I’m not labeling you. I’m pointing out that the label you’ve applied to yourself – “pro-life” – doesn’t seem to match the positions you hold.
You seem to be saying that there’s nothing morally wrong with a woman having an abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. And that sometimes extreme extenuating circumstances may make it okay even after that point. Would that be an accurate statement of your beliefs?
That’s not even remotely an insult, it’s my observation of your ethics. It’s simply a strong way of saying you’re wrong - which I used because you are so very very wrong.
Then don’t use it.
So your opposition to abortion has absolutely no connection to the welfare of the fetus, or it’s value. If it did, you would see that a fetus that was a product of rape has the same value as one that was a product of consent.
That means that you have no business telling women whether they can abort or not. It is their private decision. The state has no interest in protecting the fetus, so it must butt out.
Suppose a woman was raped, and then she was held captive for nine months and forced to give birth. She did not consent to the pregnancy OR the birth. Would that then make it okay to kill the child after it was born? By your logic, it would. Yes or no?
But fetuses or babies are not rats. They all have equal value. Their value is not dependent on how they were conceived. So either I have the right to kill all fetuses any time I want for any reason, or I never do. To use your analogy - either I can’t kill any rats, or I can kill any, including my pet, since it’s mine.
I’m a little puzzled at your self-identity as a pro-lifer myself, Chessic Sense. It seems like you’ve pretty clearly articulated the most common pro-choice stance*: abortion is okay during the first trimester because while pregnancy is a possibility during any act of intercourse, she still has one last chance to say no to pregnancy when the test comes back +. But it’s not okay later in pregnancy, when the woman has had time to get an abortion and decided not to.
*Which I find as logically unconvincing as the pro-life w/ exceptions for rape and incest arguments. If he’s consented irrevocably to a pregnancy with sex, why hasn’t she? If she can say no at 10 weeks, why not 20 or 30?
Because the gestational process gradually turns something that isn’t a human life into something that is. A baby right before birth is not significantly different from a baby right after birth and saying that a woman can abort right up until the very moment of delivery starts to brush up against legalized infanticide.
There’s no magic moment where human life begins, so the pro-choice position is to say that abortion should be easy at the beginning of pregnancy when the embryo is a tiny mass of cells and then get progressively harder as it becomes more and more like a baby. The first/second/third trimester system is a compromise to put a workable legal framework on what is a continuous process.
It’s no different than saying that at sixteen a teenager can get a driver’s license. There’s nothing that magically happens on someone’s sixteenth birthday to make them significantly more responsible than they were at 15 and 11 months, but for legal purposes we have to pick some sort of cut-off.
I’m not sure that’s a common pro-choice argument either.
All this talk of her consent, and her having a chance to abort and deciding not to, is all irrelevant.
Pro-choice means a woman has complete control over her pregnancy and may terminate it for any reason. Roe v. Wade said that the state may intervene after the first trimester - essentially saying that the state may declare that “life begins” after that point (a gross simplification).
I don’t think mainstream pro-lifers or pro-choicers have any of this consent stuff in their thinking. Most pro-lifers thinks a “pre-born” baby has the same or close to the same rights to life as a born human, period. Most pro-choicers think a woman has a right privacy that includes the right to decide whether that’s true for herself, period.
But I do agree that Chessic doesn’t appear to be a pro-lifer at all. He’s basically said that he believes abortion should be legal in the first trimester. I’m not sure he knows what he believes.
Oh, I agree, but that’s a legal argument, not a logical one. The best logical one I’ve heard is not common. It is the foundation of my own pro-choice position. Once a fetus is viable as determined by a midwife or doctor after an exam, not a legislator, the woman should still have the right to remove it from her body, but it should be done in a manner which will have the best chances of preserving its life so an adoption can proceed, because now she’s not the only person that can care for it. I’m pro-women-shouldn’t-be-forced-to-carry-fetuses-they-don’t-want, up to and beyond birth, but if that goal can be achieved while preserving the life of the fetus, great.
**
lance strongarm**, most pro-choice people do not appear to be pro-choice up until the moment before delivery. Even pro-choice people tend not to support last trimester “partial-birth” D&X abortions except when the mother’s life is at risk, for example. Some do, sure, but not most, as evidenced by how easy it’s been to ban them.
I think most people haven’t given it as much thought as we do here in these threads and so maybe wouldn’t articulate it as such, but their actions and the legislations they’ve allowed to be pushed through without much protest tell me that most pro-choice people support limited choice based on duration of pregnancy, just like Chessic Sense.
Perhaps, but my point was that neither side is concerned with this consent thing like our friend Chessic.
The issue of consent is really a circular argument. Consent to a pregnancy is what we’re discussing in the first place - whether a woman has a right to an abortion or not. If she says she wants an abortion, THAT is the act of withdrawing her consent to it.
Perhaps, but that’s only because Chessic is not really anti-abortion at all.
Except in one case it’s a privilege of driving that’s in question, and in another it is a human being’s life.
This website has a way of circularly supporting its own identity. The SDMB thinks of itself as liberal and decent. So posters tend to scoop up anything decent and label it “liberal,” or in this case, “pro-choice.” Then when someone like me comes along and says “I’m a pro-life, conservative Republican,” posters go “AHH! AHH! Go away! You can’t possibly be decent and have those labels!”
And so no matter how many times someone like me comes along and says “I think it’s too much to ask for a rape victim to carry their baby to term,” or “No, I don’t want to shoot all poor people in the face,” this board’s members insist that I’m actually secretly a liberal or secretly pro-choice or secretly a Democrat…or a troll or a parody or whatever. You’ll still cling to your caricatures of your opponents.
For this reason, being a Republican on this board is like being gay in the 70s. “There’s no way he’s gay. He seems like such a nice person.” Perhaps instead of trying to label me pro-choice, you should just update your mental Rolodex of what (some) pro-life people think.
I have: no idea if you’re a Republican, no idea if you’re conservative, no idea of any of that. I really don’t keep a scorecard, and while I recognize your username enough to know you’ve been posting here a long time, I don’t actually remember a single detail about your or your posting history. I’m sorry. I don’t tend to form those kinds of memories about most posters, to be honest.
I certainly don’t have a problem with every Republican on the planet, nor do I think they all think alike. My confusion wasn’t because of a caricature, but because I thought you were presenting an odd point of view for a self-applied label. BUT…
…I have to apologize, because I think I misread the post that confused me, and you didn’t actually say what I thought you said. I read:
And by the time I got to the end, I forgot about the first sentence limiting this to cases of rape. I thought you were giving your blessing, as it were, to aborting fetuses before week 10 “…from rape, incest and normal intra-marriage relations.”
Which, you have to admit, would be a strange thing for a pro-life person to profess.
But that’s not what you said. I see that, with my reading comprehension turned on now. So, completely my bad, and I apologize.
Thank you for actually answering the OP for the group (pro-life people who allow for abortion in the case of rape) in question. I think you’re actually the only person who did; most of us can only speculate or report on what we’ve heard/read/observed. I actually do really appreciate hearing from someone who holds another perspective from my own.
So can you remove me from your own caricature of “this board’s members,” please?
You’ve openly said you don’t oppose abortion in the first trimester. THAT is what makes you pro-choice. It wasn’t a secret - you posted it.
Your ethical claims make no sense. They are internally illogical. And they certainly aren’t worthy of being called “pro-life.”
If you think that women should only have babies when they consent to it, that’s fine.** Aborting the pregnancy is withdrawing consent.** At some point, certainly after birth, she loses the chance to withdraw consent because they fetus/baby has a right to live after that time. I think that sums up your position, and it’s pro-choice.
Have no fear: I don’t think your position is decent at all.
You have said you don’t believe life starts until week 10. And yet you still want to make abortion illegal before week 10. I guess even the rights of the non-living trump the rights of women to their own bodies.
As for the consent issue, wouldn’t the use of birth control be a pretty clear indication that consent was not given to pregnancy? And in any case, an abortion would be an unmistakeable sign of withdrawn consent.
Many of us believe that an unwanted pregnancy involves no consent at all. You can’t withdraw something you never gave in the first place.
If the woman used one or more methods of contraception, doesn’t that pretty much render the notion of “consent” absurd?
(And even if she didn’t… If I leave my door unlocked, am I truly “consenting” to be burglarized?)
Nothing new here: just disagreeing.
(The only reason I participate in these threads is…every now and then, someone actually says something new.)
My point was that the law out of necessity assigns arbitrary milestones in situations involving incremental change.
Just trying to get Chessic Sense to think.
That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I’ve said here. I already said I don’t want the law handling this, and I prefer to simply judge you socially on a case-by-case basis, dependent upon the merits of your situation. The same goes for adulterers, drunks, people who unplug relatives, and people who talk in the theater.
You didn’t read it wrong. That’s precisely what I was saying. And yes, it’s weird for a pro-life person to say, but it’s still pro-life. Let me recap here:
Let’s say you consent to sex. When you consent to sex, you consent to carrying a baby. But that baby doesn’t actually show up for 8-10 weeks (I said 10 because then it’s unambiguous, I think). Before that, it’s like a finger or appendix. Yes, it’s alive, yes, it’s human, but it’s not a person. After week 10 you’ve got a person inside you. Since you’ve already consented to it, you can’t kill it now. If you do, that’s unquestionably wrong.
But lets say you were raped and, I dunno, chained up in a basement for some time or you just didn’t know you were pregnant. Now it’s week 11 and you’ve got a person inside of you. Can you kill it? Yes, you can. You never consented to helping it live, and it’s the equivalent of letting the proverbial drowning man down. Yes, it’s a person, but it’s not your responsibility to keep it alive.
But let’s say you were raped, found you were pregnant at week 4, and had the means and access to get an abortion. Can you abort at week 8? Yes, because there’s no person. Can you abort at week 11? No, because there’s a person and you already had the opportunity to kill it before it was a person. Sure, you didn’t consent to the pregnancy, but you did “after the fact” when you didn’t take action those last 7 weeks.
Is that a weird position? Probably. But that’s what you get from someone who believes fetuses are people and should be treated like one, but also doesn’t believe in a soul. It’s nuanced and complicated, yes, but irrational? No.
Sure thing.
About what? You’ve made ultimatums left and right that I completely disagree with. You haven’t argued for your position, you’ve only asserted it. You’ve said erroneous things like “Either you protect all fetuses or none at all.”
So you have no ethical principle, you just want to judge people based on your personal impulses and biases?
That’s no way to make policy.
Well, no, that makes you pro-choice.
More absurdity.
If someone sneaked a baby into your basement without your consent, could you kill it simply because you didn’t consent to having it put there?
It’s irrational because it is inconsistent. It’s not even “pro-life.”
Logic dictates that, not me.
Unless you base the worth of a person/fetus on whether someone consented to their presence. Which is a completely unsupportable moral position.
Pro-choice and pro-life are positions defined by what you think the laws should be. You can be strongly pro-choice while believing abortion is morally wrong, and many people fall in that category.
Theoretically you could also be pro-life while believing abortion was not morally wrong, for example in a society where the population was dwindling to nothing and babies were needed to sustain it.
From this post, you are at the very least pro-choice on abortions through week 10, and have not explicitly stated what you think the law should be after that.
I must disagree. Each time you engage in hetero sexual intercourse, there’s a risk of pregnancy. It’s not “thrust upon you” to have sex, and it’s not exactly a secret that sex can result in pregnancy even if you took reasonnable steps to reduce this risk.
tl;dr: Babies aren’t brought in by storks.
Storks are also not required to stop the zygote -> blastocyst -> embryo -> fetus -> baby process before it completes. We can do that without their help.
It would be a pain to rely on storks for everything.