Sigh. That’s your opinion. Got it? Your opinion, not everyone’s.
You’re willing to enforce your opinion on others. We aren’t.
It’s called tyranny, and most of us want no part of it.
By that logic, blood/tissue/organ donation should be legally compulsory, at least when one is a sole available source or a parent of the recipient. I notice you haven’t answered my O negative blood in a small shut off town scenario. Unlike pregnancy, blood donation is truly only an inconvenience.
Lack of health insurance is documented to increase death rates. If right to life trumps incovenience, then raising taxes to pay for universal health care is a no brainer, right? Likewise, if someone steals from or robs you so they can pay for life-saving cancer treatment, they are guilty of no crime, correct?
Again, do you have a cite that kicking someone out of your house can be a crime if you are sure of their death? In some states one can shoot an intruder to protect properties. (Not that I agree with that. I just think US law places very little burden on us to physically help others.)
Now if they are your children, then yes I agree you should be obligated by law to provide housing to the best of your abilities. And you agree that you should not be obligated to give them a part of your body. So the question is, is pregnancy more like putting someone in the same house as you or giving someone a part of your body?
Anyone else outside of the woman’s body is not entitled to the use of her organs either.
A 60% chance of a building at 9 weeks, 70% at 12 weeks.
That “self-assembling pod” also spews toxic chemicals causing a person to throw up, rearranges said person’s internal organs, causes them to be hospitalized, results in immense pain, long term health effects, risk of death etc.
Buildings are also made by people by the way. (And incidentally, working construction is less deadly than carrying a pregnancy to term.) If the construction crew says fuck it I’m not going to build this building, they’re not going to be charged with the crime of destroying a building.
If you walk by a pond and someone’s drowning, you have (generally) no obligation to help them. You can walk on by.
But there are circumstances under which the law does impose a duty on you to help them. If you begin to help them, you assume a duty and can’t simply abandon it. And if you were responsible for them being in the water in the first place, you have a duty to assist them. If it’s your young child, you have a duty to assist.
Uhm, no, that’s not tyranny. I don’t see anyone proposing to overthrow the government and outlaw abortion by dictatorial decree. That would be tyranny.
And our side (the pro-choice side) is, as see by the pro-life crowd, guilty of enforcing our opinion on “others” since they define a fetus as a person. It cannot be said that we can scientifically, objectively define when a fetus becomes a person. It’s all opinion.
I still wouldn’t consider that tyranny- not all authoritarian government equates to tyranny.
Let’s say I attack you with a knife and ruin both your kidneys. It’s then discovered I’m on the kidney donation list and (surprise, surprise) I’m a 100% perfect, absolute match for you. And you’ll die without my kidney.
However, I don’t want to give you my kidney.
Should the law force me to give you my kidney?
Of course. Killing kids is an “opinion” and “tyranny”. Removing boys’ high school bleachers built by parents because they are nicer than girls’ bleachers is of course “freedom” and in no way “enforcing your opinion on others”. Queue hundreds of thousands of other regulations. All “freedom”.
Someone you let in is not an intruder. And no, there is no “cite” since the case is so egregious that it never occurred to to anyone ever to do that. But if you have any criminal lawyer friends, give them the scenario, they will tell you whether it is prosecutable.
Well, in one sense anything we say or write is an opinion, more or less by definition.
However, as philosophers and judges have both been able to demonstrate, some opinions can be supported by a coherently reasoned narrative while others cannot.
The point I would make (again) is that outlawing abortion, or de facto making it outlawed by sufficiently and unreasonably restricting it, has real and tangible impacts including emotional and/or physical pain and suffering for the mother and/or her quality of life, and potentially for the child who may be unwanted, unaffordable, or otherwise destined for misery.
Whereas in order to show that legal abortion impacts anything, you have to argue that an arbitrarily unformed fetus, right back to the point of egg fertilization, is “a person” in the accepted meaning of the word, which implies sentience, self-awareness, perception, etc. Which is objectively and biologically nonsense. The only arguments even remotely supportable are those that apply to much later stages of gestation, or the very weak argument that an early fetus is something that “will become” a person (or, more accurately, “may become”). This is certainly a valid argument for a woman wanting a baby to take care of her health in the interest of valuing and nourishing the early fetus, but arguing that it actually “is” a person and has “rights” is logic gone completely off the rails. It’s not surprising that these are exactly the same conservatives who insist that life support must be provided forever to patients in a brain-dead vegetative state. They just don’t understand what “human life” is, and are driven by emotion or religion.
This has got to be a joke, right? I mean, you are talking about that same Bible that killed people for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for offering strange fire, as well as whole-scale genocide of anyone that stood in the way of the ancient tribes? Just where is this sanctity of life mentioned in your holy book?
Not to mention, when it comes to abortion, that Exodus 21 says practically the opposite: anyone who causes a miscarriage (verse 22) – sounds pretty much the very definition of an abortion – only has to pay the husband the price he sets. Which is the same penalty as someone who kills his an ox or donkey that is not his own (verse 33-34).
In other words, in the Bible an unborn baby is no better than livestock!
But it gets better! In verse 17 it tells us that anyone who curses his parents is to be put to death. So forget the first or second trimester, the Bible says that parents can pretty much have their offspring killed whenever they feel they deserve it.
Yeah, so much for using the Bible to support the pro-life side of the debate.
Now I should clarify that I personally find it a tragedy when any woman feels that the only way out of her difficulties is to have an abortion. As others have suggested, this would probably happen far less if we had universal health care and decent social support systems in place.
But I will not be the one to stop her if that is what she decides is best.
Exactly. An abortion is a sad event.
“For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these ‘It might have been’.”
*-- John Greenleaf Whittier *
But worse than an abortion is the cruelty of not being allowed to have one and being forced against your will to carry to term under penalty of law because of someone’s Biblical perceptions. The notable thing about the Bible, as scholars like Reza Aslan and many others have said, is that it means whatever you want it to mean, and you can find verses in it to support almost any point of view. But it’s interesting that it’s mainly those with no other argument that do so.
You seem really upset about those bleachers. Why not build them for girls too?
That’s the point: it is all opinion.
One side wants to enforce laws to compel the behavior of others on the basis of that opinion, and the other side wants to allow people to be free to follow the course of their own conscience on the basis of their opinion.
It’s as if some religious group wanted to prevent anyone else from eating their idea of unclean food.
In my opinion…no. The law doesn’t provide for exact restitution in that kind of way.
If I wreck your car, you can sue me for the value lost; if I have to sell my car to make up that money, that’s my choice. But a judge can’t order me to give you my car.
The “coin” of restitution is money, not objects.
In this hypothetical, the victim dies and the assailant gets done for murder.
No-- one side wants to force it’s definition of “people” on the other side. Guess which side that is. 
In what universe are they morally equivalent? Who is raping her? If her doctor can’t get to her abortion until next month, is he morally raping her until then?
I’m sorry but I don’t see the equivalence.
That’s correct; the pro-life side is attempting to compel others to treat a pregnancy as a “person.”
Meanwhile, if someone else wants to believe their own pregnancy is a person, they have every right to it, and no one on the pro-choice side will ever make any effort at all to compel them otherwise. The pro-choice side is against coercion and compulsion – almost by definition.