This is a slight risk, which can be rather easily challenged with DNA.
The idea that any significant number of doctors who perform abortions will particularly care who signs a permission slip, and why they sign it, strikes me as rather silly. By definition, doctors who perform elective abortions are pro choice, and thus unlikely to be interested in following such an anti choice law in anything more Thanh the most perfunctory manner.
The permission slip means, “sure, maybe it was me.”
The child support depends on a paternity test.
Life is risky. For something like this, the risk is trivial.
Not necessarily. Certain jurisdictions, such as under the UCMJ for the military, have you on the hook once you agree that you are the father even if a paternity test shows otherwise later. Mind you, that was the situation about two decades ago, but the point is that the law can be a harsh mistress.
That’s why I’ll never take the law as my mistress.
Civil disobedience like this example isn’t just for that moment and that instance. If dozens and hundreds of men and women are arrested and imprisoned for going around this unjust law (especially with sympathetic circumstances, like rape and incest, that a women might be unwilling to report to the law), that will send a message of its own that helps change hearts and minds against this bill. Just like being arrested during the civil rights movement sometimes helped the movement.
If it were to pass and survive legal challenges, of course.
According to The DNA Diagnostics Center You might run into a problem with how long the test would take:
If this law causes more people to use DNA testing the waiting list will of course become longer, and I can see lawyers contesting the use of quicker private labs in an attempt to stall the process.
A great many of us are opposed to anti-prostitution laws for pretty much the same reason.
A great many of us are opposed to military conscription, too.
Meanwhile, the other items you list are punishments for crimes. Being pregnant is not a crime.
A child, male or female, is a human being with all the rights afforded a citizen, and is entitled to support from BOTH their parents, by law.
A fetus is not legally a person and is entitled to nothing.
That’s the difference.
Society is an exercise in drawing lines for what you can and cannot do. Those lines include compulsion to do things. For instance if you have a child you are legally obligated to care for that child and society will compel that care if it has to (e.g. garnish your wages for child support payments).
Nothing new there.
The question then becomes how far society should take it. Where are the lines drawn between what society wants you to do and what you want to do? There is no particular reason abortion can’t be outlawed. If society deems it should be then it is.
In the end it is a philosophical and ethical discussion about how society should function. There will always be disagreements about where to draw the lines.
That seems logical to you because, I assume, you don’t think the embryo or fetus is a person with its own interests, deserving of protection. I don’t agree with you about the status of the unborn child so I also don’t think it makes sense to “leave it up to the patient” when the lie of a third person is at stake.
The common element is that they would both be illegal. That’s all that matters for the analogy to work.
Abortion provider is to abortion as drug supplier is to drug. One obtains ones drugs from a drug supplier in the same why one obtains an abortion from an abortion provider.
[quote=“Trinopus, post:119, topic:779456”]
. Helping them find freedom is admirable, not reprehensible.QUOTE]
Um, why?
From my perspective, the morally admirable thing to do would be to inform on women you think are planning to have illegal abortions, not to help them commit a crime.
If you think helping someone kill their (unborn) child is “morally admirable”, you clearly have a very different view of morality than I do.
One is about ensuring the right to evict an unwanted presence inside one’s body, which requires the aid of a doctor. The other is about the right to put something in one’s body, which doesn’t require such aid.
Emphasis added.
You are entitled to your perspective. But its as unviable as most of the extreme prpo-“choice” arguments. Outside of pregnancy doctors routinely make decisions which are adverse to the interests of individual patients but in the best interests overall, with nary an eyebrow raised. In Triage medical professionals decide who, when and how to treat; often leaving patients in distress or withholding treatment, to ensure as many as possible get best care. Tumor Board might decide against treating an elderly patient v a young one. Transplant lists decide, basically who gets an organ and who does not. You think those are wrong too, since a third (and a fourth, fifth, sixth…) person’s life is at stake?
As far as pregnancy is concerned, there is a line where the interests of the unborn outweigh those of the mother. Where that begins, well hard to say. Its clear at the beginning of a pregnancy to be weighed in favor of the mother and at the end towards the unborn; but elsewhere, its a judgement call
Putting drugs in one’s body doesn’t necessarily require aid. Further, my “control” quote was about making sure nothing goes in that’s not wanted, rather than ensuring that everything wanted goes in.
In any case, maybe I’m wrong on drugs, in relation to this issue. I’ve put a lot less thought into it than abortion. I’m as confident as a person can be about my position on abortion.
OK. That’s different from what you originally said, but at least now your objection makes some sense.
On abortion, are you OK with elective abortion at any time during pregnancy?
For myself, the primary difference is that I have a very different view of a fetus than you have. A fetus prior to about twenty weeks is as sentient as any other bit of human tissue–skin cells, blood vessels, sperm, bone marrow. The shape of it, or its potential, confers no moral weight to it: moral weight lies in differentiated sentience (this algorithm subject to scrutiny once replicable AI programs come around).
Add to that the question of whether people are obligated to help others. This is an area where I disagree with lots of abortion rights folks: I do think there are times where you’re morally obligated to use your body to help a specific person, so I’m not a body-autonomy absolutist. However, folks who are, have a significant disagreement with you along these axes.
If you propose things differently–if you ignore these two differences, and think we’re saying that it’s morally admirable to assist in infanticide–you’re just wrong about what the difference is.
I don’t see how it’s different, but whatever.
Yes. I’ll note that my position, philosophically, is only about the right to end one’s pregnancy. Depending on medical technology and the time into a pregnancy, this may or may not require the death of the fetus.
Is that to say that a woman requesting an abortion at, say, 6 months into her pregnancy would be required to induce labor so that the fetus would not be killed?