Wait, you’d prosecute women just for getting pregnant while in bad health?
Only if they actually went and received an abortion, contrary to the law.
ETA: Perhaps I could support a law charging her with extreme negligence if she willingly had sex and had a reasonable expectation of conception while knowing her body could not support the pregnancy. It would have to be really, really bad for me to get behind that.
~Max
When you say “the fetus has rights”, what does that exactly mean? Because it matters. If it means “from the instant the sperm enters the egg the thingy in there has the right to be kept alive at all costs no matter what else happens”, then I’m pretty sure that it’s quite literally impossible for the person to agree with me on nearly anything about abortion.
And of course people could be legitimately opposed to abortions for reasons other than controlling women’s bodies. I’d imagine that the most common reason for being anti-abortion is “my pastor told me it was bad”. And following orders is a good way to adopt an anti-woman stance even if you haven’t given it a lick of thought yourself.
Er, if I’m reading this right, you’re saying that you’d refrain from prosecuting her if she allowed herself to die as a result of the pregnancy. (Taking the fetus out with along with her, presumably.)
Generous of you not to arrest her corpse?
What if she got pregnant and miscarried due to her bad health?
Having sex isn’t a human right. I already gave the example of the pedophile who will be legally denied sex for a reason beyond his control. If i’m so ugly that no woman will want to have sex with me I’ll also be denied sex because rape isn’t a legal option, either, even though it’s not my fault if I’m so ugly.
If the consequence of me having sex is that either me or someone else will die (say, I’ve been cursed by a sorcerer), then the only ethical choices for me are to refrain from having sex or to accept to die as a consequence. Choosing to have sex and have someone else die for it isn’t morally acceptable. If we assume the fetus to be a human, we’re exactly in this situation.
Nevertheless plenty of people don’t have sex despite wanting it. We don’t cater to them if doing so would be considered immoral (like allowing them to have sex with 5 yo or giving them sex slaves). And plenty of people have limitations of all sorts, for plenty of reasons beyond their control, including legal limitations, because of the potential consequences for others. For instance, epileptics can’t drive. People with severe mental diseases can be denied freedom indefinitely. “Your peculiar condition unfortunately doesn’t allow you to have sex” isn’t particularly more outrageous. Rather less since not being able to have sex is a pretty ordinary situation.
When I say the fetus has rights, I mean at some point during fetal development the fetus acquires legal personhood. Different people have different opinions on when but it’s somewhere between fertilization and birth (inclusive). I personally agree with Cecil, if I recall he said life begins with brainwaves - I go further than him and say personhood begins with brainwaves. The converse is the definition of death, after all.
The rights of the fetus are similar to the rights of a child - they do not have the right to vote but their right to life is comparable to your right to life. Their right to life trumps your right to avoid the pain of birth. In theory the right to life is inalienable but in practice sometimes there must be a hard decision - your life or the fetus. In that case society has a compelling interest in keeping you alive - we have invested more in you. That is why I make an exception where the life of the mother is in danger.
~Max
Obviously I wouldn’t prosecute her corpse, but she risked breaking the law when she decided to have sex. The actual violation, the abortion, the crime against the state, only appears nine months later. That’s just the nature of human life. As I said before, a practitioner has leeway to perform an abortion in emergent situations.
Now if she had sex before the law was changed, but is due after, in that case she is entitled to whatever abortion was previously legal. This can easily be avoided by giving the law an effective date at least ten months out.
~Max
Miscarriage is not abortion and would not break any reasonable law unless there was egregious negligence or some other willful act that caused the miscarriage (that would be homicide or assisted homicide, already illegal).
~Max
Well, even I believe that once the fetus is viable and can be immediately extracted and kept alive in an incubator it shouldn’t be legal to abort it. So if that’s all it takes to be anti-abortion-rights, I guess I’m a woman hater too!
The point where it gets problematic to me is where you are saying that the fetus has the right to occupy and harm the woman with the woman being unable to do anything about it or escape her tormenter. That’s not a right we normally give to people - even children. (A brat that bad can be given up for adoption.) Even if I grant that the fetus has the full rights of a child the moment there’s a flicker of electrical activity (which is debatable in my eyes), the full rights of a child aren’t strong enough rights to keep the woman from yelling, “Out, damned spot!”
However, even though I’m not at all certain that human rights logically extend to the right to be a nightmarish parasite, I’d actually be willing to agree to a cognition-based “only in case of emergencies in the third trimester” cutoff only if all the currently-existing impediments to getting an abortion are abolished. (Including cost!) Once within the third trimester the woman could only abort if her life were in peril, in which case she’d be acting in self defense. I’d be willing to accept this limitation because in my completely uninformed opinion it is reasonable to expect a woman to come to her decision to abort before then, and I am willing to be reasonable here.
ETA: Though the spirit of my offer includes the notion that the “other side” accepts it too and doesn’t use it as a starting point to continue to keep eroding womens’ rights. Which, well, yeah.
That’s not any kind of rebuttal. That’s a cheap shot “ah!ah! comparing women and pedophiles! I got you!” . I had used the example of a pedophile since a pedophile having sex is harmful for someone else. It’s not like I didn’t realize that writing “pedophile” couldn’t be used against me by someone who has no interest in actually addressing arguments and would rather try to take cheap shots, It’s that I expected a higher level of debate.
So, we’re assuming that :
-A fetus is a human being and killing it is murder.
-This woman, if she has sex, either will die or will have to kill the fetus (hence committing murder).
The question is : can she, morally, have sex and kill the fetus to avoid the dire consequences for herself? Does her desire to have sex (and not die) justify her killing someone? Since you’ll have a natural tendency to fight the hypothetical (killing the fetus is murder), let’s rephrase it in an even simpler form :
Having been victim of a curse, someone must die when you have sex. It’s up to you to decide if you’ll be the one dying or if some other randomly determined person (but definitely a person you would recognize as a human) will. Is it moral for you to have sex and decide that someone else will die?
For my part, I’ve no doubt that making this choice wouldn’t put you on par with a pedophile, it would make you worst than a pedophile, since the consequences of your action (death) would be worst than the consequences of the pedophile’s action.
I think most people would avoid going to the hospital if it was normal for someone to kill you the moment you lose consciousness. Don’t you think it would be bad for a society if no one went to the hospital?
As far as killing people of low intellect goes, I actually have no qualms with euthanizing, say, a baby born missing almost all of its brain. If a parent wants to raise a child in this condition, more power to them. But that’s not a “precious life”, IMHO.
But no, I’m not in favor of killing people who have limited awareness. Not on the basis of “life is PWECIOUS!”, but rather on the basis of “I may one day have limited awareness, and I don’t want someone killing me unless I have expressed that wish in a legal document.” I don’t think people should kill their six-month old babies because six-month old babies are people. They know their names. They smile. They laugh. They learn. The people who know them love them. Killing them would cause an emotional loss to the community. A baby killer is also a threat to a community. Someone who can kill a smiling, laughing, crying, fearful baby is probably not going to have a problem killing a smiling, laughing, crying, fearful child or adult.
Most importantly, if a parent doesn’t want to care for their six-month old baby, they can turn the baby over to the state and have the state deal with him or her. All they have to do is sign over their parental rights. But an unwanted fetus can’t be turned over to anyone. An unwanted fetus can’t be protected without punishing the woman who doesn’t want it. Punishments like strapping her to a bed and force-feeding her and denying her the medications she needs to be sane and healthy. What does society gain from crazy bullshit like this besides having plenty of jobs for psychopaths and fascist authoritarians?
Now that I’ve answered your questions, can you answer mine?
Are you okay with the idea of imprisoning women who selfishly refuse to stop taking their schizophrenia medication while pregnant, despite knowing these meds are teratogens? Are you okay with the idea of charging a woman with a crime for drinking a glass of wine while pregnant? Are you okay with the idea of a pharmacist making the executive decision to deny a woman her medication because she appears to be pregnant? Are you okay with the police charging a woman with murder because while investigating her alleged miscarriage, they found suspicious google searches on her computer (e.g., “States where abortion is legal” and “How long can you go to prison for terminating your pregnancy”)? If you aren’t okay with these things, explain what safe guards would keep them from occurring in a society where fetuses are treated as equivalent to six-month old babies.
Neither is being born.
No, they don’t obviously. They don’t have a concept of death (presumably, at least. Maybe there’s some innate concept/fear of death present even in fetuses, who knows?). But killing someone is considered a crime even if the victim doesn’t realize he’s a victim (deep mental disability, vegetative state, toddler…).
We have this concept that some lives can be worst than death. For instance, in some juridictions at least, no measure might be taken to save the life of a severely malformed baby with a very short life expectancy. But the bar is put pretty high. Much higher at least than “might not have an ideal childhood/parents might not be ideal parents”. I don’t think you’d argue that a toddler whose parents are problematic should be euthanized. If we assume the fetus to be as human as the toddler, then he shouldn’t be killed in this situation, either.
It seems to me that pretty much all objections are attempts at fighting the hypothetical (fetus is assumed to be human), by considering that pretty much any reason to kill it are good enough (mother would rather have sex than not, future life might not be ideal, he doesn’t realize he’s being killed, etc…). We don’t accept these motives as valid reasons to kill humans (for instance toddlers), so supporting them for fetuses isn’t in my view compatible with considering fetuses as humans.
That’s precisely what is disputed. Whether or not the fetus has a right to live (hence to be born).
In your dystopic future, the state has told her sex is inadvisable given her poor health. But she’s had sex anyway. Ends up pregnant and then a month later, miscarries. Which is not surprising since she’s sick. The risks were known.
How is she not negligent given your logic? Her actions resulted in a dead person, right?
By the way, I’m glad you’re laying out all your thoughts like you are. People need to see the implications of criminalizing abortion, to see what it might make society become. I think many on the pro-life side are content to view anti-abortion bills as only directing prosecutorial resources at doctors and nurses, but there are way too many others who happily anticipate the day that they see women in handcuffs. Even if, as your posts show, these women are driven to do so out of concern for their own health.
Rights are created by humans. If enough humans believe a right exists, then the right exist. And if there’s enough opposition to it, then it doesn’t. You can argue that a right should exist, but you can’t argue that it exists when it actually doesn’t. Not without being unreasonable.
I think 99% of people would say a woman over the age of 21 has the right to drink alcohol, take prescribed medication, smoke cigarettes, ride dirt bikes, go bungee jumping, do headstands, climb mountains, and have unprotected sex. The law books agree with this since these none of the activities are against the law.
clairobscur, if law-makers decided these aren’t rights for pregnant women because they infringe on the rights of the unborn to be born, would you understand why lots of people would be greatly troubled? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to view this as a punishment for being pregnant? Would you like to be denied freedom for nine months just because someone else has decided your bodily autonomy isn’t as important as some clump of cell’s “right” to be born? Do you think the fact that you’re guy makes it quite easy for you to be so cavalier about the logical consequences of banning abortion?
For tens of thousands in hospital bills, which of course the GOP wont pay. And a preemie often has health issues.
If Georgia will pay for all that, then fine. But they wont.
So, purely out of selfish self interest? I think that most people have an issue with killing others on the basis of empathy, rather. I’m not sure in fact on what basis we decide whose life is worth preserving.
Plenty of societies have allowed infanticide or exposition, hence rejecting the idea that newborns are people whose life must be protected. If we had received a Roman heritage, we would probably be fine with killing newborns.
And fetuses dream, move, I believe smile too and learn too. 6 months old, on the other hand, have no autonomy, don’t talk, etc…Fetuses are less advanced in their development than babies, and newborns are less advanced than 6 months old, and so on…You can decide that the level of development required to be considered a person is one minute old, but someone else could think it minus 3 months and someone else 6 months.
The last part “people who know them love them”/“Killing them would cause an emotional loss to the community” is quite a bit problematic, because it seems to imply that someone who isn’t likable, or simply who is isolated doesn’t necessarily deserve to live.
I’m convinced this has a strong cultural component. If we were living in a society where infanticide was an accepted practice, I doubt people would assume that a newborn smotherer is more dangerous than someone providing an abortion. And when abortion was not acceptable, it was perceived as a heinous crime.
No, you can’t in most jurisdictions. If the other parent opposes it, you can’t escape parental responsibility anymore once the baby is born. It’s not in your hands anymore.
.
Someone who is opposed to abortion won’t see that as a punishment but as living with the consequences of your actions. Which is a principle we apply to pretty much anything.
The last one would absolutely make sense if abortion is a crime. If your husband is found dead and there are suspicious searches on your computer ("“how long can I go to prison for murdering my husband”) you’ll be charged with murder too.
As for the rest : these aren’t in fact related to abortion (it so happens that I discussed pregnancies with two of my coworkers this afternoon and one of them mentioned hating women who drink or smoke while pregnant with a burning passion). You can have all these things happen when abortion is lawful, and all these things not happen when abortion is forbidden. Maybe you meant that they should apply if we consider a fetus as the exact equivalent of a 6 months old. But in practice, opponent to abortion don’t really see the fetus as the exact equivalent of a 6 months old. But sufficiently so to think that if drinking a glass of wine might be acceptable, killing it is an entirely different matter.