**First of all. On the issue of women’s rights, I think only female legislators should be allowed to vote. (Yes, this might give female candidates a big edge in voter support, at least when women’s rights issues are at the fore, but that is probably a good thing. ** Instead of that, such women’s choice issues could be decided by special tribunals or conventions chosen only by female voters.)
At some point a society must decide whether the taking of one’s child’s human life is a crime. In ancient Rome (I’ve heard – is it true?) a parent could slay his own minor children. … and don’t forget the recent lifeguards of Dubai story.
If society does take a stand, where should the line be drawn? Surely not ovulation, but even conception would disallow morning-after pills. There is the obvious slippery slope that if 3rd-trimester fetus is alive then so is 2nd-trimester child, so I prefer the dramatic nature of the actual birth to be a default legal bound on maternal choice. But I shouldn’t have a vote; only women should have a vote on such matters.
You claim that a homeowner does not have to tolerate a trespasser in his (her) home. If your analogy is to be accurate you must of course add that the only way of removing the trespasser is to kill him.
Personally, if I found a trespasser in my home and the only choices I had was to either let him stay for nine months or to kill him, I would let him stay. You claim that I’d have every right to kill him and that his rights do not matter at all. I disagree. I even suppose that in most countries you would be indicted for murder, if you killed him. If your analogy were accurate, I would be pro-life. But I am not.
Then of course, there is no such situation in reality so this analogy is not really better than mine, is it?
It is fictional - so is yours. The situation of an unwanted intruder in my home is something I have to imagine, because it never happened to me. Much less an intruder, who entered through no action of his own and must be entertained for nine months or killed in order to remove him.
As for the “utterly arbitrary” part. You are proving it is not, because you nicely summarize its conclusion:
Thanks.
Do you require an answer to the “magical unicorn” part? I’ll skip that for now.
As for the “why three months” question. That was an example. My view on pregnancy is that it can be viewed as having three stages. One stage, where we can safely assume that the embryo is not a person, because that is physically impossible for lack of the necessary neurological preconditions. A second stage where we cannot be sure if it is a person, because the embryo is now developing the neurological preconditions for personhood. And finaly the third stage, where we can safely assume that the fetus is a person, because it is no longer physically different from a born baby in any significant way.
As you know by now, I hesitate to kill a person. Hence I am against abortion during the second and third stage but not during the first.
As for the question when the first stage ends (and the statue becomes a human being) I am sure that a neurologist could give you a better answer than I can, but for all I know the first trimester is not all that far off the mark.
I agree that the rights of the mother are an important factor in any evaluation of the situation. That means we should allow the mother to decide whether she wants to carry the child to term or not. Up to this point I am sure we agree.
However, I also believe she should make that decision during the first trimester, which during every normal pregnancy should give her ample time to make up her mind. So where we do not agree is that you believe she should be allowed to change her decision at the expense of even a fully developed child as long as it has not yet been born. To me the right to change your mind just does not rank that highly.
You do not say why, though that seems obvious. Question: Should childless women be excluded? (This time please say why.)
You prefer to allow abortion up to the moment of birth, because that moment can easily be determined? Why is that a factor? For all intents and purposes that is also true for the moment of conception, or as one poster suggested earlier, the first measurable heartbeat.
This could be a decent compromise position. It pretty much is the reasoning in Roe vs. Wade.
The trouble is that, while the pro-choice side could, if reluctantly, accept this compromise, the pro-life side has rejected it absolutely. They have declared that personhood begins at conception, and the support for a first-trimester compromise is all but zero.
If we could find support on both sides for this, it could be a very workable compromise.
(I am also unhappy to say I don’t trust the pro-life side to keep to the compromise, even if they said they supported it. I would expect states to engage in further erosion of abortion rights, adding new complications, demanding the woman to jump through more hoops, all intended to delay her ability to exercise her right until the trimester line has passed.)
I’ve outlined my ill-formed views and am not over-eager to be drawn into debate. If you need more info from me, enhance my views into your guess of my more fully-formed position; post that along with any rebuttal; and I will comment.
No, I don’t claim that, or even imply it. As far as I know, with some minor and extraordinary exceptions, it is true that a homeowner can have a trespasser removed. In a similar vein, I advocate that a woman should have the choice to terminate a pregnancy, because the “trespass” is of a far more personal and intrusive manner.
It is possible, if unlikely, that a trespasser will be killed during removal, i.e. police are called, the trespasser refuses to leave, the police tase the intruder, who dies… even under these conditions, the homeowner is not culpable for the death nor does this possibility reduce the homeowner’s right to exclude the trespasser (I’ll cheerfully recognize the Maritime Law exceptions to this). It is a certainty that the fetus will be killed during the abortion. I don’t see why this poses a contradiction - you’ve already taken pains to point out the homeowner analogy is not a perfect one - and frankly, given the higher stakes of the nature of the intrusion, I still side with the woman even if it means the death of the fetus.
No, I don’t claim that. I’d be quite surprised if you could find a post in which I did claim that. The stakes are (almost always) not life-or-death for removing a trespasser. They are, for removing a fetus. I reject the attempt at forced dichotomy.
This analogy, where a trespasser will certainly die if removed from your home, is indeed not reality, but it also your creation, not mine. Do you live on a houseboat? Could you not meet with another boat or put into port for several months to safely get rid of the stowaway?
in an earlier thread, I indeed discussed (but I can’t remember if I originated) a hypothetical involving a person who discovers a stowaway on his spaceship, describing a situation where expulsion indeed meant death. That is closer to what you’re describing, and the situation is even more remote (and thus carries fewer options) than a stowaway on a conventional ocean-going ship.
It’s not mine.
The situation (less the nine-months-or-die constraint, an element you added) is happening right now; someone is calling police to report a trespasser or burglar or they’re calling animal control because of bears or they’re calling their insurance company because a tree has fallen in a storm across their property…
Perhaps we are working from different definitions of the word “arbitrary”.
No.
Why oppose on the second stage? From your description of the stages, personhood (as you define it) cannot be established with certainty. Under those conditions, you could never prove an elective abortion was the murder of a person. Were you contemplating the creation of a lesser offense for the murder of a possible-person?
I should add that the above paragraph carries the assumption that you would support legislation along these lines if it became an option. If this is not the case, then I withdraw the question at the end of that paragraph.
In practice, to my knowledge, what you describe is pretty much the norm. A woman who is going to abort is almost certainly going to do so before the end of the first trimester. Second-trimester electives are rare, third-trimesters virtually unknown. Where I live there are no abortion laws, and while a woman who dithers for eight months and then gets an elective abortion is theoretically possible, it would be extraordinarily unusual (I know of no such cases, but I’m open to cites - the Kermit Gosnell case makes for some nice blood-chilling reading, but he’s American). Meantime, what is unfortunately common is late-stage development of serious health problems in the mother and/or fetus, making an abortion the best medical choice (and hence not “elective”, as I would consider such). I find myself in opposition to attempts to ban late-term abortions because the proponents are thinking of the rare-to-nonexistent elective case and ignoring that the legislation will be a burden to the not-uncommon-and-tragic-medical-emergency cases. I’m fine with the issue being entirely a medical one, not a legal one.
I apologize. You did indeed not claim that the trespasser dies when you remove him from your home. I had inferred that, because you had used the trespasser as an analogy for abortion.
Since now you have made it clear that in your trespasser example the trespasser does not die (unlikely circumstances excluded), the whole example becomes quite meaningless to the debate. You have created a situation in which the pro-choice and pro-life stances are easy to reconcile: The homeowner gets to choose but the trespasser always lives. If that were applicable to abortions, we would not be having an abortion debate.
Why oppose on the second stage? That stage to me represents a black box. There might be a person in there, but I have no way of knowing. Stomping the box in this situation to me represents an immoral act.
As for the legal side. Your suggestion that in this case a stage two abortion might represent a lesser offense than a stage three one (where we know for sure that a person gets killed) certainly has merit. I will give that some thought.
I agree that last trimester abortions are probably very rare. But we are not debating whether they are frequent or rare but rather whether they should be allowed or outlawed.
Late abortions due to medical emergencies represent a special situation. It seems to me that there is widespread support for allowing an abortion when it is required to save the life of the mother. I certainly support that. My argument thus far refers to the vast majority of normal pregnancies. (If you want me to elaborate on how I justify an emergency-exception, please say so. I refrain from doing that here, because it seems to me that I would be preaching to the choir.)
You say that you do not want to ban late term abortions because of the medical emergency cases. Does that mean you would support a ban, if an exception for medical emergencies was made?
By “extending” you mean applying it to human beings before the moment of birth? Why do you consider that an extension, and why do you have misgivings about it? What exactly happens at the moment of birth that should make me say personhood starts there?
The big key is independence. Those of us who argue for the woman’s bodily autonomy emphasize this, for it is the point where she is no longer relied upon, and where no one places further demands upon her. The fetus becomes a baby, and legal personhood is established.
To a certain degree it’s a legal fiction, like the age of 18 bestowing the right to vote (as if someone is somehow incompetent to vote at 17 years and 364 days…) But it’s also a very clear change in the physical arrangements of things: what was inside is now outside. (Oedipus Rex notwithstanding.)
If we legally force a woman to continue a pregnancy, we infringe upon her bodily autonomy. There is no denying that. But from that it does not follow that the fetus currently residing in her body is not a person. It is not independent, but if independence were required for personhood, then what about the many people who directly depend on others for survival? A person in intensive care is certainly not independent, but it is a person. The medical staff who care for her have the right of choice (they can quit their job) but the person cared for has the right to be looked after. The law balances these rights against each other.
By denying that the fetus is a person you also deny that it has rights and thus that the rights of the fetus are to be balanced against the undeniable rights of the mother. I believe that if you want to deny the fetus these rights, saying “it is not independent” is not a good enough justification.
I disagree. In both cases, the key right is that removal, to declare that one is the highest authority (exceptions noted) in what will be allowed on one’s property and in one’s body. I want that authority over my property and body. The state will have to prove its case why I should not. I support others who want similar authority over their properties and bodies.
But the trespasser doesn’t always live. If the trespasser happens to die, the homeowner is not liable. The fetus never lives, but that’s acceptable (arguably, of course) because the the level of personal invasion is considerably higher.
I’m happy to debate if they should be allowed or not. I vote for allowed, for reasons I’ve already described and am prepared to elaborate on, and since in Canada they are already allowed (but in practice nonexistent) and no negative consequences have occurred that I’m aware of, I feel confident in my views. I’m assuming by “late trimester abortion” you specifically mean “elective late trimester abortion” in light of your next paragraph:
This is a matter I’m okay leaving to doctors, who will evaluate the degree of risk to the woman and hopefully inform her fully of same. Further, if major health problems with the fetus are discovered late-term, such that even if the pregnancy goes full term the resulting baby will be dead or dying anyway, I’ve no objection to terminating the pregnancy as early as possible if that reduces medical risk to the mother. Again, I defer to doctors to make recommendations and obtain informed consent from their patients, with no need for the intervention of legislators.
No, I do not support a ban under the circumstances that now exist. I have mentioned that a highly unlikely change in conditions could cause me to revisit the issue.
The entire point of the maritime law example is that it’s one of the rare cases in which ejecting a person from your property–indeed, refusing to accept them onto your property at all–will result in their death, through no fault of their own.
There are other examples, of course. If I put an infant out of my house in the middle of winter without making arrangements for his care–without ensuring his survival–I will be tried for murder. If I do the same thing to a comatose patient, say, an elderly parent–I will be tried for murder. If I’m having a house party, and a guest drinks herself into unconciousness, and I eject her into arctic temperatures, and she dies, do you genuinely think that I’ll be set free?
In all scenarios in which:
Someone is in my property;
They are unable to leave of their own volition; and
Ejecting them from my property will result in their death,
I am almost certain that I’ll face charges for causing their death.
I’ve spent a few minutes Googling terms around trespass, by the way. I can find evidence that people can use violence against trespassers if they reasonably fear for their lives. I can find nothing suggesting that they can remove trespassers by any means necessary. Is this what you wish the law were, or am I missing something?
So we have narrowed down the issue that we disagree on to *elective *abortions that occur at later stages of the pregnancy. You want to allow them, I do not. Let’s focus on that.
You are saying that you want full authority over your body as you do over your home and that authority outranks the child’s right to survival. Do you not think the responsibility a woman has for a child should be a factor - especially once she has *willingly *assumed that responsibility?
Let us look at the situation after birth for a moment: Once the mother has given birth and has taken the child to her home, I am sure we agree that she has the responsibility to care for it and that letting the child come to harm would be immoral. We can agree to that, because she has *chosen *to take the child into her care.
I believe that the same applies when she *chooses *to continue a pregnancy after the first timester. She has now assumed a responsibility. I do not think that anyone may force that responibility upon her, but if she chooses it herself, that makes a big difference for me.
re: Trespassing, here’s a link describing how to get rid of an unwanted house guest. The recommended legal method, if they don’t leave of their own volition, is to kill them and toss their body out the window.
–er, wait, that’s not right. Call the police, but the police might do nothing, so send them a certified letter giving them thirty days to vacate the premises. And if by any chance after the thirty days you dump their possessions on the lawn, and they get rained on and ruined, you can face a lawsuit for ruining their stuff.
And I cheerfully recognize them but didn’t want to exhaustively list them, lest my posts be reduced to 1% point and 99% qualifier.
In the general case, I have no problem with there being procedures to follow and professionals to involve when removing a person from your property. I object to the notion that removal should ever be deemed impossible.
Before I answer that, I need to know what you mean by “child”. Does it refer to a child after birth and no longer inside the woman’s body?
Also, that is not an entirely accurate summary of what I was saying.
“Willing assumption of responsibility” needs some clarification as well. If a woman learns of her pregnancy and takes a few days or even a few weeks to consider her options, has she “assumed” anything?
Not really. Regardless of the circumstances of how she came to have legal custody of this post-birth child, she has certain legal duties to it until such time as she can transfer custody (even temporarily) to someone else.
For the purpose of the argument I was making by “child” I meant an unborn child during the later stages of pregnancy. A more accurate term would have been “fetus”.
Feel free to correct me then. If I misrepresent your stance, it is not intentional.
Yes. If after having had the time to make up her mind she chooses to continue the pregnancy into its later stages, she has made a commitment. You cannot claim that others are denying her the right of control over her body, when she has made the decision herself (knowing quite well how long it was going to last).
Exactly. She has those duties, because she has made the committment to care for the child. She cannot relinquish the responsibility until such time as she can safely transfer it to someone else.
The thing is, there are zero examples I can find in which a person unable to leave of their own volition can be forcibly removed using lethal methods. There are no “procedures to follow” or “professionals to involve” that allow deliberately lethal methods to be used under such circumstances. But that’s the analogy you choose.
You seem to be treating the “lethal methods” part of the analogy as, at best, immaterial. I cannot possibly think that it’s immaterial. If the only way to remove someone from a property is to kill them (ESPECIALLY if they didn’t choose to trespass), then you may absolutely not remove them, full stop.
This analogy is a terrible basis for abortion rights. It’s a far better basis for denying abortion rights.
There are two ways in which pro-choice folks like myself may fight against the use of this analogy to deny abortion rights:
The fetus is not a person, so the analogy fails on this ground; and
The uterus is not a building, so the analogy fails on this ground.
I believe both of these things are true, which is why I don’t accept the analogy as a reason to deny abortion rights. But there’s no way at all it works as an analogy to support abortion rights.
Yes, but I didn’t choose it because of its lethality. I think I may have made one passing reference to the “defence of home” concept but other references were to accidental deaths from the use of police tasers.
This is tiresome. I expressed the point I wanted. I maintain the analogy has admittedly limited validity. I’m confident I’ve never suggested anything along the lines of a party host abruptly deciding the party was over and opening fire on the now-unwelcome guests. I will not further indulge this line of discussion.