Does the woman have any say in this? Do doctors get to make decisions for women without consulting them?
Which part of “after examining the mother” was unclear? Doctors do not ask patients what disease they have. Doctors diagnose. I hope this makes it clearer.
If you’ve spent much time around farm animals and wild animals (I have), you’ll see some unnerving natural events. One of these is the very common practice among animals for the mother (or father, or alpha male, or competing female, or other competing male) to destroy a newly born or younger animal. When the mother kills and perhaps consumes the newborn, it’s called savaging.One of the reasons this happens is if the mother senses a minor (or major) imperfection in the newborn ( I once rescued a duckling from such a fate, and it went on to be the biggest, strongest drake [with an under-bite] in the pond). Another common occurrence is for hogs to eat their young. In some cases, it’s to reduce the number of piglets to suit the sow’s nursing capacity, maybe to destroy a imperfect specimen, and most often, for no apparent reason. Crowding is suggested as a cause, but wild pigs also savage their young.
Are humans exempt from nature’s inner-drive to select offspring by destroying unwanted specimens? Surely laws have been put into place to prevent violent and anti-social behavior. We are apes, after all, and it’s very well part of our own nature to kill the offspring of competing males, or even the competitors themselves … so we have laws and customs. These laws and customs enable us to live in relative peace, and they flow from the desire amongst the leaders in our midst to maintain order. (Only the leaders may select whom to kill).
Either protecting a fetus is a matter of maintaining order or it’s a religious matter. If it’s a religious matter, I say to you, I fully support any religious women’s decision to not have an abortion. If it’s a matter of maintaining order, then it’s up to the leaders who may be killed. They will either declare that some fetuses may be sacrificed for the greater good of the mother, or that they will not be allowed to be killed because greater order is maintained thus.
Doctors do not generally treat patients, and especially do not perform invasive procedures, without their consent. Hence, women and their doctors should make these decisions. Women and their doctors, not the government, should determine when an abortion is medically necessary.
Sorry, had to go do actual work.
First, don’t call me pro-abortion. I wish every pregnancy was planned, and every child was wanted and loved. Sadly, that isn’t the case, so I accept abortion as a necessary tool to help overcome certain clearly-detrimental outcomes. Like the outcomes that would result if most aborted fetuses were delivered to term. That being unwanted, probably unloved children born into family situations that are incapable of supporting the child due to the mother’s age, socioeconomic circumstances, or other relevant outside factors.
Your analogy fails spectacularly. Women are hardly equivalent to a house in a howling wilderness. Such a house might have occasion to be within notice of some starving, freezing sojourner about – what, once every century or so? The sojourner whose dire straits make it acceptable to break into someone else’s property in order to sustain his life points up a vanishingly rare occurrence that is the exception to the usual rule regarding ownership. Social policy is made based on the general case, that being “my house is my castle” and not based on the exceptional occurrence.
A woman can be sexually receptive and be capable of being impregnated for decades and decades, effectively all the time, throughout her fertile life. (Noting of course actual fertility being on a repeating schedule that roughly corresponds to one week out of every four.) That’s hardly the same as once in a blue moon. Must she only have sex when she actually wants a child? Because other than that, only surgical sterilization approaches 100% reliable pregnancy prevention. If she gets pregnant despite rigorous prevention, she’s just stuck with it, according to you.
And you wish our social policy on abortion to provide the same outcome for all cases of pregnancy, regardless of the level of unwantedness, regardless of the active defenses the couple have taken to prevent pregnancy, and regardless of the circumstances that would result if a child was brought to term. “She had sex!!! So whatever happens is her own fault! And her own choice. She gave the fetus access!!” You know, you could say the same about syphilis. She had sex, she gave it access! Don’t go running off looking for penicillin now!
It is a lot more to the point than most analogies given in this thread. And you still have not answered the question - regardless of whether you think the analogy is apt or not - is it homicide or not?
Homicide is a legal term. Right now, a legally performed abortion is not homicide. What’s wrong with the word “killing”? It’s a killing. The unborn child is killed. It’s that simple. Do you prefer homicide because it has a controversial sound to it? It’s startling, like the dialog of a crime drama. We can associate one homicide with another. “Homicide … ooh, that’s a bad thing.” Well, abortion is a bad thing, compared to not needing one, I’ll give you that.
Didn’t bother to read my post, eh? Very well.
To your specific question, I hardly think an appeal to a dictionary is at all helpful to this debate. Earlier in this thread there were numerous posts devoted to questions of “murder” versus “killing” and the differences between legal constraints and social questions. I see no value in revisiting them here. Your attempt at analogy and your harping on the definition of homicide and your focus on a vanishingly rare special case (your little house in a howling wilderness) does zero to advance this debate.
A few posts ago though you demonstrated to me all I need to place your arguments in proper context. When BrightSunshine speaks of the “humanity” of women, the dangers of pregnancy, and the “sacrifices” that pregnancy requires of the mother, you reply with hand waving of “the inconveniences and the negatives associated with” it. I must say, while this may not actually rise to a level properly called misogyny, it is certainly denigration and a cavalier dismissal of women’s feelings, needs, and safety.
Why is it ok to compel a woman then? We’ve already covered the fact that completion of donation = completion of pregnancy i.e. childbirth, after which it’s not legal to take it back. When the child is not yet born, the donation is in progress. E.g. both on surgery table, donor wakes up and says no.
How are they not analogous? Both are life-giving acts somewhat harmful to one’s self. Recall that the risk of death for living kidney donation is similar to the risk of death from carrying a pregnancy to term. Recovery from kidney donation is 2-3 weeks, vs 6 weeks for vaginal birth and 8 for c-sections. Some bodily functions can be adversely affected.
Blood and marrow donation is much less onerous. Yet even that is not compulsory by law.
I have had the decency of using your preferred term, “pro-life”, not “anti-choice”. The least you can do is return the courtesy by using the term “pro-choice”.
By law it is not illegal to not help someone. Besides, the law recognizes that one’s body is more primary than one’s residence (which is in turn more primary than one’s money). Recall the body>labor>residence>other property>money hierarchy laid out earlier. If someone enters your body against your will, you are justified in removing them by the least harmful means available to you. If it’s your house, you need also establish that you believe they may cause harm. The government may require your money (taxes) routinely, your house (eminent domain) or labor (jury duty) from time to time, but never your body parts.
It does with conscription, imprisonment and executions.
The law does not condone violating the bodies of military draftees, prisoners, or even dead bodies from executed criminals. Each can still decide what to put inside or take out of their own body unless declared mentally incompetent in which case a guardian can be court appointed to act on their best interest.
Military draft is the closest example of a sacrifice we ask of some people and not others. (1) We haven’t used it in decades. (2) There are a list of exemptions from education to health to family. (3) It’s more labor than body, see above. I don’t agree with it being men only either.
Because the baby is already inside. To compare to your example, the organ has already been donated.
No, we haven’t “covered it”. You asserted it. Wrongly.
I gave you the scenario. I asked you if, in that scenario, kicking out the person is homicide and if you think it is a crime. You apparently refuse to answer. I think that speaks for itself.
Pretty much this. The Republicans got in bed with the religious whackjobs back in the 60s and we are paying the price for it now.
I’m conservative, yet I support abortion. Not all of us are religious extremists, but too many of us are.
The organ being used is still within the donor’s body. How is the donation complete?
I think it can be a dick move (depending on whether and how much housing the person may be harmful to you) but it’s currently not illegal. I am ok with laws requiring reasonable assistance (calling 911) to people in need (which we don’t have in most states), but not with laws requiring bodily violations. If a man said “have sex with me or I’ll die” and I declined, I am not responsible if he died.
My pro-choice stance is primarily motivated by fairness. Everybody has the same right to the use of their own body but not others’ without their consent. If we decide on a higher level of obligation to each other as a society, then my stance can be subject to adjustment.
I didn’t say push or beat, I said kill. If the least amount of harm she can do to him is death, does she have that right?
Legally? Maybe. But, IMO, if a woman says, “Get off!”, you remain at your own peril, including getting killed by her, her husband who’s car she just heard in the driveway, or one of her brothers in the next room. And, what’s with the death-grip? Death-grip?
So far as a fetus may be concerned, the only option other than staying in the womb is death.
I find it quizzical that everyone in this thread is advocating for legal, capricious murder of men by women. I’m not saying that the man is unwilling or even fighting against the woman or her desire (and in no way would the example make sense in the current discussion if that were the case). But I’ll make it explicit, just to be sure that I haven’t been transported to an alternate universe:
The man is fully willing and happy to oblige. He is not trying to stay where he is. He will cooperate with the woman’s desires to the full extent that he is capable. The issue is purely that even trying his most earnestly to comply, he either can’t meet the deadline or would have to die in the trying.
Of course! If she says “get out of me!”, and he doesn’t get out, then of course she has the right to use the least amount of harm to get him to stop.
I’m not necessarily onboard with a deadline, but if he doesn’t get out in a reasonable amount of time, then she absolutely has the right to use force to expel him, up to and including deadly force. A “reasonable amount of time” might vary based on the circumstances, but it’s probably anywhere from 10 or 20 seconds to a minute or two. For young, healthy people, it’s probably on the lower end of that scale.
What a bizarre argument. First of all the entire premise of the anti-abortionists is that an unborn fetus is a “person” – not a “potential person” but an actual one – we keep hearing this from you over and over again. If so, then there’s no practical difference between a fertilized egg at the moment of conception and any other gestational state, because the complete DNA makeup has been established. If one is going to buy the “without intervention or someone preventing it from happening on purpose” line of thinking, then the “baby” exists from the moment of fertilization, before implantation – because after all, in the natural scheme of things implantation happens spontaneously.
What difference should it make to “personhood” whether a fertilized egg or embryo is in a test tube or in a woman’s body? According to that logic removing an egg or embryo makes it a non-person, but putting it back suddenly makes it a person again. What an amazing transition – presumably we can keep doing this over and over again for the whole nine months, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat and then making it disappear again!
Meanwhile as the pro-life crowd plays these ridiculous semantic word games, real women – indisputably actual persons – are suffering and being deprived of fundamental civil liberties because of absurd state-by-state abortion restrictions; not content with that, the “pro-life” crowd wants to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether and turn the clock back to the misogynistic 1950s, where any form of abortion was totally illegal, women stayed in the kitchen and gays stayed in the closet, and all was well with the world. Does anyone seriously doubt that this is the goal of social conservatives?