In this case, the legal ruling was that a child’s half-siblings could not be forced to see if they were a match for a bone marrow donation, never mind actually be forced to donate.
The classic scenaior is that a crying baby could expose your location to an attacker. I have been in war zones, but luckily have never been put in situation where I have had to kill a baby to save everyone else, but I know people who have. One mother once told everyone it was either smother her six month old (and lose one child) or risk capture (at which point she and her other three children would not only die, but probably be raped repeatedly before death). For some people adoption is not an alternative, it’s a vile form of ethnic genocide. Furthermore, unless the mother is able to secure the consent of the child’s father adoption is not an option. He can take custody and sue the mother for child support. Some woman are the major economic provider of their families. If their salaries are docked by having to pay child support to the father, other members of the family suffer. The equation is kill the baby (1 life) or risk the lives of many.
Or honor killings, they happen in the West too. It’s unfortunate, but it happens. And a teenager in a family that values her hymen over her life is not going to know about the resources (precious few that there are) to help her escape. She does know if no one knows about the baby, she lives another day.
Did you read the sentence right above that? The one where I say that we already have an exception for the mother so how does anyone else (meaning anyone other than teh mother) die? I’ve never read that an older sibling died in childbirth.
There’s very little similarity between being forced buy health insurance and being forced to carry a fetus to term. (It’s really more similar to taxation. I think taxation is okay - and I think that requiring you to buy health insurance is okay. Heck, in some places it’s the same thing.)
There’s somewhat more similarity between being forced to serve in the military and being forced to carry a fetus to term. (That’s really more similar to slavery - differing mainly in that you draw a larger wage beyond food and board. I am opposed to slavery - and opposed to the draft too, as it happens.)
But there’s rather a lot of similarity between being forced to donate blood or body parts and being forced to carry a fetus to term - and the law has universally backed away from forcing you under the needle or knife. For any reason. In this case I agree with the law - a person’s body is their own. And thus I’m opposed to the law forcing women to carry fetuses to term. This is not to say that I think it would be bad if women decided to carry fetuses to term - not at all! And if people want to donate organs that’s awesome too. But I think that there’s a fundamental difference between the person decideing to put themselves under the knife and the law forcing them onto the operating table.
So it would be good if you directly addressed Heart of Dorkness’s questions. Are you in favor of grabbing people off the street whenever an organ donation is required? Of grabbing their nearest family member and forcing them under the knife? If not, how is this different than forcing a woman to take a fetus to term and get a C-section?
Also I want to address this part specifically:
A less lethal method? What precisely are you imagining here - that the doctor can wave a magic wand and make the fetus teleport out, and that it’ll start squalling and stuff immediately without any further problems?
Or is this really a gloss for “force the woman to carry the child to term, regardless of how uncomfortable or problematic that is”? I know women who had to go on two months’ bed rest to avoid complications and health risks - they couldn’t do anything. If you’re in favor of forcing them to undergo this, then perhaps you’re talking about slavery after all.
No I do not think that you can be forced to give blood (unless perhaps youa re in the military), a kidney (even temporarily), not even for your spouse (perhaps for your children). Yes I think these situations are different (not completely but still different enough that I think the result is different) from forcing a woman in her third trimester who does not face death or disability to carry her baby to term.
In order for anything i say to make sense to you, you have to entertain the idea that a viable fetus is a human being. Conversely if I believed that a fetus was just a mass of flesh until the moment it was born then I would be entirely OK with aborting it up until the moment it was born. I assume that your hypothetical means that you are trying to engage me on my terms. You are saying “so even if you say that the fetus is full blown human being, how can you justify forcing a woman (as a matter of law) to share her blood and organs with her child whether the child is viable or not”
In saying this you are also asking me to agree that the fetus is in fact a parasite/cannibal that has no mrore right to do what it does than a stranger. I have trouble with this formulation but I suppose you have trouble with the “fetus is a human being” as well so I’ll bite.
For the purposes of this question, there is no duty of care between a mother and a fetus, the fetus is a human being, and it is viable outside the womb without freeriding off of the mother’s organs, right?
So we happen upon the 6th month of a pregnancy and the fetus is drawing nutrients from the mother’s blood and the mother’s kidneys and liver are working overtime to handle the extra load. There is no risk of death of disability but the woman no longer wants the child to sponge off of her.
If the fetus can survive on its own, why do we say the mother can kill it rather than have a ceasarian? But to be fair, I don’t think I would be in favor of replacing a bunch of third trimester abortions with a bunch of pre-mature ceasarians inn the 7th month. But I would probably be OK with premature ceasarians in the 8th or 9th months (I think this probably makes the cases that I am concerned about even more uncommmon, perhaps they would be rare enough that I am spinning my wheels over nothing).
Another issue that has beenn alluded to earlier but turned into a “so you want to punish the slut for getting pregnant?” conversation. The fetus did not put itself there, at least in the case of a fetus that is not the result of rape, the woman played a part in putting it there and while the woman can exercise choice to terminate the pregnancy anytime in the first 6 months (or 7 months), if the woman failed to exxercise that right and the fetus has reached some level of development when we say it is a human being then yeah I feel pretty comfortable distinguishing this from the case of a forced blood transfusion. So perhaps there is a stronger argument for allowing greater flexibility in the case of rape.
So I don’t see an abortion in the third trimester as “forcing a woman to carry a baby to term” so much as I see it as “not allowing that woman to kill the baby”.
I thought we were talking about the US, I don’t think that happens here. In those cases, I don’t think any law against abortion would play into the decision at all. Not only are you talking about killing a living breathing child, you are talking about such an extenuating circumstance that the normal rules do not apply.
I am not pretending that abortions (especially late term abortions) are undertaken lightly. Aside from first trimester abortion, I can only imagine how much of a gutwrenching decision it is to make. I think we should make the decision to carry a baby to term easier. We should have paid maternity leave. We should have free day care. We should provide pregnant women and new mothers with mother’s helpers. We should expand the WIC program to cover diapers. We should have sex education starting in junior high school (and again in old age homes, its like these senior citizens never heard of AIDS). The birth control pill should be covered by medicaid and (ewww) medicare (I am still up in the air about whether first trimester abortions should be covered by medicaid). We should give a shit about counseling women through their first year of motherhood (I swear, I don’t know WTF my wife and i would have done if we didn’t have two grandmothers ready willing and able to give us a hand and tell us that everything weas going to be ok and to stop feraking out about ebverything).
I don’t know how single mothers do it, I don’t think I could do it and hold down a job at the same time, not when the baby need to be fed every three hours so you never get more than about 2 hours of sleep at a time.
I don’t have callous disregard for the mother and the desperation she must feel. I think a lot of these desperate women would feel less so if we had a more caring society. Things were easier for my wife and me because of all the people around us. Some women, a lot of women, don’t have that and all they see is a gauntlet of angry protesters as she heads into the abortion clinic.
As much sympathy as I feel for the woman who finds herself wanting an abortion in her third trimester, absent a threat of death or permanent physical disability, I do not see enough of an exigency to justify murder.
Not simply letting someone die, actively killing it.
By the third trimester, people know. I don’t know if you have read the whole thread but the debate isn’t about whether of not abortions should be legal. I don’t think there is much debate about their legality in the first two trimesters, I think the entire debate has revolved around third trimester abortions.
Google Melissa Drexler, people do not always know. Furthermore in the communities where a woman or girl would be most in danger from an honor killing over an illegitimate pregnancy, the clothing standards are often make it is easier to conceal her body.
I have read the whole thread. You wanted to know when giving birth could result in death for the mother. I am giving you plenty of examples. Luckily ground war has not come to U.S. soil, but some crime ridden areas are war zones enough that people do have to hid in fear of their lives. The fact that a father can demand custody, and get it, and get child support is another situation where a woman’s only alternative is abortion. I don’t think you realize how close to the edge of poverty many people live. I know women that if they had to pay child support would not be able to properly care for the children they already have or whose other family members would fatally suffer.
Depends on how you look at it. Personally, I think that third trimester elective abortions are as rare as hen’s teeth, and making them specifically against the law is like making it specifically against the law to prevent people from allowing their pet alligators to run loose in the park without a leash. Yes, it would be objectively bad if large numbers of people let their pet alligators run loose without a leash. However, in that esoteric place called the real world, there don’t seem to be that many loose pet alligators anyway, so arguing fervently to make a leash law for them seems like a waste of argumentive and legislative time.
That being the case, I am firmly convinced that when we debate about third-trimester elective abortions, we are in fact not talking about third-trimester elective abortions at all. We are talking about early second-trimester abortions, or possibly late first-trimester abortions, or maybe any abortions at all. It’s basically an argument from analogy writ large - exactly the same as when we talk about cutting loose that sixty-year old man. There are no actual sixty-year-old men whose lives are at stake, any more than there are any month-nine elective abortions on the line. In both cases the idea is to move the point of discussion to a place where one side or the other feels they can make a more defensible-seeming argument.
And that position is a silly one. “Viability” is nothing but a technological benchmark, and changes over time as technology advances. It’s not some morally significant point in a pregnancy. Are you really going to try to argue that the fetuses of the past became people later than they do now?
I will grant him a little bit of ground, though - if an operation exists that can in theory extract the fetus alive, it would be reasonable for it to be policy for the doctor to mention it as an alternative to a directly fatal-to-fetus abortion - IF the doctor is also completely honest about the relative costs, risks, and outcomes of both options. Possibly including the legal and financial ramifications if the law in the area does not allow the woman to completely cut ties with the resulting infant - it is not morally right to tell the woman that she can put it up for adoption and then slap her with hospital fees for two months in an incubator until it reaches real viability.
And regardless, the final word on which surgeries may be performed on the woman should always remain the woman’s and the woman’s alone. Unless I can decide to have Damuri’s liver removed without his permission, anyway.
Again, you didn’t really answer my questions. You came a little closer, though:
As we’ve already agreed, we’re not talking about whether someone *can *be forced do to any of these things, but whether you, Damuri Ajashi, in specific, think someone should be forced to do these things.
I’ll presume, then - please correct me if I’m wrong - that what you mean is, “No one should be forced to give blood, kidneys, etc. to anyone, except maybe their children.”
Is this correct? If so, why the (possible) exception for one’s children? Under what circumstances?
I figured that was the case; you feel these situations are different. But you stopped short of addressing the real point of my questions, which is, why? What, exactly, is the difference?
Done and done.
No.
You’re seriously misunderstanding my argument. All along, I’ve freely granted that the fetus is viable, a human being, and a person, with all the rights that confers. My point is that, nonetheless, the mother should not be forced to use her body to save or support its life, because we do not force anyone else to use their bodies to save or support anyone else’s life - even their own child’s - under any other circumstances.
Because a caesarian poses far more risk to the mother than an abortion. You’re hardly granting someone rights over their own body if you require them to to put their body and life in greater jeopardy to do so. That would be like saying, “You don’t have to give blood to save your child’s life, but in order to avoid giving blood, you have to donate a kidney.”
If there *were *a way to remove the fetus in a way that posed no more risk to the woman than an abortion, you can be damn sure doctors would be choosing that method instead. And to be clear: doctors would be choosing it, not women.
As I’ve said before, we *don’t *give “women” a choice of kill the fetus vs. let it live. The woman doesn’t get to weigh in on the life of the fetus at all - she only has choice in regard to her own body. So a woman can choose to stop supporting the fetus, but it’s up to the doctor to make that happen, and a doctor will always choose the course of action that is the safest. In most cases, that’s going to be an abortion.
Why, pray tell, not? Is it because merely being “viable” does not actually ensure the health or survival of the fetus? If so, then you should consider whether viability is indeed where you want to draw the line.
Perhaps.
Again, I’m curious as to exactly why forcing a woman to support a fetus is more acceptable than a forced blood transfusion, if both would save the life of her child.
I mean, what you’re really saying is, if she failed to exercise the right to abort her fetus for 7 months, then she should be forced to support it with her entire body for two more months, after which point she should not be forced to even give it blood. Why are those two months, when the demand on her body is so great and the risk to her so high, different from all the months thereafter, when her child is certainly no less of a viable human being?
As I said before, a person’s right to say what happens to their body is not a one-time only deal.
You may not see it as “forcing a woman to carry a baby to term”, but that’s exactly what it is. You’re justifying it because it prevents the baby from being killed (and it bears repeating: the woman is never “allowed” to kill the baby). But doing something with justification does not mean you’re not still doing it.
Incidentally, you know what else besides a caesarian carries a far greater risk for a woman than an abortion? Childbirth. It poses about 11 times the risk of death alone, not to mention serious complications. And of course, there are a whole host of crippling and/or deadly complications associated with pregnancy itself, such as preeclampsia, hemorrhage, and deep vein thrombosis. Please understand that there is really no such thing as a “woman in her third trimester who does not face death or disability.”
So given all this, I ask again: Why, in your opinion, is forcing a woman to carry a baby to term justified by saving the life of her baby, when forcing a woman to donate blood would not be justified by saving the life of her baby?
Maybe I’m just a tool of the wingnut pro-lifers but explain to me how I slide down the slope from, “no third term abortions” to “all abortions=bad”?
Heck, I could imagine accepting “no elective third-term abortions” as a compromise position (if I had to - fortunately, I don’t under current Canadian law), if I had any confidence whatsoever that the pro-lifers would be satisfied and would not seek any further restriction.
I don’t really know the extent of your personal beliefs, though I’m a little leery of your idea that under some circumstances, a parent might be forced to donate a kidney to their child. I guess I’d be okay if after death (when the parent’s body might become the responsibility of their child, assuming no spouse), an ailing child picked it over for spare parts, but that’s all.
In the same pretext that self preservation, or self defense is not considered murder! One doesn’t know the circumstance of the woman, only she does. Would it be better for a woman to have children like in some third world countries then have most of them starve to death? Would you be willing to pay the expenses, provide medical and all care and education for the children brought into the world, if the woman is physically, emotionally or financially unable to do so until adulthood? Would you(if possible )take the fertile egg and have it implanted in you? If not then you are not thinking of the woman or the child,just trying to push your beliefs on her.
You are correct I don’t think people should be forced to donate a kidney or even donate lifesaving blood. The reason I make an exception for parent and children is that there is a special duty of care between a parent and a child. I can sit idly by and watch a child crawl off a cliff, their parents cannot. This duty does not extend to donating a kidney and may not even extend to donating blood (although i would say it [bold]should[/bold]).
One of the reasons for this is that a child is not an adult. They are incompetent and incapable of taking care of themselves so we say that a parent is also their guardian unless something happens to change that. Now a guardian can go to a court and relinquish guardianship at any time without undergoing surgery, an expectant mother does not have that luxury. On top of that, this duty of care does not extend to the fetus/mother relationship.
So while there are some emotional similarities between the two situations, they are not the same.
My answer to your question is:
If a person is going to die if I do not perform some action, I am not bound to perform that action.
If a person is going to live unless I perform some action, I am bound not to perform that action.
Just as I may sit idly by to watch a child crawl off a cliff but may not shove the child off that cliff.
Even if that child was born with a disability (no kidney) and a superpower (magically filters his blood using the kidneys of the people around him) and even if I was the only person that was going to be around him for the next 3 months, I can’t push him off the cliff.
I would like to add one gloss. In the case of the pregnant woman, she cannot be entirely surprised by her situation (even Mary was told by an angel that she was pregnant even though she had not had sex) so she has an opportunity to get out of the situation. In fact, I would give her 6 months to do something about that situation after that, I do not think her long unexercised “right to choose” trumps the fetuses “right to live”. I believe this is reasonable and takes into account the woman’s right to choose and the state’s interest in preserving the life of a viable fetus.
So that is why I think we should give every expectant mother the opportunity to reject her pregnancy for the first 6 months. After that, she may only do so if carry the child to term poses the a risk of death or physical disability.
I don’t believe a parent can be forced to donate a kidney. It was a hypothetical someone else posed to me.
Like I said, if the pregnancy poses a risk of death or physical disability then the woman gets to choose.
Yes, I think we should be doing that right now. I think we should have federally subsidized child care, I think we should have at LEAST 6 months paid maternity leave, I think we should make caretakers available to women the first several weeks after delivery, I think we should make available mother’s helpers who will help the mother with chores while she adjusts to her new role. I don’t know how single working moms do it but I think we should bend over backwards to make her burden lighter
You probably haven’t read every post but we aren’t talking about fertilized eggs. We are talking about viable fetuses. A viable fetus doesn’t need to be implanted in me, it can survive outside the womb.
I am all in favor of giving ABSOLUTE discretion with no restrictions whatsoever during the first trimester. I am willing to give the woman the final say with no undue delay or burdensome additional cost during the second semester. I am opposed to abortions during the third trimester. I am still trying to figure out whether it is reasonable to ask a woman in her 6th month to carry the baby for a month until it has a relatively good chance of surviving on its own or if we would have to deliver an 3 month premature baby.
Okay, just trying to clarify your earlier statement (in part):
It was that “perhaps for your children” that raised my eyebrow.
Did my post above make clear my position on giving blood to your children? I don’t think the law requires it but I think that the parent should lose custody for refusing to do so.