It’s a good point, the analogy doesn’t scale. Henry Fonda can’t be obligated to make this his life. I do see the points the other posters made that the triviality of doing it just for one person is a big part of the point, but I didn’t pick up on that at first.
I like this one more. The answer is no, of course.
This is similar to the previous example, but I would change it to “you volunteered to attach yourself to the violinist” which makes it consensual. That doesn’t mean you consent to staying attached. You can find that the procedure is harming you, or you can just decide that you don’t want to do it anymore. Consent can be withdrawn at any time, it’s not a one-way switch. 50 no’s and one yes means yes, but 50 yes’s and one no means no. Consensual sex becomes rape the moment one person decides they don’t want to do it anymore and the other refuses to stop. These help explain why the question of personhood is irrelevant. You can’t be forced to donate your kidney to your born child who will die without one, but forcing someone to remain pregnant is giving special rights to fetuses that born children or even adults don’t have.
Yes but parents consented to accept those obligations. Consent to having sex doesn’t mean consenting to getting pregnant. Consenting to getting pregnant doesn’t mean consenting to staying pregnant. Even consenting to giving birth does not mean consenting to care for the child afterwards. Similarly, you’re aware of the risk of getting into a car crash whenever you drive, but that doesn’t mean you consent to getting into a car crash.
These really bother me, and I’m so sorry to hear about your experience. For all the pearl-clutching over late-term abortions, they represent only like 1% of all abortions to begin with. This is because those are almost always wanted pregnancies that had to be terminated for medical reasons. And this is exactly why they shouldn’t be legislated. Punishing someone for doing something they didn’t want to do but had to do to save their own life, even after the fetus is already dead(!), is so many kinds of wrong.
As the person who said it, yeah, pretty much this.
What I was trying to convey was that, in my limited experience, abortion was something that women felt forced to pick, out of fear or concern about the alternative (e.g. an unwanted or unhealthy pregnancy). It’s a “choice” in the same way that evacuating a burning building is a “choice” - the circumstances largely compelled the action.
Although, in retrospect, and after reading this thread (and coincidentally seeing some online social media about the topic)
I appreciate this correction.
Much, perhaps all, of the “tragedy” associated with abortion is intertwined with the social construct that makes it shameful and sad. If we had a healthier view of the medical procedure, we’d eliminate that stigma.
While I think that life begins at conception, I don’t think it’s sentient life. And a zygote is not a fetus is not a baby. So the idea that we are “killing a person” when an abortion occurs is nearly always nonsense (and better access to medical care is the key to early detection of pregnancy, and pregnancy abnormalities, so that problematic fetuses can be aborted before they become too far developed).
Your comment sent me on a train of thought that may be a hijack or may be very relevant to this thread—I haven’t decided yet.
Your implication seems to be that the only obligations we have to other people are the ones we freely consent to. Which reflects the individualistic nature of modern Western (“WEIRD”) culture. We place a very high value on individual autonomy, perhaps moreso than any other human culture in history.
I include myself in this. I too am a product of this modern Western culture, and I too find it natural to rank individual autonomy higher on my list of values than probably most people living in other times and places would.
If you see me lying sick unto death on the street and the only thing that will save me is the touch of your finger on the cell phone you’re currently using to photograph your latte, I feel comfortable saying I do have the right to have you to call 911 to get help.
The problem with the analogy is that it’s too trivial a task, and it involves an entirely formed person. Abortion is different, it’s a very onerous task, and involves something that isn’t a person, but could some day become a person.
Gonna disagree. At some point, yes you are obligated to stay attached. The idea that you owe society and other people absolutely nothing is not one I agree with.
A woman late term is absolutely obligated to bring that child to term in a healthy fashion. Frustrated or bored with carrying it, I don’t care. We can balance that social obligation elsewhere, but it’s absolutely an obligation at that point.
Parents are also obligated to provide financial support, and honestly personal support, to the children that are born. Again, you are a shitty, bad person if you do not do this. Yes, we have state resources, but those requires taxes, which are another obligation of society.
I am a proponent of a sliding scale where it is 100% the choice of the parents of the fetus/whatever early on, and the choices become progressively fewer as it develops. So some of these analogies don’t hold, you encur more liability the more time that passes.
I agree with this. I also understand that late-term abortions decided on a whim (i.e., in the absence of some catastrophic medical condition) are exceedingly rare, if they exist at all.
What a shitty take. You think women get abortions late term because they are bored or frustrated? They almost always get them for much better reasons than that. Their own health or life is at risk, the newborn would suffer and die unnecessarily, decisions you have no business making for anyone else.
Hard disagree. This is how we get laws that say a woman carrying a dead fetus can’t have it aborted because mumble mumble something something Jesus maybe? If staying attached is KILLING YOU then how can you rightfully be obligated to go through with it? That’s the equivalent of “I know you say you don’t want to keep having sex but I’m just so close right now I have to finish.” That’s rape, and forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term that they don’t want anymore is the same. It means bodily autonomy is nullified. Putting yourself at risk to save another may be virtuous, but it should in no way be required.
I also don’t see how it means “you owe society and other people absolutely nothing.” It sounds more like you owe society your body, but society owes you nothing in return. No thanks.
If the fetus viable and can be delivered rather than aborted, then there’s an argument to be made there, and my understanding is that the medical profession generally opts for delivery in that case. However, cervical issues discovered later in the pregnancy, or not wanting to have one’s belly cut open are still completely valid reasons to terminate. Since all late term procedures, whether delivery, caesarean, or dilation and evacuation are highly invasive and potentially risky, they’re not something being done on a whim, and they should only be the purview of the woman and doctor, not politicians and busybodies.
That’s a lot of moralizing. A state that forces a woman to carry a pregnancy to term that she doesn’t want, AND which requires the parents to support that child is a totalitarian dystopia. Let’s go ahead and disallow the parents from ever divorcing just to complete the picture. That’ll fix everything, right?
A state that can force someone to not have an abortion is a state that can also force them to have an abortion, since bodily autonomy is not respected. It’s a state that can force them to donate a kidney, or liver, or who knows what else. If that state doesn’t also offer to take on the obligations of raising an unwanted child, then they’re being massively hypocritical on top of being unjust. That’s what’s shitty.
I just fundamentally don’t understand why some people have more empathy for fetuses than women.
To see someone, especially someone who has never given birth, trivialize the experience of pregnancy, labor and delivery like that is disheartening to say the least.
By the time you get to the late term then the woman has had multiple opportunities to decide whether or not she is all in.
We have an all volunteer army. It is still possible to desert such an army. Because at some point you have to see through an obligation.
My advocacy of a sliding scale has been already chosen by many. I am an advocate of people having complete freedom of choice early in the pregnancy. Later on that choice has already been made available, then the obligation needs to be seen through. A woman who is eight months pregnant with a baby who is viable outside the womb should not be able to abort that baby. She is simply too late, the same as she is too late once the baby is born. Please don’t pretend that while rare, that this sort of thing is impossible. Some women still dump newborns in trash cans.
We have to come to terms that this is a gray area of law and we have to draw the line as best we can. I’m sure stridency and absolutes are more satisfying to people on either side.
It’s almost impossible, if not actually impossible, to find a doctor who would provide an abortion for an 8-month pregnant woman, unless there were serious extenuating circumstance – fetus is dead or severely malformed, mother is in danger of dying, etc.
So, please take your unfounded hypotheticals elsewhere. Laws that would prevent that kind of abortion, which essentially doesn’t exist for a woman who is just tired of being pregnant, instead stop women with real health problems, or with fetuses with real health problems, from getting the medical care they need.
Of course, none of this is relevant to the analogy that this thread is about.
In California at least, parent are allowed to drop off a baby they cannot support or do not wish to support with a delegated government agency. A very good policy.
I think a better analogy is as long as Henry Fonda touches you you keep living knowing if he stops touching you you will immediately die. If he stops touching you, is he guilty of murder?
I think the point of the analogy is to say even if your life required the least invasive use of someone else’s body imaginable, you still don’t have the automatic right to use someone else’s body. So with a pregnancy which is obviously an extremely invasive use of someone else’s body; of course the right to life doesn’t trump someone else’s right to bodily autonomy.
This is a perfect summary. We also don’t force people to give of their body to someone they’ve injured. If I shoot someone and get arrested they don’t make me donate my blood to save the person. If I get drunk and hit someone with my car they don’t take one of my organs away to save the other person. Very few people would want to live in a society like that where my body and its components can be forfeit in the right circumstances.