‘Enforced childbirth is slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the right to abortion | Hacker News Reader

‘Enforced childbirth is slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the right to abortion

theguardian.com

14 pointsmooreds42 comments

This is completely blown out of any conceivable proportion. The supreme court is correct, they should strike their previous decision and let the lawmakers create the proper framework.

Weird to equate this to slavery. These people actually think the supreme court revoking its previous ruling will ban abortions outright.

There are two entirely acceptable approaches. A state level legislation. Or constitutional amendment ratified by the correct process.

I don't really see any reason why either of those wouldn't be acceptable. Instead of this rather messy way done in judicial system that really don't have legs to stand on.

Southern states will never agree to a Constitutional Convention for anything other than an Amendment banning abortion unconditionally, and because a Convention can't occur without those states, and other states wouldn't approve of such a ban, any such Convention is existentially impossible. Even if that weren't the case, the South will never allow a Constitutional Convention for the simple reason that it allows the risk of reconsideration of the Second Amendment.

State level legislation is what we'll have to deal with, but let's not pretend the result of that - women having to risk fines or jail time unless they're forced to give birth or else move to a state that respects their right to bodily autonomy - should be acceptable in a modern society. It is only because half the country doesn't want to be a modern society, and because the power structures of the US are engineered such that that half can drag the rest of the country around by the nose indefinitely.

So democracy working is bad? Both seem to have it work exactly like it should, voting majority get what they want.

Following that reasoning, the South should be allowed to keep slaves, because that’s “democracy working”.

Upvoted, because I strongly believe you're wrong, and that your point of view should be near the top and debated.

So you’d be ok if SCOTUS declared that the lawmakers need to reconsider anti-slavery laws?

Seems to me anti-slavery is an amendment to the constitution. So it is a right not a law. It doesn't dangle from a previous SCOTUS decision and half assed legislation.

Freedom to decide about one’s own body - the right to abortion is a direct consequence of - isn’t written in constitution?

Yes, it isn't, otherwise this thread wouldn't exist.

Wait, US constitution doesn’t grant people basic human rights? That would explain quite a few things…

> Seems to me anti-slavery is an amendment to the constitution. So it is a right not a law.

Amendments themselves can be struck down by later amendments (see 18th vs 21st amendment).

Democrats fail to act in unison when they are in power, unlike the Republicans who are much more disciplined in this regard. They also realise that much of America is conservative at its core and will not tolerate views or actions that are too far left of center. For far too long, they have relied on the Courts as a way to do an end-run around legislatures, where they are ineffectual at getting their agenda passed. Now that has come back to bite them in the ass. The Republicans have put conservatives in many important courts now, blocking this (undemocratic) avenue for pushing forward Democrats' agenda. The Democrats would have been better off pushing for a Constitutional Amendment in the first place, but in 50+ years, they have do zilch towards that, giving the lie to their claim that they are pro-women or pro-choice. They are pro-power, as are Republicans, and that's the end of the story. Now they are forced to do the actual hard work of passing legislation or amending the constitution, for which they do not have a mandate from the public.

Of course, the Democrats have already started making noises about following another unwise course, that of packing the Supreme Court by adding more justices that they can install. They will find in due course that they will fail miserably there as well and face a profound backlash.

I think the fundamental problem here is we, as society, tend to tolerate fringe theories just because they are related to some form of cult. There is no logically valid justification for abortion ban - it isn’t any different from flat earthism, other than being harmful. But we tolerate it, because certain religion says so.

Much of the problem is that there is no grown up in the Democratic camp who can tell the others that abortion until birth isn't just cruel but also insane.

Same on the Republican side where there is no grown up to tell them to stop listening to Tucker Carlson when he supports a genocidal war.

Both right-wing people and left-wing people are worried about humans who are not born yet.

Left-wingers worry about people who'd be alive 100-150 years from now and thus want to stop climate change.

Right-wingers worry about people who'd be alive 6-9 months from now and thus want to stop abortions.

I say we should go full boomer and only worry about ourselves! Rolling coal with our large pickup trucks on the way to the abortion clinic! /s

But actually...if that is what it takes to restore sanity and end the extreme partisanship , I guess why not?

> Right-wingers worry about people who'd be alive 6-9 months from now and thus want to stop abortions.

No, they want to constrain medical decisions to reduce what they see as unacceptable promiscuity. They will generally confirm this to you if you ask them to.

Maybe, but I think they'd concede abortion if left-wingers concede climate paranoia. Somebody should organize peace talks.

This is a better point than comes across on the first read. What's behind alarmism is often just really a desire to control other people, and the government should be severely limited in the kinds of controls it can apply, regardless of the "cause". Somehow I doubt both sides will come together and embrace libertarianism however. I think it's more likely that politicians of all stripes come together in favor of more government power, which is where all mainstream parties are heading now.

If you invite someone onto your submarine, and take them down to the bottom of the ocean, but then they suffer some accident and need to be taken back to the surface for medical attention, it isn't slavery for the law to force you to pilot the submarine to the nearest port.

Whether any of that is relevant to the complicated issue of abortion is another matter, but I think Margaret Atwood is glossing over some important questions.

Driving a submarine wherever you want isn’t a fundamental human right. Deciding about one’s own body is.

A better example would be forcing someone to become an organ donor to save someone else. That’s pretty much equivalent to abortion ban.

Abortions can be easily avoided if people didn't have unprotected sex with people they don't wish to raise a family with. They had complete control over their body and who they shared it with but just don't want to deal with any of the consequences of it, I find it all very sad.

Nope, had protected sex with my wife and got pregnant (pill plus condom). We weren't ready for a kid and had an abortion. It's not black and white. Please, don't make it out to be.

Pedestrian accidents can be easily avoided if people didn’t try to cross the street. Would you advocate banning medical aid to pedestrians? Because that’s your reasoning above.

Tbh I’ve seen people argue things along these lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape

I can’t even. Is it ignorance? Malice? Trolling? Whatever it is, it’s despicable and doesn’t belong on HN.

You pretty much touched on the central issue. "Sex without consequences" is pretty much what's at stake here. And you start telling people they can't just go around having sex with whoever, you really kick the hornets nest.

In other words it’s all about upholding religious prejudices, which, while harmful to society, benefit certain people. It’s no different from sharia law. (Except even sharia law doesn’t condone this particular stupidity.)

It's not stupidity. These are incredibly inteligent people behind all of this.

It is stupidity. You will find incredible intelligent people behind every fringe theory; it’s just they aren’t particularly smart about this particular area. There is a lot of examples, from Jordan Peterson to Aquinas.

> Deciding about one’s own body is.

But deciding about an unborn child's body isn't. I really don't think your position is as incontrovertible as you're suggesting, which is why this issue doesn't have any easy answers.

Abortion isn’t deciding about fetus body, same way refusing to donate an organ for life-saving transplant isn’t deciding about transplant receiver body.

I would think fair compromise is to ban destructive abortions. That means it would have to be natural of c-section to remove the fetus. Then it is up to fetus to survive outside.

Would forcing people to donate only some non-critical parts of their body to save somebody else be a fair compromise to you?

There's a big difference between allowing someone with an illness to naturally die by not donating your organ to them, and deliberately carrying out an abortion with the intent to kill a developing child.

The law (and the field of ethics) has always distinguished between acts of commission and acts of omission, and also taken into account the intent of the actor. If a stranger's house is broken into and their TV stolen, and you could have prevented that by sleeping over at their house, that doesn't mean you are an accomplice by sleeping in your own house.

Anyway, I'm glad you're thinking about this, because it's a complicated issue and it needs multiple perspectives to sharpen our thinking.

In other words, if somebody is violating your bodily freedom, you don’t deserve the right to defend in a way that would harm them?

Abortion isn’t a complicated issue. It’s a typical science/ethics vs alt right stupidity issue. The only thing complicated about it is the prevailing political correctness towards religion.

> you don’t deserve the right to defend in a way that would harm them?

If that's your strawman interpretation of what I said, then let me turn it around and infer your position: People's rights should be based on their ability to do harm to those trying to violate their bodily freedom.

I don't think that actually is your position, but it is at least consistent with your view that vulnerable children should have no rights at all.

It's not a strawman, this is literally what you said above: that bodily freedom (in this case abortion) does not imply the right to actively defend against something/someone violating this freedom (in this case the foetus).

Children of course do have rights, because they don't invade anyone's freedom, in particular they don't parasite on another person's body against that persons will. As opposed to unwanted pregnancies.

> something/someone violating this freedom (in this case the foetus).

Thank you for explaining your position, but I think it's an odd framing to say that a foetus is "violating the freedom" of the woman bearing it. If a woman decides to handcuff herself, and then accidentally loses the key, I suppose you could say that the handcuffs are "limiting her freedom", and she needs to "actively interfere with" the handcuffs by damaging them, but saying "violating" and "defend" makes it sound like the foetus has agency and is deliberately/knowingly acting against her wishes.

I'm sure it isn't your intention to make the foetus seem like a person (which is why you call it a foetus and not a child, even though we could be talking about a fully formed human being, one day before their birth). In any case, I'm afraid your argument sounds completely circular, because you are defining "that bodily freedom" to specifically mean a supposed right to abortion. Of course if that right exists then the foetus/child may not violate it, but if there is no such right then no one may "actively defend against" the existence of that foetus/child.

Are you trying to say the law should prohibit helping people who handcuffed themselves and then lost the key?

Calling foetus a “child” suggests it’s a person, while in reality it almost never is, because it lacks the property defining a person: brain activity. It’s just a fundamentalist newspeak, invented to distort reality; kind of like “unborn child” or “civilization of life”. Why would anyone use terminology introduced by worlds leading child rapist association is beyond me.

The very idea of bodily freedom implies the right to abortion.

> Are you trying to say the law should prohibit helping people who handcuffed themselves and then lost the key?

No, because metal handcuffs are not (and will never be) people, so that's quite uncontroversial. A more instructive example would be a 7 year old child super-glueing their hands to the hands of their mother (as some kind of prank). I think we'd all agree that the law shouldn't permit anyone to "help" the mother by amputating the child's hands.

> it lacks the property defining a person: brain activity.

I'm not sure what counts as "brain activity" to you, but "Ultrasounds can reveal the embryo moving as early as 6 weeks after conception (or 8 pregnancy weeks), detecting the electrical impulses that govern movement and indicating that the brain is beginning to function."[0]

> fundamentalist newspeak, invented to distort reality; kind of like “unborn child”

The adjective "unborn" only became necessary because these were the specific subset of children whose right to life were being ignored. It's like how we didn't use the term "World War I" until there was a second one. If abortion were legal after the child is born but before they could feed themselves, we would need a name like "dependent child" to refer to them as a legal class of citizen.

The very idea of bodily freedom implies the right to not be aborted.

[0] https://flo.health/pregnancy/pregnancy-health/fetal-developm...

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