For context, the moderators closed a different thread (thank you coffee addict for providing the link) but implied that Sam2 and I could continue a tangential discussion that began towards the end of that thread.
I wrote,
How does the way the doctor characterizes the unborn baby change anything [i.e., my contention that abortion due to a potential problem detected by optional screening is wrong]?
Ubiquitin responded:
Um becasue this entire conversation is about the doctor’s intentions
No, I do not believe this entire conversation is about the doctor’s intentions. As I had already stated, I had no question that the doctor’s intentions were noble, intended to be helpful, and came from a good place. I had no quarrel with the doctor! Nor did my respect for the doctor diminish at all. My problem is with the cultural environment in which those actions can be defined as good things.
Sam2,
Do you not see any Tzad to be Mechalek between a fetus and a person.
So if we say that a fetus is not a “person”, does that give us carte blanche to do whatever we want with the fetus? Does any shitta hold that way? I think it is highly incorrect to map halachic concepts of a fetus onto the distinctions that the secular world draws. They are extremely different, and have different intents.
I find the whole secular distinction to be silly to begin with. Pick up any copy of What To Expect When You Are Expecting or Your Pregnancy Week By Week or the literature given out at an OB’s office and see what they call the fetus: your baby! This focus on exclusively calling the fetus a fetus (e.g., not a baby, not a person!) only crops up when discussing abortion. So when you peel away all of the disingenuous layers, the bald truth of the secular position is this: a fetus becomes a baby when the parents decide that they want it.
There are those who think that as long as it’s in the mother, it’s still Yerech Imo and can be excised if necessary like any other limb.
Define necessary in this case. I imagine it is quite different than what the secular culture holds.
Just because we think we are right does not make someone with another opinion on it a murderer nor is there action evil. We think it’s murder (maybe).
So it seems that you are arguing that there is no absolute good or absolute evil. It is all relative and based on cultural norms?
So if, G-d forbid, in 100 years people exclusively call a newborn younger than 1 month a neonate (don’t call it a baby or a person! Science has proven that there is no sentience by our futuristic definition of sentience!), and it was legal to kill a neonate if it wasn’t wanted or it was sick or deformed, would you then say that just because someone believes that they are not wrong because they have good intentions? They don’t have the Torah to guide them after all?
But do you really think that the Shittah that the determining factor between personhood and not is birth has no moral weight whatsoever?
It has weight, but it has not one iota of anything to do with the story I told.