This is probably true for inanimate objects, but I’m not sure the law would have the same view over a life. If someone shoved a baby in your arms and ran away, the law would likely say you have make a reasonable effort to ensure the baby’s safety. That may mean you call 911, bring it to a fire station, or something like that. You couldn’t just set it down and walk away. With a life, it might be stated that you have an implicit contract with society to make a reasonable effort keep that life safe. That’s not the same thing as if they put a loaf of bread in your arms. Whether you take care of it or throw it away, society and the law doesn’t care either way.
[quote=“Whack-a-Mole, post:214, topic:963939”]I would be willing to bet it is a lot cheaper for the state to provide birth control of any sort than to pay to support a child until they are 18.
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But by age 18 they will have a fine minimally educated worker drone, and will be making a profit off of the in no time.
IANAL but I think this sounds pretty absurd if the “something that was stolen from you” is temporarily necessary for the survival of another person.
Even in (the rare) real-life cases where kidneys were actually stolen from nonconsenting people and transplanted into third parties, there was AFAICT no suggestion that the recipients of the stolen organs would have to give them back.
And this is a situation where at least some such recipients might actually survive the process of restoring the stolen kidney, assuming they could get a consensually donated one instead. In the current state of technology, it’s impossible for an embryo or early-term fetus to survive being transferred from one uterine environment to another.
So if the fetus at any stage of development is really consistently presumed to be a human person with the same human rights as everyone else, starting from the moment of fertilization, then I think any suggestion that a pregnant rape victim has a right to an abortion because the use of her reproductive system is being “stolen” from her would be laughed out of court.
While I agree with the implicit contract, life/non-life isn’t the deciding factor. You already have the obligation to make a reasonable effort in returning a wallet that came into your possession but is not yours. The loaf of bread isn’t valuable enough for the state to care about, but a wallet (and obviously a baby) is.
Safe surrender programs complicate the discussion, but if I find a toddler, my obligation is limited to finding the parent or dropping them off at a police station. If I’m the parent, the police are going to tell me to go away and take the kid or they’ll involve CPS.
Yeah, who would have guessed that some kidneys that ended up in some rich western folk wouldn’t have to be given back to some desperately poor victims in India? I mean, that’s a horrifying story but I’m not sure the lack of action says much about what would happen if the victims actually had any legal power.
Well, there are also degrees of this. This gets into dicey territory, but one could certainly view a fetus as a person, but of lesser value than a grown person, and an embryo as lesser but still non-zero worth. Not that the average anti-abortionist takes this kind of nuanced view, but it’s not inconsistent.
Sure, but that’s because there is no protection for bodily autonomy in the US. The closest thing we have is the 13th amendment, but even that has a carveout for incarceration. It wouldn’t have been needed at all if we had a constitutionally protected right to bodily autonomy. Of course, if we did, quite a few other laws would be different.
At any rate, my point isn’t even about the law. The original claim was basically that people who agree with a carveout for rape are being hypocritical or inconsistent in their views. They may well be hypocritical in most cases, but I don’t think it’s impossible to have a moral framework where a carveout makes sense. And it’s not like the law is philosophically consistent anyway, if that’s what you’re working from.
Where these arguments keep failing for me is that so many people only considering moral and quality-of-life issues at the individual level of assessment.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve already done the version of society in which female people’s sexual interests and appetite are made directly antagonistic to their self-determination. The version of society in which we’ve set young male and young female priorities directly against each other, as adversaries. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t moral.
The depersonalizations that system encouraged spread and fed a vast array of other ways of treating categories of people as not human (or not human in any way that counted), and we’re still reeling from it, but things have gotten immensely better, immensely more fair and compassionate and mutually considerate, since we began moving away from patriarchy.
If it were the cost of preventing a return to that world, I would personally hold a shovel and scoop up aborted fetuses all day and throw them into their graves. I would do it all day long as my day job and consider it a fully acceptable price to pay.
Not from the baby’s perspective. If one views abortion as an actual murder of an actual human, how that human was conceived doesn’t make it not murder.
Can a human conceived by rape be aborted at any stage? First, second, third, fourth, fifth, 10th, etc., trimester? Does that human have fewer rights than humans that weren’t conceived in a rape? Why?
The statement “if one views sex as an agreement where a baby is a possible result” is begging the question when abortion is legal, of course. Only by making abortion illegal does that become true. In a legal abortion scenario, a baby or an abortion is a possible result of sex.
It seems to me you’re making an assumption that because sex may result in a baby, that baby exists immediately upon having sex. There’s no reason why it can’t be argued that sex may result in a baby 9 months later. Just like you can sign a contract to have a house built, but the pile of wood and nails isn’t going to be a house for quite a while.
Ah, yes, the ‘late term abortion’ slippery slope argument. Maybe grab some data on “First, second, third, fourth, fifth, 10th, etc., trimester” abortions to see which ones are worth discussing.
I’d argue that a fetus, planned and wanted or otherwise, has no rights at all. Period.
To be clear, I’m not making those arguments. I’m trying to flesh out Dr. Strangelove’s.
I’m fully pro-choice. The rape and incest (really, rape and family rape) exceptions are clearly just to make things more palatable for people who really haven’t thought things through, in my view.
Sex isn’t consent to conceive and have a baby. Keeping a baby to term is consent to having a baby. Sex is something that humans enjoy doing, and for decades, they have had access to pretty good protection against pregnancy. But, protection fails, circumstances change, or people just change their mind.
It is also, which many people tend to overlook, consent to the significant physical and psychological impacts of pregnancy itself.
Even if there were some kind of weird magical guarantee that no unwanted baby would ever survive delivery to become a born child needing parental care and funding, it would still be perfectly reasonable for an unwillingly pregnant person to want an abortion simply to avoid being pregnant.
Pregnancy and parenthood are two separate (though often closely intertwined) things. Bodily autonomy should mean that you can’t be required to go through the former, irrespective of whether it’s going to lead to the latter.
I think this line of reasoning only works if you consider the fetus as an inanimate object. We generally consider that life has some intrinsic value and a person has a responsibility to take a reasonable effort to keep it safe. This line of body autonomy reasoning would imply that if you were holding a child, you could just let it drop to the ground if you didn’t feel like setting it down slowly.
I think it’s going to be a challenge to get the fetus viewed as an inanimate object because most people think of their own existence as starting at conception rather than something like birth, first heartbeat, 3rd trimester, 1st birthday, etc. I doubt if many people consider their existence as being tied to the individual sperm and egg when they were separate. So it will be at some point after conception, and I assume that the vast majority would say it’s at conception rather than at some point after that. I think these beliefs are why it will be pretty difficult to get people to think of life beginning at birth and that abortion is not ending a life. Generally speaking, most people feel their own life began before birth. Maybe it’s not 100% life before birth, but it’s not 0% either.
Can I get a cite on that. It sounds made up.
That’s…a lot of assumptions. I find it interesting that you decided most people consider their own existence as starting at conception since, according to you, most people would consider their existence to start at some point after the egg is fertilized but before their 1st birthday (or 3rd trimester or first heartbeat) and therefore it must be conception.
Just because that statement follows from your previous statements doesn’t make it true. First you’d have to prove all those other things.
I’d go so far as to call this a strawman since you’re essentially making up statements about what “most people think” and that you “doubt if many people…” and you make assumptions about what “the vast majority would say” and some how that all leads to the conclusion that begins with “generally speaking, most people feel…”
I’d need to see some polling to believe that. My perception is most people belief life (including their own) begins at birth. You know, celebrating birthdays, rather than conception days. People who consider the Bible important generally believe human life begins with the first breath; see Genesis 2:7 quoted below. People who are scientifically minded generally believe human life begins when the fetus is viable outside the uterus.
Genesis 2:7
7 The Lord God formed[u] the man from the soil of the ground[v] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,[w] and the man became a living being.[x]
I’m not saying these things as gottcha statements to fight abortion. I’m saying them because that’s what it seems like people think. Just in casual conversations and when kids ask their parents where they were conceived when they say “Where was I conceived?”. There is a sense of self before birth in the nature of the question. I don’t get the impression that most people think of their existence as starting at birth. If that was the common belief, then it seems like the abortion debate would be a lot simpler.
I notice you didn’t mention what your personal opinion is for either yourself or the public at large. Just speaking for yourself, when would you pinpoint as the first moment of your own existence?
One thing that I just thought of is that it probably makes sense to split up ‘existence’ with ‘life’. While I might say that existence starts at conception, life could be said to start at birth. But I would say that life doesn’t spontaneously come into existence at birth. Rather, life starts at 0 at conception and goes to .99999999 before birth. It becomes a full 1 at birth.
I think this isn’t being completely fair to those who consider themselves pro-life with these exceptions. Although, in a sense, I think of them more as pro-choice, but with a constricted view of when and how that choice can be employed.
The formal, principled, reasoned pro-life argument takes the right of the developing human from conception on to life as absolute. On the other side, the formal, principled, reasoned pro-choice argument takes the right of the woman to do what she wishes with her body as an absolute. These two positions are simply irreconcilable and zero-sum - for one position to win, the other must lose.
I think there is a significant section of people who occupy “the mushy middle” on this debate, who don’t take either of the absolute positions as axiomatic. So naturally, they arrive at different conclusions for what an acceptable abortion is.
I’ve heard some people describe their feelings about the rape and incest exception as being about choice with consequences (see what Dr.Strangelove mentioned above, though I don’t necessarily speak for him or certify that that is his position). For a woman to have sex she must acknowledge that conception might result; she takes that risk freely and must abide by the consequence of that act, one effect of which might be a baby. Rape or incest short-circuit that relationship and force the woman into bearing the consequences of a choice she did not make. Giving her the choice to abort after the fact restores to her that autonomy - and keep in mind there are some women who choose to carry to term under these circumstances.
I’ll add that most people do not “think things through” in terms of having a rational basis for their opinions; most use their intellect to justify their gut reactions. This is how the pro-life movement has worked many of their wedge issues on topics like the “partial-birth” abortion ban or forcing waiting periods, ultrasounds or (unfounded) doctor statements about abortion - many people in that mushy middle consider the termination of pre-born life to be of significant moral consequence, and want those to embarking on the process of doing to to be forced to take steps to emphasize that consequence, no matter how infantilizing it is to the woman seeking an abortion.
I’d have to say I have never asked this, been asked this, or heard this mentioned in conversation anywhere other than on TV, in movies, or as part of a joke.
It’s what you think most people think. You can’t just base an argument on “it seems like people think”
Do you have a lot of casual conversations with people about when life begins? If you do, have you considered how self-selecting or biased that group is going to be?
That’s not a normal thing that kids ask their parents. I don’t know what kids you’re talking to, but I’d bet significantly less than 50% of people have any idea where they were conceived.
Even if they did, I’m not sure how the knowledge of where you were conceived would change when your life began.
ETA, I never even understood this question, or at least the answer to it. Unless your parents are only have sex once every few weeks, I have no idea how you could pin down which time was the one that resulted in conception. Think about newlyweds (or newly dating) having sex somewhere between multiple times a week and multiple times a day. Can either of the parents really say if conception happened the time they did it on the bed, covered in rose petals with a bottle of champagne or the next night when they fucked in their car, in the garage, because they were too horny to make it into the house?
Yes, and the other effect can be getting an abortion. Why is the choice to murder her baby (using some fairly common pro-life terminology) only available if she was raped or family raped? How much time does she get to choose to murder her baby in that case? Before the fake heartbeat is detected? Before there’s brain activity? Before they reach 21?
This is a strawman. Whereas there really are lots of people who want to fully ban abortion (for others, of course), you would be hard pressed to find someone who would agree to an abortion, say, while the woman was in labor. You’d have an even harder time finding a doctor to do it.
Yes, most people I know celebrate the day that’s a day or two after their parents fucked. It’s a common celebratory day!
“On the couch you’re sitting on! On that very cushion! It’s like you’re a salmon that has found its way home.”
You’ve sorta poisoned the well here by calling it “murder”. If it’s just killing of a person–a person with a limited awareness and life experience–then it starts to make sense to compare the moral cost vs. other alternatives.
Some religious folk say that there is no gradation in the worth of a human from fertilization onward, but I don’t think they really believe it (I don’t think anyone believes it). Zygotes get expelled at the time, but somehow that doesn’t have nearly the same emotional impact as a late-term stillbirth. I think it’s obvious that personhood comes in degrees even if we sometimes have to draw bright lines in the law.
An already-born baby isn’t an imposition on a woman’s body, so you can’t use that to argue for it. I’d actually say that infanticide is perfectly fine under the right conditions. Those conditions largely don’t apply in the developed world, where we have systems to reduce the burden on the mother to nearly zero. But that’s not true of all times and places.
It’s not begging the question; this entire little side-discussion is predicated on abortion being mostly illegal, with carveouts for rape.
For the record, I think Roe v. Wade was a perfectly fine bit of law, with the main problem being its obviously weak constitutional justification. It implicitly treated personhood as coming in degrees by tying different levels of protection to the trimester. Pro-choice people that treat bodily autonomy as an absolute should have been unhappy with it since does not take that stance.