I addressed that already. The child is not guilty of rape and does not deserve a death penalty for someone else’s crime.
No, I’m not nit-picking. I’m filling in some missing steps between “implanted, fertilized egg” (your first definition) and Richard Parker’s point that “egg + sperm in vagina” is equally valid under your definition of “will naturally turn into a human being unless it’s artificially stopped or nature prevents it from happening”. We can fill in more spaces, if needed.
But women deserve to be forced to carry their rapist’s child, a continuous reminder of her rape, apparently, along with increased risks of death and many other medical dangers. Why do raped women deserve such treatment? How do you believe the government should punish raped women who end their pregnancy (whether through drugs, back-alley abortions, or self-injury)?
No, they don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve to be raped in the first place. But if you consider the embryo to be a human, that human’s right to live trumps the mother’s distress. I really don’t see how you could possibly reach a different conclusion (again, IF you consider the embryo to be a human).
Of course inconvenience can trump death. If there’s a trespasser in your home and you call the police to remove him, and he dies after being tased, you are not a murderer and you still had the right to get him off your property.
It’s not nonsense despite your pre-emptive attempt to label it such. Do you have the right to remove an unwanted presence from your property, yes or no? Is the personal imperative higher with your body than with your property, yes or no?
Not if the “unwanted presence” did not have a choice of not being on your property, and its removal from your property will be its death.
I know of no legal or moral requirement to recognize these conditions, and it’s fairly easy to craft a scenario in which they are defeated.
I should add that if you know of a law or statute that requires a property owner to offer shelter, I invite you to share. Also, if you know of a law or statute that imposes criminal or civil liability on the property owner regarding what happens to an unwanted presence in the act of removal or after removal.
If I drug you and drop you off in Terr’s living room, he cannot legally kill you as long as he’s aware that you are incapacitated. You’re on the wrong side of that particular argument.
He has the right to remove me, though, right? He is not legally obliged to tolerate my drugged presence in his home for months, is he, whether he understand or cares about the extent and nature of my incapacitation or not.
I’m comfortably in the right on this.
As long as “removing” you doesn’t involve killing you. Especially if the killing is deliberate.
International Law of Naval Warfare:
For obvious reasons, this means that a military must provide shelter in their ships for enemy combatants, even if they did not put them there.
As for morals, imagine someone in a sailboat who discovers a kayaker swept out to sea; the kayaker has been at sea for, let’s say, a week. It’ll take several days for the sailor to get back to shore, and they might even fail to complete their world record sailing trip. If the sailor refuses to rescue the kayaker by taking him aboard and feeding him, do you believe the sailor is in the clear? Would you consider the world record so obtained to be free of stain?
I certainly wouldn’t.
For me, the vital question is personhood. At the point where a fetus attains personhood, the person carrying the fetus has some moral responsibility attached, just as the sailor who finds the kayaker, or the naval captain observing shipwrecked combatants, has a moral responsibility attached.
I reach a different conclusion because I believe the right to determine who and what gets to remain inside your body should be inviolate.
Personally, the only thing that ultimately matters is when you feel that the fetus becomes a person enough to protect it. For some people, its at conception. For others like me, its much much later. That is the biggest influence in how I feel about abortion. Since I see a fetus much like a hair or a fingernail, I don’t care what happens to it, I don’t have any particular reason to protect it, nor would I ever even consider according it any rights at all.
Sure–the best we can do is to approximate, and to set an arbitrary bright line.
You’re making a common error, which is to assume that because something is on a continuum, the best thing to do is to adopt an extreme conclusion. This is why many people, on observing that geographers have no exact, objective standard for what a mountain is, decide to call anything a fraction of a millimeter above sea level is a mountain. It’s why so many people, recognizing that children’s maturity and political understanding happens on a continuum, agitate for changing the age of voting from 18 to the moment of conception.
But it’s wrong to do in all three cases. When something is on a continuum, and we need to set a bright line, it makes more sense to set an arbitrary bright line somewhere in the gray area than it does to set an “objective” bright line at an extreme.
Well, let’s say Terr calls the police, i.e. he brings in some professionals, and in the act of removing me, they kill me. Is Terr guilty of something?
If a police officer shows up and says to Terr, “I’m sorry, if I remove him, it might kill him, so you’re just stuck with him,” does Terr have any recourse?
Make it a vessel at sea, a shipwreck survivor, a storm, the Coast Guard. Terr radios the coast guard, says, “I have this dude on my ship, but frankly, I just noticed that he has terrible lice, and I want him off my ship.”
The Coast Guard says, “Sorry, dude, until this storm blows over we can’t get to him. It might be three or four days. Don’t share a comb with him.”
Terr throws the guy overboard to his death. Okay?
Of course not.
There are very, very limited circumstances under which we face the dilemma of keeping an unwanted person on our property, or condemning them to death. I can’t think of any real scenarios where this happens, and where we think it’s all right to condemn them to death.
The key feature is that they’re a person.
You are changing the analogy so that it no longer is similar to an abortion. This is more like what happens if the baby dies during delivery. In an abortion, the killing is intrinsic to the procedure itself, not just some accidental byproduct.
Good, a case on point. Given the historical (heck, current) hazards of sea travel, I have no objection to the requirement - in the very specific circumstance that justifies its need.
I’m sure I’d have a negative opinion of the sailor. I’m not keen on making it legally required for him to render aid (if it isn’t already).
I’m indifferent to the personhood issue, myself. Attaching it at birth is just fine -trying to go back earlier requires an arbitrary definition, and even if the fetus is a person, I don’t see why a person gets to impose in this manner on another person. The passed out person in Terr’s house is a person, that doesn’t mean he has to tolerate that person’s presence. Sure, there may be legal procedures for the removal, but Terr can seek those and I’ll gladly defend his right to do so.
I don’t have a choice - there aren’t any situations that are exactly analogous to pregnancy, or at least none that are plausible (the “violinist” premise is physically similar in a very limited way but also far-fetched), so naturally whatever analogy I can present is going to have some variance from pregnancy. In this case, the homeowner wants the unwelcome guest removed. The homeowner does not wish this unwelcome guest to remain. If they’re at sea, fine, the homeowner (boat-owner?) will have to wait.
So? She wants to end her pregnancy. I don’t see a reason to block her, or deny her access to whatever procedures are safest for her. If she’s eight+ months along and demands an end to her otherwise unremarkable pregnancy (I have no doubt that many women suffering the physical and mental stresses of pregnancy have made such demands , whether they meant them or not), I expect her doctor will react accordingly.
Why must he follow legal procedures for the removal? If the legal procedures require tolerating the person in his house for a few hours or days, is that all right with you?
I do think there’s an important difference even here: having a critter living inside of your body and feeding off your blood is orders of magnitude more invasive than having a dude in the cabin of your ship or crashing on your couch. And I think there’s a reasonable argument that no person should be required to share their circulatory system to anyone else, even if they might be required to share their sailboat with someone else.
But I don’t think the “guy on the couch” analogy is persuasive at all, since I’d pretty much never support you if you intentionally killed a person in the process of getting them out of your house–and, failing a life-threatening burglar as the intruder, I think most folks would agree that that’s not okay.