Hmm... I'm certainly not SURPRISED by it, but I don't share it, no. I see it as being a crooked sort of kludge necessitated by the idea that people are equally valuable. "people" is a very big and complicated category, and treating it as a single moral point leads to weirdness.
Practically speaking, a person gets created over an extremely protracted period. It's not when they're conceived, it's not when they're born, it's not when they learn to speak or use the internet, it's the entire process. In contrast, people die close to instantaneously. "creating a human life" only seems morally neutral because the "human life" you're creating when you make a baby is extremely rudimentary.
But it's not generally acceptable to talk about people this way, so the difference between a fetus and a piano tuner gets surreptitiously offloaded into a difference between birth and death.
Another difference that gets misplaced onto birth vs. death is the matter of discriminate vs. indiscriminate actions. If people could create people they liked as easily as they could kill people they don't, we might see this very differently.
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.