Exactly. The forced birthers go around talking about killing babies because they are trying to cover up the fact that laws against abortion take away all of a woman’s rights. If a woman can be forced to use her body by someone else, she no rights. If you ask anyone these questions, everyone will answer “yes” but because most people don’t seem to realize the moral implications of forcing women to carry unwanted fetuses, the forced birthers only focus on the first question:
Are you against killing babies?
Do you think women should be allowed to make their own medical decisions?
Do you think women should be forced to donate organs to keep sick children alive?
Do you think it’s ok for a woman to kill someone trying to kidnap or harm her?
well, it is. 100%. It isn’t even about abortion or fetuses, it’s about women’s rights. Several of the prominent “pro-life” leaders have openly admitted this-they aren’t trying to save fetuses, they are trying to punish women for having sex and to control the sexuality of women. If you look at the actual actions of the “pro-life” people, their behavior is inconsistent with a goal of trying to prevent abortions.
Several studies have shown that laws against abortions don’t reduce their incidence, and in actual practice countries with draconian laws against abortions tend to a) be extremely misogynist, and b) have higher rates of abortion than countries where it’s legal.
The only proven method to reduce the abortion rate is to increase access to sex education and contraceptives.
And yet, oddly, the “pro-life” people are almost universally opposed to contraception and sex education. Look in CO, where pro-choice people have managed to reduce the abortion rate among teenagers by 40%, but the “pro-life” people have repeatedly attempted to have the program tossed out. Look at the bizarre attacks on Planned Parenthood by the “pro-life” people: PP prevents hundreds of thousands of abortions every year and is the only source of contraception for many poor people. Get rid of it, and what goal is achieved? Certainly not any reduction in abortion rates.
And the idea that anyone “consents” to parenthood just because they had sex is just ridiculous. If a person used contraception, that’s kind of a clue they didn’t consent to it.
No, and I’m genuinely curious why you think I am. I fully acknowledge that nobody has the right to cause harm to your body. The thing is, the person attached to you didn’t do that. It’s happening, but he didn’t do it…and not in the “didn’t intend to” sense that a driver might say they didn’t mean to hit that pedestrian, but in the sense that he literally did not create the situation. The situation just is. Unless existing in circumstances entirely beyond one’s control is a crime that justifies the death penalty, he retains the same right to bodily autonomy that you do. That situation sucks elephant ass, and simply should not be at all — and thankfully, in the real world, it isn’t — but that fact doesn’t give you the right to kill someone who’s done nothing wrong.
ETA: We’re still discussing a patently goofy hypothetical. I’m harping on that because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m trying some kind of backdoor pro-life justification. Everything I’m blathering about is based upon a given that a fetus is a full-fledged sentient human being, and bears no relation whatsoever to anything I actually believe about abortion.
You don’t have the right to another person’s body no matter the circumstances, it doesn’t matter if it was your fault or not if you ended up that way. I could get in an accident tomorrow through absolutely no fault of my own, that does not give me the right to forcibly take any of your blood.
I agree with this. You do not have the right to forcibly take any of my blood, “forcibly” meaning that you decide to do it and then take steps to make it happen. If some of my blood just happened to teleport into your body, saving you and endangering my life — and if that sounds farfetched, remember we’re operating in a world where two fully self-aware and intelligent beings wake up one day magically fused together — then I wouldn’t have the right to kill you to get it back, for the same reason.
ETA (again, sorry, but re: spamforbrains’s post, I think it’s important to clarify this) — I was hesitant to mention that bit about women’s rights because I didn’t want to give the impression, which it seems I have, that I thought the very real cultural phenomenon of systemic oppression in the guise of “human rights” was irrelevant. I believe it’s irrelevant to the validity of one specific argument, but on a broader sense, it’s one of the most relevant, and sickening, issues facing the country.
Well, you can walk away if and only if someone else has agreed to take on the task of being a parent to your child. If you walk away, and the neighbors come by and find that your child hasn’t been changed or fed or clothed in several days, the law might not compel you to sing a lullaby, but it may very well put you in jail for neglect.
Not at all; this is precisely the rationale for imposition of child support upon an unwilling father. As I noted above, the law absolutely compels parenthood (absent an agreeable substitute), and it requires no more showing of consent than having had sex.
The law doesn’t compel pregnancy, on the other hand, because pregnancy is a qualitatively different and more intrusive burden upon personal autonomy than parenthood. As Trinopus points out, you can in some circumstances buy your way out of parenthood. And again, even pregnancy can be compelled in the third trimester.
It’s not about their own bodies in this case. The government would act in order to prevent what has been proved in some way to be a murder. The government is totally in the business of preventing people from killing other people.
Even if you allowed them to end the pregnancy out of some general principle or another, they still should still be sentenced because they acted with complete recklessness. They engaged in an activity they could chose not to engage in, and resulting in the death of another human being.
If fetuses are indeed persons in the full sense of the term, you can’t let everybody kill them without consequences simply because they don’t feel like stopping having sex, and don’t want to have to deal with the predictable result of having sex either. The situation is entirely of your own making, without any fault on the victim’s part. You put it in this bad spot basically because you felt like it. Even if we take as granted that one’s own body is sacrosanct for some unknown hypothetical reason, and that abortion should be allowed if you insist on it, you’re still guilty at the very least of reckless endangerment or some kind of manslaughter.
As I already wrote, if the fetus is a person, aborting isn’t much different from abandoning a newborn to die of exposure.
Maybe not. But if the accident is entirely my fault (say, I was drunk and driving at 120 m/h), even though I can’t be compelled to give blood and save your life, I can definitely still be sentenced in court for my criminally reckless behaviour. And the fact that on top of it I refused to give blood to save you probably won’t help my case.
It doesn’t matter. It may be competing rights, but when rights compete and one of them is bodily autonomy, bodily autonomy takes precedence. Always. 100%. If I wake up and a little tiny dude is inside of me, and removing him will kill him, then I still can get rid of him no matter how he got there. It doesn’t matter if he snuck in while I slept or if a mad scientist injected him into me. Bodily autonomy takes precedence 100% absolutely all the time with zero exceptions. I may choose to leave him, but I absolutely should have the right to restrict my body to myself if I so choose, no matter how the scenario occurred.
As I wrote above, if you’re male, you’re consenting to parenthood every time you have sex, regardless of how many precautions you took to avoid becoming a parent. Regardless how ridiculous you find the concept, it’s enshrined in law pretty much everywhere, and few people dispute it.
Unless you’re a menopaused woman, sex results in pregnancies. That’s not something people should ever forget.
Tell me why. If you chose to have sex, got pregnant with a child (not a fetus) as a result, and subsequently kill the child, you think you have no moral responsibility whatsoever in the death of this child? And if you think you don’t have any such responsibility, why then shouldn’t you also be allowed to kill him after birth rather than being compelled to care for him for the next 18 years?
Your opinion that your body is sacrosanct is crystal clear and as far as I can tell I agree with it. Your opinion that the only person whose bodily autonomy is thusly inviolable is you is the part I’m not sold on. As best I can tell, you’re saying that his right to his own autonomy — and his own life — is revoked because of something he didn’t do and bears no culpability for. That’s the part I have a problem with. (In the mad scientist scenario, I’d have no problem with you killing the scientist, if that makes things any clearer.)
Or, wait, are you saying that bodily autonomy is separate from the right not to be killed, and takes precedence over that?
Moral responsibility, maybe. That doesn’t mean the government gets to decide. It’s always – ALWAYS – up to the woman. It doesn’t matter how they got pregnant. It doesn’t matter who is inside them, or how they got there. Every woman always 100% has the right to evict any person inside them, no matter how they got there, and no matter if they will die if they are evicted.
His right to life conflicts with my right to control my body. My bodily autonomy doesn’t conflict with his bodily autonomy – he can do anything he likes with his body as long as it doesn’t conflict with my body… unfortunately, his living conflicts with my bodily autonomy.
Since his is the parasitic relationship – his life relies on my body, but not vice versa – my bodily autonomy takes precedence. We do nothing, and he is feeding off my body – I’m not feeding off his. I have the right to say “no, you can’t feed off my body any more”, under any circumstance whatsoever. His bodily autonomy doesn’t come into play because I’m not feeding off his body in any way whatsoever.
Yes, but pregnancy isn’t something that just happens to you. You have to take an active step to end up in this situation. A step that you can perfectly avoid taking. If abortion is considered murder because it’s proven beyond any doubt that a fetus is as human as you are, it’s not a choice between enduring pregnancy and spending 20 years being bars. It’s a choice between getting pregnant (and enduring the consequences) and not getting pregnant. Otherwise, you’re just saying that your sexual satisfaction is worth killing another person.
I don’t think it matters why people have sex with regards to abortion, but I see sex as a totally normal and even psychologically necessary activity – almost as much as eating and breathing. People have sex because they’re people, and that’s what people do. So yes, your existence and continued psychological normalcy is worth the chance of possibly killing a person, since the alternative is tantamount to increasing the chance of possibly killing one’s self.