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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

> So I find it hard to understand how someone can care about women's health and support these policies. I'm flabbergasted that I know parents of daughters who support these policies.

Do you really not know the reason? They believe fetuses are humans and that killing them is akin to murder, just as killing a baby would. It's as simple as that.

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Have you read "the only moral abortion is my abortion"?

https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-...

Interesting, no I hadn't. It's a bit like how criminals find ways to justify their crimes. Some people have very flexible morality.

Simply put, condemnation is easy when it isn't you.

Indeed.

> They believe fetuses are humans and that killing them is akin to murder,

Unlike the woman carrying the fetus.

In my state, abortion is illegal even if not aborting may cause the mother to die.

This is pro life.

That's the thing- Imagine you think killing fetuses is akin to murder. What response would you give to your own point?

There is a huge list of counteragents someone could make if they start from that basis, and your counterpoint does nothing to impact them.

Everyone is talking past each other with arguments which make sense to them, but are largely off target for the other person.

… really? Let's say, for sake of argument, that a fetus is a life, equal in rights to that of a human.

What counterpoint is there to support the argument that 2 dead is better than 1 dead?

If you were faced with the choice of strangling a 2 year old or someone would kill you both, what would you choose?

There are lots of ethical frameworks where it is better to both die than murder the child.

That said, the situation posed by the OP was the the mother may die (e.g. there are risks).

What percent shared risk of death do you think would justify strangling a 2 year old child?

personally, Im pretty middle of the road on abortion and can understand where each side is coming from.

This has been thought about quite a bit. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/

I suppose if would depend on whether you believe that inaction leading to more death is more ethical then actively choosing to murder one life to save the other.

Let's look at the same problem but swap out the actors. Say you have one man with a mortal wound to his heart, and another man with a mortal wound to his lungs. Both will probably die, both men have families, and neither wants to die. Is it ethical to murder one man without his consent and harvest the deceased's organs to save the other?

I would say no. Most religious moral systems would say no, as well as Kantian ethics.

The only moral framework I know that would accept that is the strongest form of utilitarianism.

That's a bad analogy. Let's change it: the man with a mortal lung wound could use the lungs from the man with the mortal heart wound, but the reverse is not true for some reason involving tissue compatibility. So if nothing is done, both men die. If the heart man is killed and his lungs harvested, the lung man will live. If the lung man is killed, both men die. So either both men die, or the lung man lives. On top of all of this, the heart man is braindead, so he has no opinion and no ability to make a decision, and no real chance at a future anyway.

I'd say it's perfectly ethical to kill the man with the mortal heart wound and take his lungs.

Technically, "not aborting" may always cause the mother to die since childbirth always carries some risk. But if you mean a case where the fetus is already dead, I doubt many people would oppose the abortion? What are their arguments? I genuinely can't think of any. Maybe this is just a case of the law being ambiguously written and doctors erring on the safer side?

In my state abortion is illegal no matter the circumstances.

Which state is that? I thought the strictest laws at the moment were in Alabama, which does allow abortions in the case of a serious risk to the mother's life.

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