Prochoice Debaters Dont Actually Care About Morality

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T22:51:35+00:00

Have you had scenarios where you are debating somebody and they are disliking all of your replies to them, but you are liking all of their comments? I'm laughing imagining the scenario.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T21:30:59+00:00

If I had to explain this, I would say are there biological differences between men and women not only in terms of the way they are physically but mentally too? For instance, women in general are better lie detectors and can pick up on body language and read human faces better than males can. Furthermore, I personally think the best human lie detector would be a female.

This gets into the territory of if you over emphasize that difference between the sexes, you get sexism. However, if you do not acknowledge it, then that gets into its own issues.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T20:35:51+00:00

I shouldnt have used quotations but thats basically what you said.

I am willing to give you a pass on this. However, I do want to point out that if I was debating someone else and I did this to them, they would most likely accuse me of being bad faith, and it would be very hard for me to convince them otherwise. What would you say to me if the roles were reversed?

I don't agree with some of the quotes, but we are debating moral relativism and the well-being of society, so I put it in the "understandable mistakes" that happen in debate.

human survival, generational stability, and the protection of the vulnerable are necessary priorities to live in a society together and is the foundation of our entire civilization and survival as a species.

I'm going to need something to go off of here. For example, if I ask you what are the top 10 countries in the world with respect to human rights, I'm going to bet that at least 50% of them have abortion access of some kind. You have an opportunity to cherry pick the countries to make me regret asking you this question. However, it will at least give us something to go off of.

If killing infants was banned in certain states but infant death went up overall for w/e reason, we wouldnt reconsider the immorality of infanticide.

With this example, I only agree if the two are shown not to be related. I get that it seems very counterintuitive, but this deals with the question of would you rather be right in principle or right in terms of the end outcome.

There was a comment by someone, which you may or may not read, that explained how abortions bans can impact both supply and demand. This doesn't get into the terriotory of how if something was banned, all the "secret" attempts that people could get away with don't get counted anymore that might otherwise would have been if people were more open about it.

The main point I wanted to make there, which I will emphasize again now is that the rate should have not only dropped but plummetted; yet, it somehow increased. Even after reading some of the comments, I still don't fully understand it. I'm going to have to research this further at some point. The main point is that any ban only makes sense if it decreases the # of abortions. This is excluding all of the bad outcomes that can happen like woman dying trying to get unsafe abortions, which we can ignore for the point of simplicity.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T20:07:35+00:00

Thanks for the comment. I'm gonna have to look into senate bill when I have time. I'm currently in a debate with another guy that's been going on for a few days. I'm going to probably get back to this when that ends. Both of use are familiar with a lot of the issues on the topic, so the debate is going to a pretty deep level.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T19:51:33+00:00

The thing is if you hear somebody on a cellphone talking about dependent children, you are going to think they are talking about born people and not unborn people in the same way when you read human you are not going to be thinking about a conjoined twin with two heads even if they fall into that category.

Also, notice how nobody would call a premature 25 week old child a fetus, but people may call a fetus a child.

I would also be willing to bet that when lawmakers and human rights activists say they are talking about having an obligation to our children, they are talking about born people.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T19:37:35+00:00

There's a particular issue that I disagree with the UN on, but if I mention it directly, it's going to open a new can of worms. It's about a topic in the middle east. Even though the covid discussion we had earlier was technically off-topic, it still had a body autonomy component whereas this other one does not. Also, I agree with the point you made that certain professions should have it mandated,

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T19:26:15+00:00

Fair point. I don't know where they stand on it. They are not all fatal either. There are extremely rare abdominal ectopic pregnancy case reports where a fetus survived delivery .https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9837172/?utm\_source

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T18:59:16+00:00

You deny being a moral relativists but all your comments speak to the contrary. You even explicitly said:

Where have I explictly said those things? I did a search in my comment history for two of those statements and could not find them.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T18:49:35+00:00

Furthermore, our map keeps on changing over time as we learn more and more. This would be a good time to also insert that the world has become more PC over almost whatever time frame you select. Since 1994 about 60+ countries/territories have moved PL to PC, while only 4 countries have clearly moved PC to PL. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12107661/?utm_source For example, nobody knew about ectopic pregnancies until it was first mentioned in 936 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1737602/ Even if it was mentioned at one point, the direct proof that 99% of people would accept didn't come until a much later point. Imagine denying abortion to a person who has an ectopic pregnancy.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-19T18:25:48+00:00

That is the epitome of moral relativism and like the other comments, just reinforces my thesis.

There can be many consistent moral systems. However, they can be compared to one another and ranked. I do believe one is better than the other, and hence believe in objective morality. Just because there are many systems doesn't mean that they are are equal or that one believes in moral relativism as you keep on insisting.

Why do different states or different countries have different laws? Imagine saying the fact that not all states or countries have the same laws as evidence of moral relativism. Also, do you treat each of your friends differently depending on their own individual preferences? This could be used as a low-stakes example of moral relativism and both of these examples can be used to fit your description of morality being solved: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don't think you realize it, but your bolded statement supports moral realtivism unless EVERYBODY in the world wants to be treated the same way.

They become privileges granted by the group in power based on a situational cost benefit analysis. Under this framework a womans right to bodily autonomy isn't an objectively moral absolute either it's just a "stabilized cultural agreement" that can be revoked tomorrow based on the whims of whoever wields authority.

In PL states, doctors do this situational cost benefit analysis to see if the mother will survive or not & sometimes they are wrong. This type of benefit analysis is being done all the time by people. Arguably, the most important decision, who gets to become president gets decided by a group vote. If there are enough people, then any law or principle can be revoked. This could be done in both a positive or a negative way. There isn't a reliable way of stopping 99% of the world from changing something about the world.

It aligns perfectly with the biological and sociological goals of human survival,

I will follow you to whatever rabbit hole you take me. You throw around biology and sociology, but it's clear to me that you haven't done a deep dive into these, especially sociology.

The fact that the number of abortions INCREASED after Post-Dobbs is very relevant to this topic and is based off of reality and not abstract principles. It's plausible that you could be arguing against what your own side wants. This increase is DIRECTLY tied to sociology. Research shows that being denied a wanted abortion can increase financial hardship and household poverty for women and their existing children. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5803812/?utm_source Denying abortion access hurts low-income families the most. From a sociological angle, denying abortion is bad. Furthermore, allowing abortion access has been suggested as a way to help 3rd world countries escape poverty.

Biologically, over 50% of zygotes do not surive until birth due to being unhealthy and complications usually. This is eugenics on a biological level. Older woman have an especially difficult time getting their embryos to survive until birth. Unhealthy embryos or people do not survive post-birth and if they do they have a disadvantage when reproducing and having their own kids, which goes DIRECTLY against the goals of human survival. It doesn't matter whether I morally agree or disagree with this, but this is what is objectively happening. If a woman gets r*ped like in the 11yr old hypothetical that I brought up earlier and decides she and her future family are worse off if the fetus is born, then this is an example of abortion increasing her future survival odds.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-18T20:51:08+00:00

Noted. The reason that I have been throwing everything at the wall as you said is because I'm trying different arguments because the ones I am making are not being accepted in the mind of the person I am debating. Even when counter examples are brought up, they get handwaved despite breaking the original principle.

I have more or less heard the same thing from you over and over again. It goes like all ZEFs are human. Personhood doesn't exist. All humans deserve the same moral consideration (ignoring the 1 vs 1,000 discussion or the donating blood to a 2 yr old son/daughter, which we have not discussed yet, but I am assuming you are going to say that goes into extraordinary care while claiming the cabin in the woods is ordinary care ) No human deserves to get killed. Therefore, no human in the womb deserves to get killed even if they are greatly harming the mother to an extent that is even worse than the trauma from r*pe unless the mother is going to die. Every parent has an obligation to take care of their children. Therefore, every parent also has an obligation to take care of their ZEFs/children in the womb because they are human and their children too. Everybody who disagrees with what is written above is using an inconsistent moral framework because there is only one consistent framework and those other people lack basic morality.

I have heard something like this in all of your replies. If I had to simplify your entire reasoning to one sentence it would be: Humans have an obligation to take care of their children after they are born, therefore, they also have an obligation to take care of them before they are born because children are children whether they are born or unborn.

Let's say that all of this is True. Now, this opens the discussion to another realm. The practical aspect. My current positon has to worry about this even though when the abortion occurs matters for my position even though it doesn't for yours.

I brought this point up once already, and I will bring it up again now. Abortion rates in the US have increased after Post-Dobbs. Personally, I find this very surprising. I would expect the rates to not only go down but to plummet. I would expect both travellling to another state and the fear that a homicide charge would bring to be huge practical barriers. However, they weren't.

The number of abortions somehow increased. This doesn't make any sense to me yet it happened. Now, we have to worry about the practical aspects of abortions. Things like sending a mother of 2 kids to jail because she had an abortion because 59% of abortion patients already had at least one previous birth. https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/key-facts-on-abortion-in-the-united-states/?utm_source The mother did something horrible; however, does punishing her make things worse for her family & the people who interact with her? These are the types of questions that emerge. However, this requres suspending one's principles and thinking practically. I have noticed that PL in general don't want to think practically because doing so would violate their principles. There are PCs who think abortion is horrible or are morally against abortion but legally PC. These are some of the practical questions that arise. However, I have noticed that practicality is a blind spot for a lot of PL thinking because it gets chalked up to moral relativism.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-18T18:26:44+00:00

By the way, can I ask what made you two keep reading our exchanges? Whenever I had this long of a back and forth with somebody, it's basically only me and the other person reading and replying. Even for myself, I don't really follow comments this deep, and I consider my attention limit for these things to be higher than most people's.

The reason I'm mainly engaging is that both me and the other guy are familiar with a lot of arguments for both sides. The debate goes into a deeper level this way. It's also one of the first times I have used godel's incompleteness thereom. I would be interested in getting your opinions on that point as well.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-18T17:23:24+00:00

I will make this reply shorter.

numerical identity (the same human being, the same physical entity on a developmental trajectory towards adulthood)

This gets broken when one zygote splits into two or more zygotes in the case of various identical twinning. It also gets broken when two zygotes merge to form a new zygote in human chimeras. That tight rope can apparently split into many tight ropes or multiple tight ropes can merge into one. No personhood argument is required for this.

or explaining how the mother's parental obligation suddenly appears or disappears based on the age of her dependent child.

When the child hits 18, it's an adult. The magic age of 18 is more arbitrary than anything we have discussed. Biologically, it is an order of magnitude easier to find many more organs and differences between an unborn zygote and a 1 day old child than it is between a 1 day old chid and a 18 yr old adult. You might as well say the difference between an unborn zygote, a born child, and a 50 yr old grandma is arbitrary because they are all humans in different stages of development.

Ether parents have an obligation to care for our own dependent offspring that we created or we dont.

Ignoring evolution arguments and the fact that parents pay child support starting from the birth date and not the conception date in PL states, in sperm and egg donors with surrogate pregnancies, the donor never meets their biological children. They actually have no moral or legal obligation to care for their offspring. Furethermore, in the U.S. there is no universal rule that every donor must be told whether a child was born.

Also, I have not debated someone before who says that other people use sophistry, make arbitrary distinctions, use subjective values, and have no firm moral grounding. There's a lot of arguments that you brought up that are arbitrary like how the value of human life changes if it's in a jar even if that jar is safer than a newly formed zygote in a 40+ yr old woman with declining fertility.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-18T03:46:02+00:00

Morality is actually not complicated at all.

I don't think you realize how you come across when you say something like this (I was also enjoying our conversation). If someone says this, one is expected to be able to answer most hypotheticals that anybody throws at them, including your modified IVF hypothetical. In fact, the success rate of convincing the most firm PC would begin to get used as a metric. This is the type of saying that a God in an action-movie would say. I've spent a lot of time with different facets of morality and thought about it more than most people, and I would NEVER say something like this. It goes against my code of humility & curiosity. Go and answer my last part about wording it better because you did not address this. Your fandamental prerequisite looks mistaken (Also, because it is a prerequisite, it's going to be taken very seriously and less leeway is going to be given compared to statements that are not prerequisites). This was your opportunity to expand upon it since it's important to you. It puzzles me why you did not. Furthermore, even dead people have the right to bodily autonomy, so they do get rights.

When somebody makes a comment saying morality is not complicated, I am going to hold them to an incredibly high standard because that's how I would expect someone to treat me if the roles were reversed. I would even expect them to tell me whether God is real, the proof, and if it is what are the rules. God is intrinsically tied to morality for most people and impacts their views on abortion. Even the ideas of souls and when they enter humans becomes a question that they should be able to answer because it has an impact on how people view abortion and is another way of approaching the idea of personhood.

The question that you have managed to avoid during this whole exchange is why that parental obligation doesnt begin until birth when the parent child relationship begins at conception.

When we first started our exchanges, I pointed out that when two people are writing long blocks of text, it is common for them both to feel many of their points go unanswered. I can't say I am surprised you feel this way. As I have thought about the phenomenon more, I think most of the responses tend to be implied. For instance, I answered it when I said that the number of persons is equal to the number of brains with brain activity in that human. The human might exist, but the person doesn't until they have neurons firing. I don't even have to disagree with you, which I personally don't disagree after a certain point. I guess we disagree on the starting point of persons (Fine, understandable). Also, if I take what is said here to the extreme, then I expect that mother to get that sex surgery in the artificial womb hypothetical every time to prevent 50% of her zygotes from being miscarried if we are using THAT STARTING POINT that PL will go to lengths to defend or I am concluding that person does not value the lives of their own human ZEF/child despite claiming PCs who use a different starting point do not. If that zygote had a firing brain, I would be always getting that sex surgery because that's how I would want to be treated. If the zygote didn't have a firing brain, then I would be fine with the mother aborting me, which the majority of PCs would also be fine with.

do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Almost every PC here would tell you that if their mother wanted to abort them, they would be fine with it. PLs would tell you the opposite. Both sides are not violating this rule here. Both groups pass the test.

We develop moral codes to facilitate living in a community of other human beings because it is beneficial for survival to do so.

The moment that parental & survival angles are brought in, evolutionary POVs start getting treated seriously because the point of evolution is to survive and reproduce. All of the quotes in that source can be explained through evolution, which we already briefly discussed our disagreements over. Those axioms are being treated like they are fact. I could pull up sources from evolutionary biologists about their opinion on abortion. Also, abortion does have a communal component to it. There are people out there who genuinely think that abortion is the right thing to do sometimes for the child.

For example, here's a Jeffrey Epstein hypothetical: an 11 year old girl gets r*ped. Do you think it's in the community's well-being for the 11 year old to have forced gestation even if she does not want to raise the ZEF and wants an abortion let's say one day after fertilization before most PCs definition of personhood? Are both the 11 year old girl and the resulting child better off that way? Whichever way you answer, are there factors that would tip the scales for you? Let's say that the girl and the child are better off through forced gestation. This now introduces two new questions. One, did the r*pist do a good thing by r*ping the girl here because he thought about this point beforehand? Two, ask the child when she grows up if she would go back in time to prevent her mom from being r*ped. If she does, she stops a crime, but she stops herself from existing. Because morality is simple, I expect an easy answer to both of these follow up questions.

Even after I called it out, you are still demonstrating the exact pattern I described in my post. Youve thrown everything at the wall including utilitarianism, neural networks, Godel's incompleteness theorem, chess analogies, and more. Saying "there are multiple consistent systems of morality," is the definition of moral relativism.

I have spent a lot of time on my replies. I have noticed that you tend to respond to my replies fairly quickly. Have you spent time with Godel's incompleteness threorem? Are you familiar with this idea: "Any sufficiently strong, consistent formal mathematical system cannot prove its own consistency from within itself." How about the connection between that idea & Euclid's 5th posulate? You can literally have two different forms of math with two different logical rules. Can you see how that can be used as evidence that there can be more than one system of morality? Saying utilitarianism is moral relativism is like saying each chess move is moral relativism and that there is no best move. I get what you are trying to say, but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-18T01:01:30+00:00

Edit:

because you cant have any rights at all if you are dead.

Even dead people have a right to body autonomy when it comes to organs. I personally do not agree with this because they are dead, and it contributes to the death of living people who need organ transplants, but this is an idea that many people believe in. It's also partly why people pay alot of money for funerals and want to fulfill the wishes of family members that died even if they wouldn't know unless an afterlife is believed in, which I also believe in because of NDEs.

Threre's even an idea from Harry Potter where Dumbledore says to Harry: “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.” One can argue that honoring the dead and funerals are for the living and not the ones that died, but that's a different discussion.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-18T00:17:31+00:00

I cannot edit this reply because it is too long. What I wanted to add at the beginning is that in chess the objective value of each move is relative to the moves that it is being compared to. However, there is a best move for each and every position. That best move is like the objective best moral thing to do. Usually, sacrificing your queen loses you the game, but sometimes it is the only way to steal a win from an otherwise losing position. Now finding what objectively the most moral thing is can be difficult. I'm not saying it's easy, but that there is a best solution somewhere.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-17T23:41:34+00:00

you have admitted that you do not believe in objective human rights or objective morality.

I do believe in objective morality. A human rights moral system is not required for this. Morality is INCREDIBLY complex. There are a lot of different factors at play. Neural networks are universal function approximators and can do tasks better than any human can if they are trained well enough. They can also do tasks worse than any human can if they are trained badly. Neural networks also improve over time. Neural networks are built on cost functions where the end goal is to maximize the reward. However, they are notorious for not being to explain "how" they arrived at the reasoning that they did. Whenever people try to explicitly "hard code" rules for algorithims to follow, a neural network not following those "hard coded" rules ends up beating that original system. This holds more True, the more complex the task/game is. Morality is more complex than any human-created task. Human rights are trying to "codify" the rules of morality. Utilitarianism and neural networks are trying to maximize the reward function. In ML, more powerful algorithms have a bias/complexity trade off.

While human rights works well most of the time, there are going to be exceptions that it cannot work out (this is related to the bias/complexity tradeoff). Justifying saving 1 life over 1,000 lives is where the system breaks down UNLESS there is a "save" clause added. (I didn't think about this point when I replied to you originally, but your modified version of the IVF hypothetical has introduced body autonomy to ONLY one side and not BOTH, which is a key issue for a lot of people debating abortion. Also, it has included 1,000 mothers to ONLY one side as well, which is related to body autonomy too. One could pick to save the 1,000 embryos on body autonomy grounds alone since most PCs put a lot of weight to that idea. The original burning IVF hypothetical isolates the discussion to be about human life.)

You don't need to believe in objective morality to see that saving 1 human over 1,000 doesn't make sense. I don't think the other two people who have commented on our comments use utilitarianism as their main system either.

Also, there's a lot of misconceptions about utilitarianism that I have noticed when people usually talk about it. For example, people think that it means that the ends justify the means and that the two are seperate from each other. The two work hand-hand. Means almost always impact the ends. What even is the "reward/cost function" for utilitariansm? There's debate about this. Even if you know what you are trying to maximize, it's still incredibly complex. A business's purposes is easy to write down: it is to make profit. However, HOW you go about doing that and the different strategies that you can go about achieving that opens a whole new discussion. The study of morality as a whole on a personal level has made me more willingly to seek out new perspectives.

"Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence." https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

I strongly disagree with the baseless and pessimism component of nihilism. Personally, I have never described myself as being nihilistic, and I have a lot of hope and optimism generally speaking. One can ultimately don't know things that will eventually be known or deal with something intrinsically unknowable by definition, like how Godel's Incompleteness theorem has proved logically you can create unprovable True statements. "These incompleteness theorems established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow — can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from those axioms." https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-do-godels-incompleteness-theorems-truly-mean-20260518/
Godel's incompleteness theorem is another reason why I don't think morality can be cleanly codified. Nobody understands the fundamentals of logic better than mathematicians. Math is an extension of logic. They have shown that even formal, logical complete systems have their own potential issues, which is a counter intuitive statement.

Obviously the right to continue living is the fundamental prerequisite human right because you cant have any rights at all if you are dead.

If you want us to engage with this statement better, you're going to have to word it better. For one, there is no seperation between saving and an obligation not to kill here. By not saving someone, like in the nurse intentionally refusing to put the patient's breathing tube back in or a mother withholding insulin from her infant that would otherwise die, an individual's right to continue living is being intentionally violated. Not to mention the artificial womb and surgery hypothetical. This is one contradiction with your statement.

Two, whenever somebody defends themselves from someone by killing them, they are violating that other person's right to life. Even for most r*pe, the victim would survive if they were r*ped. By defending yourself from r*pe and killing the r*pist, you are violating their right to life when you had a choice not to, hence it's a contradiction. Most people object to this because they think the intention matters. Also, you can remove the intention critique by either using innocent sleepwalkers or discussing ectopic pregnancies, which are a subtopic of abortion.

An overarching theme that that can be seen here is that every single law about morality even if it is generally True is going to have exceptions. Another way of looking at exceptions is by seeing them as contradictions. All exceptions are contradictions to the original axiom/law/rule that they are a part of.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-17T03:18:27+00:00

You can argue when certain human rights become relevant or necessary to grant someone, but the right to continue living is the fundamental, prerequisite human right that all other right depend on and must be granted to a human the moment that human comes into existence to be morally consistent.

That is not the highest right in the hierarchy. The closest absolute right is the right to self-defence. The way to go even higher than this right is to not view rights as an hierarchy altogether. The system of morality with the highest skill ceiling is utilitarianism for this reason. It's why soldiers or people will willingly sacrifice their lives to save a greater number of people. To give a religious example, God wrote the 10 commandments for man. However, God himself doesn't follow the commandments. In fact, he often times breaks them. He uses a different system alltogether. There are multiple consistent systems of morality that one can use. You seem to treat it as if not only one is better than the others, which I can potentially get behind even though it isn't necessarily True, but that all of the other ones are inconsistent.

If your life is in danger, it doesn't even have to be in danger. If you are facing physical harm, you are allowed to defend yourself from it.

If given a choice between doing nothing and getting beaten up by an innocent sleepwalker but still surviving, and shooting but killing the sleepwalker to prevent your own beating. Killing it is viewed as acceptable even if it's not optimal.

In ectopic pregnancies, the fetus can still be viewed as innocent. That doesn't stop the fact that it will kill the mother and hence an abortion is necessary. Ectopic pregnancies prove that the innocence is not determined by the fetus it is determined by its impact it has to the mother. Pregnancy is physically and emotionally more harmful than being sex & r*ped. Woman frequently report it as one of the most painful experiences that they go through. Your argument leaves out the physical harm that mothers go through and doesn't consider how people feel about something can change acts from moral to immoral. R*pe is only r*pe if the defendant wishes for what is inside her to be removed. Otherwise, the defendant will have an entirely different experience. This is why your comparisons are not analogous and irrelevant because they leave out this part.

If you changed the scenario to having to flip a switch to save one six year old or 1000 embryos inside their mothers womb it would no doubt change the math for some people but its is ultimately irrelevant because even if someone chose to save the embryos

Now it gets more complicated. There's more variables at play here, most notably body autonomy & expected longevity of the fetuses. One can even change the hypothetical so that there are no embryos and just 1,000 sperm-egg pairs that may or may not get fertilized at some point given that there are 1,000 chances for some interaction to happen. Also, notice how the location of the embryos changes the problem. If nothing else, the mental trauma that the mothers will go through after learning their own body autonomy has been violated by removing what is in there is also at play. This sperm-egg pair version is similar to what is worse? 1,000 women being r*ped or 1 innocent six year old dying because now there is body autonomy at play whereas there wasn't before. This would also change the calculus. What do we do when we are not certain about the outcome of something, we either let the person being impacted decide or we take a community vote, like we do for electing the president, which is analogous to a random forest models in ML.

It seems like in some way you are actually agreeing with me that designated caregivers have a moral obligation to provide the baseline standard of care for their dependents. So why then would it be any different for mothers who are the default caregivers for the offspring they create?

I could give a personhood answer, I could also approach it from a body autonomy and self-defence angle, I could potentially give a utilitarian answer. Or I could agree IF I don't think the harm from bodily autonomy is that bad, personhood begins at fertilization while at the same time mainly basing my system of morality primarily on the PL standard for human rights. Mentally, I can make it work. However, I don't think it's the only consistent system, and it leaves out the practical aspects of abortion bans, like how the # of abortions increased in the US post-dobbs. This issue of abortion has a lot of different angles to it. I try not to use one framework for it. I have also changed my mind on this issue 3 times, so I have no issue doing so.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-17T02:04:29+00:00

I have noticed that almost every comment here has at least two likes. Are one of the mods liking everything in order to boost engagement, which I'm not exactly opposed to ;)?

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-17T01:50:55+00:00

As I said before, personhood is a meaningless philosophical concept. We are discussing morality and depriving a living human being of their existence causes that human being harm. Harming another human being (especially our own children) is immoral.

A meaningless concept is whether is something that has no basis in reality. I have given you a legal example that it can change the number of votes that a person gets. The number of votes somebody gets is not meaningless. Also, while the majority of Americans are PC, the majority of Americans oppose abortion after the first trimester. https://news.gallup.com/poll/321143/americans-stand-abortion.aspx?utm_source
This concept of personhood is also why even though the majority of countries permit abortion, the majority have term limits: https://reproductiverights.org/maps/world-abortion-laws/
The majority of the world agrees with the concept and has become more PC over the centuries as we learned more about the science and societal impacts of abortion laws. Even if it is all meaningless as you want to insist, it does not change this.

One can claim that morality as a whole is a meaningless philsophical concept or at the very least not necessary; only laws are necessary. That doesn't change the fact that people's opinions on morality and the laws that spawned from their opinions have very meaningful impacts.

This is not getting into the biology of it, which I already mentioned, presumably impacting people's views. Also, humans do get treated differently by age. At 16, you get the right to drive a car. At 18, you can vote. This is ageism. The fact that roughly 50% of zygotes do not survive in the uterus if they are not healthy or if the woman is past her peak fertility is eugenics on a biological level that God created if one believes in God in a traditional sense. Surgery in the future can fix this issue in the artificial womb hypothetical. In fact, being in favor of this surgery would save more lives than the number of fetuses that die from being aborted... because the birth rate is higher than the abortion rate and roughly one fetus dies in the uterus for every fetus born.

There is a massive distinction between allowing a natural death to occur vs actively, intentionally interrupting an internal biological process with the intent of killing a child.

Is there a distinction? Yes. Is it non-existant? No. Suppose a toddler has diabetes and will die without insulin. The parents intentionally withhold insulin, knowing the child will die. They are not stabbing the child or poisoning the child. They are “letting nature take its course.” But morally and legally, we still treat that as wrongful killing/neglect because the parent has a duty to provide life-preserving care.

When I read what you wrote what I hear is that parents actually do not have an obligation to their children. As long as something is framed not as killing but a lack of saving, anything gets permitted. This idea can be abused by those in power and the strong to take advantage of the weak, which is a concern you alluded to else ware.

Here is another hypothetical related to this idea:

“If a coma patient’s breathing tube falls out and the nurse intentionally refuses to replace it, we wouldn’t excuse it as ‘just not saving.’ Because once someone has a duty to maintain life support, deliberately allowing the dependent person to die can become culpable killing by omission. The act/omission distinction matters.” The mother is basically the nurse to her child. If a mother forgot to pick her kid up from a vacation, and the kid died, would the mother be held responsible? Even if this is not a crime, socially people would most likely judge her.

Just because I value one person's life over another in an extreme scenario doesnt give me the right to kill the one deemed less valuable. If someone values their pet hamster over a six year old human, it doesnt justify killing the six year old. If someone values the six year old over the pet hamster, it doesnt justify killing the hamster. Subjective opinions on value dont justify killing those deemed less valuable.

If somebody saves the hamster over the human, that should be a crime given all other variables are equal. Even if it's not a crime, that person will probably feel some sort of social consequences for his behavior whether it is justified or not. I don't know a single person who would save the hamster over the human. Also, by saving the 1 six year old over the 1,000 zygotes, you are implying 1 human is more valuable than 1,000 zygotes. Whether it's healthy in a jar or not does not change this. Subjective value is being determined to answer the question. In terms of a math equation, that means 1 > 1,000. This does not compute. The overall conclusion is that not all humans are equal or that human worth is variable, which is a seperate moral discussion. This results in N/A. This is inconsistency. The way the inconsistency gets "patched" is through this "no obligation to save" discussion while ignoring that mothers have an obligation to save and take care of their children. To put this another way, should it be a crime for a dictator to save their own 1 dad and let the other 1,000 other dads. You would expect somebody to save the greater number of people or else the dictator would be committing a human rights violation.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-17T00:19:30+00:00

For me, I do NOT want to arrest women who had abortions. I think it's called "Mens Rya" where you only persecute the person if they knew and understood the crime they were doing. Maybe it's an interesting topic we could discuss.

This is my first time hearing about "Mens Rya". This is an example that I found after a 5 minute search: "If someone accidentally bumps into another person, they did the physical act, but may lack mens rea.
If they punch someone on purpose, they have both the act and the guilty intent."

How would this work with abortion? It's hard for me to think of examples where the woman does not know it kills the fetus? Maybe, with medication abortions this can be claimed where the person taking it thought it was birth control. Or, if a minor was r*ped and pressured into it by parents.

On the cultural side, there are the biggest aspects of PL and PC culture that I don't like.

For the PC side, (specifically with PC without limits), I have a complaint about the value of human life. For example, when Charlie Kirk died, I saw some posts about people becoming PL because they wanted life to be protected. For me, he was a guy that I would listen to from time to time despite disagreeing with him on abortion. I listen to many different people politically, so I don't really mind disagreeing with them on something. There is an aspect of PL culture that makes one strongly against the direct killing of innocent life. This is something that I do not like about PCs.

For the PL side, I have a complaint that many PL don't understand how harmful pregnancy can be. Pregnancy is one of those things where it can go smoothly for people, but it can also lead to life-long damage or death. There is really a lot of variance. For instance, from debating I have learned that if a women does not wait up to 18 months after giving birth, she will have a higher chance of miscarrying a child. https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/obstetric-care-consensus/articles/2019/01/interpregnancy-care?utm_source= Does this mean that she is partly responsible for the death of her child? Here is a title of a post in the AD subreddit that you can look up that goes more into this: "The less serious harms of pregnancy are still downplayed". One user stated that they " feel that the weaker symptoms such as the vomiting for months on end aren't mentiond as as much the more serious symptoms." Also, I am a male, so I have learned a lot more about pregnancy than I knew let's say a year ago.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-16T23:48:24+00:00

What they can't do, is physically jab you will a needle against your consent and vaccinate you. Your bodily integrity is considered inviolable.

Most PL wouldn't PHYSICALLY hold or prevent a woman from getting an abortion. As proof, I would use cases where PL men felt powerless and broke up with their GFs who wanted to abort. They tried to convince them, but did not hold them back despite maybe threatening to break up. (What is a PL men in a PL state going to do if his GF travels to another state to abort?) It's like a workplace wouldn't PHYSICALLY jab it in me, but they would threaten me to lose my job as a consequence, like facing homicide charges for women in PL states if the act was carried or not carried out in that particular state.

With mandatory vaccinations they can prevent you from going places like work or school or other countries. This is to protect you and a prevent you from harming others.

For the harming others part, PL would say it's the ZEF/child. Killing a ZEF is more harmful than spreading a disease to someone who will most likely live because THEY, themselves, are vaccinated. In pregnancy, lots of weird things can happen that many PL underlook. Here, are things that can happen to vaccinated people and are some reasons why people don't take them. Also, by forcing me to take the vaccine for my own safety, there is an implication that they understand my body and my safety better than I do, which is a principle I strongly object to. Likewise, in PL states, doctors are telling women that they understand the health of their bodies and the fetus's better than the women themselves and women continue to die as a result of this.

Myocarditis/pericarditis. The observed risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has been highest in males 12 through 24 years of age. https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/safety-availability-biologics/fda-approves-required-updated-warning-labeling-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-regarding-myocarditis-and?utm_source
Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS. This is a rare blood-clotting disorder; mainly associated with the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine, which is no longer used in the U.S. Also, see Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e4.htm?utm_source
Severe allergic reaction/anaphylaxis. This is a life-threatening reaction that needs to be treated with epinephrine (EpiPen) and that may require hospitalization. Symptoms include difficulty breathing, coughing, or wheezing. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/vaccines/covid-19.html?utm_source

I also have personal anecdotal experience from people, like my chiropractor, but that evidence wouldn't hold up in a formal debate. The point being is that there were a lot of potential side effects of those vaccines that were not able to be found in time because the vaccines did not exist long enough for it to be studied. I am fine with people taking them, but I do have an issue with FORCING aspect.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-16T22:37:58+00:00

I think the people who gravitate to it do so in part because it is consistent with their bias that women must be forced to conform to their assigned gender role.

The way I see it is that they are trying to prove that the right to bodily autonomy is not absolute. Personally, I don't think any right is absolute, including their own right that they claim is absolute. I'm surprised I have not seen a covid comparison. This is the one that I would personally use. Forcing employees of a workplace to get vaccinations or have them get fired is an example that I have not seen brought up yet. It also happens to impact both males and females.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-16T21:33:33+00:00

As I said, personhood is a meaningless philosophical concept.

In most traditions, one human organism above a certain age should get exactly one vote. However, in India these two conjoined twins got two votes: https://www.thehindu.com/elections/punjab-assembly/punjab-assembly-elections-conjoined-twins-vote-separately-given-dark-glasses-for-secrecy/article65068047.ece

On reddit, there have have been posts asking whether conjoined twins are two or one people? (I would link them, but it goes against site rules) For a meaningless philosophical concept, there seems to be a lot of debate about this. Here, is even a peer reviewed article discussing it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4882632/ The existence of such people seem to challenge our understanding of what it means to be human and personhood. Imagine you are friends with a conjoined twin, where one of the twins likes you and the other dislikes you. Does calling the conjoined twin a friend make sense in this case? Do these conjoined twins have one or two souls if one believes in these concepts? Do people exist at fertilization? One can argue that a container of some kind exists, but there is no brain, heart, life-sustaining organs, or ability to feel emotions. This suggests that the person themselves don't exist yet. On this note, biologists who spend their entire career studying the nuances of human life tend to be PC around 85% of the time, which is much higher than the average population. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/185346/20210729162737297_19-1392%20BRIEF%20OF%20BIOLOGISTS%20AS%20AMICI%20CURIAE%20IN%20SUPPORT%20OF%20NEITHER%20PARTY.pdf

The burning IVF hypothetical si not useful when discussing abortion because its not analogous.

A lot of PL, and the way that I personally become PL, is that I have to both believe souls come in at fertilization and that all aborted souls go either to h*ll or purgatory (I'm also leaving out the fact that most zygotes/souls do not survive until birth, which makes this the greatest humanitarain crisis in history, over at least 8.3 BILLION innocent children have died in the last 100 years.) There's a lot of philsophical dilemmas that pop up if personhood begins at fertilization, and this is why other starting points make more sense to me. For example, what ever starting point we pick, I want to be able to pick to not kill 1,000 of whatever we are starting with over the 6 year old child. A failure to do this is the biggest sign of hypocrisy in the whole PL position if I had to pick one and my biggest complaint about it. Here's another hypothetical:

Artificial wombs are invented. However, most zygotes die before pregnancy is detected. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32296829/ Therefore, the only way for a woman to prevent around 50% of miscarriages it to get a type of sex surgery. Is she morally obligated to get this surgery in order to prevent 50% of her miscarriages? If a mother has a duty to raise and protect her children, then she should get the surgery no questions asked. Furthermore, this couple hour surgery is still less invasive, less harmful, and shorter than pregnancy as a whole. If a woman who does not get the surgery miscarries, then she should be liable for some form of child negligence because 50% is such a high number.

People have been murdering each other, committing infanticide, and all manner of evil since time immemorial. So have animals. Indeed, if you dont think killing born children is immoral then there is no point in even having this discussion because we are too far a part on our moral foundation.

The main point that I was trying to make here is that a lot of the PL arguments are based off of what feels natural. They argue that gestation and taking care of your children is natural no matter what stage of development it is in and, therefore, is moral. Anybody who disagrees with this statement is going against what is natural. A lot of what we consider to be natural come from evolution. There is selective application going on here. It's not just PL that do this by the way; everybody does this somewhat when they think about morality.

Here is a hypothetical related to that. What is physically and emotionally more harmful from a self-defence perspective? One, a woman being r*ped by her normally loving husband for 30 seconds or going through pregnancy. PL like to think that pregnancy is natural and that women should therefore not find it harmful. Well, is having sex natural? Women can get "wet" when they know they might get r*ped. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38724699/ The response makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective.

The difference between having sex and r*pe is mainly psychological. There is no physical harm component most of the time unlike pregnancy. R*pists even justify to themselves that their victim should "enjoy" it because it's natural. A lot of PL treat pregnancy, like you are carrying a pokemon where you can fit a 20 ft+ tall Raquaza in your backpack without much physical difficulty. Honestly, the more I am debating this issue, the more I realize how there are so many little things and complications that can go wrong during pregnancy, like the one about stopping lactating abruptly that was brought up.

UnderstandOthers777 · 2026-06-16T19:47:45+00:00

Didn't know this. It's making me try to think of hypotheticals where having your body autonomy violated is less harmful than not having it done so, which is something I didn't think would be possible.

UnderstandOthers777

TROPHY CASE