So? You keep saying that as though it matters. It doesn’t. My body doesn’t stop being mine when I get pregnant, and I’m allowed to reserve my organs for my own personal use.
Then imagine if someone handed you a newborn baby and said you had to take care of it, or it would die. That would put even greater demands on you and your body than just being pregnant. Now, in order for your moral code to be logically consistent you would have to believe that you were well within your rights to kill that baby, as that too would be hijacking your body.
Moral choices span a broad spectrum from “it’s clearly bad for society and everyone agrees it is wrong” (eg premeditated killing of an adult human being) to “it’s none of society’s business and most people think it is just fine” (eg. oral sex between husband and wife) with lots of gray area in the middle.
In the clearly bad case, I’m fine with having laws and I’m fine with imposing the (vast) majority’s opinion on the tiny minority who think otherwise.
At the other extreme, I am constantly amazed at how much conservatives want government to intrude in our private lives (repeal the oral sex laws now!).
Abortion is somewhere in the middle and complex enough that I don’t trust politicians to decide it. Let the woman and her doctor decide. Sometimes they’ll choose something different than you or I would choose - but I prefer that to the all-powerful state that you apparently prefer.
“As Thomson recognizes, this analogy is most applicable in cases of rape.” Not quite as applicable in pregnancies that result from consensual sex.
The analogy also breaks down after viability because you are no longer merely removing extrivating yourself from the life support system, you are killing the violinist.
Well, there is the death penalty which I vehemently oppose, but others find morally correct. That’s premeditated death that some people seem cool about. There is not enough evidence that a fetus’ right supersede the mother’s to make a hard and fast law. There is enough evidence that individual human’s do have such rights. That’s the vague area I am referring to! As much as you proclaim it’s not vague- it actually is.
There are many situations that are evolving and vague. Take same-sex marriage. I would never force a religious institution to recognize or perform such marriages, but I believe the govt should sanction it.
No that is not the point of laws. It’s to protect individual rights from the untoward actions of others or the government. Everyone can have their own moral code with in that broader context.
She is certainly well within her rights to say “no, not doing it” and put the baby down and walk away.
Heck, even if she accepts it for a time, she’s also within her rights to say “no, not doing it” and walk away up to a certain point in states with Safe Haven laws. Or through the mechanism of adoption.
We allow doctors and patients to make all kinds of difficult moral decisions. Any reason to think that they could not handle this choice too? In other words, do you think there is a massive pent-up demand for late-term abortions that would turn into a flood if we allowed doctors and mothers the choice?
Invalid argument, in my mind, mostly because it pre-supposes that you are being FORCED to support the comatose violinist. With a pregnancy (EXCEPT in cases of forced sex, such as rape, etc.), the person wasn’t forced in the initial decision that resulted in the pregnancy.
A better thought experiment, and more useful to the deeper discussion, would be one in which you make a choice that RESULTS in your being forced to support the violinist. Say, for example, you were a drunk driver, and the resulting auto accident resulted in the violinist becoming comatose. Now are you more morally obligated to sustain the violinist?
I totally thought that whole Violinist analogy was going in a different direction. I thought it would talk about how, everyone can recognize that someone is a concern violinist simply by listening to them play. Much like, everyone can recognize that a baby in her mothers arms is a person. Both represent one end of a spectrum.
At the other end of the spectrum - you have someone who has never played a note of music. If you give them a violin and a bow - the do not instantly become a concert violinist. Sure - they have all the necessary parts - a violin, a bow, arms, fingers, a brain, etc. But without a lot of other things happening (years of practice, training, etc.) - they most certainly are not a concert violinist. There is a continuum along which they progress from being a novice to a concert violinist. In much the same way, when an egg and a sperm get together, they now have the necessary parts (well, dna mostly) to make what will eventually become a person. But countless things need to happen first for that potential person to become an actual person.
Well, I’d have to imagine it, since that doesn’t actually happen. And apparently you have to imagine pregnancy, or you’d never have typed up any of the rest of that silly drivel.
In your opinion how does the act of birth make a baby more capable of thinking reasoning and self awareness? I assume you are not OK with killing newborn babies right?
But if someone (as many "pro/life"rs do) believes that abortion is equivalent to murder, then surely you can understand that they don’t feel they can simply stand by and let other people have the choice of murdering what they believe to be innocent human beings, just like you wouldn’t make homicide legal just so that other people can decide for themselves whether they want to kill someone or not.
I would like to point out, once and for all, that I am in fact very much pro-choice myself. I’m even tilting in the direction of being pro-parental-right-to-infanticide (in some cases only). I think WhyNot summed up my own opinion pretty well, perhaps with the exception that I don’t really care if the mother has an absolute right to be rid of the child or not, but only about the consideration and appraisal of the interests of the mother and the foetus (and anyone else involved)
Except the point is, at the point where abortion is legal, the foetus is NOT a baby. There’s a third option here you’re not considering. That you can believe a late-term fetus = baby, but that first-trimester fetus is NOT a baby, and so it’s fine to eject them if they are in the mother’s body against her desire or ability to bear a child.
This whole “what’s the dividing line between a baby just before birth and just after birth” is a total smokescreen. We don’t abort babies just before birth, so that question has nothing at all to do with abortion - it’s an emotional misdirection.
Someone in the BBQ pit gave the absolute best point to the abortion discussion I’ve ever seen: if you are saying that by engaging in sexual congress you are consenting to pregnancy, then by the same reasoning, by entering your car and traveling any distance in it, you are consenting to be in a car crash.
I think the question is whether we can legally force someone to stay connected. While there may be some moral duty to stay connected, there is generally no duty to rescue except in some limited relationships (parent/child relationship just happens to be one of those along with innkeepers and trainconductors/fligth attendants).
This situation is different because the pregnant woman was not abducted in the middle of the night unless she was raped and she is doing more than simply disconnecting herself if her fetus is viable.
I do not prefer an all-powerful state. I think all forms of consentual sex between adults should be legal, and I think that is a clear cut case of “private morality” if ever there was one. But the reason for it being a private matter is that it doesn’t harm anyone; abortion on the other hand could, if you take the stand that a foetus is morally a human being, harm, and in fact kill, someone, which takes it right out of the private sphere of free choice. If you take that stand, that is. You and I, it seems, at least agree that as the interests of the mother who doesn’t want to be pregnant overrides the foetus’s interest (if it can truly have any) to stay alive and not experience pain, the harm caused by allowing the abortion is less than by forcing the woman to have the child.
What I’m really trying to say is that we cannot expect people who are against abortion because they consider it infanticide to respect or support the pro-choice cause.
By that logic I shouldn’t allowed to get treatment for food poisoning, since after all nobody forced me to eat that hamburger. How dare I have those poor innocent bacteria poisoned!
I never said anything about a willingness to abort that leads to poor decision making, but rather that women who abort are prone to poor decision making, which is basically me repeating what you said. There is a rather direct correlation between unintended pregnancy rates and abortion rates. It’s not a stretch to believe that, taking what you said at face value, that if we look at who obtains the majority of abortions that women who make impulsive, short-sighted decisions would obtain more than their counterparts on the basis of them becoming unintentionally pregnant more often than their counterparts.
It’s not? I’m sure you wouldn’t think that way if you were aborted.
Rape accounts for less than half a percentage of all abortions. Even if you assumed double that (1%), we’d be talking about a minority of women. Even if you times that by ten, you’d still only be talking about 5% of the women in the surver. Furthermore, I’d be interested in seeing something which shows that rape victims are more likely to abuse their children, because I highly doubt that is true. At all.
I didn’t say you said abortion makes women abusive. I said that women who have abortions might be predisposed to being abusive.
I dare say, at least in the U.S., abortion attitudes have returned to their pre-1973 levels, so it’s not much of an argument to the contrary.
Lack of abortion access doesn’t reinforce poverty.
Yet the unborn are not afforded self-determination?
If a thread ever pops up about a Jehovah Witness denying their child a blood transfusion when it would save the child’s life, I’ll be sure to remind you that the government should stay out and let the child die, all the while accusing anyone of disagreeing to be socialists
