A Woman's Rights

From the perspective of traditional family values, in Ancient Rome you had 8 days after the child was born to decide whether to keep them or to leave them on a mountain to die from exposure and get eaten by vultures. But you couldn’t, say, abuse the child during the first 8 days regardless of whether you were going to keep them or not.

I think the NYT is conflating the idea of personhood and equal rights here.

There is no logical reason why other rights shouldn’t kick in before the right to life, in the same way that, say, the rights to drive or vote kick in afterwards.

Even if the Supreme Court rules in favor of fetus personhood, I don’t see any reason why that should change current abortion policy or somehow grant a fetus equal rights, whatever that would mean.

I don't see anything. Is there a non subscription way to read about this?

I wonder if anti-choicers have really thought through the implications of their position, or if they just feel that it will never apply to them and thus don't care? Even if we take as granted that a fetus is a full human at conception, fundamentally anti-choice is about having the government use its effective monopoly on physical force to compel one human to suffer pain, risk of death, and have their bodily fluids harvested to save another against their will. It's true that anti-choicers want to restrict this to just a certain class of humans (women), but the logic can certainly apply to far more then that. There are objectively often significant shortages of organs and critical fluids (including both blood and plasma), and the lack results in suffering and death amongst humans (including children). This could be reduced if the government could just forcefully harvest from any person under their jurisdiction at will. Even if we restrict it to only cases where risk of death would be the same or less then pregnancy, that still leaves a lot on the table. I can't speak for anyone else, but that would be a scenario I'd deeply oppose. I have donated blood before, I have my organ donor card filled out and with me when I drive, and I honor those who volunteer to take on risk and pain for others in general. But that doesn't mean I would be comfortable with it being forced rather then volunteered, not even given the clear fact that it would surely save some children's lives.

Pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion, just that someone doesn't support the government using violence for forceful body harvesting [1]. In fact I strongly suspect that most pro-choice people are anti-abortion, either for moral reasons or even simply because they view it (I do) as an unfortunate scenario brought on by bad luck, limitations of our current medical technology and societal choices. For example, ideally we'd have invested all the money spent on this debate into trying to develop far better birth control methods for both men and women and then made that available for free to everyone. If we imagine something based on stents and implantable long lasting induction powered valve systems then perhaps something like a reversible-on-demand vasectomy/tubal ligation would become possible, or something else we haven't even considered. If constantly involuntarily active near perfect birth control was ubiquitous that would likely significantly reduce the incidence of abortions. If our medical technology was more advanced we could cover a wider class of in-utero conditions that current present tough choices for mothers. If we had better universal healthcare and UBI that might save some people from certain life critical financial choices too. Etc etc. Heck, maybe someday we'll have full on synthetic womb technology at a level where someone who doesn't wish to carry to term can just not even in the first week yet have development happen anyway.

There are lots of potential constructive avenues for those who truly wish there to be fewer abortions. I find it hard to see how it's justified to bring shooting women/doctors/whomever into the picture frankly, and the whole spectre of forcefully harvesting one human for another should be more then a little off putting even for men.

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1: That's not hyperbole, that's just what it means for something to be "illegal", there are of course lots and lots of intermediate steps and pressures government will generally apply first, but at the foundation of the whole endeavor is force. And I think "make it illegal" is treated far too casually in modern society.

Just thinking about the first anecdote in the article - you can't have a fetus be a life when you want and just some tissue mass when you don't want.

If a drunk driver runs into my pregnant wife and only minorly injures her but kills the nearly-born baby, what should the punishment be? I think it would need to be similar to if a drunk driver runs into a woman and injures herself and kills her nearly-born baby.

The whole "debate" is a classic divide-and-conquer campaign.

People in the one reality tunnel [0] believe one thing, while people with an incompatible reality tunnel have different beliefs. Both sides have their valid points. Both sides are confused about other aspects of the situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

One of my more memorable taxi driving experiences [1] started with a woman trying to leave her sober living facility, and her friends saying, "You'll never get your baby back, if you leave..." Her newborn had been taken by CPS at birth two weeks before, on account of her already having a child in the state's custody.

This woman hadn't had a miscarriage/stillbirth/aborted her baby, but she was nonetheless traumatized by losing the child she'd delivered. Most children do better when they're not raised by the state: parents/adoptive parents > foster care. I don't think many pro-life activists dedicate themselves to raising other peoples' children.

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-...

A simple reframe of the issue could end the effectiveness of this divide-and-conquer campaign. Both sides need to acknowledge that it's better to not need an abortion, that women throughout history have developed not-very-safe methods of dealing with inconvenient pregnancies [2][3], and that the post-Roe v. Wade divide-and-conquer campaign actually amplifies the number of abortions/miscarriages/stillbirths/hurt women.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-induced_abortion

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#In_ancient_history - Greece and Rome:

  "[...] These babies would not be directly killed, 
  but put in a clay pot or jar and deserted outside 
  the front door or on the roadway. In ancient 
  Greek religion, this practice took the 
  responsibility away from the parents because 
  the child would die of natural causes, for example 
  hunger, asphyxiation or exposure to the elements."

Maybe conservatives will realize the futility of their efforts to put the technology-genie back in the bottle, and shift to supporting pregnant women who have no support (thereby giving women who might otherwise abort an option).

Maybe liberals will find non-medical ways to help women manage their menstrual cycles without doctors. Some progress was being made by feminists in the mid-20th century, but this line of investigation/development shut down when "the pill" was approved... My friend called me in a panic once when she missed her period, but she got it to come back by herself.

I wish liberals and conservatives could reconcile the intellectual dishonesty around their views on vaccines and abortion. They are on opposite sides of both issues. Either a person’s body is their own or it isn’t. I know I would prefer my personal rights be recognized and if letting others have abortions and decline vaccines is necessary to protect my rights then so be it.