Sure, but they didn’t consent to the crash either, and that was just a result of the physical universe we live in, where alcohol clouds judgment and dulls reflexes. They didn’t crash intentionally, but they intentionally put themselves in a situation where a crash was likely. Likewise, we live in a universe where sex frequently results in conception.
I could see where there might be a parallel cultural divide here: the anti-abortion crowd is also more liable to think “the primary purpose of sex is for procreation”, while the remainder are perhaps more likely to think (as you do) of procreation as an uninvited and unpredictable side effect of sex.
Yes, I agree. I think it’s likely that most drunk drivers don’t want to get into a crash, so they didn’t consent to getting in a crash.
You seem to be using the words “consent” and “intent” interchangeably. They aren’t the same concept.
No, I don’t think that pregnancy is always uninvited. Some people do want to get pregnant, so those people are consenting to get pregnant. But we don’t limit ourselves to the issue of consent when deciding what to criminalize. That’s certainly a factor we use, but it’s not a deciding factor.
But in any case, when someone hasn’t consented to an outcome, such as pregnancy, then it doesn’t make sense to state that they have consented.
They’re certainly related. I posit that consent is implied when there is intent.
But what does it mean to say that someone intentionally engaged in some activity, but doesn’t consent to a predictable outcome? It’s just magical thinking to say that we can arbitrarily separate actions from consequences.
It could be that we differ on the precise semantics of consent. I view it as more than just a mental construct, divorced from reality. You can’t consent to sex in the first place without an understanding of the physical reality of sex and the possible consequences, including children and disease.
You can still consent to sex, while understanding that you might get pregnant, and not consent to actually being impregnated. Sex is a normal human activity. It’s not just for procreation, or recreation, it is, for most people, as natural and necessary a part of human existence as eating a variety of foods.
Women don’t consent to becoming pregnant merely by partaking in normal human behavior.
Further, the issue of consent is immaterial. A woman might decide to get pregnant and later change her mind. It’s her body, and anything or anyone inside her stays inside only with her permission. If she decides she wants it or him or her out, she has the right to get it out, for any reason and at any time.
We might be using the terms differently then. Generally, in the legal system, for something to be a crime, you have to meet all the elements of the crime. And usually (but not always), you have to intend to meet each element. However, consent is usually used separately (either as a separate element, in which case it’s lack of consent) or as a defense. You’re certainly under no obligation to use the terms this way, but that’s where I’m approaching this from.
Here’s a few examples. Let’s say I go outside and hit some random person. I intended to hit them. They did not consent to being hit. That’s illegal. But, let’s say later, I go in a boxing ring and hit someone. I intended to hit them, they consent to being hit. And it’s not illegal. That’s a case where the determination of criminal activity is dependent on consent.
Now, let’s say I go out and offer to sell people shares in my business, but I do it in such a way that violates securities laws. It doesn’t matter that my presentation was on the up-and-up. It doesn’t matter that every single person consented to buying my shares. It doesn’t even matter if everyone made a ton of money. I’ve still violated the law, even though everybody consented. In this case, consent is irrelevant to the illegality.
But it’s not a predictable outcome, at least with the technology we have. It is more or less unpredictable whether or not sex will lead to a pregnancy. We have ways of reducing that unpredictability, but there’s no way to eliminate it (as of yet).
Ok, but there are people who don’t know that sex can lead to pregnancy. What about those people? If we’re not going to use legal definitions (which is fine), then how can someone consent to an outcome that they have no idea about?
Maybe. I don’t have a strong position on the subject, but as I said I think it’s a point on which reasonable people can differ. “Sex” is normal human behavior but “sex without pregnancy” is a fairly recent invention.
So what is your opinion on the Violinist-analogy-with-consent? Is there no moral problem with disconnecting the Violinist partly through the process, even if I agreed to it with sound mind?
The law doesn’t recognize any such absolutist position on abortion or anything else (drugs, suicide, etc.) and to consistently declare that a woman’s body is an inviolable temple requires a fairly hardcore libertarian bent.
One thing which has always confused me: why does this line of thinking stop at the boundaries of the body? Few complain that parents are obligated, under threat of liberty, to dedicate a large portion of their personal resources toward the welfare of the baby. Under other circumstances we’d call it slavery. Liberty is not just about what goes into my body but in addition what I am forced to do with my body.
Not really. The Romans used a specific plant for abortifacient contraception, and used it so much that it became extinct. It has been speculated that the shape of the sylphium seed is the origin of the “heart” shape you see everywhere today in connection with love, e.g. on Valentine’s Day, which looks nothing like an *actual *heart.
As for condoms, they were first documented in the 16th century (but could well have existed before that) and although they were initially devised to try and prevent the spread of smallpox one wagers people didn’t need to be Gassendi to puzzle out their other properties.
ETA : and of course, to quote the movie Rob Roy there was always “a crone with a twig”
Right; and the law recognizes that there are degrees of intent. If I shoot a gun at someone and kill them, it matters immensely if it can be shown that I really wanted to kill them and took actions toward that end (loading the gun, etc.). If it can be alternately shown that I thought the gun was unloaded and was just playing around, the charge might be degraded or thrown out.
My point is just that there’s a gray area here and that people can differ. Pregnancy is not an absolutely inevitable result of sex, especially with contraception taken into account, but neither are they totally causally disconnected.
For the most part, we call these people “children” or “intellectually disabled” and the law recognizes that they can’t consent, which is why we have special protections for them.
Right. Which is why medical treatment isn’t available for people who got into car crashes, since they obviously deserved whatever they got and gave it implicit consent, and thus should learn to live with it ;).
Like I said, a fairly recent invention. “Normal human behavior” was well established hundreds of thousands of years ago, so anything a few thousand years ago is recent. Reliable contraception is of course a very recent invention.
No, it is normal human behavior, and one we’ve evolved for. Human females unlike other species don’t have easily detectable fertile periods, and we have very low fertility compared to a “sex is for breeding” species like cattle. We are evolved to have lots of sex, most of which won’t result in a pregnancy; sex without pregnancy is the norm, not the exception for humans.
As I said, we seem to make a distinction between predictable, expected outcomes vs. the converse. When you get into an accident under normal conditions, we accept that there was no intent, and that the accident could not have been reasonably foreseen, and so there’s no cause to deny you freedom. When alcohol is involved, we say that you cross a threshold, and that you should have foreseen that the alcohol would degrade your abilities, and therefore we do have the right to deny your freedom. It is a fairly subtle distinction but it’s a well recognized one.
But there doesn’t appear to be any algorithmic way of making these decisions. We didn’t have to draw the DUI line exactly where it was; that just happened to be the place where it settled on over time (and of course the line has moved throughout history). Abortion is more divisive and although reasonably settled legally is less so among the population.
You can’t separate one from the other. “Humans have lots of sex” combined with “humans have fairly low fertility” still means “humans engaging in normal sexual behavior have a high probability of causing a pregnancy within a fairly short timescale”. It is predictable over time and couples that want a baby despite trying for many months correctly conclude that something is wrong.
Ok, sure. You’re using the term intent a bit different than it’s used legally, but it’s close enough that I’m not going to quibble. But nowhere here have you mentioned the issue of consent. Because consent and intent are not the same thing.
I didn’t say they were disconnected. Of course there’s a cause-effect here. But simply because one thing can cause another thing, that doesn’t mean that you have consented to the second thing.
Nah. I’ve met lots of people who were competent adults and didn’t understand this concept. I was shocked at first, but it happens. That’s my own personal experience, though, so I can’t really defend it on a message board.
Most pre-modern women probably ovulated fewer than 50 times in their lives. Most of their adult months were annovulatory due to pregnancy or exclusive on demand breastfeeding or low body fat from periodic starvation…or infertility.
Modern women who are not pregnant and/or breastfeeding should consult a physician if they haven’t spontaneously conceived within 12 months, but there’s no reason to assume that our ancestors A) figured out the link between sex and baby all that long ago or B) were even as fertile as our modern “low-fertility” fat, non-lactating women.
Y’ain’t been on Yahoo Answers much, huh? Sure, some of the people who don’t get the link between sex and pregnancy are children or disabled. Others are just undereducated, or think you can’t get pregnant your first time, or when she’s on her period, or if you douche with coke afterward. Do you really want to force the morons to breed by denying them access to abortions?
Since there isn’t any written record you can’t know, and certainly not assert what people hundreds of thousands of years ago thought about sex, nor that they didn’t have ways to end or cut pregnancies short.
Furthermore, “normal human behaviour” of thousands of years ago, or even two thousand years ago simply isn’t normal human behaviour today. Why should anybody care one way or the other ? The past is a different country, with weird foreign customs.
Oh, OK. Which is why people who get into *DUI-caused *car crashes are denied medical assistance, have to live with the consequences etc.
I’m probably missing something here, but how is this not doing exactly what I was talking about in the OP?
Why can’t the pro-lifers say, “Oh, swell, sure, women are people too. That means we should prosecute women who have abortions for murder, because what they did was the moral equivalent of stabbing their fully conscious and intelligent Siamese twin because they were tired of dragging her around everywhere”?
Maybe not that exact argument, but the point is, “women are people too” has absolutely no chance of resonating with pro-lifers, because to them, from what I understand of their reasoning and beliefs, it’s completely off the point. Why bother using it on them at all?
Absolutely – pithiness counts for a lot! One can’t help but be pithy when many profess that fetal personhood is not only absolute and unarguable fact, but it begins either at conception or perhaps earlier (which is why contraception is a form of murder!). Whereas the personhood of the adult mother seems somewhat doubtful, since some have proposed or enacted laws that make abortion illegal even if the pregnancy is the result of rape or if it condemns the mother to excessive pain and suffering or even threatens her life. Mind you, once the child is born, it’s no longer their concern. Many of the states with the strongest abortion laws were the same ones opposed to public funding for children’s health insurance, and they correlate well with the group of states that declined the ACA Medicaid expansion option. There’s enough irony there to fill several pithy volumes.
One can’t help but be pithy when many profess that fetal personhood is not only absolute and unarguable fact, but it begins either at conception or perhaps earlier (which is why contraception is a form of murder!). Whereas the personhood of the adult mother seems somewhat doubtful, since some have proposed or enacted laws that make abortion illegal even if the pregnancy is the result of rape or if it condemns the mother to excessive pain and suffering or even threatens her life. Mind you, once the child is born, it’s no longer their concern. Many of the states with the strongest abortion laws were the same ones opposed to public funding for children’s health insurance, and they correlate well with the group of states that declined the ACA Medicaid expansion option. There’s enough irony there to fill several pithy volumes.