(Decided to post this in general because it's more philosophical than a debate on policy.)
It seems every time people argue over abortion it boils down to one group that believes that fetuses are human beings and another saying that they aren't. As someone that isn't entirely convinced life exists at all, I find the argument to be rather pedantic, leading my question to be more along the lines of... So what?
Even if you want to argue that life is worth protecting, you've sentenced someone to death by the time you've conceived them. If your goal is to minimize death, the ONLY option you have is not to bear children. Literally the ONLY counterargument to this is the idea that cutting a life short deprives that person of having experiences, but this is a moot point because such an argument comes out of someone's personal dogma and beliefs - beliefs that your unborn child has not been indoctrinated with yet. In other words, such an argument projects a set of values onto a blank slate that has none. In fact, this argument really only makes sense if the individual in question has formed some idea of a long term goal - say, the toddler that wants to be a firefighter or astronaut. Anything before that and you're probably placing more value on a child's life than they place on their own.
What we call life has always existed on a totem pole. Mosquitoes have been shown to be excited for variable lengths of time when stimulated by air puffs, indicating that they have distinct affinities for fear - distinct personalities. Individuality. Of course, we don't value their lives because they don't physically resemble us. In fact most of us would probably rather stomp on an insect that tear a cute stuffed animal to bits. The same principle applies within our own species, where we sympathize more with people that look and behave the way we do while alienating the rest - this is where racism comes from. Zoom in even farther and you see how cliques distinguish themselves even in a homogeneous group of people.
The reason for peoples' empathy being selective seems pretty obvious to me: Dunbar's number. We simply lack the mental capacity to care about everyone we come into contact with. I guess what I'm saying is that we don't really care about each other as much as we say we do. We pretend to care about things like human rights because we see them as moral values through which we can validate ourselves, but ultimately our so-called ethics are more a reflection of how we want to be seen.
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