Can consent be withdrawn? If not, why not?
Exactly. “Consent” does not mean the exact same thing as “accept a certain amount of risk”.
When you get in a car, you accept a certain amount of risk that you will be injured in an accident. That doesn’t mean that if you *are * injured, that you *consented * to it. It also doesn’t mean that you should be left by the side of the road with a shrugging “Well, whatdidya expect? Serves ya right.”
How about you use a condem and Lucy uses your sperm from the condem to impregnant herself. What then?
Banning abortion is a very slippery slope. In vitro fertilization would end because frozen embryos would be judged entitled to life and would have to be implanted. Every miscarriage would have to be examined to see if the woman somehow caused it. Maybe she took an aspirin with a slug of coffee or just “thought bad thoughts” cause the baby to be expelled. Any woman who miscarried could be judge guilty of murder.
I always wonder how many people are here simply because their mothers did have an earlier abortion and then chose to have a child when in a better condition (more mature, better well off, etc?). A woman aborts a handicapped feturs, then has three children. If she had kept the handicapped child, she might not have had the other three.
Let me put this in a different light, lets take sex, and issues like sluts out of the equation.
A woman takes a turkey baster, and some sperm from a sperm bank, inserts the turkey baster between her legs and deposits the sperm inside her. By this act she may create life, I’d say due to her actions she has a moral responsibility to that life if it is created, and should let it develop inside her. I’d say the above it true even if she used a condom over the turkey baster, the chance is there as condoms are known not to be 100% effective. She is playing with the potential of creating another human life, that is not something to just dismiss, and I put great weight on that.
I’m not clear how that hypothetical is supposed to help resolve the inconsistencies in your position regarding unwanted pregnancies. The woman in your scenario would presumably be attempting to become pregnant. Why would she use a prophylactic along with a method of insemination?
It’s a very confusing hypothetical, to be sure.
No - Once the turkey baster in inserted there is a real non-zero chance that a human life will be created, she has no further control what happens from that point on (yes she can do things to reduce the chance, like the morning after pill - but it’s still non-zero).
or to look at it another way:
Lets say you give consent to be shot, the person pulls the trigger, the bullet leaves the barrel and is traveling at you, you can’t move out of the way at this point and it’s going to hit you. You can’t at this point withdraw consent, doing so would be meaningless, it may make you feel better, but morally you gave consent, that consent resulted in actions that have a real unchangeable result .
Assuming facts not in evidence, perhaps it’s some sort of advanced teenage truth and dare game.
Except that every one of your analogies and replies is predicated on the notion that a fetus is identical to a living, breathing, thinking adult. Or “person”. It’s just not. It has no ability to sense pain, or fear, or the cessation of life. In all those respects, it has far more in common with that cancerous tumor (which also contains human DNA) than with a person.
The only respect in which it may be more like a person than a tumor is that it *may *have a soul, if such a thing exists and if it is present early in pregnancy and if there is a god to care whether or not it’s born at that time in that body. Since we decided two hundred some odd years ago not to base our laws around any particular religion or its ideas, the soul argument is completely irrelevant for legal ethics.
Consent cannot be given for an illegal action. The shooter here is guilty of manslaughter.
Does the woman have to give consent to every fetus in her body? Say a couple wants a child, but the woman cannot carry to term. So they create an in vitro embryo, knock out a woman and implant it. The embryo holds. Should the woman have to carry it for nine months and then give it to the genetic parents? Or the woman gives consent, then finds out that carrying the child to term will kill her. Should she then still have to carry it at the risk of her own death? Because she consented and abortion is murder.
Well, I would wonder if we need to develop policy and law to account more for the typical behavior of billions of humans or the exceedingly strange behavior of one hypothetical teenager.
Except, apparently, if they were conceived via rape. For some reason that means they lose their right to life, even though they are as innocent as any other fetus.
But aside from that, kanicbird’s argument appears to be more concerned with consent of a consequence rather than a fetus’ right to life, which is what my analogy addresses.
One major problem with your analogy so far: We are talking about pregnancy, not child support. Two different issues that aren’t comparable in analogy. Pregnancy, by virtue of biology, is only under the control of women. Child support on the other hand, is not. In theory, both men and women are equals when it comes to child support. This distinction matters for one reason: an unwilling father has to pay child support only because he is unable to terminate a pregnancy without simultaneously violating a woman’s autonomy. Thems the breaks, but this reality has nothing to do with “consent for a baby.” Once a baby is born, both parents have to take care of it by law, whether they want it or not.
If she chooses not to end the pregnancy, then yes.
Sure, if we’re talking about child support. Your absent of consent doesn’t allow you to kill the baby, though. And that’s the fatal flaw of your analogy.
A pro-lifer says aborting a fetus is murdering an innocent person. soarise made an excellent point earlier. If abortion is murder no different than any other murder, then why draw the line at pregnancy? If rape babies start off different from other babies, with less rights to life, then why not allow them to be killed after birth? This line in the sand actually supports the view that there is something special about fetuses that make them not fully human. In effect, the rape baby exemption is an attempt to argue to two contradictory things at the same time.
I used “rape baby” a lot in this post. Happy pizzabrat ;)?
Yes, this is the premise I’m going on, a a fetus is a human life worthy of human rights. I admit that. If you read my post I am speaking in a ideal situation, and admit that in real world conditions my theory is unworkable, but it is morally consistent and holds together for the view of abortion allowed only in the case of rape.
legally you are correct, I’m speaking morally however not legally.
The way I view it is not the right to kill your baby, but the right to remove a person from your body (again if you never gave consent willingly to the act that allowed this life to be created). Death once removed is a consequence of it’s removal. Much like a ship captain may be able to order stowaways to get off his ship in the middle of the ocean - not nice but morally IMHO is his decision to make, unlike contracted passengers who he has a moral responsibility to deliver, even if they have to eat some of the ship’s supplies.
Once the baby is delivered they are off the ship and on their own.
You have a very confused morality (and a childlike conceptualization of sex and procreation, in my opinion).
Let me ask it in this way: What specifically makes it a bad thing to remove a person from your body if that person got there because you engaged in sex?
To paraphase a quote from anti-abortionist Randy Alcorn’s book: It is reasonable to expect a woman to live with an unwanted or even an unsafe pregnancy if ending it would mean the death of an innocent person.
You can tell HE was never pregnant. He talks about pregnancy as being like a normal life (you can still go to school, go to work and socialize) passes over childbirth, and makes single motherhood and giving a child up for adoption (adoption is a God-given alternative to a woman who cannot raise her own child) sound like the easiest things in the world.
I hate when you bring sex back into this, someone soon will be shouting ‘sluts’ pretty soon trying to muddy the waters.
By turkey basting (willingly) you have set into motion the creation of that life by your own actions, once that life starts you have a moral responsibility to him/her (again due to the actions you willingly did to create him/her).
So it’s bad to engage in a activity that creates a person then murder that person.
What’s your definition of ‘person’, kanicbird?
But why is it bad? What is it about that that makes it a bad thing?
(Human) Conception onward
Violation of a moral contract that leads to the death of a human.
When you try to leave sex out of it and bring in turkey basters, it’s disingenuous.
People who get inseminated invariably want babies. People who have sex usually only want orgasms.