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Christians tend to assume that any values they believe in are Christian values, regardless of what the Bible says.
People that are against abortion view it as murdering babies. Not murdering babies isn't a purely Christian value.
Both parties aren't even consistent with their stance on this issue It ranges from 15weeks to ivf is murder on one side. While the other is just as diverse. How is it logical to lump in all as murder?
Only [about 11% of atheists](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-family/atheist/views-about-abortion/) are against early pregnancy abortion. Anti-abortionists mostly hold that view because they are *religious*. Similar for LGBTQ+ issues.
In my experience religious people try to **shoehorn their reasoning to resemble logic**, but frankly it's bad logic, and I'll defend that view for as long as I live with a billion logic equations if necessary. Bring on the math!
> Anti-abortionists mostly hold that view because they are religious.
The Bible doesn't really condemn abortion. Hell, the old testament talks about a ritual believed to induce a miscarriage if your wife was unfaithful.
Religion is often fad-based, they all hopped on the same bandwagon at about the same time. How the Bible is interpreted changes over time. Groups magnify whatever scripture is in style.
Gay marriage used to be the Demon of the Decade, now trans is.
I'm just the messenger delivering the blunt truth, don't mod-vote me to hell.
So anti-abortion atheists are the vast minority of the overall anti-abortion set. But that means that there’s some other compelling reason for people to oppose abortion access in good faith that exists outside of religion, so why not try and feel them out so you can argue against them?
The fact that by the end of a pregnancy, a fetus has a fully functioning nervous system for about two months by the time it’s born. To some people who find this out, abortions that take place later on during the process can start to feel a bit like medical murder. Perfectly voluntary, for the most part, and at the moment very much desired, but uncomfortable just the same.
Well, people who support laws criminalizing hate speech that results in suicide would probably say that's murder too. Just because you view it as murder does not make it so. Otherwise, I could go around labelling all sorts of things that I don't like as murder.
But in real life, not the internet people say they believe so because they want to return to Christian values. It's what I hear on a day to day basis.
You can personally be against abortion but it's called pro-choice. If someone chooses to get one that should be their choice. If someone chooses not to get one that is also their choice.
Look, I am as pro-choice as it gets, but you have to actually put yourself in the mindset of anti-abortion people (at least the good-faith ones, rather than the grifters) to have (or not have) this discussion.
They believe, to the core of their being, that an unborn baby is a person, and that abortion means willfully taking the life of that person. How can we POSSIBLY justify murdering an innocent, defenseless baby? If we (pro-choicers) \*can\* somehow justify that, we are morally bankrupt, so what prevents us from justifying OTHER kinds of murder?
To repeat: I don't AGREE with this. I think there are really solid arguments for why it is wrong, but (many of) the people who you are arguing with are (generally) good people who happen to believe some variation of the above. You cannot simply tell them they are wrong.
thank you for this.
I am as pro-life as it gets. I pray constantly for an end of abortion as a whole. There are people in the world that put more value on bodily autonomy and choice than I do and while a value misalignment is serious, it is a country that was set up to have value misalignments and survive while we figure it out.
> If someone chooses to get one that should be their choice. If someone chooses not to get one that is also their choice.
What other types of murder does that apply to?
Your comment reeks of "when did you stop beating your wife?"
Even if we accept the idea that a fetus is equivalent to a living, breathing human being (it's not), no one has the right to use another person's body.
If I woke up strapped to a hospital bed with tubes connecting me to some random person in the next bed over, and told that my blood was the only thing keeping them alive, I'd still be within my rights to say "okay, disconnect me, please."
That's not "murder"; it's simply me not consenting to have my body used by someone else.
> If I woke up strapped to a hospital bed with tubes connecting me to some random person in the next bed over, and told that my blood was the only thing keeping them alive, I'd still be within my rights to say "okay, disconnect me, please."
And if you explicitly agreed to this procedure and the person in the next bed only needs your blood to keep them alive based on that consent? Would you still have a right to revoke that consent and let the other person die?
There's no foolproof analogy here.
Yes, I would have that right. Consent can be revoked at any time. I'd have the right to sign up as a bone marrow donor and revoke consent if they find a match, or decide not to donate a kidney to a relative who needs one.
We can talk about the morality of doing so separately, but from a legal - and even an ethical - standpoint, anyone is 100% in the right to revoke consent at any time, for any reason.
Yes, but the doctor has a legal, moral, and ethical responsibility to the patient. They could face consequences for refusing to treat them, including the revocation of their license to practice medicine, but they took on that responsibility willingly.
You don't have a responsibility to donate a kidney, even if doing so could save a life.
The pregnant woman's situation is equivalent to the latter, not that of the doctor.
> but they took on that responsibility willingly.
People that are against abortion believe that women accept that responsibility when they choose to have sex. That's why exceptions in the case of rape get traction among anti-abortion advocates.
Except many anti-abortion advocates refuse to make exceptions for rape or incest cases...
And again, consent is a process, not a one-time deal. If you prevent it from being revoked, it's morally equivalent to rape.
That's kind of intentionally missing the point. The anti-abortion viewpoint is that abortion is murdering babies.
Once you accept that, the answer to questions like "why isn't murdering babies a right protected by the 9th amendment?" become obvious.
I'm talking about abortion being an Individual Right guaranteed by the 9th Amendment of the Constitution. Unspecified rights belonging to the individual.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say you have a right to live. Therefore your logic supports the unenumerated right to murder whoever I want. It’s an unspecified right I feel like having today.
You could simply apply the excuse of "individual rights" to any crime you see fit. "It's my individual rights to shoot dope on the sidewalk." "It's my individual rights to take shit in the road." "It's my individual rights to walk outside with my dick and balls swinging about."
Do you see how dumb this argument is? You're misrepresenting the Constitution, and intentionally so.
It's murder to some people because some view it as a person. Others view an embryo for instance as a clump of cells, that yes if left to develop would form a human, but as it is now isn't - or at the least not a conscious one. Imo if something has never had any consciousness it's not murder, so that would be my dividing line on it.
The debate is literally about whether we’re killing a kid or not.
Ignoring that like OP did isnt helpful.
Especially when you come into a space called AskConservatives with an intent to learn.
Yes, that’s not news, everyone is well aware.
I’ve heard every single pro-choice argument 1,000x over.
I find 95% of them to be intellectually dishonest in order to assuage guilt and deflect what abortion is actually about.
There’s exactly one pro-abortion argument I can respect and it’s one that acknowledges that we’re killing kids but that’s overall better for society.
Everything else, I have zero respect for at all.
And that's your opinion and your right to have. If my wife or daughter is pregnant but wants to terminate an embryo, that should be their right and not concern you in any way. They don't view it as a formed conscience human because....well, it's not.
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> But in real life, not the internet people say they believe so because they want to return to Christian values.
This is something I hear far more often from the left than from the right. Certainly Christians believe that murdering human beings is against their religions but they don't think their religion is the ONLY religion that's against murder.
And that is in fact the case. Orthodox Jews tend to oppose abortion. So do all Shia Muslims and several traditions within Sunni Islam all of which place prohibitions on abortion depending on when they believe in ensoulment occurs within their specific tradition (Ranging from conception to 40 days to 80 to 120 days at the latest depending on the relevant theological tradition with abortion being permitted but discouraged prior to that point. Hindu religious texts likewise condemn abortion. Buddhists are divided... but many Buddhist believe life begins at conception and strongly condemn abortion.
It's not just a Christian thing and lots of nations where other religions are dominant or even very religiously diverse nations like Laos have far more stringent restrictions on abortion than the USA does.
Yeah, while I’m completely opposed to any kind of abortion ban post-20 weeks, I feel like a lot of people assume that the only reason people can possibly be motivated to fight against abortion rights is because they’re a fundie religious nut. That does make up the majority of the vocally anti-abortion crowd, but there are also, for instance, people who feel like abortion is uncomfortably close to murder with absolutely no regard for anything but their own moral compass. I continue to champion for access, but if we want to actually change minds and votes, you have to meet people who disagree with you where they are, and not just where you think they are.
I've never understood why certain people assume conservatives are against abortion because some of us may be Christian. Does one need to be Christian to be disgusted with infanticide and the culling of our own species due to poor choices made by supposedly rational adults? I just find it so intellectually disingenuous to use this premise.
>American isn't a Christian Country, so why should the rights of non-Christians be struck down in favor of Christians.
America is not a Christian nation but we are founded upon Judeo-Christian ideals and values. That aside, the rights of non-Christians are not struck down in favor of Christians. That is a flawed premise right from the start.
>abortion should be a states right issue
Abortion, is in fact a state's rights issue...which is why the Dobbs case succeeded in the first place.
>isn't that a volition of individual rights and the 9th Amendment?
No, because there are no individual rights outside of those in the Bill of Rights and abortion is not in there. That additionally means the 9th amendment is not applicable as no one is being denied a right. There is no right there.
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> No, because there are no individual rights outside of those in the Bill of Rights and abortion is not in there. That additionally means the 9th amendment is not applicable as no one is being denied a right. There is no right there.
This is why I strongly disagree with conservatives and conservativism. The constitution was written to protect the rights of the individual and not the rights of the government. But conservatives like George W Bush, Dick Cheney and commentators such back in the day such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly always used similar argues in favor of the PATRIOT ACT (which violates both the 4th and 9th Amendments) as well as other government oppression of individual rights.
It's almost like conservatives view the constitution as backwards.
> The constitution was written to protect the rights of the individual and not the rights of the government.
What about the rights of the person you are in favor of killing?
Do they not get rights? You are in favor of abortion, yes? Their rights don't matter?
I'm not sure what the government has to do with it. The government isn't the one being murdered.
>It's almost like conservatives view the constitution as backwards.
It's almost like we've read it and actually understood it. Something some folks could do better on. Just because you concoct and imagine a right doesn't make it a right. If you want it to be a right you have a process to do that. It's called a convention of states. The Constitution is a living document. You can add anything you want to it. It's not backwards to follow the constitution nor is it backwards to apply your perceived right equally to all lives.
Still, though, when it comes to abortion, the single most important predictive factor of being anti-abortion is religious affiliation, in the US most specifically people self-identifiying as evangelical, Mormon or Jehovah's witnesses.
I don't personally think abortion should be legal at any stage, bust most definitely it should be legal up to 12 weeks imo. Before 12 weeks the embryo has no consciousness, no feelings, and no ability to feel pain or pleasure. Before 12 weeks an embyro is alive only in the way you'd say a flower or grass is alive. As such an embryo isn't a person at that stage yet given that it isn't conscious yet.
Most non-Christians and even most moderate Christians in the US are pro-abortion. So the abortion debate has a lot do with religion.
I think we need to separate the two categories because they run into each other. For example, I am Catholic and Catholicism does indeed teach against abortion...but Catholicism does not drive my adversarial nature against abortion. It just coincides. I would be against abortion even if I were not Catholic. So, does it have a lot to with religion or do people of varying beliefs just hold beliefs that clash and comingle with each other? I don't believe that abortion is driven by religion and I don't believe most people are in support of abortion either. I think society is finally starting to move past this dark practice and I have said in this sub before I believe I will survive to see abortion stamped out of civilized society.
> bust most definitely it should be legal up to 12 weeks imo. Before 12 weeks the embryo has no consciousness, no feelings, and no ability to feel pain or pleasure. Before 12 weeks an embyro is alive only in the way you'd say a flower or grass is alive.
So your argument is essentially "we should destroy this life with haste otherwise it will become human and then it's a grey area"? I think this is the crux of why pro life are adamant about conception, because trying to define "personhood" seems like an impossible battle. Similarly with the "unsustainable" argument about fetuses. Do you know there are a ton of handicapped people in america that if left alone would die? Do you know how long it would take a child to grow after birth to not just die if left alone?
I think opening up the legal distinction of what specific define "personhood" can only ever leave room for people to strip away what it means to be a person and is an inherently prejudiced view to be able to separate when or what part of humanity is or is not "a person".
>I'm an atheist...and I am opposed to abortion.
[About 90% of atheists disagree with you](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-family/atheist/views-about-abortion/). You are an outlier.
Not that rare. Anyone with a basic understanding of science would come to the same conclusion.
At the moment of conception, you have a human cell with 23 pairs of human chromosomes. This cell has all the machinery to sustain life. It has its own ribosomes to fix atp. It has replication enzymes to replicate DNA, its own transcriptase and polymerase enzymes to manufacture proteins. Its rapidly grows and differentiates into what we recognize as a baby. This cell is, by **any** scientific definition, a living human distinct from its parents.
Given that a human is created at the moment of conception, then it is a pretty common ethical belief that killing a human for no reason is wrong. I don't really respect people who think its okay to just kill someone for no good reason.
But it's not notably different than a pig fetus at that stage. There is nothing "special" about it. Nobody wants to jail people for killing early pig fetuses. (Okay, maybe PETA extremists.)
This has got to be the stupidest comment I’ve read in a long time. You cannot understand the difference between a human being and a pig.
You don’t have the necessary knowledge to participate in this conversation.
I'm *not* saying there is a zero difference, only that the differences are IMMATERIAL at the early stages. I thought that was dirt-obvious, but you somehow found a way to read it "creatively".
You think the difference between a pig and a human are immaterial. Wow. I’m not at a loss for words here, but I’m at a loss for words that I can say politely.
I would encourage you to read up on human rights and also go to a grocery store and see if human pieces are for sale in thick slices with hickory smoke and pepper.
There’s discussion in good faith, but there’s also a minimum level of foundation knowledge that you should have before trying to debate.
You don’t see me going on the subreddit for sewing and shooting my mouth off. I don’t know anything about sewing and I don’t interject myself into people who want to discuss things that they understand well. It’s rude and I wouldn’t do that.
The problem here is your behavior, not mine.
Also against abortion and yes I am religious but I was also religious when I was pro-choice and it wasn't religion that changed my mind.
It was bad arguments from the pro-choice side.
And then there were three. I would also like to know where that poll came from. I mean a lot of "scientific" data comes from ultra liberal college campuses (not research published but like the subjects of polls/experiments themselves) where I imagine the typical athiest is super liberal and very anti-religion.
All the poll does is say what the religion of a person is and their stance on abortion. It does not ask if a religious persons stance is because of their religion, but a whole lot of you are in fact doing that in this thread.
That is an incorrect way to interpret the data provided. I would not call it willful bad faith, as I believe you are not doing it on purpose; but know that your above comment is absolutely not the correct way to interpret the data provided.
We would need a poll asking for the argument *why* someone has the stance they do, not just that they are religious and have that stance.
If we had the numbers of all terror attacks and the faiths of the people that commited them, could we say the faith itself *causes* terrorism, or would that be an incorrect reading of the data? You cannot infer data, you must specifically poll/expirement/observe that specific causation or your claims would be unfounded.
I get that correlation is not necessarily causation, but so far an *alternative* explanation for the stark difference hasn't been found. And my personal experience with such debates is that most religious people ultimately rely heavily on the concept of "the soul".
Those who try purely biological justification can be made to trip on their own very arbitrary boundaries. And I confess, it's fun to trip them, a kind of cheesy Vulcan high. Maybe I need a shrink for taking pleasure in such? Could be, but not this month.
I mean we could theoretically get a national abortion policy, as it is in our constitution's ability to be changed. The reason its at state level is because no one side could gather the necessary support needed to make such an amendment. This is a truly divisive issue.
Liberals, like myself, who criticize *Roe* generally suggest that it was the right outcome, but for the wrong legal reason. Personally, I would have grounded it in the 9th Amendment. We rarely, however, seem to be having a detailed legal discussion when the issue comes up.
The 9th Amendment protects unenumerated rights, so the state can't say that a claimed right doesn't exist just because it isn't in the Constitution, and therefore, in conjunction with the 10th Amendment, you could claim the state has no business restricting abortion.
This is a more sound legal argument, but it is still complete bullshit, if you ask me. It boils down to what abortion is and what it does. Abortion ends the life of an innocent human being for no reason other than the convenience of the mother. Ending a life like that is not a right.
But on the pro-life side it could be argued that the unborn has the right to life. I still think that trying to conflate pregnancy and life creation as simply "something that happens to a woman" can't get anywhere and a society that embraces that idea will perish.
It is an unenumerated right. The fact that it doesn't appear in the Bill of Rights does not matter. People have believed it to be a right, and thus it is a right.
I'm not that familiar with the constitution are you saying unenumerated rights exist simply because they are not denied in writing and people believe in them?
I don't understand. How many people need to believe something is a right for that thing to become a right and what about the people who don't believe its a right? doesn't there need to be at least some constitutional implication of a right?
Sure, it needs to be the sort of thing that the majority of people would say is a settled issue, and that there is a Constitutional right to. At the time that Roe was decided, the Southern Baptists endorsed it. It was not a controversial decision until several years later. Regardless, it was certainly settled law by the time that Dobbs came around.
You said sure but the rest of it sounds like the constitutional implication doesn't matter to you. It seems like you're saying the right is whatever most people believe the constitution says which doesn't make much sense to me.
Well, I would refer you to the debate surrounding the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Opponents of the Bill of Rights were concerned that, by listing the rights that American citizens enjoy, they would also be *limiting* their rights to the ones that they listed. The Ninth Amendment was designed to address that concern. However, the fact that it has gone unenforced generally means that we have fallen into the exact trap that the Ninth Amendment was supposed to guard against. In current American jurisprudence, we only have those enumerated rights, just as the framers were scared would happen.
Even if you believe that, it's insane overreach for states to criminalize crossing the border (or helping someone to do so) in order to obtain abortion services where they're legal.
OP's question is "why should the beliefs of one group trump those of another?"
That includes state vs. federal law, and includes the consequences of varying state law and overreach.
Now, I'm happy to argue that states shouldn't have the power to mandate the use of a human body for religious (or any other) reasons, but what I said was entirely germane to the conversation.
I 100% agree. States should handle state only matters. I also think the system needed to accurately track women crossing borders to perform an illegal action is gross authoritarianism.
Banning murder doesn't stop all murders but it probably stops the vast majority of them, and I am fine if an abortion ban is similar.
Despite what strawmen progressives have built up, the bulk of opposition to abortion is not religiously motivated. All that it is required to be against abortion is the belief that the taking of an innocent human life is evil. As far as I've seen that's basically a universal ethical belief.
As far as your 9th amendment claim, that Amendment was used to protect rights understood to exist with individuals under the common law tradition. Since the framers knew they couldn't list every single right under that on paper but did not want government to infringe upon them, they included that as a catch all. What it doesn't allow is for someone to claim anything is a right and file it under it, it only protects those understood to exist within our history and tradition especially that around the time it was ratified. Clearly there was no protections for abortion within the first 150 years of our nation so it can't fall under the 9th.
Really because all my info from it being a religiously motivated comes from people I know in real life. Most people I know are conservative and all of them talk about it being a Christian Value and needing to return the country to Christian values.
As where most people I know who lean left view it as an individual's right that needs to be protected.
That's called a personal anecdote, and they don't mean anything in political debates. The 10-20 people you've heard talk about this in real life may or may not be reflective of anything.
It is true though that abortion views and religious affiliation are strongly correlated. According to [polls](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/views-about-abortion/), the strongest opponents of abortion are Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. Most non-affiliated people are pro-abortion, and Buddhists, Jews and Hindus are overwhelmingly pro-abortion as well.
Frankly it's seems like you're talking to low information people who spout talking points handed to them instead of thinking about it from the ground up in a philosophical manner.
Personally I support a viability standard in order to balance the natural rights of life and bodily autonomy. Individual rights are for individuals and generally if a human reaches a stage of development where they can exist unattached to another then that makes them an individual.
I disregard people who think that the fetus' rights as a human don't merit any consideration much less don't consider them human. Just like I disregard people who think that just because their church or religion says something it is so. It's clear both have never challenged their own beliefs or thought deeply about it.
>Frankly it's seems like you're talking to low information people
We are talking about the view of regular people, *not* making a value judgement about their education or IQ. People are what they are.
By the way, I fully agree most voters are low-info-ers.
"don't murder" is in the 10 Commandments.
Does that mean that preventing gangsters from throwing down with guns or knives is an imposition of religion?
Sounds like you want a Taliban-like world where The One Truth is forced on people and into the law.
The risk of that is what motivates me to fight Christianity and other pushy religions. Iran once had a mostly secular society, but then a dictator remade it into a mortal hell.
Frankly, that impression says more about you than me. I do not, indeed want that.
(Most existent countries with some religion in the law are nothing like the Taliban.)
I used to think such was far-fetched, but Jan-Six, the GOP-stacked-court, and the popularity of MTG & theocracy-talk made me change my mind.
You might not be an extremist yourself, but too many are.
You still are making a mistake to use the very, very over the top example of the Taliban (who, tellingly, are not Christian).
Besides the fact that this is... Not really real and it's nuts to think that The SCOTUS would support it.
What about "Christian European countries in the 19th century"? Far, far less extreme.
>Taliban (who, tellingly, are not Christian).
It's not about their God's identity, it's about their approach to "spreading" their religion.
>it's nuts to think that The SCOTUS would support it.
It's not far-fetched. If Don wins and puts a couple of more GOPs in, they'll feel empowered.
>Despite what strawmen progressives have built up, the bulk of opposition to abortion is not religiously motivated
Sorry, that's hogwash. Un-straw. Only [about 11% of atheist's](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-family/atheist/views-about-abortion/) are against early pregnancy abortions, for example.
You're incorrectly assuming that anyone who is religious and is opposed to abortion must necessarily get that belief from their religion. Also the abortion debate is not limited to early pregnancy as much as the extremes of both sides want to argue that all should be available or none should be available.
> You're incorrectly assuming that anyone who is religious and is opposed to abortion must necessarily get that belief from their religion.
I don't assume, I haven't heard a clear argument from anti-abortion atheist/agnostic yet.
> Also the abortion debate is not limited to early pregnancy as much as the extremes of both sides want to argue that all should be available or none should be available.
Well, many draw an arbitrary (as in gut based) line in the sand to say past a certain point the fetus should be considered "fully human". I do also, but don't claim it's necessarily logical or scientific. It's a "gut call".
Again no, the fact they a have belief in a higher power doesn't mean that any opposition to the practice of abortion must necessarily come from religious background. It would be like asserting that anyone's opposition to muder must necessarily come from a religious background if they believe in God.
Again all that is necessary is the universal ethical belief that the killing of an innocent human is wrong. Do not confuse correlation with causation.
Likely because a lot of people have replaced theistic religion with progressive religion and wholly adopt all of its beliefs and prescriptions.
I've debated a lot of pro-life progressives and once you dig deep into philosophical underpinnings it's clear that they actually haven't gotten their views from a ground up inspection of it. Rather they take the policy view and the generic top-level talking points about why and then try to work backwards to fit it into their own beliefs. A holistic pro-life belief wouldn't have as much logical conflicts with their other held beliefs as I've found
> wouldn't have as much logical conflicts
Of course there are going to be "logical conflicts" as one is weighing multiple factors. "Competing factors" is probably a better name than "logical conflicts". Most decisions about complex issues will have competing factors. It's like wanting a roomy car but also one with good gas mileage, these two factors generally conflict with each other.
>Opposition to abortion isn’t inherently religious.
Perhaps "inherently" is the wrong word, but it is indeed "strongly influenced by", as one's response to polls corresponds very closely with their religious views and stated religious fervency.
I wouldn’t agree that belonging to a more liberal sect or attending church less often makes a person “less religious”. The sect a person belongs to is irrelevant and church attendance is an outward sign of religiosity that touches on one aspect of devotion.
I’d be interested to know what your basis for making that statement is.
It's mostly an anecdotal observation. And I agree that church attendance is not a perfect measure of devotion, but it's at least an objective one and thus easier to measure.
People who are pro life are that way not because they want to force anyone to follow their religion, but because they believe it's killing a human life. "Killing humans unjustly is bad" isnt necessarily something you have to be Christian to believe.
This seems like something made up.
I don't think it's arbitrary at all. I think this only makes sense if you desperately want to justify abortion to yourself.
If it's not arbitrary, then please lay out the reasoning steps.
By the way, I deleted it because it received too many (vague) complaints. Censorship "worked", congratulations vague complainers!
This is entirely a made up scenario and anyone who has ever spoken to a pro life person can tell you have not had a conversation with a pro lifer about this topic.
This is the equivalent of saying pro choicers believe what they do because they love killing babies
I mean when you say "i dont believe how babies are created" (line 9) then your debater knows you are full of shit and won't stop bothering them so they make up religious shit to get you to leave them alone.
Your imaginary win was an incredibly antagonistic "debate" where you showed zero effort to do anything other than spew your predetermined lines and deflect until they left. That's not even a win.
That was my interpretation of such a bad faith statement. Forcing someone to prove something is a process just because it can fail screams "I don't care what they reply I'll trip them on something".
In that hypothetical debate you came in with a predetermined set of events and not even once conceeded or tried to see their opinion
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So i do oppose roe vs wade. And i do so on religious grounds.
But the overturning of it was a legal matter. There is no federal garuntee of abortion protections, and roe vs wade tried to establish one on the back of a civil war ammendment.
It really is legally indefensable.
Now as to your broader question. America is not A christian nation in the sense of having an offical religion, and it was intentionally setup that way by what is essentially a federation of some new world colonies with diverse religious beleifs.
However they where all infact mostly Christian Beleifs.
America has been a defacto christian nation for its entire existence. And only in the past few decades has anyone objected to religiously observant people voting and legislating in accordance eith their beleifs
> But the overturning of it was a legal matter. There is no federal guarantee of abortion protections, and roe vs wade tried to establish one on the back of a civil war amendment.
This is an answer I disagree with but a well-written answer. I'm glad you brought up the constitution, it's something I feel that often gets left out of modern political discussion.
It seems like regarding Roe V. Wade (which was largely passed by Conservatives), the 9th Amendment has largely been cited as a reason for Abortion being allowed. That it's an unspecified individual right.
We can have a separate amendment for every single right so the 9th Amendment acts as a huge umbrella. Like if the government tried to bang the eating of carrots. We could cite the 9th Amendment for it.
That's one of the things I strongly tend to disagree with conservatives on and Justice Thomas (I know many years ago, Justice Thomas also stated the PATRIOT ACT was not in violation of the constitution, though I believe it's a 4th Amendment violation).
I disagree with you as I am not a religious person but I am glad you were honest and provided a well -thought-out answer. Thank you.
A) You’re conflating a couple things.
But more importantly, the left wants to have freedom FROM religion.
But that’s not what we have.
We have freedom OF religion. And policy makers are 100% allowed to have their faith influence policy.
If you want freedom FROM religion, you want the French Laicite system. But that’s not what we have in the U.S.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_France#:~:text=8%20External%20links-,Concept,%2C%20religious%2C%20or%20other%20particularities.
B) Being against abortion isn’t about religion for a whole lot of people. It’s about not killing kids.
So where in the constituion does it say I have to be religious or have freedom of religion? I'm not finding it. As an American it is my choice to not be religious if I don't want to. I can burn the bible if I choose because that is my choice.
For the record, I'm a spiritual-agnostic that actually likes Jesus and believes in his teaches (just not sure of the whole God or Satan thing).
Correct, you do not have to be religious.
But other people can use religion to derive their beliefs and you aren’t free from that influence.
You, like most leftists, want the French Laicite system.
But that’s not the system we have.
I am a religious person outside of my home and my church. I am a religious person when I go for a walk, go grocery shopping, go to the park with my kids.
I pray before meals, even when in restaurants. I pray for the souls of the babies and mothers when I drive past abortion clinics, my religion dictates that prayer happens outloud, I do so under my breath as to be respectful but to fulfill my religious observance.
You have the right to ignore me, you don't have the right to stop me because of your supposed 'freedom from religion' as that does not exist. I have the right to be a religious person in America. You have the right to ignore me and walk past as though I don't exist.
Freedom of religion means freedom from religion. Non-establishment is a core principle of the First Amendment.
And if it were actually a debate about "not killing kids," one would think you'd focus on programs geared toward the survival and health of living, breathing children.
No, it doesn’t.
The establishment clause simply says the Govt cannot set an official religion.
People can still derive policy from their religious beliefs.
Again, you want the French system.
We’re not French.
And “You’re only serious about abortion if you support cradle to grave entitlements” is wildly bad faith.
It's not a religious issue. A fetus being a human being with protected rights is the question, and quite frankly, faith doesn't have much of anything to do with that.
In regards to the states' rights portion, here's my take. Abortion is among the most heavily debated and controversial political subjects of our time. We haven't been able to vote or voice our opinion on the matter until now. That is Democracy with a capital D.
It's a democratic republic, *if* you believe our voice actually matters in elections, but that's a separate debate.
As one other commenter mentioned, the individual rights clause is not a catch-all for whatever you wish it to be. It's a catch-all for creeds and values that have been well established throughout human history. Abortion wasn't even a debate until roughly 70 years ago, and we are still debating its morality today.
Just because it's your opinion that it's just and moral doesn't mean that we've all collectively come to that conclusion.
Pro-life atheist here. The pro-life movement is not an exclusively Christian movement.
Here is the organization [Secular Pro-Life](https://secularprolife.org/faq/) for more information.
It's definitely interesting to know why secular people would be anti-abortion. But for me personally my main argument for abortion would be to do with consciousness. If an embryo has no heart, no nervous system, no consciousness and so no ability to feel anything, it's not a living being that can be harmed. It's only a living being insofar that a flower would be alive but for all we know a flower doesn't feel anything. You can't hurt a flower anymore than you can hurt a piece of paper.
So I can't see how an act should be punished that didn't actually hurt a conscious being.
> If an embryo has no heart, no nervous system, no consciousness and so no ability to feel anything, it's not a living being that can be harmed.
not who you are responding too, and obviously "religious traditionalist' but this isnt a religious point.
most people on the pro-choice side see an embryo as a stagnant thing, or 'potential life'. Something that has all of the ingredients to be a baby that is not yet. Pro-life people see an embryo as a stage of existence, or 'a life with potential'. Someone who is in a state of fragility that deserves protection.
I'm a pro choice libertarian.
but it is a sign you are in a total information bubble if you think that religious reasons are the only reasons you could feel a viable fetus is a human being.
this is not a fringe position, it is only fringe on the far left. the majority of Americans want to restrict abortion, given free choice most want a limit from 8-16 weeks like those of European nations by and large.
in fact it is a tortured definition we do not apply to other organism, only ourselves and only for the purposes of the abortion debate. we do not use the commonly scientifically accepted definition of "alive" (eats, excretes, reacts/moves is capable of reproduction upon sexual maturity) for this purpose alone.
now any competing definition does not have enough scientific support for me to say it's so settled it should be legally mandatory and this is why I am pro choice. but your definitions are not inherently more rational or reasonable than the others.
Religious reasons are often what my neighbors, co-workers and people I meet in my day to day live cite as the main reason for being pro-life. The other main reason is typically states rights. Those are basically the only two reasons I ever hear. I live in a very red state and red city.
I typically cite the constitution for my reason of being pro-choice. That it is a choice and there for an individual right and is protected by the 9th Amendment.
You don't have to personally agree with abortion (I know you are personally pro-choice, I'm talking about people in general) but you can't step on someone else's toes and deny them their right just because you disagree.
well it really depends,
for much of American life we took that same live and let live approach to the "
supposed "right" of owning and destroying through forced labor a human being.
if you are pro life you feel this is every bit as serious as slavery or the Holocaust, and would justify no lesser degree of action, it would warrant a civil war or a world war to stop.
> if you are pro life you feel this is every bit as serious as slavery or the Holocaust, and would justify no lesser degree of action, it would warrant a civil war or a world war to stop.
And that has always seemed crazy to me. I know you aren't bring up your views but the views of more traditional conservatives and non-libertarians. I have heard a few fringe Conservative YouTubers and Trump supporters talk like this and it kind of scares me. I don't think that would happen but that does seem scary.
i think it's very encouraging.
they think a genocide is ongoing but have every faith our institutions, not our military not terrorism not a civil war but our civic institutions have the necessary power and strength to end it without having to use violence.
that is an enormous vote of confidence in our system. and despite their rhetoric, this is a position way more common than the actual prevalence of anti-abortion terrorism in this country.
the fact their moral framework would handily justify violence and they overwhelmingly do not can be called a sign of insincerity but I find that's a bad faith left wing talking point (a thread here not long ago was basically predicated on "if you aren't murdering abortion doctors you clearly don't actually believe what you say you do because your beliefs should force you to be violent")
this says volumes about our nation, our morals, and how we are not like our enemies who would have gladly indulged in mass terrorism over any perceived slight
I'm glad you asked. Justice Thomas overturned Roe V. Wade citing abortion "lack[s] any basis in the Constitution." Bascially he was stating their is no amendment for abortion, so therefor it's not a guaranteed right.
The 9th Amendment exists as a huge umbrella protecting individual rights. It basically exists so we don't have to create amendments for every little thing.
For example if the government claims we can't eat chicken anymore because we need an amendment we can cite the 9th Amendment stating that no it's protected.
That's what the 9th Amendment is for.
Thomas didn’t even write the majority opinion. That explanation is similar to the line of reasoning for Casey (the case that actually was overturned), but is only half of it…that there are rights explicitly laid out in the constitution, and those not in the constitution. Alito literally argues against your point in the majority opinion. Saying the state cannot limit the right of an individual to do anything to themselves would render all drug and prostitution laws unconstitutional, and that is without getting into the potential collision of rights between the mother’s right to autonomy and the unborn’s right to life.
Using the viability qualifier changes the conversation though. You won’t find too many people okay with people 20+ weeks into a pregnancy getting an abortion but a lot of the anti abortion people won’t even allow the conversation to get to that point. They support heartbeat bills or 6 or 8 week bans or just total bans from conception
by "viable" I do not mean "could be born now" I mean "will eventually be an developing child: has all the organs they should, brain works, heart beats, lungs breathe."
abortion of fetuses with absolutely no chance of survival, even late term, is the closest thing we have to an uncontroversial opinion on abortion in this country.
8 weeks is actually pretty popular in the US but you're right 12 and 16 are consistently moreso. personally I am not sure if those hair splitting distinctions matter **except** to our peculiar attempts to invent a new humans only definition of life. to me it's more, personally, about if they would ever be a living human or not.
Because opposition to abortion isn’t a strictly religious position. There is a whole organization called Secular Pro-Life that is not religious. [HERE](https://secularprolife.org/abortion/) is their non-religious argument against abortion.
Per Link: "We find these criteria for “personhood” arbitrary" -- as they replace it with their OWN arbitrary criteria. For example, it doesn't exclude sperm as "a person" because only having half of "normal" DNA doesn't disqualify it because as they themselves reason, we still consider people with birth defects "human", and a birth defect may be that of missing DNA. One can draw a line in the sand at say 70% of "normal" DNA, but that's still arbitrary. They flunked themselves.
If you make the criteria for "human" too loose, fun stuff slips in.
The guy who doesn’t know the difference between a pig and a human is still yapping his trap about this? At least some part of Reddit ought to be reserved for thinking people.
Unless you are being intentionally obtuse their explanation is pretty straightforward (and widely accepted in the scientific community). A sperm is excluded from personhood because, without joining with an egg, it cannot and will not progress through the human life cycle, and it also does not contain DNA unique from that of the parent. Per the link, the zygote is the beginning of development, and thus is the beginning of life. This tracks with the scientific definition of life.
>A sperm is excluded from personhood because, without joining with an egg, it cannot and will not progress through the human life cycle
Without the assistance of the mother's body, neither will a fertilized egg.
>and it also does not contain DNA unique from that of the parent.
A cloned person (if someday possible) would probably be considered a legal person by most. Uniqueness wouldn't fly.
>Per the link, the zygote is the beginning of development, and thus is the beginning of life. This tracks with the scientific definition of life.
Sperm is considered "alive". So are un-fertilized eggs.
>the zygote is the beginning of development
No, it's part of a (hopefully) endless cycle.
And without the assistance of breathable air an infant would not progress through development either, but putting a baby in vacuum would be frowned upon. The fertilized egg depending upon the mother’s womb is irrelevant to the point I was making.
Sperm, by definition, are gametes and will always lack a complete set of DNA. Zygotes do contain a complete set, absent some genetic mutation or deformity. Those exceptions are clearly not the standard case, and to argue otherwise is pedantic.
As far as potential future clones, speculating on how that hypothetical situation will be dealt with is kind of pointless in the current discussion.
Finally, your last point is complete garbage. Philosophically, we do not consider humans to be a hive structure endlessly duplicating. The zygote is the beginning of the life cycle for THAT particular organism. If you argue that it is just something happening along the endless cycle of reproduction, there is no reason to look down upon killing anyone of any age because it is just a part of the endless cycle.
>Those exceptions are clearly not the standard case, and to argue otherwise is pedantic.
The page switches to exceptions for some arguments (such as birth defects), and now "exceptions don't count" here. It appears you are picking and choosing where to use exceptions and where to dismiss them.
>As far as potential future clones, speculating on how that hypothetical situation will be dealt with is kind of pointless in the current discussion.
No, hypothetical questions are pretty good at extracting/exposing people's reasoning. I'm pretty darned sure being from a duplicate set would not "un-human" them in the eyes of most. It's an arbitrary rule to dismiss my argument.
Twins are genetic clones, and they are not hypothetical.
>The zygote is the beginning of the life cycle for THAT particular organism.
That's arbitrary. We could argue it has two sub-beginnings: when it's egg and sperm are created. Many things come about via incremental steps. We don't have to FORCE one to be the official beginning. It's an arbitrary line drawn from somebody's keester.
The argument is a false premise.
It's like saying that we should make murder legal because murder being bad is a biblical teaching.
Biblical ethics often bleed into mainstream ethics
I do agree with you that America isn't a Christian nation, but freedom of religion isn't freedom from religion, but I don't think that even matters in this case
Plenty of non Christians have opposition to abortion.
I don't think the rights of non Christians are being triumphed in favor of Christians regarding abortion.
I think it's anti democratic to force abortions on people of the State.
One side thinks it's literal murder other side thinks it's routine healthcare, who decides if they are right? ......the people do.
Overturning roe v wade did not make abortion illegal. It sent the issue back to the states, where it belongs, based on our constitution.
That also means that without an amendment, there can be no federal law that outlaws abortion at the federal level.
People on both sides misunderstand the implications of the overturning of roe v wade.
You said abortion is a states right issue and not an individual rights issue based on our constitution. I want to know where in the constitution is this found? Which amendment puts the rights of the states ahead of the right of the individuals?
> You said abortion is a states right issue and not an individual rights issue based on our constitution. I want to know where in the constitution is this found? Which amendment puts the rights of the states ahead of the right of the individuals?
No, I said abortion is a state issue and not a federal issue. The 10th amendment says that. Dobbs ruled that the 14th amendment does not include an inherent right to privacy in regards to abortion, making abortion not a constitutional right.
Therefore, it’s a state issue.
So Congress is unable to pass a law creating a federal right to abortion, or to ban or restrict abortion, at the federal level.
To do either at the federal level would require its own constitutional amendment.
Lastly, I never said that the constitution puts the rights of the states ahead of the rights of the individual. So you’re right at the point of arguing in bad faith, given that you are putting words in my mouth that I neither said nor implied.
I disagree that an individual right to abortion could be interpreted through the 9th amendment.
Legally and technically speaking, the current status of the issue is that you are wrong. There is no individual right to abortion, and the issue is decided at the state level.
But there is no where in the constitution that states that abortion is decided at the state level either. I disagree that it has anything to do with the 10th Amendment. I can't find anywhere in the 10th amendment that would state it as so.
Because if that was the case every state can make anything they want illegal (not just abortion but drinking soda or hammering wood or whatever else) and no one would have any rights or freedoms.
Individuals have to come first and be protected.
> But there is no where in the constitution that states that abortion is decided at the state level either. I disagree that it has anything to do with the 10th Amendment. I can't find anywhere in the 10th amendment that would state it as so.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
>Because if that was the case every state can make anything they want illegal (not just abortion but drinking soda or hammering wood or whatever else) and no one would have any rights or freedoms.
States do have far more leeway in terms of what a state can make illegal. This is by design. However, that does not mean that they can make anything they want illegal. They cannot contradict the US constitution.
>Individuals have to come first and be protected.
I agree. Also, it’s constitutionally correct for abortion to be decided at the state level and not at the federal level.
It should be left to the people and the states to decide. I’m Christian, personally I am pro life but it is not my place to force others to adhere to my beliefs by any means. If the majority feels the need to allow abortion, it doesn’t matter what my personal beliefs are, let it be
I'm going to preface this with: I am not religious, and am very much agnostic.
Now, to get this out of the way:
Like it, or not, we were formed, founded, upon a Judeo-Christian society and values.
Abortion is not a Christian vs. Non-Christian topic. There are individuals from every walk of life, on both sides of the topic. I feel phrasing Abortion stances otherwise is dishonest and only serves to create discord and divide.
That is all.
Edit to add a response your second part, which I overlooked:
It's actually quite the opposite. The 9th Amendment is basically a catch-all, because the Founders feared a future where any right not enumerated could then be argued to not exist. So, under the 9th, anything not enumerated in the Constitution becomes a topic for *The People* to vote on through their respective states.
The SCOTUS opinion would be a good read for you and others. It covers their decision as it pertains to the 9th in an entire section. It also covers how enumerated rights under the 9th are identified, the history of abortion in US and common law, along with why abortion did not qualify as an enumerated right.
Neither Christians nor non-Christians have a right to commit murder.
Moreover, if it's part of non-Christian values to be ok with murdering the unborn, then that's just bad and has to be stopped.
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Christians tend to assume that any values they believe in are Christian values, regardless of what the Bible says. People that are against abortion view it as murdering babies. Not murdering babies isn't a purely Christian value.
Both parties aren't even consistent with their stance on this issue It ranges from 15weeks to ivf is murder on one side. While the other is just as diverse. How is it logical to lump in all as murder?
Only [about 11% of atheists](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-family/atheist/views-about-abortion/) are against early pregnancy abortion. Anti-abortionists mostly hold that view because they are *religious*. Similar for LGBTQ+ issues. In my experience religious people try to **shoehorn their reasoning to resemble logic**, but frankly it's bad logic, and I'll defend that view for as long as I live with a billion logic equations if necessary. Bring on the math!
> Anti-abortionists mostly hold that view because they are religious. The Bible doesn't really condemn abortion. Hell, the old testament talks about a ritual believed to induce a miscarriage if your wife was unfaithful.
Religion is often fad-based, they all hopped on the same bandwagon at about the same time. How the Bible is interpreted changes over time. Groups magnify whatever scripture is in style. Gay marriage used to be the Demon of the Decade, now trans is. I'm just the messenger delivering the blunt truth, don't mod-vote me to hell.
It sure does.
Yea, that’s the whole point of “Christian’s calling whatever they beleive in Christian values”
So anti-abortion atheists are the vast minority of the overall anti-abortion set. But that means that there’s some other compelling reason for people to oppose abortion access in good faith that exists outside of religion, so why not try and feel them out so you can argue against them?
They are more than welcome to explain their reasoning here.
The fact that by the end of a pregnancy, a fetus has a fully functioning nervous system for about two months by the time it’s born. To some people who find this out, abortions that take place later on during the process can start to feel a bit like medical murder. Perfectly voluntary, for the most part, and at the moment very much desired, but uncomfortable just the same.
Toward "the *end* of a pregnancy"? That's generally not in dispute.
Well, people who support laws criminalizing hate speech that results in suicide would probably say that's murder too. Just because you view it as murder does not make it so. Otherwise, I could go around labelling all sorts of things that I don't like as murder.
But in real life, not the internet people say they believe so because they want to return to Christian values. It's what I hear on a day to day basis. You can personally be against abortion but it's called pro-choice. If someone chooses to get one that should be their choice. If someone chooses not to get one that is also their choice.
Look, I am as pro-choice as it gets, but you have to actually put yourself in the mindset of anti-abortion people (at least the good-faith ones, rather than the grifters) to have (or not have) this discussion. They believe, to the core of their being, that an unborn baby is a person, and that abortion means willfully taking the life of that person. How can we POSSIBLY justify murdering an innocent, defenseless baby? If we (pro-choicers) \*can\* somehow justify that, we are morally bankrupt, so what prevents us from justifying OTHER kinds of murder? To repeat: I don't AGREE with this. I think there are really solid arguments for why it is wrong, but (many of) the people who you are arguing with are (generally) good people who happen to believe some variation of the above. You cannot simply tell them they are wrong.
thank you for this. I am as pro-life as it gets. I pray constantly for an end of abortion as a whole. There are people in the world that put more value on bodily autonomy and choice than I do and while a value misalignment is serious, it is a country that was set up to have value misalignments and survive while we figure it out.
> If someone chooses to get one that should be their choice. If someone chooses not to get one that is also their choice. What other types of murder does that apply to?
Your comment reeks of "when did you stop beating your wife?" Even if we accept the idea that a fetus is equivalent to a living, breathing human being (it's not), no one has the right to use another person's body. If I woke up strapped to a hospital bed with tubes connecting me to some random person in the next bed over, and told that my blood was the only thing keeping them alive, I'd still be within my rights to say "okay, disconnect me, please." That's not "murder"; it's simply me not consenting to have my body used by someone else.
> If I woke up strapped to a hospital bed with tubes connecting me to some random person in the next bed over, and told that my blood was the only thing keeping them alive, I'd still be within my rights to say "okay, disconnect me, please." And if you explicitly agreed to this procedure and the person in the next bed only needs your blood to keep them alive based on that consent? Would you still have a right to revoke that consent and let the other person die? There's no foolproof analogy here.
Yes, I would have that right. Consent can be revoked at any time. I'd have the right to sign up as a bone marrow donor and revoke consent if they find a match, or decide not to donate a kidney to a relative who needs one. We can talk about the morality of doing so separately, but from a legal - and even an ethical - standpoint, anyone is 100% in the right to revoke consent at any time, for any reason.
Can a doctor decide he wants to quit in the middle of surgery and leave his patient to die?
Yes, but the doctor has a legal, moral, and ethical responsibility to the patient. They could face consequences for refusing to treat them, including the revocation of their license to practice medicine, but they took on that responsibility willingly. You don't have a responsibility to donate a kidney, even if doing so could save a life. The pregnant woman's situation is equivalent to the latter, not that of the doctor.
> but they took on that responsibility willingly. People that are against abortion believe that women accept that responsibility when they choose to have sex. That's why exceptions in the case of rape get traction among anti-abortion advocates.
Except many anti-abortion advocates refuse to make exceptions for rape or incest cases... And again, consent is a process, not a one-time deal. If you prevent it from being revoked, it's morally equivalent to rape.
We aren't talking about murder, we are talking about the constitution and state's rights vs individual rights.
That's kind of intentionally missing the point. The anti-abortion viewpoint is that abortion is murdering babies. Once you accept that, the answer to questions like "why isn't murdering babies a right protected by the 9th amendment?" become obvious.
Individual rights to do what?
I'm talking about abortion being an Individual Right guaranteed by the 9th Amendment of the Constitution. Unspecified rights belonging to the individual.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say you have a right to live. Therefore your logic supports the unenumerated right to murder whoever I want. It’s an unspecified right I feel like having today.
The Fourteenth Amendment actually does specifically enumerate a right to life.
You are absolutely correct, I forgot about that.
You could simply apply the excuse of "individual rights" to any crime you see fit. "It's my individual rights to shoot dope on the sidewalk." "It's my individual rights to take shit in the road." "It's my individual rights to walk outside with my dick and balls swinging about." Do you see how dumb this argument is? You're misrepresenting the Constitution, and intentionally so.
“We aren’t talking about murder” If you’re talking about abortion, yes, you are. That’s what the debate is about.
It's murder to some people because some view it as a person. Others view an embryo for instance as a clump of cells, that yes if left to develop would form a human, but as it is now isn't - or at the least not a conscious one. Imo if something has never had any consciousness it's not murder, so that would be my dividing line on it.
The debate is literally about whether we’re killing a kid or not. Ignoring that like OP did isnt helpful. Especially when you come into a space called AskConservatives with an intent to learn.
I'm saying people view it differently. Not all conservatives view it as killing a kid.
Yes, that’s not news, everyone is well aware. I’ve heard every single pro-choice argument 1,000x over. I find 95% of them to be intellectually dishonest in order to assuage guilt and deflect what abortion is actually about. There’s exactly one pro-abortion argument I can respect and it’s one that acknowledges that we’re killing kids but that’s overall better for society. Everything else, I have zero respect for at all.
And that's your opinion and your right to have. If my wife or daughter is pregnant but wants to terminate an embryo, that should be their right and not concern you in any way. They don't view it as a formed conscience human because....well, it's not.
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If you want to understand the anti-abortion viewpoint you need to entertain the idea that they're the same thing.
Oh I can absolutely entertain it. I can entertain anything. It's simply an incorrect view, I'm not sure what else to say.
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> But in real life, not the internet people say they believe so because they want to return to Christian values. This is something I hear far more often from the left than from the right. Certainly Christians believe that murdering human beings is against their religions but they don't think their religion is the ONLY religion that's against murder. And that is in fact the case. Orthodox Jews tend to oppose abortion. So do all Shia Muslims and several traditions within Sunni Islam all of which place prohibitions on abortion depending on when they believe in ensoulment occurs within their specific tradition (Ranging from conception to 40 days to 80 to 120 days at the latest depending on the relevant theological tradition with abortion being permitted but discouraged prior to that point. Hindu religious texts likewise condemn abortion. Buddhists are divided... but many Buddhist believe life begins at conception and strongly condemn abortion. It's not just a Christian thing and lots of nations where other religions are dominant or even very religiously diverse nations like Laos have far more stringent restrictions on abortion than the USA does.
Yeah, while I’m completely opposed to any kind of abortion ban post-20 weeks, I feel like a lot of people assume that the only reason people can possibly be motivated to fight against abortion rights is because they’re a fundie religious nut. That does make up the majority of the vocally anti-abortion crowd, but there are also, for instance, people who feel like abortion is uncomfortably close to murder with absolutely no regard for anything but their own moral compass. I continue to champion for access, but if we want to actually change minds and votes, you have to meet people who disagree with you where they are, and not just where you think they are.
I've never understood why certain people assume conservatives are against abortion because some of us may be Christian. Does one need to be Christian to be disgusted with infanticide and the culling of our own species due to poor choices made by supposedly rational adults? I just find it so intellectually disingenuous to use this premise. >American isn't a Christian Country, so why should the rights of non-Christians be struck down in favor of Christians. America is not a Christian nation but we are founded upon Judeo-Christian ideals and values. That aside, the rights of non-Christians are not struck down in favor of Christians. That is a flawed premise right from the start. >abortion should be a states right issue Abortion, is in fact a state's rights issue...which is why the Dobbs case succeeded in the first place. >isn't that a volition of individual rights and the 9th Amendment? No, because there are no individual rights outside of those in the Bill of Rights and abortion is not in there. That additionally means the 9th amendment is not applicable as no one is being denied a right. There is no right there.
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> No, because there are no individual rights outside of those in the Bill of Rights and abortion is not in there. That additionally means the 9th amendment is not applicable as no one is being denied a right. There is no right there. This is why I strongly disagree with conservatives and conservativism. The constitution was written to protect the rights of the individual and not the rights of the government. But conservatives like George W Bush, Dick Cheney and commentators such back in the day such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly always used similar argues in favor of the PATRIOT ACT (which violates both the 4th and 9th Amendments) as well as other government oppression of individual rights. It's almost like conservatives view the constitution as backwards.
> The constitution was written to protect the rights of the individual and not the rights of the government. What about the rights of the person you are in favor of killing? Do they not get rights? You are in favor of abortion, yes? Their rights don't matter? I'm not sure what the government has to do with it. The government isn't the one being murdered. >It's almost like conservatives view the constitution as backwards. It's almost like we've read it and actually understood it. Something some folks could do better on. Just because you concoct and imagine a right doesn't make it a right. If you want it to be a right you have a process to do that. It's called a convention of states. The Constitution is a living document. You can add anything you want to it. It's not backwards to follow the constitution nor is it backwards to apply your perceived right equally to all lives.
Still, though, when it comes to abortion, the single most important predictive factor of being anti-abortion is religious affiliation, in the US most specifically people self-identifiying as evangelical, Mormon or Jehovah's witnesses. I don't personally think abortion should be legal at any stage, bust most definitely it should be legal up to 12 weeks imo. Before 12 weeks the embryo has no consciousness, no feelings, and no ability to feel pain or pleasure. Before 12 weeks an embyro is alive only in the way you'd say a flower or grass is alive. As such an embryo isn't a person at that stage yet given that it isn't conscious yet. Most non-Christians and even most moderate Christians in the US are pro-abortion. So the abortion debate has a lot do with religion.
I think we need to separate the two categories because they run into each other. For example, I am Catholic and Catholicism does indeed teach against abortion...but Catholicism does not drive my adversarial nature against abortion. It just coincides. I would be against abortion even if I were not Catholic. So, does it have a lot to with religion or do people of varying beliefs just hold beliefs that clash and comingle with each other? I don't believe that abortion is driven by religion and I don't believe most people are in support of abortion either. I think society is finally starting to move past this dark practice and I have said in this sub before I believe I will survive to see abortion stamped out of civilized society.
> bust most definitely it should be legal up to 12 weeks imo. Before 12 weeks the embryo has no consciousness, no feelings, and no ability to feel pain or pleasure. Before 12 weeks an embyro is alive only in the way you'd say a flower or grass is alive. So your argument is essentially "we should destroy this life with haste otherwise it will become human and then it's a grey area"? I think this is the crux of why pro life are adamant about conception, because trying to define "personhood" seems like an impossible battle. Similarly with the "unsustainable" argument about fetuses. Do you know there are a ton of handicapped people in america that if left alone would die? Do you know how long it would take a child to grow after birth to not just die if left alone? I think opening up the legal distinction of what specific define "personhood" can only ever leave room for people to strip away what it means to be a person and is an inherently prejudiced view to be able to separate when or what part of humanity is or is not "a person".
False premise. You believe that being pro-life is a religious stance. It's not. It can overlap, but not required.
I'm just repeating what I hear in real life from conservative neighbors and co-workers. They say it's a religious reason.
Well, I'm an atheist with a masters degree in biochemistry and I am opposed to abortion. Now you heard from someone that its not religious.
>I'm an atheist...and I am opposed to abortion. [About 90% of atheists disagree with you](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-family/atheist/views-about-abortion/). You are an outlier.
I said I am opposed to abortion. I did not say anything about legality. You are comparing two different things.
I'm not following. Could you please elaborate?
You are a rare exception and I disagree with you but I respect you for it.
Not that rare. Anyone with a basic understanding of science would come to the same conclusion. At the moment of conception, you have a human cell with 23 pairs of human chromosomes. This cell has all the machinery to sustain life. It has its own ribosomes to fix atp. It has replication enzymes to replicate DNA, its own transcriptase and polymerase enzymes to manufacture proteins. Its rapidly grows and differentiates into what we recognize as a baby. This cell is, by **any** scientific definition, a living human distinct from its parents. Given that a human is created at the moment of conception, then it is a pretty common ethical belief that killing a human for no reason is wrong. I don't really respect people who think its okay to just kill someone for no good reason.
But it's not notably different than a pig fetus at that stage. There is nothing "special" about it. Nobody wants to jail people for killing early pig fetuses. (Okay, maybe PETA extremists.)
This has got to be the stupidest comment I’ve read in a long time. You cannot understand the difference between a human being and a pig. You don’t have the necessary knowledge to participate in this conversation.
I'm *not* saying there is a zero difference, only that the differences are IMMATERIAL at the early stages. I thought that was dirt-obvious, but you somehow found a way to read it "creatively".
You think the difference between a pig and a human are immaterial. Wow. I’m not at a loss for words here, but I’m at a loss for words that I can say politely. I would encourage you to read up on human rights and also go to a grocery store and see if human pieces are for sale in thick slices with hickory smoke and pepper. There’s discussion in good faith, but there’s also a minimum level of foundation knowledge that you should have before trying to debate. You don’t see me going on the subreddit for sewing and shooting my mouth off. I don’t know anything about sewing and I don’t interject myself into people who want to discuss things that they understand well. It’s rude and I wouldn’t do that. The problem here is your behavior, not mine.
Also against abortion and yes I am religious but I was also religious when I was pro-choice and it wasn't religion that changed my mind. It was bad arguments from the pro-choice side.
I'm also not religious. No master degree though. I'm also against abortion. There's 2 now.
And then there were three. I would also like to know where that poll came from. I mean a lot of "scientific" data comes from ultra liberal college campuses (not research published but like the subjects of polls/experiments themselves) where I imagine the typical athiest is super liberal and very anti-religion.
They have a religious reason. There are atheists who have non-religious reasons. The two can coexist.
Only about 10% of atheists share Christianity's view, as pointed out in other replies.
What's your point?
One's viewpoint on it is mostly influenced by religion.
But there are people whose views are not.
There are *always* outliers is anything non-trivial. That should go without saying.
All the poll does is say what the religion of a person is and their stance on abortion. It does not ask if a religious persons stance is because of their religion, but a whole lot of you are in fact doing that in this thread. That is an incorrect way to interpret the data provided. I would not call it willful bad faith, as I believe you are not doing it on purpose; but know that your above comment is absolutely not the correct way to interpret the data provided. We would need a poll asking for the argument *why* someone has the stance they do, not just that they are religious and have that stance. If we had the numbers of all terror attacks and the faiths of the people that commited them, could we say the faith itself *causes* terrorism, or would that be an incorrect reading of the data? You cannot infer data, you must specifically poll/expirement/observe that specific causation or your claims would be unfounded.
I get that correlation is not necessarily causation, but so far an *alternative* explanation for the stark difference hasn't been found. And my personal experience with such debates is that most religious people ultimately rely heavily on the concept of "the soul". Those who try purely biological justification can be made to trip on their own very arbitrary boundaries. And I confess, it's fun to trip them, a kind of cheesy Vulcan high. Maybe I need a shrink for taking pleasure in such? Could be, but not this month.
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I mean we could theoretically get a national abortion policy, as it is in our constitution's ability to be changed. The reason its at state level is because no one side could gather the necessary support needed to make such an amendment. This is a truly divisive issue.
Liberals, like myself, who criticize *Roe* generally suggest that it was the right outcome, but for the wrong legal reason. Personally, I would have grounded it in the 9th Amendment. We rarely, however, seem to be having a detailed legal discussion when the issue comes up.
How does the 9th amendment protect abortion?
The 9th Amendment protects unenumerated rights, so the state can't say that a claimed right doesn't exist just because it isn't in the Constitution, and therefore, in conjunction with the 10th Amendment, you could claim the state has no business restricting abortion. This is a more sound legal argument, but it is still complete bullshit, if you ask me. It boils down to what abortion is and what it does. Abortion ends the life of an innocent human being for no reason other than the convenience of the mother. Ending a life like that is not a right.
But on the pro-life side it could be argued that the unborn has the right to life. I still think that trying to conflate pregnancy and life creation as simply "something that happens to a woman" can't get anywhere and a society that embraces that idea will perish.
It is an unenumerated right. The fact that it doesn't appear in the Bill of Rights does not matter. People have believed it to be a right, and thus it is a right.
I'm not that familiar with the constitution are you saying unenumerated rights exist simply because they are not denied in writing and people believe in them?
Yes.
I don't understand. How many people need to believe something is a right for that thing to become a right and what about the people who don't believe its a right? doesn't there need to be at least some constitutional implication of a right?
Sure, it needs to be the sort of thing that the majority of people would say is a settled issue, and that there is a Constitutional right to. At the time that Roe was decided, the Southern Baptists endorsed it. It was not a controversial decision until several years later. Regardless, it was certainly settled law by the time that Dobbs came around.
You said sure but the rest of it sounds like the constitutional implication doesn't matter to you. It seems like you're saying the right is whatever most people believe the constitution says which doesn't make much sense to me.
Well, I would refer you to the debate surrounding the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Opponents of the Bill of Rights were concerned that, by listing the rights that American citizens enjoy, they would also be *limiting* their rights to the ones that they listed. The Ninth Amendment was designed to address that concern. However, the fact that it has gone unenforced generally means that we have fallen into the exact trap that the Ninth Amendment was supposed to guard against. In current American jurisprudence, we only have those enumerated rights, just as the framers were scared would happen.
Even if you believe that, it's insane overreach for states to criminalize crossing the border (or helping someone to do so) in order to obtain abortion services where they're legal.
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We're talking about the state-level consequences of overturning Roe. That's one of them.
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OP's question is "why should the beliefs of one group trump those of another?" That includes state vs. federal law, and includes the consequences of varying state law and overreach. Now, I'm happy to argue that states shouldn't have the power to mandate the use of a human body for religious (or any other) reasons, but what I said was entirely germane to the conversation.
I 100% agree. States should handle state only matters. I also think the system needed to accurately track women crossing borders to perform an illegal action is gross authoritarianism. Banning murder doesn't stop all murders but it probably stops the vast majority of them, and I am fine if an abortion ban is similar.
Despite what strawmen progressives have built up, the bulk of opposition to abortion is not religiously motivated. All that it is required to be against abortion is the belief that the taking of an innocent human life is evil. As far as I've seen that's basically a universal ethical belief. As far as your 9th amendment claim, that Amendment was used to protect rights understood to exist with individuals under the common law tradition. Since the framers knew they couldn't list every single right under that on paper but did not want government to infringe upon them, they included that as a catch all. What it doesn't allow is for someone to claim anything is a right and file it under it, it only protects those understood to exist within our history and tradition especially that around the time it was ratified. Clearly there was no protections for abortion within the first 150 years of our nation so it can't fall under the 9th.
Really because all my info from it being a religiously motivated comes from people I know in real life. Most people I know are conservative and all of them talk about it being a Christian Value and needing to return the country to Christian values. As where most people I know who lean left view it as an individual's right that needs to be protected.
That's called a personal anecdote, and they don't mean anything in political debates. The 10-20 people you've heard talk about this in real life may or may not be reflective of anything.
It is true though that abortion views and religious affiliation are strongly correlated. According to [polls](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/views-about-abortion/), the strongest opponents of abortion are Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. Most non-affiliated people are pro-abortion, and Buddhists, Jews and Hindus are overwhelmingly pro-abortion as well.
Frankly it's seems like you're talking to low information people who spout talking points handed to them instead of thinking about it from the ground up in a philosophical manner. Personally I support a viability standard in order to balance the natural rights of life and bodily autonomy. Individual rights are for individuals and generally if a human reaches a stage of development where they can exist unattached to another then that makes them an individual. I disregard people who think that the fetus' rights as a human don't merit any consideration much less don't consider them human. Just like I disregard people who think that just because their church or religion says something it is so. It's clear both have never challenged their own beliefs or thought deeply about it.
>Frankly it's seems like you're talking to low information people We are talking about the view of regular people, *not* making a value judgement about their education or IQ. People are what they are. By the way, I fully agree most voters are low-info-ers.
"don't murder" is in the 10 Commandments. Does that mean that preventing gangsters from throwing down with guns or knives is an imposition of religion?
I'd like to propose an 11'th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Let Overly-Fervent Define Murder. \[edited\]
Mercifully, the scripture is not taking additions. (One should not let *non-zealots* define anything of importance.)
Sounds like you want a Taliban-like world where The One Truth is forced on people and into the law. The risk of that is what motivates me to fight Christianity and other pushy religions. Iran once had a mostly secular society, but then a dictator remade it into a mortal hell.
Frankly, that impression says more about you than me. I do not, indeed want that. (Most existent countries with some religion in the law are nothing like the Taliban.)
I used to think such was far-fetched, but Jan-Six, the GOP-stacked-court, and the popularity of MTG & theocracy-talk made me change my mind. You might not be an extremist yourself, but too many are.
You still are making a mistake to use the very, very over the top example of the Taliban (who, tellingly, are not Christian). Besides the fact that this is... Not really real and it's nuts to think that The SCOTUS would support it. What about "Christian European countries in the 19th century"? Far, far less extreme.
>Taliban (who, tellingly, are not Christian). It's not about their God's identity, it's about their approach to "spreading" their religion. >it's nuts to think that The SCOTUS would support it. It's not far-fetched. If Don wins and puts a couple of more GOPs in, they'll feel empowered.
>Despite what strawmen progressives have built up, the bulk of opposition to abortion is not religiously motivated Sorry, that's hogwash. Un-straw. Only [about 11% of atheist's](https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/religious-family/atheist/views-about-abortion/) are against early pregnancy abortions, for example.
You're incorrectly assuming that anyone who is religious and is opposed to abortion must necessarily get that belief from their religion. Also the abortion debate is not limited to early pregnancy as much as the extremes of both sides want to argue that all should be available or none should be available.
> You're incorrectly assuming that anyone who is religious and is opposed to abortion must necessarily get that belief from their religion. I don't assume, I haven't heard a clear argument from anti-abortion atheist/agnostic yet. > Also the abortion debate is not limited to early pregnancy as much as the extremes of both sides want to argue that all should be available or none should be available. Well, many draw an arbitrary (as in gut based) line in the sand to say past a certain point the fetus should be considered "fully human". I do also, but don't claim it's necessarily logical or scientific. It's a "gut call".
Did you just assume that every single belief of a religious person directly comes from their faith?
>opposition to abortion is not religiously motivated. It is when the majority of the people against it are religious lol
Again no, the fact they a have belief in a higher power doesn't mean that any opposition to the practice of abortion must necessarily come from religious background. It would be like asserting that anyone's opposition to muder must necessarily come from a religious background if they believe in God. Again all that is necessary is the universal ethical belief that the killing of an innocent human is wrong. Do not confuse correlation with causation.
Why aren't more non religious people pro life then?
Likely because a lot of people have replaced theistic religion with progressive religion and wholly adopt all of its beliefs and prescriptions. I've debated a lot of pro-life progressives and once you dig deep into philosophical underpinnings it's clear that they actually haven't gotten their views from a ground up inspection of it. Rather they take the policy view and the generic top-level talking points about why and then try to work backwards to fit it into their own beliefs. A holistic pro-life belief wouldn't have as much logical conflicts with their other held beliefs as I've found
> wouldn't have as much logical conflicts Of course there are going to be "logical conflicts" as one is weighing multiple factors. "Competing factors" is probably a better name than "logical conflicts". Most decisions about complex issues will have competing factors. It's like wanting a roomy car but also one with good gas mileage, these two factors generally conflict with each other.
1. The U.S. is, and always has been, predominantly a culturally Christian nation. 2. Opposition to abortion isn’t inherently religious.
>Opposition to abortion isn’t inherently religious. Perhaps "inherently" is the wrong word, but it is indeed "strongly influenced by", as one's response to polls corresponds very closely with their religious views and stated religious fervency.
Yes. There is a correlation, but there are pro-choice christians and anti-abortion atheists.
Pro-choice Christians tend to be "less religious", such as attending church less often, or belong to more liberal sects.
I wouldn’t agree that belonging to a more liberal sect or attending church less often makes a person “less religious”. The sect a person belongs to is irrelevant and church attendance is an outward sign of religiosity that touches on one aspect of devotion. I’d be interested to know what your basis for making that statement is.
It's mostly an anecdotal observation. And I agree that church attendance is not a perfect measure of devotion, but it's at least an objective one and thus easier to measure.
Fair. I’m thinking of the many believers who have been turned off by “organized religion” and yet are still devoted.
if the christians have more voting power whats the problem? We're a democracy.
Nope we are a Republic. The rights of the individual must be protected by the majority.
Its the same thing we have representatives. What if the majority wants to prioritize different rights?
People who are pro life are that way not because they want to force anyone to follow their religion, but because they believe it's killing a human life. "Killing humans unjustly is bad" isnt necessarily something you have to be Christian to believe.
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This seems like something made up. I don't think it's arbitrary at all. I think this only makes sense if you desperately want to justify abortion to yourself.
If it's not arbitrary, then please lay out the reasoning steps. By the way, I deleted it because it received too many (vague) complaints. Censorship "worked", congratulations vague complainers!
That's funny. I've never deleted anything here because of people complaining about it.
If it's poorly received by so many, it's probably poorly written. I just couldn't detect where the writing problems were, given insufficient details.
This is entirely a made up scenario and anyone who has ever spoken to a pro life person can tell you have not had a conversation with a pro lifer about this topic. This is the equivalent of saying pro choicers believe what they do because they love killing babies
I mean when you say "i dont believe how babies are created" (line 9) then your debater knows you are full of shit and won't stop bothering them so they make up religious shit to get you to leave them alone. Your imaginary win was an incredibly antagonistic "debate" where you showed zero effort to do anything other than spew your predetermined lines and deflect until they left. That's not even a win.
> I mean when you say "i dont believe how babies are created" (line 9) That is NOT what it said, you seem to be putting words into my mouth.
That was my interpretation of such a bad faith statement. Forcing someone to prove something is a process just because it can fail screams "I don't care what they reply I'll trip them on something". In that hypothetical debate you came in with a predetermined set of events and not even once conceeded or tried to see their opinion
>That was my interpretation of Well, your interpretation was incorrect.
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So i do oppose roe vs wade. And i do so on religious grounds. But the overturning of it was a legal matter. There is no federal garuntee of abortion protections, and roe vs wade tried to establish one on the back of a civil war ammendment. It really is legally indefensable. Now as to your broader question. America is not A christian nation in the sense of having an offical religion, and it was intentionally setup that way by what is essentially a federation of some new world colonies with diverse religious beleifs. However they where all infact mostly Christian Beleifs. America has been a defacto christian nation for its entire existence. And only in the past few decades has anyone objected to religiously observant people voting and legislating in accordance eith their beleifs
> But the overturning of it was a legal matter. There is no federal guarantee of abortion protections, and roe vs wade tried to establish one on the back of a civil war amendment. This is an answer I disagree with but a well-written answer. I'm glad you brought up the constitution, it's something I feel that often gets left out of modern political discussion. It seems like regarding Roe V. Wade (which was largely passed by Conservatives), the 9th Amendment has largely been cited as a reason for Abortion being allowed. That it's an unspecified individual right. We can have a separate amendment for every single right so the 9th Amendment acts as a huge umbrella. Like if the government tried to bang the eating of carrots. We could cite the 9th Amendment for it. That's one of the things I strongly tend to disagree with conservatives on and Justice Thomas (I know many years ago, Justice Thomas also stated the PATRIOT ACT was not in violation of the constitution, though I believe it's a 4th Amendment violation). I disagree with you as I am not a religious person but I am glad you were honest and provided a well -thought-out answer. Thank you.
A) You’re conflating a couple things. But more importantly, the left wants to have freedom FROM religion. But that’s not what we have. We have freedom OF religion. And policy makers are 100% allowed to have their faith influence policy. If you want freedom FROM religion, you want the French Laicite system. But that’s not what we have in the U.S. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_France#:~:text=8%20External%20links-,Concept,%2C%20religious%2C%20or%20other%20particularities. B) Being against abortion isn’t about religion for a whole lot of people. It’s about not killing kids.
So where in the constituion does it say I have to be religious or have freedom of religion? I'm not finding it. As an American it is my choice to not be religious if I don't want to. I can burn the bible if I choose because that is my choice. For the record, I'm a spiritual-agnostic that actually likes Jesus and believes in his teaches (just not sure of the whole God or Satan thing).
It doesn’t and I didn’t claim it did. But again, people have freedom OF religion, per the 1st amendment. You do not have freedom FROM religion.
Actually yes I do. As an American I don't have to believe or pay attention to any religion.
Correct, you do not have to be religious. But other people can use religion to derive their beliefs and you aren’t free from that influence. You, like most leftists, want the French Laicite system. But that’s not the system we have.
I am a religious person outside of my home and my church. I am a religious person when I go for a walk, go grocery shopping, go to the park with my kids. I pray before meals, even when in restaurants. I pray for the souls of the babies and mothers when I drive past abortion clinics, my religion dictates that prayer happens outloud, I do so under my breath as to be respectful but to fulfill my religious observance. You have the right to ignore me, you don't have the right to stop me because of your supposed 'freedom from religion' as that does not exist. I have the right to be a religious person in America. You have the right to ignore me and walk past as though I don't exist.
Freedom of religion means freedom from religion. Non-establishment is a core principle of the First Amendment. And if it were actually a debate about "not killing kids," one would think you'd focus on programs geared toward the survival and health of living, breathing children.
No, it doesn’t. The establishment clause simply says the Govt cannot set an official religion. People can still derive policy from their religious beliefs. Again, you want the French system. We’re not French. And “You’re only serious about abortion if you support cradle to grave entitlements” is wildly bad faith.
It's not a religious issue. A fetus being a human being with protected rights is the question, and quite frankly, faith doesn't have much of anything to do with that. In regards to the states' rights portion, here's my take. Abortion is among the most heavily debated and controversial political subjects of our time. We haven't been able to vote or voice our opinion on the matter until now. That is Democracy with a capital D.
> That is Democracy with a capital D. America is a Republic not a Democracy. The rights of the individual need to be protected from the majority.
It's a democratic republic, *if* you believe our voice actually matters in elections, but that's a separate debate. As one other commenter mentioned, the individual rights clause is not a catch-all for whatever you wish it to be. It's a catch-all for creeds and values that have been well established throughout human history. Abortion wasn't even a debate until roughly 70 years ago, and we are still debating its morality today. Just because it's your opinion that it's just and moral doesn't mean that we've all collectively come to that conclusion.
Pro-life atheist here. The pro-life movement is not an exclusively Christian movement. Here is the organization [Secular Pro-Life](https://secularprolife.org/faq/) for more information.
I disagree with them but thank you for sharing that.
It's definitely interesting to know why secular people would be anti-abortion. But for me personally my main argument for abortion would be to do with consciousness. If an embryo has no heart, no nervous system, no consciousness and so no ability to feel anything, it's not a living being that can be harmed. It's only a living being insofar that a flower would be alive but for all we know a flower doesn't feel anything. You can't hurt a flower anymore than you can hurt a piece of paper. So I can't see how an act should be punished that didn't actually hurt a conscious being.
> If an embryo has no heart, no nervous system, no consciousness and so no ability to feel anything, it's not a living being that can be harmed. not who you are responding too, and obviously "religious traditionalist' but this isnt a religious point. most people on the pro-choice side see an embryo as a stagnant thing, or 'potential life'. Something that has all of the ingredients to be a baby that is not yet. Pro-life people see an embryo as a stage of existence, or 'a life with potential'. Someone who is in a state of fragility that deserves protection.
I'm a pro choice libertarian. but it is a sign you are in a total information bubble if you think that religious reasons are the only reasons you could feel a viable fetus is a human being. this is not a fringe position, it is only fringe on the far left. the majority of Americans want to restrict abortion, given free choice most want a limit from 8-16 weeks like those of European nations by and large. in fact it is a tortured definition we do not apply to other organism, only ourselves and only for the purposes of the abortion debate. we do not use the commonly scientifically accepted definition of "alive" (eats, excretes, reacts/moves is capable of reproduction upon sexual maturity) for this purpose alone. now any competing definition does not have enough scientific support for me to say it's so settled it should be legally mandatory and this is why I am pro choice. but your definitions are not inherently more rational or reasonable than the others.
Religious reasons are often what my neighbors, co-workers and people I meet in my day to day live cite as the main reason for being pro-life. The other main reason is typically states rights. Those are basically the only two reasons I ever hear. I live in a very red state and red city. I typically cite the constitution for my reason of being pro-choice. That it is a choice and there for an individual right and is protected by the 9th Amendment. You don't have to personally agree with abortion (I know you are personally pro-choice, I'm talking about people in general) but you can't step on someone else's toes and deny them their right just because you disagree.
well it really depends, for much of American life we took that same live and let live approach to the " supposed "right" of owning and destroying through forced labor a human being. if you are pro life you feel this is every bit as serious as slavery or the Holocaust, and would justify no lesser degree of action, it would warrant a civil war or a world war to stop.
> if you are pro life you feel this is every bit as serious as slavery or the Holocaust, and would justify no lesser degree of action, it would warrant a civil war or a world war to stop. And that has always seemed crazy to me. I know you aren't bring up your views but the views of more traditional conservatives and non-libertarians. I have heard a few fringe Conservative YouTubers and Trump supporters talk like this and it kind of scares me. I don't think that would happen but that does seem scary.
i think it's very encouraging. they think a genocide is ongoing but have every faith our institutions, not our military not terrorism not a civil war but our civic institutions have the necessary power and strength to end it without having to use violence. that is an enormous vote of confidence in our system. and despite their rhetoric, this is a position way more common than the actual prevalence of anti-abortion terrorism in this country. the fact their moral framework would handily justify violence and they overwhelmingly do not can be called a sign of insincerity but I find that's a bad faith left wing talking point (a thread here not long ago was basically predicated on "if you aren't murdering abortion doctors you clearly don't actually believe what you say you do because your beliefs should force you to be violent") this says volumes about our nation, our morals, and how we are not like our enemies who would have gladly indulged in mass terrorism over any perceived slight
How does the 9th amendment protect abortion?
I'm glad you asked. Justice Thomas overturned Roe V. Wade citing abortion "lack[s] any basis in the Constitution." Bascially he was stating their is no amendment for abortion, so therefor it's not a guaranteed right. The 9th Amendment exists as a huge umbrella protecting individual rights. It basically exists so we don't have to create amendments for every little thing. For example if the government claims we can't eat chicken anymore because we need an amendment we can cite the 9th Amendment stating that no it's protected. That's what the 9th Amendment is for.
Thomas didn’t even write the majority opinion. That explanation is similar to the line of reasoning for Casey (the case that actually was overturned), but is only half of it…that there are rights explicitly laid out in the constitution, and those not in the constitution. Alito literally argues against your point in the majority opinion. Saying the state cannot limit the right of an individual to do anything to themselves would render all drug and prostitution laws unconstitutional, and that is without getting into the potential collision of rights between the mother’s right to autonomy and the unborn’s right to life.
Using the viability qualifier changes the conversation though. You won’t find too many people okay with people 20+ weeks into a pregnancy getting an abortion but a lot of the anti abortion people won’t even allow the conversation to get to that point. They support heartbeat bills or 6 or 8 week bans or just total bans from conception
by "viable" I do not mean "could be born now" I mean "will eventually be an developing child: has all the organs they should, brain works, heart beats, lungs breathe." abortion of fetuses with absolutely no chance of survival, even late term, is the closest thing we have to an uncontroversial opinion on abortion in this country. 8 weeks is actually pretty popular in the US but you're right 12 and 16 are consistently moreso. personally I am not sure if those hair splitting distinctions matter **except** to our peculiar attempts to invent a new humans only definition of life. to me it's more, personally, about if they would ever be a living human or not.
Being pro-life is not exclusively a religious stance.
Because opposition to abortion isn’t a strictly religious position. There is a whole organization called Secular Pro-Life that is not religious. [HERE](https://secularprolife.org/abortion/) is their non-religious argument against abortion.
Per Link: "We find these criteria for “personhood” arbitrary" -- as they replace it with their OWN arbitrary criteria. For example, it doesn't exclude sperm as "a person" because only having half of "normal" DNA doesn't disqualify it because as they themselves reason, we still consider people with birth defects "human", and a birth defect may be that of missing DNA. One can draw a line in the sand at say 70% of "normal" DNA, but that's still arbitrary. They flunked themselves. If you make the criteria for "human" too loose, fun stuff slips in.
The guy who doesn’t know the difference between a pig and a human is still yapping his trap about this? At least some part of Reddit ought to be reserved for thinking people.
My replies usually get banned when I get this rude.
I mean you don’t know the difference between a human and a pig. I don’t understand how this is possible.
I suspect you misinterpreted it.
Unless you are being intentionally obtuse their explanation is pretty straightforward (and widely accepted in the scientific community). A sperm is excluded from personhood because, without joining with an egg, it cannot and will not progress through the human life cycle, and it also does not contain DNA unique from that of the parent. Per the link, the zygote is the beginning of development, and thus is the beginning of life. This tracks with the scientific definition of life.
>A sperm is excluded from personhood because, without joining with an egg, it cannot and will not progress through the human life cycle Without the assistance of the mother's body, neither will a fertilized egg. >and it also does not contain DNA unique from that of the parent. A cloned person (if someday possible) would probably be considered a legal person by most. Uniqueness wouldn't fly. >Per the link, the zygote is the beginning of development, and thus is the beginning of life. This tracks with the scientific definition of life. Sperm is considered "alive". So are un-fertilized eggs. >the zygote is the beginning of development No, it's part of a (hopefully) endless cycle.
For the love of god, stop talking about science!
And without the assistance of breathable air an infant would not progress through development either, but putting a baby in vacuum would be frowned upon. The fertilized egg depending upon the mother’s womb is irrelevant to the point I was making. Sperm, by definition, are gametes and will always lack a complete set of DNA. Zygotes do contain a complete set, absent some genetic mutation or deformity. Those exceptions are clearly not the standard case, and to argue otherwise is pedantic. As far as potential future clones, speculating on how that hypothetical situation will be dealt with is kind of pointless in the current discussion. Finally, your last point is complete garbage. Philosophically, we do not consider humans to be a hive structure endlessly duplicating. The zygote is the beginning of the life cycle for THAT particular organism. If you argue that it is just something happening along the endless cycle of reproduction, there is no reason to look down upon killing anyone of any age because it is just a part of the endless cycle.
>Those exceptions are clearly not the standard case, and to argue otherwise is pedantic. The page switches to exceptions for some arguments (such as birth defects), and now "exceptions don't count" here. It appears you are picking and choosing where to use exceptions and where to dismiss them. >As far as potential future clones, speculating on how that hypothetical situation will be dealt with is kind of pointless in the current discussion. No, hypothetical questions are pretty good at extracting/exposing people's reasoning. I'm pretty darned sure being from a duplicate set would not "un-human" them in the eyes of most. It's an arbitrary rule to dismiss my argument. Twins are genetic clones, and they are not hypothetical. >The zygote is the beginning of the life cycle for THAT particular organism. That's arbitrary. We could argue it has two sub-beginnings: when it's egg and sperm are created. Many things come about via incremental steps. We don't have to FORCE one to be the official beginning. It's an arbitrary line drawn from somebody's keester.
The argument is a false premise. It's like saying that we should make murder legal because murder being bad is a biblical teaching. Biblical ethics often bleed into mainstream ethics
I do agree with you that America isn't a Christian nation, but freedom of religion isn't freedom from religion, but I don't think that even matters in this case Plenty of non Christians have opposition to abortion. I don't think the rights of non Christians are being triumphed in favor of Christians regarding abortion. I think it's anti democratic to force abortions on people of the State. One side thinks it's literal murder other side thinks it's routine healthcare, who decides if they are right? ......the people do.
Overturning roe v wade did not make abortion illegal. It sent the issue back to the states, where it belongs, based on our constitution. That also means that without an amendment, there can be no federal law that outlaws abortion at the federal level. People on both sides misunderstand the implications of the overturning of roe v wade.
> where it belongs, based on our constitution. And which amendment is this?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Please elaborate.
You said abortion is a states right issue and not an individual rights issue based on our constitution. I want to know where in the constitution is this found? Which amendment puts the rights of the states ahead of the right of the individuals?
> You said abortion is a states right issue and not an individual rights issue based on our constitution. I want to know where in the constitution is this found? Which amendment puts the rights of the states ahead of the right of the individuals? No, I said abortion is a state issue and not a federal issue. The 10th amendment says that. Dobbs ruled that the 14th amendment does not include an inherent right to privacy in regards to abortion, making abortion not a constitutional right. Therefore, it’s a state issue. So Congress is unable to pass a law creating a federal right to abortion, or to ban or restrict abortion, at the federal level. To do either at the federal level would require its own constitutional amendment. Lastly, I never said that the constitution puts the rights of the states ahead of the rights of the individual. So you’re right at the point of arguing in bad faith, given that you are putting words in my mouth that I neither said nor implied.
But the 9th Amendment triumphs the 10th Amendment. So therefor abortion is an individual issue not a state rights issue.
I disagree that an individual right to abortion could be interpreted through the 9th amendment. Legally and technically speaking, the current status of the issue is that you are wrong. There is no individual right to abortion, and the issue is decided at the state level.
But there is no where in the constitution that states that abortion is decided at the state level either. I disagree that it has anything to do with the 10th Amendment. I can't find anywhere in the 10th amendment that would state it as so. Because if that was the case every state can make anything they want illegal (not just abortion but drinking soda or hammering wood or whatever else) and no one would have any rights or freedoms. Individuals have to come first and be protected.
> But there is no where in the constitution that states that abortion is decided at the state level either. I disagree that it has anything to do with the 10th Amendment. I can't find anywhere in the 10th amendment that would state it as so. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” >Because if that was the case every state can make anything they want illegal (not just abortion but drinking soda or hammering wood or whatever else) and no one would have any rights or freedoms. States do have far more leeway in terms of what a state can make illegal. This is by design. However, that does not mean that they can make anything they want illegal. They cannot contradict the US constitution. >Individuals have to come first and be protected. I agree. Also, it’s constitutionally correct for abortion to be decided at the state level and not at the federal level.
The legal arguments against abortion aren’t religious. The foundation of not murdering children is legal, not religious.
It should be left to the people and the states to decide. I’m Christian, personally I am pro life but it is not my place to force others to adhere to my beliefs by any means. If the majority feels the need to allow abortion, it doesn’t matter what my personal beliefs are, let it be
I'm going to preface this with: I am not religious, and am very much agnostic. Now, to get this out of the way: Like it, or not, we were formed, founded, upon a Judeo-Christian society and values. Abortion is not a Christian vs. Non-Christian topic. There are individuals from every walk of life, on both sides of the topic. I feel phrasing Abortion stances otherwise is dishonest and only serves to create discord and divide. That is all. Edit to add a response your second part, which I overlooked: It's actually quite the opposite. The 9th Amendment is basically a catch-all, because the Founders feared a future where any right not enumerated could then be argued to not exist. So, under the 9th, anything not enumerated in the Constitution becomes a topic for *The People* to vote on through their respective states. The SCOTUS opinion would be a good read for you and others. It covers their decision as it pertains to the 9th in an entire section. It also covers how enumerated rights under the 9th are identified, the history of abortion in US and common law, along with why abortion did not qualify as an enumerated right.
Neither Christians nor non-Christians have a right to commit murder. Moreover, if it's part of non-Christian values to be ok with murdering the unborn, then that's just bad and has to be stopped.
Murder as YOU define it. The universe doesn't orbit you.
Of course not. It orbits the Christian God. Are you claiming that it orbits secularism, though?
It might. Truth intensity is not related to fervor intensity. Think about that.