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Comment by car_analogy | Hacker News Reader

There's a much better argument to legalizing abortion, that holds even if one considers fetuses as persons. In that just as one may not be forced to donate organs or even just blood to save someone else's life, by the same logic, one cannot be forced to bear a child.

Of course this is an ethical, not legal argument, so I don't know how it would translate to US law.

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"…[L]et me ask you to imagine this. 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. The director of the hospital now tells you, 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.' Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. 'Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.' I imagine you would regard this as outrageous…"

Judith Jarvis Thomas: "A Defense of Abortion," 1971. https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.h...

The moral question in this case isn't "Should you be able to unplug the violinist?" but "Should the violinist unplug themselves?".

As an adult who is profiting from a crime committed against you, they are morally obligated to return you to your original state that existed before the crime was committed (even though it would return them to their original state, which was illness and near-term death).

For a child in the womb, though, they do not have a pre-existing state (under the philosophical premise that conception is the starting point of a unique human), and most conceptions are not the result of crimes (although I can understand someone drawing a bright moral line between different pregnancies based on that factor).

It also only applies to a fetus created as the result of rape. A fetus created by consensual sex is like if you walked into the hospital, sat down in the room, and plugged the needle into your arm yourself.

That is patently absurd. Consent to sexual intercourse is not consent to pregnancy, especially if contraceptives were used and failed.

At the risk of stretching the metaphor to its breaking point, this is you choosing to go out and get drunk while aware that members of an unethical music lovers' organization are skulking about looking for victims to graft sick violinists onto. Sure, they no longer need to actively drug you because you willingly did that yourself, but that doesn't imply your consent to what happens next.

Consent to sexual intercourse is not consent to pregnancy

It's as much consent to pregnancy as dropping a cinderblock on your foot is consent to a broken toe or eating ten cheeseburgers a day is consent to getting fat.

No, it's really, really not, and this line of reasoning is getting absurd.

People around the world routinely engage in frequent sexual intercourse without becoming pregnant. If you show me even a fraction of that same number of people who have demonstrated an ability to consume ten cheeseburgers a day for a prolonged period without gaining weight, maybe you'd have a point. Otherwise, this is just a blatant false equivalence.

People around the world routinely engage in frequent sexual intercourse without becoming pregnant

Yes, and people routinely take methamphetamine without having a heart attack and shoot themselves without dying. That doesn't obviate the fact that pregnancy is the direct result of coitus. Claiming you did not consent to the function for which a body part evolved when you used that body part is like saying you didn't consent to sweating when you went for a summer jog. Sure, you may certainly take measures to prevent an undesired outcome but the physical results of your choices can only be tragedy, not injustice.

Consent to eating is consent to taking a dump.

Social constructs don't apply to biology.

Notwithstanding the other debate in this thread about consent to sex versus consent to pregnancy, does your answer to the scenario above change even if you willingly plugged the needle into the arm yourself?

From my perspective, even if we assume the person plugged the needle into the arm, it's absolutely not my place to mandate that you must now keep the needle attached until the violinist can live independently again.

You may feel horrible about disconnecting that needle. We may even agree that it's a pretty awful thing to do to the violinist. In fact, we may even agree that you should be responsible for at least attempting to find alternative options for the violinist. But I certainly would never imagine creating a society in which we would prevent you from doing it. It is your body, and you should absolutely retain the right to revoke consent for the violinist to live off of it.

What kind of a question is that? Obviously you have to agree to it! What right do you have to kill someone just because you are inconvenienced?

You aren't required to save their life, but you also can't kill them.

Is this seriously an abortion argument, or are you just trolling? Are you seriously telling me people are OK with killing someone just because it's not convenient?

I always thought that the abortion argument was because they did not consider their unborn child a person. If you do consider that child a person then obviously you can't kill it.

> What right do you have to kill someone just because you are inconvenienced?

Bodily autonomy and integrity is not merely an inconvenience. It's a major principle in human rights. Otherwise you could demand I give you my healthy kidney to save your life, and if I don't I'd be "killing you".

> You aren't required to save their life, but you also can't kill them.

You're not killing the violinist, you merely withdraw life support you're not obligated to give it in any way, they die on their own.

To use your example, you can't demand I give you a kidney, but once you have it (and assuming you immediately die without it), I can't take it back.

Body autonomy is great and all, but it doesn't excuse murder.

Like I said: I'm not required to save you, but I also can't kill you.

> Body autonomy is great and all, but it doesn't excuse murder.

But it's not murder if I wake up in the middle of the procedure, walk away, and you die on the operating table.

Changing the scenario midway does not help anyone. Unless you are implying you agree with me, and wish to discuss a new scenario.

To me the lines are clear: You don't have to take action to save his life, but you also can not kill him by your actions. i.e. if everyone froze at this moment and did nothing - would he live, or die?

I wasn't changing the scenario.

In that just as one may not be forced to donate organs or even just blood to save someone else's life, by the same logic, one cannot be forced to bear a child.

Speaking as a generally pro-abortion person, I don't think it's that black and white. When you agree to sustain someone's life, is taking away that sustainment murder? For example, if you reach out and stop someone from falling off a cliff but then choose to let go before they regain their balance, is that murder? I also don't see how to logically reconcile the idea that abortion isn't murder but letting a baby starve to death is. Either you have a responsibility towards human life you created or you don't.

You and maccolgan raise good points - the parent-child relationship is not the same as any other. But I'm not sure when parental responsibilities should start. E.g. you said "When you agree to sustain someone's life" - but when one chooses abortion, presumably one never "agreed".

but when one chooses abortion, presumably one never "agreed".

I suppose that depends on your definition of agrees. If you know that sex creates babies you are agreeing to the baby as much as you are agreeing to an explosion when you light a firecracker.

I suppose in this case, if the pregnancy is the result of rape, contraceptive failure, or simple lack of sex education, abortion would be legal, and otherwise it wouldn't be.

Maybe odd at first glance, but the more I think about it the more sense it makes. It helps to turn the logic on its head - should it be legal to deliberately or negligently create human fetuses, only to kill them?

Hence my grandparent comment. Our attitudes and laws about what a person is are wildly different depending on whether we're talking about abortion, or human experimentation, or human cloning. We're allowed to make and kill fetuses but only when it doesn't serve a useful purpose?

We are talking about a mother, courts frequently force parents to act in the best interests of their children even if it's against the interests of the parents. A mother's child is not an alien unrelated in any way to the mother.

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