Men have different rights and choices * because they have different bodies. * They have to make their peace with reality before sex. Women get to make different choices because the fetus is literally mining their bodies and putting their lives at risk. To give men the same choices as a pregnant woman is give men rights that do not exist because of nature. You can’t make the situation equal.
Something else: having sex is not consent to give control of one’s body and fate to a fetus, because sex does not produce pregnancy every time. Use of any form of birth control destroys that argument.
All this talk about the fathers’ “rights” to force the woman to do something-----while apparently making men be responsible is a bridge too far----hints at something else. How far is it till just forcing a fetus onto a woman is acceptable?
BC certainly does not destroy the argument, nor does that sex does not always equal pregnancy. If sex has a probability of pregnancy and the couple take that risk, that is enough. Unless the BC method brings that probability down to zero, which non of them do statistically, then BC is just having sex with a lower chance of pregnancy.
If one plays russian roulette, one does not absolve oneself of a bullet. If a bullet comes out, it’s yours. One is only absolved if no bullet comes out.
There are other reasons to support abortion rights, but this is certainly not one.
On the flip side, I would support the right of a man to walk away from the baby prior to its birth. To renounce paternal rights and responsibilities. I get why the tax man wants men to pay, but that seems unfair to me. We are a wealthy enough society that we could spread out that cost.
I’ve postedthis essay on abortionby Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan before because it actually changed me years ago from being pro-life to pro-choice. The general argument is that it doesn’t matter when life begins, because that’s not the important question; we kill animals, who are clearly alive, all the time. The issue is when does distinctly human life begin.
You can’t possibly argue that human life begins at conception because a single human cell is clearly not a human. If you were to argue that killing a cell is akin to murder, then every cell biologist in the world would be a mass murderer because we kill human cells all the time. So, what should be the yardstick? These guys argue that distinctly human brain waves begin around 30 weeks of gestation. So rather than have the “life begins at conception” vs “life begins at birth” false dichotomy, this offers a more realistic and rational basis for determining when this is actually killing a human being.
Playing Russian Roulette with more than thirty chambers is a but different.
If sex is consent to pregnancy, then I guess men should be required to make deposits in a fund every time they have sex, yet strangely, the onlyargiments ever made are that men should have the ability to stroll away from children, or else they get veto power over womens’ choices.
Then society pays for mens’ desire to be irresponsible. The woman pays no matter what, and then she gets to pay 100%.
The reason child support is inescapable and should remain so is the one argument anti-choicers never seem to make: what’s best for the kid. Once born, the kid needs support. Two parents created it, exactly why do men get a special right that foists their responsibility off on women in particular and society in general?
It is, it’s the way it works, you can’t change that any more then you can change the speed of light constant.
Well stating it perhaps somewhat better, consent to sex is consent to the possibility of pregnancy, thus the possibility of a fetus in one’s uterus.
Now I’m not saying you can not evict the fetus, and I actually support your right to do so if you so desire, but one can not absolve themselves from being pregnant nor absolve oneself from a fetus/embryo/zygote using part of your body because they used BC during sex.
It also does not absolve one from having to make the choice to keep or abort if such a choice exists.
The way you phrase it we have the ridiculous case that the women comes in and says I am pregnant but we used condoms, and the doctor says ok I will have to remove that, it doesn’t count. It is anti-choice and demeaning to women, not respecting their responsibility in the choice.
The woman pays something, but she doesn’t have to pay for 18 years, not under current law. She can chose an abortion. She can (in many states) abandon the baby at a police station or emergency room and run away. She can almost always give it up for adoption.
But if she wants to keep it, the father is on the hook.
There’s not a great answer. But I’m not convinced this is the best one.
Looks to me like it’s your argument that’s ridiculous.
Any time I take a car on the road, no matter how careful I am, there’s a non-zero chance of my getting in a car accident. That doesn’t mean that by driving to the grocery I’m consenting to get into a car accident.
Any time a child is born, there’s a non-zero chance that said child will grow to kill somebody; and also a non-zero chance that the child will die before adulthood. In deciding to give birth to a child, the parents are not consenting to either of those outcomes.
– having failed to resist pointing that out, I nevertheless note that we’re getting pretty off track here. This thread is supposed to be about the narrow question of why pro-choice people don’t make a specific argument; or, rather, why pro-choice people don’t abjure a specific argument.
Thanks - yes, specifically why pro-choice people don’t just issue a blanket statement that “Abortion is a woman’s choice regardless of fetus personhood.”
We do indeed have a few Dopers here who expressed exactly that view, so I’m sure it’s a sizable minority within the pro-choice movement overall. Just wondering why it hasn’t become ***the ***mainstream pro-choice, standard stance yet. It would be far simpler and more concise than delving into an impossibly convoluted debate over when exactly a fetus becomes viable, and whether it’s brain waves or a heartbeat that does it, etc.
This is different from what you wrote in your OP. In your OP, you suggested that pro-choicers agree with pro-lifers that fetuses are persons. Here you’re saying that the question of fetal personhood is irrelevant. These are different positions – can you clarify?
Anyway, certainly pro-choicers who live in states that pass fetal personhood will take the position you suggest in the quote above, since it’s not like they will suddenly become anti-abortion if the state defines a fetus as a person.
You don’t understand the pro-choice position at all, do you? I’d suspect that most people who support abortion rights don’t think the fetus is a person. But we support the right of people who do to not have abortions. Just not to enforce their opinions on others.
In other words, every woman makes the choice about personhood for herself. Personhood matters for that woman. Personhood does not matter in the general debate because it is an undecidable problem and we shouldn’t enforce our opinions on others.
I’m pretty much onboard with a choice window for either prospective parent–women have up to 20 weeks gestation to decide whether or not to take the pregnancy to term. During that same time frame, the prospective father should be allowed a similar choice to either accept paternity and the attendant financial consequences and expectation that they will fully co-parent or alternately to relinquish all rights to the baby in perpetuity. That means NO contact, no coming around later and deciding the kid is actually pretty cool and trying to horn in, is never allowed to even say the kid is theirs under pain of prosecution and imposition of back child support (and that imposition goes to the kid, not to mom, in a trust account and STILL doesn’t grant parental rights–it’s just a penalty, like violating a restraining order.) Even if mom and dad decide to get together after all later down the road dad MUST pay into an escrow account for the kid’s majority the equivalent of all missed child support, plus a healthy bonus for all that time the kid didn’t get a dad. Put some teeth into it and I suspect it would work pretty well.
This also neatly covers that one example that was all over Twitter and Facebook, where a guy talked a woman into carrying his child to term, then she handed him the kid and said “There you go, that’s all I’m doing for this baby aside from paying child support,” which she did and he was PISSED that she left him with the responsibility he insisted she give him. What an asshole. You want it, you might get it, them’s the rules.
If we are going to give the fetus the right to use another person’s bod without their permission, who else? If I need a kidney transplant and you’re the perfect donor, should you be forced to give me your kidney? HELL NO!
An anti-abortion person told me Saturday “The woman does nothing and the baby lives.” Uh, pregnancy is nothing? I don’t think so.
And of course, if a lesbian gets pregnant by raped, she has only two choices: Give the baby up for adoption or raise the child only if she can stop being a lesbian.
I was already somewhat pro-choice before I read that essay years ago, but it did help gel my thoughts on the matter. And to how it addresses the OP:
Before the end of the second trimester, or thereabouts, I think the fetus does not qualify at all for the rights that we afford to persons. Much of that time, it doesn’t even have a functioning brain, and after parts of the brain start functioning, it’s not in a way that we would describe as a “person.”
And since the vast vast majority of abortions are before this point, I will NOT concede the argument that a fetus is a person. There is nothing even slightly immoral about abortions in the first two trimesters. I’ll grant the pregnant woman the right to make the choice, but I might try to make a moral argument to some women that it’s more moral to have an abortion, depending on her circumstances.
During the last trimester, the fetus is beginning to have some characteristics of personhood. I will still go with the right of the pregnant woman (with guidance from her doctor) to choose. The vast majority of abortions at this stage are in pretty tragic circumstances and I’ll leave it up to them to do what’s best.
In the vanishingly small number of the remainder of cases, such as when a nine-month pregnant woman chooses to abort just because she decides she doesn’t want it, I’ll go with the bodily autonomy argument and allow here to make that choice. I won’t advocate for that to be illegal, but I also may have moral disdain for a woman who did that. Again, these situations are extremely rare.
Just curious, at what point does this entity get protection? I personally place it as first breath, even if that first breath happened during a botched abortion attempt. Sort of like football and breaking the plane, once it’s past that point, it’s under protection of authorities.
Because minds are made up. People are coming up with arguments to make themselves right and not to exp[lore whether or not they are actually right.
Pro-lifers think abortion is the murder of innocents and pro-choice folks think that abortion is a fundamental right. An argument, no matter how clever, is ever going to change very many minds.