I’m more or less on board with the OP. A fetus is alive, human, and a person, and abortion should be legal until the moment of birth. Because a fetus is also, simultaneously, a part of the woman’s body until that point. It’s a unique situation.
Well, I know for sure that I am alive, and a human being. Yet I cannot force a woman to house, feed and keep me inside her for 9 months against her will.
I wish I had known that before her neighbours called 911, but the point stands.
[QUOTE=clairobscur]
If she wants to be absolutely sure to not face the issue, she can abstain from having sex or have her tubes tied
[/QUOTE]
(emphasis mine)
It’s actually quite difficult to have that done before you’re old and wrinkled and it doesn’t matter any more. Doctors tell girls that they don’t understand what it means, that they’ll change their mind just you wait, etc… and will place any amount of hurdles in the way, from psych exams to simply refusing to do the procedure themselves.
They don’t tell that to guys who want vasectomies. But women opting to not ever spawn face an absurd amount of patriarchal patronizing. Even more so when the women in question haven’t spawned before.
[QUOTE=lavenderviolet]
If pregnancy were something completely random and unforeseeable that just happens to you based on bad luck
[/QUOTE]
But unwanted pregnancies often are just that - bad luck, that one shitty part of the Gaussian. My ex GF had an IUD and we used condoms on top of that. Still knocked her up. When you do what you should be doing and the thing you deliberately tried to avoid still happens, what do you call it ?
I’m pro-choice and don’t have a problem saying that a fetus is a human being. That doesn’t mean that I think it is a person, though. I don’t think a fetal human being is equal to a natal human being–which would be an actual person.
Pro-life folks tend to argue that all human life is sacred and must be protected. (Whether they truly believe it is another thing altogether). I don’t agree with this.
Bad luck if you want, but still you knew this was a possibility. I never knocked up anybody, but I got a couple false alerts one of then with a woman who wouldn’t have aborted. I would have called that becoming unexpectedly a father.
Still, bad luck or not, within the OP frame, you now have to kill a person (not abort a fetus) to solve the issue to your satisfaction. That’s not a valid moral choice for dealing with a result that you knew could occur. On one hand, there’s an hour of fun with your gf. On the other hand, the choice between being burdened for life with a child and murdering someone. Still deciding that you’ll have your fun and if you’re unlucky, you’ll just pick the murder option is both irresponsible and morally repugnant. You can’t reasonably hold this position unless you actually don’t make the assumption that the fetus is a human being (hence it’s not a murder) or you’re a sociopath who thinks that satisfying his fleeting sexual desires is more important than someone’s else life.
A dead fetus can’t grow up to go to the same church as its parents and later become a tithing (paying) member of that church as an adult.
Thus churches will NEVER condone abortion! It is against their financial interests.
Anything which goes along with growth of the church: Yes “god wants this”.
Anything against the growth of the church: “You are a sinner and will go to hell!”
If you do not think churches are money hungry, get the real story by reading the book "Have Mercy!: Confessions of the Original Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal"by Wolfman Jack. Preachers advertised on his radio station in the early 1960’s and he talks about the greedy people they are behind the scenes.
I think this was the spirit of the OP, and that you’re fighting the hypothetical (which you should never be allowed to do on this board) by playing semantics.
The idea is precisely that it’s somehow now an established fact (not a value judgment) that the fetus is a person. Aborting is the equivalent of killing a 10 yo, for instance. The question seems to be : can you still allow abortion because of the special circumstances (fetus occupying mom’s womb)? I content that you can’t because the special circumstances are a direct result of an easily avoidable choice you made.
The status of the fetus doesn’t affect my support for abortion rights, which are entirely based on the rights of adults of sound mind to have full control of their bodies under any scenario, including to remove anyone or anything that is inside their bodies that they do not want inside.
I trust that women are the best judges of whether their bodies should be providing biological support, aid, or pleasure to another object, creature, or person, under any circumstances and at any time, rather than government.
That’s the opposite way of looking at it, I think. It’s not “one orgasm trumps a person”. Nobody thinks that way. But consider it the other way : is one person’s life worth more than a lifetime of desires and happiness with the person you may or may not be in love with ? Is one person’s life worth your, or the person you love’s *entire *sex life ? A person you don’t know and will, perforce, never meet ? Do you expect the sacrifice of so much love, desire, pain, pleasure, emotions for the sake of a complete stranger ?
People half a world away have been killed for much less than that. And with much less of a shit being given. People die because chocolate is yummy, because diamonds are pretty. People die because the subway’s kind of uncomfortable and a car isn’t. Shit, people die *a street away *from you for less than that. Actual, not a single moral hemming and hawing, no splitting hairs people. Alone, unloved, unwanted. Nobody gives a fuck. And many of the people who say that they DO give a fuck when you do it demonstrably do not give a fuck when it’s their turn.
So fuck that sanctity of human life bullshit, okay ?
In which cases are you allowed, morally or legally to kill another person? I don’t think “we would have a shitty sex life otherwise” would excuse any crime, let alone murder. Let’s assume you’re a pedophile, your lack of opportunity to have a sex life otherwise won’t get you far in court, for instance.
And besides, there are at least two other alternatives : having a romantically and even sexually satisfying life without penetrative sex or having a regular sex life and risk having to take care of a child, and accept this risk. And in fact, as a man, that’s a choice you have made every time you had (heterosexual) sex. There’s no guarantee for you that your partner will seek an abortion in case of “bad luck”.
Regarding your statement that people don’t really care about perfect strangers, and that you can’t expect them to, sure, that’s true. For instance, if some evil genie was asking secretely people “either renounce to any sex life or some random stranger will die”, many would pick the latter. But how many would argue that this is a morally defensible choice? Besides, not giving a fuck that some random Liberian dies for blood diamonds is one thing. But being yourself the direct cause of this death is an entirely different situation.
If the fetus is a human being, it has the rights of any other human being. That does not include the right to use another human’s body without her permission. Hell, a person has the right to kill another person who comes into their house and refuses to leave.
And you don’t give any moral responsibility to the person who created this human, to satisfy his own whims and urges, in full knowledge that he would be totally dependant and deciding in advance that he would kill him to avoid the inconvenience and responsibilities?
Let’s assume I’m a god. I feel it would be fun to create a ball of dust, and then to create a couple human beings on it. So, I snap my fingers, the ball of dust appear, I snap them again and Adam and Eve appear. However, I don’t particularly care about creating animals or plants, and intend to let them starve to death now that the fun of creation is over. Would you similarly state that I have indeed no responsibility towards them, and that my actions are morally flawless?
Or : I actually have a child. It’s an human being. Reusing your words : “it has the rights of any other human being. That does not include the right to be fed and housed for free with my hard-earned money”. So, I leave the baby at the street corner, knowing perfectly it will die in quick order, being totally dependant on adults for its survival. Again, would you state I have no responsibility towards it and that my actions are morally flawless?
If a fetus was a person then killing it would be wrong. Abortions would have to change to letting it be born on the spot. So if it wasn’t viable yet it would either die after being born or the government at no expense to the parents would have to pay to keep it alive. This way the mothers body remains under her control and a person isn’t killed. The end result would be much more expense and government and intervention or babies that died outside the womb rather than in it.
Maybe they have some moral responsibility, depending on the circumstances, but I don’t believe the law or government should step in. Women get to make the decisions about their reproductive systems, end of story, and I oppose any criminal sanctions for any such decision under any circumstances.
If you believe law or government should step in, under what circumstances? How should women be punished if the government decides that they improperly used their reproductive systems in some way? Are you at all concerned that some women might be punished/jailed/prevented from getting an abortion when they really needed it for a good reason?
Well I’ve never heard this theory before.
This thread seems a bit too either-or. American law does generally permit states to recognize a degree of partial personhood in a fetus in the third trimester. 43 states have such restrictions (as do many other Western nations, FWIW).
Where such personhood is recognized, the fetus has a life interest that allows states to prevent its termination (i.e., to require the mother to continue to carry and support it, even over her objection). This is not full personhood, because the fetus’s interests are overcome where continuing the pregnancy would threaten the life or health of the mother; in such circumstances abortion must be permitted.
Does this mean that abortions can be performed on mentally handicapped pregnant women against their will?
Actually, they can. I can’t copy text from the cited PDF, but starting in the Abstract and continuing over the next couple of pages, the paper cites several court rulings that uphold parental right to compel a minor to donate organs/blood/tissue, etc.
I think that, under the hypothetical outlined in the OP, the legal arguments would center around consensual removal of healthy tissue - a concept that is far from settled in case law. There are cases where it is clearly OK to do so, like cosmetic surgery or gender reassignment, but also cases where the law is very murky, like amputation of a healthy limb. I think it is pretty well settled that cutting off you own arm, for example, is not a crime (though it may get you forcibly committed to a mental hospital). It gets much murkier when a surgeon (qualified or not, hospital or back alley) performs the amputation. This PDF has some interesting discussion around the ethics and legality of consensual removal of limbs.
I’m confused - the arm isn’t a person. The OP hypothetical is about personhood.
I see that 4 out of 11 “pro-life” have voted to “keep abortion legal even if a fetus is a person” - looks like we have some undercover cross-voters…
I disagree. To me, the question of whether or not the fetus is a human being is the central issue of the abortion debate.
If there was a general consensus that a fetus was not a human being then an abortion would be as uncontroversial as an appendectomy. And if there was a general consensus that a fetus was a human being then abortions would be as illegal as murder. The fact that there are some people who regard abortions as the equivalent of appendectomies and some who regard them as the equivalent of murder is a reflection of the fact that there is no consensus on that central issue.
But if the central issue could somehow be resolved, the secondary issues would all quickly and easily follow.