What?
People generally have special feelings towards their children after they are born too, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the possibility of parents doing harm to their own kids, a thing that unfortunately happens far too often? Why would “special feelings” towards a fetus be assumed to so perfectly guide behavior?
Of course I don’t, and it’s pretty gross that you keep trying to imply that I do as a rhetorical tactic.
That example came directly from @puzzlegal. That should be clear, since I quoted the post where she said so in the response of mine that you quoted.
You think that I believe this and that’s why I support the government placing no legal restriction on abortion? That’s an interesting chain of logic.
Honestly I’m not really able to discern what you believe since most of your contributions have been tendentious, superficial criticisms of what I’ve said. It really does sound like you think women shouldn’t be able to end a pregnancy at any stage for whatever reason they decide.
If I’m getting that wrong, you are of course free to say what you believe rather than asking me what I believe about what you believe.
What do you mean by “shouldn’t be able to”?
I don’t believe that there should be a law forbidding abortion after a certain point. That should be between a woman and her doctor.
I do believe that doctors should act according to the codes of medical ethics held by the body that licensed them, and my understanding is that no such body is going to sanction a super late term abortion unless there is medical necessity for it, and the argument that doctors have made for why this is the case is persuasive to me.
If I’ve misunderstood your point, you are welcome to correct me, but it sounds like that last point is where you disagree, and you believe that medical licensing boards need to instruct their doctors that they should perform elective abortions at any time.
I think that we both agree that regardless of whether medical licensing boards change their guidelines or not there will be vanishingly few cases of elective abortions at the very end of pregnancy; you seem to believe that because of this we shouldn’t even discuss the situation, but I think that medical ethics should obviously cover all bases, even cases that are extremely rare.
I am not sure whether you are talking about what the law ought to say, or about what moral actions might be. I need above that it’s often legal to do something immoral.
I happen to think
That’s pretty close to what I believe. I believe there are competing moralities here, and the highest is that it is immoral to force a woman to remain pregnant against her will for any reason.
Maybe so-called “elective partial birth” abortions are immoral in some cases, maybe not. We are in a thread that’s ostensibly about “fetal personhood.” I happen to think that the former is a hypothetical and unlikely edge case that’s usually intended to put restrictions on a woman’s right to choose, and even if it’s not intended that way, it does serve that purpose. Maybe nobody in this thread really has that intent, but that’s most often where I see these argued, so I see these arguments as being bad-faith and having a hidden agenda, which is a different kind of immorality.
I can’t stop seeing those arguments as a trojan horse to undermine reproductive freedom, so I feel it’s necessary to go ahead and justify the edge cases that are used as scare tactics. Because a woman should be allowed to choose at any time for any reason, then yes, I fully and enthusiastically support a woman’s right to choose abortions in situations that would make everyone else howl at the immorality of it.
This is not because I celebrate those situations or choices, and most definitely not because I think they’re a realistic problem that anyone needs to worry about, but because I want to be clear that if such choices are the logical outcome of my belief, then I support them and oppose all conditions and restraints upon them. I deride the pearl-clutching that comes along with it, and I think everyone needs to get comfortable with the discomfort because it’s not their choice. Yes, there are certain abortions that would make me very queasy, but no, my gut feelings on it are 100% irrelevant and I will not prioritize them in the slightest. Not my choice, so my feelings are my problem.
Very well put, and covers everything I feel exactly.
I think that legally (as others has said), the point that legal protections kick in should be birth because at that point the mother’s bodily rights are no longer the overriding issue.
Morally, I think that a fetus doesn’t become a person until well after birth. Many animals by all appearances have a greater awareness and mental complexity than a newborn, and we don’t give them personhood. A newborn is still “booting up”, as it were; there’s no person there yet.
Yeah, exactly.
I agree with this. But:
I think the law should protect the mother’s rights to bodily determination absolutely. But i also think she has a moral obligation to care for the fetus to the extent that doesn’t hurt her.
Fortunately, when a person doesn’t want to be pregnant, they have a lot of time to deal with that before the fetus gets too close to becoming a person. Unless bad laws interfere.
This is a great perspective, on this and many other issues.
The answer to the question ‘when does a fetus become a person?’ is by nature an arbitrary and subjective one. ‘When does a fetus get personhood rights?’ is equally arbitrary. I feel like folks are looking to science to give a definitive answer, but while science can tell us a lot about what is happening with a fetus, it cannot tell us if the fetus is a person or not, nor can it tell us what to feel about a fetus, or how much a fetus’ personhood matters with regards to laws designed for ‘people’.
The messiness and subjectiveness means discomfort. There’s no way around it.
Reading (some parts of) this thread has been very useful for me. In some cases, especially certain posts from some women posters, have helped me to understand on a more visceral level things about child-bearing that I knew intellectually but had not internalized. As a result of this reading, I probably would have framed the thread differently, but as it stands it has been a mostly* reasonable and straightforward discussion. My view now is that fetus personhood is probably not what we should be talking about. I was never anti-abortion, but I did have some of that discomfort about the messiness that the previous poster mentioned.
*You can and probably will call this junior modding, and I know I don’t own the thread (far from it, considering how little I have participated) but I could really, really have done without the back and forth of “you seem to think” and “how dare you say that about me” that has gone on here. Just give all that a rest, is my request. Repeating and clarifying, without getting your ego involved, and without attacking other posters, would be a big help. Just let me see that once before I die (I know, faint hope).
I think because pregnancy is so common people don’t realize how hard and dangerous it can be. Even a lot of women who have had children don’t realize how hard it can be. And it’s a lot easier to bear the worst of it when you actually want a child. Pointless suffering is very difficult to endure.
I really don’t think any of this can be divorced from the fact that it’s happening to women. Women have a long history of things being done to them without their consent. Getting a woman pregnant is one of the easiest ways to control her. In fact in my husband’s own family his great-grandmother was held against her will, raped and impregnated so that she had to marry the man who wanted her. This story was told in his family like a charming meet cute, because for a long time women just had to accept that they had no control over their lives. Contraception is probably the single biggest thing to ever give autonomy to women. The opposite of contraception is forced childbirth. There is a direct relationship between how much freedom a woman has and whether or not she gets to decide whether or not to give birth.
I am the product of rape. My mother married her rapist, of course, because that’s what you do, and he was heinously abusive. My mother did not want a child. She was forced to give birth at age 19. My biological father wouldn’t even drive her to the hospital when she went into labor. I was born breech and she was not the same physically or mentally after the experience. She resents it so much she wants every woman to suffer the way she did - which she has admitted. She was a very abusive parent. She was limited in what she could do with her life - not least because of her trauma.
I don’t know why anyone would inflict on a child a lifetime of being unwanted. But that’s a separate issue, I guess.
I think there is a tendency toward dishonest debate on both sides of this issue because of the intensity of the feelings blinds people to reality. The reality is there’s probably some real intrinsic value to a fetus at least past the point of viability. If you want to call that personhood, fine. It’s more nebulous to me. But the value of that fetus is in direct conflict with the value of women getting a say in their own lives. In the great balance of things I side with the women. How could I not, with what I’ve seen and experienced?
One thing I didn’t realize was that child-bearing can lead to diabetes. My mother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was somewhere around 6 to 8 years old (I was the second and last child), and later in my life I learned that she suffered a lot of medical issues during her pregnancy with me (not immediately life-threatening, but bad enough, I imagine). I associated this with various physical problems that I was born with, but not, until now, with her diabetes. She managed it pretty rigorously but still in her later life had frequent insulin reaction events and died of one at 78.
Another thing this thread made me realize that I don’t have any mothers among my close acquaintances, and even when I did have (one or two) they never talked about these things, at least not with me.
I had no idea what to expect and I don’t have a relationship with my Mom so I was pretty much stuck with Reddit. Among women on Reddit it seems that the amount you’re willing to suffer is viewed as roughly proportional to how much you love your children. A LOT of women have traumatic birth stories. My son’s birth was relatively uncomplicated, I don’t remember much of it because I was pumped full of morphine, but I nearly killed myself in the days following. It took the better part of a year to recover in most ways, and in some ways I just didn’t recover.
Really the only reason women aren’t constantly dying in childbirth the way they used to is that medicine has gotten really good at saving their lives. Right now that medical progress is in jeopardy.
This could be refined a bit more to: fetal personhood shouldn’t be the basis for any law. In terms of the OP title, the fetus becomes a person when it transitions to infancy. Talk about fetal personhood if you wish, just not as the basis of any law.
I still find myself wondering if there’s any scope for a woman (and only the woman) to declare her fetus to be a person at some point in the pregnancy, so that there would be some extra bite for laws against someone else attacking or harming a fetus against her will. Not because the fetus really is a person, but because it’s (potentially) a possession of irreplaceable value to its owner. It might be the product of dozens of attempts to conceive, maybe at great financial cost.
Loss of one’s reproductive legacy is a special kind of harm that I don’t know is well enough treated in law. I’m not sure if even forced sterilization is adequately criminalized in all cases. But it seems like that’s opening a can of worms that really ought to be manageable entirely by strengthening the framework of bodily autonomy and ensuring that women are considered equal under it.
The question there is, if she declares the fetus a person, but later circumstances make abortion the best choice, did she commit murder?
I’d be reticent to do it on that basis alone.
One of the reasons I’m concerned about banning abortion in the second trimester is that, at about 20 weeks gestation, you have an in-depth examination where you learn whether your unborn child may be at a high risk for genetic defects. If your baby has a disabling genetic condition, or a horrible malady that will kill them within hours of birth, that’s when you find out. Think you might need to terminate the pregnancy? Oops. Too late!
I think these laws often intentionally outlaw abortion past a certain period specifically because the pregnant person has very little information at the time they have to decide. They want to make sure by the time she receives more information, it will be too late to do anything about it.
This is another reason why the binary “is it a person, Y/N” question is just clearly untenable framing, regardless of one’s stance on the morality of abortion.
Does it really make sense to you that legal personhood should hinge upon someone else’s feelings? One fetus is a person subject to laws and protections, but another is not?
There are already ways (I am assuming?) in which harming a fetus or ending a pregnancy against the mother’s will can be punished. We don’t need to call a fetus a person in order to do that.
Yes. There are so many real world practicalities that prevent us from treating a fetus as if it was a person with all the rights of a person. Even the staunchest anti-abortionist does not truly want (or has not truly thought through the implications of) a moral and legal framework in which fetuses (and embryos) are “treated like people”.
When does a human fetus become a person with personhood rights,
{FISH}When it can apply for a Boat Loan.{/FISH}
Yeah, well, that’s why I framed it in super ambivalent terms. I just thought for thoroughness it’s worth at least asking the question, If the mother has absolute sovereignty, then does that extend to a declaration of fetal personhood? Probably not. It seems like the cons outweight the pros. And it’s not really about bodily autonomy either, it’s just a different aggravating condition for assault, and could be handled that way without any loss of autonomy.