No, anti-abortion folks use religion to boost their belief, as if it’s a fact that God chooses the woman to get pregnant and she has a moral right to let the fetus stay in her body until it is born whereupon it will be adopted and live happily ever after in a straight couple’s Christian home.
Only straight married Christians need apply. All Jews, Muslims, atheists and homosexuals are going to hell, and their parenting is “child abuse.”
I disagree. Pro-choice are willing to compromise. Anti-abortionists anti-life are not.
The “pro-life” movement is anti-life. “Pro-life” is a oxymoron of sort.
Of course not ! They should be surgically tied to & crossed with your circulatory system for 9+ months so that their kidneys act as your dialysis machine, obviously. That’s the only ethical thing to do. After all, doesn’t the sanctity of your life trump their temporary discomfort, complete loss of agency and autonomy and risk to their own life ?
This proposal doesn’t really make sense, because the right to an abortion is about bodily autonomy: i.e., not carrying an unwanted pregnancy. It’s not about a right to abdicate responsibility for a future baby. Avoiding that responsibility is a side effect of terminating a pregnancy, not a right in and of itself.
Men (at least, cisgender men) already have complete guaranteed bodily autonomy as far as pregnancy is concerned: they’re not even legally required to share the financial costs of pregnancy incurred by a woman they’ve impregnated. So no, they’re not entitled to a legal choice window for rejecting potential future parenthood on top of that.
A woman can choose to terminate her pregnancy during the “choice window” when elective abortion is legal. If she misses that window for any reason, she’s on the hook for future parenthood just as much as the father is, however unwanted parenthood may be.
(Mind you, I think it’s ethically questionable to deliberately demand child support or any other parental duties, in the case of an unintended pregnancy, from a sex partner who consistently made it clear that they don’t want any of the responsibilities or rights of parenthood. But that doesn’t mean that the biological parents shouldn’t legally be held responsible. As soon as a baby is born, no matter who did or didn’t want it, it has to be paid for and cared for. And unless the biological parents both agree to transfer the responsibilities and rights of parenthood to a third party, they’re the ones who remain stuck with them, legally speaking.)
No, that would be legally treating an early-term fetus as equivalent to a child, which I clearly said I don’t advocate and don’t think is workable in any consistent sense.
I am in favor, as I said, of socially regarding an early-term fetus as equivalent to a child if the pregnant woman regards it as such.
That means, for example, that when a mom-to-be starts talking about her “baby” as soon as the pee stick shows a positive result, I don’t snarkily tell her that actually her blastocyst/embryo doesn’t count as a baby yet. If a woman who miscarried in her second month talks about her “departed child” to whom she’s given a name and personality characteristics, I don’t try to argue that it’s unrealistic to regard a six-week fetus as a fully human person. Socially speaking, if a pregnant woman thinks of her embryo/fetus at any stage as a “child”, then so do I.
That doesn’t mean that I support legally equating an early-term fetus to a born child just because the pregnant woman says so. It sounds as though k9bfriender supports that position, though (judging from their post of 02-01-2020 12:30 PM), so you can argue the point with them.
This is one of the rare cases where transgender rights make sex roles clearer. Which is to say, they ain’t involved here.
If a man and a woman have sex, but they’re both transgender, then it’s the man who might get pregnant. If he does, it’s the man’s decision whether to carry the child in his body.
It’s not that women get all the say so about pregnancies. It’s that every individual gets the say-so about any pregnancy that occurs in their body. If some people want to have a baby but don’t have the necessary reproductive organs to grow one internally, they better find a willing partner. They don’t get to force a pregnancy they want on the body of someone who doesn’t want it.
Obviously, far greater than 99% of pregnancies occur in women’s bodies. But in the rare cases where they don’t, it’s the body the pregnancy occurs in, not the respective genders of the parents, that determine who gets the say-so over the pregnancy.
That said, I find myself pretty uncomfortable with the bodily autonomy argument–a position that places me outside of the pro-choice mainstream.
Here’s my science-fiction scenario explaining my discomfort:
A disease strikes humanity. At the onset of puberty, children develop a wasting illness that, over the course of 2 months, is 100% fatal.
A cure is found. Weekly infusions of blood from one of their parents–hell, let’s say their XY parent–will stabilize a child until the illness passes. The illness, coincidentally, takes about 9 months to pass.
Most dads flock to the new blood transfusion centers, because they want to save their kids.
A tremendous number of kids die, because their dads are dead, or unknown, or for some other reason are unable to make the donation.
But there is a third group of kids. These kids know who their dad is, and their dad could make the donation. But for a variety of reasons–maybe a fear of needles, maybe some super-bitter hatred of their ex-wives, maybe general uselessness, maybe membership in a religion that forbids blood transfusions–these fathers openly refuse to make the donations.
Each year, there are more than one million children in this third group, children who will die because of their dad’s decision.
A law is proposed: fathers with sick children must submit to weekly blood transfusions, and a failure to do so will be treated as homicide.
And I support the shit out of that law.
There are of course a lot of differences between this scenario and pregnancy, natch, not least of which is that pregnancy is way more of an interference in life than a blood draw. But the relevant difference for me is that the children are actual people, not potential people; and actual people have actual rights that potential people do not.
Velocity et al treat this sort of distinction as “tortured logic.” On the contrary, I think it’s key to the issue. There are not other areas of life where we treat a potential thing as the actual thing. This confusion only seems to happen in the highly specific area of legislating abortion.
:dubious: :dubious: Bodily autonomy doesn’t automatically outweigh every other factor in a situation. We can support a right to abortion in early pregnancy on the principle of bodily autonomy without thereby being impelled onto a slippery slope that would take us as far as your frankly silly paternal blood-donation scenario.
Ah. I’ve heard people argue exactly the opposite, on this board I think. When a person is saying that bodily autonomy is super important, I agree with that. I just don’t think it outweighs every other factor, as you say.
There is a moral concern that doesn’t exist so much at the individual level but at the aggregate level. If abortion isn’t available, and the social arrangement is such that individually pregnant people aren’t viable parents minus the financial clout to raise a child alone, and such clout comes far later in life (generally speaking) than puberty, sex ends up polarizing the boys against the girls. The threat of pregnancy makes girls who are otherwise horny and curious and sexual quite alienated from their sexuality and explorations thereof. It makes parents inclined to try to keep their girl-children ignorant of sex aside from instilling fear of boys and things boys do. It makes boys predatory, manipulative, inclined to see girls as adversaries as well as goals but not as people like themselves with appetites like their own. And if all this sounds more than vaguely familiar, yeah, we’ve already done this, we know the results, and they aren’t good.
Sexual equality is a good thing.
As I said, the outcome affects society in the aggregate. It shapes what it means to be a boy or a girl.
Patriarchy is sinful. It’s an abomination in the eyes of God. In ancient pre-agrarian times we didn’t have medical abortions but we also didn’t have individual parental responsibility for the raising of a child, we didn’t have the stoning of fornicating women in the village square or the application of scarlet letters; puberty’s onset was later and a person biologically ready to become pregnant was generally socially ready to have and raise a child and to be supported within the community as someone doing a normal non-deviant thing. Patriarchy as we knew it isn’t how things always were until the pill and abortion changed everything – it emerged, and now it is dying and may it rest in peace ASAP.
Would you feel the same if instead of a blood transfusion the child
needed one thyroid, or a piece of liver, requiring an operation with a significant (say 5%) chance of killing the father?
I would not. I would support any and all non-violent social measures directed at those dads, including public naming-and-shaming, social ostracism, economic boycotts, civil lawsuits etc.
But forced blood donation is beyond the pale to me, for exactly the same bodily autonomy reason I support abortion rights.
That makes sense because back in the day, so many people died young leaving so many children as orphans that many were raised either by their “village” or by relatives.
Say your in a medieval village where fathers are often called up to go to war where there was a good chance he wouldnt return.
or the father worked on a whaling ship which could be gone for over a year and often 10% of the crew didnt return.
Or if said village was raided and plundered by an invading army and often all adult men and women were killed but they would take away the children to be slaves.
Interesting. However there are/were a few matriarchal societies, how do they handle that? and would you say they are also a abomination in the eyes of God?
Also sexual equally has some issues such as it is only people who God have given a womb who can get pregnant, and thus have to deal with this issue. I could accept that they are both souls who are suppose to be doing the work of God’s kingdom on earth, be loving and serving beings, in their current positions and bodies. In the service to God there is equality as they both serve the King, in their bodies there are differences, in their tasks for the Kingdom there are differences in their roles there are differences. Some will have to deal with issues in life while others do not, pregnancy is just one of many.
Thomas Beatie the first married man to give birth. I read his first book, and he got a lot of hate mail from the “pro-life” movement, stating that he and his legally wedded wife should not be allowed to raise the child, as that would be child abbue.
I am pro-life, as it were, and the government says its okay to kill your future child, then that’s the law. I do think women will have to answer to God for that, but that has nothing to do with the law. And count me as an exception to “those” people who say adoptive parents have to be straight, or differing sexes.
Those with strong feelings on either side tend to be equally rigid in not giving an inch, believing that compromise equals slavery or eternal damnation. They’re powerful forces in the debate, but not all-powerful.
I think everyone is “anti-abortionist”, given the historic connotations of that word.
Nice hypothesis , but there’s nothing to back it up. Gorillas are run by the silverbacks.
The idea there was some Eden-like Matriarchal paradise pre-history has nothing to back it up.
Nice rejoinder, but there’s nothing to back it up.
Bonobos are not run by the silverbacks.
The notion that I proclaimed an Eden-like Matriarchal paradise in prehistory is not supported by the content of my actual post.
As an example:
To address another point:
As I said:
Eventually you can increase the inconvenience/suffering/risk-to-life/loss of freedom to such a degree that it becomes a tricky question for me; and you can continue increasing those factors until they’re no longer a tricky question for me. If every father has a 5% risk of death from the action of saving his kid, I would be a lot less likely to support a law coercing fathers to take this risk. If the risk of death becomes 90%, no way would I support such a law.
The point of my scenario is not that I’m equating weekly blood donations to pregnancy. I explicitly said as much. The point of the scenario is to distinguish my moral conclusion from that of bodily autonomy absolutists (or at least more absolutist than me, and yes I know there’s an oxymoron there) like MrDibble.