When blacks were freed from slavery and granted citizenship and started voting , the already angry whites got even angrier and instituted laws to keep blacks from voting without actually saying so too loudly that that is what they were doing. Like, voters were forced to pass a test and pay a special tax to vote. When whites were ensnared by these requirements, they were granted an eacape hatch in the form of grandfather clauses. But again, it wasn’t openly advertised as such. Whites back then were racist but they weren’t totally stupid.
What is my point? My point is that you can craft any law and make it seem like it targets a broad demographic (all voters or all sex participants) when really the intent is to control a smaller demographic (black voters or women). I could see some stupid law-maker from back in the day thinking that otherwise respectable women will only “slut around” with guys who promise to wear condoms. If guys can’t get them, they will just find themselves a whore like all red-blooded men do. But at least “good” young ladies won’t be tempted. Take away condoms and female virgins stay that way.
First I condemn her and the practitioner for breaking the law. If she knew she had cancer before having sex I condemn her for bringing this situation upon herself.
If the law does not allow for consideration of whether the fetus has a reasonable chance of survival, I condemn the law. Ideally if she had sex, then found out she had cancer, she would get a meeting with her oncologist and obstetrician and discuss whether the child has a reasonable chance of surviving with treatment, and if not, whether she has a reasonable chance of surviving without the treatment. If the mother or the mother and child will necessarily die, it makes no sense to prohibit an abortion. So you can say I make an exception in cases of extreme medical necessity.
If she had sex knowing that her cancer might require the termination of a fetus, she deserves the consequences prescribed by law, possibly for pre-meditated murder but more likely for manslaughter if she did not reasonably expect the pregnancy (used contraceptives). If her partner is identified and knew, he would be named a defendant. I trust the law instructs the judge to consider the intense emotional consequence of cancer and an elective abortion, if it did not, I would condemn the law for being insensitive. Murder of a fetus is still murder, but unless done sadistically it must not carry the same consequences as a serial murderer.
The practitioner deserves punishment under the law. As with the woman above, the law aught to allow for wide discretion for legal abortions, and unless it can be proved that the abortion was urgently necessary in an emergency situation, the practitioner should not have performed the operation. A warning should be placed on the practitioner’s record. A routine provider of illegal abortions should be stripped of their license and possibly imprisoned. If the abortion was performed by a nonpractitioner, appropriate charges should be filed for impersonating a doctor or performing medical services without a license.
The reason abortion is different is because, to people who decry the practice, the fetus has rights. Killing the fetus is only justified in extreme situations.
A comparable procedure might be an organ transplant that kills a non-consenting donor, eg: Ughurs in China. Except the organ only needs to be transplanted because… the recipient has a right to have sex?
Where laws have been passed to prosecute people whose actions have resulted in a miscarriage, these people aren’t prosecuted for a crime against property, like for instance vandalism. But for a crime against a person, like manslaughter or murder.
Supporting such laws is most of the time (if not always) agreeing that the fetus should be considered a human being, with a right to life. This isn’t a position someone who supports abortion should take casually. And in fact, a lot of activists on both side have perfectly identified this issue.
Arguments that equate a blastocyst’s life with an adult woman’s make me queasy. In my eyes a blastocyst’s life is utterly worthless, so what does that make the woman?
So, I assume that killing someone in a coma, or with a very low intellect isn’t an issue because he neither cowers in fear nor pay taxes?
And of course, it also fully applies to a baby. So, killing a 6 months old shouldn’t be considered a crime because the baby doesn’t have a concept of death?
I would argue that those extremes only come about as a result of very unfortunate biology. Unfair? Yes. Does that make for an exception? No. See my [POST=21661132]post #164[/POST] which should be consistent. I wouldn’t smile or laugh telling a person that having sex is immoral, the discussion would be an unhappy one for everybody.
Those technologies cost money, though. It is fine and dandy to tell a woman to get sterilized if she is so afraid a fetus will kill her, but if she can’t afford one, then what? And do we just throw up our hands when her husband divorces her for not performing her wifely duties?
“Don’t have sex” advice fails to appreciate that sex is a huge component of relationships. People don’t just pair up with each other so they have someone to watch TV with. They pair up because sex is what binds them. Take that away and you have a bunch of people “going their own way”. And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing for childfree folks. But a bunch of folks going their own way is not “pro family” or “pro life”. Seems to me it would the conservatives’ nightmare.
Welllll, there’s another way that one could write the laws which would address this:
Heretofore it shall be declared that when a woman has become pregnant the entity developing within her will become a person with legal rights when she says it does, or when it is removed (alive) from her body, whichever comes first. The woman’s body is her own sovereign kingdom and it is upon her to declare when growths within her are worthy of the larger society’s attention.
I’m not kidding here - it seems to me that pregnant women fall into two categories: ones that look at their belly and see a growing person, and ones that look at their belly and see a growing problem. Both types of women should be respected; while I will argue vehemently against anyone who points at a woman and says “your body is ours to control because we declare that that’s a baby in there!”, I will not tell a women happily talking about how she’s growing a baby in there that the thingy inside doesn’t qualify for the label yet.
Just double-checking, these are the laws that burden people with additional legal punishments based on medical conditions outside of their control, right? It sounds like a nightmare world.
We both agree that an adult woman’s life is valuable.
I might say a blastocyst’s life is as valuable as an adult woman’s life.
Therefore, from my perspective, both the adult woman’s life and the blastocyst’s life are valuable.
You say a blastocyst’s life is worthless.
We both agree that an adult woman’s life is valuable.
Therefore, from your perspective, the adult woman’s life is more valuable than the blasocyst’s life.
You cannot simply adopt my conclusion without adjusting one of your premises, and in the quote above, you are adjusting the premise that underlies the conclusion.
I must not be making myself clear, because I completely agree with you.
I was arguing that it is outrageous to tell a woman to just not have sex if a pregnancy may threaten her life, because there exists a range of means to sever the connection between sex and pregnancy. Some of them are as cheap and easy as a condom, others as difficult as an abortion – and many of the people opposed to the latter also act to deny the entire range.
Yes, sex is very important. Giving a woman a stark choice between fucking and living – when there are other options available – is outrageous and wrong.
But not everybody thinks that the blastocyst’s life is utterly worthless. That’s precisely why there’s a debate about abortion. So if the blastocyst is a human being that makes the woman another human being, I guess.
And I suspect that only people whose opposition to abortion is solely based on religion would actually be worried about the well being of a blastocyst (as opposed to an embryo/fetus), and those think that both the blastocyst and the mother have a soul, that makes them equals and equally deserving of protection, I guess.
Morally speaking, the husband is in the wrong. But I’m afraid there is no legal recourse that I can think of. It is unfortunate and another reason for opponents of abortion to support state subsidies for such technologies.
I strive to recognize all consequences of my positions, especially when imposing my opinion on public policy. But in the unfortunate case where the woman cannot sustain pregnancy and cannot be sterilized, not having sex just becomes an unfortunate moral consequence. Again, unless there was some misrepresentation by the wife before marriage, the husband is wrong to leave her. And there are other options for raising a family - surrogate pregnancy or adoption.
No, the punishment is in response to killing the fetus. It is the responsibility of both partners to avoid a situation where the fetus (or mother) must necessarily die. If they could not reasonably know that would happen, I have no issue allowing a legal abortion, and further, it is the doctor’s ethical responsibility to provide such an abortion.
I personally might make a rape exception, but for the sake of debate I will not unless the mother’s life is in danger. But in the case of rape the state must to offer to care for the child, and compensate the mother (financially and emotionally if possible).
Actually the consistent refrain I’ve heard is that the woman’s life is worth less than the thingy in the tummy. It’s sadly unfortunate if the woman is killed by the pregnancy, but it’s horrible beyond all reason if the pregnancy is killed by the woman.
And what I’m not doing is adjusting the premise; I’m rejecting the premise. When I reject the premise the argument pops like a soap bubble leaving nothing left. Which means there’s no argument supporting the existence of the proposed law - it’s just hurtful dictatorship for hurtful dictatorship’s sake.
The correct response to my rejection of the premise is to either convince me I was wrong in rejecting the premise, or to craft a different argument that doesn’t depend on the rejected premise. (Or on any other premises which will be rejected.)
It doesn’t address it. You’re acknowledging here that fetuses can legitimately be considered as human beings. You just add a caveat “but someone else can decide on a whim that these human beings can be denied their humanity and be killed”. That’s not what you’re saying, but it’s IMO implicit in your proposal. And that’s a concept that is totally antithetic to western values. That someone could decide if someone else is human or not, and grant him human rights or not arbitrarily is abhorrent. And this issue will be pointed out immediately.
People aren’t entitled to their own reality. You don’t need to tell her that gratuitously, but you have no reason to agree with her, let alone to make her subjective opinion the law of the land.
Very well, but it just so happens that I am arguing that the lives of the woman and the fetus are of equal value. It’s difficult for me to back that up without going way off topic into philosophy, and if you remember from the dualism thread I don’t even have a position on basic philosophy.
But could you admit that, for at least some people, this notion that the fetus has rights and whatever logic underlies it is the only disagreement between you and them? If you were to accept that premise, which you don’t, would you endorse my position? Does anything seem unreasonable at that point?
We are already quite a bit off the original topic, but would you admit that people might be legitimately opposed to abortions for reasons other than controlling women’s bodies?
The overwhelming majority of people opposed to abortion support allowing it when the life of the mother is at stakes. Your statement is blatantly false. That’s just yet another example of demonizing the opposition.
And pointing at some specific example of such preference for the life of the unborn over the life of the mother won’t prove your point. Give me a poll showing that, say, 75% of people opposed to abortion wouldn’t allow it even if the life of the mother was in danger, and I’ll concede the point.