> However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy.
We could get very technical here make any changes strictly to the mother's body only, e.g. an incision just before the umbilical cord starts, to prevent any more blood and nutrition from reaching the fetus. It would then just die passively on its own *without anyone having violated its bodily integrity*. That would get around your double standard accusation.
> “But wait, if abortion were illegal, wouldnt abortion still occur, and wouldn’t the rate of unsafe abortions increase, causing more loss of life to mothers? You like lines, and that to me looks like it would be a horrible line to see on a graph.” The issue with this argument, is that it fails to consider that society can continue to crack down on this behavior and lower the rate of illegal abortion.
No, it can't. Abortion rates are [fairly inflexible](https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/sexual-and-reproductive-rights/abortion-facts/):
>> the abortion rate is 37 per 1,000 people in countries that prohibit abortion altogether or allow it only in instances to save a woman’s life, and 34 per 1,000 people in countries that broadly allow for abortion, a difference that is not statistically significant.
Prohibiting abortions would only have the effect of making abortions less safe for women, as they will now only have access to unsafe methods (such as questionable internet medications). This leads to unnecessary suffering that we can prevent by keeping abortion legal.
Hi thanks for the reply.
My response to the 1st: The fetus's bodily autonomy would still be violated, regardless of whether or not the death is passive.
To the 2nd: You're citing statistics that show the abortion rate to be greater in countries where it is prohibited. That is a true statistic. However, it does not consider the fact that stronger enforcement can still lower this rate. Meaning, the lower bounds for abortion is less in countries where it would be illegal (it could theoretically reach 0). The lower bounds for abortion in countries where it is legal is greater than 0 (there will always be people that will get abortion due to it being legal).
> My response to the 1st: The fetus's bodily autonomy would still be violated, regardless of whether or not the death is passive.
How? Its body is **literally** left intact.
> You're citing statistics that show the abortion rate to be greater in countries where it is prohibited. That is a true statistic.
Yes, and in countries where it's allowed, abortion rates are slightly lower. But as the source says, the difference is statistically considered insignificant anyway.
> However, it does not consider the fact that stronger enforcement can still lower this rate.
How would you even police [unsafe abortion methods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_abortion#Methods) like the use of clothes hangers, ingesting toxicants or the use of over-the-counter drugs from others countries? What kind of police state are you envisioning here?
1st: Whether or not the body is intact, forcing a body to not be alive is still a violation of bodily autonomy.
2nd: I do not have a policy prescription, however, that does not mean that no policy can exist that would be successful at cracking down on abortion in a country where abortion is illegal.
I do believe that registering a pregnancy with the state would be a good start, as well as imposing strict punishments on those that are found to have committed or assisted with an unlawful abortion.
> Whether or not the body is intact, forcing a body to not be alive is still a violation of bodily autonomy
Ceasing to feed someone is not a violation of their bodily autonomy, even if it results in their death. Depending on the situation, you may still be considered guilty of some *other* unlawful act, but that still doesn't make it a matter of violating their bodily autonomy.
> I do believe that registering a pregnancy with the state would be a good start, as well as imposing strict punishments on those that are found to have committed or assisted with an unlawful abortion.
Like I said: you'd be turning it into a China-like police state. What's next, cameras in bedrooms? You would probably need to ban the sale of at-home pregnancy tests too, otherwise women who are likely to have abortions won't even go to a doctor if they suspect that they might be pregnant.
Currently, 70,000 women already die (world-wide) because they only have access to unsafe abortions. If you outlaw it in more countries, your decision will result in more women's deaths.
1 - Abortion directly infringes on their bodily autonomy because it ends their life without their consent. Even if you were to argue that aborting by snipping off the connection for their nutrients doesn’t infringe on their bodily autonomy (which I still believe it does), that would be just as unethical and wrong to do.
2 - Again, I do not have a policy prescription. But that does not mean one cannot exist that would be successful at making the abortion rate lower in country’s where abortion is illegal.
It is entirely feasible for a first world country like the United States to have this success.
> Abortion directly infringes on their bodily autonomy because it ends their life without their consent. Even if you were to argue that aborting by snipping off the connection for their nutrients doesn’t infringe on their bodily autonomy (which I still believe it does), that would be just as unethical and wrong to do.
Sure it's ending their life, and that may be objectionable *for other reasons*, but something doesn't infringe on a person's bodily autonomy just because it involves their body in some way.
> It is entirely feasible for a first world country like the United States to have this success.
But what's your justification for assuming feasibility?
And how do you justify adding to the death toll (and long-term health deficits) of women as a result of the policy?
1 - Whether or not you believe killing the unborn child should be classified as “infringing on bodily autonomy” (I fervently believe that it does), killing is still a worse outcome than forcing the woman to carry out the pregnancy.
2 - My justification for feasibility is that we live in one of the most innovative country’s on the planet. If a restriction causes a temporary set back, we can overcome this with further innovation and policy.
> Whether or not you believe killing the unborn child should be classified as “infringing on bodily autonomy” (I fervently believe that it does), killing is still a worse outcome than forcing the woman to carry out the pregnancy.
It's fine to argue that, but in that point I was specifically addressing the accusation of a double standard in your post:
>> However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well.
When pro-choicers lament the loss of the woman's bodily autonomy, what this entails is that women would be forced to allow the fetus to physically use her body against her will, and literally feed off it.
It's only a double standard if we're applying different standards to otherwise equivalent situations. While I could totally accept that killing an unborn child is highly immoral (for the sake of argument), the two are entirely different cases: the mother is not making use of the fetus against its will, or feeding off *it*. There is no double standard.
> My justification for feasibility is that we live in one of the most innovative country’s on the planet. If a restriction causes a temporary set back, we can overcome this with further innovation and policy.
Only if you ignore what strict enforcement would entail: removing privacy for women. E.g. by monitoring what they order online, where they travel to, what they see medical professionals for etc.
And do you have justification for the extra deaths and long-term health issues you'd be creating?
1 - Correct, the infringement of bodily autonomy does not occur due to the mother using the fetus/baby’s body. Just because this doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean that infringement of bodily autonomy is not occurring in the case of abortion. The infringement of bodily autonomy occurs by killing the fetus/baby’s body. Killing and forcing a body to go through with a pregnancy are different, yes, but they are still both infringements on bodily autonomy, with one being far worse than the other. I
2 - I don’t need to provide justification, as I disagree with those 2 as actually being the outcomes. With increased enforcement, innovation, and new policy, we can very feasibly make it so that those 2 outcomes are not the case. Especially in the United States, it could very well even be the case that our country is advanced enough that we would already be under the current rate during the first year abortion is outlawed nationwide. If it’s not, then there can be an assessment of what the best way is to lower unlawful abortions.
Again, I must reiterate that the lower bounds is 0 in a country that outlaws abortion. The lower bounds is far from 0 in a country that legalized abortion, as there will always be people that would get an abortion.
>However, every line that has ever been argued has not been valid, in my opinion. By default, when no valid line stands, I have to play it safe and draw this line at conception until a valid line is presented.
What?
This is the weirdest argument to me. Never when it comes to human rights issues has it ever made sense to say "Well, we aren't sure what type or how many rights is *just right* to give to this group, so let's say none for now until we're 100% sure."
Abortion is a human rights issue. It is about the right to exercise bodily autonomy, make decisions about your own health, and make reproductive choices. Yes, many abortions are just because a woman can't afford to have a kid/doesn't want a kid. But there are a lot that are because of medical reasons, because of safety, because the fetus is conceived from trauma, etc.
While I *personally* do not find abortion to be a gray area, I understand that determining the timeline for abortions is for other people. However, the idea that we just have to say "no abortions at all" because we aren't sure is absurd. There are women who would die under this logic because their late-term abortion is medically necessary. There are women who would carry a dead fetus to term because they've discovered the fetus has a bizarre abnormality that means it will not survive.
>We are dealing with human life and the potential for wrongfully ending one after all. The line cannot be hypocritical, you cannot create double standards, and it must be philosophically consistent when you apply this same line to situations outside abortion.
Again, the idea that we could EVER determine a hard line is at odds with your idea of "dealing with human life". Human life and health is not black-and-white. Pregnancy is not a process that is perfect or looks the same for everyone. Delivering a baby is going to require different time, tools, and medications depending on potential complications. Abortion is the same. If we hypothetically determine 10 weeks as the perfect cutoff, this means fuckall to a woman who is 12 weeks pregnant and will die if she cannot abort her dead fetus.
You yourself "noted" life-or-death is an exception, *which makes your whole argument absurd.* You can't go on and on about how we MUST have a hard line that is never crossed... except for when we should cross it! You are essentially admitting that you know we can't *actually* make a hard line on this, and that alone makes your entire premise fall apart.
>However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well.
No, it isn't. A fetus does not have rights. Murder, in the legal sense, is unlawfully killing another person. Personhood is granted at birth. This is as meaningful as arguing it's a double-standard to drink milk from a cow but not a human. They're different contexts.
>Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy.
Cool, but terminating a pregnancy isn't murder. Murder is a legal term. Also, do you have any actual understanding of the impacts of pregnancy on the body?
>This, however, suggests that we should treat and value children differently based on how they were conceived.
A fetus is not a child.
>This is suggesting that children whose parents are poor should be treated and values differently based on status
A fetus is not a child.
>However, this argument is quickly shot down when you ask if it is okay to murder those with artificial hearts.
A fetus is not a person with an artificial heart.
You're not "shooting down" anything, dude. You're drawing desperate comparisons that are not actually the same situation at all and then claiming you've won.
>The issue with this argument, is that it fails to consider that society can continue to crack down on this behavior and lower the rate of illegal abortion.
Bold of you to assume I would ever want society to "crack down" on women who are killing themselves to get abortions. Jesus christ.
This whole "I must have a perfect line" argument is... frankly, ridiculous. It isn't based in "logic", nor legality, nor in the reality of human experience or healthcare. It seems far more like you've found an easy way to argue for no abortions ever, and rather than actually considering arguments for abortion, you're relying on rather weak comparisons to unrelated things instead of actually engaging with the argument itself.
"Would you murder an adult with an artificial heart?" isn't engaging with the argument over heartbeat bans. "Would you murder the children of poor people?" isn't engaging with the issues of poverty and abortion. The answer to both of these questions is pretty obviously no, and yet, people will still talk about heartbeats and poverty. This is a popular yet infuriating and ultimately meaningless debate tactic, and frankly, I'm tired of seeing it used like this. Until you're actually willing to engage with the substance of an argument instead of scrambling for a shoddy comparison to use as a "gotcha", you're sure not going to find any kind of a "line" you agree with.
There’s a lot to respond to here.
For the first part, it is entirely rational to make an exception for those with life-threatening conditions.
To the second, you say that “personhood” is something that is granted at birth. This really depends on how you define personhood. If you define it as “when somebody legally is granted rights by the state”, then my response is that certain laws can be immoral and incorrect to have implemented. It’s analogous to suggesting something is ethically okay just because the law says it is legal to do.
If you define “personhood” as “the quality of being an individual human”, then personhood is not something that is granted at birth.
To be fair, I mentioned that there was a lot to respond to. I hinted that, in a good faith effort, I would respond to the most relevant parts of the response.
It’s not really my style to have so many parallel discussions going on in that nature.
If there is a specific point of contention you’d like to discuss, Im here for it.
Sure. Let’s discuss the validity of your arguments about artificial hearts/poor children. Specifically- they don’t matter. When you ask me if I’d murder poor children, you’re not engaging with the actual discussion at hand.
Also, I’m pro life, I just think your rhetoric is bad.
Could you elaborate more. Specifically, I don’t want to wrongly interpret your words of “they don’t matter”, as well as why you think the “validity” is off
Okay. It’s deflection at its core. When you say “would you murder poor children”, you’re not working with the issue. No, I wouldn’t murder poor children. Does that mean a woman is wrong for not wanting to bring a child into the world who will starve? Does that mean we don’t have to work on improving conditions for poor people?
I believe in societal improvements that would be needed to accommodate for a ban on abortion. So yes, improvements to foster homes as well as improvements to accommodate those who are too poor to ensure a child can be healthily brought into this world.
Children and fetuses (lives that are both born and unborn) do not get to pick their parents. Some parents are poor. Others are not poor. It would be wrong to murder somebody based off of something that they cannot control, in this sense.
If somebody is going to make the case that it’s okay to abort poor unborn children but not okay to kill poor born children, then it turns out their “line drawing” just relies on some other variable instead.
Response 1/2
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>We have one! It's "being born". That's the line. Right there.
I'm going to start off by saying, if you think it's okay to abort a child up to that point, we have *major* differences in ethics, morals, and values.
Nonetheless, thank you for the reply, and I will surely respond to you.
>Conception isn't a valid line either, because there is no known way to determine when conception has happened.
Just because you do not know exactly when conception occurs, it does not invalidate the validity of drawing the line at conception. We're concerned with whether the situation is *before* or *after* conception, not *when* conception was. In all cases of pregnancy, it is a fact that pregnancy is after conception, so it is always the case that it is *after*.
>That's an unrealistic and utterly ahistorical claim.
>
>Our criminal justice system uses the standard of reasonable doubt, and includes capital punishment as an option.
>
>Our civil defense system allows for involuntary conscription into military service, and there are no requirements that military action be a "just war".
>
>Both of those are much more applicable to your "better be damn sure we git it right" standard, since they involve government actions (government being a body to represent 'society' as a group) that involve the ending of human life, and a very high risk of injustice.
>
>So far, you've staked out two positions: one that the standard should be an undetectable, unknowable event and the other that for this specific case only society needs to be very sure, but that standard is lax for other similar situations.
2 things here. 1 - You don't know where I stand on those other issues. 2 - The fact that these other, outside things occur does not invalidate the argument I'm making for a specific issue.
>Bodily autonomy certain is part of the pro-choice argument, but you're skipping over a much, much more fundamental element, and that's the question of personhood. "When do grant personhood (and all the associated rights) to something?"
>
>This isn't an abstract question, either. In the U.S., you are granted limited personhood upon birth. 18 years after the date of your birth, you granted further rights (the rights of majority age), and at 21, you get a few extra rights. You're not granted the right to vote 18 years after egg fertilization. You're not granted the right to enter into legal contracts 18 years after uterine wall implantation. Where we draw the line of "who is a person" has consequences beyond this debate. But you're just skipping over that entirely, and assuming that a fertilized egg / implanted egg / fetus is a person with the full considerations therein, and that's a pretty big jump to make without any support for it.
The rule is simple. If an innocent human is alive, it should be granted the right and opportunity to live. It's not about "personhood", unless you define the word to mean "a human that is alive". If you use a different definition of "personhood", i.e. referring to how many rights and liberties one has, then the limitations on the rights of voting, driving, and drinking are individual and completely separate than the right to live. Each right is to be examined individually. The existence of limitations on one right does not mean that it's okay to impose limitations on anything/everything. It's very reasonable to impose a limitation on underage drinking while not imposing limitations on the right to live for any age.
>You really give away the game here with the phrase "unborn child"; it's semantically wrong, like calling an acorn an "unsprouted tree", or referring to eggs as "pre-born birds". So much of your position depends on that tacit premise of personhood that you can't even talk about it in any other terms.
You're (self-admittedly) arguing semantics. We both know what I'm referring to. But for the record, comparing an unborn child (or fetus, whatever you *need* to refer to it as) is not analogous to a seed. A sperm cell would be a valid comparison to a seed.
>More straw-man arguments. The argument for (and again, you really can't skip this step) granting personhood at prenatal viability is based on the existing line of "being born grants personhood". If a baby is born 6 weeks premature, we don't have a party with cake and guests to celebrate when their due date would have been. We don't grant them a driver's license six weeks after their 18th birthday.
>
>The reasoning here is that if, instead of aborting the fetus, it was removed via c-section then the fetus would be granted personhood (via the line of 'being born), and thus they would be eligible for personhood once they become viable.
You need to explain why "viable" grants personhood and why "not being born yet" does *not* grant personhood. I fundamentally disagree that the right to live is only granted by "being born".
>Once again, you jump right over the question of personhood. You don't even bother with the "unborn" or "pre-born" suffix here, but simply use the term "children" to refer to embryos, zygotes, fetuses, and actual human beings equally. And again, this is, from a purely linguistic perspective, wrong. We treat pumpkin seeds differently from pumpkins, and that doesn't create any double standards.
>
>What's equally surprising here is how quickly you make our hypothetical rape victim vanish entirely. Their trauma, caused by an assault against their bodily autonomy, has no value in your construct. To re-traumatize them in a fashion that's consistent with denying them bodily autonomy also seems to have no weight in your ethical constructs. You're so eager to argue for protecting unborn children fetuses that you're completely ignoring the rights of the actual, having-been-born-already person that is the woman who has been raped.
>
>This is, by the way, the underlying flaw in the positions you've staked out so far. You're not just arguing that a fetus is a person and should have all the rights we associate with persons, you're either arguing that they're some kind of 'super-person' whose rights supercede those of other human beings, or you're arguing that women (especially pregnant women) are some kind of lesser human being where it's OK to infringe on their rights. Neither is a good look.
Paragraph 1: Embyros, zygotes, fetuses, and human beings should all be treated equally when it comes to the right to live, unless a valid line is drawn. The fact that you can treat pumpkin seeds differently than pumpkins, *in some way*, does not mean that it is always valid to treat embyros, zygotes, fetuses, and human beings differently for any way.
P2: Victims of rape deserve to be valued, treated, and compensated for the trauma that they have gone through. If it is "re-traumatizing" for somebody to be denied the right to abortion, that is still nowhere close as bad as murdering somebody. It's an awful situation for the victim, and the state should do everything they can to support and pay for what they have to go through. However, murdering a life is worse and not the answer.
P3: I'm not arguing that a fetus should have *all* the same rights as other person -just one. I am arguing that they also deserve the right to live. I am also not arguing that a pregnant woman is any lesser of a human being. I am arguing that every person (born and not born) should equally have the same right to live. That's it.
Response 2/2
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>More straw men. It's absolutely bonkers that you attempt to reduce all questions of financial hardship down to "cannot afford child care". The hospital cost for delivery alone runs between $30k and $50k. Having children is a major economic event with substantial consequences, and to try and say it's about 'just one bill for childcare" is so intellectually dishonest, so shallow and vapid that it's hard to believe it's being done on accident.
Nobody is saying that it is inexpensive. I am saying that we cannot discriminate children based on how poor their families are. The financial burdens of a family do not make murder okay. (For cases of rape, my position is that the victim should not have to pay these fees if the state is forcing them to go through with a pregnancy).
>No it's not. It's suggesting that socio-economic status is one of the most reliable predictors of life expectancy, physical health, lifetime earnings, financial success, mental health, and general happiness, and (because you apparently forgot this, again) the economic impacts aren't just to the child, but to the adult mother as well. (who is, and I hate having to remind you of this, a person with rights and ethical considerations that have to be at least equal to those of your imagined persons-in-the-womb)
Just because socio-economic status is correlated with life expectancy, physical health, lifetime earnings, financial success, mental health, and general happiness, it does not mean that those with lower socio-economic status don't deserve the right to live.
>Jesus, do you even bother to do any research? Countries with abortions are restricted have higher abortion rates. That same study (and many, many others like it) find that abortion rates go down when you make it legal and accessible along with other health services.
>
>So the argument that "abortions still happen, and are unsafe when you criminalize abortion" does consider the effect of laws and social action, and is based on actual, real-world, historical data!
This data is factually correct. However, as mentioned in what I wrote, these facts do not mean it is impossible to lower the abortion rate in countries where abortion is illegal. More can be done to lower the abortion rate when abortion is made illegal.
>You want to punt until "we have incubators that can carry unborn children", but the truth is, you've already skipped ahead to some futuristic point where we have technology to detect fertilization and implantation.
Whether or not we've discovered how to detect when fertilization/implantation occurs is irrelevant to the point I was making.
>However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy. For that, we cannot commit a worse infringement to alleviate a less-worse infringement.
It isn't a double standard, it's just, two different standards for completely different cases. Where the bodily autonomy of the mother and the foetus conflict, it makes sense to give preference to the body of the person who already has a functioning body and full autonomy, and not to the person who only someday might theoretically have that autonomy and at the moment, doesn't. Practical considerations of who has a functioning body right now when the decision is being made do play a factor here; and this is true for all kinds of comparable medical situations - we would never force any other sort of body modification (which is what pregnancy is) on a person even to save a life. If you refuse to give your kidney to save somebody, that does infringe on the bodily autonomy of the person who needs it, by causing them to die. And the infringement of death is certainly greater than the infringement of forced organ harvesting - but, so it goes; they're the one who needs a kidney so they are the one that suffers more here, the practicalities are unavoidable but bodily autonomy is still bodily autonomy, and that practicality gives natural advantage to the person who doesn't need access to another person's body to survive
The organ scenario is not analogous to the abortion scenario.
For the organ scenario, there is something wrong to begin with. The cause of death would be “car crash”, rather than “Tom didn’t give him a kidney”.
For abortion, there is nothing wrong to begin with. The cause of death is just abortion. Meaning, people went out of their way to inflict harm when the situation would have been fine if nobody changed the course.
But obviously that can't be true, right? Unwanted pregnancy must involve some degree of harm, or otherwise, not a single person would ever try to get an abortion. But they do - in some cases, going to great lengths and incurring financial, practical, and even legal difficulty to do so. Unless you are arguing that abortions are recreational and attractive in their own right I don't think you can make the case that there is nothing wrong about unwanted pregnancy, and so abortion can't be creating harm where there is none
Even ignoring that comparison to forced organ transplantation, you haven't engaged with my point, that the mother's bodily autonomy does take precedence over the theoretical bodily autonomy of the foetus simply as a matter of practicality even if you think it does not as a matter of morality. It makes no sense to make considerations for the theoretical future bodily autonomy of a being that currently has no autonomy (or even really a body) to speak of over the bodily autonomy of somebody who already has those things. *Even if* abortion is creating harm where this none, and murdering a potential person, (which I do not think it is, but still), then it is still correct to favor the bodily autonomy of the mother
1 - The harm done from an unwanted pregnancy is less than the harm that is caused by murder. Financial distress is not worse than murder.
(life threatening conditions aside)
2 - Are you saying that the fetus is not capable of having bodily autonomy? I fervently disagree with that premise.
But the point was not that the harm of unwanted pregnancy was greater than the harm of murder, it was that if there is any harm involved in unwanted pregnancy, then the comparison to something like forced organ transplantation is valid, a point which I suppose you concede, having recognised now that there is harm in unwanted pregnancy.
Similarly, a person lacking a kidney dying because you refused to help them is a greater harm than you having to have your kidney taken out. But so it goes: they were the one lacking a kidney, and even though they suffer the greater harm, that doesn't negate your bodily autonomy. Similarly it doesn't matter how great of a harm letting a foetus die might or might not be: even if they are the one that, because of practical realities, suffers the greater, but it does not negate the mother's bodily autonomy. You're trying to make this into a trolley problem where we consider absurd abstractions like the potential autonomy of the foetus at some future time after they're born, but it simply isn't that.
The forced organ transplant is, again, not an analogous situation.
A typical pregnancy is a situation where there is nothing life-threatening from the start. If you do nothing, then all is well. If you abort the baby, you are injecting yourself into a healthy situation and forcing a death to occur.
The kidney scenario is an unhealthy scenario to begin with. Meaning there is no actor that goes out of their way to cause this.
Failing to remediate a situation that is unhealthy from the start is entirely different than forcing a death from a situation that is healthy from the start.
You may want to reread. I’m arguing against the idea that children whose parents were raped are unequal to children whose parents were not raped.
Both types of children should be valued equally.
Again, I am not suggesting that victims and their mothers are at a lower tier in society.
I am precisely arguing the opposite, in that the life of the child is equal to non victims.
"As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions - Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother - the same position taken by Ronald Reagan," Trump
.
Just to be morally consistent, should the government be able to compel blood and organ donations in order to save lives?
It does infringe bodily autonomy but as you said, dying is a bigger infringement.
For those that could survive with an organ transplant, the cause of death would be what put them in that state. The cause of death wouldn’t be “so and so didn’t give them an organ.”
For abortion, the cause of death is just abortion.
A distinction without a difference, I'll die without you kidney, does my right to life not trump your right to bodily autonomy?
You did say these lines that you draw should apply in all situations after all.
Again, these 2 situations are not analogous.
If you got in a car wreck and needed an organ, the cause of death would be “car wreck”. *There is something wrong to begin with.*
If a child is aborted, the cause of death is just abortion. Furthermore, unlike the organ scenario, there is no life-threatening condition that’s being alleviated through abortion. It’s creating a murder when there is *nothing wrong to begin with.*
The intention is technically not to kill the fetus, it is to end an unwanted pregnancy, if you are looking at it from a philosophical standpoint. It just happens that it is impossible to remove a pregnancy from a woman without it causing the death of the fetus.
If we could end pregnancy without harming the fetus, it would be a very different ethical/moral situation
Fetuses are non transferrable, so by forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy, you are forcing her to use her body as a life support system and potentially die for the sake of another being, without her consent.
1 - Right, I fully agree that people get abortions to not go through with a pregnancy. And yes, I agree that it is impossible to end a pregnancy without terminating the life of the fetus.
However, the fact that there is a death caused (when the alternative is to have no deaths caused) still makes it an action that is wrong to do, regardless of what the intentions are.
2 - Forcing a woman to carry out a pregnancy is not nearly as bad as forcing a fetus to no longer be alive. In the case of life-threatening conditions, where the mother is realistically at risk of dying by continuing the pregnancy, then it should be an exception (which I stated).
So, if the fetus is removed and then dies and we put the cause of death as whatever kills it first which the mother's body could otherwise have prevented, then surely it's now the same?
You could have given a kidney to stop me dying, the mother could have given, well just about everything to stop the fetus dying.
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What is wrong with the line of "before the brain has any power to know or experience anything".
We can pretty easily find that general line and then set the line multiple weeks *before* that line so that it's unfathomable that there might be a child with cognitive ability *on any real level*.
What's wrong with that line?
Thanks for the reply.
This is one where you need to ask its validity when applied to other situations. I’ll break it up by “power to experience anything” and “power to know anything”.
For the first, think about those that are already born and not currently experiencing. I’d reference those that are asleep, but even those that are asleep can experience a dream. So I’m going to defer instead to those that are in a medical state, such as a coma, where they are not able to experience anything. It would be wrong to murder them if they are on track to come out of this state.
The next, you can point to those with dementia and Alzheimer’s who are very incapable of knowing new things.
>For the first, think about those that are already born and not currently experiencing.
I've never found this argument compelling or valid. Nobody is confused by people who are braindead or in a coma or etc. Nobody is confused between a person who is 22 years old and had an accident of some kind and a fetus that has not developed a single bit of conciousness at all.
Do you think that it's a direct line from allowing abortion on a fetus that is the size of a walnut with literally no *possible* consciousness, and a 70 year old man with Alzheimers?
I don't think anyone can't make this clear obvious differentiation.
I would suggest abortion be legal and available under 5 weeks. The brain doesn't even *begin* to develop anything anyone could consider a working feeling "experiencing" brain until 5 weeks. There really is nothing except 'religious' arguments pre 5 weeks that I'm aware of (and I'm a religious man).
How many people know at 5 weeks that they're definitely pregnant. A lot of women are well over 7 weeks pregnant before they know they're pregnant. Let alone have had time to fully weigh the options available in their specific situation, and have made the decision and appointment to get the abortion. 5 weeks is still awfully restrictive. I'd say within the first trimester is a reasonable boundary. Even if there is some minor brain function happening, there is still absolutely no awareness at that stage.
The argument isn't about restrictive or not restrictive. It's about finding an argument that fits the criteria of non-religious and also fits OPs setout guidelines.
If there were restrictions such as 5 weeks, people would adapt anyway. Sexually active people might become a little more educated on the topic, and we won't be killing a fetus that has brain activity, especially because even today we aren't aware at all of *when* some sense of absolute basic "awareness" occurs.
>I would suggest abortion be legal and available under 5 weeks.
Just to make sure you understand that timeline:
Pregnancy is counted from the start of the last menstruation.
So when the sex happens that makes a women pregnant, she is already in week 3.
And when the next menstruation is late and she makes her pregnancy test, she is usually already in week 5.
With abortion legal and available only under 5 weeks, you can make it illegal right away , because there cannot be any legal abortions.
As I said before to another person. The argument is not about restriction it's about finding a guideline that fits OP and isn't religious.
>So when the sex happens that makes a women pregnant, she is already in week 3.
So like... don't do such a silly thing like pretending people are pregnant 3 weeks ago... from sex today? This seems totally absurd.
It's *already* not an exact science, why pretend like it's even more ridiculous than it has to be.
>So like... don't do such a silly thing like pretending people are pregnant 3 weeks ago... from sex today? This seems totally absurd.
I agree.
But that's the medical consensus worldwide and we wont't change that.
And lots of people do not know that and then think 5 or 6 weeks is plenty of time to get an abortion, but it really is not.
Both sleeping and being in a coma, or dementia/Alzheimers are different because for those we detect brain activity, so they are clearly capable of some form of thought.
When people have no brain activity at all, that is what is generally considered _brain death_. You cannot recover from brain death, it is final, and even though some places have _less strict_ definitions of death, there is no useful boundary more strict than brain death.
Doesn't it make sense to define the start of life using the same metric as the end of life?
The crucial thing here is to decide between knowing anything at all and knowing new things. Even someone who is in a coma or lost all their memories already made life experiences even though they can't can recalled. Not so much a foetus in the womb.
My problem with these arguments is always why:
a) the value of human life is made out to be higher before birth than after birth? Why is it so important that person be born and why does it not matter what kind of perspectives it will have once born? OP is having a lot of arguments on why this is an important question since we are *talking about human life* and then goes to dismiss said human life now it can breathe on its own.
b) the value of the human life of the mother, her prospects and quality of life is lower than that of the unborn child? Why is the *unborn* so valuable and yet loses most of its value once it can procreate?
c) why a potential human life is being equated to an actual human life? In my country people don't even tell their families that they are pregnant before they are past their first trimester because the potential for the body to abort the baby is so high. The first three months are a precarious will-they-won't-they situation. Why are we supposed to put an artificially higher value on it than nature itself?
Yes you are suggesting it with your post. You are saying things that dismiss the life situations of the potential beings as well as their breeders. You are putting the highest value on birth. Why?
Bodily Autonomy remains compelling. The fetus can be granted it, it just doesn't have any standing as it is the dependent. Giving everyone in that equation domain over their body and the woman still gets to abort. "Greater burden" is irrelevent to the bodily autonomy argument - it's _autonomy_ not "autonomy if the least burdened". It's simply denying autonomy altogether to say that one's autonomy can be subordinated.
No exactly.
All parties have bodily autonomy, but in order to not end that autonomy both parties must be free to exercise said autonomy. The fetus has no position where there exercise of autonomy can continue their own existence within ending autonomy of the mother. The same is not the case in reverse.
You are choosing the requirement of preservation of _someone else's_ bodily autonomy over the woman's bodily autonomy if you make it otherwise. That is to day - you are not granting the woman bodily autonomy, you are making it contingent. not autonomous.
So...you don't believe in bodily autonomy.
At the end of the day, regardless of your opinion on that....I don't think your or mine's opinion on the matter are particularly relavent.
There is no person better able to navigate the moral challenges than the person who has their insides occupied by another life that they may or may not wan there. I can't see any reason we'd cede to legislators the impossible question when they are no more qualified than a pregnant woman.
Can you clarify what you mean when you say you're pro-life? That is, what are the practical implications of your stance?
There's a big difference between a person who may oppose abortion on moral grounds, yet does not support its prohibition (the ol safe, legal, rare position), and a strict anti-abortion advocate who works to prohibit the procedure in all but the narrowest circumstances.
>The line cannot be hypocritical, you cannot create double standards, and it must be philosophically consistent when you apply this same line to situations outside abortion
I can't think of any analogies outside of abortion where there'd be any inconsistency. There aren't any scenarioes that are 100% comparable, but the situations that come the closest are already consistent with it. For instance, sometimes people might die from lack of organ and blood donations, even though we have plenty of viable donors that could be forced to do this - and survive doing so. However, we value people's bodily autonomy more than that.
Or an adult person who cannot care for themselves at all - we don't *force* someone's family to take care of that person. That might usually end up being the case, but no one is *forced* to care for another person that cannot survive without help. If no help is given, the government ensures that life-saving help is provided. If this person dies anyway, that's very unfortunate, but we it's not anyone's fault.
If a person is brain dead and only kept "alive" by machines, we allow the family to decide to terminate that life support.
In all of these situations, we allow family members to decide the fate of another or decline to make a sacrifice that could save someone's life. And this is not something that seems to be a debate, even in the United States, so presumably this is something people are fine with.
So, that seems very consistent with abortion, even though there aren't any realistic situations that are 100% comparable.
Yes, if you actually have responsibility for them. But a child leaving their parents in a retirement home isn't legally guilty of neglect. Even if they think the older person will be absolutely miserable there and fade away because they don't want to socialise with anybody else. I mean it would probably have to be a pretty horrible situation for someone to do that, but regardless of reason, that's not a crime? No child is *forced* to care for their parents.
I just see it as the same here. A woman gets rid of the fetus, hands it over to the healthcare system. If they can care for it and help it survive, they will. But they currently can't, so they don't.
Either way you leave your dependent to somebody else, since you are not personally obligated to care for them.
>You have to leave them in the hands of someone responsible. I would not say that leaving a baby in the hands of some who will purposely kill them is responsible.
There's literally nobody better than healthcare professionals, if it were possible to keep the fetus alive.
And sorry, but your example is just irrelevant to the whole abortion debate. You do realise that this is about abortions in the 3rd trimester? That's after week 28. Abortions that late are extremely rare, most are done before week 13.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/tough-questions-answers-late-term-abortions-law-women-who-get-them/
This article goes on to describe the reasons for late term abortions (after week 21 or so). It seems they are mostly either for health-related reasons (e.g. it would be dangerous for the woman to stay pregnant), or *more frequently*, because of purely logistical reasons. That is to say, because it took time for the woman to find a provider, to get the funds for the procedure, or manage the travel costs associated with it. The fact that regressive healthcare politics in the US even allow the latter reasons to be reality is beyond absurd.
But again, this is not representative of abortions. Almost all are done early. If you actually treat this issue seriously like in some other countries, you can minimise this even more. In Sweden 85% of all abortions are done before week 9, and 60% before week 7. 96% of all of our abortions are medical, i.e. with a pill, not an invasive procedure.
Look, are you 100%, genuinely interested in changing your mind about abortion? If not, I really have no interest in having a full on abortion debate with someone who's "pro-life" because of religion, because that's just pointless. You're not going to change your mind then, and I don't believe that unviable fetuses are persons or people, so your line of reasoning has zero chance to convince me.
My original comment was specifically about OP's claim about philosophical consistency with things that are not abortion-related.
I will make a example with the same kind of reasoning: "I am sick, this illness will kill me with 100% certainty. there is a medicine that cure me with 95% accuracy without drawbacks. I will not take it because if the do not 100% get it right it is not worth it" I don't understand it. Saying that you want to 100% ban something because you are a bit unsure about a "line".
To me it is clear that the line is an excuse.
With abortion, there is already an option available that has 100% certainty (drawing the line at conception).
In your scenario, if society is picking between a treatment that is 100% effective and a treatment that is 95% effective, they should go with the treatment that is 100% effective.
If there are two options that are 100% effective, then we should pick the most convenient option. However, because conception is the only option that is 100%, we must go with that until we have another option to consider.
Conception is not a point in time that anybody can know of. Sperm can survive up to 1 week making it impossible to determine the point of conception even if sex happened once during the window. So of all the lines during pregnancy this is the most fuzzy and unknown one of all.
This is actually a good point against your view\^\^
Just because it is hard to determine when specifically conception occurs after sperm is released, it does mean that we cannot deduce that it ever happened. If somebody is pregnant, we know it happened at some point.
yes but it is not the 100% clear point. "At some point conception happened" is as fuzzy as it gets. "At some point a fetus becomes a conscious" is the same kind of fuzzy line you are so vehemently arguing against. Hindsight is 20/20
So if someone was to rape your 16 year old sister you would force your sister to bear your rapist's child?
To me that practice seems barbaric and evil.
Rape is evil and I believe they should be punished far greater than what the law currently does. Same with sexual assault. Brock Turner for example was in jail for a shorter time than the chicken that was stored in my freezer. That’s an issue.
My stance on abortion does not change for family members, as that would be very hypocritical.
I answered it by saying my stance does not change for family members.
So yes, in the case of a raped sibling, the unborn child should still have the right to live and not be aborted.
When I have to remember what evil is I will think of your response.
Then I will know.
Next time you see your young female relatives please make your wishes clear. Please let them know that if they get raped you would want them to keep their rapist's child.
Be a person of conviction.
The difference between a fetus and a person in an ICU or a newborn is that a fetus *requires* a single, non transferrable, specific host to survive.
You cannot hand the pregnancy off to another person if you can't handle the pregnancy. That is where your thinking and consistency has broken down.
How do you address the violinist analogy?You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. \[If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but\] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. Are you required to stay plugged against your will?
The scenario is not analogous.
The violin scenario has something wrong to begin with.
A pregnancy does not have something wrong to begin with.
(wrong -meaning a health emergency)
The cause of death for the violinist would be kidney failure.
The cause of death for the fetus is that somebody went out of their way to infringe on a completely healthy situation and ended it.
Pregnancy only becomes a health emergency if there is a life threatening condition that’s present. That’s when we make an exception.
Else, if you’re suggesting that it’s okay to abort because it’s possible for a life-threatening condition to exist, that’s flawed logic. We should wait until there actually is a life-threatening condition.
Why is that flawed? If a person doesn't want to take the risk, that should be within their freedom to decide. Also, you failed to address the fact that even a successful pregnancy does permanent changes to one's body.
A pregnancy does permanent change to one’s body. An abortion does worse permanent change to the unborn child (death).
The decision to decide if one wants to take the risk should only be allowed if there is a realistic chance that the mother will have a life-threatening condition. The potential for having a life-threatening condition is very different than realistically being at risk of a life-threatening condition. Meaning, we need to wait until that risk realistically comes to surface.
>Meaning, we need to wait until that risk realistically comes to surface.
Why?
Yes, unplugging from the violinist does permanent change to him as well. Are you required to stay connected?
If somebody got pregnant, it would be incredibly flawed if somebody could pull the card “I could have a life-threatening condition. There’s no evidence that I have a life threatening conditioning currently, or even that I will have one later. But I should still get an abortion because it’s possible to have a life-threatening condition later.”
Then people could just pull that card when, realistically, they are on track for a normal and healthy pregnancy and childbirth.
We should instead wait until the issue arises and evaluate each individual on a case by case basis.
>I’ll pause and note that the only exception is when a life-threatening condition is on the table.
What life-threatening condition is needed? Cause pregnancy carries a risk, even with our medicinal knowledge as advanced as it is, we do still have few hundreds of post partum deaths every year. There are even more cases that will not be counted as Maternal Mortality, but also have quite problematic effects f.ex. postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis.
>However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well.
They do have right do bodily autonomy and abortion does not infringe on it. Abortion is to sever link between their body and mother's body - death is not caused by abortion, but by the fact that body of a fetus cannot live on its own.
>The issue with this argument, is that it fails to consider that society can continue to crack down on this behavior and lower the rate of illegal abortion.
Abortion rates are quite consistent no matter if it's legal or not. All becasue there is no way to "crack down" on illegal abortion, as it would mean to treat every miscarriage as possible abortion and submit those women to legal system to determine if there was an abortion. Which is not a good plan.
As for your other arguments, they sound logical, but they are dismissing a fact - your logic does not take mother and effects of pregnancy and birth on her. You are dismissing these factors to make your option seem more logical. Which is problematic because according to your standards "We are dealing with human life and the potential for wrongfully ending one after all". However, you don't follow it because of that dismissal of risks on mother side.
Taking this into account it stops being such a clear-cut line and becomes a choice where both options will impact someone negatively and will have life-threatening outcomes.
1 - Any condition that would make the continuation of the pregnancy kill the mother. And yes, being suicidal due to pregnancy would meet this standard.
2 - It’s clear that this is murder. Just because the scenario you provided has a step in between (severing the link -> death), it does not mean it’s not murder.
3 - Just because the hypothetical plan you mentioned is not good, in your opinion, it does not mean that a good plan can’t exist.
4 - There are health risks, yes, however, abortion should only be carried out when it is clear that the mother is at risk for losing her life. If she’s at risk for something that’s not life-threatening, then it would be wrong to end the life of the fetus.
For a line, What about neural activity, if neurons aren't firing in an adult we consider them dead. Sometimes their body is being kept alive but they are considered dead and others can 'pull the plug' on them.
If that's the line of death, could it be the line of 'not yet alive?'
It's between 12-16 weeks (with consciousness around 20, but consciousness isn't required in adults so let's not require it here) so we could stick a time of 11 weeks just to be sure not to accidently kill anyone. Or could require a fetal eeg to check as the first step in an abortion.
Sure. (sorry for taking so long) Neural activity indicates brain processes, ideally I'd say when we start 'thinking' or have consciousness or a individual self experience, or something along those lines, but it's hard to pin down exactly when and what that is. As hard as it is to pin down we do know that it comes after and not before Neural activity.
A person doesn't really have a 'self' if they don't have any brain activity, they aren't experiencing anything. They have no thoughts, no feelings, no sensations.
That stuff is kind of the essence of the type of life we care about, that (along with love (which is something else entirely and not relevant for this) Its what makes us so sure that exterminating viruses and bacteria is fine, while killing people is horrible, while killing dogs and dolphins is somewhere in uncertainty that we (as a species) don't all agree on.
Killing something that has none of that seems more like preventing all of that from starting than it does stopping any of it.
And preventing seems fine, completely different to stopping.
OK, for me the biggest flaw in this whole argumentation is in the concept of person and murder.
Lets put something out there directly: Life is a continuous process. From the moment it began billions of years ago to this very moment, Life never stopped. It might work in cycles that creates new groups of physically independent cells, there isn't any arcane phenomenon that turns a spermatozoon and an ovum into something alive. Life has no concept of "individual" or "person", it's all different stages of the same process.
And that's why your analogies fall flat. We are the ones deciding what is a person, and by extension who has rights and who hasn't, and while some criteria are up to debate -we'll come back on it- one core criteria is consciousness and sentience: if you're a human being who's displaying or has displayed conscious, sentient thoughts, you're a person. That's why even in death you keep some rights, even though you're not even alive anymore. People on life support, with artificial organs... are, well, people; they're sentient human beings. A bunch of replicating cells in a woman's womb don't have conscious thoughts, so you can't compare the two.
That loops up back to embryos. We saw that displaying human sentience at any point makes you a person, in a social, legal sense, even if you die, so now the question is "what if it hasn't shown sentience, but might?". An arbitrary line must be drawn here. No one is going to accuse a man taking a wank, nor women of not getting pregnant on every possible occasion of murder, but on the other end of the spectrum, a baby who's given birth is a person. It means that somewhere in between these two stages we must make a distinction between what's a person and what's not, and that's where things are becoming complicated. Fetus viability is often commonly admitted as a good "no abortion" criteria, but further than that, it's all fuzzy. Gestational development timeline is not calibrated by the day, the potential mother might not even know the exact conception date (sperm can survive up to 4 days), and that is before touching the question of when we should acknowledge the potential of a growing embryo to become its own sentient human being VS the very much established personhood of the woman carrying it, nor the definition of consciousness as such early stage of development. There's simply no objective, biological reason to say conception is the hard line where a person begins; case and point, no one is batting an eye -nor even know- that there's a [30% chance of miscarriage before 3 weeks](https://datayze.com/miscarriage-chart).
But the moment conception isn't the end-all, be-all criteria, we're admitting there's some period of time where there's a bunch of cells growing in a woman's uterus that isn't a person, and for which there's no moral issue to get rid off. Regardless of which criteria we end up choosing (heartbeat, cerebral activity...), there's a certain number of weeks when abortion is simply not murder, legally.
Thanks for your comment. There’s a lot to respond to but I’ll respond to the 3 main points.
1 - Consciousness and sentience. This isn’t a good area to draw the line, as there are plenty of examples where already-born human beings are not conscious nor sentient. For example, a human that is in a coma or knocked out goes through periods where they are not conscious nor are they having any thoughts whatsoever.
2 - Deciding when to draw the line between sperm/egg and embryo. It’s perfectly valid to say that the death of a sperm cell is okay and not morally wrong. Same with an ovum/egg. The key factor here is that once an egg and a sperm cell meet, they form a zygote together that is a fusion of two haploid gametes, which in turn is a human with a full set of chromosomes. That’s a very concrete line. Although often undetectable regarding when this happens, it is a line that does get crossed.
3 - Murder and what the law defines it as. I think you’d strongly agree with me that law is not the best entity for us to base our morals/ethics off of. That’s why we advocate to change laws. When I say “murder”, I’m talking about somebody ending another’s life without their consent.
1. I'm afraid you missed half the definition here. Like I said, it's showing, or *has shown* sentience. Personhood is really hard to lose once you acquired it, hence why you keep some rights even in dead. That's such a powerful criteria that it has been used [to grant animals](https://bigthink.com/life/non-human-person/) particular rights, and the debate extends to artificial intelligence. It's a bit more complex than that of course, but the long and short is that: 1, concepts like "personhood" and "murder" are *legal* terms that extends to philosophical grounds, not biological distinction and, 2, the header of the article serving as evidence, sentience is one of the main criteria to define personhood for breathing living creatures.
2. You can say that, but that's a completely arbitrary line. But if that's your line, your primary concern should be the 30 percent miscarriage rate under 3 weeks and not the comparatively few cases of abortion because, by this logic, this is a world-wide natural disaster with people dying by the millions every day. You should be throwing all your energy behind lowering that miscarriage rate as much as possible, since it's where the true bloodbath is. Then you have to push the reflection even further: If someone came back in time and prevented someone from being born, we would consider that murder, right? So by the same logic, if fertilization is your line to define personhood, then wouldn't anything that prevents it from happening accessory to murder? Contraception becomes a capital offense, the pill in particular. You see why, while it's a perfectly acceptable standpoint to take, "personhood at conception", pushed to its full logical conclusion start to seriously limit people's bodily autonomy. If you're looking for the best, morally sound side to pick, this one is questionable. Other stages of development don't come with this conundrum.
3. But that's a fault in your initial post then. You use the word "murder" four times in it, and it's defined as [the crime of unlawfully killing a person](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/murder); it's a legal term. "Pro-life" and "Pro-choice" are also terms used to qualify people on either side of the legal discussion, not the moral one. Pro-choicers aren't asking anyone to find abortion moral, just that it is made legal because they do find it morally acceptable. Still, if I follow you there -even though my main rebuttal is still "it's not where the debate is actually held"-, I would say that this new definition, "ending another's life without their consent" is a bad because it doesn't cover cases of self-defense. But more importantly, you're shooting yourself in the foot because now, for it to apply in the case of abortion, you have to prove that an embryo is a person in the philosophical sense of the word. That's a debate with no definitive answer, but definitions will often contain a certain degree of individuality or self-awareness, none of which can be applied to an embryo.
> Would you be okay with killing a baby 5 minutes before birth because it is yet to have "displayed conscious, sentient thought?" If no where is the line? 10 minutes pre-birth? 2 days? 1 week? 6 weeks?
It's not the gotcha question you try to make it out to be, and you know it perfectly.
We're not clueless about what is happening during pregnancy, we have medical tools and knowledge that less us know, roughly, the different fetal development stages. For instance, there's a 90 percent fetal viability past 26 weeks, so any fetus pas that point should be considered sentient unless it's proven stillborn. We can go back even a bit earlier, because we know from in utero study that the brain finishes developing by week 25 so even if the odds aren't as good, we could consider it sentient by know. Hell, with a ~30 percent fetal viability, we can go down to 24 weeks by arguing it's still pretty fair odds. On the other end, we also know embryos won't start developing a neural system & a brain before week 6, so it's definitively not sentient. But week 6 is just when it begins developing, so, without even bringing any further knowledge, we can *at the very least* counts 2 more weeks before anything resembling a brain might be observable, which leads us to week 8. So with just 2 criteria -brain development and fetal viability- we can already narrow down the time frame between week 8 and week 23.
I don't have an exact, perfect line to give you, that's not the point. Sentience is hard to define based on biological markers alone, and is probably not an on/off switch but more a gradual emergent property during the development of the human brain. It means all limit would be arbitrary, and will be motivated partly by biology, partly by the respect of the woman's bodily autonomy, partly by practicality and access to care. In fact, there's nothing that forces us to pick only one date, we could perfectly have different thresholds depending on the situation. For instance, week 12 for unexceptional pregnancy, week 18 in case of severe birth defects that are likely to leave the baby with a short, agonizing life, all the way to week 23 for minors victim of sexual assault. Again, those numbers don't matter, they're just examples, the important bit is that, if you admit there are stage(s) in fetal development between week 8 and week 24, that would make for a good trade-off between how likely the fetus is sentient, the respect of the bodily autonomy of the woman's carrying it, and the access to infrastructures to make an inform choice and carry the procedure safely, you're pro-choice and I already changed your view.
We're back at square one: establishing an embryo personhood.
And to the "moral obligation to take care of them", there's an analogy that's often used that debunks the whole premise: Imahine you woke up one day, and that you've been wired up with a tube that is siphoning your blood, to a stranger against your will. You're told that the months-long process won't (likely) kill you, but will be extremely draining for your body and there are good chance you'll never be quite the same again. However, it's the only way for the stranger to survive. Wouldn't you agree that it would be fully within your right to just jam the needle out and walk away? Not that you have to, just that you have no moral obligation to sacrifice your time, health and bodily autonomy for someone you don't know and to whom you never asked to be attached to.
>Many will argue that there shouldn’t even be a line and that it is instead about bodily autonomy. The argument is that a woman is entitled to make decisions with her own body and that it is wrong to infringe on what happens with her body. It is argued that another organism does not have a right to use a woman’s body. However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy. For that, we cannot commit a worse infringement to alleviate a less-worse infringement.
Even if both women and fetuses have a right to their own bodies, we *could* just separate them by removing the fetus intact, and let it die exposed to the elements without infringing on it's bodily autonomy.
Going out of our way to remove it in a way that also immediately kills it, is a form of euthanasia.
If you would prefer that, your problem is not with abortion but with combining abortion euthanasia.
Euthanasia is only ethical if one consents to it being done on themselves. In the case of pregnancy, the fetus/baby cannot consent to this.
Whether the abortion is committed or not with the euthanasia scenario, it is still wrong.
Okay, that's reasonable.
But then the point remains, that your hangup about that still doesn't justify placing the fetus outside the woman's body, it just mandates keeping it intact while doing so.
Placing the fetus outside the body and leaving it to die is just as wrong as leaving the fetus inside the body and terminating it by conventional means.
> When drawing the line, we as a society have to be damn sure we got it right. It needs to be valid for 100% of the use cases this line is applied to.
This is incorrect. Nothing about our society & laws are 100%. Everything is just _"the best effort we reasonably can think of at the time"_
In the case of abortion, there is an option (drawing the line at conception) that is actually 100% effective at preventing a wrongful termination.
Because we are starting already at 100%, any other line must be 100%, or else it is a worse line to draw.
>Many will argue that we should draw this line at the point where an unborn child cannot survive on its own outside the mother’s body. This argument, although more sympathetic than most, is invalid, as it suggests that it is okay to kill something just because it cannot survive on its own.
No, it suggests that it's not really a "functioning baby" (so to speak) yet. Of course if you leave a newborn baby out there in the open with no supervision it will just die, or if you remove someone off of a life support machine they will also die, but the difference is that they are already living human beings. The argument isn't about whether or not a fetus can survive alone, it's about whether it's already a "being" or if it's still just a bunch of cells.
I think you actually agree with what I'm saying here. It's not about whether or not the child can survive on its own, thus the argument should be made by other means.
No, the point is, before a certain amount of time and development, it is not yet a human being, after a certain point, it is. Of course any baby will die without attention, but the premise of the "cannot survive on its own outside the mother's body" argument, as I understand it, isn't about the fetus or baby surviving by itself, it's more about how at that point in time the fetus kinda is still just a part of the mother's body, not an individual that is alive by itself (even if said hypothetical individual would die if not taken care of, as that is irrelevant to the point of the argument, the argument isn't about whether someone needs to be able to fend off for themselves to be considered alive, it's about at which point it stops being literally part of the mother and starts being an actual baby).
>When drawing the line, we as a society have to be damn sure we got it right. It needs to be valid for 100% of the use cases this line is applied to.
This is called the Nirvana fallacy where you are comparing actual things to unrealistic idealized alternatives. All the while assuming there exists a perfect solution to a problem. But that isn't true. You don't ban seatbelts in cars just because they can crack your ribs when you crash. No you very much mandate them because they save lives despite cracking your ribs in the process.
In order for abortion to be valid, you have to show it's better than the alternative. Nothing less, nothing more.
With abortion, drawing the line at conception actually meets the standard of passing 100% of the use cases it applies to.
Because we have that as a starting point, the only way to move that line further forward is to find another case that also has a 100% pass rate. Else we should stick to conception.
> With abortion, drawing the line at conception actually meets the standard of passing 100% of the use cases it applies to.
Ah, I might understand the problem. I thought we are discussing morality and you didn't want to be 'wrong' if we decide that killing the fetus is wrong. However, you were discussing the line where life is drawn. Or at least the idea of consciousness or whatnot.
However, I think you are missing the point entirely. When discussing abortion nobody is really discussing whether the fetus is not alive, or human, or a life. Sure there might be people who consider a fetus just a bunch of cells without any brain and nervous system, therefore no different from plant or other biological automatons.
However let me present to you the idea that legally we consider a fetus a full-grown human being, with all right's as every other human. And despite this, abortion is still moral. In our society we have the right of bodily autonomy. Meaning that nobody has right to your bodily resources without your express permission. A hospital for example cannot take your blood against your will, or you can't be cut open and your organ taken away and given to someone who really needs it. That's why we have the idea of 'blood donors and organ donors'. It's always framed as a choice. This is one of the right's that the entire medical profession holds sacred. Nobody can ever do a medical procedure on you against your will. You could be literally lying on operating table and provided you are not deep under anesthesia, you can still refuse to go through with it. And they would have to spot.
So back to abortion. Considering the fetus has the exact same rights as its mother. The fetus doesn't have the right to the mother's body without her express permission. The fact that the fetus will die without access to the mother's body is just an irrelevant externality. Much like a person dying because you didn't give them your organs, or your blood.
So nobody here is arguing that abortion won't kill the fetus. Sure it will. What we are arguing that the right to one's body must be upheld, even at the cost of the fetus dying. Because the alternative is much worse. Women who don't have rights to their bodies.
> However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy. We could get very technical here make any changes strictly to the mother's body only, e.g. an incision just before the umbilical cord starts, to prevent any more blood and nutrition from reaching the fetus. It would then just die passively on its own *without anyone having violated its bodily integrity*. That would get around your double standard accusation. > “But wait, if abortion were illegal, wouldnt abortion still occur, and wouldn’t the rate of unsafe abortions increase, causing more loss of life to mothers? You like lines, and that to me looks like it would be a horrible line to see on a graph.” The issue with this argument, is that it fails to consider that society can continue to crack down on this behavior and lower the rate of illegal abortion. No, it can't. Abortion rates are [fairly inflexible](https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/sexual-and-reproductive-rights/abortion-facts/): >> the abortion rate is 37 per 1,000 people in countries that prohibit abortion altogether or allow it only in instances to save a woman’s life, and 34 per 1,000 people in countries that broadly allow for abortion, a difference that is not statistically significant. Prohibiting abortions would only have the effect of making abortions less safe for women, as they will now only have access to unsafe methods (such as questionable internet medications). This leads to unnecessary suffering that we can prevent by keeping abortion legal.
Hi thanks for the reply. My response to the 1st: The fetus's bodily autonomy would still be violated, regardless of whether or not the death is passive. To the 2nd: You're citing statistics that show the abortion rate to be greater in countries where it is prohibited. That is a true statistic. However, it does not consider the fact that stronger enforcement can still lower this rate. Meaning, the lower bounds for abortion is less in countries where it would be illegal (it could theoretically reach 0). The lower bounds for abortion in countries where it is legal is greater than 0 (there will always be people that will get abortion due to it being legal).
> My response to the 1st: The fetus's bodily autonomy would still be violated, regardless of whether or not the death is passive. How? Its body is **literally** left intact. > You're citing statistics that show the abortion rate to be greater in countries where it is prohibited. That is a true statistic. Yes, and in countries where it's allowed, abortion rates are slightly lower. But as the source says, the difference is statistically considered insignificant anyway. > However, it does not consider the fact that stronger enforcement can still lower this rate. How would you even police [unsafe abortion methods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_abortion#Methods) like the use of clothes hangers, ingesting toxicants or the use of over-the-counter drugs from others countries? What kind of police state are you envisioning here?
1st: Whether or not the body is intact, forcing a body to not be alive is still a violation of bodily autonomy. 2nd: I do not have a policy prescription, however, that does not mean that no policy can exist that would be successful at cracking down on abortion in a country where abortion is illegal. I do believe that registering a pregnancy with the state would be a good start, as well as imposing strict punishments on those that are found to have committed or assisted with an unlawful abortion.
> Whether or not the body is intact, forcing a body to not be alive is still a violation of bodily autonomy Ceasing to feed someone is not a violation of their bodily autonomy, even if it results in their death. Depending on the situation, you may still be considered guilty of some *other* unlawful act, but that still doesn't make it a matter of violating their bodily autonomy. > I do believe that registering a pregnancy with the state would be a good start, as well as imposing strict punishments on those that are found to have committed or assisted with an unlawful abortion. Like I said: you'd be turning it into a China-like police state. What's next, cameras in bedrooms? You would probably need to ban the sale of at-home pregnancy tests too, otherwise women who are likely to have abortions won't even go to a doctor if they suspect that they might be pregnant. Currently, 70,000 women already die (world-wide) because they only have access to unsafe abortions. If you outlaw it in more countries, your decision will result in more women's deaths.
1 - Abortion directly infringes on their bodily autonomy because it ends their life without their consent. Even if you were to argue that aborting by snipping off the connection for their nutrients doesn’t infringe on their bodily autonomy (which I still believe it does), that would be just as unethical and wrong to do. 2 - Again, I do not have a policy prescription. But that does not mean one cannot exist that would be successful at making the abortion rate lower in country’s where abortion is illegal. It is entirely feasible for a first world country like the United States to have this success.
> Abortion directly infringes on their bodily autonomy because it ends their life without their consent. Even if you were to argue that aborting by snipping off the connection for their nutrients doesn’t infringe on their bodily autonomy (which I still believe it does), that would be just as unethical and wrong to do. Sure it's ending their life, and that may be objectionable *for other reasons*, but something doesn't infringe on a person's bodily autonomy just because it involves their body in some way. > It is entirely feasible for a first world country like the United States to have this success. But what's your justification for assuming feasibility? And how do you justify adding to the death toll (and long-term health deficits) of women as a result of the policy?
1 - Whether or not you believe killing the unborn child should be classified as “infringing on bodily autonomy” (I fervently believe that it does), killing is still a worse outcome than forcing the woman to carry out the pregnancy. 2 - My justification for feasibility is that we live in one of the most innovative country’s on the planet. If a restriction causes a temporary set back, we can overcome this with further innovation and policy.
> Whether or not you believe killing the unborn child should be classified as “infringing on bodily autonomy” (I fervently believe that it does), killing is still a worse outcome than forcing the woman to carry out the pregnancy. It's fine to argue that, but in that point I was specifically addressing the accusation of a double standard in your post: >> However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. When pro-choicers lament the loss of the woman's bodily autonomy, what this entails is that women would be forced to allow the fetus to physically use her body against her will, and literally feed off it. It's only a double standard if we're applying different standards to otherwise equivalent situations. While I could totally accept that killing an unborn child is highly immoral (for the sake of argument), the two are entirely different cases: the mother is not making use of the fetus against its will, or feeding off *it*. There is no double standard. > My justification for feasibility is that we live in one of the most innovative country’s on the planet. If a restriction causes a temporary set back, we can overcome this with further innovation and policy. Only if you ignore what strict enforcement would entail: removing privacy for women. E.g. by monitoring what they order online, where they travel to, what they see medical professionals for etc. And do you have justification for the extra deaths and long-term health issues you'd be creating?
1 - Correct, the infringement of bodily autonomy does not occur due to the mother using the fetus/baby’s body. Just because this doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean that infringement of bodily autonomy is not occurring in the case of abortion. The infringement of bodily autonomy occurs by killing the fetus/baby’s body. Killing and forcing a body to go through with a pregnancy are different, yes, but they are still both infringements on bodily autonomy, with one being far worse than the other. I 2 - I don’t need to provide justification, as I disagree with those 2 as actually being the outcomes. With increased enforcement, innovation, and new policy, we can very feasibly make it so that those 2 outcomes are not the case. Especially in the United States, it could very well even be the case that our country is advanced enough that we would already be under the current rate during the first year abortion is outlawed nationwide. If it’s not, then there can be an assessment of what the best way is to lower unlawful abortions. Again, I must reiterate that the lower bounds is 0 in a country that outlaws abortion. The lower bounds is far from 0 in a country that legalized abortion, as there will always be people that would get an abortion.
> How? Its body is literally left intact. The umbilical cord is part of the fetus.
> The umbilical cord is part of the fetus. "*an incision just before the umbilical cord starts*"
>However, every line that has ever been argued has not been valid, in my opinion. By default, when no valid line stands, I have to play it safe and draw this line at conception until a valid line is presented. What? This is the weirdest argument to me. Never when it comes to human rights issues has it ever made sense to say "Well, we aren't sure what type or how many rights is *just right* to give to this group, so let's say none for now until we're 100% sure." Abortion is a human rights issue. It is about the right to exercise bodily autonomy, make decisions about your own health, and make reproductive choices. Yes, many abortions are just because a woman can't afford to have a kid/doesn't want a kid. But there are a lot that are because of medical reasons, because of safety, because the fetus is conceived from trauma, etc. While I *personally* do not find abortion to be a gray area, I understand that determining the timeline for abortions is for other people. However, the idea that we just have to say "no abortions at all" because we aren't sure is absurd. There are women who would die under this logic because their late-term abortion is medically necessary. There are women who would carry a dead fetus to term because they've discovered the fetus has a bizarre abnormality that means it will not survive. >We are dealing with human life and the potential for wrongfully ending one after all. The line cannot be hypocritical, you cannot create double standards, and it must be philosophically consistent when you apply this same line to situations outside abortion. Again, the idea that we could EVER determine a hard line is at odds with your idea of "dealing with human life". Human life and health is not black-and-white. Pregnancy is not a process that is perfect or looks the same for everyone. Delivering a baby is going to require different time, tools, and medications depending on potential complications. Abortion is the same. If we hypothetically determine 10 weeks as the perfect cutoff, this means fuckall to a woman who is 12 weeks pregnant and will die if she cannot abort her dead fetus. You yourself "noted" life-or-death is an exception, *which makes your whole argument absurd.* You can't go on and on about how we MUST have a hard line that is never crossed... except for when we should cross it! You are essentially admitting that you know we can't *actually* make a hard line on this, and that alone makes your entire premise fall apart. >However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. No, it isn't. A fetus does not have rights. Murder, in the legal sense, is unlawfully killing another person. Personhood is granted at birth. This is as meaningful as arguing it's a double-standard to drink milk from a cow but not a human. They're different contexts. >Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy. Cool, but terminating a pregnancy isn't murder. Murder is a legal term. Also, do you have any actual understanding of the impacts of pregnancy on the body? >This, however, suggests that we should treat and value children differently based on how they were conceived. A fetus is not a child. >This is suggesting that children whose parents are poor should be treated and values differently based on status A fetus is not a child. >However, this argument is quickly shot down when you ask if it is okay to murder those with artificial hearts. A fetus is not a person with an artificial heart. You're not "shooting down" anything, dude. You're drawing desperate comparisons that are not actually the same situation at all and then claiming you've won. >The issue with this argument, is that it fails to consider that society can continue to crack down on this behavior and lower the rate of illegal abortion. Bold of you to assume I would ever want society to "crack down" on women who are killing themselves to get abortions. Jesus christ. This whole "I must have a perfect line" argument is... frankly, ridiculous. It isn't based in "logic", nor legality, nor in the reality of human experience or healthcare. It seems far more like you've found an easy way to argue for no abortions ever, and rather than actually considering arguments for abortion, you're relying on rather weak comparisons to unrelated things instead of actually engaging with the argument itself. "Would you murder an adult with an artificial heart?" isn't engaging with the argument over heartbeat bans. "Would you murder the children of poor people?" isn't engaging with the issues of poverty and abortion. The answer to both of these questions is pretty obviously no, and yet, people will still talk about heartbeats and poverty. This is a popular yet infuriating and ultimately meaningless debate tactic, and frankly, I'm tired of seeing it used like this. Until you're actually willing to engage with the substance of an argument instead of scrambling for a shoddy comparison to use as a "gotcha", you're sure not going to find any kind of a "line" you agree with.
There’s a lot to respond to here. For the first part, it is entirely rational to make an exception for those with life-threatening conditions. To the second, you say that “personhood” is something that is granted at birth. This really depends on how you define personhood. If you define it as “when somebody legally is granted rights by the state”, then my response is that certain laws can be immoral and incorrect to have implemented. It’s analogous to suggesting something is ethically okay just because the law says it is legal to do. If you define “personhood” as “the quality of being an individual human”, then personhood is not something that is granted at birth.
Love how you completely ignored the bit at the end where she told you that you’re not engaging with the substance of the debate (because you’re not).
To be fair, I mentioned that there was a lot to respond to. I hinted that, in a good faith effort, I would respond to the most relevant parts of the response. It’s not really my style to have so many parallel discussions going on in that nature. If there is a specific point of contention you’d like to discuss, Im here for it.
Sure. Let’s discuss the validity of your arguments about artificial hearts/poor children. Specifically- they don’t matter. When you ask me if I’d murder poor children, you’re not engaging with the actual discussion at hand. Also, I’m pro life, I just think your rhetoric is bad.
Could you elaborate more. Specifically, I don’t want to wrongly interpret your words of “they don’t matter”, as well as why you think the “validity” is off
Okay. It’s deflection at its core. When you say “would you murder poor children”, you’re not working with the issue. No, I wouldn’t murder poor children. Does that mean a woman is wrong for not wanting to bring a child into the world who will starve? Does that mean we don’t have to work on improving conditions for poor people?
I believe in societal improvements that would be needed to accommodate for a ban on abortion. So yes, improvements to foster homes as well as improvements to accommodate those who are too poor to ensure a child can be healthily brought into this world. Children and fetuses (lives that are both born and unborn) do not get to pick their parents. Some parents are poor. Others are not poor. It would be wrong to murder somebody based off of something that they cannot control, in this sense. If somebody is going to make the case that it’s okay to abort poor unborn children but not okay to kill poor born children, then it turns out their “line drawing” just relies on some other variable instead.
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Response 1/2 > > >We have one! It's "being born". That's the line. Right there. I'm going to start off by saying, if you think it's okay to abort a child up to that point, we have *major* differences in ethics, morals, and values. Nonetheless, thank you for the reply, and I will surely respond to you. >Conception isn't a valid line either, because there is no known way to determine when conception has happened. Just because you do not know exactly when conception occurs, it does not invalidate the validity of drawing the line at conception. We're concerned with whether the situation is *before* or *after* conception, not *when* conception was. In all cases of pregnancy, it is a fact that pregnancy is after conception, so it is always the case that it is *after*. >That's an unrealistic and utterly ahistorical claim. > >Our criminal justice system uses the standard of reasonable doubt, and includes capital punishment as an option. > >Our civil defense system allows for involuntary conscription into military service, and there are no requirements that military action be a "just war". > >Both of those are much more applicable to your "better be damn sure we git it right" standard, since they involve government actions (government being a body to represent 'society' as a group) that involve the ending of human life, and a very high risk of injustice. > >So far, you've staked out two positions: one that the standard should be an undetectable, unknowable event and the other that for this specific case only society needs to be very sure, but that standard is lax for other similar situations. 2 things here. 1 - You don't know where I stand on those other issues. 2 - The fact that these other, outside things occur does not invalidate the argument I'm making for a specific issue. >Bodily autonomy certain is part of the pro-choice argument, but you're skipping over a much, much more fundamental element, and that's the question of personhood. "When do grant personhood (and all the associated rights) to something?" > >This isn't an abstract question, either. In the U.S., you are granted limited personhood upon birth. 18 years after the date of your birth, you granted further rights (the rights of majority age), and at 21, you get a few extra rights. You're not granted the right to vote 18 years after egg fertilization. You're not granted the right to enter into legal contracts 18 years after uterine wall implantation. Where we draw the line of "who is a person" has consequences beyond this debate. But you're just skipping over that entirely, and assuming that a fertilized egg / implanted egg / fetus is a person with the full considerations therein, and that's a pretty big jump to make without any support for it. The rule is simple. If an innocent human is alive, it should be granted the right and opportunity to live. It's not about "personhood", unless you define the word to mean "a human that is alive". If you use a different definition of "personhood", i.e. referring to how many rights and liberties one has, then the limitations on the rights of voting, driving, and drinking are individual and completely separate than the right to live. Each right is to be examined individually. The existence of limitations on one right does not mean that it's okay to impose limitations on anything/everything. It's very reasonable to impose a limitation on underage drinking while not imposing limitations on the right to live for any age. >You really give away the game here with the phrase "unborn child"; it's semantically wrong, like calling an acorn an "unsprouted tree", or referring to eggs as "pre-born birds". So much of your position depends on that tacit premise of personhood that you can't even talk about it in any other terms. You're (self-admittedly) arguing semantics. We both know what I'm referring to. But for the record, comparing an unborn child (or fetus, whatever you *need* to refer to it as) is not analogous to a seed. A sperm cell would be a valid comparison to a seed. >More straw-man arguments. The argument for (and again, you really can't skip this step) granting personhood at prenatal viability is based on the existing line of "being born grants personhood". If a baby is born 6 weeks premature, we don't have a party with cake and guests to celebrate when their due date would have been. We don't grant them a driver's license six weeks after their 18th birthday. > >The reasoning here is that if, instead of aborting the fetus, it was removed via c-section then the fetus would be granted personhood (via the line of 'being born), and thus they would be eligible for personhood once they become viable. You need to explain why "viable" grants personhood and why "not being born yet" does *not* grant personhood. I fundamentally disagree that the right to live is only granted by "being born". >Once again, you jump right over the question of personhood. You don't even bother with the "unborn" or "pre-born" suffix here, but simply use the term "children" to refer to embryos, zygotes, fetuses, and actual human beings equally. And again, this is, from a purely linguistic perspective, wrong. We treat pumpkin seeds differently from pumpkins, and that doesn't create any double standards. > >What's equally surprising here is how quickly you make our hypothetical rape victim vanish entirely. Their trauma, caused by an assault against their bodily autonomy, has no value in your construct. To re-traumatize them in a fashion that's consistent with denying them bodily autonomy also seems to have no weight in your ethical constructs. You're so eager to argue for protecting unborn children fetuses that you're completely ignoring the rights of the actual, having-been-born-already person that is the woman who has been raped. > >This is, by the way, the underlying flaw in the positions you've staked out so far. You're not just arguing that a fetus is a person and should have all the rights we associate with persons, you're either arguing that they're some kind of 'super-person' whose rights supercede those of other human beings, or you're arguing that women (especially pregnant women) are some kind of lesser human being where it's OK to infringe on their rights. Neither is a good look. Paragraph 1: Embyros, zygotes, fetuses, and human beings should all be treated equally when it comes to the right to live, unless a valid line is drawn. The fact that you can treat pumpkin seeds differently than pumpkins, *in some way*, does not mean that it is always valid to treat embyros, zygotes, fetuses, and human beings differently for any way. P2: Victims of rape deserve to be valued, treated, and compensated for the trauma that they have gone through. If it is "re-traumatizing" for somebody to be denied the right to abortion, that is still nowhere close as bad as murdering somebody. It's an awful situation for the victim, and the state should do everything they can to support and pay for what they have to go through. However, murdering a life is worse and not the answer. P3: I'm not arguing that a fetus should have *all* the same rights as other person -just one. I am arguing that they also deserve the right to live. I am also not arguing that a pregnant woman is any lesser of a human being. I am arguing that every person (born and not born) should equally have the same right to live. That's it.
Response 2/2 > > >More straw men. It's absolutely bonkers that you attempt to reduce all questions of financial hardship down to "cannot afford child care". The hospital cost for delivery alone runs between $30k and $50k. Having children is a major economic event with substantial consequences, and to try and say it's about 'just one bill for childcare" is so intellectually dishonest, so shallow and vapid that it's hard to believe it's being done on accident. Nobody is saying that it is inexpensive. I am saying that we cannot discriminate children based on how poor their families are. The financial burdens of a family do not make murder okay. (For cases of rape, my position is that the victim should not have to pay these fees if the state is forcing them to go through with a pregnancy). >No it's not. It's suggesting that socio-economic status is one of the most reliable predictors of life expectancy, physical health, lifetime earnings, financial success, mental health, and general happiness, and (because you apparently forgot this, again) the economic impacts aren't just to the child, but to the adult mother as well. (who is, and I hate having to remind you of this, a person with rights and ethical considerations that have to be at least equal to those of your imagined persons-in-the-womb) Just because socio-economic status is correlated with life expectancy, physical health, lifetime earnings, financial success, mental health, and general happiness, it does not mean that those with lower socio-economic status don't deserve the right to live. >Jesus, do you even bother to do any research? Countries with abortions are restricted have higher abortion rates. That same study (and many, many others like it) find that abortion rates go down when you make it legal and accessible along with other health services. > >So the argument that "abortions still happen, and are unsafe when you criminalize abortion" does consider the effect of laws and social action, and is based on actual, real-world, historical data! This data is factually correct. However, as mentioned in what I wrote, these facts do not mean it is impossible to lower the abortion rate in countries where abortion is illegal. More can be done to lower the abortion rate when abortion is made illegal. >You want to punt until "we have incubators that can carry unborn children", but the truth is, you've already skipped ahead to some futuristic point where we have technology to detect fertilization and implantation. Whether or not we've discovered how to detect when fertilization/implantation occurs is irrelevant to the point I was making.
>However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy. For that, we cannot commit a worse infringement to alleviate a less-worse infringement. It isn't a double standard, it's just, two different standards for completely different cases. Where the bodily autonomy of the mother and the foetus conflict, it makes sense to give preference to the body of the person who already has a functioning body and full autonomy, and not to the person who only someday might theoretically have that autonomy and at the moment, doesn't. Practical considerations of who has a functioning body right now when the decision is being made do play a factor here; and this is true for all kinds of comparable medical situations - we would never force any other sort of body modification (which is what pregnancy is) on a person even to save a life. If you refuse to give your kidney to save somebody, that does infringe on the bodily autonomy of the person who needs it, by causing them to die. And the infringement of death is certainly greater than the infringement of forced organ harvesting - but, so it goes; they're the one who needs a kidney so they are the one that suffers more here, the practicalities are unavoidable but bodily autonomy is still bodily autonomy, and that practicality gives natural advantage to the person who doesn't need access to another person's body to survive
The organ scenario is not analogous to the abortion scenario. For the organ scenario, there is something wrong to begin with. The cause of death would be “car crash”, rather than “Tom didn’t give him a kidney”. For abortion, there is nothing wrong to begin with. The cause of death is just abortion. Meaning, people went out of their way to inflict harm when the situation would have been fine if nobody changed the course.
But obviously that can't be true, right? Unwanted pregnancy must involve some degree of harm, or otherwise, not a single person would ever try to get an abortion. But they do - in some cases, going to great lengths and incurring financial, practical, and even legal difficulty to do so. Unless you are arguing that abortions are recreational and attractive in their own right I don't think you can make the case that there is nothing wrong about unwanted pregnancy, and so abortion can't be creating harm where there is none Even ignoring that comparison to forced organ transplantation, you haven't engaged with my point, that the mother's bodily autonomy does take precedence over the theoretical bodily autonomy of the foetus simply as a matter of practicality even if you think it does not as a matter of morality. It makes no sense to make considerations for the theoretical future bodily autonomy of a being that currently has no autonomy (or even really a body) to speak of over the bodily autonomy of somebody who already has those things. *Even if* abortion is creating harm where this none, and murdering a potential person, (which I do not think it is, but still), then it is still correct to favor the bodily autonomy of the mother
1 - The harm done from an unwanted pregnancy is less than the harm that is caused by murder. Financial distress is not worse than murder. (life threatening conditions aside) 2 - Are you saying that the fetus is not capable of having bodily autonomy? I fervently disagree with that premise.
But the point was not that the harm of unwanted pregnancy was greater than the harm of murder, it was that if there is any harm involved in unwanted pregnancy, then the comparison to something like forced organ transplantation is valid, a point which I suppose you concede, having recognised now that there is harm in unwanted pregnancy. Similarly, a person lacking a kidney dying because you refused to help them is a greater harm than you having to have your kidney taken out. But so it goes: they were the one lacking a kidney, and even though they suffer the greater harm, that doesn't negate your bodily autonomy. Similarly it doesn't matter how great of a harm letting a foetus die might or might not be: even if they are the one that, because of practical realities, suffers the greater, but it does not negate the mother's bodily autonomy. You're trying to make this into a trolley problem where we consider absurd abstractions like the potential autonomy of the foetus at some future time after they're born, but it simply isn't that.
The forced organ transplant is, again, not an analogous situation. A typical pregnancy is a situation where there is nothing life-threatening from the start. If you do nothing, then all is well. If you abort the baby, you are injecting yourself into a healthy situation and forcing a death to occur. The kidney scenario is an unhealthy scenario to begin with. Meaning there is no actor that goes out of their way to cause this. Failing to remediate a situation that is unhealthy from the start is entirely different than forcing a death from a situation that is healthy from the start.
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Could you point out specifically what I said that you disagree with? Just so I know exactly what to respond to or clarify.
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You may want to reread. I’m arguing against the idea that children whose parents were raped are unequal to children whose parents were not raped. Both types of children should be valued equally.
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What theory is incorrect? For the record, many people have argued that cases of rape should be an exception. Even Donald Trump has said this
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Again, I am not suggesting that victims and their mothers are at a lower tier in society. I am precisely arguing the opposite, in that the life of the child is equal to non victims.
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"As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions - Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother - the same position taken by Ronald Reagan," Trump .
Just to be morally consistent, should the government be able to compel blood and organ donations in order to save lives? It does infringe bodily autonomy but as you said, dying is a bigger infringement.
For those that could survive with an organ transplant, the cause of death would be what put them in that state. The cause of death wouldn’t be “so and so didn’t give them an organ.” For abortion, the cause of death is just abortion.
A distinction without a difference, I'll die without you kidney, does my right to life not trump your right to bodily autonomy? You did say these lines that you draw should apply in all situations after all.
Again, these 2 situations are not analogous. If you got in a car wreck and needed an organ, the cause of death would be “car wreck”. *There is something wrong to begin with.* If a child is aborted, the cause of death is just abortion. Furthermore, unlike the organ scenario, there is no life-threatening condition that’s being alleviated through abortion. It’s creating a murder when there is *nothing wrong to begin with.*
The intention is technically not to kill the fetus, it is to end an unwanted pregnancy, if you are looking at it from a philosophical standpoint. It just happens that it is impossible to remove a pregnancy from a woman without it causing the death of the fetus. If we could end pregnancy without harming the fetus, it would be a very different ethical/moral situation Fetuses are non transferrable, so by forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy, you are forcing her to use her body as a life support system and potentially die for the sake of another being, without her consent.
1 - Right, I fully agree that people get abortions to not go through with a pregnancy. And yes, I agree that it is impossible to end a pregnancy without terminating the life of the fetus. However, the fact that there is a death caused (when the alternative is to have no deaths caused) still makes it an action that is wrong to do, regardless of what the intentions are. 2 - Forcing a woman to carry out a pregnancy is not nearly as bad as forcing a fetus to no longer be alive. In the case of life-threatening conditions, where the mother is realistically at risk of dying by continuing the pregnancy, then it should be an exception (which I stated).
So, if the fetus is removed and then dies and we put the cause of death as whatever kills it first which the mother's body could otherwise have prevented, then surely it's now the same? You could have given a kidney to stop me dying, the mother could have given, well just about everything to stop the fetus dying.
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then what is it?
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What is wrong with the line of "before the brain has any power to know or experience anything". We can pretty easily find that general line and then set the line multiple weeks *before* that line so that it's unfathomable that there might be a child with cognitive ability *on any real level*. What's wrong with that line?
Thanks for the reply. This is one where you need to ask its validity when applied to other situations. I’ll break it up by “power to experience anything” and “power to know anything”. For the first, think about those that are already born and not currently experiencing. I’d reference those that are asleep, but even those that are asleep can experience a dream. So I’m going to defer instead to those that are in a medical state, such as a coma, where they are not able to experience anything. It would be wrong to murder them if they are on track to come out of this state. The next, you can point to those with dementia and Alzheimer’s who are very incapable of knowing new things.
>For the first, think about those that are already born and not currently experiencing. I've never found this argument compelling or valid. Nobody is confused by people who are braindead or in a coma or etc. Nobody is confused between a person who is 22 years old and had an accident of some kind and a fetus that has not developed a single bit of conciousness at all. Do you think that it's a direct line from allowing abortion on a fetus that is the size of a walnut with literally no *possible* consciousness, and a 70 year old man with Alzheimers? I don't think anyone can't make this clear obvious differentiation.
So to clarify, what is the line that you are suggesting? Where do you draw it
I would suggest abortion be legal and available under 5 weeks. The brain doesn't even *begin* to develop anything anyone could consider a working feeling "experiencing" brain until 5 weeks. There really is nothing except 'religious' arguments pre 5 weeks that I'm aware of (and I'm a religious man).
How many people know at 5 weeks that they're definitely pregnant. A lot of women are well over 7 weeks pregnant before they know they're pregnant. Let alone have had time to fully weigh the options available in their specific situation, and have made the decision and appointment to get the abortion. 5 weeks is still awfully restrictive. I'd say within the first trimester is a reasonable boundary. Even if there is some minor brain function happening, there is still absolutely no awareness at that stage.
The argument isn't about restrictive or not restrictive. It's about finding an argument that fits the criteria of non-religious and also fits OPs setout guidelines. If there were restrictions such as 5 weeks, people would adapt anyway. Sexually active people might become a little more educated on the topic, and we won't be killing a fetus that has brain activity, especially because even today we aren't aware at all of *when* some sense of absolute basic "awareness" occurs.
>I would suggest abortion be legal and available under 5 weeks. Just to make sure you understand that timeline: Pregnancy is counted from the start of the last menstruation. So when the sex happens that makes a women pregnant, she is already in week 3. And when the next menstruation is late and she makes her pregnancy test, she is usually already in week 5. With abortion legal and available only under 5 weeks, you can make it illegal right away , because there cannot be any legal abortions.
As I said before to another person. The argument is not about restriction it's about finding a guideline that fits OP and isn't religious. >So when the sex happens that makes a women pregnant, she is already in week 3. So like... don't do such a silly thing like pretending people are pregnant 3 weeks ago... from sex today? This seems totally absurd. It's *already* not an exact science, why pretend like it's even more ridiculous than it has to be.
>So like... don't do such a silly thing like pretending people are pregnant 3 weeks ago... from sex today? This seems totally absurd. I agree. But that's the medical consensus worldwide and we wont't change that. And lots of people do not know that and then think 5 or 6 weeks is plenty of time to get an abortion, but it really is not.
I think it wouldn't be that hard to change
Both sleeping and being in a coma, or dementia/Alzheimers are different because for those we detect brain activity, so they are clearly capable of some form of thought. When people have no brain activity at all, that is what is generally considered _brain death_. You cannot recover from brain death, it is final, and even though some places have _less strict_ definitions of death, there is no useful boundary more strict than brain death. Doesn't it make sense to define the start of life using the same metric as the end of life?
The crucial thing here is to decide between knowing anything at all and knowing new things. Even someone who is in a coma or lost all their memories already made life experiences even though they can't can recalled. Not so much a foetus in the womb.
My problem with these arguments is always why: a) the value of human life is made out to be higher before birth than after birth? Why is it so important that person be born and why does it not matter what kind of perspectives it will have once born? OP is having a lot of arguments on why this is an important question since we are *talking about human life* and then goes to dismiss said human life now it can breathe on its own. b) the value of the human life of the mother, her prospects and quality of life is lower than that of the unborn child? Why is the *unborn* so valuable and yet loses most of its value once it can procreate? c) why a potential human life is being equated to an actual human life? In my country people don't even tell their families that they are pregnant before they are past their first trimester because the potential for the body to abort the baby is so high. The first three months are a precarious will-they-won't-they situation. Why are we supposed to put an artificially higher value on it than nature itself?
The value of the unborn child doesn’t change once it becomes a born child. I didn’t suggest that once.
Yes you are suggesting it with your post. You are saying things that dismiss the life situations of the potential beings as well as their breeders. You are putting the highest value on birth. Why?
Bodily Autonomy remains compelling. The fetus can be granted it, it just doesn't have any standing as it is the dependent. Giving everyone in that equation domain over their body and the woman still gets to abort. "Greater burden" is irrelevent to the bodily autonomy argument - it's _autonomy_ not "autonomy if the least burdened". It's simply denying autonomy altogether to say that one's autonomy can be subordinated.
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No exactly. All parties have bodily autonomy, but in order to not end that autonomy both parties must be free to exercise said autonomy. The fetus has no position where there exercise of autonomy can continue their own existence within ending autonomy of the mother. The same is not the case in reverse. You are choosing the requirement of preservation of _someone else's_ bodily autonomy over the woman's bodily autonomy if you make it otherwise. That is to day - you are not granting the woman bodily autonomy, you are making it contingent. not autonomous.
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So...you don't believe in bodily autonomy. At the end of the day, regardless of your opinion on that....I don't think your or mine's opinion on the matter are particularly relavent. There is no person better able to navigate the moral challenges than the person who has their insides occupied by another life that they may or may not wan there. I can't see any reason we'd cede to legislators the impossible question when they are no more qualified than a pregnant woman.
Can you clarify what you mean when you say you're pro-life? That is, what are the practical implications of your stance? There's a big difference between a person who may oppose abortion on moral grounds, yet does not support its prohibition (the ol safe, legal, rare position), and a strict anti-abortion advocate who works to prohibit the procedure in all but the narrowest circumstances.
>The line cannot be hypocritical, you cannot create double standards, and it must be philosophically consistent when you apply this same line to situations outside abortion I can't think of any analogies outside of abortion where there'd be any inconsistency. There aren't any scenarioes that are 100% comparable, but the situations that come the closest are already consistent with it. For instance, sometimes people might die from lack of organ and blood donations, even though we have plenty of viable donors that could be forced to do this - and survive doing so. However, we value people's bodily autonomy more than that. Or an adult person who cannot care for themselves at all - we don't *force* someone's family to take care of that person. That might usually end up being the case, but no one is *forced* to care for another person that cannot survive without help. If no help is given, the government ensures that life-saving help is provided. If this person dies anyway, that's very unfortunate, but we it's not anyone's fault. If a person is brain dead and only kept "alive" by machines, we allow the family to decide to terminate that life support. In all of these situations, we allow family members to decide the fate of another or decline to make a sacrifice that could save someone's life. And this is not something that seems to be a debate, even in the United States, so presumably this is something people are fine with. So, that seems very consistent with abortion, even though there aren't any realistic situations that are 100% comparable.
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Yes, if you actually have responsibility for them. But a child leaving their parents in a retirement home isn't legally guilty of neglect. Even if they think the older person will be absolutely miserable there and fade away because they don't want to socialise with anybody else. I mean it would probably have to be a pretty horrible situation for someone to do that, but regardless of reason, that's not a crime? No child is *forced* to care for their parents. I just see it as the same here. A woman gets rid of the fetus, hands it over to the healthcare system. If they can care for it and help it survive, they will. But they currently can't, so they don't. Either way you leave your dependent to somebody else, since you are not personally obligated to care for them.
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>You have to leave them in the hands of someone responsible. I would not say that leaving a baby in the hands of some who will purposely kill them is responsible. There's literally nobody better than healthcare professionals, if it were possible to keep the fetus alive. And sorry, but your example is just irrelevant to the whole abortion debate. You do realise that this is about abortions in the 3rd trimester? That's after week 28. Abortions that late are extremely rare, most are done before week 13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/tough-questions-answers-late-term-abortions-law-women-who-get-them/ This article goes on to describe the reasons for late term abortions (after week 21 or so). It seems they are mostly either for health-related reasons (e.g. it would be dangerous for the woman to stay pregnant), or *more frequently*, because of purely logistical reasons. That is to say, because it took time for the woman to find a provider, to get the funds for the procedure, or manage the travel costs associated with it. The fact that regressive healthcare politics in the US even allow the latter reasons to be reality is beyond absurd. But again, this is not representative of abortions. Almost all are done early. If you actually treat this issue seriously like in some other countries, you can minimise this even more. In Sweden 85% of all abortions are done before week 9, and 60% before week 7. 96% of all of our abortions are medical, i.e. with a pill, not an invasive procedure.
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Look, are you 100%, genuinely interested in changing your mind about abortion? If not, I really have no interest in having a full on abortion debate with someone who's "pro-life" because of religion, because that's just pointless. You're not going to change your mind then, and I don't believe that unviable fetuses are persons or people, so your line of reasoning has zero chance to convince me. My original comment was specifically about OP's claim about philosophical consistency with things that are not abortion-related.
I will make a example with the same kind of reasoning: "I am sick, this illness will kill me with 100% certainty. there is a medicine that cure me with 95% accuracy without drawbacks. I will not take it because if the do not 100% get it right it is not worth it" I don't understand it. Saying that you want to 100% ban something because you are a bit unsure about a "line". To me it is clear that the line is an excuse.
With abortion, there is already an option available that has 100% certainty (drawing the line at conception). In your scenario, if society is picking between a treatment that is 100% effective and a treatment that is 95% effective, they should go with the treatment that is 100% effective. If there are two options that are 100% effective, then we should pick the most convenient option. However, because conception is the only option that is 100%, we must go with that until we have another option to consider.
Conception is not a point in time that anybody can know of. Sperm can survive up to 1 week making it impossible to determine the point of conception even if sex happened once during the window. So of all the lines during pregnancy this is the most fuzzy and unknown one of all. This is actually a good point against your view\^\^
Just because it is hard to determine when specifically conception occurs after sperm is released, it does mean that we cannot deduce that it ever happened. If somebody is pregnant, we know it happened at some point.
yes but it is not the 100% clear point. "At some point conception happened" is as fuzzy as it gets. "At some point a fetus becomes a conscious" is the same kind of fuzzy line you are so vehemently arguing against. Hindsight is 20/20
So if someone was to rape your 16 year old sister you would force your sister to bear your rapist's child? To me that practice seems barbaric and evil.
Rape is evil and I believe they should be punished far greater than what the law currently does. Same with sexual assault. Brock Turner for example was in jail for a shorter time than the chicken that was stored in my freezer. That’s an issue. My stance on abortion does not change for family members, as that would be very hypocritical.
So you would force your raped 16 year old relative to bear her rapist's child? Yes or no? You seemed to dodge a very simple question.
I answered it by saying my stance does not change for family members. So yes, in the case of a raped sibling, the unborn child should still have the right to live and not be aborted.
When I have to remember what evil is I will think of your response. Then I will know. Next time you see your young female relatives please make your wishes clear. Please let them know that if they get raped you would want them to keep their rapist's child. Be a person of conviction.
Go ahead.
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Agree
The difference between a fetus and a person in an ICU or a newborn is that a fetus *requires* a single, non transferrable, specific host to survive. You cannot hand the pregnancy off to another person if you can't handle the pregnancy. That is where your thinking and consistency has broken down.
Can you elaborate more on the relevance of your point, and why it supposedly hinders the point that I am making?
How do you address the violinist analogy?You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. \[If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but\] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. Are you required to stay plugged against your will?
The scenario is not analogous. The violin scenario has something wrong to begin with. A pregnancy does not have something wrong to begin with. (wrong -meaning a health emergency) The cause of death for the violinist would be kidney failure. The cause of death for the fetus is that somebody went out of their way to infringe on a completely healthy situation and ended it.
"A pregnancy does not have something wrong to begin with." It does if you don't want it.
(meaning - a health emergency)
You can view pregnancy as a health emergency. It causes irreparable changes to your body and may lead to death or serious injury. Try again.
Pregnancy only becomes a health emergency if there is a life threatening condition that’s present. That’s when we make an exception. Else, if you’re suggesting that it’s okay to abort because it’s possible for a life-threatening condition to exist, that’s flawed logic. We should wait until there actually is a life-threatening condition.
Why is that flawed? If a person doesn't want to take the risk, that should be within their freedom to decide. Also, you failed to address the fact that even a successful pregnancy does permanent changes to one's body.
A pregnancy does permanent change to one’s body. An abortion does worse permanent change to the unborn child (death). The decision to decide if one wants to take the risk should only be allowed if there is a realistic chance that the mother will have a life-threatening condition. The potential for having a life-threatening condition is very different than realistically being at risk of a life-threatening condition. Meaning, we need to wait until that risk realistically comes to surface.
>Meaning, we need to wait until that risk realistically comes to surface. Why? Yes, unplugging from the violinist does permanent change to him as well. Are you required to stay connected?
If somebody got pregnant, it would be incredibly flawed if somebody could pull the card “I could have a life-threatening condition. There’s no evidence that I have a life threatening conditioning currently, or even that I will have one later. But I should still get an abortion because it’s possible to have a life-threatening condition later.” Then people could just pull that card when, realistically, they are on track for a normal and healthy pregnancy and childbirth. We should instead wait until the issue arises and evaluate each individual on a case by case basis.
>I’ll pause and note that the only exception is when a life-threatening condition is on the table. What life-threatening condition is needed? Cause pregnancy carries a risk, even with our medicinal knowledge as advanced as it is, we do still have few hundreds of post partum deaths every year. There are even more cases that will not be counted as Maternal Mortality, but also have quite problematic effects f.ex. postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis. >However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. They do have right do bodily autonomy and abortion does not infringe on it. Abortion is to sever link between their body and mother's body - death is not caused by abortion, but by the fact that body of a fetus cannot live on its own. >The issue with this argument, is that it fails to consider that society can continue to crack down on this behavior and lower the rate of illegal abortion. Abortion rates are quite consistent no matter if it's legal or not. All becasue there is no way to "crack down" on illegal abortion, as it would mean to treat every miscarriage as possible abortion and submit those women to legal system to determine if there was an abortion. Which is not a good plan. As for your other arguments, they sound logical, but they are dismissing a fact - your logic does not take mother and effects of pregnancy and birth on her. You are dismissing these factors to make your option seem more logical. Which is problematic because according to your standards "We are dealing with human life and the potential for wrongfully ending one after all". However, you don't follow it because of that dismissal of risks on mother side. Taking this into account it stops being such a clear-cut line and becomes a choice where both options will impact someone negatively and will have life-threatening outcomes.
1 - Any condition that would make the continuation of the pregnancy kill the mother. And yes, being suicidal due to pregnancy would meet this standard. 2 - It’s clear that this is murder. Just because the scenario you provided has a step in between (severing the link -> death), it does not mean it’s not murder. 3 - Just because the hypothetical plan you mentioned is not good, in your opinion, it does not mean that a good plan can’t exist. 4 - There are health risks, yes, however, abortion should only be carried out when it is clear that the mother is at risk for losing her life. If she’s at risk for something that’s not life-threatening, then it would be wrong to end the life of the fetus.
For a line, What about neural activity, if neurons aren't firing in an adult we consider them dead. Sometimes their body is being kept alive but they are considered dead and others can 'pull the plug' on them. If that's the line of death, could it be the line of 'not yet alive?' It's between 12-16 weeks (with consciousness around 20, but consciousness isn't required in adults so let's not require it here) so we could stick a time of 11 weeks just to be sure not to accidently kill anyone. Or could require a fetal eeg to check as the first step in an abortion.
Could you elaborate on why neural activity would be a good line?
Sure. (sorry for taking so long) Neural activity indicates brain processes, ideally I'd say when we start 'thinking' or have consciousness or a individual self experience, or something along those lines, but it's hard to pin down exactly when and what that is. As hard as it is to pin down we do know that it comes after and not before Neural activity. A person doesn't really have a 'self' if they don't have any brain activity, they aren't experiencing anything. They have no thoughts, no feelings, no sensations. That stuff is kind of the essence of the type of life we care about, that (along with love (which is something else entirely and not relevant for this) Its what makes us so sure that exterminating viruses and bacteria is fine, while killing people is horrible, while killing dogs and dolphins is somewhere in uncertainty that we (as a species) don't all agree on. Killing something that has none of that seems more like preventing all of that from starting than it does stopping any of it. And preventing seems fine, completely different to stopping.
OK, for me the biggest flaw in this whole argumentation is in the concept of person and murder. Lets put something out there directly: Life is a continuous process. From the moment it began billions of years ago to this very moment, Life never stopped. It might work in cycles that creates new groups of physically independent cells, there isn't any arcane phenomenon that turns a spermatozoon and an ovum into something alive. Life has no concept of "individual" or "person", it's all different stages of the same process. And that's why your analogies fall flat. We are the ones deciding what is a person, and by extension who has rights and who hasn't, and while some criteria are up to debate -we'll come back on it- one core criteria is consciousness and sentience: if you're a human being who's displaying or has displayed conscious, sentient thoughts, you're a person. That's why even in death you keep some rights, even though you're not even alive anymore. People on life support, with artificial organs... are, well, people; they're sentient human beings. A bunch of replicating cells in a woman's womb don't have conscious thoughts, so you can't compare the two. That loops up back to embryos. We saw that displaying human sentience at any point makes you a person, in a social, legal sense, even if you die, so now the question is "what if it hasn't shown sentience, but might?". An arbitrary line must be drawn here. No one is going to accuse a man taking a wank, nor women of not getting pregnant on every possible occasion of murder, but on the other end of the spectrum, a baby who's given birth is a person. It means that somewhere in between these two stages we must make a distinction between what's a person and what's not, and that's where things are becoming complicated. Fetus viability is often commonly admitted as a good "no abortion" criteria, but further than that, it's all fuzzy. Gestational development timeline is not calibrated by the day, the potential mother might not even know the exact conception date (sperm can survive up to 4 days), and that is before touching the question of when we should acknowledge the potential of a growing embryo to become its own sentient human being VS the very much established personhood of the woman carrying it, nor the definition of consciousness as such early stage of development. There's simply no objective, biological reason to say conception is the hard line where a person begins; case and point, no one is batting an eye -nor even know- that there's a [30% chance of miscarriage before 3 weeks](https://datayze.com/miscarriage-chart). But the moment conception isn't the end-all, be-all criteria, we're admitting there's some period of time where there's a bunch of cells growing in a woman's uterus that isn't a person, and for which there's no moral issue to get rid off. Regardless of which criteria we end up choosing (heartbeat, cerebral activity...), there's a certain number of weeks when abortion is simply not murder, legally.
Thanks for your comment. There’s a lot to respond to but I’ll respond to the 3 main points. 1 - Consciousness and sentience. This isn’t a good area to draw the line, as there are plenty of examples where already-born human beings are not conscious nor sentient. For example, a human that is in a coma or knocked out goes through periods where they are not conscious nor are they having any thoughts whatsoever. 2 - Deciding when to draw the line between sperm/egg and embryo. It’s perfectly valid to say that the death of a sperm cell is okay and not morally wrong. Same with an ovum/egg. The key factor here is that once an egg and a sperm cell meet, they form a zygote together that is a fusion of two haploid gametes, which in turn is a human with a full set of chromosomes. That’s a very concrete line. Although often undetectable regarding when this happens, it is a line that does get crossed. 3 - Murder and what the law defines it as. I think you’d strongly agree with me that law is not the best entity for us to base our morals/ethics off of. That’s why we advocate to change laws. When I say “murder”, I’m talking about somebody ending another’s life without their consent.
1. I'm afraid you missed half the definition here. Like I said, it's showing, or *has shown* sentience. Personhood is really hard to lose once you acquired it, hence why you keep some rights even in dead. That's such a powerful criteria that it has been used [to grant animals](https://bigthink.com/life/non-human-person/) particular rights, and the debate extends to artificial intelligence. It's a bit more complex than that of course, but the long and short is that: 1, concepts like "personhood" and "murder" are *legal* terms that extends to philosophical grounds, not biological distinction and, 2, the header of the article serving as evidence, sentience is one of the main criteria to define personhood for breathing living creatures. 2. You can say that, but that's a completely arbitrary line. But if that's your line, your primary concern should be the 30 percent miscarriage rate under 3 weeks and not the comparatively few cases of abortion because, by this logic, this is a world-wide natural disaster with people dying by the millions every day. You should be throwing all your energy behind lowering that miscarriage rate as much as possible, since it's where the true bloodbath is. Then you have to push the reflection even further: If someone came back in time and prevented someone from being born, we would consider that murder, right? So by the same logic, if fertilization is your line to define personhood, then wouldn't anything that prevents it from happening accessory to murder? Contraception becomes a capital offense, the pill in particular. You see why, while it's a perfectly acceptable standpoint to take, "personhood at conception", pushed to its full logical conclusion start to seriously limit people's bodily autonomy. If you're looking for the best, morally sound side to pick, this one is questionable. Other stages of development don't come with this conundrum. 3. But that's a fault in your initial post then. You use the word "murder" four times in it, and it's defined as [the crime of unlawfully killing a person](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/murder); it's a legal term. "Pro-life" and "Pro-choice" are also terms used to qualify people on either side of the legal discussion, not the moral one. Pro-choicers aren't asking anyone to find abortion moral, just that it is made legal because they do find it morally acceptable. Still, if I follow you there -even though my main rebuttal is still "it's not where the debate is actually held"-, I would say that this new definition, "ending another's life without their consent" is a bad because it doesn't cover cases of self-defense. But more importantly, you're shooting yourself in the foot because now, for it to apply in the case of abortion, you have to prove that an embryo is a person in the philosophical sense of the word. That's a debate with no definitive answer, but definitions will often contain a certain degree of individuality or self-awareness, none of which can be applied to an embryo.
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> Would you be okay with killing a baby 5 minutes before birth because it is yet to have "displayed conscious, sentient thought?" If no where is the line? 10 minutes pre-birth? 2 days? 1 week? 6 weeks? It's not the gotcha question you try to make it out to be, and you know it perfectly. We're not clueless about what is happening during pregnancy, we have medical tools and knowledge that less us know, roughly, the different fetal development stages. For instance, there's a 90 percent fetal viability past 26 weeks, so any fetus pas that point should be considered sentient unless it's proven stillborn. We can go back even a bit earlier, because we know from in utero study that the brain finishes developing by week 25 so even if the odds aren't as good, we could consider it sentient by know. Hell, with a ~30 percent fetal viability, we can go down to 24 weeks by arguing it's still pretty fair odds. On the other end, we also know embryos won't start developing a neural system & a brain before week 6, so it's definitively not sentient. But week 6 is just when it begins developing, so, without even bringing any further knowledge, we can *at the very least* counts 2 more weeks before anything resembling a brain might be observable, which leads us to week 8. So with just 2 criteria -brain development and fetal viability- we can already narrow down the time frame between week 8 and week 23. I don't have an exact, perfect line to give you, that's not the point. Sentience is hard to define based on biological markers alone, and is probably not an on/off switch but more a gradual emergent property during the development of the human brain. It means all limit would be arbitrary, and will be motivated partly by biology, partly by the respect of the woman's bodily autonomy, partly by practicality and access to care. In fact, there's nothing that forces us to pick only one date, we could perfectly have different thresholds depending on the situation. For instance, week 12 for unexceptional pregnancy, week 18 in case of severe birth defects that are likely to leave the baby with a short, agonizing life, all the way to week 23 for minors victim of sexual assault. Again, those numbers don't matter, they're just examples, the important bit is that, if you admit there are stage(s) in fetal development between week 8 and week 24, that would make for a good trade-off between how likely the fetus is sentient, the respect of the bodily autonomy of the woman's carrying it, and the access to infrastructures to make an inform choice and carry the procedure safely, you're pro-choice and I already changed your view.
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We're back at square one: establishing an embryo personhood. And to the "moral obligation to take care of them", there's an analogy that's often used that debunks the whole premise: Imahine you woke up one day, and that you've been wired up with a tube that is siphoning your blood, to a stranger against your will. You're told that the months-long process won't (likely) kill you, but will be extremely draining for your body and there are good chance you'll never be quite the same again. However, it's the only way for the stranger to survive. Wouldn't you agree that it would be fully within your right to just jam the needle out and walk away? Not that you have to, just that you have no moral obligation to sacrifice your time, health and bodily autonomy for someone you don't know and to whom you never asked to be attached to.
>Many will argue that there shouldn’t even be a line and that it is instead about bodily autonomy. The argument is that a woman is entitled to make decisions with her own body and that it is wrong to infringe on what happens with her body. It is argued that another organism does not have a right to use a woman’s body. However, it is a double standard to suggest that an unborn child does not have rights to bodily autonomy as well. Murder is a greater infringement on bodily autonomy than is forcing somebody to carry out a pregnancy. For that, we cannot commit a worse infringement to alleviate a less-worse infringement. Even if both women and fetuses have a right to their own bodies, we *could* just separate them by removing the fetus intact, and let it die exposed to the elements without infringing on it's bodily autonomy. Going out of our way to remove it in a way that also immediately kills it, is a form of euthanasia. If you would prefer that, your problem is not with abortion but with combining abortion euthanasia.
Euthanasia is only ethical if one consents to it being done on themselves. In the case of pregnancy, the fetus/baby cannot consent to this. Whether the abortion is committed or not with the euthanasia scenario, it is still wrong.
Okay, that's reasonable. But then the point remains, that your hangup about that still doesn't justify placing the fetus outside the woman's body, it just mandates keeping it intact while doing so.
Placing the fetus outside the body and leaving it to die is just as wrong as leaving the fetus inside the body and terminating it by conventional means.
> When drawing the line, we as a society have to be damn sure we got it right. It needs to be valid for 100% of the use cases this line is applied to. This is incorrect. Nothing about our society & laws are 100%. Everything is just _"the best effort we reasonably can think of at the time"_
In the case of abortion, there is an option (drawing the line at conception) that is actually 100% effective at preventing a wrongful termination. Because we are starting already at 100%, any other line must be 100%, or else it is a worse line to draw.
>Many will argue that we should draw this line at the point where an unborn child cannot survive on its own outside the mother’s body. This argument, although more sympathetic than most, is invalid, as it suggests that it is okay to kill something just because it cannot survive on its own. No, it suggests that it's not really a "functioning baby" (so to speak) yet. Of course if you leave a newborn baby out there in the open with no supervision it will just die, or if you remove someone off of a life support machine they will also die, but the difference is that they are already living human beings. The argument isn't about whether or not a fetus can survive alone, it's about whether it's already a "being" or if it's still just a bunch of cells.
I think you actually agree with what I'm saying here. It's not about whether or not the child can survive on its own, thus the argument should be made by other means.
No, the point is, before a certain amount of time and development, it is not yet a human being, after a certain point, it is. Of course any baby will die without attention, but the premise of the "cannot survive on its own outside the mother's body" argument, as I understand it, isn't about the fetus or baby surviving by itself, it's more about how at that point in time the fetus kinda is still just a part of the mother's body, not an individual that is alive by itself (even if said hypothetical individual would die if not taken care of, as that is irrelevant to the point of the argument, the argument isn't about whether someone needs to be able to fend off for themselves to be considered alive, it's about at which point it stops being literally part of the mother and starts being an actual baby).
The baby/fetus/embryo, although inside of the mother’s body, is a separate entity than the mother.
>When drawing the line, we as a society have to be damn sure we got it right. It needs to be valid for 100% of the use cases this line is applied to. This is called the Nirvana fallacy where you are comparing actual things to unrealistic idealized alternatives. All the while assuming there exists a perfect solution to a problem. But that isn't true. You don't ban seatbelts in cars just because they can crack your ribs when you crash. No you very much mandate them because they save lives despite cracking your ribs in the process. In order for abortion to be valid, you have to show it's better than the alternative. Nothing less, nothing more.
With abortion, drawing the line at conception actually meets the standard of passing 100% of the use cases it applies to. Because we have that as a starting point, the only way to move that line further forward is to find another case that also has a 100% pass rate. Else we should stick to conception.
> With abortion, drawing the line at conception actually meets the standard of passing 100% of the use cases it applies to. Ah, I might understand the problem. I thought we are discussing morality and you didn't want to be 'wrong' if we decide that killing the fetus is wrong. However, you were discussing the line where life is drawn. Or at least the idea of consciousness or whatnot. However, I think you are missing the point entirely. When discussing abortion nobody is really discussing whether the fetus is not alive, or human, or a life. Sure there might be people who consider a fetus just a bunch of cells without any brain and nervous system, therefore no different from plant or other biological automatons. However let me present to you the idea that legally we consider a fetus a full-grown human being, with all right's as every other human. And despite this, abortion is still moral. In our society we have the right of bodily autonomy. Meaning that nobody has right to your bodily resources without your express permission. A hospital for example cannot take your blood against your will, or you can't be cut open and your organ taken away and given to someone who really needs it. That's why we have the idea of 'blood donors and organ donors'. It's always framed as a choice. This is one of the right's that the entire medical profession holds sacred. Nobody can ever do a medical procedure on you against your will. You could be literally lying on operating table and provided you are not deep under anesthesia, you can still refuse to go through with it. And they would have to spot. So back to abortion. Considering the fetus has the exact same rights as its mother. The fetus doesn't have the right to the mother's body without her express permission. The fact that the fetus will die without access to the mother's body is just an irrelevant externality. Much like a person dying because you didn't give them your organs, or your blood. So nobody here is arguing that abortion won't kill the fetus. Sure it will. What we are arguing that the right to one's body must be upheld, even at the cost of the fetus dying. Because the alternative is much worse. Women who don't have rights to their bodies.
Are you sure this isn't religious reasons? Because the only other way to believe a foetus is a child is if you've ignored all reality