Such an interesting discussion. I lurk on LW, don't really post because to be honest, there's not much I have to contribute that isn't already said by others.
But I just wanted to say how interesting it is to compare how this community discusses the subject is in such contrast to almost every other forum, despite the variety of opinions on the matter.
As for the issue, I remember when I was young (really young) I saw a doco on a third world country, where the mothers would kill their babies if they were female, as they weren't considered an asset in the way that males were, (post birth abortion??) and in my very young mind, it just made striaght forward sense, that a family that can barely survive shouldn't burden themselves further unnecessarily. which probably means when I was young I didn't value human life that much. Now I'm really not sure what to think. I see babies as almost pure potential, so there is that element of wastefulness, but then again, most of the time that potential is just wasted. Makes discussions on a place like this all the more interesting though. I also think it depends a lot on what you think of identity. I view myself more as a malleable collection of memes and ideas as opposed to a physical set of atoms, does that mean me as a baby I don't really identify with as ....me? Are babies anyone yet? (these are non-rhetorical questions btw)
But good show everyone
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.