MARTIN UK - 20 January 2012 12:23 PM

Antisocialdarwinist - 20 January 2012 12:19 PM

DanielMoore1991 - 20 January 2012 10:05 AM

My second point is that hypothetically you would not like it if you were to be aborted. Like if your mom we’re to travel back in time and abort you. Then possibly you’d disappear in the present.

Now there’s a compelling argument against abortion.

Straight from the fruitloop school of “Huh!”.

But worded so massively!

Antisocialdarwinist - 20 January 2012 09:09 AM

hannahfriend - 19 January 2012 05:51 PM

Antisocialdarwinist - 19 January 2012 08:20 AM

hannahfriend - 18 January 2012 06:59 PM

I think there could be more problems with the single-sex abortions than posters have allowed.  If it starts to make a significant impact on the percentage of females, there will be a lot of lonely, frustrated guys without partners (homosexuals exempted).  But of course this impact wouldn’t be felt until they are in their teens or older, so the repercussions could last a long while before the genders evened out again.

From the New England Journal of Medicine:

The Chinese government has acknowledged the potentially disastrous social consequences of this sex imbalance. The shortage of women may have increased mental health problems and socially disruptive behavior among men and has left some men unable to marry and have a family.24 The scarcity of females has resulted in kidnapping and trafficking of women for marriage and increased numbers of commercial sex workers, with a potential resultant rise in human immunodeficiency virus infection and other sexually transmitted diseases.25 There are fears that these consequences could be a real threat to China’s stability in the future.26

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr051833

Of course the West is not China, but still the impact could be quite negative.

Suppose it’s true that the social consequences of sex imbalance are potentially disastrous. Is it the mother’s responsibility to help avert this potential disaster by carrying her unwanted baby to term? Does the mother’s right to liberty trump the “right” of society (if such a right even exists) to avert the potentially disastrous consequences of sex imbalance?

I don’t think it is a mother’s unalienable right to choose the sex of her baby.  I have trouble understanding a mother who says she wants a child, but just not a girl.  That seems rather shallow to me.  And, yes, I think we should keep the social consequences in mind.  Just as we don’t let people sell babies or donor organs.  Some personal choices have negative ramifications and so are regulated.

It seems shallow to me, too, but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to deny a woman the right to choose whether she carries her unwanted baby to term.

I think the social consequences argument is more compelling. But even so, forcing a woman to have a baby she doesn’t want—for whatever reason—seems like the greater evil.

As for selling babies and donor organs, I don’t have a problem with that—provided the babies and organs are allocated according to non-discriminatory criteria. Rather than auctioning babes or organs off to the highest bidder, “donors” would sell them to a central clearing house. The clearing house would then allocate them according to the same criteria currently used for donor organs and adoptions. I heard this proposal on the radio a while back. They conducted a survey to see how much money people would take for one of their kidneys. The average answer was around $50k. No way would I sell my “spare” kidney for $50k.

I think there are two separate issues going on here: 1) sex selection, 2) abortion. The sex selection problem solved, without the need for abortion, should reduce or certainly not increase the number of abortions including late term abortions and infanticide (if that is occurring). Of course, sex selection can lead to a whole host of issues or problems as have been previously brought up, if it is under-regulated or over-regulated.

I don’t see a problem with sex selection prior to or at impregnation, but it could potentially cause some imbalance depending on “cultural” attitudes, and I don’t think “producing” strictly for baby-selling is the right thing to do either. Adoption for unwanted full-term babies and abortion within reasonable time limits is still the way to go in my view. I don’t think they’re supposed to, but some adopters can find ways to select the sex of the new-born baby they’ve arranged to adopt. If a couple prefer to have at least one boy and one girl, there’s no sense in the hit or miss method only to end up with six kids, and abortion doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me from the birthing mother’s perspective because of the risk, the intrusive procedure and the eventual damage that can be done such as incompetent cervix, etc. when all that needs to be done is select the right sperm at the outset.

Ironically, people in Iran wheel and deal for organs through a third party “contacting” agency directly with each other (donor and recipient) negotiating price and accepting or rejecting the offers, and back-door alley abortions are being performed even with young married couples who would like to have children some day but who realize they can’t afford to in their present situation.

It just seems weird to me to imagine that a woman would want a boy child, but would feel forced to carry to term a girl child.  (Maybe everyone would be better off if such a woman had no children.)  Maybe it’s just because our culture does not disparage either sex. 

I know couples who have had one or two more children than they had originally intended in the quest to have a desired boy or girl.  But they seem to love all the kids.  Even those that ended up with four girls or four boys, then stopped, find that what they got was just wonderful, even though it is not the family they envisioned at the start. 

As for donor organs for sale, the fear is that poor people would be pressured into surgery to remove their organs, or even that people would be killed to harvest their organs.  And similarly, if babies could be sold, this could lead to kidnapping.  (Both are grist for crime novels.)

as far as donor organs go it seems better (and more likely with the apparent direction of technology) that we just grow organs for patients from their own cells and dna, though we will not see this commonly for at least another two, three, or four decades. organs are being grown but the science is in its infancy for sure.

also the “problem” here seems to originate from unresolved issues of the various effects of testosterone on the psyche, and other contributing biochemical or cultural influences that impel individual or collective thought toward territorialism, aggression, resource monopolization, and other key signatures of so called “alpha male” behavior.

the key note here is how individualism once again selects for harm toward others, with testosterone and possibly other biochemical or cultural factors magnifying this tendency.

if sex selection alone changes the balance it is highly likely that a more male world would be more individualistic and therefore more destructive to others. a predominantly male world is also the most likely world to exist as long as immortality does not, as fathers in most cultures in the world (india, china, most of africa, islamic regions, indo-chinese regions, some areas of south america) view sons as more likely than daughters to immortalize themselves or create some kind of blood legacy.

combined with population pressures and growing energy and water scarcity, a world of high violence seems the most likely future, filled with testosterone fueled men.

should immortality come to exist, the notion of gender will lose its relevance. i suspect most of you are terrified to envision such a world, should your brain even be capable of it.

saralynn - 17 January 2012 10:05 PM

What’s with the “she” business?  Is that supposed to be an insult?  I doubt it.  You’re probably trying to be egalitarian. It’s not your fault.  These pronouns are terribly awkward, aren’t they?  Something must be done.  I am so tired of this “he or she”  business.  We need a new pronoun, don’t you think?  i recommend (s)he, but I don’t know how to deal with “his” and “her”.  Maybe “sher”?

i always use the plural they or theirs.

“they told me they’d be here at eight.” works colloquially for singular even if technically its supposed to be plural only. but generally using the plural that way is obviously equivocating enough to clue the listener in to the hidden pronoun’s identity. or, if used in a speech perhaps seen as polite non-specificity.

specificity may not be a word, but it should be.

Antisocialdarwinist - 18 January 2012 09:16 AM

but I’m told the plural form is grammatically incorrect when it refers to a single person.

sadly, yes. no reason language can’t be changed, however…

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (Rob) - 18 January 2012 10:53 PM

Yes, Skep, it’s the old, never-ending argument about when a fetus becomes a person. My answer to that (and this might put the cat among the pigeons) is once they’re born. Others will disagree vehemently but I think they are wrong. Anyway, that is not the issue here and don’t want to derail the thread.

the underlying assumption that propels these sorts of discussions, arguments, inner conflicts, what have you, is that life is special.

particularly human life.

particularly individual human life.

i suppose at the individual level it may be, certainly up to this point in history arguably appears to be, necessary for conscious intelligence capable of self-reflection to consider itself special in order to maintain a will to live.

i could of course be wrong about what maintains the will to live.

yet if we take a longer view of life in general, we can wonder what was so special about life for all those millions of years it did nothing but, in equilibrium with its environment, slowly accrete its information storage complexity until it, as we have noted in our species, evolved a virtual capacity called imagination that allows us to manipulate and pressure our habitat until it bursts, as it appears we have the capacity to do long before we are likely to break the shackles of our imprisonment on this lonely rock.

even now we can wonder what is so special about something that is so easy for us to produce more of, had we the unlimited space, food, and water to do so.