Comment by oliveoil12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oliveoil12 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't buy that fetal personhood automatically leads to the persecution of women and policing of pregnancies. These sorts of scenarios where mothers are being charged with manslaughter for getting into a car accident while pregnant are exceedingly rare and probably a case of a bad judge more than bad law. Is there not a way to compromise and protect both fetal personhood and women?

I would wager most pro-life people only want: fetuses to have personhood and abortion as a contraceptive to be outlawed. There are sensible scenarios where an abortion is unavoidable to save the life of the mother or in some other medical emergency scenario, for example. Possibly rape and incest, too. But that's no different from other rare scenarios like conjoined twins (both have personhood) where one has to die for the other to live.

But an abortion because you had unprotected sex and don't want the baby (which I have no data on but I'm guessing represent the overwhelming majority of desired abortions)? Not a good enough reason, in my opinion.

As a pro-lifer I would be willing to compromise on abortion: allowed for extraneous circumstances (mother in danger, rape, incest, etc.), not allowed simply because it is undesirable. Crimes against fetuses are no different from crimes against a newborn. If you inject yourself with heroin while pregnant, why is that any different than injecting your newborn with heroin?

> I would wager most pro-life people only want: fetuses to have personhood and abortion as a contraceptive to be outlawed.

IME, most in the pro-life movement, of those, only want abortion to be restricted (and that largely as a means to enforce particular views of gender and family roles); fetal personhood isn't an end-goal but a means to get to abortion restrictions. No one ever argues for any other consequences for fetal personhood.

> As a pro-lifer I would be willing to compromise on abortion: allowed for extraneous circumstances (mother in danger, rape, incest, etc.).

How can you reconcile allowance for rape and incest with fetal personhood as a real moral position on not just an instrumental PR tool to get restriction on abortion? Would you support allowing a mother to kill a newborn because it was fathered in rape? Would you allow either parent to kill a newborn because it was a product of their consentual incest?

Sorry to be blunt, you can't expect a heroin addict to quit because someone raped them. It's really hard to quit heroin.

It's really hard to be pregnant and not kill your fetus especially when your own life is a mess.

Not injecting a newborn with heroin is easy. Mess that up, and you were extremely negligent.

> I would wager most pro-life people only want: fetuses to have personhood and abortion as a contraceptive to be outlawed.

If I'm to place money, I'll bet against that. I think the abortion issue, for a much larger body of protesters than anyone wants to admit, is merely the excuse for something broader, and that in my experience (which of course is limited to my experience) this attitude tends to bleed out to contraceptives generally as they are all conflated as 'inducing an abortion' or something close enough to it. In fact, I would be willing to bet that if planned parenthood were to shutdown all abortion, never perform another one, never refer anyone to where they could get one, wash their hands of it completely, and continue on with everything else they do, the majority of protesters would not leave. but, then again, this's just my opinion informed by my experiences.

>Crimes Against fetuses are no different from crimes against a newborn

>I would be willing to compromise on annotation; allowed for extraneous circumstances

And thereinlies the contradiction. Does 2 wrongs make a right or doesn’t it? The answer is unclear and difficult, which leaves room for not only interpretation but personal expression. I gather you have a heart for victims of violence, but not for victims of poverty, despite all the measurable causal relationships between the two.

Pregnancy is an especially trying moment for any person, and by any logic concerns questions that both supersede that of carceral punishment and occupy capacity for managing decisions. If we want to prevent these horrors you describe, we need to concern ourselves with the material challenges of impending motherhood and healthy childhoods.

Glad you are willing to compromise on someone elaes body.

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