Fetal rights vs. animal rights

Forums: Politics, Abortion, Meat, Animal Rights, Fetal Rights
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It is interesting that both issues, abortion and vegetarian meat, are big news currently.

The vegetarian meat issue is happening more because of the sustainability issues that surround it, but it is interesting that both abortion and meat involve killing; and that both forms of killing require certain people to claim that the lives of those killed are not worthy of protection.

In the case of fetuses, the argument is that it is not a fully-formed human, even though it is certainly human genetically. In the case of meat, the argument is that humans aren't human enough to justify protecting them against killing the way humans protect other humans.

Since the two issues are polarized according to the usual left-right divide, it would be interesting to see them become weaponized for partisan politics. E.g. the left could accuse the right of not caring about animal rights, while the right could accuse the left of supporting animal rights but not caring about human fetuses (which they have already, I think)

In any case, it is an interesting parallel and we might wonder if a future exists where both animals and fetuses are no longer killed in favor of human pleasure and enjoyment of sex and meat.

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Yes, people are crazy. So what else is new?

Meat is religious. The bible says "Rise, kill and eat." That's good enough for me.

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@livinglava,

It seems like it's incongruous until you look at it less than shallowly. A circumcised foreskin is 'human genetically'. An animal is sentient and capable of feeling pain. A woman who's life is destroyed by carrying a foetus she does not want and did not chose more so.

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@hingehead,

hingehead wrote:

It seems like it's incongruous until you look at it less than shallowly. A circumcised foreskin is 'human genetically'. An animal is sentient and capable of feeling pain. A woman who's life is destroyed by carrying a foetus she does not want and did not chose more so.

And what does a fetus feel? Does it feel it's heart start beating? Does it feel itself being sliced up and/or sucked away from it's mother by a vacuum?

You can say a post-natal baby relates to its mother differently because it's outside her body, but does it really? It's vision isn't that sharp and it mostly relates to her through her mammary glands, which are the external equivalent of the placenta within the womb.

Would you say that because the mouth experiences oral gratification in order to make it suck, the baby is more sentient than before it's born when it experiences gratification in being nurtured via the placenta?

Instead of just using the mystery of fetal development within the womb to assume what's convenient where abortion is concerned, why don't you look more closely at what it means to have experiences as a creature with a nervous system?

Even a worm contracts as a result of stimuli. We can assume a fetus experiences nothing more than a worm up to a certain stage, but how do we know really? In fact, how do we know that they don't experience even greater pain at earlier phases than later ones? After all, don't children experience more pain, fear, and sensitivity than adults? If so, why wouldn't even younger babies and fetuses be even more sensitive to pain than children even?

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You need to investigate the meaning of "rights". A fetus does not have any. It is not a person. It is totally dependent on the woman and she protects it only if she wants a baby.

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@Jewels Vern,

Jewels Vern wrote:

You need to investigate the meaning of "rights". A fetus does not have any. It is not a person. It is totally dependent on the woman and she protects it only if she wants a baby.

Animals have rights. If it is exempt from human rights, could it qualify for animal rights at least?

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@livinglava,

Quote:

And what does a fetus feel? Does it feel it's heart start beating? Does it feel itself being sliced up and/or sucked away from it's mother by a vacuum?

No it doesn't. Do you feel better now?

Just to clarify. The heart starts beating when it's an embryo. Also when you give a **** about worms I'll pay more attention to you.

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@hingehead,

hingehead wrote:

Quote:
And what does a fetus feel? Does it feel it's heart start beating? Does it feel itself being sliced up and/or sucked away from it's mother by a vacuum?

No it doesn't. Do you feel better now?

Just to clarify. The heart starts beating when it's an embryo. Also when you give a **** about worms I'll pay more attention to you.

How do you presume to know with such certainty?

Are you one of those people who just asserts that cows don't feel anything because it would inconvenience you to think they do and still eat beef?

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@livinglava,

Quote:

How do you presume to know with such certainty?

How do you?

I read science and biology - and I confess I am talking about early stage pregancies, embryos..

What are you doing in your life to stop pain in people and things that are already alive? Why does this drive you above all else? I don't expect an honest answer but you never know.

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@livinglava,

Typical - a Christian minister sums up my thoughts way better than I can.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/2f/63/01/2f6301b76b08aa1f6857a9dd6485888f.jpg

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@hingehead,

hingehead wrote:

Quote:
How do you presume to know with such certainty?

How do you?

I don't. I explore the possibilities openly and look for reasons that one possibility might be more or less likely than others based on known information.

Quote:

I read science and biology - and I confess I am talking about early stage pregancies, embryos..

Which areas of science and biology deal with the subject of what living things experience or don't experience and how?

Earlier in the thread, I posed the question why it should be assumed that earlier stage embryos experience less intense pain than those at a later stage. I contend that children experience more fear and pain and other sensitivities, such as to flavor, than adults; so it is possible that fetuses are even more sensitive, though they can't express much response to what they feel because their muscles are still nascent.

How can you prove that a fetus feels less than a baby, or that a baby feels less than a toddler, pre-schooler, elementary schooler, high schooler, and/or adult?

Quote:

What are you doing in your life to stop pain in people and things that are already alive? Why does this drive you above all else? I don't expect an honest answer but you never know.

I am not responsible for stopping pain for living people. I do however criticize economic greed and structures that block people from getting healthy and getting access to health care interventions that would help them restore their health instead of just filling corporate coffers and addicting them to stop-gap treatments that keep them unhealthy and dependent on care.

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Quote:

In the case of meat, the argument is that humans aren't human enough to justify protecting them against killing the way humans protect other humans.

That’s not an argument for killing animals, so presumably you mean ‘the animals aren’t human enough to justify protecting them against killing’?

Quote:

An animal is sentient and capable of feeling pain. A woman who's life is destroyed by carrying a foetus she does not want and did not chose more so.

Down syndrome/severe autism like genetics aside (because I’m not including such in the following question) do you have examples of “A woman who's life is destroyed by carrying a foetus she does not want and did not chose more so.”

Quote:

You need to investigate the meaning of "rights". A fetus does not have any.

‘Rights’ are a form of group consensus, (and rights are formed out of) a agreed upon 'principle' arising out of issues of morality, ethics, fairness etc. As such, the concept of ‘rights’ are created subsequent to the concept of morality, ethics, fairness etc. As example:

- in times past women bathing in the sea had to wear excessive coverage, and did not have the right to wear a bikini (similar things happen today in some non western countries). These things were not a right back then, but are now.

- In some countries there is religious freedom, in some there has not been. In the ones that didn’t have it, it was not a ‘right’, but most in the west consider this a right

- In some countries there is the right to vote, in some there isn’t, so it is not a ‘right’. In the ones that didn’t have it, it was not a ‘right’, but most in the west consider this a right.

- In some countries, freedom of speech is a right, but other countries repress it. In the ones that didn’t have it, it was not a ‘right’, but most in the west consider this a right

- it used to be a right to own slaves, and slaves did not have many rights. Yet now the descendants of those same groups embrace 'freedom' as a right.

So are the above rights or not? The answer is they became rights when agreed upon by the masses, or those in power. So a ‘fetus does not have any rights’ is subsequent to the morality, ethics, etc that gave rise to the line of thought (ie. the 'right').

Livinglava’s original question is the about morality behind that right, not the subsequent right itself.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

Quote:
In the case of meat, the argument is that humans aren't human enough to justify protecting them against killing the way humans protect other humans.
That’s not an argument for killing animals, so presumably you mean ‘the animals aren’t human enough to justify protecting them against killing’?

I was referring to the fetuses as human, not the animals.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Ah, fair enough. The confusion seems to have arisen because of the topic of both fetal humans and animals as meat. In this comparison, you've started a sentence with In the case of meat...

Makes more sense now.

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@livinglava,

No. A fetus is not a living entity until it breathes.

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@Jewels Vern,

That's a statement of belief, rather than fact. Fact is, neither the pro-abortion nor the anti-abortion stance on it is fact. No one can truly define what entails a living entity, particularly in regards to a human fetus, perhaps because it is the most emotive, or perhaps because of its brain. Perhaps because of other factors.

After all, the fetus develops a brain, and that brain is capable of functioning like a living organism, even in the womb - the closer to term, the closer to 'human like' its brain functions (and it is the brain that sets us apart from other living animals). This by the way, is not a pro or anti statement, it is simply a statement.

All the other subjective nonsense that swirls around this is used to justify peoples stances, one way, or the other.

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@Jewels Vern,

Jewels Vern wrote:

No. A fetus is not a living entity until it breathes.

The fetus exchanges oxygen and CO2 with the mother via the placenta.

Just because it isn't using lungs to breathe yet doesn't mean it isn't alive.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

That's a statement of belief, rather than fact. Fact is, neither the pro-abortion nor the anti-abortion stance on it is fact. No one can truly define what entails a living entity, particularly in regards to a human fetus, perhaps because it is the most emotive, or perhaps because of its brain. Perhaps because of other factors.

After all, the fetus develops a brain, and that brain is capable of functioning like a living organism, even in the womb - the closer to term, the closer to 'human like' its brain functions (and it is the brain that sets us apart from other living animals). This by the way, is not a pro or anti statement, it is simply a statement.

All the other subjective nonsense that swirls around this is used to justify peoples stances, one way, or the other.

What living things experiences is simultaneously subjective and objective because no one knows exactly what you experience, even when you verbally claim to experience something and it sounds the same as what others experience. E.g. you can say that you perceive color or experience pain, and other people can recognize those experiences based on their own personal experience of them, but your experience can still be different because it is ultimately subjective.

When a baby cries, we assume it is suffering, even though when a child cries, you can sometimes tell that it's not actually suffering but that it just knows how to make itself cry to get attention and manipulate to get what it wants.

Still, if you remember experiencing life as a child, you probably remember pain and suffering you went through; such as losing teeth, or tasting foods that were disgusting to you, or getting injured and feeling the pain of wounds. Because of those memories, we can be certain children experience pain and suffering and other things, and that the experiences are more intense than adults experience as they age.

So then the question is why can't we remember childhood experiences before a certain age, i.e. around 5 years old? Is it because we didn't experience anything or maybe because the experiences were so intense, we learned to block them out rather than experience intense anxiety with regard to them?

If toddlers and infants in fact experience sensations more intensely than older children, even, then what is the difference between an infant who was born yesterday and one who will be born tomorrow? The only question becomes whether there is a stage in fetal development where the nervous system has yet to develop sufficient complexity to experience that same level of childhood intensity of experience.

That then leaves us with the question of how the nervous system experiences sensations. Is intensity based on the number of nerves, their connectivity and how well signals flow through the larger network?

And then if we assume that a fetus experiences pain and other sensations, even intensely, does that mean it is less ethical to anesthetize and then euthanize it? Is it more or less ethical to euthanize a fetus under anesthesia than a living breathing child or adult?

A news headline I saw recently claimed that an otherwise-healthy dog was euthanized in order to bury it with its owner, and questioned whether that was legal/ethical. Is euthanasia-under-anesthesia a form of animal cruelty? If so, does that mean it should be illegal to control animal populations by euthanizing stray animals? If so, what can be done with those stray animals as an alternative to euthanizing them? Can people simply breed less animals so there are less unwanted pets that end up as strays? Likewise, can people simply avoid unwanted pregnancy in order to avoid abortion?

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@vikorr,

"No one can truly define what entails a living entity,"

But that is exactly what both sides of this argument propose to do, and both sides want to use government power to enforce their will.

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@Jewels Vern,

Jewels Vern wrote:

"No one can truly define what entails a living entity,"

But that is exactly what both sides of this argument propose to do, and both sides want to use government power to enforce their will.

This is basically the exact same strategy climate denialists take to avoid climate reforms.

They say, "climate change can't be proven either way, and both sides want what they want," and that way they can resist and avoid change.

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Fetal rights vs. animal rights

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