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by dark_silicon 3192 days ago
I'd encourage anyone to examine their conscience, read about the viability of babies born prematurely, and consider that even post-birth a baby is not self-sufficient. We don't have good criteria for what makes something alive or conscious, yet many draw an arbitrary line at birth.

I'm not looking to continue this discussion, but I'm glad you're thinking about this.

1 comments

"Self-sufficient" is not a good argument. Most people are not self-sufficient when it comes to survival on their own. Just look at the history - as soon as mass-produced food is cut off, famines kill hundreds of thousands, millions sometimes.

I used to support abortion, but more and more I'm sliding towards being maybe against it, because (some of) the anti-abortion side arguments are logical too. No matter how you draw the line based on some argument, you can use the same logic to kill adults. That includes viability, lack of pain, etc.

On the other hand, our technology is at the level where you can turn any cell in your body into sperm:

https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sp...

So if you're against abortion based on the "viability", every time you scratch your nose, you commit genocide.

It's a hard question.