This may be a question for GQ, but I wonder, in the general population, what percent of pro-choice people hold that a woman’s right to choose an abortion extends all the way till birth, and what percent hold that it ends with the fetus’ personhood and/or viability?
Are there any stats on this?
I don’t know, but I wonder how I would factor in - I think that we are morally obligated to allow the the woman decide to abort or not whenever she likes, but I think the woman is morally obligated to refrain from aborting if she thinks the fetus has developed sentience. (ETA: Give or take mitigating circumstances, like rape or unusual health risks.)
Semantics? You’re arguing semantics?
I made one post where I neglected to put in the “human” in “when human life begins”, and that’s what you call me on?
I give up.
I am not arguing semantics, unless the difference between “alive” and “dead” is a semantic one. And I was certainly not calling you on leaving out “human”.
A sperm is human life, an egg is human life, and a (human) tumor is definitely human life. Your left lung is human life. Your appendix and tonsils are too - should doctors who extract those be shot in churches?
Being human life has nothing to do with it. What matters is if the fetus is a human person. You know, one of those things that can have rights and which we care if you kill it. A fetus is certainly human life from the instant it is conceived (and before), but it takes a fantastic level of imagination to call it a person at that point.
Care to address any of the other arguments in this thread? Simply repeating your assertion isn’t the same thing as arguing it.
Fair enough, although to be clear, I didn’t say he attached himself. Doctors did it for him, without either of our consent. I don’t think saying you attach him is quite right, either - that, to me, would be analogous to you intentionally getting pregnant, whereas I was thinking about unintentional pregnancies. But I have no problem with a woman choosing to terminate a planned pregnancy any more than an unplanned one, so I’ll go with it. You hear of his plight, and are moved to help, so you attach him to you - without asking whether that’s what he wants, of course. I still say that you have the right to rescind that offer at any time.
You’re correct in your assumption that viability is irrelevant to me. However, I take issue with the bolded part above. In the vast majority of abortions, there is no choice whether to do it in a way that would allow the fetus to live. And even if there were, a viable fetus is not the same as a full-term (36-week) baby. To say only that it would live leaves a lot of room to discuss the length and quality of that life, and whether it would in fact be a good thing thing save it.
But let’s say for the sake of discussion that in every abortion, there is the option to simply extract the fetus without harming it or the woman, and the fetus will then go on to have the same chance at health and happiness as a full-term baby. If I were seeking an abortion and were given that choice, I would choose to let the fetus live, and would imagine most women would, too. Or in the case of our analogy, if I could just detatch the 60-year old and let him live on his own? Of course I would.
But in a draft, the government isn’t taking control of your body, per se; they’re taking control of your freedom. That’s a totally different question. One of our rights as people (and citizens of the U.S.) is to treat our bodies as we see fit; we can get pregnant, get tattoos, smoke, seek (or refuse) medical treatment, etc. Another right is the freedom to choose what we do with our lives; we can fight in a war, raise a child, live in the city of our choice, etc. Yes, they’re both “what we do with our bodies”, but the former is really about maintaining or altering physical integrity while the latter is basically about the location of our bodies incidental to doing what our minds choose to do. Those are very separate rights, either of which could be impinged upon without affecting the other.
Abortion has nothing to do with where life begins. My and many other posts have addressed that in detail.
I shouldn’t have said “alive” and “dead” - I should have said “person” and “tumor”.
As a matter of fact, I do.
One might, but I wouldn’t. I think that’s actually an incredibly stupid argument. It would never occur to me to argue that abortion (or lack of same) is for the greater good of society. It’s for the good of the women who choose it.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any (though there was a poll on the SDMB recently about just this – sorry, I tried to search ‘abortion’ and my computer crashed). I’m all for up 'til delivery, sure, though finding a doctor to do one might be difficult. I imagine there’d be as many women lining up for that after 9 months of, what, a hilarious pregnancy prank?, as there are women who got bored with babies and schedule a third-trimester abortion for ‘selfish’ reasons.
Wow.
“Wow” is not a rebuttal.
Again, LIFE began in the primordial soup, and has been passed on in an unbroken chain from organism to organism since time immemorial (or at least I don’t remember back that far). Personhood is established anew with each generation, at some difficult to define point in early development. At voting age, possibly.
However, regardless of when that is, I don’t think it’s up to us to decide when that point is. It’s up to the woman.
No, it’s not. It’s about deciding who will control a person’s uterus - that person or the state. But if that issue gets a “whatever” from you, then I remain confident my arguments would be irrelevant to you and I’ll happily let others wade into the pointless and eternal mosh pit of semantics (“life”, “person”, “human”, “baby”) to wage battle with you.
Go head… try to convince the pro-life loonies that the debate really isn’t if a woman can have an abortion, it’s when. Once you’ve done that, then I’m sure you’ll find the rest of us quite willing to have a nice leisurely chat over what’s the latest appropriate fetal development stage for that decision. Run along now, we’ll await word of your success.
There is also the issue of consent. If women suddenly became pregnant randomly (think Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned) I’d hope even most right-to-lifers would relent (though their concern about the results of rape make me think I may be too optimistic.)
Let’s look at the possibilities. If the 70 year old man (I’m too close to 60!) was sentient and attached himself without permission, then I hope there wouldn’t be too much trouble with detaching him. Many on the other side seem to have no trouble with blowing away trespassers, and this is a hell of a case of trespass.
If he is non-sentient and randomly attaches, we already agree it is okay to detach him.
If he contracts with the woman to attach, and she changes her mind, then we have a contract issue, since if she had refused in the first place he might have been able to find a host. The analogy here is a surrogate deciding to end a pregnancy, though even worse because the fetus is not sentient.
If he is sentient and randomly, and against his will, winds up attached, then I think we have quite a dilemma. But there I will end, because in the actual case the fetus is not sentient in any sense of the word, so the analogy does not apply in the interesting cases.
Abortion rights are about each woman deciding where life (read personhood) begins for herself. You never responded to my question about those who believe life begins before you do, and whether they should be allowed to limit your choice. You also never responded to whether or not this line can ever be scientifically drawn.
But can’t we infer that by carrying a fetus to the point where it is viable outside the womb a woman has given her consent? {unless her life is threatened or other drastic variables}
Isn’t that somewhat settled? A fetus becomes a child at birth.
When you get to the point of viability outside the womb you are in the area where the fetus* could* become a child without much risk to the mother. {exceptions recognized}That’s a different moral consideration.
Not really. First, viability is a technological standard not a biological one, which means that as technology advances eventually you’ll get to the point where the conception is viable even before she knows she’s pregnant, much less decided to keep it. And second, because if you are talking about the present day it is a given that by then either she wants it but can’t keep it, has been prevented from getting an abortion earlier, or is having an abortion forced upon her. Women make the decision to keep it or not long before present day viability.
The thing is there are very few if any cases a year where those types of abortions occur without medical necessity. However, if we were to push back viability by several months, it would be an entirely different matter, especially if the live extraction method were more dangerous to the mother than abortion. If it were less dangerous, the only people supporting abortion in those circumstances would be extreme feminists who think that giving an inch is equivalent to a mile (i.e. that relaxing abortion rights at all will give power to fundies), and those that fear that women would be on the hook for child support to the same extent that men currently are.
It is true that many anti-abortionists still baldly assert without proof a god-given right to life regardless of sapience. But by the same token, a great number of pro-abortionists assert that the question of sapience is unimportant, which makes the god-botherers appear the saner of the two extremes, which is quite an accomplishment.