If you think abortion is not OK because one is killing a person then that argument requires that personhood be rigorously defined in a rational fashion.
Null argument; it works just as well against the other side.
Since you can’t create that bright line definition, an anti choice argument that depends on it is a bad argument.
Ditto as above.
thorny locust holds multiple opinions:
One, that a zygote, blastula, embryo, or early stage fetus is definitely not a person.
Two, that while a late stage fetus (say in the last couple of months) is far enough along in the process of becoming a person that it may be a person in some senses, it shouldn’t be considered one in the sense of a legal definition; and, while we’re at it, has not generally been considered so by society as a whole.
Three, that even if a zygote, blastula, embryo, or early stage fetus were considered to be a person (which, again, I do not hold and am not conceding), a woman’s bodily autonomy would supercede any rights that it would have.
Four, that at the stage of viability outside the womb* things get somewhat blurry; because at that point three conditions obtain simultaneously: one, that the fetus is somewhere in a blurry area between not being developed enough to be considered a person and definitely being a person; two, that it is at least theoretically separable from the mother at that point without killing it; and three, that if it is separated from the mother at that point but before it’s reached full term it will be significantly and possibly permanently damaged by the early separation. Due to that specific combination of reasons, I think that abortion after that point could reasonably be considered to require some restrictions: one of them being that abortion after that point should require significant danger to the life or to the health, physical or mental, of the mother, or else be because the fetus although of viable age has been discovered not to be viable; and two, that if the reason is a danger to the mother then if and only if it’s possible to do so without increasing that danger the method chosen should be such as to attempt to produce a live delivery, though the mother should be held responsible for any resulting child only if she chooses to be.
*current stage of viability, which is a shifting target. Note that I'm talking about a stage at which all three conditions obtain simultaneously -- if we ever get viability outside the womb down below the point at which there's a functioning brain, I think this part of my opinion would change.
I’m aware that anti-choice people complain that an exemption that allows for health, especially one including mental health, can be turned by doctor-shopping into an exemption that allows for anything at all. I think this is a very weak argument, and that cases of women actually desiring to misuse such an exemption combining with their being able to find competent health care workers willing to go along with such misuse would be so rare that the potential damage to women who genuinely need a late term abortion and would be unable to obtain one without such an exemption massively and utterly outweighs it.
I am also, while I’m at it, entirely unconvinced by arguments that the primary purpose of sex in humans is reproduction. In addition to what I’ve said previously: most humans physically want sex more or less continuously, already pregnant or not, from their early teens into extreme old age, including considerable lengths of time during which pregnancy is not possible. There might be some sort of argument to be made that the primary purpose for sex in humans were reproduction if we only went into heat when in physical condition to initiate a pregnancy and were totally uninterested in sex the rest of the time, but if we were built like that I very much doubt we’d be having this argument.
And I am equally unconvinced, as I’ve said previously, by arguments that a person consenting to have sex with a specific person in a specific manner at a specific time, which consent can be withdrawn at any moment, is somehow also providing a non-withdrawable consent to host a different person entirely inside herself for months if the condom happens to slip or the vas deferens has regrown. That is just plain not how consent works.
That’s also the future of the egg and the sperm, if they get to have one. Not all of those futures can possibly be fulfilled; not even if you required everyone with a womb to keep it full continuously except for right after delivery from the age of first menstruation until menopause or until they died of it, whichever came first.
For that matter, it’s the future of something that crawled out of the ocean and started to breathe air, close to half a billion years ago. Was that creature a human person, because some of its eventual descendents are human?
– there have been more posts since I typed all this, but I need to go do something else now. Should have done that sooner, probably.
