Christian terrorist arrested in Planned Parenthood bomb plot

[Serafina]

I didn't dodge the question; if the expected value of the number of embryos is greater than the number of children saved, I'd save the embryos. If not, I'd save the children. I don't have a yes-or-no answer; this gives some probabilities, but it's lacking the percent of women that get a second batch frozen after their treatment failed, so I'm not sure if I can arrive at a figure for "total percent of embryos used", and I can't find the original paper. I also can't find anything that says anything regarding the proportion of embryos that fail to properly develop when implanted into the mother.

Hey, you finally answered the question.
So you would save the embryos and let the child die. By utilitarian logic, you are thus an evil person:
You choose to let the child suffer - it dies in horrible agony - but the embryos won't sufffer, since they have no capability for suffering.
Your morality is not utilitarian at all. Because it lacks utilitarian criteria: You do not use "prevent suffering, increase happiness" as utiliarism does.

Also, by letting the child die, you also cause the death of human beings - millions if it's a boy and hundreds if it is a girl.
Because they carry sperms and eggs that have a chance of becoming a human being.

An embryo is 98.7% of a human being; the 99.37% chance of surviving birth multiplied by the 99.4% chance of surviving to five years old given that they were born gives roughly a 98.7% chance of surviving to five years old, and I think we can all agree that five-year-olds are human beings. Unwanted children suffer, but that suffering is a less negative result than that of never existing in the first place, and they would also have good bits in their lives that would cancel that out. Even someone who grew up in the slums can work hard, go to university, start a company, get an MBA, and work their way up to the highest ranks of our society; it's just not terribly likely. Also, abortion does cause destruction; the destruction of human life. You can put a price tag on human life through an assortment of economic methods; the most simple is something along the lines of "I am willing to spend $50 to prevent something that has a 1/100,000 chance of killing me, therefore my life has a value of $5,000,000." There are more complicated ones out there that involve pay scales and the money invested by parents and whatnot, but I think that's sufficient for my point.

What i said above. This is not utiliarism.
Also, you are still assuming that an embryo is a human being. It is not. Your "math" does not change that.

Says the woman on a science fiction board dedicated to debating Star Wars vs Star Trek. More seriously, human expansion into space is inevitable, as well as highly desirable, and I don't know what rational thinker would deny this. There is no reason not to do so other than politics and short-term economics.

Unlike you, i am not using science fiction in real life arguments.
Furthermore, others have already explained to you why this does not work. We will run into these problems far before space colonization is viable or possible.

She killed the baby, and she very possibly harmed the father, if he wanted to have the baby. Also, I'm not dreaming; scientists really are building artificial wombs for sharks.

It's not a baby, it's an embryo. An embryo is an equivalent to a few skin cells. Follow your own logic and kill yourself, it will prevent billions of human beings (your skin cells) from being killed.

Yes, just like any other suspicious natural death, like psychologically healthy people tripping off of the tops of buildings, or elderly millionaires whose young wives stand to inherit dying in their sleep. The latter is probably a better example, since both are natural deaths with someone who stands by to profit from the fact that it occurred (and let's be blunt here; a good chunk of abortions are due to economic reasons).

So you will have to regularly investiage millions of women under suspicion of murder. Yes, that's really viable

Yes, they do. They totally do, if you're being rational about it. The exact mathematics I used might not be the exact equations Friendly AIs and the like would use (I'm not particularly interested in wading through Bayesian learning, decision making, expected utility functions, and whatnot), but they're close enough for this purpose.

Your logic:
Anything that has a chance of becoming a human being has an equivalent worth to a human being as high as it's chance of becoming a human being.
By that logic, you have to protect any single sperm and egg, because those also have a chance of becoming a human being.
And your calculation is also flawed, since most fertilized eggs are naturally aborted anyway.

I believe I've already covered that; they have a 98.7% chance of become a human being, and are therefore close enough that the difference doesn't matter, morally.

As i said above, that's your actual point.
Unfortunately, this is purely "because i say so".
There is absolutely no morality behind it, there is no science behind it, there is no logic behind it.
Wait, sorry, there is logic behind it - and that logic dictates that we do whatever is possible to ensure that every sperm and every egg grow into a human being.

But the actual flaw in your "reasoning" is that the chance of becoming something is not relevant here. Otherwise, you are already a mass-murderer at birth - you prevented thousand (or millions? eh, doesn't matter) of other sperm from being born. Since that's by your logic equivalent to murder, you should be killed immedeately - by your logic, at least.
You are still ignoring that abortion does not harm human beings. By your own admission, it harms a few cells that have a chance of becoming human beings - but they are not human beings. You are willing to let millions of human beings suffer in order to save lumps of cells that one day might become human beings. By utilitarian morality, you are an evil person. In fact, i can not think of any moral system by which you are not an evil person - except blind faith into religion, which has no morality in it.

[Shroom Man 777]

I don't claim to be a scientist; I don't know exactly how the machines work. I just know that scientists were building them. Those all sound like engineering problems, though; you could probably rig up some sort of hybridized iron lung/reverse dialysis machine to fulfill those functions or something.

Nope. Not within the next hundred years probably. They are not engineering problems. There are very very complicated interactions between mom and fetus we dont have a handle on yet.

Just the connection between the placenta and the uterine wall will be a bitch to replicate. I mean, all that ganglionic endometrial crap? How the hell does one make an artificial uterus? That's science fiction. And, again, actuals are far more important and significant than potentials. Because potentials are, guess what, not even existing yet. Like magitech exo-whatevers or some poops.

Of course, just handwaving it away as "just an engineering problem" that "we'll fix eventually" is a great display of ignorance and craps. Just shows how much thought the person's put into things compared to more knowledgeable people (who may or may not be arguing his points).

[Serafina]

Actually, let's not deal with all that tangential crap. Let's focus on your actual point:

You are treating potentials as being just as important in relation to actuals, modified by the chance of them happening.
How do you justifiy this? What is the benefit of this moral framework?

(oh, and thanks to Shroomy for the words "potentials" and "actuals". You are awesome).

[PeZook]

Hey, the rate of spontaneous abortion is actually 80%? I thought it was more like 30%...

[LionElJonson]

Actually, let's not deal with all that tangential crap. Let's focus on your actual point:

You are treating potentials as being just as important in relation to actuals, modified by the chance of them happening.
How do you justifiy this?

Because that's pretty much the definition of the expected value for this sort of simple probability function.

What is the benefit of this moral framework?

It's part of the basis of the way to program morality into artificial intelligences, for one thing.

Hey, you finally answered the question.
So you would save the embryos and let the child die. By utilitarian logic, you are thus an evil person:
You choose to let the child suffer - it dies in horrible agony - but the embryos won't sufffer, since they have no capability for suffering.
Your morality is not utilitarian at all. Because it lacks utilitarian criteria: You do not use "prevent suffering, increase happiness" as utiliarism does.

It is utilitarianism, since it's all about maximizing the value of the utility function. The utility function is also not merely that of personal pleasure or the minimization of personal pain, either.

Also, by letting the child die, you also cause the death of human beings - millions if it's a boy and hundreds if it is a girl.
Because they carry sperms and eggs that have a chance of becoming a human being.

And until those sperm and eggs do some fertilization, they have a zero percent chance of becoming a human being. If you really wanted to argue this, the real indicator would be the number of offspring produced, and those could be forecasted as being roughly the same for the child and for each embryo, since you'd be going off of the same statistical data to do your forecasting.

[Serafina]

Because that's pretty much the definition of the expected value for this sort of simple probability function.

So you can't differentiate between mathematics and morality.
And you wonder why i call you an immoral asshole?

It's part of the basis of the way to program morality into artificial intelligences, for one thing.

As per you saying so. Except that it seems more likely that this would result in numerous brutal, amoral actions by the AI because it judges ones potential higher than that of someone else and hence that person is less important.
And again, you are dreaming. (could someone who knows more about AIs comment on this? *Summons Starglider*)

It is utilitarianism, since it's all about maximizing the value of the utility function. The utility function is also not merely that of personal pleasure or the minimization of personal pain, either.

That article has nothing to do your with your argument.
Your argument "potential is worth as much as actual things, modified by their odds". The article has NOTHING to do with that or your argument. The article is about taking other values than societies and individuals well-being into account. Indeed, the article is straying from utilitarism (mind you, i am not a pure utilitarist). Stop being a lying piece of shit.

But let's stay on the various utilities of abortion.
First of all, abortion enables freedom of reproduction - which leads to much greater general freedom. And also to sexual freedom and hence to less discrimination against women.
Second of all, it's a method of population controll. Since we will be dealing with overpopulation soon (and already are), this is a great benefit.
Third, it can greatly increase happiness for both men and women. An unplanned pregnancy and/or child has severe impacts on ones life - if those are unwanted, unhappiness is a likely result. Abortion prevents that.
And last but not least, it also prevents unwanted children or children born to parents who can't deal with them or who can't support them properly. Those are major causes for unhappiness for the children and for other problems.

Now, what are the results of your proposal?
First, it would lead to the criminalization of women, essentially reducing them to second-class citizens and destroying many of their freedoms.
Second, it would increase population growtht.
Third, it results in many more unwanted children.
Fourth, it will kill some women who do not dare to get an abortion, even if you keep it legal for medical reasons.
Fifth, it creates a precedent that puts potential situations on par with actual situations. As another example, if a small child walks into a room while it's parents have sex, it would have to be punished since it just murdered a human being (if conception was possible). Or if it's a phonecall or something like that. And so on and so on. Indeed, you could argue that both are guilty of murder if they use a condom.
And do not try to errect an artifical barrier there - you say that potential matters, and the potential was there in this situation. They prevented a potential child from being born, that is by your logic murder.

Are there any positive sides to your proposal? I don't see any, and it's your job to argue them anyway. It does not prevent any harm. It does not provide any real benefit. It does nothing positive.

[LionElJonson]

Because that's pretty much the definition of the expected value for this sort of simple probability function.

So you can't differentiate between mathematics and morality.
And you wonder why i call you an immoral asshole?

If you want to be rational about things, mathematics is a good place to start.

It's part of the basis of the way to program morality into artificial intelligences, for one thing.

As per you saying so. Except that it seems more likely that this would result in numerous brutal, amoral actions by the AI because it judges ones potential higher than that of someone else and hence that person is less important.
And again, you are dreaming. (could someone who knows more about AIs comment on this? *Summons Starglider*)

Except that I'm not. Yes, I know CFAI is regarded as somewhat obsolete, but my point still stands.

It is utilitarianism, since it's all about maximizing the value of the utility function. The utility function is also not merely that of personal pleasure or the minimization of personal pain, either.

That article has nothing to do your with your argument.
Your argument "potential is worth as much as actual things, modified by their odds". The article has NOTHING to do with that or your argument. The article is about taking other values than societies and individuals well-being into account. Indeed, the article is straying from utilitarism (mind you, i am not a pure utilitarist). Stop being a lying piece of shit.

It was a rebuttal of your "You aren't a utilitarian because you're not trying to maximize pressure or mininize pain" bullshit. I am a utilitarian; I act to maximize the result of the utility function.

But let's stay on the various utilities of abortion.
First of all, abortion enables freedom of reproduction - which leads to much greater general freedom. And also to sexual freedom and hence to less discrimination against women.

[Citation Needed]

Second of all, it's a method of population controll. Since we will be dealing with overpopulation soon (and already are), this is a great benefit.

[Citation Needed]

Third, it can greatly increase happiness for both men and women. An unplanned pregnancy and/or child has severe impacts on ones life - if those are unwanted, unhappiness is a likely result. Abortion prevents that.

So does actually using multiple redundant measures of birth control, and that doesn't require murdering any babies.

And last but not least, it also prevents unwanted children or children born to parents who can't deal with them or who can't support them properly. Those are major causes for unhappiness for the children and for other problems.

If the parents don't want them, they can put them up for adoption. There's more demand than supply for healthy, white babies in the adoption system as it is.

Now, what are the results of your proposal?
First, it would lead to the criminalization of women, essentially reducing them to second-class citizens and destroying many of their freedoms.

No, it wouldn't. It'd lead to the criminalisation of murdering your babies.

Second, it would increase population growtht.

Only marginally; most of the world's population growth is in the Third World, and the First World isn't meeting replacement requirements in any case. If anything, we need more babies, not less.

Third, it results in many more unwanted children.

Better to be unwanted than to not exist at all.

Fourth, it will kill some women who do not dare to get an abortion, even if you keep it legal for medical reasons.

Doctors would know the law; someone dumb enough not to see a doctor when they're sick and their system is weakened due to the pregnancy is probably not going to see a doctor regardless of whether this was implemented or not, and due to the increased scrutiny given to miscarriages, may well be driven to see the doctor when they wouldn't, for fear of being accused of deliberately killing their baby.

Fifth, it creates a precedent that puts potential situations on par with actual situations. As another example, if a small child walks into a room while it's parents have sex, it would have to be punished since it just murdered a human being (if conception was possible). Or if it's a phonecall or something like that. And so on and so on. Indeed, you could argue that both are guilty of murder if they use a condom.
And do not try to errect an artifical barrier there - you say that potential matters, and the potential was there in this situation. They prevented a potential child from being born, that is by your logic murder.

Only the unaltered potential matters; without those sperm meeting the eggs, neither matters, and preventing them from doing so has no inherent utility save that gained by the pleasure of the act of sex, and

Are there any positive sides to your proposal? I don't see any, and it's your job to argue them anyway. It does not prevent any harm. It does not provide any real benefit. It does nothing positive.

A consistent, logical base to build things off of, for one thing, rather than keeping a bunch of idiotic double standards around. Additionally, creating more humans is a net benefit in my utility function, not a net loss like you implied.

[Shroom Man 777]

Still not seeing how a clump of embryonic fetus tissues counts as a human being, and how a person is murdered when these non-thinking underdeveloped fetus tissues are removed, speaking as an actual medical professional and not as a silly person who has no idea what he's talking about while going out trying to invent sea-launched Indian nuclear-propelled exo-wombships or whatever shit congenitally defective brain finds presently fashionable. Find it hilarious for miscarriages and other maternal complications treated as homicides or manslaughters or becoming subject to police investigation, as opposed to in/out-house hospital visit. Made testing thread just to ridicule idea.

When does a human being come to be, anyway? Which trimester? Late term well-developed fetus/baby capable of living and surviving outside the womb with/without assistance? Early term underdeveloped fetus/embryo cell cluster tissues? Or immediately during fertilization? Before or after organogenesis, in which the process of rudimentary organ formation begins - wherein the multicellular thing is nothing like a human at all? Pray tell, how and why should this or that be criminalized when features that define a person/human being aren't present in the undeveloped tissues at all? Why does utilitarian argument trump other arguments (like, say, underdeveloped fetal tissues don't count as person because features that make up a person are still non-existent). Why should underdeveloped fetal tissue be so valued that its removal constitutes grave crime and murder? Potential or actual, underdeveloped fetal tissues still not worth living human being complete with differentiated and functional organ systems.

Amusing to see moron make over-generalization in criminalizing a very complex issue such as fetal development and maternal whatevers, and using dubious and ill-conceived philosophical backing as justification without little scientific knowledge at all regarding actual medical/physiologic craps involved. Moron probably knows next to nothing about stages of fetal development and nuances of such medical things. Likely, as moron assumes reproductive processes of cartilaginous fish to be anywhere near resembling that of human/mammalian processes, ignorance at suggesting fish egg incubator technology as something that can lead to applications in human beings laughable. Startling display of biological ignorance. Startling display of medical ignorance. Startling display of reproductive ignorance. Bad. Does not inspire confidence in argument of reproductive-whatevers, as utilitarian buzzwords not backed by any substantive knowledge on actual scientific realities of reproduction, gestation and birth. Leads others to assume moron is moron blathering on topic he actually knows nothing about. Liable to get shouted down by others who actually know what they are talking about. Like actual medical/healthcare professionals, or women possessing actual reproductive organs discussed in thread, or soon-to-be-fathers more mature and knowledgeable on these issues, or actual adults.

Oops.

[PeZook]

I do support killing, if the killing is morally justified. Whether or not it's legally murder is a matter for the legal systems, though using "murder" to refer to unjustified killing is a decent shorthand for it.

Fine, that's reasonable enough.

No more so than a woman who marries an elderly millionaire is automatically put through a background check or something.

Actually, since miscarriages happen a lot (I was told 30% in health class, Alyrium apparently thinks it's 80% ; Either way, you have you have almost 2 million failed pregnancy a year, which would necessitate a murder investigation every time. Currently, the police inestigates about 16 thousand reported murders yearly.

So...your policy wouldn't require just "oh hey hire more coroners", but increasing police resources dedicated to murder investigation by two orders of magnitude, while criminalizing two million women a year who'd find themselves in county jail under investigation FOR MURDER.

How do you think that would affect their lives and the lives of their families? You have to include that in the utility calculation.

Only if the fetus actually dies as a result.

And if it doesn't die, there's still charges of reckless endangerment and such, which would have to be applied, since fetus = person. Do we charge mothers who don't take supplements?

How do you prove an elderly gentleman was suffocated, and didn't just die in his sleep?

There's a body. A woman who got an abortion in Vienna leaves no evidence. What, you're going to pressure foreign governments to send the aborted fetuses to you as evidence? Or maybe stop pregnant women from leaving the country altogether?

The mother has the right to self-defense, like anyone else. Additionally, as far as I know, there's no way to statistically calculate the probability of success of any particular person; you can at best calculate the average for their demographic.

Yes, you can calculate that for their demographic, but there are some cases where it can be reasonably estimated.

How do you reconcile the right of the mother to self-defence with turning every mother-to-be into a potential criminal?

Yeah, obviously. You'd just hire more coroners, and let them sort through it. You'd only arrest them if there was reason to believe that criminal wrongdoing was involved. Just like you only arrest the widows of elderly millionaires if you think criminal wrongdoing was involved. Most likely, you'd just create another bureaucratic burden on the police force and coroners. Besides, even if criminal charges do get involved, "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

"Hiring more coroners" sounds nice, but first: a fetus is not a body, it's a lump of cells. You can expect forensic analysis to be much harder.

Second of all, you'd need two orders of magnitude more resources to process all the added police workload.

And last but not least, you still did not include the damage done to a woman's family as a result of an accusation of MURDER. How employable do you think she'd be?

--------------------------

As an aside in the debate, I have to make an observation: anti-abortionists often seem to view women as potential baby killers. My mother often criticizes them for that, correctly pointing out that in most cases, an abortion is not a decision taken lightly. Women don't like getting abortions, they are usually forced to by circumstances ; Providing a good state safety network for potential mothers does more to lower abortion rates than criminalization.

[Serafina]

Let's once again cut to the chase, shall we?

But let's stay on the various utilities of abortion.
First of all, abortion enables freedom of reproduction - which leads to much greater general freedom. And also to sexual freedom and hence to less discrimination against women.

[Citation Needed]

It's simple, if you are not an imbecile.
A woman only has freedom of reproduction if she can choose NOT to do it. Abortion is one way to ensure that.
Similarily, sexual freedom is only possible if sex is safe, which includes pregnancy - and hence birth controll.

Second of all, it's a method of population controll. Since we will be dealing with overpopulation soon (and already are), this is a great benefit.

[Citation Needed]

Are you really that daft?
Abortion obviously is a method of birth controll and therefore population controll. And several countries are already dealing with scarcity issues due to overpopulation.

So does actually using multiple redundant measures of birth control, and that doesn't require murdering any babies.

It doesn't murder any babies. It kills embryos. They are not human beings or even capable of feeling pain, hence it's not murder.
You are harping on that point again and again, except that you already admitted that they are not human beings.

If the parents don't want them, they can put them up for adoption. There's more demand than supply for healthy, white babies in the adoption system as it is.

Great. Let's ignore any of the problems of adoption and focuss solely on white people

No, it wouldn't. It'd lead to the criminalisation of murdering your babies.

Yes it would. Because all those millions of women who had natural miscarriages would be suspected of murder. That's what i am talking about.
Also, it's still not about murdering babies.

Only marginally; most of the world's population growth is in the Third World, and the First World isn't meeting replacement requirements in any case. If anything, we need more babies, not less.

So if a problem is "only marginal", we can ignore it? And it would also prevent that population growth from lowering by forbidding it.

Better to be unwanted than to not exist at all.

Really?
Oh, right, you were the moron who argued that no existing is somehow a bad thing, right?
Not existing doesn't harm you, since you do not exist and therefore can not be harmed.

Doctors would know the law; someone dumb enough not to see a doctor when they're sick and their system is weakened due to the pregnancy is probably not going to see a doctor regardless of whether this was implemented or not, and due to the increased scrutiny given to miscarriages, may well be driven to see the doctor when they wouldn't, for fear of being accused of deliberately killing their baby.

Ah, a classic. Ignoring psychology.
If you criminalize something, people will be carefull around it. Even for cases where it is actually legal.

Only the unaltered potential matters; without those sperm meeting the eggs, neither matters, and preventing them from doing so has no inherent utility save that gained by the pleasure of the act of sex, and

Ah, but the child/phone call/condom are altering the potential.

A consistent, logical base to build things off of, for one thing, rather than keeping a bunch of idiotic double standards around. Additionally, creating more humans is a net benefit in my utility function, not a net loss like you implied.

What "double standards"?
Your system is neither logical nor consistent. You treat something that is not a human being as a human being, you harp on "altering the odds" in one case but dismiss it in others and so on.
Also, creating more humans is not a net benefit if those humanb beings suffer. Then again, you have already shown enormous disregard for human suffering.

You have NOT shown that your system would produce any net benefits. Being more logical is not a benefit, and certainly not enough to justify the criminalization and suffering of millions of people.
Also, you still assume that it is equivalent to killing human beings, despite your admission to the contrary and lack of any logical argument for that.

[Shroom Man 777]

Murder charges require both bodies of deceased victim and murder weapon. If woman uses orally ingested abortifacient to induce abortion, where is the murder weapon? If woman has abortionist suction the fetus out, and if false internet rumors and urban legends are true and Chinese people do eat fetuses and thus body is disposed via Chinese food, where is the body?

Also, again, things that make a person a person are not present in clump of embryonic cells and tissues. So how can it be murder? It is not a person. Is not. Emphasis on word "is". Not talking about potentials or actuals. It is tissue that is removed.

So, anyway, according to stupid logic miscarriages, abortions and the like are potential crimes/murders/homicides. So we need a new branch of the law, or a new division of police/investigative branches, solely dedicated with the nuances of female reproductive issues. Officer-gynecologists. Gynecologist-detectives. Obstetrician-inspectors. Suggest that abortion become federal offense and become purview of the FBI. FBI will form new task force, the Menstruation Abortion Miscarriage Murder Investigation Squad. MAMMIES. When woman has miscarriage, they must secure the scene of the crime by slapping police tape on woman's clitoris. They must take photographs of crime scene (uterus) by using endoscopes. They must also compare ballistics of weapons used, so must test-fire all the penises involved to match ballistics, diameter of rounds, and penetration levels and cock-calibers. Hahahahaha.

Horatio Caine: The time of death? That time of the month. YEEEAAAHHH

EDIT:

Who do we send to the gas chambers when a woman contracts an STD that causes death to the fetus? The mother, for the crime of having a diseased vagina? Or do we, as previously said, confiscate all the cocks of the men who she has had sex with and do ballistics tests to determine which caliber of cock shot her and which one has bullets that match? What happens to man with drip-dick? Life in prison? Lethal injection? Firing squad? Accomplice of murder? Hurm. Sanitary napkin thoroughly soaked in blood. Possibly syphilis. Must investigate further.

[Shroom Man 777]

whoops. pressed 'quote' instead of edit. please destroy post. do it. DO IT!

[Kanastrous]

Murder charges require both bodies of deceased victim and murder weapon.

Not in the United States.

[Shroom Man 777]

What is required then? The movies say that you need a body to prove that the guy was actually murdered, and a murder weapon to seal the case or something.

[Serafina]

What is required then? The movies say that you need a body to prove that the guy was actually murdered, and a murder weapon to seal the case or something.

Obviously you only require a murder weapon if one was used. If you throw someone off a bridge or snap his neck, it's not required.
You could easily rule that no murder weapon is required in an abortion-"murder"-case.

Nevertheless, proving an abortion instead of a miscarriage would be exceedingly difficult and often next-to-impossible.

[LionElJonson]

No more so than a woman who marries an elderly millionaire is automatically put through a background check or something.

Actually, since miscarriages happen a lot (I was told 30% in health class, Alyrium apparently thinks it's 80% ; Either way, you have you have almost 2 million failed pregnancy a year, which would necessitate a murder investigation every time. Currently, the police inestigates about 16 thousand reported murders yearly.

So...your policy wouldn't require just "oh hey hire more coroners", but increasing police resources dedicated to murder investigation by two orders of magnitude, while criminalizing two million women a year who'd find themselves in county jail under investigation FOR MURDER.

How do you think that would affect their lives and the lives of their families? You have to include that in the utility calculation.

[/quote]
The vast majority of those 2 million failed pregnancies would go unreported as well; most likely, the actual charge would come up in a few situations: where the police already have you, and are just throwing every charge they can at you; when an officer needs to make arrest quotas or the like; when the woman in question's drawn the negative attention of a police officer who uses it as an excuse to make her life difficult; when someone tips the cops off that Ms. So-and-so went and got an illegal abortion; and when the cops bust an illegal abortion operation, and uses the documentation there and/or his bank accounts to track down the people who received his services.

If it gets too bad, the Supreme Court would just rule that part of the law unconstitutional, anyway.

Only if the fetus actually dies as a result.

And if it doesn't die, there's still charges of reckless endangerment and such, which would have to be applied, since fetus = person. Do we charge mothers who don't take supplements?

No, because of practical enforcement issues; the cops would most likely only go after people who make themselves obvious. If a woman is drunkenly staggering down the street while obviously pregnant, and a cop comes by, she'd probably wind up spending the evening in the local jail. If a woman gets drunk at home, unless something else draws the attention of the police, it would obviously be impossible for the police to do anything, especially if the woman isn't showing yet.

How do you prove an elderly gentleman was suffocated, and didn't just die in his sleep?

There's a body. A woman who got an abortion in Vienna leaves no evidence. What, you're going to pressure foreign governments to send the aborted fetuses to you as evidence? Or maybe stop pregnant women from leaving the country altogether?

There would be a body for aborted fetuses, too; they're just small and relatively easy to dispose of. As for pregnant women leaving the country to get abortions, well, there's nothing stopping someone from leaving the country to murder someone where that's legal, too.

The mother has the right to self-defense, like anyone else. Additionally, as far as I know, there's no way to statistically calculate the probability of success of any particular person; you can at best calculate the average for their demographic.

Yes, you can calculate that for their demographic, but there are some cases where it can be reasonably estimated.

Maybe, but it's impossible to tell whether or not someone will be the next Einstein or Van Gogh before they were even born.

How do you reconcile the right of the mother to self-defence with turning every mother-to-be into a potential criminal?

Because people have the right to protect themselves with lethal force if their life is in turn threatened. It's not an optimal scenario, but we don't live in an optimal world.

Yeah, obviously. You'd just hire more coroners, and let them sort through it. You'd only arrest them if there was reason to believe that criminal wrongdoing was involved. Just like you only arrest the widows of elderly millionaires if you think criminal wrongdoing was involved. Most likely, you'd just create another bureaucratic burden on the police force and coroners. Besides, even if criminal charges do get involved, "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

"Hiring more coroners" sounds nice, but first: a fetus is not a body, it's a lump of cells. You can expect forensic analysis to be much harder.

Babies don't magically appear at the nine-month mark, you know. They spend that time growing. It's a small body, but it's still recognisable as a body very early on.

Second of all, you'd need two orders of magnitude more resources to process all the added police workload.

Not really; odds are it'd be one of those laws that aren't really enforced, like being publically gay in, IIRC, Georgia (I remember reading an anecdote by a lesbian on another forum I used to visit wherein she and her girlfriend were arrested based on an old law noone's overturned yet because she mouthed off to a cop after making out in public; it was in one of the southern states).

And last but not least, you still did not include the damage done to a woman's family as a result of an accusation of MURDER. How employable do you think she'd be?

Depends on how credible the accusation is.

As an aside in the debate, I have to make an observation: anti-abortionists often seem to view women as potential baby killers. My mother often criticizes them for that, correctly pointing out that in most cases, an abortion is not a decision taken lightly. Women don't like getting abortions, they are usually forced to by circumstances ; Providing a good state safety network for potential mothers does more to lower abortion rates than criminalization.

We do; it's called "adoption"; there aren't enough healthy, white babies in the system as it is. Women don't seem to like using it, though; possibly because the hormone cocktail involved in pregnancy messes with their brains and makes them somewhat irrational about it.

It's simple, if you are not an imbecile.
A woman only has freedom of reproduction if she can choose NOT to do it. Abortion is one way to ensure that.
Similarily, sexual freedom is only possible if sex is safe, which includes pregnancy - and hence birth controll.

Any evidence that other forms of birth control aren't sufficient for ensuring women's sexual freedom?

Are you really that daft?
Abortion obviously is a method of birth controll and therefore population controll. And several countries are already dealing with scarcity issues due to overpopulation.

I'm sorry, I suppose I wasn't clear enough. Please let me rephrase that. Obviously abortion serves as a form of population control; this much is blatantly obvious. What I was asking for was for evidence of overpopulation problems in modern, industrialized nations. If anything, we're seeing the opposite, with the increased loads our aging populations are placing on our retirement systems; we need more young people to reduce the strain, not less.

It doesn't murder any babies. It kills embryos. They are not human beings or even capable of feeling pain, hence it's not murder.
You are harping on that point again and again, except that you already admitted that they are not human beings.

I don't care about pain or cognitive abilities or the existance of the soul; those are all losing arguments. I talk about murdering babies because a fetus is worth 99.37% of an infant, and 98.7% of the value of a five-year-old child, at the average infant mortality rates for American infants and children, and that's close enough to just round up to one for day-to-day purposes.

Great. Let's ignore any of the problems of adoption and focuss solely on white people

Problems? Okay, list them. I can't rebut arguments you haven't made.

Yes it would. Because all those millions of women who had natural miscarriages would be suspected of murder. That's what i am talking about.

Yes, but the police aren't stupid; they'd be selective about the cases they pursue, since even a reasonable doubt is enough to get a Not Guilty verdict returned, and the evidence is too easy to hide. Short of records demonstrating that they did it, a confession, or someone close to the mother approaching the police and telling them she had an abortion, I doubt the police would actually investigate them as murder charges; more likely is hospitals taking all the miscarriages down to their coroner for an examination for the more common forms of inducing miscarriages, followed by a "Natural death" label on the file.

Also, it's still not about murdering babies.

.987 is close enough to 1 that rounding should be fine for the purposes of our discussion, and therefore, yes, morally, fetuses are babies. They're also five-year-old children.

So if a problem is "only marginal", we can ignore it? And it would also prevent that population growth from lowering by forbidding it.

If it is in the Third World, it's irrelevant to this discussion, since we're talking about abortion in developed countries. So, yes, it is ignorable.

Really?
Oh, right, you were the moron who argued that no existing is somehow a bad thing, right?
Not existing doesn't harm you, since you do not exist and therefore can not be harmed.

Yes, yes, and no. Not existing doesn't harm you, but it does something even worse than merely being harmed: it deprives you of continued existence, or, in the case of abortion, from existing at all. Not that I'm surprised, since you seem to have interpreted utilitarianism in one of the more juvenile fashions.

Ah, a classic. Ignoring psychology.
If you criminalize something, people will be carefull around it. Even for cases where it is actually legal.

[Citation Needed]

Ah, but the child/phone call/condom are altering the potential.

No, they're not. Before they were applied, the probability of a human arising barring an external event occuring was zero. Afterwards, the probability was still zero. It's not until the sperm fertilises the egg (an external event) that the probability of a human being being created is achieved.

What "double standards"?

One moment, a baby is in the womb. It is alright to kill this baby; it's just a fetus, after all, not a real person. Ten hours and a lot of swearing later, it's screaming in the arms of its mother. Now it's magically become a person, and it's totally not alright to kill it, even though nothing has truly changed about it. What's changed between point A and point B, to create such a large difference? Nothing but emotional flim-flam.

Your system is neither logical nor consistent. You treat something that is not a human being as a human being, you harp on "altering the odds" in one case but dismiss it in others and so on.

Yes, it is. There are one of two scenarios occuring. In the first, I am failing to properly explain my case properly, in which case I should work on elucidating it more concisely rather than rebutting each individual point you make. Secondly, I have explained it, and you're simply refusing to accept any arguments regarding it, because doing so threatens deeply-held beliefs you've invested emotional energies in, in which case you might be well-served by reading and internalising this. Actually, you should probably read and internalise that, anyway; being willing to admit that you're wrong and change your mind is one of the major cornerstones to science, and should be something everyone on this board should be working their hardest to accomplish.

Also, creating more humans is not a net benefit if those human beings suffer. Then again, you have already shown enormous disregard for human suffering.

Yes, it is. Suffering is preferable to non-existance.

You have NOT shown that your system would produce any net benefits. Being more logical is not a benefit, and certainly not enough to justify the criminalization and suffering of millions of people.

Well, for one thing, it'd result in saving the lives of millions more, which was the main point of the whole exercise in the first place.

Also, you still assume that it is equivalent to killing human beings, despite your admission to the contrary and lack of any logical argument for that.

I am not assuming that. Either you are simply ignoring my arguments to that effect, or they are not well-enough phrased for you to understand. Since I was, to my knowledge, very clear and concise about how I arrived at those numbers, I have to assume the former.

[Serafina]

Any evidence that other forms of birth control aren't sufficient for ensuring women's sexual freedom?

Yes, by the sheer fact that abortions are necessary. Accidents happen, and some women just don't take the pill well.

I'm sorry, I suppose I wasn't clear enough. Please let me rephrase that. Obviously abortion serves as a form of population control; this much is blatantly obvious. What I was asking for was for evidence of overpopulation problems in modern, industrialized nations. If anything, we're seeing the opposite, with the increased loads our aging populations are placing on our retirement systems; we need more young people to reduce the strain, not less.

Yes, let's ignore the rest of the world Just like you only talk about "white babies". Fuck off, racist.
But on your actual point: Maybe we do not have overpopulation problems in our specific countries at least partially DUE to abortion?
And our planet as a whole is getting overcroweded. Nationalism is no excuse for adding to that problem.

I don't care about pain or cognitive abilities or the existance of the soul; those are all losing arguments. I talk about murdering babies because a fetus is worth 99.37% of an infant, and 98.7% of the value of a five-year-old child, at the average infant mortality rates for American infants and children, and that's close enough to just round up to one for day-to-day purposes.

Still your "99.37%" figure?
Again, by your logic we must forbid birth controll as well, since i am pretty sure that those eggs also have a good chance of getting fertilized without it. And every women should be compelled by law and try to get pregnant every time she can, at least by your "logic".

Problems? Okay, list them. I can't rebut arguments you haven't made.

Lack of available, suitable parents. Greater risk of abuse. Potential distress due to being adopted. Problems with later adoptions. And so on.

Yes, but the police aren't stupid; they'd be selective about the cases they pursue, since even a reasonable doubt is enough to get a Not Guilty verdict returned, and the evidence is too easy to hide. Short of records demonstrating that they did it, a confession, or someone close to the mother approaching the police and telling them she had an abortion, I doubt the police would actually investigate them as murder charges; more likely is hospitals taking all the miscarriages down to their coroner for an examination for the more common forms of inducing miscarriages, followed by a "Natural death" label on the file.

Guess what, shithead:
If you forbid abortions by professionals, we will go back to backalley-abortions. Which leads to infections, internal injuries, bleeding and other problems. You can NOT forbid abortions, they are just a fact of life. They even happened in France during WWII-german occupation, where they had the death penalty for both parties involved (IIRC).

.987 is close enough to 1 that rounding should be fine for the purposes of our discussion, and therefore, yes, morally, fetuses are babies. They're also five-year-old children.

Your figure is bullshit, moron. An embryo is not comparable in any way to a baby. It lacks every defining feature of it except the DNA.

If it is in the Third World, it's irrelevant to this discussion, since we're talking about abortion in developed countries. So, yes, it is ignorable.

Oh, really? Since when? As per you saying so?
You are apparently a racist shithead who only cares about having more white babies in his own country. At least that'S what you said so far.

Yes, yes, and no. Not existing doesn't harm you, but it does something even worse than merely being harmed: it deprives you of continued existence, or, in the case of abortion, from existing at all. Not that I'm surprised, since you seem to have interpreted utilitarianism in one of the more juvenile fashions.

We already had that discussion. You lost - HARD. Not existing does not constitute any harm.
And again, by your logic, we should ensure that every egg get's carried to term (there are too many sperms for this to be viable). By your logic, it should be our top priority and anyone failing to comply should be submitted to severe punishment.

Ah, a classic. Ignoring psychology.
If you criminalize something, people will be carefull around it. Even for cases where it is actually legal.

[Citation Needed]

This ain't Wikipedia, moron. This is basic psychology - if you submit something to a heavy stigma, people are less willing to do it even if it is legal in their case.

No, they're not. Before they were applied, the probability of a human arising barring an external event occuring was zero. Afterwards, the probability was still zero. It's not until the sperm fertilises the egg (an external event) that the probability of a human being being created is achieved.

Demonstrate how the probablity is zero. After all, an egg has a pretty good chance (according to you, at least) to become a baby if you just have sex at the right time.

One moment, a baby is in the womb. It is alright to kill this baby; it's just a fetus, after all, not a real person. Ten hours and a lot of swearing later, it's screaming in the arms of its mother. Now it's magically become a person, and it's totally not alright to kill it, even though nothing has truly changed about it. What's changed between point A and point B, to create such a large difference? Nothing but emotional flim-flam.

A fetus is NOT a baby. It does NOT have a brain, it does NOT have an nervous system, it has nothing that defines being a human.
EVERYTHING changes between point A and B - it get's a brain, it can feel pain, it can think (rudimentary, at least).

Yes, it is. There are one of two scenarios occuring. In the first, I am failing to properly explain my case properly, in which case I should work on elucidating it more concisely rather than rebutting each individual point you make. Secondly, I have explained it, and you're simply refusing to accept any arguments regarding it, because doing so threatens deeply-held beliefs you've invested emotional energies in, in which case you might be well-served by reading and internalising this. Actually, you should probably read and internalise that, anyway; being willing to admit that you're wrong and change your mind is one of the major cornerstones to science, and should be something everyone on this board should be working their hardest to accomplish.

"Oooh, she's just emotional"
How about possiblity 3 instead: Your arguments are utterly immoral.
We already had laws against abortion. Those laws demonstrably harmed people. Getting rid of them improved society. You want to go back to the previous state. I oppose you because that would be a bad thing.

Yes, it is. Suffering is preferable to non-existance.

We already had that argument. You lost it.

Well, for one thing, it'd result in saving the lives of millions more, which was the main point of the whole exercise in the first place.

*Yawn* The same bullshit.

I am not assuming that. Either you are simply ignoring my arguments to that effect, or they are not well-enough phrased for you to understand. Since I was, to my knowledge, very clear and concise about how I arrived at those numbers, I have to assume the former.

And you are constantly ignoring a simple point:
An embryo has nothing in common with human being, and there is a difference between an embryo and a baby.


You have two points:
-If someone has a certain chance of being something, it has a value equal to the odds of achieving that state.
You therefore argue that an embryo is nearly worth as much as a human being. But your argument has no basis in reality, and your calculation is bogus since it ignores the large amount of natural miscarriages. You also ignore all the differences between a human being and an embryo.
-You argue that not existing is the most terrible thing ever and that everything is preferrable to it. We already had that discussion in SLAM, you were unable to defend it. This argument is simply not based in reality.

You also ignore all the consequences of your logic, such as
-an immense incentive to fertilize and carry every egg to term
-immense social distraught for women
-enormous social problems
-the creation of an unenforcable law

You are right - you utterly fail to make intelligent points. You are just as moronic as other anti-abortionists.

[Serafina]

Ghetto-Edit:
By the way, Lions "not existing is the worst thing ever"-crap was previusly ripped apart in this thread.

[Starglider]

WTF with the idiot dragging random transhumanist stuff into a completely unrelated discussion? I am certainly not going to participate in another thread derailment but I will say that there is absolutely no reason why 'friendly AI' would be anti-abortion. Expected utility does not work that way, not unless the input goal system is 'get the human population as high as possible as fast as possible' (or 'implement my inconsistent fundamentalist ravings').

[bobalot]

Designated responders to LionElJohnson: PeZook, Serafina, Liberty.

If he wants to take Shroomie on, we'll all no doubt enjoy the show, but he doesn't seem to respond too well to the kind of mockery and I'd rather this thread had an actual debate in the old style instead of a pileup.

Could I suggest moving this debate to the The Coliseum? It would be an interesting topic and any time someone brings it up again, you could just point to the Coliseum.

[Gil Hamilton]

This discussion is so deliciously twisted it must be fattening. Is there really a discussion here about launching a police investigation to make sure that women who've miscarried didn't abort their child deliberately?

Oh, man, so a woman has to go to the doctor to find out that her future baby is dead, which I know from personal experience is HORRIFICALLY traumatic and then they are may get turned over to the police for investigation to make sure what happened wasn't an illegal abortion. That's just about the worst thing you can do short of shooting the mother at the end of it.

Who the fuck are you, Lion? Skeletor? Do you don a fucking purple cape and skull mask when you write this shit?

[Kanastrous]

The comparison is unflattering to Skeletor.

His basic positions were at least internally consistent. If relatively simple.

[Liberty]

Geez, I turn around for a minute...

A couple points. First, this:

The vast majority of those 2 million failed pregnancies would go unreported as well; most likely, the actual charge would come up in a few situations: where the police already have you, and are just throwing every charge they can at you; when an officer needs to make arrest quotas or the like; when the woman in question's drawn the negative attention of a police officer who uses it as an excuse to make her life difficult; when someone tips the cops off that Ms. So-and-so went and got an illegal abortion; and when the cops bust an illegal abortion operation, and uses the documentation there and/or his bank accounts to track down the people who received his services.

If it gets too bad, the Supreme Court would just rule that part of the law unconstitutional, anyway.

This is wrong on so many levels. If the officer needs to make ARREST QUOTAS? So I'm what, supposed to live in fear of some police officer finding out I had a miscarriage and being PROSECUTED for it? Do you not realize this is retarded?!? If I had a miscarriage and wanted the baby, I'd be grieving, and now I have to worry about having legal problems because of it?!? I have to be honest, as a woman, if this were the law, I would be really afraid of what might happen if I had a miscarriage. REALLY afraid. And that might make me less likely to get pregnant with a wanted child for fear of miscarrying it (80% chance, after all). My mother in law, a pro-life Catholic, had two miscarriages. She grieved and felt a great deal of pain. And she could be PROSECUTED?

Point 1:

You say an fetus is worth 99.37% of a baby. Well I have news for you. The natural miscarriage rate is over 80%. So a brand new embrio is by your logic actually worth roughly 19% of a newborn baby. But wait! Currently, there roughly 22.6% of all pregnancies are aborted. So, of that 19%, 22.6% will be aborted and therefore not become babies, so the chance of a given embrio making it to baby status declines to 14.7%. So, an embrio is now worth 14.7% of a baby.

Now how about an egg, what's that worth? Well, the average woman has 30 years of menstrual cycles, which makes 360 eggs. If the average woman has two babies, that means that each egg has a 0.56% chance of being fertilized and becoming an embrio. Except that given the natural miscarriage rate, the average woman actually has 10 pregnancies in order to result in two children (she would not be aware of most of those pregnancies, as the miscarriages occur early). Since embrios have a 14.7% chance of becoming a baby, each female egg has a 0.41% chance of becoming a baby. Therefore, each egg should be treated as 0.41% the worth of a baby.

Unless of course you live in certain African nations where women have an average of 5 children rather than 2. If their natural miscarriage rates are the same (which they should be), that would mean that in these countries each egg is worth 1.02% of a baby. Interesting. African eggs are worth more than American eggs.

But wait! Different countries have different infant death rates and different abortion rates. In a country like Russia, with it's 52% abortion rate, only 9.12% of embrios will become babies. This means that a Russian embrio is worth 9.2% of a baby, quite a bit less than an American embrio, which is worth 14.7% of a baby. Only 20% of pregnancies are aborted in Uganda, but I would surmise that a poor African country would have higher miscarriage rates and higher infant mortality rates, thus pushing down the embrio's likelihood of becoming a baby and thus its worth. Only 13.3% of pregnancies in the Netherlands are aborted, and their stillbirth rate and natural miscarriage rate wouldn't likely differ from the United States, so that would mean that a Dutch embrio would be worth 16.5% of a baby, thus being more valuable than an American baby, a Russian baby, OR an African baby. Interesting.

Are you getting tired of your numbers game yet? I'm not done. A woman over 40 has a MUCH higher natural abortion rate than does a woman of 20. Does this mean that if I were to get pregnant right now, my embrio would be worth more than those of women who get pregnant over 40? After all, my embrio would have a much higher likelihood of becoming a baby than would that of a 40 year old woman living in my same town.

Did you know that women on average live longer than men? This means that the average woman has a greater chance of living past seventy than the average man does. Does that make the average woman's life more valuable? If you had to choose between saving two healthy twenty-five year olds, one male one female, would you therefore save the female? After all, she'll likely live longer.

And how do you rate worth like that anyway? What is a percentage of a person? How would I treat a 50% of a baby person? Or a 14.7% of a baby person? I'm guessing the answer would be to not end its existence lightly, but to rate myself way higher than it, and therefore be okay with ending its existence if it causes me life problems. Or do you disagree? By virtue of its being a percentage of a person, do you grant it a "right" to be born? And if so, why the hell are you messing around with percentages? Remember that your schema also grants eggs rights of some sort. What would those be? And finally, how does it make sense that embrios and eggs in Africa are worth more than embrios and eggs in the United States?

Your logic makes NO SENSE whatsoever. None. Period.

So how about you try again? What makes aborting a fetus murder?

Fixed quote tags ~Edi

[Alyrium Denryle]

Now how about an egg, what's that worth? Well, the average woman has 30 years of menstrual cycles, which makes 360 eggs. If the average woman has two babies, that means that each egg has a 0.56% chance of being fertilized and becoming an embrio. Except that given the natural miscarriage rate, the average woman actually has 10 pregnancies in order to result in two children (she would not be aware of most of those pregnancies, as the miscarriages occur early). Since embrios have a 14.7% chance of becoming a baby, each female egg has a 0.41% chance of becoming a baby. Therefore, each egg should be treated as 0.41% the worth of a baby.

Lets have even more fun with this, and extend it back farther in the causal chain. If a fetus has a set chance of becoming a baby, so do the mom's oocytes and future pregnancies.

If we are to force mom to carry a baby to term. As a result, we can conclude that any one of mom's oocytes is worth 0.00000575 five year olds at a fertility rate of 2.3/female. This is because she has ~400000 oocytes set at birth, and will successfully ovulate 400ish of them. During each cycle, 1000ish start the process and fail, and she gives birth to an average of 2.3 in the US)

As a result, if we execute mom for murdering her potential baby, we lose her 1 and her future pregnancies. This number added together could be 1.3 or, 2.3. We lose mother, and any fetuses she may have born in the future. This is of course an average. Some mothers have more or fewer non-miscarried pregnancies. Add this to the loss of the fetus, and you end up with a negative utility of 2.3 or 3.3

The net, had you left mom alone would have been +.3, or +1.3

As a result by his twisted logic executing or otherwise preventing the future pregnancy of a mother is a negative utility... when you measure everything in future 5 year olds.

[Shroom Man 777]

This discussion is so deliciously twisted it must be fattening. Is there really a discussion here about launching a police investigation to make sure that women who've miscarried didn't abort their child deliberately?

We will have to shave the pubic hair off the woman's vagina so the police tape can properly adhere to her clitoris. POLICE LINE DO NOT CUNT CROSS.

Oh, man, so a woman has to go to the doctor to find out that her future baby is dead, which I know from personal experience is HORRIFICALLY traumatic and then they are may get turned over to the police for investigation to make sure what happened wasn't an illegal abortion. That's just about the worst thing you can do short of shooting the mother at the end of it.

At least if the mother is proven guilty of abortion, she can get the death penalty and will be reunited with her dead baby in heaven (no wait she is going to hell but maybe the baby can visit her or shit). Then the aborted baby can go play in afterlife daycare with 8 pounds 6 ounces newborn infant Jesus. *goes to mass with LionElJohnson and prays to Jesus*

Who the fuck are you, Lion? Skeletor? Do you don a fucking purple cape and skull mask when you write this shit?

He is the new Jesus.

Or an idiot who doesn't know shit about biology, or medical crap, or reproductive, gestational and maternal shit, and yet despite this profound ignorance feels he has the right to dictate shit and morality and the treatment of women and make arbitrary claims about the personhood of embryonic tissues.

Man. Now I am sure the Indians will never give him nuclear bombs for his Project Orion shit. I mean, this guy might use it for terrorism and nuke an abortion clinic.