Comment by pibaker
18 days ago
No. I think the opposite is true. Those who consider abortion murder can claim that we do not in fact universally condemn the murder of babies because abortion is legal and widely practiced in many places.
Some may consider abortion to only kill a fetus rather than a fully formed baby and thus not murder. Others disagree because they consider a fetus a baby in its own right. This raises a more fundamental question about the validity of any supposedly universal morality. When you apply rules like "don't torture baby" to real life, you will have to decide what constitutes as a baby in real life, and it turns out the world is way messier than a single word can describe.
You are ignoring the “for sport” clause.
The moral status of abortion is irrelevant to the question of whether “don’t harm babies for fun” is a moral universal, because no woman gets an abortion because “abortion is fun”
"You are only making abortion legal because you want to have sex (read: fun) without consequences" is not an uncommon argument against it.
If you want to argue that this isn't what "for sport" means, you just circle back to the point I made earlier. It is even harder to define what is for fun and what is not than to define what is a baby.
That's certainly not what people argue. People do argue that women do get abortions for fun.
I think there’s a clear distinction between (1) doing an act because you find it fun in itself, (2) doing an act because it eliminates an unwanted consequence of some other fun act.
When I say no woman gets an abortion “for fun”, I mean there is no woman for whom abortion belongs to (1); when some pro-lifer claims women get abortions “for fun”, they are talking about (2) not (1).
My claim that essentially everyone agrees it is immoral to harm babies for fun is talking about “for fun” in sense (1) not sense (2)
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