Hacker News Reader

Comment by EdHominem | Hacker News Reader

The "but then I wouldn't have been born" argument misses that you have billions of potential first-cousins who never were born.

Your grandmother would have had a less assuredly bad life (no idea if it would have been better, but we can only hope...) and someone else would be having this anthropic discussion.

> But it really bothers me when people like you who've likely never had any personal connection to the issue

Cough.

> imply that only one side of the debate is rational.

Well, look around at those who believe what you do. Most of them do so because of religion, which by definition is irrational.

As an opinion, you're welcome to yours. As policy, it comes with all the rest of the baggage of the religious.

> But, like drugs, that doesn't mean that it's a fundamentally good thing.

But, like TV, that doesn't mean we should ban it. Control, control, control. Why the need to control?

View on HN

> Well, look around at those who believe what you do

I've yet to meet another person who is intentionally ambivalent on the issue, so I can't exactly do that. I'm neither pro-choice nor pro-life. I've chosen to remain neutral on the issue and allow others to make the decision since both sides of the debate seem wrong to me and I can deal with either outcome.

But I can see both sides of this argument and both sides feel irrefutable to me. That's not to say that the religious origins of many pro-life viewpoints aren't irrational or that it isn't hypocritical to oppose abortion and support war, the death penalty or any of the other anti-life policies often advocated by pro-life supporters. But just because someone arrived at a correct conclusion by specious reasoning or impure motives doesn't make that conclusion wrong.

I recognize that many people aren't as conflicted as I am on this issue. I'm happy for them. But to suggest that this issue is one where science and logic makes one position definitively correct and the other incorrect is wrong. It is an issue of morality and philosophical beliefs and, as such, science cannot decide it any more so than religion can.

> I've yet to meet another person who is intentionally ambivalent on the issue

I can see why circumstances make you feel that there's a special something about a fertilized egg, but we're really all in the same situation - but for a tiny difference someone else would have been born.

If your grandmother had a weapon she might have been able to prevent being raped, which would have been a positive spin on the same result as an abortion - you not being born.

> I'm neither pro-choice nor pro-life. I've chosen to remain neutral on the issue

Neutral is pro-choice. No law.

To justify a law, present a reason and a rationale. Otherwise why pass it, right?

> But to suggest that this issue is one where science and logic makes one position definitively correct and the other incorrect is wrong. It is an issue of morality and philosophical beliefs and, as such, science cannot decide it any more so than religion can.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. There's no reason you can't apply science to religion.

If there were gods, and they had an impact on us, it'd be scientists who noticed it and performed experiments to quantify it. We'd even be doing cohort studies to see if the gods disapproved of being monitored, etc.

I know you're trolling, but...

> I can see why circumstances make you feel that there's a special something about a fertilized egg

This is being intentionally dismissive. The fact is a fertilized egg inside a woman has, for centuries, resulted in a baby being born without the woman being able to do anything about it. Being able to safely terminate a pregnancy is a relatively new development. The fact that my grandmother had an abortion and, because of the law at the time and the circumstances surrounding it, the procedure didn't succeed in terminating the pregnancy is very different from playing the what-if game.

> Neutral is pro-choice. No law.

No, neutral is letting others determine the law without interjecting my opinion.

> That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. There's no reason you can't apply science to religion.

I never said you couldn't. I only said that both science and religion can both be the basis for political positions. It was you who made the connection of science being rational and religion being irrational. I was merely pointing out that neither rational nor irrational bases can inform this issue. A position on this issue is strictly based on morality and philosophy. This contrasts starkly with other issues like climate change or tax policy where math and science can inform a more correct position.

Okay...I'm done feeding the troll :-)

> This is being intentionally dismissive.

Not at all.

> The fact that ... is very different from playing the what-if game.

I was trying to speak broadly so as not to speak for you. How would you put it?

> No, neutral is letting others determine the law without interjecting my opinion.

For a pure observer, maybe. For a taxpayer, not so much.

> It was you who made the connection of science being rational and religion being irrational.

Yup.

> I was merely pointing out that neither rational nor irrational bases can inform this issue. A position on this issue is strictly based on morality and philosophy.

Assuming you feel that a human should not be killed (without reason anyways) you can formally extend that reasoning to a baby, a fetus, and so forth. At some point, the initial reasoning may stop applying. Congrats, you've now derived an opinion on abortion.

You may feel that morality has a religious core, but that's a god of the cracks type thing. You can squish that bit away and analyze the rules systematically using the tools of logic.

> This contrasts starkly with other issues like climate change or tax policy where math and science can inform a more correct position.

There shouldn't be any contrast. What's the problem with runaway climate change? The suffering and death that it will cause. But that's the same ethical framework you'd use to analyze abortion. And it leads the same place - your basic value for the lives of others, which you may call religious or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com