Well, I am aware how babby is formed, as well as how girl get pragnent :). Personally, I’d consider such people incapable of giving consent, even if the law does not give them special consideration.
I’m not sure why you would think I’m opposed to abortion; in fact I consider Roe v. Wade a pretty good compromise specifically because it does not endorse absolutist positions on either fetal personhood or body rights.
If a person thinks that a woman is a person with equal rights to a fetus, then they should think that abortion is a complicated issue involving competing rights. Do the pro-lifers you talk to view abortion that way? Or do they dismiss any notion of the rights of the woman and only focus on the fetus?
I’m not the one that brought up “normal human activity”; I was just responding to it. Regardless, sex has been fun since humans have existed. And regardless of when humans learned the precise mechanism behind babymaking, it’s widely known now how it works except by the profoundly ignorant, young, or disabled.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. We don’t deny anyone medical assistance, but people that cause accidents via DUI lose their freedom to some degree.
And you’re responding to it by making assertions on what is or isn’t normal human activity, and what was normal “hundreds of thousands of years ago”.
Sure. That’s neither here nor there re: whether “sex without pregnancies” is such a hip new thang.
We do when we restrict the abortion rights of women who don’t want or can’t afford to be preggers, don’t we ?
And there are a great many of the first two, since so many people in our society go out their way to obfuscate the matter or outright lie about it.
The only assertions I made were that “sex” is normal human behavior and that this was established hundreds of thousands of years ago. Not exactly controversial.
To me honest, I’m not sure about the point of your quibble, and we seem to be arguing about what “recent” means, so I’m just going to leave it.
You changed the subject–nobody should be denied medical assistance, including abortions for medical reasons. It’s elective abortions that are controversial.
Which brings me back to my original point, which is not that that elective abortions should be restricted, but rather only that it is reasonable to make a distinction between purely elective abortions vs. ones from rape/medical need/etc. There is a particular pro-choice argument that goes something like “How can you make a rape exception if you think the fetus is a person? Shouldn’t a right to life trump everything?” And indeed there are some absolutist pro-life types that would agree and support no exceptions. However, others do support exceptions and there is nothing inconsistent about if they believe that informed consent is a factor in moral decisions. Personally, I agree with this particular point even though I fall on the pro-choice side on the whole.
No argument there. It’s shocking that a subset of alleged pro-lifers would restrict the one thing (education) that would genuinely reduce the number of abortions.
In a process that takes place over time, consent can be withdrawn. I can consent to sex initially but I’m not obligated to continue this consent indefinitely or until the other party is finished. People who agree to donate organs can back out whenever physically feasible.
Likewise, consent to begin a pregnancy does not mean consent to continue a pregnancy.
I must have misunderstood your assertion earlier then. I thought you were saying that humans have long understood that sex comes with a risk of pregnancy, and that we’ve got legal protections in place that disallow sex with those individuals who don’t make that connection, because only children and intellectually disabled people don’t understand that sex comes with the risk of pregnancy. (Although even that isn’t true - children can legally have sex with other children at the age of fertility, and intellectually disabled people are not barred from having sex or from having children of their own.)
This thread is spinning off into random directions pretty quickly; it’s hard to keep up.
(That was a rhetorical “you,” by the way. I’m not keeping a list of sides here. The sentence could have worked with “one” or “we,” instead.)
Been a while since I checked this thread, but I think that’s partly right. I wouldn’t say that procreation is the primary purpose of sex, but it certainly is not an ‘unpredictable’ side effect. It’s one of the essential purposes of sex, it is always a risk even though contraception can reduce it. If you engage in the act that’s desgned for procreation, you’re responsible for the outcomes of it.
I’d also say that there is another cultural divide in that (many) pro-lifers tend to put less importance on things like ‘bodily autonomy’, ‘personal liberty’, etc. than pro-choicers.
BrightNShiny it’s not that the woman’s interests in her personal freedom, autonomy, etc. don’t matter at all, it’s that they are trivial compared to the life of another human person. It’s a matter of relative priorities and which you value more.
Many of us believe that obtaining an abortion is one way of taking that responsibility. Instead of bringing an unwanted baby into the world, we end the unwanted pregnancy. That is responsibility.
Exactly: it’s a personal decision, that no one can make for anyone else.
No, it’s matter of creating a definition of “person” that makes no sense and has no purpose other than justifying oppressing women. And fails even at that; if you call a mindless lump of tissue a “person”, then you are simply creating a new category of “person” that is hugely morally subordinate to a thinking human being, such as the woman it’s inside.
Nor would a genuine person have the right to live off her body anyway, any more than someone would have the right to knock you unconscious and steal one of your kidneys.
I’ll be charitable here and assume that you think the definition ‘makes no sense’ because the embryo/fetus doesn’t have a brain. I’m a substance dualist though, not a materialist, so I locate personhood in the soul- you don’t have to have a physical brain to count as a person in my book.
I don’t agree. Neither of them is morally subordinate to the other in the sense that it’s OK to kill them. Size, independence, state of development etc. don’t change the intrinsic moral status of a person. In any case, this argument fails because you’re not weighing the life of the fetus against the life of the mother. (If that was the case, I think abortion is permissible). You’re weighing the life of the fetus against the liberty and autonomy of the mother. By any thoughtful moral calculus, life is more important that bodily autonomy, personal liberty, etc.
If the person is there because of your actions (as is the case following an act of consensual sex), and if their living off your body causes you no permanent damage, and if removing them would kill them, then yes of course they have a right to live off your body.
This whole discussion assumes some very strong, libertarian principles about personal freedom and autonomy that I simply don’t hold. It reminds me a lot of economic right-wingers who complain about having ‘their money’ taken away from them. I think that both with regard to our bodies and the fruits of our labour, very often personal liberty needs to be sacrificed for the common good and for our obligations to others.
Then that just creates a category of “person” that doesn’t deserve the same rights or considerations as a thinking person. Souls are morally irrelevant even if they existed. Except for the purpose of justifying killing; souls are a reason to care less about killing things, not care more.
They certainly do. A few cells are not the moral equal of a real thinking, feeling person.
Nonsense. Cancer is alive; that doesn’t make it the moral equal of the person its parasitizing. You destroy life every time you scratch an itch; there’s nothing particularly morally important about “life”.
They certainly don’t. And pregnancy & childbirth does cause permanent damage, anyway.
I support abortion and I’m totally unconvinced by this argument. I despise it, really.
It conveniently forgets that the fetus didn’t came out of nowhere. The usual counter-argument is “you don’t get to invite someone at your place and then kill him for trespassing”.
Sex can always result in pregnancy. That’s a fact of life. People have to take responsibility for their actions. If the fetus is a person, then you can’t use bodily autonomy as an argument, because you’re the one who put the fetus where it is.
Ony in case of rape would this argument hold water for me.
There’s no “likewise”. Consent to sex and consent to begin a pregancy are apples and sardine cans. In fact there’s no such thing as “consent to begin a pregnancy”. You don’t “give consent” when you begin a pregnancy, since it’s a completely unilateral decision. There’s no fetus wanting a pregnancy, with you wondering whether you’ll give it consent or not. There’s not even a fetus who can accept or refuse your offer of pregancy. Your unilateral action creates its predicament and it has no say in the matter.
You’re under no obligation to provide me with sex, or money, or vacations in an exotic place. On the other hand if your actions harm me or put me in jeopardy, you certainly don’t get to just walk away and wash your hands of the consequences.
If the fetus is a person, you similarly can’t walk away from the consequence of your actions. This is a concept perfectly accepted wrt the obligation of parents towards their children. A father doesn’t get not to pay child support because he “withdraw consent” after the child is on the way. If a fetus is the person in the same way a baby/child/adult is, then you changing your mind about having a baby is equally irrelevant. You created the situation, like with essentially all of your choices in life, you live with the consequences.
For the record and to answer the question asked by the OP, if I believed that the fetus was a person (for instance because it has a soul), there’s no way you could convince me to support abortion, except in case of rape. The only reason why I support it is that I believe a fetus is just a clump of cells.
“Soul” is a religious concept, so there are First Amendment issues here.
What you count as what, in your book, is really no affair of mine. I won’t try to regulate or legislate what you believe. Meanwhile, the pro-life movement needs to back off and accept that others have other books, and they can’t regulate or legislate for others, either.
Compelling others to follow your book is tyranny. Compelling them to follow your religious definitions is religious tyranny.
As an atheist this is not too difficult of a question for me. When does a fetus become a person? Let’s agree that a person is a being that has consciousness. Since consciousness requires brain activity and brain activity begins at around the end of the first trimester, I’d say the fetus becomes a person sometime after the first trimester–whenever consciousness begins. It seems silly that consciousness starts immediately after birth somehow, but it is possible, I guess.
Of course, this is entirely separate from the question of whether it is ever right to have an abortion before or after the first trimester. Rule-based and Consequentialist moralists both have a tough time with that one.
With due respect, this is a silly argument. Every set of laws embodies a moral position, and constitutes an imposition of a certain moral view on people who might or might not share it. I’d certainly agree that particularly in affairs of personal morality we might want to minimize those kind of moral impositions and leave a reasonable space for personal liberty, but preventing a human person from being killed is exactly the kind of thing where abrogating personal liberty is most justified.
There are Amish people and Christian Scientists who don’t believe in modern medicine and would leave their children’s ailments untreated. I think the law should prevent them from doing that, and should throw them in jail if they don’t allow doctors to treat their children. Is that an imposition of personal liberty? Sure, but it’s justified on the grounds of protecting an innocent child. I would simply extend that to unborn children as well, starting at conception.
‘Personhood starts at birth’ or ‘personhood starts with the beginning of brain activity’ or anything else, isn’t actually a ‘neutral’ moral view either. The law has to make some decision about when personhood starts, and I think it should draw that line at conception.