There certainly is correlation and even causation. Liberals tend to trust individuals more than conservatives and thus are more comfortable about women making the decision themselves. What makes it noteworthy is that this distinction need not matter. As I said, it depends on whether you think a fetus is a person or not. Unsurprisingly liberals tend to conveniently take a stance consistent with their belief that a woman will make the right decision for herself and most conservatives conveniently take the opposite view.
He’s involved in the sense that he’s contributed half the DNA to the child and I’m not belittling that. But I don’t think that’s the sense we’re talking about here. The man is not biologically involved in the pregnancy.
Of course he is, assuming he is identified. If the woman decides to carry the fetus to term and deliver, he will have at absolute minimum 18-21 years of legal and financial obligations. And as you seem to be focusing on economics, this should be pretty clear.
And I must say I don’t understand your position at all. You insist that fetuses are individuals, in effect tiny unborn people, yet you claim to be pro-choice? So you’re okay with killing little people?
Fetuses are NOT individuals. We are not far ttechnologically from being able to create viable fetuses from tissue samples, It makes no more sense to say you’re killing a person by destroying an early-term fetus than claiming that jerking off kills millions of people each time.
I will admit that somewhere in the process this status changes, but I don’t claim the wisdom to be able to determine when. Nor would I support imposing a single definition arrived at as a political act on all of us.
I would like there to be some additional choices available to the father, and I believe that may be possible in the future with the appropriate technology. If a fetus can be removed from the mother’s body with as little or less risk and pain than an abortion, and gestated in an artificial womb, then I sould say the father should be offered more choice on whether or not to continue the pregnancy. Until then, I don’t see a realistic alternatives to the present system.
I’m not sure that the premise (liberals tending to trust individuals more than conservatives) is true. As a non-representative self-selected sample of one, I would certainly consider myself as both conservative and individualist. Popper’s “I am an almost orthodox believer in unorthodoxy” sums up my ethos - as I understand it. I’m not discounting the possibility that others may understand my ethos better than me - a position incidentally that, if granted credence, puts an individual woman’s ability to understand the rights and wrong of a situation better than anyone else in a different light. Thus, when Marley says, ‘I think if you remove the woman’s ability to exert control over such an important decision in her life (to have a child now, or not to do so) you are significantly dimishing the value of that life’ (in answer to the excellent question ‘Should we give a woman the right to her body?’), I would answer ask “Why should this be the case? Are there not other situations in which we acknowledge that control of our life has sufficient impact on the life of others to cede at least some control?” Popper referred to this kind of problem as the paradox of freedom.
If a person is open-minded enough to be persuaded that it is possible for a conservative to be able to trust an individual as much as a liberal (and this may require a definition of ‘conservative’ that rules out some fellow waving Old Glory and going to church), then the problem turns not on whether we trust individuals or not buton whether we believe there are some questions where individuals should be relieved of the requirement to make decisions. Thus, it happens that in some countries adults are required to undergo some kind of military training, and in others all adults are required to vote. Strangely (to everyone perhaps without a Popperian turn of mind), some of the countries in which the decision-making is taken away from the individual and invested in society are considered some of the most liberal in the world.
Speaking for myself, a foetus growing in a woman’s womb is NOT a person. What it IS, however, is a living being that will become a person.
Good summation.
PS Good to have a discussion on this that stays civil.
Of course there are situations in which we cede control over parts of our lives. That’s not news to anybody. My point was that in this specific situation, women should not have to cede control over this part of their lives for the reasons I and others have given.
Actually, I don’t think I ever said that an embryo/fetus is necessarily an individual. I just questioned why we don’t call an embryo/fetus an individual. However, I don’t think that is necessary to define an embryo/fetus as an individual or a person to give it rights.
I do have a problem giving woman the right to abort a pregnancy if the cost to them of continuing the pregnancy is greater than the cost to the embryo/fetus of being aborted, with the caveat that we need to consider the externalities.
Correction: I do NOT have a problem giving woman the right to abort a pregnancy if the cost to them of continuing the pregnancy is greater than the cost to the embryo/fetus of being aborted, with the caveat that we need to consider the externalities.
[QUOTE=Kel Varnsen - Latex Division]
Actually, I don’t think I ever said that an embryo/fetus is necessarily an individual. I just questioned why we don’t call an embryo/fetus an individual. However, I don’t think that is necessary to define an embryo/fetus as an individual or a person to give it rights…QUOTE
You didn’t use the word “necessarily”, but you certainly DID say the fetis was an individual:
This is the entire basis of your arguement. Don’t you remember?
And now you say this, which makes even less sense to me:
WTF does that mean? What else has “rights”? Chairs, dirt. dogs? Which would you equate a fetus to?
AFAIK, there are only two categories of entities that have rights anywhere on this planet. They are human beings, and associaions of human beings like corporations and nations. Everything else is considered a resource and/or propoerty, and human rights are in part defined by how we agree to interact with our resources and/or property.
Do you want to create an entirely new category, composed entirely of human fetuses to give rights to? The ONLY reason to do that is to protect “them” from the rest of us – most of all from their “carriers”, pregnant women. Are you going to arrest pregnant women because they don’t practice proper nutrition, and are endangering their fetus?
The reason I quoted individuals is because I don’t know if an embryo/fetus is an individual.
The basis of my agrument is that since any future individual has an equal chance of being either an embryo/fetus who is to be aborted or the woman who wants the abortion we should look at whether we want to give this woman the right to abort or give the embryo/fetus the right to not be aborted.
I would agree that most people who support the right to abortion do so because they believe that the fetus is not a person and thus possesses no rights. And I believe that too, but my stance on the issue would not change even if the fetus was regarded as a person.
Consider this hypothetical situation. Person A is dying of kidney failure, and can only be saved if person B agrees to donate a kidney. If person B say “I won’t donate a kidney because the chances of me being killed by the operation are too high”, then person A will die. If B says “I won’t donate a kidney because it involves too much suffering on my part”, then person A will die. If B says “I won’t donate a kidney because I don’t feel like it”, then person A will die. You may hate the decision, believe that person B is evil, believe that B ismurdering A, but the government has no right to step in and force B to take a certain action because person B has a right to their own body.
The right to control your own body is very important, so important that it can at times outweigh someone else’s right to live.
I responded to a similar argument in this thread, so instead of re-writing the same idea, I’ll just quote what I said there:
I would agree that an action a woman takes does result in the creation of the fetus except in cases of rape, where it clearly doesn’t. But when an unwanted pregnancy occurs the woman isn’t trying to create a situation where another person is completely under her control, unlike in the scenario you present.
I’m not sure it makes any sense to say that I have any chance at all of being an embryo/fetus. If the body I have now was somehow transformed back into an embryo form, I would for all intents and purposes be dead: I would litteraly have been destroyed no different than if you cut my heart out and kept it alive while the rest of me ceased to exist. Who and what I am is not what an embryo is. Embryos and fetuses were necessary precusors to my existence, but no more than penises and food for my parents to eat when they were growing up. It makes no more sense to say that I have an equal chance of being a fetus than to say I have an equal chance of being a pimple.
This is not to downplay the significance of the question. One of the weaknesses of the veil idea is that deciding what “positions” are legitimate is ultimately arbitrary. We might have very different conclusions about whether or not it is ok to hunt seals depending on whether “seal” is one of the positions we have a chance of occupying, for instance. And the veil formulation cannot, itself, decide the issue for us.
There are big differences here.
Person A and Person B could negotiate to reach an efficient deal if we allowed them to. An embryo/fetus and a woman cannot negotiate.
However, we have to look at the externalities of this deal. If we allowed people to sell their organs in this way we might create a market for organs were people will start selling organs. Or that only wealthy people will be able to afford organs. We can make a very good case that ex-ante a person does not want the right to be able to purchase the organs.
Also, the person needing the organ probably has other options, including finding another donor. The embryo/fetus has no other option.
There is also the fact the Person B is taking an not affirmative action, just failing to take an action. Them woman is taking an affrimative action against the embryo/fetus.
We tell people things they can’t do with their bodies all the time. You can’t rent your body for sex. You can’t intake certain drugs. Etc.
I would like people to think about and answer this question. Looking at this from the ex-ante position of you having an equal chance of being either the embryo/fetus or the woman, do you think the cost of abortion to the embryo/fetus is greater than the cost of continuing the pregnancy is to the woman or is the cost greater to the woman?
I see your point. I am just trying to find a reason why we say that an embryo/fetus does not have rights. What is the difference between an embryo/fetus and a birthed baby that causes us to give sone rights and the other no rights?
When she was feeling bad, tumor was one of the nicer things my wife said about our very wanted child when she was in the womb. No matter - your point only works if we were forcing women to have abortions. One suspects that a woman having one by choice does not have these warm feelings.
I have a question for pro-lifers: do you consider birth control techniques which prevent implantation the equivalent of abortions? If not, why not?
The cost to my pre-proto-self of being aborted is nothing. I had nothing, I was nothing, I did nothing, I thought nothing. Think back to the time before you were born. Now imagine staying there. By my interpretation, the cost of being aborted to a pre-conceived child is nil. By this argument, the cost of openly available abortion to “society” as pre-conceived individuals is nothing.
Post-conception my proto-self would have had only my potential to negotiate with. So the benefit I offered my mother was basically what I have given her. In monetary terms, this would be about $0. Of course, I have given her tremendous joy and meaning in her life, love and memories, etc. But as far as negotiating these things, that is impossible.
By this argument, the potential mother has no guarantee of payment from the fetus and thus is not protected by law. No “property” protection rights are guaranteed the mother. To create a law that has tremendous benefits for a proto-person and tremendous costs for mothers is ludicrous from a cost analysis viewpoint.
Either way, I see limiting availability of abortions resulting in greater “costs” to mothers and society. Of course if you believe in the utter sanctity of life, this doesn’t matter. (I have a hard time with someone who claims to believe in the pure sanctity of life while sending people on death row to die coughBUSHcough)
Why does all this change when the embryo/fetus is born? What is it about birth that changes everything? Or are you OK with “terminating” a baby? Or are you against abortion at some point during pregnacy? I don’t understand why the rights of the embryo/fetus/baby vest at birth. Can you explain why you choose birth.
I’m not up for an abortion debate at this time, but I believe a lot of posters have been confused by the OP’s reference to “The Veil of Ignorance” and I wanted to try to clear that up.
The Veil of Ignorance is a concept John Rawls (one of the more important recent philosophers) came up with in his book A Theory of Justice. This involves pretending that you are a rational, self-interested intelligent being that is about to enter into the world – and that you have no idea what your position in society will be. There’s a “Veil of Ignorance” preventing you from knowing this. You don’t know if you’re going to be a healthy white heterosexual man or a black lesbian with a serious disability. You could have any possible personal situation. But you have one important thing going for you right now. You get to pick the rules for the society you’re going to enter into.
The idea is that the rules you’d pick under such circumstances are going to be pretty darn fair. In decades past many white Americans clearly had no problem with Jim Crow laws, but they were safe in the knowledge that these laws would never hurt them because they weren’t black. No rational being would agree to such laws if they didn’t know what color skin they were going to have in the future. Behind the Veil of Ignorance, you can’t afford to agree to a prejudiced system.
So, you’re behind the Veil of Ignorance and you don’t know who you’re going to be. What sort of abortion laws would you choose for your society?
Actually, I consider it perfectly reasonable to contend that the entity gestating in the womb is an actual tumour within a certain period since it might be a teratoma rather than an embryo.
Nevertheless, whether analogy or reality, I consider the argument that “we all have equal chance of being a gestating entity” is specious. We similarly all have equal chance of being an entity comprising a separate sperm and egg with potential. Even the very atoms of my body were different a few years ago - the inanimate objects around me have the potential to become me via simple metabolism. Am I to “negotiate” with the potato I am about to eat?
We democratically decide an arbitrary moment at which to confer personhood upon this bunch of cells, given that we are a bunch of cells also. Before this moment, the cells can ethically be considered a potato/surgical waste/wet dream etc..