Again with the disingenuousness.
The child is a human being either way. The person whose body it’s occupying gets to make decisions about whether it will be allowed to do so. No one else does. Not assailants, and not you.
It is the debate. Some people think the fetus becomes a child immediately, some a long time later. But this is not a debate that can be resolved scientifically, since personhood is not a scientific concept in the womb. We can measure heartbeats, and brainwaves, and movements, but which combination of these makes a person is a value judgment.
Which is why pro-choice is the valid argument. If you strongly believe that a fetus does not become a person until the second trimester, say, why should the government force you not to abort earlier than that because some influential pastor convinced the legislature to set personhood at implantation? (We’ll act as if we both are women here, since as men our opinions shouldn’t count for squat, it not being our bodies.)
Certainly no one is planning to force someone who believes personhood begins at conception to have an abortion after that point. You clearly believe personhood begins at some time between conception and one day before birth - pro-choice just means the state will respect your decision on this.
It doesn’t. In most states a woman can give up a child is she doesn’t wish to or is unable to take care of it. The analogy to the anti-choice position would be to force her to take care of it without giving her the option of putting the child up for adoption.
Indeed, the unborn baby is not only inside, it’s attached.
Birth may not be the only “line” worth thinking about in moral terms, but it’s still a bright one. There is a major operational difference between an unborn baby and a born one.
Let’s dial it back, please. Stick to the arguments and make them without personal comments.
So … waitaminnut … you “support abortion rights” but you’re … attacking the pro-choice movement and calling it “bullshit”?
Wha … ? :dubious:
Garbage. “Life” is irrelevant; personhood is what matters. Trying to reduce the question to one of “life”, reducing humanity to “meat that isn’t dead yet” is a perversion of the anti-abortionists. It isn’t the “core of the debate”.
No; that is the “core of the debate”; are women people, or are they cattle? Are they just life support systems for a womb or people capable of choosing what to do with their body?
Where is all this idiocy you speak of?
I have no doubt you could dredge the bottom of the internet and find a whack-job saying abortion till the moment before birth is ok but this is nowhere near the mainstream view.
Please cite Planned Parenthood or NARAL or some other main stream organization or pundit at the center of this debate and show me their idiocy.
And it is about choice in the first trimester…the woman and the woman alone gets to choose whether or not to continue the pregnancy. As mentioned second trimester abortions are pretty rare and third trimester abortions exceptionally rare (relatively speaking) and only done when there are serious threats to the mother’s health.
The trimester demarcations are a pretty good guide actually. Viability does seem to occur around week 24. Yes, some fetuses have been delivered and survived sooner but those are truly rare cases (and only a week or two before that…I’d have to look it up).
He’s not attacking the movement; he’s attacking a particular argument that he perceives to be being used by the movement to support its position.
Mm? I realize you’ve got a lot farther in the natural sciences than I have, but I was taught in biology that, to be considered alive, an organism had to be able to sustain that life itself. I believe this was tied in to homeostasis somehow. This is why viruses aren’t considered alive. Is this an outdated or oversimplified notion?
To throw my 2 cents in the ring (stipulating that I’m a male and my wife would probably scowl at me for even opening my mouth on the subject): I’ve gotten pretty uncomfortable with abortion since having a kid.
First couple weeks - meaning AS SOON AS you find out about the pregnancy? Ok. Not ideal, but ok.
But it wasn’t long after that that I started thinking of my son as very real.
I don’t think 2nd or 3rd trimester abortions should be legal except when the mother’s life is in danger, or as an act of humanitarianism (e.g. the baby is SEVERELY handicapped and is guaranteed to have a very short and very painful life.)
Perhaps there should be a 2nd trimester exception in cases of rape and incest, to give extra times to those victims who have trouble speaking out.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to ask who, exactly, the fetus’s body belongs to? If the fetus is a person, then surely the fetus’s body would belong to the fetus, and it would be the fetus who has the right to choose.
The fetus’s body is its own, and it’s welcome to take itself elsewhere. It doesn’t get to choose to use *my *body, any more than I get to choose to do whatever I like with yours.
1.) It’s not a person.
2.) It’s a parasite. If I woke up in the middle of the night and you’d connected yourself to me via tubes that, if removed, would kill you, I think I’d be able to disconnect them.
DianaG and others are handling this pretty ably, but I’ll just chime in to concur that you’re misunderstanding, Monkey: the “choice” in pro-choice is *not *“whether or not to kill my baby” but “what I want to have happen to my body”. When life/personhood begins is frankly irrelevant. If I don’t want my body to be used as a support system, then I have the right to make that choice.
I had a philosophy professor once who put it this way: Imagine you wake up one day and find that doctors have attached a 60-year old man to your body. His kidneys aren’t functioning, you see, and so yours are being used to filter his blood along with your own. They had to do this because you are the only person in the world who matches his very rare genetic whatever, so otherwise, he’ll die. Do you have the right to say, “I don’t want my body used to support this guy’s life anymore?” That’s the choice.
Obviously, neither you nor anyone else has the right to simply stab the guy in the heart, starve him to death, or harm him in some other way. And obviously, if you have no problem with your body being his life support, no one else has the right to remove him from that support. But many people, including me, would argue that you do have the right to say, at any time, “I don’t want my body used in this way,” even though that inevitably means he will die. It might be immoral, it might be unethical, it might be a sin, fine. But it’s your right to choose what happens to your body. And FWIW, I’m seven months pregnant.
Yes. When people on my side make bad arguments, I call them on it. I will not abide people who refuse to examine their political and moral values out of lazy “feel good” logic. I respect women’s rights too, but dammit, “choice” is irrelevant. That is not what the debate should be about.
I am “pro-choice” but I loathe the misnomer.
So, because you are uncomfortable with the idea some totally unrelated woman shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion in the second trimester? How about if some other uncomfortable person thinks there shouldn’t be one halfway through the first trimester? I’ve got two kids, and I’d be perfectly comfortable if my kids needed one then - though we trained them well, and the need is extremely unlikely.
The point of the argument is that we should respect your feelings about you and yours, and you should respect ours for our families.
Interesting to come at the question of killing the unborn from two directions today. Elsewhere, I said this,
As I said, there may be more than one “line” to be found, depending on context. I see no necessary conflict in acknowledging that a late-term unborn baby is almost the same as a born baby, and holding an assailant similarly responsible for its injury (including murder charges), while also acknowledging the critical difference, with respect to the prevailing rights of the woman.
This is probably the most succinct way to put it.
No insult intended to the OP but he seems to have gotten hung up on a perfectly valid but fairly (by now, for most of us) banal aspect of this whole debate, which is (a) terminology being used to advance an ideological end; and (b) the fact that slogans place more emphasis on short and catchy and happy-sounding than nuanced or negative.
It became established pretty early on that the pro-Roe people were not going to describe themselves, or accept the label of, “pro-abortion,” any more than the antis were going to call themselves anti-choice.
The OP would probably be okay with “pro allowing abortion if the woman wants it, during certain phases of the pregnancy.” But that’s never going to be the shorthand reference.
The “Pro-Choice” argument is fine. A woman has a *choice *to terminate her pregnancy before an agreed upon time.
As for person-hood, anyone who thinks that a fetus that doesn’t possess brain function is a person is most likely basing that on a religious myth.