It would be problematic on several levels for Pro-Choice.
Part of the pro-choice thing is choice. Or how it used to be phrased the abortion is a issue that is between the woman and her god or doctor, depending on the telling, and no one else’s business. It is undetermined when human life starts as we don’t even know what human life means, therefor as part of the choice it is a choice to believe it is just a clump of cells, and not a person. It is also a choice to believe the fetus is a person. Or the mother can have other beliefs. The mother then can chose accordingly accordingly to her beliefs and wishes under her circumstances.
Further Pro-Choice is the guardian for millions of women that they did not morally commit murder, a reversal of their stance admitting abortion is killing could serve to stigmatize many women, perhaps also unnecessarily as a fetus still might not be a human life.
As such I believe their rank and file would not accept such a premise and threaten to split Pro Choice. Into ‘It’s just a clump of cells’ and ‘it’s OK to kill my baby’ groupings. Pro Life would have a absolute field day with that.
The best argument for the undecided is to say: One side gives you a choice and respects your human rights to make decisions right for you, the other side does not. Vote accordingly.
Well, not quite … one wank = 1 possible pregnancy if you concede that you would have screwed one woman, the only way it would possibly be more if it was into a cup for invitro fertilization where one shot could possibly go for several eggs.
Not to get off-topic, but Hitler was hardly a Christian, he was involved in the occult. And he was not anti-abortion, only against aborting Aryans.
Wasn’t it uncovered that Margaret Sanger wanted abortion because it would get rid of black babies?
Anyway, I suspect the point was that declaring a fertilized egg to be a human makes about as much sense as declaring an individual sperm to be a human.
Well, I don’t make that argument because I don’t believe it. I think the early fetus isn’t a person, and that once it becomes a person, the mother should have a reason stronger than “I don’t want to be pregnant” to kill it.
Yeah, I disagree with “castle doctrines” in general. I don’t think you should be able to kill another person unless you are in real danger. So, for instance, if the pregnancy imperils the mother in some way, of course she should be able to end it. But if you are 8 months pregnant and healthy, I don’t think you should be able to kill the fetus. And if someone breaks into your house and is sitting quietly in your living room eating crisps, and not presenting any threat, I don’t think you should be able to shoot him, either.
(You might schedule a c-section or call the police to help you force the guy out of your house. Neither of those should involve killing, unless something goes badly wrong.)
I would never argue that an early-term fetus is a person because I’m not a liar and don’t engage in the practice of telling lies for convenience or political benefit.
Also, if I was convinced that a fetus was a person, I might not be pro-choice. I mean, the arguments for pro-choice are much stronger when it’s between “the woman or controlling misogynists who want to enslave her as baby factory” rather than “the mother’s bodily rights or a person’s life.” Yes, there is an argument based in bodily rights, but I’ve never given it a full analysis because I’m not deluded enough to think that there’s a person in there. Arguments for late-term abortions seem to be mostly based on things like threats to the the mother’s life, which is yet another argument that I feel is stronger than the argument based on bodily autonomy.
So yeah - I’m not inclined to throw out reality and adopt a weaker position based on delusion in order to coddle religious nuts and those who wish to enslave and dehumanize women.
Velocity, we know exactly what happens when fetuses are declared persons. In fact, pro-lifers are pushing personhood bills as we speak. The result is legal jeopardy for women who have miscarriages, or who aren’t careful enough while pregnant, or who get in the way of a bullet heading towards their uterus.
So, you tell me – why should pro-choicers adopt this language?
A person is different than a human – a human with no brain is no longer considered a person, for example. I wouldn’t argue that a blastocyst, fetus, etc., isn’t human tissue – of course it’s human tissue. It’s just not a person for legal purposes – personhood brings all kinds of rights that fetuses, embryos, etc., shouldn’t get in my opinion.
While I have not performed therapeutic abortions, I have managed spontaneous ones circa eight to fifteen weeks or so. And having dealt with the expelled products of conception, I cannot feel that those tiny bits represent a person. A potential person, yeah I can buy into that. For sure. But to me a potential person’s rights don’t trump the rights of the person carrying the potential person.
I have also managed miscarriages/stillbirths. Those do seem to me to be more like the loss of a person, moreso the more advanced they are.
So where do I personally draw the line between potential person and person? Not sure. But it is sometime after the first trimester, in my opinion.
My country doesn’t, but that’s not the only scenario where a person can be legally killed.
This is a non-sequitur; at birth, abortion becomes moot, and it doesn’t clarify the difference between the proposed scenarios A and B. Is there a practical difference between assigning the label personhood at conception versus assigning it at birth and if so, what is it?
Are you serious? I’m asking DrDeth to expand on his post 21 in which he asserts:
I asked Velocity the same and his reply in 35 suggests he thinks pro-lifers would be defeated or thwarted or at least significantly silenced, which I find to be wildly absurdly optimistic. I’m pretty sure I have a good handle on why pro-lifers want to attach the label personhood to a fetus, but Velocity’s proposal that pro-choicers should just concede the matter is unconvincing at best.
It seemed pretty clear to me that DrDeth was saying that abortions don’t kill people if we don’t consider fetuses people. The fact that abortions are only done to fetuses prior to birth goes without saying. The fact that their status as a person or not is different is the difference between scenarios A and B goes without saying. The fact that the resulting lack of events that might be called murders is a practical difference between scenario A and B goes without saying.
The fact that you seem to be questioning a lot of things that go without saying confuses me.
I’m not getting it, I admit. In practice, isn’t declaring a fetus to be a person at some stage X in its development done solely as a prelude to telling the mother that she can no longer can choose to abort? What other effect does it have or could it have?
Fine, you recognize this outcome and I recognize this outcome but I don’t know if DrDeth recognizes this outcome and Velocity certainly doesn’t recognize this outcome, or least didn’t in post 35. It’s really the obvious answer to the original question:
Q: Why don’t pro-choicers just recognize fetuses as persons?
A: Because pro-choicers don’t want to extend to pro-lifers an invitation to call pro-choicers murderers because that would follow and not, as the OP suggests, disarm pro-life arguments.