The analogy would work better if the 60-year-old man were brain dead, though might recover. If we could chat with him, or with a fetus, things might be different. Of course if we could chat with cows we’d probably eat a lot less hamburger too.
And congrats!
Yes, I’m attacking the pro-choice movement. 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 logic. As people who support the medical procedure, we need to be sure that we can back the medical procedure both morally an ethically.
I am “pro-choice” but I loathe the misnomer.
Again I ask…
Please provide a cite to a mainstream organization that actively advocates on the pro-choice side and put on display this lazy logic you speak of.
But pro-abortion in no way describes the pro-choice position, even with your qualification. Thinking it does is why Sarah Palin gave the impression that deciding to keep her last baby was in someway a blow against pro-choice. It isn’t.
Doing everything one can do to reduce the number of abortions to a bare minimum through education and availability of birth control is also perfectly compatible with a pro-choice position. A woman who is personally deadset against abortion for herself can also be pro-choice.
So why is “pro-chice” a misnomer? Reardless of when you consider “life” or “personhood” or whatever other label you want on it having an abortion is a choice. I don’t think there are random packs of feral doctors roaming around performing abortions on unsuspecting pregnant women. Women who get abortions have, in most cases, chosen to have one. How is that not a choice?
You can “choose” to have an abortion. You can also “choose” to not have an abortion. As Rush said “you still have made a choice.”
There’s a lot of gray area.
But for me, that’s the whole point. Even though he’s clearly got “personhood” and “life”, however you choose to define them, even if he’s a walking, talking, living doll, his right to life still doesn’t supersede someone else’s right to not have their body used against their will.
And thanks!
Then you’re screwed, because it’s not ethical to force a woman to carry a child to term, either. You’re subjecting her to a long period of phyisical discomfort and potentially extreme medical risks. Personally I see forcing that on a person against their will to be about as morally equivalent as stealing their kidney and leaving them in a bathtub full of ice.
Though on the other side of things, if one decides that there’s no person/child to be found in an early-term fetus, then there’s nothing immoral or unethical about killing it at all - unless you have similar problems with killing tapeworms, anyway.
It’s not a misnomer. Pro-choice people want the woman to have the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It’s a precisely accurate label - to the degree that the only way it could be more accurate would be to call it “pro-choice-with-regard-to-whether-to-get-an-abortion”. Which is so snappy.
That’s precisely the issue, and it bears repeating. Life began only once, as far as is known, some couple of billion years ago; the question is, what kind of life do we regard as being worthy of special protection, and to what degree. And I’m not sure there’s a hard and fast line to be drawn – a lot of people have problems with late-term abortions even though they are fine with early ones; and yet, if carrying the baby to term would seriously endanger the mother, and if the baby on its own only had a small chance of survival, views tend to change again.
A similar situation exists wrt the killing of animals: I don’t think twice about squatting a mosquito, or a fly; coming to the aid of my screaming girlfriend, a spider is made short work of. Rodents are of another order, though if I had some sort of infestation, I wouldn’t worry about laying out traps, and not necessarily the non-lethal kind. Anything bigger, though, and killing it is far less easy on my conscience, though I could concoct scenarios where I would find it justifiable, up to killing humans in self-defence. Other people evidently feel different – some would not kill a worm, others see no wrong in hunting big game for sport, for example.
The difference (well, one difference) between the two cases is that in the latter one, nobody demands a catch-all demarcation line; the justifiability of ending life in one of its manifestations is highly dependent on context, and most people don’t seem to see anything wrong with that. The question then is: should this be different when all the life involved is human? Is it reasonable to ask for a clearly delineated border between protection-worthy and protection-unworthy life?
There always is choice, in the end – faced with certain situations, a doctor might have to choose between saving the life of the mother, or the life of the child; there is no consistent ‘pro-life’ stance in the absence of an objective criterion for which life is more valuable.
Oh, I’m not arguing that point. My point was just that it’s natural both sides are going to choose the most positive-sounding term to characterize themselves. There’s a reason no one calls themselves pro-abortion-choice though it’s more granular than “pro-choide” (which on its face sounds like we might be debating what to eat at the buffet).
I wasn’t trying to address a mainstream organization. It’s the all too common fault shown here:
That’s one way to handle a difficult question like that, to just assert the answer. Makes a lot of things simpler, that way.
First of all, it’s clearly and absolutely not a parasite. Second, the proper analogy is not if I connected myself to you such that if you removed the tubes I would die; it’s if you made the connection such that if you removed the tubes I would die. If you’re pregnant, it’s a result of your own actions. If you didn’t want to be pregnant, then you shouldn’t have gotten pregnant.
To add to this…
The flip side, those opposed to abortion, want to deny that choice to women. Agree with their reasoning or not the result of having it their way would be to force a woman who gets pregnant to carry the baby to term. Essentially depriving her of any choice in the matter.
um, wouldn’t that just be induced labor?
You could argue then, using your parameters that anything other than natural labor popping the sprog out is then an abortion because the woman’s body did not do it of its own volition [so to speak]
This is not a difference - there are cases where killing full-fledged, fully-developed, sentient and preumably intelligent human is a-okay. For example, in states with castle doctorine a man has a right to kill people for the crime of being on their property. I gather that this sort of law finds itself popular among the same sort of people who oppose elective abortion, ironically enough.
This is a rather subpar OP for Great Debates, isn’t it? Your extreme example of the day before birth is completely useless for this discussion. Even later you insist on using a 9 month pregnancy for your argument. Can you please reconsider using this since abortions this late are quite rare and frequently involve something wrong with the fetus or mother? Many pro-choice people also consider it a baby at the later stages but are worried about government sticking their noses into these abortions because there is the issue of fucking up a woman’s health or forcing a seriously deformed child to be born (and could have been suffering in utero). Therefore, the choice to abort should be relegated to the more informed, the mother and her doctor. BTW, many hospitals require a panel review on late term abortions. The worst ones to make this choice is the fucking Justice Department, especially if its run by an ignorant rightwing Christian like Ashcroft.
I really don’t think you understand what choice means at all. Hence your dismal OP. DianaG and Heart of Darkness have good posts on this so I won’t reiterate.
I will give you props for understanding the difference between beginning of life and when a fetus becomes a child. Unfortunately, you left that out of the OP and didn’t get to the crux of the issue until a later post. Even worse you said that there is some logic to the anti-choice movement. Well, their premise is flawed. Their premise is that a human being or a human life with a soul or special something begins at conception. Who cares if logic follows if the premise is crap?
There’s a pit thread on this that has many of the arguments. It was started by someone who also appears to be confused by the concept of choice, personhood, the woman’s body etc.
I’m really confused by these threads started by people who say that they don’t want to outlaw abortion but don’t understand the concept of choice. By not outlawing abortion, you are allowing a woman to make a choice whether or not to abort based on all information available.
The whole thing is that it’s a woman’s decision whether to be pregnant or not.
Now I have a problem with third-trimester abortions. But I worked in a hospital for five years and have a friend who’s an OB-GYN, and neither I nor she ever heard of anyone having a third-trimester abortion for a nonmedical reason. Maybe it happens, but it sure doesn’t happen a lot. Anybody who doesn’t want to be pregnant has had, at that point, a lot of time to figure out how to not be. (Yes, there are those clueless people who don’t know they’re pregnant until they go into labor, and there are a surprisingly large number of them–but that’s a different case entirely.)
So to argue this “one day before birth the child is the same” is kind of unreasonable.
Anyway, a third-trimester abortion is, essentially, a birth. If you decide, a week before your due date, that you don’t want to be pregnant, tough–it’s really the same effect on you as if you wanted to have a baby. There is no easy one-step procedure to get a third-trimester fetus out. This is true even if you’re doing it because something is wrong with the baby.
Second trimester abortions are no picnic, either. At some point in the second trimester it’s no longer an easy procedure–it’s labor and delivery. Which is why most people who make the choice make it before that point, when it IS an easy procedure, and why the “one day before birth” thing is a bad argument. They’re having an abortion when it’s not a “baby” to them, or to anybody else.
As a person who is pro-choice, I believe in the woman’s right to make the decision. I would prefer that she made it earlier than later, but the choice is hers. As are the consequences.
Seems to fit the definition of a parasite:
Accidents happen (condoms break, the pill is not 100% effective, etc.).
Women get raped and become pregnant.
Third trimester abortions are a minute fraction (less than a tenth of 1%) of all abortions anyway, and the ones that are performed are not elective, but performed for medically necessary reasons (usually after the fetus is already dead or dying).
The “one day before birth” scenario is a red herring in the abortion debate, since elective abortions of healthy, full term fetuses never happen in actuality. 90% of abortions occur in the first trimester.