Conservatives know the difference between positive and negative rights. Liberals, in general, do not (case and point above). The right to life is a negative right, not a positive one.
Your inaccurate potshot aside, so what?
“Negative rights” can be assigned to both sides of the issue. A woman has a right to not utilize her body for the benefit of someone else. A woman has the right to bodily autonomy- part of which includes no one inside her body that she does not wish to be there.
You believe the fetus has a right to life that overrules these rights of the woman. Whether or not the fetus has any rights, I do not believe that any possible rights by the fetus overrule the “negative rights” of the woman.
The inaccuracy of your claims of inaccuracy aside, everything. As the right to life is a negative right, you are not required to do anything to save someone else’s life. You are, however, prevented from doing things which would end that person’s life. It’s not a hard concept at all. One requires some form of interference; the other precludes it.
This is logically incoherent. You cannot engage in action x and then claim the naturally deriving consequences of that action violate your rights. That’s, simply put, idiotic and is a thought process employed nowhere else in society.
Having previously seen (and having never fully understood the point of) this “positive vs. negative rights” thing before, I’ll not delve into it but instead suggest that abortion is a losing political issue in large part because of cellphones, the internet and venues like The Daily Show. Collectively, they make it darn-near impossible for a Republican pol to say something factually ignorant about pregnancy or abortion (even if it’s to a friendly local crowd that believes the ignorance and cheers loudly in support) and not be thoroughly and nationally lambasted for it.
If a fetus has rights, why is it okay to abort those that are the results of rape or incest? How does the origin of the fetus determine what level of rights it has?
Sure it’s coherent, depending on your point of view. The fetus is taking resources from the woman. The woman has the “negative right” to not have part of her body consumed by another. How this little being got inside the woman is not relevant- whether it grew from a fertilized egg, was implanted by an alien, or crawled in from the garden and dove in while she slept, she still has the “negative right” of bodily autonomy, and if she does not want the fetus in her, then her “negative rights” are being violated.
Look - if you didn’t want that tapeworm inside you, you shouldn’t have swallowed that contaminated meat.
That flatworm is a blessing from God. If you don’t agree, next time keep your lips together.
You slut.
There’s one thing that I don’t understand about republicans. Don’t republicans always strive for freedom and “let people make their own choices” rather than having the government control so many things?
So by that line of logic, isn’t it self-contradictory for them to be opposed to abortion. By keeping abortion legal, you are allowing the mother to make her own choice, whether she wants to give birth to that baby, or abort it. If you ban abortion, then you are allowing the government to make choices for pregnant women. That basically translates to “women must give birth if pregnant”. You are not allowing the mother to make her own choices, but you are controlling them by telling her than you must give birth to your child. Since republicans really value freedom, wouldn’t it make more sense if republicans were the ones who are for abortion? This is a sincere question.
Aside from that, I am completely for abortion being legal. What if you have a woman, that gets raped? Then she is pregnant and if abortion were to be illegal, she is forced to give birth to a child. What if she’s not ready for pregnancy? Pregnancy is a lot of work and pain for women, and if you don’t believe me, go and check out a few IMHO/MPSIMS pregnancy threads. What if she just got married and doesn’t want to have children at this point? What if she doesn’t want to have children period? Are you now going to force her to give birth against her will? Seriously, is that how we’re going to do things here?
As a wise political philosopher once said, the less you plan to do about something, the more you must talk about it. That is why the party that espouses personal freedom can be against abortion, homosexuality, marriage equality, recreational drug use, and building mosques.
I don’t believe Republicans strive for that. If they do, they don’t practice it
Because anybody who support some sort of a government agrees that at minimum it should protect people against coercive actions like murder or theft. Since pro-lifers believe those not yet born are also people, they support abortion bans as part of the government’s power to prevent above-mentioned coercive actions.
Incidentally while I’m pro-life I’m otherwise socially quite libertarian whether the actions in question are moral or not.
Most pro-lifers support an exception in cases of rape (such as myself). And to a pro-lifer most of the other factors would be outweighed by the child’s right to life.
It’s funny (so to speak) to hear conservatives talking about how important individual rights are, and how small the government should be, and how bad regulations are – and then watching them do a U-turn on a dime when abortion comes up. Suddenly, individual rights must surrender to other people’s rights, and the government must have an overriding regulatory and enforcement role.
If you do all of these things against her will, does she have the right to kill you if you are not using deadly force? No.
Is it ‘killing’ with deadly force to deny people access to your body and biological processes? NO
Thousands of already born people die every year because they are denied access to tissues/organs/bodies of other people that could sustain them. No person’s ‘right to life’ entitles them access to another person’s body in order to survive.
She has the right to extricate the offender from her body. Anyone always has the right to extricate anyone or anything from their body if they so choose. It doesn’t matter who or what is in your body- if you want it out, that’s your right.
Is it your contention that all abortions involve a mere extrication of the fetus? If so would you be in support of the banning of abortions that use lethal force?
In most cases, removing the fetus is fatal no matter what. In (extremely rare) instances in which the fetus is removed but still alive, then IMO the doctor has the same responsibility to the baby (no longer inside another person) that they do to any other person who is not-inside-another.
It is extraction of tissue. Does removing a kidney involve lethal force to the kidney? The tissue dies, either during the process or shortly after.
And to answer your question: no. The technology doesn’t even exist to keep a 1 month old fetus alive and developing outside the body. This idea would ban almost every abortion, but I’d guess you would be happy with that.