I can entirely respect this. I’m extremely creeped out by the ‘even if the fetus is a person, my body, my choice’ rhetoric. Your argument, by contrast, makes sense to me even if I don’t share it- we just disagree about the moral status of the embryo/fetus.
The bodily autonomy argument is the reason I’m pro-choice. Anyone and everyone has the right to remove any thing or any person from inside their body, no matter how it got there, at any time and for any reason. Yes, that goes until the end of pregnancy. Yes, I trust women (and their doctors) to make the decision for themselves, and not anyone else, such as the government.
It doesn’t matter if a person took an action (like having sex) that might result in pregnancy. They still get to make the choice for themselves on what goes in, and what stays, inside their body. Taking responsibility, in my opinion, means making the choice in a reasonable period of time. But even if someone is irresponsible, they still have that right.
I am absolutely OK with creeping out the ‘other side’ on this issue. I think this is one of the issues that there’s just not much common ground between the two sides. And I’m OK with that.
Ask them to prove the existence of a human “soul” without resorting to scripture. Since that cannot be done, then arguing about “fetal personhood” is strawman fallacy and it can be easily dismissed.
Does that mean that they are going to change their minds and become “pro-choice?”
No.
But it does mean that any future arguments have been curtailed by their failing prove one of the basic premises of any potential argument.
Sometimes that’s about a close to a “victory” as you are likely to achieve.
There are very distinct differences between ecclesiastic laws and secular laws, even if the two happen to agree (happily) in basic issues of ordinary morality.
You and I might both agree that murder is wrong…but we are likely to have extremely different beliefs about why murder is wrong.
Attempting to blur this distinction is a facile and fallacious effort to elevate religious values as “universal” values. It is often seen in the attempt by Christianists to put The Ten Commandments forward as the basis of the laws governing our democratic society.
“With all due respect, this is a silly argument.”
Trinopus it’s unclear to me why ‘the embryo has a soul, starting at conception, which makes it a human person deserving of protection’ is substantively any different from a moral position like ‘people have an intrinsic right to free speech and freedom of the press’. neither is necessarily a religious position, both of them are moral positions (and ones that a lot of people disagree with). imposing a particular moral view is what governments do, by their nature.
In this case, I think that the embryo is a human person deserving of the same protection from murder that the rest of us enjoy.
Revealed by . . . ? Not God, at any rate.
It depends what kind of fetal personhood we’re talking about: the religious idea of the soul, or just the idea that an embryo should be considered a person because it has many of the characteristics of a person.
For the former idea, the burden of proof is on those claiming a soul. If you wish to believe souls exist, fine, but you should also accept that church and state are separate. For the existence of souls to inform law-making, then evidence should be sought.
Obviously it doesn’t work quite like that in very religious countries like the US, but that’s the ideal.
For the latter idea, we can gain an understanding of what aspects of personhood an embryo acquires at what point in development. I mean things like self-awareness, experience of pain, episodic memory etc.
While we can’t see through an embryos eyes we can draw some conclusions – I can’t see through your eyes, but I can say with some confidence if you lost your whole occipital lobe in an accident, you would not be able to see. Likewise we can draw some conclusions from observing the development of the fetal brain.
So it’s quite feasible to draw a line somewhere and say “Up to this point enough characteristics of personhood are absent that we do not consider this a person yet”.
BrainGlutton I don’t necessarily want to turn this into a religious debate, but yes, revealed by God.
Once you use the word “soul,” you have gotten into an inescapably religous position.
If you strike that word, and simply use the word “legal person,” then you come closer to having a valid point. However, at that point, it is no more than a legislative dispute over legal terms. We can define the “age of personhood” as freely as we can define the “age of majority.”
In either case, the matter is squarely dealt with by the U.S. Constitution, which affords us freedom from religious-based legislation and also protects us in our private personal dealings.
Trinopus OK, then I suppose we now have a debate about whether legal personhood should start at birth or at conception.
Birth. Making it at contraception contradicts the entire modern secular idea of what makes someone a legal/moral person. And if actually taken seriously and applied such a standard would kill people (because among other reasons it would forbid organ transplants) and create a great deal of misery.
One you reduce “personhood” to just being meat that isn’t dead yet, you’ve thrown out everything that actually makes a person of moral value and are rejecting any remotely modern, rational standard. You’re declaring that what matters aren’t thoughts or emotions or feelings or memories; that all that makes something a “person” is the meat.
An attitude which far from being protective of life, is generally quite good at dehumanizing & devaluing people and producing a general disregard for life.
Agree with you Der Trihs, but just to add: there’s no reason to have the false dilemma of choosing conception or birth for personhood. We could set it at any stage of gestation.
Or, like today in many (most?) countries, consider an embryo to be a legal person only at birth, but have restrictions on abortions in the latter stages of pregnancy anyway.
So it’s not like the two options are only “embryo is just lump of tissue” and “zygote = person”.
This was part of why Roe v. Wade was a sensible compromise. It forces each side to give up a little of what they would prefer. It permits early abortions, but puts limits on later ones. It takes into account the growth of the state’s interest in the matter as fetal development progresses.
It also starkly reveals the unwillingness of one side to accept reasonable compromise.
Trinopus The vast majority of abortions are early term ones, so it’s hardly very much of a compromise.
Not only is abortion in the first trimester available for essentially any reason, but your side is even unwilling to allow things like ultrasound laws whose purpose is to try and strongly discourage women from having abortions (while leaving them legal).
Sorry, but that’s not much of a compromise to me. (I’m not sure there really is much ground for compromise).
Why would we want to force women to undergo a procedure that neither she nor her doctor deems as necessary? Why would we want the government assigning medical procedures against the wishes of the patient or her doctor?
And, during the early term, the fetus is vastly less developed, and thus the removal of it is far less of an imposition on your morals. It’s a perfectly sensible compromise.
The problem is that your side is unwilling to engage. You’re practicing a “my way only” approach to a complex moral issue, and thus alienating the vast middle ground. You’ve demonized the issue. (And, yes, I agree I have also. I refer to Eric Rudolph now and then. Of course, it’s easy to demonize someone when they’re actually, y’know, demonic.)
The ultrasound laws are unnecessary garbage. That’s why its not part of a reasonable compromise. Try again
Roe v Wade *is *the compromise. The starting point was all abortions are illegal and unsafe. The *counter proposal *was that abortion is a private decision between a woman and her doctor. The *compromise *was Roe v. Wade, where an early abortion (defined differently in different states) is a private decision between a woman and her doctor and a later abortion remains illegal and unsafe.
Roe v. Wade is where the ball landed after a kickoff, and it’s about 20 yards away from goal. You want a new compromise that brings the ball even closer to a touchdown. But my uterus is not a football, sorry. This is not a sports metaphor, this is my life.
It’s really very simple. I don’t like ultrasound laws because I don’t *want *to “strongly discourage women from having abortions”. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to reduce abortions. I do very much want to reduce abortions. I want to do that by reducing the *need *for abortions. I want to increase childcare options and job training and job availability for people so they can afford to have their babies and support them, too. I want to increase education and availability and compliance with forms of contraception that are more effective than condoms and withdrawal. I want to change the culture of welfare dependence that keeps (some, few) families in a cycle of public aid. I want to make it easier for women of all ages to obtain sterilization when they want it. I want paid maternity and paternity leave for a reasonable time and breastfeeding friendly workplaces after a child is born so that having a baby isn’t a career killer.
I want to attack the most common reasons that women choose abortion, and resolve those problems so that women *want *to have their babies, and can have their babies.
But once a girl or woman is pregnant and realizes that she’s in no good position (financially, emotionally, whatever) to raise a baby? Then the last thing I want to do is to discourage her from having an abortion. Because in my experience, she’s absolutely right. Women don’t *underestimate *their ability to handle parenting, they overestimate it. If they feel like they can’t, they probably really can’t. The child is likely to end up anywhere from genuinely loved but not well provided for to neglected, abused or even killed. To force anyone who has serious doubts or negative emotions about having a child to become a parent is evil.
Not really- abortion at any stage is an imposition on my morals, because I believe that even an embryo at the earliest stages is a person worthy of respect. Any compromise that allows the vast majority of people who want abortions to get them is a compromise that’s very close to what you want, and very very far away from what I want.
Roe is the law of the land, unfortunately, but don’t expect me to be happy that it’s a reasonable compromise.