To play devil's advocate here, these reasons could justify euthanising a severely mentally disabled person. As long as they a) felt no pain, b) wouldn't be missed, and c) didn't have the capacity to plan, dream and so on, by this criteria, it would be morally permissable to humanely kill people with conditions ranging from alzheimers to autism, as long as it was severe enough that they didn't realize what was going on, and there was nobody to grieve.
Honestly? If they truly have
no capacity to plan or love or wish or anticipate the future - which amounts to barely being able to think or feel at all, really - then yeah, I think it is morally justifiable to euthanize them humanely. Obviously you wouldn't do so just for the hell of it, but if (as is the case with abortion) they were having a serious negative impact on the lives of other people and that were the only way to end it, yes. This sounds horrible, but logically I truly believe the three reasons I named are the reasons murder is wrong and that situations where they don't apply are therefore not murder.
A bullet to the back of the head from a high powered rifle is virtually painless, and you'll die so quick you never knew what happened. This is still tried as murder. On the other hand, there are many excruciatingly painful methods of torture that aren't penalized nearly as highly. And also I can't really think of many people who think of "oh my gosh he must hae undergone so much pain" when they hear someone has been murdered (at least not physical pain) so I think this point is pretty much moot.
If this is true, then why are miscarriages so emotionally stressing? Not just a mother is attached to a zygote, in most cases, an entire family is. Either way, I don't believe this is the reason murder is bad either, at least for the most part.
It has potential though. It may not think to realize it has potential (But do we know this? Late term it may) but every human life has infinite potential, and it's wrong to remove it from the world. What if you had been aborted? You say you don't believe in the afterlife. If you died right now, instantly, painlessly, with no time to realize it, how would that be very different from an abortion (in your own perspective.) You would say it wouldn't be fair, that you had so much potential. But how is it fair for the fetus?
If I say there are three reasons murder is bad, you can't proceed to list situations where
one of the reasons doesn't apply and say that disproves it. If somebody is murdered painlessly, you are
still causing grief to those who knew them and cutting off their ability to continue to do things they anticipated doing with their lives; therefore it is still wrong. Like I said, I think the most important thing about killing someone is robbing them of the rest of their lives,
but causing people pain is also wrong and therefore murder where you also cause pain is worse than murder where no pain is involved. This ought to be extremely simple to grasp. And, for the record, I believe torture
should be penalized more harshly, but that is not in any way relevant.
Miscarriages can be traumatic when people were actually planning to have a child. Somebody else's abortion should not traumatize anyone, however, if they had no plans to have a child.
If I had been aborted, I wouldn't care because I would never have existed. This is different from me dying painlessly right now because, as I
already explained, then there would be people left grieving for me and I would have been robbed of my ability to do the many things that I am currently planning to do with the rest of my life. This is exactly what I said in the post you were responding to. And no, I do not think there would have been anything "unfair" about me being aborted as a fetus. I didn't exist, in any meaningful sense; I was a blob of cells growing inside my mom. I don't think there is any such thing as being "unfair" to a blob of cells unable to feel pain or anticipate anything and years away from having any sort of a sense of justice.
Yes, it would have resulted in me never existing or getting to create a website and write fanfics and have the cuddliest boyfriend in the world. But so would my parents using contraception that night, or either of them not being in the mood, or some other sperm cell of my dad's happening to beat this one to the egg; logically, if aborting me would somehow have been unfair to the potential future me that never existed, so is any sperm cell not being combined with any egg in the world because of the potential future people that would have resulted in. You can wax poetic about the difference between the statistic potential of a zygote and individual sperm and egg cells all you like, but it makes no difference to the potential people who were or were not born as a result.
I personally am against abortion in its entirety. Truth be told, if you don't want a baby, don't have sex. It's a very simple solution.
The thing about this argument (and similar ones in the same vein) is that humans engage in a whole host of such very low-risk behaviours
all the time, simply because the steady benefits outweigh the very, very low risk. By your logic, then you should respond to...
...a car accident victim with, "If you don't want to get into a car accident,
don't drive cars."
...a murder victim with, "If you don't want to get murdered,
don't do things that might upset someone."
...an old woman who slips on ice and breaks her hip, "If you don't want to break your hip,
don't go outside."
And so on and so on. Thing is, people like sex. Yes, they could get pregnant, but by using contraceptives that risk can be made extremely low, to the point where sex is simply well worth that small risk, the same way that the convenience of driving cars is worth the risk of having a car accident.
Furthermore, yes, sometimes people have sex in a genuinely irresponsible manner, but forcing them to have a kid as a
punishment? Is just all kinds of skeevy. Even though having unsafe sex is irresponsible behaviour, it does not hurt anyone else, and having your body hijacked for nine months for it when it can be avoided is
extremely disproportionate retribution, kind of like denying a lung cancer patient treatment because they smoked. (Also, why is only the woman receiving this horribly disproportionate retribution, whereas the man gets off mostly scot-free unless the woman invites more punishment onto herself by keeping the child and making him pay child support?) And, as I mentioned in my first post, using a living, thinking child to punish other people for having sex (or anything at all, for that matter), no matter how irresponsibly, is a pretty revolting idea.