Sure, if the legal procedures have some demonstrable value behind them (i.e. don’t touch the possibly injured person - wait for the police or ambulance to arrive, though it may take some time). On point, mandatory waiting periods for abortion procedures have no merit that I’ve ever seen satisfactorily explained (they hinge on something about how making a woman undergo an ultrasound and then have to wait 24 hours or more allow her time to fully understand the nature of her decision, or some such crap, as if she were a child with limited intelligence).
More distantly related, it’s my vague understanding that mandatory waiting periods before purchasing firearms are (or were) in place based on the assumption that someone who wants a gun now might be planning to use it to cause harm to himself or others. Debatable, certainly.
Thing is, people do kill other people who are trespassing; just wander into any gun thread and there will be passionate defenders of the right to defend one’s home with lethal force. Hence I find debates on whether or not a fetus is a person to be a waste of time. You can kill/remove a person who is in your home against your will, the stakes are certainly higher if they’re in your body against your will, so even if we decide that the fetus is a person… so what?
Call a fetus a person, call it not a person… I don’t care. Some do care and base their arguments on such definitions. That’s up to them.
Yep. Houses aren’t bodies. I get to decide, always and without exceprion, who gets to enter and who gets to stay in my body. Women should have the same right.
If you can’t find an analogy that has an essential characteristic of the original issue being discussed, you don’t get to just make one up and say it’s useful. Sometimes there are no analogies. An essential part of an abortion is that the fetus dies as part of the process, not as an accident that might or might not happen. That’s the whole issue-- if the fetus didn’t die, then things would be completely different.
I’m playing devil’s advocate, taking the pro-life position to its logical conclusion. Do not confuse that with my own stance which is about as pro-choice as you can get.
Sure, I do. Others get to ignore the analogy or dismiss it or mock or respond in any other way as they see fit. That’s part of the whole freedom thing.
And I’ll happily revisit my views if I live long enough to see the advent of transporter technology or something comparable that can remove a fetus intact and transfer it another uterus (possibly in another person, a female mammal or a machine of some sort) while posing no more risk to the woman than current D&C procedures.
Meantime, the woman doesn’t want a pregnancy and doesn’t want a child, and can address both in one procedure. There’s no conflict in this, the pregnancy is simply the more immediate problem. If she doesn’t want a child but already has one, there are legal procedures for her to transfer off custody. They make some time, but the steps are in place.
I’m arguing against the ideas you are describing. Whether you personally believe those ideas is not really my concern. Advocate away.
Well, you’re free to call my analogies whatever you like. I recognize the limitations of using something that isn’t pregnancy as an analogy for pregnancy, but at least I’m way ahead of pro-lifers who seem to have a profound blind spot when it comes to recognizing that there’s a woman in the situation at all. Even if they can’t bring themselves to sympathize with an unwillingly pregnant woman, describing an unwelcome visitor in one’s house is readily graspable and far more plausible than blood-tethered violinists.
Ok, well, it seems we are at an impasse. That’s ok. I have moderated my position a bit and it was from talking to you and Dork and Hiker, and a few others, so it was an interesting discussion for me at least.
You are creating a strawman out of an extreme example – outright infanticide – that no one here has ever defended. The assertion that a newborn infant is not materially different from a fetus is yours, not mine. We’ve already discussed why birth is a necessary demarcation point in law. Gestation itself is a continuum of constant development, beginning with something that is clearly not human by any sane definition, and ending with something that clearly is. At any instant in time you can point to its stage of development and say that it’s not materially different from what it was several days prior. This is a rather pointless truism, belying the fact that over a larger time interval it is materially different, in the same way that a chicken is materially different from an egg.
A related argument against abortion has sometimes been raised in terms of the fact that these same cultures have also at times used access to abortion to terminate fetuses simply because they were determined to be female. Yes, well, this is the same culture that engages in “honor killings” where a man will kill his own daughter because her skirt was too short. Don’t get me started on these demented savages. But this variation on the abortion argument seems to be an attempt to raise a kind of syllogism fallacy – “because a savage culture does ‘x’, therefore ‘x’ is savagery”, and this does not logically follow.
The basic thinking of anti-abortionists seems to be that just because something is sad, unfortunate, or even perhaps morally objectionable, it should be illegal. History is littered with the catastrophes and the unintended consequences of attempts to legislate subjective morality. I would venture the opinion that any woman who considers an abortion to be an unreservedly happy occasion has something wrong with her, but that’s not a matter for the police or the courts. But let me respond specifically to this statement of yours: “My wish is that people would just admit that sometimes the lesser of two evils is the best option available.”
OK. Sometimes the lesser of two evils is the best option available. Actually I’ve said it before, probaby more than once, and it’s very much on point. An abortion is a difficult, emotionally wrenching and intensely personal tradeoff that seeks to balance a very complex mix of many different factors that occur in a wide variety of different personal situations. None of which are anyone’s business, because fundamentally the purpose of any law is to protect a compelling public interest, and there is manifestly no public interest here to protect, other than the basic civil rights of the woman. How do I know this? Because one can observe that progressive societies which allow abortion at some or all stages of gestation seem to be surviving quite well and maintaining a high degree of social compassion and social order, not degenerating into some latter-day Gomorrah of moral turpitude. Indeed by and large they tend to be more compassionate societies than stridently religious or sanctimoniously moralistic ones. Anti-abortionists are left having to either assert the nonsensical fiction that an embryo is a sentient human being from the instant of conception, or else base their argument on the banal emotional projection that it will eventually become one.
I would only partly follow you on that.
A woman, without doubt, should have the right to self-determination. That includes the right to decide whether she wants to carry a child to term or not.
In an accidental pregnancy she did not have the option to exercise that right by deciding whether she wanted to get pregnant in the first place (hence “accidental”.) So I advocate giving her that right during pregnancy by allowing her to have an abortion - but not without limits. Once the woman has learned of her pregnancy and has been given the opportunity to make an informed decision, if she decides to carry the child to term, she assumes a responsibility. And once you *willingly *assume the responsibility for a child, I believe you cannot abandon it, regardless of whether the child still lives inside your body.
I have never liked the trespasser analogy. To my mind it has two major flaws:
[LIST=2]
[li]It works from the assumption that an unborn is a person from day one of pregnancy.[/li][li]It asserts that the personhood of the unborn is irrelevant.[/li][/LIST]
Allow me to modify your analogy to illustrate my point:
While you are out a delivery man drops a statue in your living room. You are informed that if you keep the statue there for three months, it will magically turn into a living human being. If you allow that to happen, you must keep the human being in your living room for another six months or it will invariably die.
I believe that if you decide to throw out the statue, you cannot be blamed. You did not ask to have it put there in the first place. But if you decide to let the statue become human and then kill the human, you are doing wrong.
I’ve always thought the pro choice argument in favor of allowing abortions was garbage on its on. It makes presumptions about ones conception of the world that are left unsaid and unresolved that make a huge difference on whether choice is a viable option or not.
I am in favor of women being able to choose, but that is due in large part to my understanding of the nature of a fetus. I don’t consider a zygote or later fetus a human being of the same standing as say, a 5 year old. Same goes for a woman like Terri Schiavo who’s a vegetable and is no longer “there.”
It takes a certain threshold of self awareness to be considered a human being imo, one that a fetus has yet to reach. This is not limited to human beings, if an alien landed on earth and was a sentient being I don’t think it would be OK to just kill it on a whim. IF I did consider a fetus to have the same sentience and moral weight as a 5 year old, then I would NOT be in favor of a womans right to choose, because she would be terminating not merely a fetus, but a sentient human being, and there would be more than just her life in the balance that warranted some ethical restraints on her choices.
But I don’t view a fetus that way, and frankly, I don’t think the OP and most of the pro life movement does either.
Here is a question to ask such people. A doctor performs an abortion of a fetus of 4 months. Do you consider his actions murder? Is killing a 4 month old fetus morally indistinguishable to killing a random person on the street?
If yes, then it seems to me your only sensible position is to be against abortion. If you do NOT consider that the same act, then you do NOT consider a fetus the same as a sentient human being. It is worse to kill a fetus than an ant, because even though the fetus is not yet sentient, it has the potential to develop that quality, and snuffing it out before it can blossom into that kind of human being is a sort of tragic thing. But it’s still not worse than killing the same life 10 years later, because that would be snuffing out not just potential, but an ACTUAL sentient creature.
I think the proper position for pro lifers ought to be to minimize abortions as much as possible by persuading people to choose other paths. But still allow people to get them.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify my point.
A sperm cell’s DNA is a subset of the father’s DNA; therefore, the sperm cell is part of the father’s body. An unfertilized egg’s DNA is a subset of the mother’s DNA; therefore, the unfertilized egg is part of the mother’s body. A fertilized egg’s DNA is neither a subset of the father’s DNA nor a subset of the mother’s DNA; therefore, the fertilized egg is part of (or rather, all of) someone else’s body.
It would be more accurate to say that a fertilized egg’s DNA is *both *a subset of the father’s DNA *and *a subset of the mother’s DNA. If it were neither, the biological mechanism of heredity would not work.
The resulting DNA is not really a new body. You could call it a construction scheme for a new body, since it carries genetic instructions that are necessary for the creation of that body. But it should be noted that the vast majority of these genetic instructions are already in the DNA of the sperm and the egg.
I don’t see this as an accurate assessment, but I’ll write more about this later when I am at a computer.
It doesn’t work. Given two banal and commonplace situations that are lightly comparable (a woman with an unwanted pregnancy; a homeowner with an unwanted intrusion) that are happening in thousands of places just in the US. just today, you introduce magical statues that come to life, which has never happened, anywhere.
What it illustrates to me is how you feel about abortion, not any kind of rational argument pro or con.
For those who refuse to believe that pro-lifers are sincere, do you believe that YEC-ers are sincere? I find the pro-life position* much more defensible than the YEC position. It seems to me that if you accept people as sincerely believing in a YEC world-view (and I see no reason not to), then it’s hard to deny that at least a good number of pro-lifers are sincere in their belief.
*subject to the things we are discussing in the other thread, that is that the person holds the position constantly w/o the “rape or incest” escape clauses.
Hmm - what a dilemma. My scenario does not work for you, because there are no magical statues. And yours does not work for me, because it involves what I consider to be a false analogy. (An intruder into your home is a person - an embryo, when entering a woman’s body is not.)
If it illustrates my feelings about abortion, that is something. As to why you feel that I am not being rational I would like an explanation.
