How important is a life?

Question

I ask this question to help me decide whether abortion is wrong or if it is okay. When I female has her period she drops eggs. This happens every 28 days, so they have give up a chance for a child to live every 28 months. In a abortion you give up the chance for a child to live each time you have one. What is the different? Is there one?

Answer 1

...none...not at all...other people differ in opinion...its mine...

Answer 2

When a female has her period she drops an unfertilized egg.  Most would say there is no life there.  A process of cell division occurs to a fertilized egg whereupon life comes to fruition.  That's the obvious difference, the question of whether you are ending an existing life and that's probably not the answer you're looking for.

Answer 3

It depends on how much you want to care for others or for yourself. If you care for every being born on this earth, you would not want any human, animal, insect, or plant to die. Since everything in nature dies, all that really matters is life, rather than a life. Once you realize the unity of all of life, you realize that every single life is but a part of the greater life.  

Answer 4

A zygote is not a person.  It is potential life, as fuel is potential fire.  Left alone, it will, as you say, be flushed away with the female's menses.

A joined pair of zygotes becomes a new life.  Left alone, it will grow until it must be born, then mature into an adult, produce, consume, and perhaps reproduce, and eventually die.  During that time it will be loved, hated, commended, condemned, and both suffer and enjoy as you do.

Answer 5

I have thought about this quite a bit over the years. The wide spread of opinions is incredible, matched only by the passion of the activists on all sides. This is an issue that few people are even able to have a civilized discussion about. Complicating it further is that there are few that hold a black-and-white view of the issue. The majority of people in the US see abortion as a giant grey area with varying degrees of abortion considered acceptable. Very few people hold the position of unlimited abortion access or no abortion under any circumstances. Below is the process I went through to come up with my position on the matter.

First, I asked myself the question at what point does a human being obtain "personhood" and as such gain all the legal and moral protections that status entitles them to? There are some who say that the point of personhood is 28 days AFTER birth, at which point you still should be allowed to abort. In fact, there is a professor of ethics at Princeton University that actively advocates this position. This is the position that spurred “Born Alive” legislation that says if a woman has an abortion and the baby survives, that doctors cannot withhold care and let the baby die on the operating table. Others say up to the point of birth. These folks, such as Barak Obama, would hold that this type of infanticide as well as partial birth abortion is a reasonable procedure. Or perhaps just before while the mother is in labor. Or 6 months of gestation or 3 months or three weeks. I wrestled with this for a long time.

Then I looked at the issue a different way. Does human life have an imputed value or an intrinsic one? If we say that it is imputed, meaning the value is derived from something else, some outside criteria, then any one of the above positions would be equally valid. We as a society would decide what criteria to select. My problem with this is what criteria do you use? On what basis is a baby at 6 weeks more valuable than a baby at 5 weeks? Is a baby that has not yet developed a heart still a baby? This hit really hard on my wife and I when we lost one of our children. Lynne had a miscarriage a few years ago. When people with strong pro-choice sentiments gave us their condolences, they referred to the fetus as a child, even though she (we named her Grace, even though we do not know for sure if she was a she or a he. It made it easier to explain to the children what happened and easier for Lynne and I to grieve our loss) was at the same gestational point, 9 weeks, that they believed abortion was merely removing some unwanted tissue of the mother. So, the criteria used is whether or not a child is wanted. If that is so, then why? The characteristics of an object of any sort are not contingent on another persons belief for perception.

By similar logic, if the value of human life is imputed, it can also be taken away, depending on what some person or group of persons believe that life is worth. So if you happen to be mentally retarded or black or Jewish, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to be killed off for the good of the community if they believe it. I have a friend who is paralyzed from the neck down and constantly in pain. There are some in the world who would look at her and say that she has no quality of life or that the money and effort to support her would be better used on others. They would have her die due to her handicap. But knowing her the way I do I find the notion that she is without a quality of life to be ridiculous on its face. She is a writer, a painter, a social worker, and heads up an international charity. I’d call that a pretty good quality of life. So would her husband who married her years after her accident put her in the wheelchair. Thus, the imputed value logic is shown to me to be completely arbitrary. Following any of the “prior to this point it is not human but at this one on it is” positions is likewise arbitrary and does not answer the question of personhood.

But consider the proposition that human life has an intrinsic value. That it is valuable simply because it is human life and no other reason. No measure or quantification of the value of it, it is and that is enough. It is sort of like gold. Gold is valuable because it is gold, not because we as a society stood up one day and said, “we are going to make gold valuable”. Gold has an intrinsic value as opposed to an imputed value, such as paper currency. Paper currency is worthless in and of itself. It has value only because we say it has a certain value.

This position then would support a clear line between human life and not human life. With this position, you are a human at the point that you have a unique genetic code. In other words, at conception. Prior to that, there was no “you”. The male and female reproductive components in and of themselves are not a unique genetic code, but merely parts of the donors. It is only when they combine to create new life do “you” begin to  

Answer 6

It depends on who it is! Is it a responsible humble person of human dignity or people with reckless responsibilities toward their own existence!

Answer 7

An infertile egg is lost, not a another chance. That would be like saying you have lost millions of chances when you beat off. In an abortion, you are taking a life that has already started. Now as far as your first question goes, you tell me what is more important than a human life. Think of any one you know and how life would be if they were aborted. There is  nothing more important.