The linchpin of the abortion debate typically boils down to the “Is a fetus a human being or not” part - with most, but not all, pro-choicers claiming that it is not - and most, but not all, pro-lifers claiming that it is indeed.
Now, in this thread, let’s agree - for the sake of argument - that a fetus is, indeed, a human being, and that life does, indeed, begin at conception.
Wouldn’t the battle lines still be drawn roughly the same? Wouldn’t the vast majority of pro-choicers still argue that a woman should decide what she does with her body and that the rights of the mother trump the rights of the fetus, and that abortion should still remain legal? Pro-lifers would still oppose abortion as much as before, of course, in fact, probably even more strongly now.
Wouldn’t most of the pro-abortion and anti-abortion arguments still remain largely unchanged, and wouldn’t most liberals still be in favor of abortion anyway?
I think if fetuses were legally recognized as living human beings, it would change the legal position. They would have a right to their own life which could not be taken away without due process.
An interesting question would be whether fetuses, even if recognized as living human beings, would be recognized as American citizens. As far as I know, citizenship is a status that people acquire at birth; so nobody can have prenatal citizenship.
Yeah - I don’t think they could have citizenship, but if someone assaulted a pregnant woman, resulting in death of the fetus, that might be manslaughter or something like that.
I have never believed that the abortion debate really lies in the fetus is life or not-life issue. I think the real issue lies, “Do the mother’s interests trump the fetus’?” If fetuses were human beings, that question would still be unanswered.
Yes, you have pegged it. The claims about whether fetuses are humans or not is just a tool used by the forced birthers. It doesn’t matter. How can it possibly be ethical to force a person become a walking incubator, suffer permanent physical damage, and risk death?
We accept it’s ethical to kill someone in self-defense when they infringe on your life, and growing inside someone against their will has to be the most severe violation of rights I’ve ever heard of.
A human being does not come into existence at any discrete point in time. The developing zygote, embryo and fetus become progressively more human. It’s incorrect to say that it’s human, and it’s incorrect to say that it’s not human. It’s somewhat human, becoming progressively more so as it develops. That’s why the ethical question of the rights of the developing fetus is so difficult, because ultimately we have to try to set fixed cutoff dates for something changing quantitatively. The only thing I’m sure about is that inventing a soul that pops in there on day X at 4:30pm and suddenly gives the embryo rights that it didn’t have at 4:29pm really really doesn’t illuminate the issue, any more than claiming that male masturbation is akin to murder.
Perhaps if we got to grips with the ethical rights of animals it might help illuminate the issue.
Whether a fetus is a person that has rights or not isn’t a fact , it’s an opinion. And should there ever be a consensus in American society that a fetus is a person, and therefore should in every way be treated the same as a four year-old, one year-old, four month-old or one day-old baby then abortion might well become illegal. It is impossible to say what would happen, because we are nowhere near such a consensus. But it would have to be a society where benefits (everything from welfare to tax dependents* to citizenship to inheritances) did not depend on birth but on conception , where people who suffer a miscarriage are no more told they can “try again” than people whose five year-old died. I personally don’t think there will ever be such a consensus, but that’s a separate issue.
There is no real difference in expenses between a pregnancy that ends in a live birth on Dec 31, one that ends in a full-term stillbirth on Dec 31 and one that ends in a live birth on Jan 1. But only one results in a dependent on Federal taxes for the year ending Dec 31.
Why wouldn’t the fetus have citizenship, if it’s a real person? Why wouldn’t it have voting rights? And jury duty.
And if it’s a real person, we can expect it to get out and get a job, find it’s own place to live and start paying some taxes, right?
I mean, that’s what we expect from real people, right?
No, the answer would still be the same. Other human beings are not entitled to use my body for spare parts or take up residence in my body without my express written permission.
The problem with the “walking incubator” logic is that we are generally talking about situations resulting from consensual sex between people who are capable of understanding that sex can result in pregnancy (many pro-lifers do feel that rape is an exception, and abortions as a result of rape are not the typical scenario that most pro-lifers are talking about when they want to ban abortion).
You can defend shooting someone for trespassing if they were breaking into your house. You can’t defend shooting someone for trespassing if you first invited them into your home.
If pregnancy were something completely random and unforeseeable that just happens to you based on bad luck, then it certainly does seem like quite a violation for some other person to be growing in your body without your consent. However, we know clearly that abortion is preventable because over the last few years, we HAVE made significant strides in preventing abortion (and unplanned pregnancy). The abortion rate, as well as the teen pregnancy rate in general, has been falling significantly over recent years.
I think that there are a lot of pro-choice people out there who sincerely think that fetuses are not human beings. I do think some of them would probably find it more morally troubling if they actually did believe it was killing human beings. However, it is also true that there are many situations where people are indifferent to killing that involves other people who are inarguably actual human beings (for example, the fact that most of us who live in developed countries do little or nothing to help people in Africa who are dying every day from preventable/treatable illness).
So, long story short, I think it really depends on the individual person and that some people would change their minds but some would not care.
I cannot answer the poll question as phraed, because the way it’s phrasedd makes an essential mistake. First off, there is no doubt that a fetus growing in a human woman’s womb is a human being; the question is whether it’s a PERSON, that is, an entity deserving of legal protection. That is a value judgment, not a factual assessment.
OK, thanks for the correction. But my point still stands - even if everyone agreed that a fetus is a person, most pro-choicers would probably still argue that the mother should have the right to choose to have an abortion. We have actually had some pro-choicers already in this thread,arguing exactly that.
Arguments from analogies always fail, because there is no other situation, anywhere, ever, that is fully analogous to a pregnancy.
Also, not using sufficiently effective birth control measures is not “inviting them into your home.” And even if I did invite them into my home, I get to tell them to go away whenever I want. You can’t come over from dinner and then take up permanent residency, just because “I invited you.”
(Show me the invitation. I’m sure the fetus kept it, somewhere in his little file cabinet or email archive.)
Certainly some would, but that doesn’t mean that most would. And I’m not sure that most would- there are a fair amount of pro-choice people who have moral issues either with abortions in general or with abortions in particular circumstances who simply don’t feel they should impose their moral views on everyone. They might have a different view if everyone agreed a fetus was a person deserving of moral rights. Of course, we’re not going to get to that point overnight, so it won’t be a matter of individual people changing their stance so much as the percentage of the population holding a particular stance increasing or decreasing.
Toddlers are certainly citizens, which is the thing you tried to deny fetuses.
Legally, we don’t allow toddler or adult citizens to have a right to … say, burrow their way into their mother’s bloodstream and overwhelm her immune system with their hormones, which is a thing fetuses do every time.
Toddlers don’t have the right to a blood transfusion from their mothers, even though toddlers are human beings and citizens and maybe would die without it. Toddlers don’t have a right to someone else’s heart or lungs if theirs is on the fritz. Blind toddlers, who are citizens and human beings, can’t just demand one of their mother’s corneas.
And it’s not just toddlers. Parents - full humans and taxpaying citizens - can’t legally force a child to donate a liver, because the child is also a full human being with human rights and bodily autonomy.
Oh - maybe she’ll want to donate. That’s cool. But she’s not legally required to do so.
Why would fetus citizens who are human beings in your OP, remember, have more rights than we give any other citizen or human being, in order to override someone else’s bodily autonomy?
It most certainly matters to me. Except in case of rape, women aren’t forced to become incubators. Pregnancy is a known result of sex, and there are ways to avoid it and of massively reducing the odds of becoming pregnant even while having sex. Once a child is born, you can’t get out of your obligations towards him (you can have him adopted, but not if the other parent opposes it) because society assumes that this birth is ultimately your responsibility and no one else. So, you’re on the hook for the next 18 years, regardless how problematic it is for you. You can’t kill him either, that would be a murder because…a baby is a person, which according to the OP is now the case for fetuses.
Now, I have trouble figuring out what the OP assumption would mean in real terms. I guess it would be something like discovering that fetus have a kind of soul, and somehow feel things in the same way newborn babies do. In any case, somehow they are morally equivalent to a living child.
Then, yes, I would oppose abortion on the basis that the mother is ultimately responsible for the situation she is in. She doesn’t get to murder a children after birth regardless how inconvenient it is to raise him, and she doesn’t get to murder a children before birth regardless how inconvenient it is to carry him to term. If she wants to be absolutely sure to not face the issue, she can abstain from having sex or have her tubes tied (and before someone screams about controling women sexuality, the situation is exactly the same for men, except that per biology, they can’t carry a child. But the “on the hook for 18 years” part still applies to them. Every time you have sex, you might become a father, and you should be aware of it).
The two moral issues left are rape (the woman isn’t responsible, but the fetus isn’t, either, and he’s now somehow a full-fledged human being) and very significant risks for the life of the mother, in which case, someone has to die, it could as well be the fetus, but it’s still not obvious because the situation is still the mother’s responsibility, not the fetus, and again the fetus is now the equivalent of an actual child. From a moral point of view, it could as well be handled like with conjoined twins, where the one with the best chances to survive gets to live. Or even by giving the preference to the fetus, due to both his lack of responsibility in the situation, and to the fact that our society has a preference for saving children in priority over adults.
People who say that the personhood of the fetus isn’t relevant IMO are fighting the hypothetical. For some magical reason, the fetus is exactly the same thing as a child, and I doubt most people wouldn’t think twice before murdering a kid because his continued existence is inconveniencing an adult, regardless how bad the inconvenience. Otherwise, they should presumably also support the exposition of newborn babies, as the Romans did, which is after all rather consistent morally, although considered unacceptable in our societies.
She has freely decided to donate at the moment she had sex. She just created a child (again : from the instant of conception, it’s a child, now, not a fetus) on her own volition.
You can’t just deny there is a moral issue in creating a life (again : an actual life, equivalent to herself, her partner, you, me, your children, whatever…not a clump of cells) that is totally dependant on you just because you wanted to have some fun, and then withdraw support and let the person die. That would be unspeakably cruel. “I want to have some sexy times even if it means I’ll have to then kill someone” isn’t morally defensible. It’s the thought of a psychopath or at best of an utterly irresponsible person.
I’ve said on this board before, I think of a woman’s uterus as a sovereign nation. With the woman of said uterus as the sole, supreme leader.
Whether a fetus is a human or not is irrelevant. We (the United States government) have no jurisdiction as to what goes on inside that uterus. No more than we do any other country.
A fetus is a human being, and life does begin at conception. And yet that’s the way it is.
The only argument is about personhood, not the species of zygote/fetus or whether it is alive.
This is actually the realization that brought me over to the pro-choice side. Once the parameters changed, I saw a compromise position. And that position happens to fall along the pro-choice side–it’s pro-choice, but no late term.