Bryan:
This thread is not actually about abortion. It is about thought and reasoning, attempting to be rational.
Nobody suggested anything would descend into chaos because of abortion, so bully for Canada.
The conclusion #3 at the end of your OP seems to.
Do you consider that a pregnant woman and a pregnant women alone being allowed to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy is indiscriminate murder?
Of course not. I thought equating abortion and “indiscriminate murder” was something you were doing, or at least something you were claiming pro-lifers were doing.
No.
Then I have to question the clarity of the OP, and your expressed opinion that the pro-life argument (as you have summarized it in the first half) is something you “would consider” to be “a pretty strong argument, invoking as it does the prohibition against murder.”
If one does not make the abortion/murder connection, doesn’t that undercut the argument’s strength?
For what it’s worth, I side with the posters who’ve pointed out that a pro-choicer who tries to argue about the nature of the fetus and what labels to apply to it is wasting their time. I’m supremely indifferent to whatever labels are applied to the various stages of pregnancy, unless they have some clear scientific/medical purpose. For legal/ethical purposes, its location (inside the body of a person who may not want it there) is far more significant.
Ok. Go for it.
You are referring to the OP. I didn’t use the word murder in my description of the pro life stance. So, no. You have this wrong.
I don’t know what it’s worth. It’s kind of a weird criteria though. I am a person if I am outside of another body, but not a person if I am in one.
By this definition a cheeseburger is a human being until you eat it.
I worked hard to be careful with my word choice in my OP, I tried to be as logical rational and consistent as possible.
If you read my OP and came to the conclusion that you could rebut it by saying “Canada” because you think Canada has a great stance on abortion, than you have utterly missed the point of my exercise.
As I stated explicitly in my OP:
“Abortion is a difficult and nuanced issue, society has been struggling with for some time. It’s not going to be solved here, and we are not going to try. the goal here is to have a dispassionate and agenda-less discussion surrounding the arguments both for and against abortion, a deep dive into the logic and assumptions that guide those arguments. If you are a true believer who is certain in their convictions, than this is not the thread for you. If you are looking to explore and contribute to a framework for thought on the issue, it might be for you.”
Scylla, you’re really going to great lengths to avoid the issue that I and others have raised: namely, that even if we accept your premise that a zygote/embryo/fetus is a person, no born person has the right to use another person’s body for survival. You would give a zygote more rights than a living child. How do you defend that?
Aren’t these the second and third paragraphs from your OP? :
Emphasis added.
You can apply the word “person” to either state or neither state as you wish, it’s an arbitrary label.
Well, case in point, you can apply the labels “person” and “human being” to literally anything under any circumstances. The significant element is not the nature or labeling of the intrusive item, but the wishes of the person whose body is being intruded upon.
That said, I could picture and have described on this board the unlikely conditions under which I might (reluctantly) minimize the wishes of the host - I suggested it would take some kind of science-fictiony threat to the survival of the human species, i.e. pregnancies drop to some critical low and it’s starting to look like this might be the last human generation unless as many pregnancies as possible are carried to term.
Well, great is a judgement call, but I daresay Canada has a rational stance on abortion, and with no negative societal effects I’m aware of. I gather your perspective is that of an American and by any number of relevant metrics, abortion-permitting Canada is probably doing as well or better than the abortion-restricting U.S., though I admit I haven’t done a full survey. If this thread is meant purely as a thought experiment and empirical evidence is of no importance, fine.
I don’t agree that it is a particularly difficult or nuanced issue. It’s contentious, certainly, but your descriptions of “the logic and assumptions” of both sides contain assumptions of your own. Do pro-lifers really start with the definition of a fetus as a human being, and all else flows from that? Do pro-choicers really have to challenge this assertion or be dismissed as presenting “bad arguments” ?
To me, the fetus is quite obviously “human life”. It’s made of human tissue with human DNA and such. This is just simple observable fact. Anything describing how it should be treated, though, moves out of pure reason and into the spheres of morality, ethics and law, and trying to discuss those with dispassion and divorced from agenda is… well… tricky.
I’m not avoiding anything, and I’m not assigning rights. I’m evaluating arguments. FWIW, if you read my OP, you’ll see I end up on the pro choice side.
But, let me try to answer your question anyway:
I don’t think the argument makes any kind of sense. In order for the argument to make sense you must value control over one’s body higher than you value human life in general (assuming you grant the premise that an unborn child is a person, of course.)
Why? What value allows for this? A body is just a bag of meat. What makes it special? The only thing I can come up with is that your body is special because it belongs to you. It is your property, and most feel that you have a right to access and use your property. In a way that you see fit.
So a holder of this stance values property rights higher than it values human life.
This is an unusual stance. We place all kinds of controls on the use of property, including bodies. For example, you just can’t throw a stowaway overboard. You are not allowed to murder yourself, etc. you can be put in prison and use of your body restricted by restraints, etc. etc.
So, what does the fact that one body is inside of another body have to do with anything? What makes a body in a special category outside of other property? What makes pregnancy an even more special circumstance, that disallows restrictions on the use of your body when said use may be restricted for what appear to be lesser reasons?
Perhaps there is something intrinsic in this argument over a right to control one’s body that I am missing. If so, I suspect that it is that you consider someone’s Body to be their ‘person.” That is supposedly some special category of property.
If it’s so special than why does society not resist imposing restrictions upon it as outlined above? Why is pregnancy exempted as special form restrictions, particularly the one against the taking of another life?
You see, when you say a fetus can’t make use of somebody else’s body for survival you have not made a complete consistent argument (unless you are placing property rights above sanctity of life in general) are you doing so?
People sometimes try to argue around this problem by saying something like “nobody forces you to give a kidney transplant” or such this is true.
Similarly you generally can’t be forced to take somebody as a passenger on your boat, or as a tenant in your home. Once they are there though the situation changes. They have something like squatter’s rights, and you just can’t kill them because they are where they aren’t supposed to be, making use of a resource that isn’t theirs.
A fetus is even more blameless than most stowaways or squatters. These latter usually had to take such action or make some choice to end up where they aren;t supposed to be. A fetus has no such choice and is blameless for its trespass.
I haven’t figured out a way where any sort of reasonably acceptable and agreeable value system consistently allows an abortion under bodily sovereignty criteria without creating all kinds of other situations where killing of people that are violating property rights also would not apply.
So, not only is the argument incomplete, when it is examined it tends to look like an obvious nonstarter.
The fact that it doesn’t make sense to me and I can’t make it work logically and consistently doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Perhaps it is obvious to you. If so, i’d Love to hear it.
If I may…
What? No, this is ridiculous. Even if we support the right of a pregnant woman to abort an unwanted fetus, this does not imply we or she are putting that right higher than the value of “human life in general”. It is the very specific circumstances of the pregnancy that informs the view; it’s not license for her to kill, for example, the guy that got her pregnant or anyone other than the fetus itself.
Shit! I don’t want to make an excuse or weasel. That’s a mistake on my part. I do say it in the ‘in other words part.’ Though, not in the initial description. Murder is killing outside the law. Anytime killing somebody is legal it is by definition not murder. So, the killing of a person within the law is not murder, even if it is heinously immoral. I used the wrong word there even though it was in the ‘in other words’ part. I thought I did a good job sweeping my OP for such things, but I missed that one and I missed it again when I double checked before responding to last post. Sorry.
I’ll respond to the rest if I can, later.
What makes those specific circumstances so special compared to other circumstances?
I gather you’ve never been pregnant.
Of course, neither have I, but I’m given to understand it is stressful. By way of empathy, I can try to picture suffering from a rapidly-growing abdominal tumour and wanting it removed, yet being told I was not legally allowed to do so and would have to simply suffer until the tumor went away on its own, and it would not go gently.
On the longer timeframe, I can certainly understand someone wishing to avoid the burden of an unwanted child. I can picture myself in this situation as well, though in recognition of biological reality my burden would be financial and not also invasively physical as for the hypothetical woman I impregnated. I can accept not having a say in whether or not her pregnancy continues. If through some kind of medical advance I could become pregnant myself, I’d want it to be by my choice alone.
Denying women the option does not offer enough of a benefit, as best I can tell. If Canada represents some kind of abortion-access baseline, someone would have to demonstrate how changing that would improve things.
Er, no. I’ve tried to break this down as much as possible, but it really wasn’t complicated to begin with. Show me one instance where a person has the right to use another person’s body without their consent.
When someone is sentenced to community service, or other legal action compels you to do things you don’t want to do. I’ve given several examples of body restriction already
Generally, except in the instance of pregnancy the body is a single user type meat vehicle.
The question I asked is what makes your body special as property to such a degree that you may kill trespassers and stowaways on it when you are generally not allowed to on other forms of property?
You are conveying a special status, an exception. You are attempting to do so without explanation or justification.
Whether abortion is aggressive, and denying a organ is passive, is a specious argument and evades the point.
Either body autonomy can be broken to save a life or it can’t. If it can, then we should see the state harvesting organs with or without permission. And people should be being forced to grant organs to others whose lives would be saved.
Neither of these will happen any time soon as they are obvious and gross violations of a human being’s most basic body autonomy. These things come with medical risk, it’s your body and your call to make. That it’s being considered somehow okay to over ride a woman’s body autonomy is straight up misogyny on display.
In my opinion, anyone who claims they don’t understand that, are being supremely disingenuous.
The reason why the Canada example is instructive and on point is that it shows that abortion doesn’t have to be an issue at all. By agreeing that abortion is an issue that we have to struggle with is already conceding something to the pro-life side. Canada is not some remote country with norms and laws so different from the US that it’s baffling to us. Canada shows us how a first-world, extremely similar country can get along just fine with no abortion laws at all, just leaving it as a choice between a woman and her doctor.
If religious people want to struggle with whether it’s OK to get an abortion and at what point in a pregnancy, and why it’s OK if it’s their daughter or mistress but not if it’s someone else’s, that’s fine by me, but leave my family out of it.
We are examining arguments to see if they are logical, make sense, are internally consistent, whst values they depend on and whether the implications of those values are upheld outside of the particular case. This last helps us to see whether the value is actually held or whether it is just a pretense.
Your stance seems to be that there is a special case regarding whether something is a person or not depending on whether it is inside another body, and depending on wether the host considers it a person or not.
In no other circumstance are we willing to claim that making use of another’s property disqualifies one from personhood, and as a society we have gone out of our way to explicitly say that this is so. Stowaways and squatters must be treated as persons in that they have rights and may not just be killed.
You haven’t explained why stowing away in a body is a special case where this does not apply. There is a big explanatory gap here.
Secondly, the very idea that one is a person only If some other person says they are has been the foundational value behind the worst of the worst atrocities in all of human history.
It is without hyperbole a strong candidate for the most evil argument in history. Slaves were not persons, Jews were not persons during the holocaust, various indigenous peoples have been labeled as non persons. Always, this has been done with the intent to enslave, exploit, or exterminate them.
After the fact, people making this argument for these justifications have been universally reviled as evil.
Personhood has never been justifiably considered a granted or conveyed status. It has always been considered inherently present within the person. It is self-proclaiming.
So, your argument runs counter to foundational moral values of western society, and has been used almost exclusively by slavers, Nazis, those committing genocide.
I would ask you to consider whether You really want to charge up the hill.
The idea that one is only a person if someone else says they are, does not have a particularly good track record.
It’s possible you might have missed some of the implications.
What the hell?
This is the worst case of confusion about the varying meanings of the possessive that I’ve ever seen. My body is not my property in the way that my shoes are my property. My body is me. Anything that is done to my body is being done to me.
The body is the person. “Crimes against the person” are specifically distinguished in law from “crimes against property.”
– if somebody breaks into my house, takes my shoes away, and shoves his cock into them: that’s a crime against property. If somebody breaks into my house, takes my body away, and shoves his cock into it against my wishes, that’s kidnapping and rape, which are crimes against the person: and are treated significantly differently in law and by the society, as they certainly ought to be.
Killing a person can only be done by killing that person’s body, for that matter. If a crime against the body were to only be a property crime, then murder would also only be a property crime.