Novel Pro-Choice Argument?

Great Debates
1

I hate to rehash this old perennial topic, but I think I might have a new argument for the pro-choice side, and one that might be a little more persuasive to libertarian-ish conservatives. If anything, I haven’t seen this approach argued by anyone before. Please shoot as many holes in it as you can.

First of all, let’s go ahead and assume fetuses are people, with all the rights and sympathies we offer a kindergartener or even an adult. I don’t necessarily believe this, but I’m trying to persuade the other side.

Second, let’s call the mother’s womb her property. It’s not quite the same as a house, but if anything we should have more rights over our bodies than our homes and land, right? (This one may be tough for pro-prohibition moral majority types to swallow.)

Anyway, let’s set up the analogy: The fetus is a homeless person, the womb is the mother’s home.

It is very noble and good to feed and care for the homeless, until they can get back on their feet and take care of themselves. However, no one should be obligated to house someone, feed them, and take care of them. Even if you originally invited this person into your home, you’ve got the right to change your mind at any time and ask them – even force them – to leave.

Of course, you can’t just murder homeless people. However, if you kick them out of your house and stop feeding them, and they later die due to lack of food and shelter, that doesn’t mean you murdered them. That means you – maybe for selfish despicable reasons, maybe for good, wholesome reasons – simply withdrew your support.

Withdrawing your material support and banishing someone from your property is not murder and should not be a crime, agreed? However bad the consequences or intentions?

Two implications here are that fetuses viable outside the womb mustn’t be killed, but incubated and eventually adopted. And that parents should have the right to send their kids away to foster care or adoption at any time from birth to graduation. I’m okay with these, how about you?

This side steps the whole metaphysical “life begins at conception” business and focuses the argument on personal property rights. But it’s not airtight or unassailable. Why not?

2

I’m pro-choice and see two problems with your analogy:

  1. We don’t allow a parent to kick a child out of her (or his) home whenever the parent wants. Parents are obligated to provide care for their children unless they make other arrangements that ensure the child will survive.
  2. A minor change to the analogy–the womb is the mother’s speeding car, not her home–both adds accuracy to the analogy and makes it clear that we don’t allow you to kick someone off your property under all circumstances. If I want you out of my car, I’m obligated to wait to kick you out until your exit won’t be lethal to you.
3

Also, doesn’t the abortive procedure kill the fetus before it’s ejected from the womb?

But the idea that a fetus is like a homeless adult person is an analogy, alright. A BAD analogy. But if you want to use that analogy, you have to posit that you are not only literally throwing out the homeless person, but throwing him into a 20 ft pit filled to 10ft with boiling oil.

4

Sorry, I don’t think is going to fly with anyone.

The existence of the “homeless” fetus in the “home” or womb is not due to charity but is the responsibility of the two parents whose actions put it there.

I don’t know of any analogy that would hide this fact. The two parents have made a fetus (whether it is a person or not I will not address here, although I believe it is not until quite late in the pregnancy) which cannot survive outside the womb. If you grant that this fetus is a person as you did for the sake of argument, then you have no choice but to give it at least a chance to survive, which with current technology means in the womb until a certain minimum number of weeks.
Roddy

eta: this was assuming sex was voluntary on both sides.

5

I think that the problem with the analogy is the distinction between adults and children.

For example, imagine I have a son (Junior) and he has a little friend (little Timmy) come over to visit out house (I invent my child, so that I’m not just sitting around alone with someone’s kid in my living room). Little Timmy is a real brat and, frankly, if it weren’t for Junior’s incessant whining I never would have agreed to have the kid come over.

Can I banish Timmy from my house? Eventually. Can I refuse to let him come over again? Sure (subject to marital disharmony). Can I throw him out the door and into the cold? And then, if he gets eaten by wolves, argue that I didn’t kill him, I merely withdrew my consent to his presence? Probably not. What if little Timmy’s mother doesn’t come pick him up (and who can blame her)? I don’t think I can set him out on the sidewalk like a piece of give-away furniture.

I think that’s the flaw in the analogy. Once a “fetus” is a “child” deserving of rights and protections, then it’s a child deserving of rights and protections.

6

And it isn’t a new argument.

7

Unfortunately, once you grant this, you’re giving the other side license to pass any protective legislation they please. Regardless of how reasonable a compromise you think you’re offering, they have no incentive to accept it.

I’d suggest a different tack, like starting from how you recognize that a protective duty exists for a parent toward their child, but it’s not absolute. A parent is not required to jump into a piranha-filled pool to rescue their child, nor into a burning building. A parent is not required to give up a kidney or other organ for transplant into their ailing child. A parent is not legally required to directly nurse a child (at least not that I’m aware of). From there, build to how a parent is not required to lend personal biological support to a child, i.e. extended and direct and intrusive use of the parent’s body.

And yours is not a novel argument, even on this message board.

8

This is not a morally defensible argument. First, as John Mace says, inviting a homeless person into your house, murdering them and then throwing their corpse out into the street is not the same thing as simply kicking them out.

Second, if you have offered somebody sanctuary for a set duration, you cannot throw them out part way through if their survival depends on waiting it out. If you invited the homeless person for a ride in your Cessna, you cannot kick them out halfway through the flight.

Third, the fetus is not a homeless person. They are your child, and you have a moral and legal obligation to provide care to them. You can’t just take your baby and dump them in the bush behind your house because you’re tired of them.

9

I’m with you so far.

Now you lost me. If you accept the premise that a fetus is a child and that a parent has a duty to care for a child, then implicit in this duty is hosting the child inside of a woman’s body until viability. There is simply no other way for the child to survive and it would make all other duties meaningless. An exception could be made for the life or serious health of the mother being similar to the burning building analogy.

But I think that the pro-abortion argument crumbles once person hood is conferred on the unborn.
ETA: Nursing might be another exception. If the mother and child were marooned on an island without access to formula, I’m sure she could be charged with endangerment for refusing to nurse the child under an “it’s my body” exception.

10

This is just an (infinitely worse) version of the Violinist Argument.

11

It doesn’t strike me as implicit. If one isn’t required to donate the use of a kidney, why is one required to donate use of a uterus?

I don’t know about crumbles (or “pro-abortion”) - it’s just a matter of labeling. Calling a fetus a person doesn’t change it’s nature. We could expand the definition of murder to include swatting flies if we wanted and nothing would change, except that we gain a self-defined justification to severely punish the swatting of flies, such justification to evaporate the moment we change our definitions to something else.

If you have to create an extreme and unlikely circumstance, I’m less than convinced.

12

As others have commented, this isn’t a new argument. It was advanced by Judith Jarvis Thomson in A Defence of Abortion:

13

So is the OP suggesting that a fetus can be guilty of trespassing? Or that you can keep it in the “house” until it’s an adult, then kick its sorry ass out?

14

This assumes that because pregnancy is a possible outcome of sex, having sex is the equivalent of consenting to pregnancy. But it’s not, especially not when contraceptives are used. In that case, having sex is no more consenting to pregnancy than driving is consenting to a collision - you do your part to avoid it, but it happens sometimes anyway.

And the majority of people who seek abortions were using contraceptives in the month when they conceived. They may not have been using it properly (usually due to failure of proper instruction) or consistently (usually due to poverty) but the majority were certainly using it. So in the homeless person analogy, it’s more that they failed to lock their door, or the door didn’t latch right, and the homeless person walked in unbidden, and now some people believe that they should have to do any and everything short of dying to accommodate their presence until they’re ready to leave.

15

Do you really want to make this argument? Really?

Fine, it is like accidentally forcing the homeless person to enter your house. Yeah, that makes killing them so much better.

16

I would be extremely uncomfortable with any group that would, in that circumstance, compel her to nurse. That’s getting much too close to body-slavery for me.

A comparable example might be donating blood via transfusion in a similarly straitened situation. If it’s the only way to save someone’s life, most of us would do it…but would we be able to respect the leadership that compels it of us?

17

I wouldn’t. I’d rather just have abortion considered a medical matter, rather than something needing legislative attention.

18

Yep, and if we get around to establishing a colony on the Moon I imagine you’ll have to show some pretty clear and present danger before the law is comfortable with you throwing someone out of the airlock; all the more so if circumstances already guarantee that they will be obliged to leave on or around a certain date whether they want to or not, and so they cannot be a permanent drain on your resources.

The analogy holds even more water if, rather than simply inviting the stranger into your home, you used some drug to render them helpless and dragged them in, having first made sure that they could not leave alive before a certain date.

19

Thanks guys. Didn’t think it could be new, just that I never heard it used and made it up independently. Also, for me it hits the heart of why it’s pro-choice and not pro-abortion. It’s about not forcing someone to do something with their body they don’t want.

Regarding abortion: Does it require death? Is it not possible to terminate the pregnancy and still keep the fetus alive, if it is viable outside the womb? It’s one thing to terminate the pregnancy and fetal death is just a byproduct – I’d be a little less okay with it if it were possible to keep them alive and doctors just crushed them to death anyway.

Still, I believe the vast majority of abortions are performed in the first few weeks, well before viability.

Anyway, thanks for the criticism. Like most analogies, it isn’t perfect. In my mind, it just highlights the more relevant aspects of the pro-choice side – personal freedom and dominion over your body/property. Also, it seems like it would be more persuasive to a conservative debater than “it’s just a clump of cells”.

20

In the US something like 90% of all abortion are performed in the first 2 months.