Maybe that’s why I’m so willing to admit my morality is situational: I think the alternative to situational morality is idiotic morality. Every real moral dilemma appears in a situation, not in an abstract theory; if your morality can’t deal with that, then it’s a suck-ass morality.
And while I think that physical autonomy is a good thing, I don’t think it’s the only good thing; and I don’t even think reproductive autonomy is the most important subset of physical autonomy. I’d much rather be castrated than die of starvation, for example.
**The rights of the individual are paramount. It is never acceptable to force a woman to carry a child to term. **
If I get knocked up, it’s entirely my decision to kill or give birth to my baby. I don’t give a crap what you call it, baby, fetus, that little thing in my uterus that could grow up and be human - it’s my call whether or not to birth to my child.
I don’t have contempt for humanity, I daresay I’m quite fond of humanity but I don’t understand why breeding the next generation is a priority.
If the near-zero birth rate scares people bad enough that they decide to revoke my rights, I’m not going anywhere near a penis. To be fair, I’m a lesbian and I’m probably not going there anyway but still…
Props to **Freudian Slit ** for the creepy hypothetical.
Seriously, what’s the deal with perpetuating humanity? I’m not hand-waving the seriousness of human extinction, I just don’t understand how the future of the UNBORN trumps the rights of women.
I agree that morality is situational (what do you expect; I’m an atheist). However I’m ill-inclined to say what the OP wanted to hear :D, so I prefer to attack the hypothetical and/or subvert the absurdity of the premise of humanity’s end being bad.
And honestly I’m not sure there isn’t a hypothetical situation where abortion should be banned. I can’t think of one (humanity dying doesn’t cut it for me), but maybe there is one. But even so - so what? Unless that situation actually occurs, I’m still pro-choice.
Seriously, what’s the deal with people not reading the thread? If you’ve read the whole thread and can’t find the answer to this question, I’ll point you to the appropriate post; but it sure looks like you’re posting without reading the thread, which is really annoying.
I dunno about him, but I’ve read the thread, and I still don’t know what the deal with perpetuating humanity is.
Is it that business about the elderly all starving to death because they’re the last generation? It’s kind of hard to take that seriously as a reason to start rape camps (presuming, for any arbitrary undefined hypothetical, that that’s what it takes). It’s only a reason to do something. In a world of honorable people, I could manufacture cyanide pills and give them away for free, to allow everyone to go peacefully into the great dark night when they felt their circumstances spiraling inevitably downward into misery. Clearly that’s not an optimal state of things, of course, but as compared to rape camps my situational morality thinks it looks better and better.
Of COURSE it’s that business about the elderly–i.e., the women who didn’t get pregnant when they could, and the men of their same generation, who were therefore the last generation–dying of starvation, disease, riots, etc. What else?
And again, the scenario isn’t define well enough to debate clearly. Nobody has yet proposed a scenario in which rape camps are the only alternative to this mass horrific death of the people who could get pregnant, plus the males of their generation.
Well, uh, right. Like I strongly implied in the bit of my post you didn’t quote, there is no reason to believe that the hypothetical would compel rape camps or even denying abortions, because it’s impossible to make a hypothetical where people are unable to kill themselves as opposed to carrying out the “atrocities” in question. (That was in scare quotes because one man’s atrocity is another’s moral duty). So, it’s quite impossible to propose a scenario in which rape camps are the only alternative to this mass horrific death of the people who could get pregnant, plus the males of their generation.
Oh, nonsense. People have different moralities, and quite clearly some people think that forcing women to do it to themselves with coathangers on the sly is a level of barbarism below which a right thinking human would avoid inflicting on others at all costs.
Just because your morality isn’t calibrated that way doesn’t mean that we can’t hypothesize that occuring. Heck, the hypothetical has all women aborting compulsively. If we can twiddle their impulses that much then anything goes.
I may have chosen words poorly. “Defensible” meant, there, that I could understand and appreciate that point of view. “Indefensible” means that I think it’s misguided and awful.
And it’s obnoxious to suggest that anyone is forcing women to “do it to themselves with coathangers.” That’s really silly.
The question is this: given some unnamed hypothetical that’s preventing a woman from voluntarily having a baby, is it better to condemn that woman to involuntarily having a baby, or to condemn that woman and an innocent man to either suicide or horrific death by starvation?
Without knowing the hypothetical, it’s hard to answer the question for sure.
Bwah? You think it’s silly to suggest that women who want abortions have been known to go to desperate length to engineer the effect when prevented from getting it professionally done? Well, if you say so. I’d heard that it had been known to happen in real life.
“Preventing a woman from voluntarily having a baby”? That’s a…unique…turn of phrase. I thought the hypothetical was “every pregnant woman wants to have an abortion”. Admittedly, this leaves open the question of how badly they want an abortion, and what they would be willing to do to curcumvent any proscriptions on them (coathangers, eschewing sex entirely, etcetera), but I think we know enough not to obfuscate the word “abortion” completely out of the discussion.
And quite demonstrably, in this thread, there are people who feel that it would be better to die childless than to force another person not to get an abortion/lock them up away from coathangers/rape them until pregnant/etcetera. Apparently regardless of the hypothetical, for these people; banning abortion alone is enough to make any alternative more palatable. Particularly, once you start demonizing anti-choice people it’s quite easy to divide the populace into those who would choose death, and those who deserve to die - so, it’s cyanide in the water for everyone!
In other words, you regard women as less than an animal. Even a mouse is on a higher moral plane than a mindless lump of cells. And pregnancy is more than an inconvenience; not that you care since women aren’t people in your eyes.
A fetus is a mindless thing; by subordinating a woman’s freedom to it you are declaring that you regard her as lower than that. And yes, opposing abortion is misogyny; that’s the point of it.
Many, perhaps most miscarry. And by that logic every wet dream or act of masturbation is mass murder. What matters is what it is, not what it might be.
And she was working against the interests of women to be so.