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Comment by simondw | Hacker News Reader

It's a loss of bodily autonomy because, well, that's what bodily autonomy is. The government is compelling you to use (and risk) your body for a particular purpose.

That's a separate question from whether that loss of bodily autonomy is justified.

> Women choose to have sex consensually, no?

Well, yes, sometimes. Maybe you could be more explicit about how you think that justifies the loss of bodily autonomy?

For example, maybe you have a principle like "If you played a necessary role in the creation of a person, then you can be compelled to use your body to support their life." Do you think fathers should be compelled to donate blood or organs to their offspring?

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My argument is that no autonomy is lost since the potential consequences of the actions are known beforehand.

No more or less than eating certain foods or consuming certain beverages.

You're still conflating "pregnancy" with "pregnancy that you're forced to carry to term." The former is necessarily a potential consequence of having sex; the latter is not.

I'm still curious what principles you think justify the enforcement of the latter, and especially why they don't cover things like the OP's forced organ donation scenario.

Edit: Just to expand on the first point, I think there's some circular reasoning going on here.

If the claim is "people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term," you can't support that with "because people should endure the consequences of their actions" if "consequences of their actions" means "being forced to carry a pregnancy to term."

Because then you're just saying "people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term because people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term."

> the potential consequences of the actions

Being forced by the State (ie at the point of a gun) to carry a pregnancy to term is not an inevitable "consequence". It's a choice.

Women have a long history of using abortifacients to terminate pregnancy, so there's nothing "natural" or inevitable about forced birth.

What? For most of history birth is the inevitable outcome of pregnancy. Women aren’t being forced to give birth.

> For most of history birth is the inevitable outcome of pregnancy.

Induced abortion has, from documentary evidence, been a thing for at least ~3500 years, and even without induced abortion very many pregnancies historically ended in miscarriage (still the case) and/or maternal death (much less the case, now, but still a concern.)

Miscarrying is a very great point, as is still births. But my point in general is that once you’re pregnancy your body “finishing” is the inevitable outcome, intervention notwithstanding.

We do have still work to do in making the end of the pregnancy the desired one (healthy baby), yes.

This creeps close to an "appeal to nature". For most of human history once your heart stopped death was the "inevitable" outcome, but this is not a good argument for defibrillators being morally wrong.

> But my point in general is that once you’re pregnancy your body “finishing” is the inevitable outcome, intervention notwithstanding.

I think you mean something other than “inevitable” here, since “inevitable” means “cannot be avoided”, such that if A and B is the inevitable consequence, than B must happen with 100% certainty.

But childbirth isn't even approximately an inevitable consequence of pregnancy.

That’s a fair point.

Okay, so you don't know the history of medicine. That's not uncommon.

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

In Roman times, Silphium was such a popular abortifacient that the plant was over-harvested to extinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_(antiquity)

The fact of the matter is that other than rape, by definition, women are consenting to an activity that will put them at high risk for getting pregnant.

Your argument is effectively that people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable.

> "Your argument is effectively that people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable."

Well, yes.

Why did you say "other than rape (in which abortion should be allowed imo)"? Either you think the foetus has value and needs to be brought to term, or you don't. That makes it seem that you aren't deciding based on the value of the foetus or the importance of all life, but rather want to assert superiority and punish women for having sex. What difference does it make to the importance of the foetus if the pregnancy was rape or not? Why does that make more difference than whether the pregnancy is wanted or not?

You can eat meat from murdered animals every day, you can pierce or tattoo your body or kill brain cells with alcohol, you have the right to return a $5 plastic toy for a refund, but if your birth control fails you can't kill 10 cells. Has it any more soul or value at that stage than the hair or fingernails you cut off without a thought, or the dead skin you shed, or the spit you spit? Why does it have more value than the woman?

> people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable

I think you've gone a little too broad with that principle. If I ask a taxi to take me somewhere, I can get out if I notice the driver is drunk. If I accidentally spill a glass of water, I can clean it up. And so on.

> people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable.

That's literally the entire basis of modern medical intervention, yes.

Following your example, if after you ate something the state forced you to digest it and outlawed inducing vomiting then you would have lost body autonomy. You're not in control of your body anymore.

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