In your example we do not allow people to exercise rights that they cannot exercise for practical reasons. We do, however, allow them to exercise their right to live, because they can.
Is what you are saying that you support denying a fetus the right to live, because the fetus cannot exercise it on its own? To my mind that would be a better argument than to flatly say the fetus has no human rights.
If you have followed this thread, you know that I agree with you in regards to the early stages of pregnancy.
So why not for the late stages? I believe that two things have changed by then and both are equally important:
The embryo has become a human being. An abortion is now much more “expensive” because it now requires to kill a human being.
The woman has made a choice when she decided to continue the pregnancy beyond the first trimester. The new human being is not dependent on her body due to some accident but because she made it happen. It is a responsibility she has assumed, and I do not find it unfair if you are made to bear a responsibility fors six months once you have *willingly *accepted it.
If a late-term pregnancy would somehow come upon a woman without her having had a say in it, my position would be different.
No one has a right to your bone marrow (or as others have pointed out to your kidneys). The difference is that you have never assumed that responsibility. When you register as a donor an then do not donate, no patient will be off worse than if you had not registered in the first place.
A different situation would occur, if you were the surgeon performing a kidney transplant. Then you could not walk out in the middle of the operation and point to your right to personal freedom, because your patient would definitely be off worse for it. By starting the operation you assume a responsibility, and you know that your freedom is going to be limited until you are done. That is fair, because no one has forced you to start it in the first place.
I think that’s been stated or implied repeatedly - it’s the forced imposition on another person that we object to. It’s you and others who have tried to argue that the fetus has or should have human rights and/or personhood, in trying to support this imposition.
Make it abortion-on demand up to 4.5 months with no restriction, and after 4.5 months with a broad “medical necessity” exception and convince people that you will not demand more or sneak in useless “regulations” to hamper on-demand, and I could see that as an acceptable compromise. Not in Canada, mind you, but most places.
I do see the forced imposition and I am not taking it lightly. I am arguing the personhood of the fetus, because without it the decision would become more or less a no-brainer. Placing the burden of continuing an unwanted pregnancy upon a woman when such a measure does not protect the rights of anyone would obviously be unjustified.
When we assume that a developed fetus is a person (and thus has rights) the question becomes one of balancing these rights against the rights of the woman. Only then does my argument make sense.
I believe that a good legislation should provide for a compromise between the right of the woman to decide about her body and the right of the unborn child to have its life protected. The first trimester rule currently in place in my country represents such a compromise - that is why I support it. If another country after careful weighing of the rights of both parties came to the conclusion that 4,5 months is a more suitable period, I would not argue with them. I lack the detailed knowledge about prenatal delevlopment I would need to come up with my own assessment of the “perfect” cutoff point, so I have to trust the lawmakers with that.
I entirely agree with the medical necessity exception and I do not claim that a medical necessity is only given when the mother’s life is in danger. For legal abortions the state should ensure that
[ul]
[li]every woman who requires an abortion can find a qualified doctor who performs the procedure[/li][li]every woman who requires an abortion can afford it[/li][li]women have access to qualified and unbiased counseling on the pros and cons of an abortion, if they require it[/li][li]no one has the right to interfere with the decision of the woman for or against a legal abortion[/li][/ul]
German law on abortion contains another clause that I support:
For doctors and medical staff the participation in abortions should be on a voluntary basis. That means no doctor or nurse can be fired from their hospital for refusing to partake in an abortion. That exemption only covers participation in the procedure itself, not pre- or aftercare. And of course in case of an emergency everyone is obliged to help.
When it comes to someone else using my health and wellbeing in order to support their own health and wellbeing, yes. We don’t have mandatory organ donation. We don’t require you to donate blood. I’m not required to billet the homeless in my home - even if its 20 below zero and its likely some of them will freeze to death - or share my food or my money with them. I’m not required to stop to save someone’s life if there was an accident on a busy freeway, putting my own life in danger. I’m not required to jump in to save someone from drowning, putting my own life at risk. I’m not even required to give my own kid a kidney or bone marrow if there is a match to save their life.
All of this is true. Yet you are required to feed your newborn baby, to keep it warm, look after it, protect it and give it your attention. Every parent will tell you that this is no small burden and yet we require you to do it. Why do you think we can do that? Should we not do it?
That should probably be a warning sign of the weakness of your argument; reliance on labeling.
“I want to stop people from eating fish.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“We’ll call them ‘sea kittens’.”
“Oh, that changes everything. Nobody should eat kittens.”
If it’s the woman who determines if counseling is required, fine. Rather than “pros and cons”, though, make it “procedures and risks” so she can give informed consent, as for any medical procedure.
Presumably much as the pro abortion crowd feels about cannibalism.
Either animals and humans are different, morally, or they are not. If they are the same, then abortion and meat eating and cannibalism are all equally wrong. If they are different, then abortion and meat eating and cannibalism all need to be judged on their own merits.
Incorrect. If my argument relies on something that is true, that is not a weakness. I have given my reasons for why I believe it is true, so it is not an unsubstantiated claim, and it certainly amounts to more than merely “labeling”.
You are free to claim that it is not true, a claim that I would of course ask you to back up. So far I have not seen you make that claim.
Actually, we don’t - as long as I legally surrender my child to the state, I’m not required to do these things. If I can’t do them, I’m ENCOURAGED to surrender my child. The state is not interested in me not doing these things and would rather have the child in foster care.
Indeed. But surrendering your child to the state is something that cannot be done from one moment to the next. If you feel “this is all too much”, you can call social services or whoever is responsible in your country. But you still have to continue looking after your child until someone else does. So I repeat the question: Why can we ask that of you?
It takes fifteen minutes. I call a crisis line, someone picks up the kid fifteen minutes later. That’s a temporary solution, it takes longer to transfer parental rights. They even tell me that if I’m afraid I will harm the child, I should just walk out of the house and leave the child there.
(And to be clear, I know this because my son was adopted through an agency that also ran crisis nurseries - so for years I’ve been donating to and been active in an organization that provides this service).
Ok, I take your word for it. I have no personal experience with that system.
What I was getting at is that the state/society hold you responsible for the well-being of your child. The reason why we do that is that at some point *you have decided *that you want to assume that responsibility knowing that it will be yours at least for as long as it takes to transfer it to someone else (which apparently is only 15 minutes as I am finding out to my surprise).
The important fact from my point of view is that the state has not *imposed *the responsibility upon you. You have assumed it. This is where my stance on abortion comes from. Once you have agreed to continue a pregnancy beyond the first trimester, you cannot say that anything has been forced upon you. Not if you were free to make that decision.
But how do you know I’ve agreed to my pregnancy beyond my first trimester? When I conceived my daughter - after years of infertility, I wasn’t aware I was pregnant until the second trimester. Years of infertility meant skipped periods were normal. Fatigue was explained by having my adopted son who was a baby, home. And I’m not alone, I know a lot of women who due to undependable menstrual cycles missed their first tri.
There isn’t a blinking flashing light for a lot of women informing them they are pregnant. Its easy to get to eight weeks without knowing it - and then you only have a few more before that first trimester is done - maybe not enough time to come to terms with it and makea HUGE FUCKING DECISION on whether to terminate or not.
By the way, I expect when a child is unwanted, a woman is far less likely to be aware of the pregnancy during the first trimester. She isn’t expecting to get pregnant, so she isn’t watching it, and when you really want something to not be true, your brain will help you rationalize it (well, I broke up with my boyfriend, that was stressful, stress will cause you to miss your period, right?). Also, when you are talking about high risk pregnancies where drug and alcohol abuse are involved or the woman is living in uncertain circumstances or women who are very young - tracking your cycle is not something that women tend to do.
Are you making a case for giving women more time? That would be a different approach than to say there should be no limit on abortion, because the rights of the child do not count.
As you have seen in this thread, I am all for letting women make an informed decision. I believe that for the majority of pregnancies the first trimester is enough time for that. If you can make a good case demonstrating that there are cases where it is not (and I believe you can), I am open to making exceptions.
However - the “huge fucking decision” should be approached with the appropriate care. It is a huge decision not only for the mother but - depending on the outcome - also for a child. Allowing a child to come into being is not a side issue and should not be treated as such.
Provisionally “yes”… it depends how “comes with” is defined. It might be a label that we apply particular significance to, but the decision whether or not to actually apply the label in the first place is pretty much an arbitrary one.
I realize there are a lot of caveats and no small amount of hedging in the above, but if the end result is " a fetus is a person, therefore no (or restricted) abortion", then I’d consider that faulty reasoning.
On further reflection regarding “person” arguments, let’s say a fetus is legally a person from the moment of conception. When has a person ever had the right to residence inside the body of a second person, against that person’s will? In previous instances where “person” was extended to a previously “unpersoned” group, or when a group’s personhood was going to be taken seriously, it was to extend rights that already existed, i.e. women get recognized as persons so they can now vote, own property, or run for public office - all of these being rights that already existed but were only available to a subset of the population. Similarly, corporations are recognized as legal persons in order to let them exercise rights already possessed by individuals. Extending personhood to fetuses creates new rights not otherwise in society, in this case to parasitically leech off the body of another against that person’s will.