You’re right of course- men are never denied the right to have a foetus removed from their bodies! It’s not fair! :mad:
Total agreement.
Way back when, in the 1960s, I didn’t pay much attention to the issue. I confess to exercising male prerogative and not really caring about something that would never affect me personally.
My wake-up call came when a fundamentalist Christian (laughingly so-called) set fire to a women’s clinic building here in San Diego. That showed me what the higher issues were: right-wing terrorism at its starkest and ugliest.
Since then, I’ve made the effort to educate myself about the issue, and now hold the issue of personal bodily autonomy to be a foundation-stone of my philosophical views. But my political views were formed by my opposition to the criminality and evil of the extremists on the other side.
(Show me a pro-choice terrorist, and I’ll reject them and their political base also!)
I do understand that. But the problem is that this runs into a fundamental biological difference: the way new humans come into being is by starting inside a female body – not a male one. Your implicit point that men don’t have to balance the rights of a developing fetus against their right to bodily autonomy is absolutely valid, but it’s also not a matter of human design – rather, a matter of the design of humans.
Besides, Bricker does believe in forcing a male to give up their bodily autonomy in that he feels that forced blood and organ donation should be enforced by law to save the life of your child.
The feminist (and true, IMO) answer to this is that reproduction has been used as a tool in the large-scale efforts for the near-complete control of women and their bodies throughout history – women have been told by those in power how and when they can use their bodies, and men have not, or at least not nearly to the extent that women have. And one side of this issue, again IMO, is on the side of continuing this effort to use force of law to control women and their bodies, even if not to the great extent of the past.
Shifting gears slightly, I’ll assume you’re of the mainstream pro-life crowd (and please correct me if I’m wrong) – that is, I assume you don’t believe rape victims should be forced to carry their rapist’s child. If so, then you don’t believe that this developing fetus’s rights override the right to bodily autonomy of the mother, because she was raped. I take it a step further – no developing fetus’s rights override the right to bodily autonomy of the mother at all… whether she was raped or not, it is always the woman’s decision whether to continue her pregnancy.
Part of this issue is trust. If you’re in that mainstream pro-life crowd, then in some occasional circumstances (rape, incest, risk to life, etc.) you trust that the woman has the wisdom to make that decision for herself and her body. I just take it a bit further, and say that in all circumstances the woman has the wisdom to make that decision for herself and her body.
If you’re not in that mainstream crowd, and hold that rape victims should be forced by law to carry their rapist’s babies, then this argument is probably not valid.
While I agree with you, I’ve always felt it best not to hold up the rape exception as meaningful or indicative of hypocrisy on the part of the pro-life movement. I believe it is actually contradictory to the moral values held by nearly all pro-life advocates, and that it is included in the litany solely because, without it, they lose a very large proportion of their supporters.
It is a “strategic concession,” made, not out of moral belief, but out of political necessity. The “art of the possible.” They really would rather not exempt even the child of rape (for how is the fetus supposed to partake of punishment for something it had no possible responsibility for?) but they have to offer it as a part of a working consensus-building compromise.
For many at least, and perhaps most, I believe it’s a sincere concession. I think most pro-life people just can’t imagine denying a rape victim the right to end her pregnancy. Perhaps because they think about their wife/daughter/sister/mother, or perhaps for some other reason, but I think that’s a sort of moral ‘common sense’ thing.
For me the concession would be political and practical – rape and incest pregnancies amount to less than 1% of all abortions. I would be willing to save 99 unborn children at the cost of losing one – especially given that the alternative is to continue losing 100.
But the reality is that as terrible as the thought is of being pregnant with the child of a rapist, the child himself or herself is utterly innocent of that, or any, crime.
Imagine a mother who is not sure if the father is her husband or the rapist – so she waits until the baby is born, sees proof it’s the rapist’s biological child – and then kills the newborn. No matter how heinous the crime visited upon her was, I assume you agree society should criminalize that action.
So, too, do I feel that society should protect the unborn life. But I recognize that this is a matter on which it would be impossible to gain public support, and since it amounts to such a tiny fraction of the cases, as I say, I’m willing to see the law grant that exception.
If you were King, and a slim majority supported it, would you prosecute and imprison doctors who performed abortions for rape victims?
No.
OK – then I’m curious what you think of my argument in post #1605, which I think applies to you.
I see - you offer them immunity to testify against the mothers, then?
If I were King, I would sanction doctors that performed such abortions with fines, and suspensions of their medical licenses, but not with prison. So I think I fall outside the parameters of your argument.
No. See above.
The morning I awake to find Bricker is king is the morning I know that there is no God, and He hates me.
OK. I think that’s a very evil view, but that probably doesn’t surprise you.
No – because you don’t regard the unborn fetus as a human being. If you did, I doubt you’d still find it evil.
Actually, my views about abortion have nothing to do with the fetus, and everything to do with individual rights to bodily autonomy. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not the fetus is considered a human being (and biologically, it’s certainly human). Everyone has the right to expel anyone or anything from their bodies, at any time and for any reason, regardless of who or what it is and how it got there, IMO.
I find it incredibly evil that anyone would mandate, by force of law, that pregnant rape victims carry their rapist’s babies.
Incidentally, I also consider it evil to force anyone who does not wish it to remain pregnant, but for rape victims it’s ‘more evil’, IMO.
The problem, for me, is that pregnancy is really sui generis. Most pro-choice arguments, even those that derive from premises that I would entirely agree with, tend not to acknowledge that. It is one of those truly rare situations in which there is really no comparable analogy, at least I can’t think of one. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t still arrive at the same conclusion (especially if you believe that the fetus is not a human being), but it just doesn’t lend itself well to analogy.
I agree with Falchion’s characterization of pregnancy as sui generis – but even so, I’ll attempt an analogy.
As a general principle, the law does not compel us to render aid. We can walk right by a victim who’s drowning, for example, and suffer no legal consequence for the failure to throw the victim a rope.
But that’s not always true. In particular, parents have a duty of care to their children. A parent cannot legally walk right by his drowning minor child without a reasonable attempt to offer aid.
Because the unborn child is in fact a child, in my view the pregnant mother cannot simply assert her right of bodily autonomy. She owes a special duty to the child, at least until the child can be cared for by others and she can rid herself of parental rights.
And in my view, bodily autonomy trumps the rights of an unborn child. That special duty to protect her child does not manifest until birth.