I am neither “completely in favor of violating pregnant women’s bodily autonomy” nor “completely apathetic about accepting the loss of tens of thousands of lives annually [due to lack of donated organs]”. As for the latter, there are other potential sources for organ donations besides forcing it on people. For example, we could legalize the sale of one’s own organs to save lives of those whose needs are not met by the current system. Or we could make more of an effort to encourage organ donation upon one’s passing.
As to the former, earlier in this thread, I posted this (regarding pregnancies that result from rape):
Does that:
dispel the notion that I’m “completely in favor of violating pregnant women’s bodily autonomy”
do anything to assuage your concern that my views “don’t really take forced continuation of pregnancy seriously as a violation of bodily autonomy”?
I certainly consider my views rational. I recognize that there are competing interests at play here: between the pregnant woman who may not wish to carry the pregnancy to term and the life growing inside of her that has some vested interest in continuing to live and grow.
In your post, you accused the pro-life side of being too dismissive of the pregnant woman’s interests, yet you seem particularly dismissive about interests of the life of the child. You’ve called it “a clump of cells” and “embryonic or fetal cells that have little to none of the capabilities of a human person”. What are your views on, for example, third-trimester abortions?
Yeah, like every time a driver drives down the road there is a national debate for that one stretch of road’s speed limit? Actually, laws are passed that codify the collective decision. Now trouble occurs when a judge rules something that is popular is illegal and then you have these decade long fights.
That’s funny. I thought trouble occurs when people try to force their religious views on a populace whose right to have an abortion has already been declared Constitutional.
True, and likewise there are other and much more positive ways for decreasing the number of abortions besides legally forbidding women to get one. Improved access to birth control, for example, does a much better job of reducing unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions than abortion bans do.
If you really want to effectively diminish the prevalence of abortion in this country, joining the crusade of a bunch of anti-birth-control anti-sex-ed anti-woman religious zealots to criminalize the procedure is a pretty lousy way to do it. Making reliable birth control and sex education much more easily available, along with improving social programs that support women and children and make it less likely that an unplanned pregnancy will ruin a woman’s life, is a much better way.
Somewhat; and thanks for the recap, which is different from the impression I got from your subsequent remarks about your investment in “protecting innocent lives”. But not all that much, tbh.
What is problematic about this is the vagueness of the status of what you call “the life growing inside of her” in terms of personhood. There are many forms of “life” that can grow inside a person that don’t have and will never attain personhood of their own. An embryo or fetus is obviously different from those forms in some ways, but that doesn’t mean that we must automatically assign it the status of a person with “some vested interest” right from the get-go.
What child? My view is that calling an early-term fetus, much less an embryo or blastocyst, a “child” or a “baby” is an ideology-driven fiction rather than a biologically realistic description. Now if a pregnant woman wants her own fetus described as her “child” or her “baby” from the instant of conception onwards, that’s her choice and I’m happy to comply with it. But for anyone else to talk about an embryo or early-term fetus in the abstract as a “baby” or “child” is just religious propaganda.
Of course, as I noted, gestation in its complete form is the process of turning an embryo and then a fetus into a baby that undeniably is a person. Just as it’s unrealistic and arbitrary to declare that a fertilized ovum immediately possesses full personhood, it would be unrealistic and arbitrary to declare that a full-term baby shortly before delivery possesses no personhood.
Anywhere we decide to draw the line in the gestation process between “not-person” and “person” is going to be arbitrary, but at least we can make it somewhat less unrealistic. I would say that somewhere around the start of the third trimester is a reasonable point to consider that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy starts to be outweighed by the fetus’s increasing rights as a person
:dubious: Well, by your reasoning, they would be “rare enough edge cases” that are “not very common” and so not really worth “fleshing out a firm position” about. Abortions after the 21-week mark occur about as frequently as people with organ failure dying from lack of a live-donable transplant.
If we’re going to take a less lackadaisical approach, though, I think it’s reasonable to default to the position that decisions about third-trimester abortions should be left to a pregnant woman and her doctor, since the overwhelming majority of such late abortions occur in wanted pregnancies for overriding medical reasons. I have no problem with legal prohibition of elective third-trimester abortions, that is, ones that a doctor doesn’t see any medical reason for, in keeping with the above remarks about the growing personhood of a late-term fetus.
Assuming, of course, that early-term elective abortions are allowed and accessible. If a woman has ample opportunity to terminate an unwanted pregnancy at will in its first several weeks, then I think that would substantially weaken the bodily-autonomy argument for elective abortion applied to late-term pregnancy. But if early-term abortions become more difficult to get, then you can probably expect to see a lot more later-term ones, and you pro-lifers will largely have yourselves to thank for it.
How about: What is the position you’re trying to argue for, what is your support for that position, and why should we accept the things that support your position as being relevant and valid?
You don’t think that a secular person could say something like how he or she has viewed ultrasounds before and, damn, that sure looks like a human life in there, so I think there needs to be something more than the woman’s sole and irrevocable choice before we kill that thing?
We give a stray dog more protection than that, so is it inconceivable that a non-religious person might have a problem with abortion on demand?
See, this is why it’s important to be really, really clear about what stage in the development process we’re talking about. Just like there’s a difference between a walnut, a sapling, and a tree, thingys in womens’ tummys go through a lot of different stages before they apply for retirement and move into a rest home. Not all the stages need to be treated the same.
Not that I’ve taken a poll of the universe, but I suspect that most secular folk think that the thingys in tummies start out as definitely-not-people, end up as definitely-people (presuming all goes well), and on the way there may spend a lot of time as the former before becoming the latter.
And of course it may not matter if they’re people - there are a lot of place in america where you’re allowed to shoot an intruder in your house if they don’t leave promptly when requested. Even if the intruder is a person! Presuming that a woman has as much sovereignty over her body as a man has over his castle, there are arguments to be made that the woman should be able to evict/kill her intruder at any point. And again, those arguments are basically castle laws.
What some random guy thinks, ‘sure looks like a human life’, to him, does not, in ANY way whatsoever mitigate that duly elected representives and their appointed judiciary bodies, in compliance with the countries processes, have determined … that abortion IS constitutional.
Of course abortion is constitutional. Or did you mean to say that it is, as currently held in the United States, a woman’s constitutional right placing it outside the democratic process? The basis for Roe and Casey are spurious at best and the dissents in those cases point out much better than I could why that is the case.
The random guy is a voter just like anyone else. His opinion doesn’t control the policy outcome, but like everything else in a representative democracy, the people should be able to vote on it. We wouldn’t have this nearly 50 year old national struggle which is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court if it hadn’t overstepped so long ago, and if Republican presidents could support real conservatives instead of the Kennedy, O’Connor, Souter…possibly now Roberts ilk.
I’ve argued against this analogy earlier in the thread. A burglar is an aberration, an act outside the normal bounds of human conduct and worthy of punishment.
A child inside his mother’s womb, like I was and like you were, is not such a thing, and it would be ridiculous for a court of law to hold that the very way that we all came into existence was an act of criminality or an invasion/intrusion into someone else.
Under that analogy, if the woman chose not to abort, then the child should face some sort of criminal/juvenile/corrective punishment once born.
I don’t know that this applies to just burglars - you can have anyone forcibly removed, if you have ownership of the property.
If you willingly allow somebody to stay on your property for nine months, I’m not sure you can press charges for that after the fact. (Though maybe you can; I’m no lawyer.)
And as I said, this is a position that some people take - and not entirely without logical justification. If they really have control over their bodies, they can have anyone evicted.
Now, there’s possibly a period after the thingy has become a person and before it can survive in the world outside. This is somewhat more problematic, because it’s probably legally frowned on to toss squatters out when its 70 below outside and they’re certain to die. That is a situation that the “eviction rights last to the last second” folks will have to defend their stance for.
Myself, though, I’m willing to just assume that the vast, vast, vast majority of abortions take place before the thingy becomes a person in the first place, and thus there’s no problem at all. The exceptions are probably just that: exceptional, and presumably demanded by medical necessity in virtually all cases.
This paragraph is, I think, the central crux of the matter. There are relatively few people in the country that want elective abortion to be legal right up until birth. There are also relatively few people that want it illegal in all circumstances. Most people seem to understand that there’s a developmental process taking place and with it comes something of a sliding scale of rights / recognition of personhood. We’re engaged in a national conversation about where to draw that rather arbitrary line. You said you’d prefer the tipping point to be the start of the third trimester. Georgia said it wants it to be when a heartbeat is detected. I don’t think either perspective is so wildly unreasonable that the people espousing them ought to be castigated as we so often do to each other.
For the sake of being better informed, here is a poll that I think does a good job of illustrating where the American people are, collectively, on the matter:
HD’s poll links are on point. The hardcore extremists on both sides strawman the shit out of their opponents. For pro-choicers, it’s all about mocking people whose religion leads them to believe even a blastocyst is a “baby”. And everyone in the middle (including me) rolls their eyes at the idea that a “clump of cells” is the same as a baby. But then the pro-choice activists take it too far by supporting laws like the one in Virginia, which make everyone in the middle (including me) horrified. (Tomndebb had a good post on this point.)
The second trimester is where the argument should really be joined. Extrapolating from Ditka’s Gallup poll cite, my view (that abortion should be legal in the first trimester, but illegal in the second and beyond) was the single most widely held 20 years ago, when it was as high as 41 percent. It is now down to 32 percent, and has been overtaken by the belief that it should be banned even in the first trimester, which has risen from 36 to 40 percent. The belief that it should be legal in the first and second trimesters, but not in the third, is held only by 15 percent, up from 13 percent in 2000. And support for legal abortion in all three trimesters is steady at 13 percent, as it was in 2000.
So politically, my group is a clear swing faction that should get a lot more attention. And in fact we really ought to have the leverage to make policy line up fairly perfectly with our preferences. After all, the pro-lifers aren’t likely to actually oppose us when we push for second trimester abortion bans, just because that doesn’t go far enough. Likewise, the pro-choice side needs us even more: we make up 53 percent of those who don’t want to ban first trimester abortion.
Definitely not. I wouldn’t even go into a burning building to save some kids inside, unless they were my own flesh and blood. Heck, I wouldn’t go into a *smoldering *building to save a bunch of orphans, not even if I thought there was a 95% chance I could get out safely.
I don’t think I’m unusual, either (although most people won’t say it out loud). Heck, Peter Singer points out that most people won’t even do the equivalent of wading into a shallow pond (ruining their expensive suit in the process) to save a drowning child.
Again, this is the easy fight, like fish in a barrel. I support comprehensive sex ed, so strongly in fact that I refused to give my teenage daughter permission to attend the sex ed segment of her health class, because it was abstinence only. (My wife and I got her some good materials on contraception and safe sex.) But I’m for a hard ban on abortion after the first trimester. How do you feel about that?
Actually, no. I can’t call the cops and tell them to remove my nine year old daughter, who is currently minding her business in her room, there only because my wife and I created her and provided her a domicile, as the law requires us to.
There are a number of things in a representative democracy that I don’t think “the people” should be able to vote on.
I don’t think “the people” should be able to vote on whether people of, say, a minority religion or physical characteristic should be enslaved, for instance. Or forbidden to vote. Or forbidden to learn to read. Or forbidden quite a lot of other things.
Depends on how that’s defined. If all you need is one doctor citing vague “health risks” of pregnancy (which are true for any woman), then that doesn’t fly with me. If it’s more like the kind of bioethics panel you’d have to convene to agree to sacrifice one of a pair of conjoined twins to give the other a better chance? Then sure.
Why would you call the cops? If you wanted to give up custody of and responsibility for your daughter, you’re better off calling a family lawyer and arranging an adoption. The point is, a mechanism exists if you need it and as far as I know, lawmakers aren’t trying to deny it to you for political gain.
If it’s going to be a “conversation”, then it has to be conducted in good faith with respect for the facts. This is something that the abortion-ban movement tends not to be very good at, or to care very much about.
For example, this arbitrary but warm-fuzzy-sounding popular “pro-life” talking point about “detecting a fetal heartbeat” at six weeks, when the fetus is the size of a pea. As this article notes,
But this is long past the point of the formation of the fetal heart and the start of its activity, as you can learn from actual sources on embryology:
So this notion of the so-called “detection of a heartbeat” at six weeks, a good three weeks after the typical fetal heart has begun operation, is meaningless except as a propaganda move. If the anti-choice movement was serious about any specific biological milestone, such as the circulation of blood by the heart, as the marker of full human personhood, then they’d demand bans on abortion after three weeks. But they know that allowing a window not even as long as a full menstrual cycle for permissible abortion would be rightly seen by pro-choicers as a completely ridiculous insincere “compromise”.
No, six-week “fetal heartbeat bills” have got jack-shit to do with any actual biological stage of fetal development. They’re simply a PR ploy to encourage people to imagine “listening” to the “baby’s” “heartbeat”, an experience we’ve all had with our own heartbeat and/or those of other people, and forget the fact that this six-week “baby” is a pea-sized blob that would make you shriek in disgust if you saw something like it while cracking open a chicken egg.
And the anti-abortion movement is chock-full of these sorts of PR ploys that try to stir emotions while misrepresenting facts (e.g., tales like “women regret abortions”, “abortions increase breast cancer risks”, “abortions are racist genocide”, etc. etc.). Any honest “national conversation” about abortion needs to involve calling them on their bullshit.