And I still maintain, that even if you follow this principle, and allow the abortion, the woman is still responsible for the death, since it’s her reckless actions that caused the death of an innocent person. Like in the reckless driving example. You might not have to give your blood, but you definitely have to do the time for acting in a way that resulted in someone’s death.
Thank you, I understand now. You are of the belief that killing someone is not a violation of their right to control their own body.
That’s…not something I’d concur with. At this point I’ll concede to agreeing to disagree. Sincere thanks for the intellectual honesty in the back-and-forth. Beats having everything turn into snarky half-insults by the third reply. 
Ok, so if I’m a pedophile, can I have sex with children with impunity for the exact same reasons? Or if I can’t manage to find a willing partner, can I rape some random woman? Obviously having forceful sex with them is a lesser crime than killing them. So, if my psychological well-being is more important than someone else’s life, surely it’s also more important than someone’s else bodily integrity?
I’m not killing them, I’m evicting them. “You don’t have the right to my body, and if you won’t leave, I will remove you”. That’s always okay – it doesn’t matter if it’s a rapist in the middle of the night or a parasitic tiny person. If they can’t survive without my body, that sucks, but I still have the right to control access to my body. My right to control my body is not dependent on whether or not someone else requires access to my body to live.
I’ll turn it around on you – let’s say the scenario is the exact same, and the connection is a very large needle shoved into my genitals. Do I have a right to remove this needle from my genitals?
I’m talking about consensual adult sex – perhaps I should have made myself more clear. Only consensual adult sex.
And therein lies the problem with using ONLY that criteria to judge whether we should care about fetuses. I know there are additional issues, which is why that’s not the sole criteria I use to determine how I feel about abortion.
As annoyingly uncomfortable as it makes me, I accept that many laws will not be 100% consistent. In trying to reach perfection, however, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming only perfection is acceptable, its perfectly fine to have a good law, not a great law. That we cannot become fetuses is a good reason why at least in this case, abortion isn’t about self-preservation and we don’t have to ever worry about the feelings of fetuses or whether or not they even have one.
When it comes to people with Down Syndrome, we can view it as a medical illness, and its similar enough to that to assume that self-preservation in that case stretches to medical issues. You wouldn’t want patients to have no rights. And it would be weird to cover some illnesses, and not others. But being a fetus isn’t a medical condition, its dissimilar enough that we can give it its own classification. Therefore, we need not worry about the wellbeing of fetuses when determining whether abortion should or should not be legal
Not for nothing, but…
(Emphasis added.)
But, I’ll accept that you’re now arguing the position that you don’t have the right to kill him, but do have the right to evict him, and that the fact that you’re perfectly aware that the action (as opposed to inaction) you’re consciously taking will result in his inevitable death is irrelevant in light of the fact that bodily autonomy while living outweighs the right to life.
Given that he’s biologically fused to you, what method of removal are you suggesting that doesn’t constitute, at the very least, assault?
(As an aside, I’ve been gone a while, but now I remember why I used to love this place. Where else can you get high-handedly moralistic in defense of the rights of a magical sentient parasite?)
To skip to what I presume is your point, if the needle is a sentient and intelligent person whom you know will die if you remove it, and whom you also know was not in any way complicit in its insertion into your crotchal region, then no, you still can’t murder an innocent person, although you do have my deepest sympathies for your plight.
If any of those conditions are not true, then please continue, and I apologize for making assumptions.
Thanks – that was a mistake, and I should have specified the right is to evict.
I will happily carve out a tiny portion of my own body so that I don’t touch his (assuming I conclude that living with him attached is intolerable).
If there’s no way to do this, I would strongly consider suicide, as living with someone fused to my body would be entirely intolerable and incompatible with living an acceptable life.
No, the needle is just the method of attachment – some mad scientist hooked him up to me in the middle of the night by means of a hose and a big needle shoved into my genitals.
Why would it be different if he’s hooked up to me by genital-needle vice him being fused to my body somehow? Either way he is parasitizing my body without my consent.
Also, how does your thinking change if this connection (however it is) causes me frequent pain and other negative physical symptoms? I still don’t have the right to sever the connection, in your mind?
In California, at least, already taken care of: I just drop the baby off at a hospital, police station, or firehouse.
Sorry, but if your desire for sex is more important than another person right to live, which is what you argued, then it most certainly also more important than their right not to have non-consensual sex, which is a lesser offense.
You’re killing someone because 1) your bodily autonomy is more important than their life and 2) you put him in the situation where the choices are his death or your bodily autonomy just because you feel better when you can have sex. If you make the assumption that we’re actually talking about a person, this behaviour shows a sociopath level disregard for human life. You don’t care that someone dies so that you can have your jollies, using the “he!he! “bodily autonomy”! you can’t get me! :p” card. That’s worst than being a rapist. A non-sociopath would abstain from having sex rather than killing someone.
Unless again you don’t accept the OP premise which is that the fetus is an actual person equivalent to a living child, yourself, me, your mom, etc…
To actually not fight the hypothetical, you must picture yourself ordering, say, a 10 yo kid (instead of a clump of cells) to be killed every time your protection failed or you just didn’t care enough to use an adequate protection during sex. Even if it’s somehow legal, what would you think of someone who states that having a satisfying sex life is more important than killing actual kids and definitely justifies and excuses the killing?
In the United States, citizenship is conferred by birth or naturalization.
That wasn’t my argument.
My argument was that sex (consensual adult sex) is part of normal and necessary human existence, and if normal and necessary human existence caused a chance for a new person to be born inside someone (which it does), that doesn’t mean that someone loses the right to bodily autonomy just for the “crime” of existing as humans do (which involves consensual adult sex).
You make a conscious choice to invite me into your house, knowing full well that once I arrive, I would be physically unable to leave without dying, for a set length of time. Then you change your mind about letting me stay and are therefore justified in killing me to get your space back.
Not to put too fine a point on it, you don’t actually have the right to murder someone who you invited in and refuses to leave.
If they’re latched onto your body and won’t let go, you have the right to use force to remove them.
What does “evict” mean?
If the method of eviction is “eviction by death,” then you are arguing for the right to kill the fetus.
Using ‘eviction’ as the defining action of an abortion feels like a very tortured way of trying to maintain a narrative where all life is absolutely equally important (including a fetus), and at the same time it’s ok to kill that life if you insist that it is violating a mother’s rights as an autonomous person.
With respect to you (and to the basically good and interesting conversation happening here), using the language of ‘rights’ to describe the interaction between mother and gestating baby is bizarre.
It’s not “eviction by death”, it’s “death by eviction”, in these cases. The object of an abortion is not to kill a fetus, it’s to end a pregnancy.
In fact, if fetuses were people, and there were fetus-supporting technology, then I wouldn’t object to mandating that abortions remove the fetus alive and transfer it to the artificial wombs – women still get full control of their bodies, and that’s what’s paramount to me.
My point is that to me that feels like semantic playing around to avoid addressing the very real-world consequence that abortion=remove the fetus from the mother=kill the fetus. I don’t think, given the practicalities of how this all works, you can say “I am not for killing fetuses, but I am for removing fetuses from their mothers.”
The “object” is irrelevant. For example, the “object” of the death penalty is not to kill people, but is to [make the world safer/punish wrongdoers/serve as deterrent/whatever else]. That doesn’t mean that support of the death penalty isn’t supporting the killing of people.
This response was aimed more to the people who say body autonomy is currently a right. It is not, it’s quite conditional.
Granted, the cases presented don’t address the issue correctly, but the following quote does:
Both parents and the courts have the right, known as “substituted judgment”, to compel organ donation from a minor or incompetent person.
Sex isn’t necessary and if it was, it would be equally necessary for the pedophile, the guy who can’t get laid, etc… If you think that the latter two can and must abstain from having sex because it would cause harm to someone else, then you could and should equally abstain from having consensual adult sex if it results in someone’s death.
As I already said, arguing that satisfying your need for sex allows you to kill another human being if required is either a sociopathic attitude or fighting the hypothetical (you don’t really think we’re talking about an actual person).
My point isn’t even about bodily autonomy (and this could be argued against to), it’s that creating an human being that you fully intend to subsequently kill, simply for the purpose of satisfying your sexual urges, is morally totally bankrupt (and IMO worth a sentencing at least for reckless homicide, if we buy into the “bodily autonomy trumps everything” argument).