No, not at all. I do not seriously believe that you advocate infanticide; it was only that your argument did not draw a distinction that would disallow killing a newborn child. If we are in agreement that a genetically-human creature capable of any of the characteristics you ascribe to a human being ought to be classed as one, and therefore merit the right to life, we are singing from much the same hymn sheet.
I also disagree that a blastocyte is a human being, and I believe you and I, if we discussed this thoroughly, would end up, at most, arguing about where to put the line on the calendar. In that case I owe it to you to apologise for anything that reads like demonisation of you. This has been as much like a bar-room brawl as a debate, and you know how they work: sometimes the nearest person gets slugged for no reason.
I won’t say for certain that a 30-week-fetus has the same rights as a 30-year-adult. Rights are a continuum, I think, not a binary setting, and I’m willing to grant rights according to the subject’s capacity to appreciate them. That does mean that I’m a lot more interested in protecting the 30-week fetus than I am in protecting the 30-day embryo, though, and if a law is passed that disallows third-trimester abortions except in cases where the mother’s health is endangered, I’m sure not going to be fighting that law.
(Incidentally, this means that I do think we should offer much stronger protection to certain animals, as I think that, for example, an adult chimpanzee is farther along the rights-continuum than a neonate).
I appreciate the apology, and apologize in turn for my puppy-torture comments.
Choice, shmoice. May I slap the living shit out of you for irritating me? No, of course I may not. But you are taking away my CHOICE! Yes, but the act I am intent on is despicable. Therefore it is not a CHOICE that I am allowed to exercise. Good gravy. Either something is permissible or it is not. If it is not, it is no defence to bleat that my CHOICE is being taken away by not allowing me to do it.
I personally would grieve for any woman who maimed herself or her foetus through a botched abortion. Nevertheless, if someone is intent on an illegal and immoral act, it is no responsibility of mine to protect them from the consequences of it.
Dare I say, pregnancy-free sex never has been a right throughout most of human history? It is only lately with the availability of contraception that is over 90% effective that we have embarked on a social revolution founded on the inane supposition that it is in fact 100% effective. I have no idea on what grounds you claim it as a right - at most, you can only assert it as something that you want.
Additionally, it has been explained time and time again that in cases where the mother’s life is in danger, abortion is no more murder than any other act of self-defence. But it would be highly proper, I believe, to ask what proportion of abortions are carried out to save the mother’s life.
I’ll weigh in. I’ve been trying to follow the thread, but if someone else has made the point, I apologize in advance.
I am willing to concede a gray area in when a fetus is to be granted rights as a human. However, being a cautious man, I am willing to concede that human life begins at conception.
Here’s the thing- it doesn’t matter. I am very much pro-choice, not because of any arbitrary judgment on when life begins, but because no matter what, we as a society have no right to force someone to bear, host, and support that life with their bodies. We have become really blasé about pregnancy, ignoring the complications, strain, and all around misery that results from even the most wanted, routine pregnancy. Someone else made the point that abortion is less risky than pregnancy…doesn’t that make make every case of abortion one of ‘life or health of the mother’? Where does the woman’s right to self defense kick in?
I would not want to be forced to be a life support vehicle for anyone else, and I don’t think that the courts should be able force me to. That’s what you’re asking, those of you on the pro-life/anti-choice side.
Sure, there are instances where abortions are really not necessary, or even advisable…but that’s not my call to make. That alternatives are always worse. Too often, it all boils down to ‘this woman must shoulder the burden of her sexual behavior.’ that’s not the sort of thinking I want to be associated with.
Get back to me when you figure out how to remove a zygote and raise it to viability with no burden to the mother. get me past those 9-10 months of being enslaved and forced to bear the child. Then we can talk about being pro-life.
That can be flipped around. We can (and have) just as easily said that a z/e/f does not have a right to a uterus with lining and a lack of certain chemical substances in the mother’s bloodstream. In fact, this can be invoked in the exact same way that your slapping example can.
Ooh. If we can have abortions for self-defence, can we also have them for trespassing, vandalism, theft, and invasion of property?
Even to save a wonderful, educated, saintly adult, we wouldn’t forcibly use someone else’s body. We wouldn’t steal organs, or even borrow them. We wouldn’t force blood transfusions, or bed rest, or time off work.
We don’t do these things even if it means the death of self-aware, intelligent, adult citizens. We don’t do these things even if it means the death of persons we all acknowlege have all of the same rights we do. We don’t do it for a pope or a president or a child prodigy. No one has the right to use someone else’s body, not even for their own survival.
If we could figure out a way to create an artificial womb, then maybe I’ll agree that abortion should be more restricted. Of course, that raises the problem of what happens to the fetus. How many kids are out there that no one will adopt?
This gets to the place where I’m not completely happy with abortions. For fetuses that are 7 months along, there are artificial wombs available, more or less: they’re called incubators. Fetuses at that age have a pretty high viability if they’re born prematurely.
Would it be reasonable to say that, unless doing so would endanger the mother’s health, a woman wanting to rid herself of a seven-month fetus should be required to birth the fetus via induced labor or C-section? I don’t know.
If induced labor/C-section are extremely invasive procedures compared to late-term abortions, then I could see an argument that a woman has the right to choose the less-invasive procedure: in this case, I believe that existing rights with the fetus may be weighed against the existing rights of the mother.
But if the procedures are comparable, then I don’t think a woman has the right to choose an abortion because giving birth and giving the child up for adoption would be emotionally traumatic (e.g., the pregnancy is the consequence of rape). However emotionally traumatic it may be, in these cases, the 7-month-old fetus, with its capacity for pain and pleasure*, and a capacity for desire, has rights that win out, in my mind.
As for the number of unwanted children out there, my understanding is that these unwanted children are all either older kids or kids with severe health problems (severely mentally retarded, etc.) Healthy adoptable infants are a rare treasure in the field of adoptions, and the waiting list is a mile long.
I don’t have an answer for the question of late-term abortions: the balancing of rights that they entail is very difficult, I think, unlike the balancing of the rights of a woman versus the (nonexistent, I believe) rights of an embryo she carries.
Daniel
I should’ve mentioned pain and pleasure before when I talked about the features that I look at when deciding whether an entity has rights.
I do believe there should be specific time limits set on abortions. Barring health issues for the pregnant woman, I think the upper limit should be set somewhere between 16 & 20 weeks. After that point, unless you have a specific medical reason for delivering early (and after that point, it’s delivering early), the baby should be carried to term.
I believe we covered this in another thread: It’s far too traumatic and places too much stress on the infant’s system to be born any earlier than is necessary, so inducing at 7 months shouldn’t be an option.
Very few, to be sure. But there are still abortions performed at 24 weeks-ish, which makes me extremely uncomfortable. At 24 weeks, you’ve been pregnant for approximately 6 months, more than enough time to make a decision.
The reason I brought up delivering early was in response to Daniel’s assertion:
Premature birth is one thing, but intentionally delivering early unnecessarily shouldn’t be encouraged.
Don’t be silly, eleanor, dear. Of course it’s the woman’s fault. She seduced him. She wore her skirt too short, her sweater too tight, he couldn’t help himself, it’s not his fault!
And after all, that’s exactly the kind of way we want babies to be brought into the world, yes? Not viewed as products of love, but as punishment for a fuckup!
Well, nothing, really. And people SHOULD be responsible for their actions. Unfortunately, men won’t be held physically responsible for their actions. The body changes, the labor pain, the recovery; that’s solely on the woman. Which is why I, for one, resent being told by any man that it’s my responsibility, I didn’t have to have sex, yadayadayada. It’s very easy to be judgemental when you never have to go through the consequences.
I forget: Which comedian said that if men were to ever have to bear children, abortion would go up by 50%?
What brought this up in my mind was yesterday, talking with my wife about this thread, and she told me of a radio interview she’d heard with a woman who’d been raped and who said she didn’t realize she was pregnant until she was seven months along; at that point, she got an abortion (having to travel to another state to do so), because she couldn’t bear emotionally to carry the rapist’s child to term.
That’s a very difficult case, I think. Obviously the whole “take responsibility for your actions” argument doesn’t apply in the case of rape: she never chose to have sex. And she didn’t choose to wait till the last minute to get an abortion (stipulating for now that she really didn’t realize she was pregnant, something I find bizarre). So we’re basically weighing the rights of one completely “innocent” person against another completely innocent “person.”
I’m really not sure how I feel about such cases. On the one hand, I don’t feel it’s appropriate to make her carry this rapist’s fetus in her for an instant longer than she’s comfortable with: Lord only knows I can’t imagine the horror of doing that. On the other hand, by 28 weeks, that fetus would be viable outside the womb.
Thus my comment about inducing labor/performing a C-Section. Yes, that would be traumatic for the fetus; but it would not be as traumatic as an abortion would be, and it would serve the purpose of getting the fetus out of the woman, the only legitimate purpose that an abortion would serve. (If the woman in the example actively desired the death of the fetus, I don’t consider that desire something that needs to be weighed).
I don’t know. These cases are, to the best of my knowledge, vanishingly rare; at the same time, they’re not imaginary. What’s the right choice? Not what’s the right choice for the victim of the rape, but what’s the right choice for us as a society when we balance the rights of the parties involved and decide what will be the rape victim’s legal choices?
Also, what kind of home life do you think a child will have when the mother is forced to have the baby? Do you really think she’s going to see that child as a blessing? Let me clue you in, bub.
My mom got pregnant with me when she was 19. Pre Roe v Wade, and she’d seen her best friend butchered by a Mexican abortion clinic, so that was out. She and my dad got married. She resented the daylights out of the fact that she never got to go to school, never finished her degree, never got to be young. Does she love me? Most assuredly. But I was very aware that the reason she didn’t become a vet was because she had me instead. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure no child ever has to feel that kind of guilt.