Actually, I expect that women would despise men pretty much indefinitely. “Men are all rapists and the enemy” would become part of womankind’s collective cultural tradition, since they would all be descended from rape victims.
At least they’d still be around to feel angry about it.
Do you really think it’s better to bring forth people into the world if they’re just going to suffer?
So?
You know, this is one of the few situations where I really could see taking place the extremist-feminist scenario of a male-killing virus being released, and the women hunting down and killing any survivors. Usually the fantasy falls flat due to the fact that the majority of women would just kill the virus releasers instead. But in this scenario they really might cheer the genocide on. Including the deaths of their “husbands” aka rapists and the sons that were forced on them.
I don’t really have a stake if humanity survives or not. I mean, it has to die out one day. Who really cares what that particular day might be? So we die off a few million years earlier than we would have. The net result is- what? Nothing.
I do care what people’s lives are like. And I’m always going to favor the rights of the living over the rights of people who don’t even exist.
Don’t you want humanity to exist forever, for it to control the Universe in every galaxy? Do you not think as an intelligent and rational species humans are destined to dominate the universe? A sort of a Galactic Manifest Destiny.
Yes, because shooting people and eating them, or enslaving the whole planet, are in the same level as forcing one woman to keep a baby she does not want.
In any case, even if we ignore the ridiculousness of the comparison, yes, there may be a condition where shooting at people and eating them is justified.
- We already justify the first: During wars
- The second has happened already: I believe during a crash landing of a plane in the Alps, people had to eat some of the human dead bodies to survive, and not many people condemned them for it.
Of course I’m talking about extremes here, but the fact is that, yes, humanity does do some extreme stuff when pressed for survival, and under those conditions they are not judged that harshly. Compared to all the horrendous things humanity has done for survival, where in that spectrum does forcing a woman to carry a baby to term fall?
Agreed. But is being forced to carry a baby to term one of them? If you are pregnant, would you prefer to be shot rather than carry the baby to term against your will?
If they were already dead, what’s the problem? If we’re talking about killing humans to kill them, then that’s the preservation of human life that’s already here. It’s justifiable to do things in the name of self-defense, but not in the name of humans who might one day exist.
If it came down to it, I’d probably change my mind. But theoretically, I think I’d rather be dead than live in a world where it came down to me being forced to give birth or die. I don’t want to live in a society that views me as a walking incubator.
Not if it’s a species of scum. In that case, I’m rooting for the lizard people from Spica.
Pretty close, and we are talking about many women not just one. Thousands or millions.
At the level of a war crime. At the least, all the men who go along should be executed. Let’s see how “necessary” they think it is then.
Yeah! Don’t you want to be the Master of Orion?
Because I think people’s lives have value - not objective value, perhaps, but the value we assign it, and that’s enough. I see zero value in this goal of “the continued existence of the species.” It’s vanity, pure and simple. Not only that, it’s obsessive, fearful vanity, as if you believe the value of your life hinges on the existence of others of the same species.
Be of good cheer: there’s no such thing as the apocalypse.
This is exactly what I said earlier about vanity. You, person going by Curtis LeMay, have the exact same worth whether human kind “controls the universe” (by the way, the screen name Darth Vader IS available) or not. People are intelligent but not particularly rational, and if they do somehow dominate the galaxy - and good luck with that; New York City can’t keep the crosstown bus running on time - it will not be because of you, and it will not enrich your personal glory one iota.
Manifest Destiny was bullshit. It was a fancy word for “greed” and nothing else, intended to justify landgrabbing, slavery and murder. It is to laugh that even controlling a continent wasn’t enough, and now you insist it’s humanity’s destiny to “control the universe,” which as an idea is so laughable that you either don’t understand what it means or just think it sounds nice but don’t actually believe it.
Why should we want humanity to exist forever? Don’t get me wrong, people are interesting, but what’s in it for us if our descendants exist forever? What does it have to do with our life today? Nothing. Why would I want things to stay the way they are forever, particularly long after it would have any effect on me?
Bahh…
Lets assume we are on a interstellar colony ship. Earth is gone. Our 100,000 humans are all thats left of humanity. The main reticulated framus burns out. The backup will only support about 10,000. We can’t find 90,000 volunteers. So either its murder most folks or all of humanity dies out.
Vaginas and wombs maybe somewhat sacred to some, but IMO they certainly aren’t more sacred than life itself. Nor humanity itself for that matter.
If you are willing to require even one person to DIE to save many, then requiring a pregnancy is nothing in comparision to my mind.
Actually, there is one difference here that is key. In the colony ship disaster, there are people to save. In the pregnancy example, there is no one in danger.
In your colony ship example, we have a case of justifiable homocide for the purpose of saving people. In the pregnancy example, we violate another human being’s rights not for the purpose of saving anyone, but instead because someone selfishly wants a descendant.
By my way of thinking, humanity is nothing. Meaningless and worthless. It’s individuals that matter, and no individual should ever be sacrificed for the sake of some abstract conglomerate entity like humanity.
If we get to the point where that’s what it takes for humanity to survive, it will either nobly die its quiet death, or it will deserve a hellstorm of divine judgement.
shrug We have the technology. We just don’t use it because it’s too “risky”. Instead of aborting the fetus, let her terminate her parental rights and then we’ll transfer the fetus to another person. There’s no way we can ensure that the pregnant female takes good care of herself. A woman determined not to have a child, as evidenced throughout history, is likely to try repeatedly to arrange her preferred outcome. We can’t strap her down in a rubber room and feed her intravenously. We can’t force her to exercise without putting severe stress on her body and mind. It’s truly a crapshoot, since even now stillbirth rates in the U.S. are astounding. Heck, pay her for her eggs, IVF the heck out of every willing woman possible, and let her be child-free. Or appeal to her greed. “We’ll make you Queen of Alaska/Zambia/Chicago, with a million dollar a week expense account, if you carry the baby to term.” There are lots of ways to ensure that the race continues without trying to force her to bear children. Heck, implant all those frozen embryos left over from random IVF treatments into as many women as possible. It just wouldn’t come down to a situation where the decision of one woman, or a small group of women, controls the population. And if it does, inbreeding will finish us.
She’s had enough kids already.
Good point. Queen of Florida, then. 
There is a person temporarily inconvenienced by carrying a pregnancy they voluntarily entered into to term. Lets be honest… this would not even be close to the most onerous duty placed involuntarily on a person by the state in such a circumstance.
But then I’m not rabidly pro choice, and consider Roe v Wade a suitable compromise between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the woman.
I would fight a society such as the OP proposes by every means at my disposal. It’d even make me give up my pacifism, and I don’t even do that for personal self defence. A human race that forcibly turns its women into breeding machines is not one that deserves to exist.
Try reading Randy Alcorn’s pro-life books. He insists that pregnancy is a “temporary inconvenience” and that women should give birth because “there is a major shortage of newborn babies being given up for adoption.” Of course, all the older children in foster care should just be stuck waiting while couples wait to adopt newborns.
When he mentions adoption, he’s quick to claify that it should be by the "right’ couples: married Christians. No gays or lesbians.
My jaw dropped when I found out that “90% of people approve to abortion under some circumstances.” That means that 10% don’t approve of abortion even to save the life of the mother! That is the most fucked-up thing I have ever heard.
ETA: Why aren’t all the women who say “life begins at conception” offering to carry frozen embryos to term?
There are tons of situations where individuals don’t want to be the ones who do something, but agree it must be done for the good of the nation/people/world. We vote for tax increases for the rich even if we’re not rich. We institute drafts so others can go fight even though we aren’t personally eligible. We tell people they have to reduce carbon emissions while still making excuses why our Hummer is necessary for ourselves.
A society could go so far as to prize individual choices so much that they make everyone dependent on individual choices and then end up fucked when those individuals choose in their own best interests instead of the state. Imagine a Libertarian Utopia where everything is fee for service and everyone just decides not to pay, so the army is disbanded, cops laid off, etc. There would be an outcry to make these things a priority but when you interview any particular individual about why they’re not personally paying the fees for these things, they have reasons for why they don’t, but someone should by god!
Isaac Asimov postulated a world where, thanks to thousands of robotic servants per individual, the individuals became so anti-social that they wouldn’t reproduce with each other. They ended up growing their offspring in vats because of the biological necessity, but found the whole process repugnant and made it a taboo.
Enjoy,
Steven