Not to mention opposition to the HPV vaccine. They would prefer that women suffer from disease and die of cancer, rather than have them have one fewer possible consequence of having sex. There is no way to spin that as a pro-life position.
Can we stop with this pedantry? Look, I just had to yell at the dog to keep him from barking at the cars going by. You probably think that I shouldn’t shoot him, right? You probably think I should go to jail if I shoot him for barking. Does it follow that because you believe that, you should have to care for my dog? That you should be responsible for caring for him because you say I can’t shoot him?
On the contrary: it has everything to do with the abortion debate.
The premise of the absurdly-named “pro-life” movement is that the life of a fetus or embryo is just as valuable as the life of a born person.
There is NO argument that the life of a fetus or embryo is more valuable than the life of a born person. The value that one puts on the lives of people already born and in the world is necessarily a ceiling on the value they put on the lives of fetuses and embryos.
So when they demonstrate - massively, in the past 18 months as Covid has taken millions of lives round the globe and they’ve collectively shrugged - that they value the lives of born persons barely at all, that proves that they value fetal life barely at all as well. Period. End of story.
So now we can, with a clean conscience, tell people who call themselves “pro-life” to shut up and get out of our faces, because the evidence of the past year and a half is so overwhelming.
ETA: Not much of a silver lining to the carnage of the past year and a half, but it’s the best I’ve got.
I disagree. I think the “life of the woman” exception which is everywhere shows that the two are not in equipoise. The idea is that this thing is a human or potential human life and should not give way to the preferences of another human. You clearly disagree, but I wanted to point that out. And, in my view, the “preferences” of a rape victim should overcome that innocent human being’s right to live. It’s not one that I arrived at lightly, but people on my side go far too far with the idea, even though I get criticized for being inconsistent.
Not analogous. There are already laws in place forbidding you to frivolously kill a healthy pet: nobody’s trying to impose on anybody a draconian new “right to life” for pets that they didn’t formerly have.
A more apt analogy would be if the government decreed that, say, you can’t kill ants in your house because the ants are living creatures and need to be protected. It would be pretty reasonable in those circumstances to respond that in that case, the government needs to take responsibility for dealing with your ant problem, because it’s placing too great a burden on you to expect you to put up with the ants.
(And speaking of “pedantry”, it seems kind of needlessly pedantic of you to object to the term “anti-abortion”, which is a perfectly accurate description of the position of people who don’t think abortion should be allowed.)
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I disagree that pregnancy is like an ant infestation. None of us would be here typing if a mother didn’t carry us to term. It is not like pestilence. It is nature.
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I have no problem with the term “anti-abortion” but just don’t bitch about “pro-life.” We can go for hundreds of posts about how pro life and pro choice are logically inconsistent, but they are fair terms that each side has applied, they have a little puffery involved, and we can then get to the real substance of the debate.
? So by your own admission, you do think that that fetal life should “give way to the preferences of another human”, as long as that human did not consent to the sex that caused the pregnancy.
The determining factor here is not the rights or innocence of the fetus, but the sexual conduct of the pregnant woman.
We all know that sex causes kids right? You make a choice to do it.
This isn’t 1692… women can have sex and even (fainting couch pulled out) unmarried sex. But it can cause a kid. We all know this and it isn’t a shock.
If she got raped, she didn’t choose that…so…that’s where I come in and I understand that it is a good trap for the pro life people.
In what alternate-universe bizarro biology do you imagine that an ant infestation (or a pestilence, for that matter) is not “nature”?
In both cases, it’s a question of having living creatures someplace where you don’t want them, where you are entitled to a high degree of control over your circumstances, and where you can’t remove the unwanted living creatures without killing them.
The issue in both cases is whether somebody else’s arbitrary decision that these living creatures in these circumstances must be protected outweighs your unwillingness to have them there.
The undisputed fact that pregnancy and birth are natural has fuck-all to do with the ethics of this question. Dying of a snakebite is also 100% natural, but that doesn’t mean that if a snake bites you then you’re automatically ethically obligated to just sit there and let the venom kill you.
Sometimes natural things happen to us that we don’t want, and we’re not necessarily required to passively put up with them merely because they’re natural.
These are human/potential humans, not mice or ants or snakes.
ETA: Or even dogs which have more protection than a potential human.
Nobody’s disputing the human biology of the embryo/fetus. The point is that you don’t get to decree for everybody else that a human embryo/fetus must be regarded as a human person, with full human rights, from the very instant of its fertilization (when it’s far tinier and less sentient than a dog or mouse or snake or even an ant).
You personally are free to believe in full human personhood beginning at the moment of fertilization all you want to, of course. But you can’t expect other people who don’t share that belief to buy into your anti-abortion arguments that are based on that belief.
(Especially not, as I noted previously, if you’re willing to suspend your support of the “potential human’s” alleged human rights in deference to the preferences of the pregnant woman, as long as she didn’t consent to the sex that resulted in the fertilization. In that case, not only are you making arguments based on a belief in early-term fetal rights that other people don’t agree with, but you’re arguing based on a belief that even you don’t totally agree with.)
It is totally reasonable for the law to require humane protection of the life of a pet dog that lives in your house.
If the dog had to live in your uterus in order to survive, though, that would be another matter entirely.
But those are the value judgments that every law makes…a dog in my house…a human in my uterus.
We think that yes, that dog should be protected. But the Supreme Court tells us that the Constitution, of all things, demands that a woman’s sole preference must yield the unreviewable death sentence of the child because the child is in her uterus–when she engaged in activity which biologically causes these children to be conceived–the very purpose of the sex act. Again, not to say that women cannot have recreational sex, but just remember that you might get pregnant from it, and if you do, you have to take responsibility. And we don’t let men off the hook. Most stay on it because of their natural love for children, but we at least make them pay.
I, and a hell of a lot of other people, don’t believe that allowing the woman to decree death is the right balance. And why it has destroyed our politics for 50 years.
You don’t have to have a dog at all. Entirely up to you.
And if I were opposed to you shooting the dog, but also opposed to any taxes being spent on animal shelters, I would indeed have an inconsistent position.
There are lots of people who aren’t here (or anywhere else) typing because the person who would otherwise have been their mother carried someone else to term.
How? You didn’t force me to get a dog. Like you said, I bought it of my own choice. But because you don’t want me to shoot it, why should you have to support taxpayer funded animal shelters to be consistent? It makes no sense to me, respectfully.
ETA: I bought a dog. I have to take care of it. Period. Why do you have to pay something?
OK, but you’re not meaningfully disagreeing. The key thing is that the value that one puts on the lives of born persons is necessarily a ceiling for the value that one puts on the lives of fetuses.
If (value of fetus) < (value of born person), the argument works every bit as well as if (value of fetus) = (value of born person). So if you’re saying, well sometimes ‘pro-lifers’ are saying it’s ‘<’ instead of ‘=’, they’ve still knocked the legs out from under their position either way.
And none of us would be here typing if Dad had climaxed a few seconds earlier or later, and a different sperm cell had won the race to the egg. 
(No, I’m not rebutting anything here, just digressing for my own amusement.)
No, I don’t think so. How?
Everyone agrees it is a difficult question. The fetus is not a full human, but it isn’t nothing, not an ant or a snake.
So we say, yeah, a woman might not want to have this child for various reasons. That human value does not equal a right to kill the child. It’s too much. The woman is a full human. But to say that she gets an unappealable right to say death to this potential life is too much.
And for years, many people have held this opinion and it is not fanciful, Puritan, condemning sex, or anything close to it. Roe unreasonably held that this opinion was simply worthless. But it is so strongly held by new generations. And it will keep being expressed unless SCOTUS can show in a far better way than Roe did, as to why a woman’s convenience or preference overrules in all cases an innocent life.
And if the early-term embryo/fetus isn’t considered a “child” with full human personhood, but simply a developing complex of human cells that acquires personhood and human rights gradually over the process of gestation, then there’s no problem at all with the woman’s “sole preference” being the determining factor in what happens to the embryo/fetus.
If the embryo/fetus is not actually equivalent to a child, and doesn’t have the personhood or rights of a child, then all your emotionally-loaded rhetoric is completely beside the point.
Irrelevant. Plenty of other types of conscious choices can also lead to unintended biological processes which have consequences that we don’t want. That doesn’t mean that we’re obligated just to put up with those consequences without doing anything about them.
You don’t have to take responsibility for bearing or caring for a child when there isn’t any child, but just a developing complex of cells. It’s not a child, it doesn’t have the same rights as a child, and you are free to remove it from your body even if that destroys its life. There, problem solved.
I’m not saying that you personally have to agree with that viewpoint, but nobody else has to agree with your viewpoint either.
We don’t let either men or women off the hook of accepting responsibility for a child when there actually is a child.
Before an embryo/fetus cell complex gradually turns into a child, nobody is on the hook for it, and the woman whose body it’s in is free to terminate its development.
The fetus gradually develops from “nothing” to “full human” over the course of gestation. We as a society are entitled to decide where in the course of its development we assign it various rights.
I get it—we all get it—that you personally disagree with the assignment of fetal rights that the Roe decision came up with. But that doesn’t automatically make you right or Roe wrong..
But an early-term embryo/fetus is not a “life” in the sense of a human personhood with a right to life. So the question of its innocence or non-innocence is irrelevant.
Again, I get that you don’t agree with that viewpoint. But other people don’t agree with yours: in fact, a solid majority of Americans believe that abortion should be a woman’s choice at least in the first trimester of pregnancy. So you can cool it with your argumentum ad populum attempts, because the populus isn’t backing you up.
Indeed we are, and Roe denies us that right.