Personally I'd just prefer to base it on fetal viability (which was the standard). That's roughly 25 weeks or so (some variation and debate). If a fetus were to come non-viable after that, or endanger the mother, I think that should be back on the table too.
you left out the "at least induce labor if viability is possible," so maybe we're just interpreting the comment differently
But I'm not a native speaker so that might very well be wrong.
Can chalk it up to a different in interpretations I guess.
> There's a lot of middle ground between banning all abortions and allowing all abortions
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others?
As a rhetorical tactic, do you have a lot of luck with obvious deliberate obtuseness?
Half of the problem here is that reasonable people think this will be a states' rights issue with reasonable exceptions that local people can all agree on, but with which others might differ. Whereas what's actually happening is that extremist state legislatures are seizing on the issue to pass the most restrictive abortion laws they possibly can, and the GOP at the national level is salivating over the prospect of a national abortion ban as soon as they regain control of the government (see statements from VP Pence, Mitch McConnell, and various House republicans). People thought throwing the issue back to the states would be the end of it, but it's clearly not.
It wasn't like we had a referendum and reasonable people voted for this to be a states' rights issue. Rather, we never had an abortion law or anything in the constitution that could reasonably be interpreted as a right to abortion, so the Supreme Court overturned RvW. What we need is a federal law (Amendment?) that protects abortion access for the most extreme cases (i.e., the cases where a healthy majority of Americans agree).
What then happened is that a president elected by a minority of the country appointed extreme Justices, who were confirmed by a Senate that also represented a minority of the country, and they made a unilateral decision based more on their personal religious beliefs than the actual law. Rather than settle the issue as they thought it would, they have thrown the whole country into abject chaos. A lot of reasonable people, and in fact highly distinguished legal scholars (including decades of Justices) interpreted the Constitution as supporting Roe, so calling them unreasonable is, I think, not right and adds insult to injury.
What is certainly unreasonable is where we have landed. State legislatures are passing the most extreme laws they can possibly can, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Forcing 10 year olds to flee a state to get an abortion because she was raped is not reasonable. Forcing mothers to wait until an ectopic pregnancy has ruptured before providing abortive care just because a heartbeat is detected on an unviable fetus is not reasonable. Just this weekend the Idaho GOP moved so far as to advocate for no exceptions at all even to save the life of the mother. That's not reasonable, that's extremism.
Far from this being an issue thrown to the states, now the GOP is turning toward a nationwide abortion ban if they retake the government. This is completely unsustainable and will likely tear this country apart.
I probably agree with some/much of the spirit of this paragraph, but I don't think "every person could make up their minds about <ending a life>" is a reasonable state of affairs--I want it codified in law as with homicides--generally prohibited with exceptions for a few extreme cases (e.g., self-defense). I think we should also strive to avoid the problem as much as possible by minimizing unwanted pregnancy (improve access to birth control). We should also invest more in family, adoption, and foster services on the backend. I think it's totally fair to criticize pro-life people for failing to support these sorts of programs while also advocating against abortion.
> What then happened is that a president elected by a minority of the country appointed extreme Justices, who were confirmed by a Senate that also represented a minority of the country, and they made a unilateral decision based more on their personal religious beliefs than the actual law. Rather than settle the issue as they thought it would, they have thrown the whole country into abject chaos. A lot of reasonable people, and in fact highly distinguished legal scholars (including decades of Justices) interpreted the Constitution as supporting Roe, so calling them unreasonable is, I think, not right and adds insult to injury.
I think packing the courts is reprehensible (as were many actions of that particular president), but we need court reform to prevent this kind of abuse in general. However, I believe (though I suspect you will disagree) that this is largely an orthogonal issue--I don't believe this court acted on their personal religious beliefs, but rather I believe (as do many prominent pro-choicers, by the way) that Roe v. Wade was extremely tenuous and the proper channel for establishing abortion policy is legislative.
> What is certainly unreasonable is where we have landed. State legislatures are passing the most extreme laws they can possibly can, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Forcing 10 year olds to flee a state to get an abortion because she was raped is not reasonable. Forcing mothers to wait until an ectopic pregnancy has ruptured before providing abortive care just because a heartbeat is detected on an unviable fetus is not reasonable. Just this weekend the Idaho GOP moved so far as to advocate for no exceptions at all even to save the life of the mother. That's not reasonable, that's extremism.
I agree with this, but again, the answer is legislative--the Supreme Court is responsible for interpreting the Constitution, and it's eminently plausible to interpret the Constitution as being silent on abortion. We should have passed some sensible abortion legislation decades ago.
Agreed, I was implying that it was left up to the individual within the bounds set by Roe and Casey, which had limits that worked. It seemed that most of the debate of the past centered on exactly the cutoff, which is an important issue but much different than the current debate of "should women have access to abortion whatsoever?"
> though I suspect you will disagree
I do disagree. The reason is that at least two of the Senators who confirmed the Justices who concurred with the Dobbs decision have come out to say they felt at least one of those Justices, one who squeaked by with a 50 vote margin, lied to them during his highly politicized confirmation process. If this were a straightforward matter of poor jurisprudence, then it would be enough to say that. Instead, there was a certain level of at best coy obfuscation, to at worst outright fingers-crossed deceit during the confirmation processes. That makes it impossible for me to see the decision as anything other than motivated by ideology. They said what they needed to in order to get confirmed, and as soon as the majority was solidified, they immediately used their power to do what they wanted to all along.
> Roe v. Wade was extremely tenuous and the proper channel for establishing abortion policy is legislative.
Perhaps it was tenuous according to some, but it was also tested in court, reaffirmed, and part of our social contract for 50 years. Maybe the stick holding up the roof of your house isn't the best, but it's still holding up the roof, so perhaps we shouldn't just get rid of it one day in June because it's not the best? Why isn't anyone thinking about the roof?
> I agree with this, but again, the answer is legislative
I don't think the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agrees. There's nothing in their opinion that would suggest to me that they wouldn't strike down Roe codified by the Congress. My reading of the opinion is that they would strike down any right to abortion not enshrined in the Constitution as an amendment. Amending the Constitution to protect abortion is neigh impossible, and so I don't think we will have anything close to a codified Roe v. Wade as long as the majority of the court remains conservative. Instead about half the states in the country will outlaw abortion full-stop, no exceptions; while the other half services the women and children fleeing those states seeking healthcare, likely maintain the same safeguards offered by Roe in the first place.
Even in this extreme case though, if said 10-year-old victim were 1 hour away from being able to give birth, I don't think it would make sense to allow an abortion (though of course a C-section can be performed at any time). So clearly there is some line, even for the most extreme cases.
It's the oldest and largest national anti-abortion organization in the United States, hardly the fringes. They do a lot of campaign financing.
Yes. Also, I was specifically talking about contraception, not abortion.
> It's the oldest and largest national anti-abortion organization in the United States, hardly the fringes. They do a lot of campaign financing.
IHMO, whether it was fully understood by the GP or not, "extremist organization, way out on the fringes" was probably in relation to the US Democratic Party, not American politics in general.
It's toxic, misleading, and annoying, but I think a lot of rhetoric nowadays is trying to manipulate the "Overton window" to partisan advantage rather than debate the issue itself.
Even more so if you were to present this explicit situation - I'd bet even some of the most religious people you find would be hard pressed to say that a ten year old girl should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term.
> More than a third of abortion opponents (36%) say it should be legal if the pregnancy results from rape, with 27% saying “it depends” and 37% expressing opposition to legal abortion even in this situation https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abo...
...and the largest anti-abortion organization in the country agrees with the decision to deny her healthcare. Does that match their constituents' beliefs?
Is the agreement by the largest anti-abortion organization in the country to deny her healthcare in line with their constituents' beliefs?
So your straw-man of a 32 week abortion isn't applicable at all.
It's not a straw man. It's a hypothetical test of his reasoning. He says viability doesn't matter to his argument, but throws out that induced birth could be an option. His argument is not that "abortion should be illegal at viability, but you should be able to induce birth". You are twisting his words.
> Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy.
What does "at least induce labor, if viability is possible" mean to you?
Also I support abortion and I'm a social democrat FWIW.
This is actually not entirely true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law
"Safe-haven laws (also known in some states as "Baby Moses laws", in reference to the religious scripture) are statutes in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants with statutorily designated private persons so that the child becomes a ward of the state. All fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have enacted such statutes.[1]"
I assume these are meant to prevent infanticide among other reasons but yeah, you can just give up the baby. Apparently you can't just drop them off in most cases, as I thought you could, I think in the movies they show parents just leaving them on the steps. You have to find a responsible party to hand them too.
Post 32 week abortions are debate within a debate because people aren't really talking about the same thing, much more than other parts of the abortion debates. Many on the pro-forced-birth side would have you believe that this is a common occurrence. The pro-choice side would say that abortion is a difficult decision in and of itself and if someone is choosing abortion after 32 weeks, it must be an exceptional case, and we should respect the parent-doctor relationship to make that decision.
Being in a situation where I'm at the 32 week mark with my wife, I can't imagine many people choose to knowingly wait this long, and then just have an abortion for "funsies". Pew Research suggests it is less than 1% after 21 weeks (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...).
But I also think it's helpful to cede some ground to the moderate pro-lifers. If we can acknowledge that 32 week fetuses are empathetically "infants in a difficult locale", to me it's clear that there is some legal burden there. I don't think the opinion of one woman and that of any one doctor she can find willing to agree with her are sufficient grounds for killing a fetus at that stage. Not all people make good choices, and thinking things deserve protection from bad choices.
I'll also add that the criminalization of late-term abortions rests heavily on
1. Guaranteed access to early-term abortions regardless of circumstances
2. Mid-term abortions under specific circumstances.
3. Affirmative defense for late-term abortion given even narrower circumstances, i.e. bodily risk to mother.
With those guarantees, and only with those guarantees, I think the argument can be made that a mother with a late-term pregnancy has willingly undertaken the responsibility to carry that pregnancy to term, and therefor aborting that late-term pregnancy may be treated similarly to a parent harming an infant. But I'll reiterate: only with those guarnatees. And, of course, lots of places don't have those guarnatees right now, which is why this is a "debate within a debate", as you say. And this is the smaller and less impactful of the debates.
> it's hard to imagine there's a significant number of mothers of sound mind who would deliberately abandon their child such that it has no chance of survival.
I don't see how either of these quotes fit into a discussion about abortion/childcare law. Shouldn't the law make as clear as possible when it is illegal to abort a pregnancy or give up the care of an infant? The argument that "nobody will ever/has ever (that we can think of) do something so horrible as that" does nothing but muddy the water.
Let's just assume that at least one person in the future wants to abort their healthy 39 week fetus, and at least one person in the future wants to abandon their infant. These would hardly be the most surprisingly immoral things ever done by human beings.
Criminal laws exist in part to express society’s moral norms. Abandoning babies to die isn’t illegal because it’s a widespread problem. It’s illegal because it’s wrong.
But if your point is that the Venn Diagram intersection between pro-choicers and folks who want to decriminalize infanticide is not a null set you’ve made it.
I can't say I have a strong position on infanticide. There are undoubtedly cut and dried cases where an adult deliberately terminates the life of a newborn baby that should be classified as criminal acts. Abandoning your own child probably deserves a separate legal classification.
Not exactly 32 weeks, but close:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/abortion-doctor-kermit-gosnell-gui...:
> "Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered. ... The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping,'" the report alleged.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/doctor-kermit-gosnell-found-guilt...:
> Prosecution experts said one was nearly 30 weeks along when it was aborted, and it was so big that Gosnell allegedly joked it could "walk to the bus." A second fetus was said to be alive for some 20 minutes before a clinic worker snipped its neck. A third was born in a toilet and was moving before another clinic employee grabbed it and severed its spinal cord, according to testimony. Baby E let out a soft whimper before Gosnell cut its neck, the jury was told; Gosnell was acquitted in that baby's death.
IIRC, all that stuff was done in an actual licensed abortion clinic.
Also you have a weird kind of argument that seems to pivot on the false assumption that the issue is how gruesome the act is, not the act itself.
It was implicit in your response. The acts I cited were gruesome, and your response implied the response should be to replace them with better-regulated, more antiseptic version of the same act.
It's possible the interpret your comment as an extremely aloof statement of fact without implicit policy advocacy, but that interpretation strains credulity.
Unless you somehow believe that doing so without providing a safe/regulated alternative will magically result in women no longer having health-threatening pregnancies or reliably deciding to persist with their pregnancies no matter what (despite all the evidence to the contrary from other parts of the world with very limited legal access to abortion), then I can't see how you could not advocate for better-regulated facilities.
And just in case there's any doubt as to my position - if a woman pregnant at 30 months were to decide she was no longer able to continue the pregnancy, such that live birth was not an option for whatever reason, and there were a way that the foetus could be safely and readily aborted with no risk of harm to the mother, then absolutely she is the only person who can reasonably make that choice. The rest of us have no right to insist we know better, no matter how much we may dislike the result (and yes, I would absolutely be saddened to know that foetus was robbed of its chance to develop into a human).
So your issue isn't so much with snipping the spinal cord at 30 months, but but whether the scissors are dirty or clean?
Since you've cut off the only other option available to her it is on you to come up with the solution that works nationwide for hundreds or thousands of mothers every year.
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/laws/abortion-laws/
By definition, a fetus becomes viable if it is likely to sustain survival outside of the uterus. It has to be able to survive without extraordinary medical measures.
Doctors determine whether a given fetus is viable. They make this decision on a case-by-case basis.
Typically, a fetus becomes viable around the 23rd week of the pregnancy. Doctors also consider a fetus to be viable once it weighs at least 500 grams.
At the end of the day childbirth is dangerous and expensive and our US social safety net is terrible. If we truly respected life in this country there are better ways to show it than outlawing abortion.
that's not really a good analogy because prior to donating the kidney, the kidney recipient isn't dependent on your kidneys, whereas at the moment of conception the zygote/fetus is dependent on the mother's body. A better analogy would be being able to take back the kidney after it's been donated, although that's also flawed because you're not really giving anything up when you're getting aborted.
Also, mandatory organ donation after death should be obvious table stakes for a pro-life person, if they were logically consistent.
There's nothing inherent to the pro-life position that would require mandatory organ donation between parents and children or anyone else whether before or after death.
Medical realities currently play a role in viability calculus so it is a perfectly valid analogy in that medical advances in organ donation being a possibility are equally valid.
The pro-life position is that human life is so precious that preserving the human life of the fetus it is more important than any right the mother may have. There is no logical reason this argument would stop after birth - the mother (and presumably father as well) should maintain this obligation of preserving the life of their child by any means that don't require them to give up their own life.
Being legally required to, say, donate blood for their child should be a no-brainer, if you bleieve that the preservation of your child's life should be a legal requirement that trumps any other right you may have (except your own right to life). Donating their organs to their child after death should also be an obvious legal requirement.
Exceptions for rape are much more common among those who also accept at-will termination of pregnancy up to some gestational age (e.g. at-will abortion up to 12 weeks, or up to 20 weeks in cases of rape).
Edit to add: the vast majority of active pro-life campaigners are also opposed to sex education and free contraceptives, once more proving that the question of consensual unprotected sex is not in any way at the forefront of their ideology.
It seems like you're conflating "pro-life" and "people who want to ban abortion entirely". The pro-life position includes people who want to ban abortion in the general case even while allowing abortion for exceptional cases.
> Exceptions for rape are much more common among those who also accept at-will termination of pregnancy up to some gestational age (e.g. at-will abortion up to 12 weeks, or up to 20 weeks in cases of rape).
Agreed, but that doesn't refute pro-life people having rape exceptions (multiple groups can allow for rape exceptions).
> the vast majority of active pro-life campaigners are also opposed to sex education and free contraceptives, once more proving that the question of consensual unprotected sex is not in any way at the forefront of their ideology
Can you source this claim about the majority of pro-life campaigners (also, why does that seem indicative of pro-life people in general)? Also, even if it's accurate, I don't think it constitutes proof of much--in particular, they could hold that it's not the government's job to provide sex education or free contraception (I personally favor the government providing both of these, by the way).
In any case, rather than arguing about ONE pro-life position, it seems like it would be better to acknowledge that there can be multiple specific positions within a movement. I'm certainly happy to concede that the pro-life movement includes many people with extreme positions, why can't we agree that it includes some more moderate positions as well?
Yes, but pro-life people are more likely to see “balancing mortality risks” cases as exceptional than “circumstances of parenting” cases.
Just like people opposed to deliberate homicide in general are more likely to see “self defense” as an exception than “the existence of the person killed reminded me of a bad thing that that person didn't cause”.
Rape victims are an issue that resonates particularly strongly with people who see the central issue as one of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy, not those who see it as about the fetus as a human life.
> Rape victims are an issue that resonates particularly strongly with people who see the central issue as one of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy, not those who see it as about the fetus as a human life.
There are some pro-life people (per the parent's claim) who believe that a child's life is so precious that it overrides the mother's right to bodily autonomy even in rape cases; however, this doesn't mean that they care less about rape victims than people who care about bodily autonomy--for example, they could care the same amount (or even more), but value unborn life even more. Notably, the loudest (most popular?) pro-choice claim is that unborn children don't constitute human life, that they're mere "clumps of cells", so all we can say (at least as far as it concerns people who hold this view) is that they care more about rape-victims than they care about "clumps of cells" which isn't strong evidence that they care a lot about rape victims.
I also think it's reasonable to expect that those who actively campaign to ban abortion are more likely to have more extreme positions than those who simply passively accept these positions. I also think their positions are very relevant, as they have proven to have more sway over public policy than the majority of the population - so combating their arguments is more improtant than combating the beliefs of the more silent pro-life majority.
This is the part I'm most interested in exploring. Absent a debate about "life", under what pretext does this construction arise? It's hard not to view it as a post hoc rationalization of a just world fallacy. Are there any other ways to construct the consequence of a waiver of the right to forego birth that stems directly from the act of sex? Some sort of sex teleology? Something else?
I'm not sure if I understand your question, but the general rule is that the person with agency also bears responsibility (this is a widely-held axiom). In this case, we have parents who have agency to predictably create a life which depends on carriage and birth, and thus responsibility to provide carriage/birth (obviously biological realities preclude an identical share of the responsibility between parents).
> It's hard not to view it as a post hoc rationalization of a just world fallacy. Are there any other ways to construct the consequence of a waiver of the right to forego birth that stems directly from the act of sex? Some sort of sex teleology? Something else?
Again, not sure if I understand your question.
I feel like analogizing here might confuse rather than clarify, but I'm thinking of other cases where agents taking actions waive their rights and how those waivers are socially justified. For example contracts bind people in ways that limit their rights.
Ex: if you and I enter a futures contract for you to purchase wheat from me at a certain price, there is a constraint placed on each of us - me to pay you the money, and you to deliver the wheat. The reason we socially allow such contracts of obligation is to facilitate commerce. We allow for other waivers of rights for other reasons.
What is the underlying social reason for the agency-responsibility regarding pregnancy? I'm genuinely asking with the understanding that there may be multiple reasons, but I don't have an internal sense of agency-responsibility toward pregnancy that apparently others do. Under what principles is such a responsibility formulated?
This possibly confuses things more, but we socially recognize that some rights are non-alienatible, ex: you cannot voluntarily enslave one's self in a legally meaningful way. So there do seem to be some limits to which rights people can consent to void.
No worries!
> I feel like analogizing here might confuse rather than clarify
Agreed--finding accurate analogies is hard for most things, IMHO.
> What is the underlying social reason for the agency-responsibility regarding pregnancy? I'm genuinely asking with the understanding that there may be multiple reasons, but I don't have an internal sense of agency-responsibility toward pregnancy that apparently others do. Under what principles is such a responsibility formulated?
Protection of life. Indeed, as a society we purport to value life (especially vulnerable life) even above commerce.
We also don't let parents neglect children even though this restricts parents' liberties. When you elect into parenthood (e.g., via consensual sex or adoption), you have a legal/moral responsibility to provide vital necessities to your children while they're in your care. Of course, once a child has been born, parents can elect to transfer that responsibility (to the state or other parent/s), but for obvious reasons we can't transfer care of an unborn baby.
Of course, this is predicated on the axiom that an unborn baby constitutes human life.
If yes, in a hypothetical world in which giving a child up for adoption isn’t possible, would you support a parent killing their toddler because they don’t want to have to slave to support them (that is, their autonomy is harshly limited)? If no, how do you reconcile this with your position on abortion (e.g., perhaps you would draw some distinction between slavery/forced-labor and bodily autonomy?)?
This thread is also not about post-birth situations. I'm strictly interested in discussing the construction of a bodily autonomy right to abortion that is not predicated on the aliveness of anything. Maybe you'll have better luck elsewhere.
The government already has rights over your bodily autonomy in many ways; just the right to incarcerate someone is controlling their body pretty dramatically. They regulate where your body can go, and to an extent what you can put into your body.
Yes it does seem backwards. However, nobody here is making that argument.
> I'm over here trying to find a minimum amount of government authority over our bodies
Perhaps I'm just splitting hairs at this point, but "No one, not even the government, should have more authority over your body than you." is just such a broad brush that it's trivially refuted for certain scenarios. Maybe you're talking about medical authority?
In any case the rule of law is very concerned with what happens when rights collide. It is possible -- perhaps common -- for individual's rights to be in conflict.
Maybe. It has much less rhetorical flourish though ;) I still think it's a valid ideal and even if realistically unobtainable in the absolute, it still incredibly worthwhile north star.
We probably still would not force an organ donation in such a case, still leaving it entirely up to the person, but their choice could affect the consequences for them depending on how and why they caused the person to need the organ. If they choose to donate and save the person then they might only be looking at some kind of endangerment charge for causing the person to need an organ. If they choose to let the person die they might be looking at murder charges.
It might help to analogize with some other examples: say for instance I get into a car crash with another driver and am compensated by an insurance agency. It makes no difference to me that the money comes from the insurance account rather than the other person involved. The end result is the same for me - I can repair the damage. Would it seem as though other people are much more concerned in the other driver paying the obligation themselves? Or perhaps there are other reasons?
The more that I think about this, the stranger it gets. It feels like a categorical imperative-type argument to justify their own obligated existence.
First of all, pregnancy is overwhelmingly a choice (of course there are exceptions)--it's not our hypothetical organ donor's fault that the hypothetical recipient needs an organ, but it is the parents' "fault" that an unborn child (recall we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread) needs to be born insofar as the child's life is the result of a risk the parents knowingly entered into (again, there are exceptions).
Secondly, if our hypothetical organ donor backs out, our hypothetical recipient can get an organ from another donor--with few exceptions, there's no way to transfer a pregnancy (at least not outside of some extremely early window).
> The ability or non ability to alternatively source organs doesn't logically lead to a change in consequence.
But your analogy doesn't capture the responsibility of the donor for willfully creating the circumstances in which the recipient needs a kidney. Moreover, abortion is a procedure which actively kills a child which would likely otherwise live (without intervention); your analogy supposes a person who would naturally die without intervention. I'm sure we could contort your analogy to make it account for these things, but doing so would exhaust its utility.
At this point we've added mode of consequence to the analogy, but it seems you're introducing yet another constraint: active and passive intervention. I'm afraid I'll have to stop this here. It appears as though you will continue adding complexity until with the intention of forcing your result. Sorry, I don't debate with people acting in bad faith.
If you're really deeply committed to this analogy, we would have to suppose a world in which everyone knows that voluntary sex produces children with an organ deficiency which can only be satisfied by a donation from one parent.
> At this point we've added mode of consequence to the analogy, but it seems you're introducing yet another constraint: active and passive intervention. I'm afraid I'll have to stop this here. It appears as though you will continue adding complexity until with the intention of forcing your result. Sorry, I don't debate with people acting in bad faith.
Pointing out that your analogy fails to capture the relevant dynamics isn't "acting in bad faith".
EDIT: Removed some snark.
If a person poisons another person deliberately and causes their kidneys to fail, it is not an acceptable punishment to take their kidney and give it to their victim. This remains true even when the victim will die and has no other organ source available.
Right, did you miss my disclaimer?: "recall that we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread" (based on upthread: "I'll just add that many people who are pro-choice believe that the issue of whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant.")
> "fault" is too strong a term even in quotes
Yeah, I put it in quotes because I wasn't sure what the analogous term is. "responsibility" is probably better.
> If a person poisons another person deliberately and causes their kidneys to fail, it is not an acceptable punishment to take their kidney and give it to their victim. This remains true even when the victim will die and has no other organ source available.
It's not about punishment, but about making the victim whole. But as discussed elsewhere, I think this analogy is broken for other reasons--specifically, an abortion is an active procedure to kill a dependent party who would most likely otherwise survive, while our analogy posits a dependent party who would die without active intervention. The analogy postulates the state requiring an intervention to preserve life, but an abortion ban is a prohibition on interventions which stop life.
My intuition is that most people would say the would-be donor is at least immoral in this scenario, and many would say should be subject to punishment. Curious where you fall on this.
1. for lack of a term for people who have changed their mind.
Which is fine, but I'd rather people be honest about their arguments rather than dress it up in pseudo-moralism.
The question of abortion is really interesting in that it scratches at a deeper moral question-- precisely why do we consider murder to be wrong?
In my view, there are a few different reasons. One is that we are preventing future consciousness for a being by ending the body's ability to be conscious. That one certainly applies to abortion. But another is that we hurt the people that have relationships with or dependencies on that conscious being. That one doesn't apply to abortion at all.
But you’ve hit on my overarching point. The current pro choice argument is largely nonsense because the atheistic position doesn’t have a good answer to the “why is murder wrong” question.
If you don’t consider life sacred, the majority of our legal system unwinds. It gets even worse considering the pro choice cadre is also anti death penalty
The west is only now truly grappling with Nietzsches God is Dead and few realize it
I think you misunderstand my point. There are many reason murder is harmful, and abortion applies equally for some but not all of them. So the morality doesn't depend "entirely" on any of them (including the two I listed).
I do actually think its worse to e.g., kill a husband and a father of young children, compared to killing a hermit with no social ties. And it seems like society feels the same way-- otherwise we wouldn't hear about how victims are "a father of five" in tragic news stories.
This is an example of taking some oversimple principle, and applying it too consistently without consideration of complicating factors.
If you induced labor at many points after the "point of viability," the baby still has a large change of dying or suffering harm even with long, intensive, and expensive care in a NICU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_termination_of_pregnancy#...:
> Long-term survival is possible after 22 weeks.[59] However, odds of long-term survival between 22 and 23 weeks are 2–3 percent and odds of survival between 23 and 24 weeks are 20 percent.[60] "Intact survival", which means survival of a neonate without subsequent damage to organs such as the brain or bowel is 1% at 22 weeks and 13% at 23 weeks.[60]
That being said, I will _assume_ that you are tying to make a variation of the The Violinist Argument [0] and so I will respond to that instead.
This argument claims that the question of fetal personhood is irrelevant because the mother’s right to an abortion would trump the fetus’ right to life even if he is a person.
The idea is that this situation is analogous to an unplanned pregnancy: against her plans, the woman finds herself supporting the life of an unwanted person and has the right to deprive that person of her bodily support, regardless of what the result is for the parasite.
The key logical flaw lies in its failure to distinguish between killing and letting die. In the context at hand, this distinction corresponds closely to the difference between what might be called ordinary and extraordinary life-preserving measures, whether they take the form of healthcare or some other intervention.
Let me give a simple example to illustrate what I mean by ordinary vs. extraordinary life-preserving measures. If you have fainted on the train tracks, it would be admirable for me to dive in front of an on-coming train and sacrifice myself in order to knock you out of the way. But you are not entitled to have me perform this extraordinary act of heroism. If I do not dive in front of the train, no one would say that I was guilty of manslaughter. On the other hand, you probably would be entitled to my assistance if I am standing idly by and see you collapse hours before a train is in sight. Where exactly to draw the line between ordinary and extraordinary life-saving measures might be fuzzy, but the basic validity of the distinction should be readily apparent.
Having laid this groundwork, we can see that the “Right to Life” is a right not to be killed. It is not a right not to die. The reason that the woman in the story can sever the tubes without violating the violinist’s dignity is because he does not have a right not to die. The tubes are an extraordinary means of preserving his life, and he is not entitled to extraordinary life-saving measures. However, the woman may not stab the man in the heart and only then sever the tubes. In this case, she would be violating his dignity because he has a right not to be killed. This latter scenario most closely resembles an abortion, in which the fetus is ripped or burned to death while still in the womb and only then removed.
Now, why does the abortion procedure go to such great lengths to kill the fetus before removing him? In many early-term abortions, the procedure is simply easier, but not so in late-term abortions. The reason is instructive: leaving a prematurely born infant to die without providing basic care would be illegal, a violation of the infant’s right not to be killed. Like the violinist, an infant is not entitled to extraordinary life-saving interventions, but he is entitled to ordinary sustenance. This includes the baseline level of care necessary for ordinary survival—food, water, oxygen, warmth, etc.—from those responsible for him. Parents who fatally neglect their young children are guilty of killing them, not just letting them die. Regardless of whether the parents want or ever wanted those children, the law understands that they have a primary responsibility to provide the ordinary sustenance to which young children are entitled. If unborn children have the same personhood status as infants, then they should be accorded the same rights. Since the placenta represents the ordinary means by which a fetus obtains food, water, oxygen, and warmth, it follows that he should have the right to remain in his mother’s womb until viability, even if she does not want him there.
The abortion debate is very much a question of personhood.
When Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun penned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion in the United States, he admitted:
> If this suggestion of [fetal] personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] amendment.
The appellant was Roe, and the 14th Amendment states that “no person shall be deprived of life…without due process of law.”
In other words, Roe v. Wade itself acknowledges this.