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I respect people who believe banning abortion is saving the lives of babies. You're not evil, you're doing the best you can by your own worldview. However I don't share this belief, and am thankful to any tech that gives me control over my body, even in violation of govmt law.

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So what part of “babies are humans that deserve constitutional rights” do you not believe in?

Aella

@Aella_Girl

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@JaredPine

"human" isn't a binary category, it's a fuzzy cluster of concepts, and fetuses are too far outside the edge of fuzzy cluster for it to trigger any sort of moral responsibility for me

4:41 PM · Jun 24, 2022

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This really strikes me as a belief that is held merely as an excuse to justify abortion rather than one that is logical, much less scientific. It’s at the very least an extremely subjective belief.

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I hold the belief about a lot of things - this is at the core of how I engage with concepts. Concepts are not (rarely?) binary; they are clusters. It's a pretty common thing in ratspace with a lot of writing about it, and I've discussed it before in not-abortion contexts.

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and

Is there a point in pregnancy where the fetus becomes "human-enough" that if you chose to remove it from your body, you'd have an obligation to try not killing it in the process?

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and

When does it become a person is a religious belief, and people's religious beliefs are protected under the constitution, thus it's your choice to abort not the government's.

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and

At what point does a typical human organism merit at least some level of moral responsibility? Might an answer be expressed as a confidence interval? Considering birth can happen at many developmental stages, is birth really the optimal dividing line, or perhaps too convenient?

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But then you must decide "at what point does this stop being fuzzy."

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