Really? This right subjugates all other possible rights? Why do you think this?
Sigh. Okay, the woman’s right not to have a child she does not want trumps any rights anyone may think the fetus has.
Sigh. Why do you hold this? If you simply consider it axiomatic, just say so.
Let me ask it another way: Doesn’t the right to live necessarily subjugate the right to self-determination? If one doesn’t have the right to live, aren’t all other rights illusions? Doesn’t the right to abortion become illusory if I can kill the owner of that right without compunction?
If you agree with this, do only certain humans have the right to live? If so, how do you determine which humans?
The woman’s right not to have a child she does not want trumps any rights anyone may think the fetus has. Yes, to me, that’s just a given. For years, I didn’t really think that any rational adult actually believed that a fetus is the same as a born person. I thought when people claimed that abortion was “killing a baby,” it was, for all but an unworldly minority, just a slogan or hyperbole. But what I’ve seen in the SDMB abortion threads is leading me to suspect that a lot of pro-life people really do see things that way.
The fetus’s right to live trumps any right anyone may think the woman has. Yes, to me, that’s just a given. For years, I didn’t really think that any rational adult actually believed that fetus wasn’t a human being.
Does my statement make it so?
Not sure I get you, MAV. Nobody’s statement makes anything so. Statements do not have the power to make something so or not so. Your statement that something is so does not make it so. My statement that something is so does not make it so.
Okay, just checking. It sounded as if your statement was made to “trump” everyone else’s.
MAV, if that is your belief, don’t have an abortion. But it’s a belief, not a fact, so it has no bearing on what other people decide.
I’m not about to force someone else to make their personal reproductive choices based on my beliefs, which are that the woman’s right to determine the use of her uterus trumps the fetus. You’ll never see me arguing that someone should be forced to abort, but you will see me arguing that someone else shouldn’t make that choice for me.
It’s an individual belief, it’s an individual choice, and that’s how it should stay.
Yes, of course it is! Otherwise, there would be no such thing as a “pro-choice” crowd. But my argument to that is that there are simply things in life that aren’t a matter of “individual choice”. I cannot “force” someone not to have sexual intercourse – a woman’s right to determine the use of her reproductive organs “trumps” my opinion that she ought not to do that if she doesn’t want to become pregnant. In other words, it’s her “choice” to do so.
However, suppose someone develops inoperable cancer somewhere in or on their body. Where is the choice now? Perhaps the individual smoked, or performed other actions that increased the chances of the development of this cancer. Clearly, the individual’s choices were made prior to the development of this cancer.
What about the “choices” made by those who risk severe injury or death in their recreactional activities? While it is a tragedy when someone is paralyzed or killed when their motocross stunt goes awry, but doesn’t it stand to reason that the “individual choice” was made by the individual to perform these actions prior to the manifestation of the consequences?
Beyond that, what if it was your mother’s “individual belief” that you should be killed? Isn’t it her “individual choice” to do so? What’s the difference in her exercise of individual choice to kill you and her exercise of individual choice to abort her pregnancy? If it IS the mother’s right to choose, then why doesn’t that choice extend beyond the legality set forth by current abortion laws?
If my mother had chosen to abort the pregnancy that resulted in me, I never would have been and would have nothing to say about it.
Do you have a point there, or are you just trying to get me to say that the fetus that became me would’ve had a problem with being aborted?
Since you ignored many of my legitimate questions by asking one of your own, I’ll just say that it’s a great question!
Would you prefer to be as you are – alive – today, or would you prefer that your mother had aborted her pregnancy with you?