>I disagree. I think it's absolutely insulting to say that an unborn, memoryless fetus/embryo/cell cluster has more of a right to life than the living, breathing, self-aware woman its inside.
I think it's telling that instead of defending the core of your position, that abortion should always be allowed, you're falling back to periphery issues, such as what to do when the life of the pregnant woman is threatened by the pregnancy. Many (most?) pro-life people would agree with allowing abortion in such cases, and it's really a sideshow to the main question.
> The pro-life position believes that life should be protected earlier than the pro-choice position. That is not discriminatory against women.
I disagree. I think it's absolutely insulting to say that an unborn, memoryless fetus/embryo/cell cluster has more of a right to life than the living, breathing, self-aware woman its inside.
> We are obviously setting side abortion in cases of rape.
This isn't obvious. Many conservatives believe abortion should be universally disallowed, including pregnancies resulting from rape.
>you are saying the rights of a blob of cells supersedes that of a grown woman.
There are many ways to philosophically argue against a 'life begins at fertilization' position. I don't know why you feel the need to assume things that were not said.
> You've only taken half of the statement, it was:
Because I was only responding to that half of the statement. The argument for banning abortion must stand without it. Your insistence on it was why I chimed in.
What you're now alluding to is a different claim than the one I responded to: that a. a fetus is a person (as you both seem to agree, disputable) and that even if we concede that question, the rights of the fetus outweigh those of the woman; taking some of the bills and laws that have passed in the various states, at the extreme, that it's fine to deny to a woman bodily autonomy, even where it will put her through great trauma, up to and including death.
>> If the fetus is a life, none of this stuff matters.
> This is irrelevant to my personal views on abortion because I believe that individuals have rights over their own body which supersede anyone else's rights to their body.
It absolutely is relevant, because you view collapses into nonsense unless you believe a fetus is a not an individual and that it has no rights. If the fetus is a person, then you're in a situation where their rights to their own body are getting superseded by another's right.
> We hold this as true in all other facets of bodily autonomy.
No, not all. You totally have the legal obligation to provide for your children, if you have them, and that almost always involves using your body in some way.
> 1. There are certainly more and less extreme flavors of the pro-life movement. I reject your assertion that the more extreme side is negligible, as there are laws on the books, and now enforceable, that prohibit abortion in all cases, such as in Louisiana.
It's not that that faction's negligible, it's that the argument isn't helpful for refuting "the mother does have some obligation to a life that was created and became dependent on her through her own actions" because someone who holds that position probably doesn't disagree with you that rape and incest are exceptions. It's a distraction not from the broader debate, but specifically from substantively addressing this particular position.
> 2. Fetuses are not babies. Babies are people, from a legal and ethical perspective; fetuses are not. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, as abortion would already be considered murder. So yes, fetuses are living, but that does not afford them any rights, any more than cows have rights by virtue of being alive, and it certainly doesn't afford them rights that supersede those of an actual person.
This is precisely the point of contention, and it is far from clear-cut even on the pro-choice side. That's why 3rd trimester abortion rights are far less popular than the rest—even to many pro-choicers, the is-/isn't-a-baby question is settled at some point before birth, but after the 1st trimester.
> I don't really care whether fetuses are people are not.
... well, if they are, then abortion is murder, right? I don't see why you wouldn't care whether they "are people" or not. It seems crucial, at least if you think, like I do, that murder is just about the worst thing a person could do.
> The fact is that bodily autonomy is never restricted so much [...] I'm not forced to donate organs, to donate blood, or even to do something so simple as get a vaccine.
These are not in the same category. All of these might give another person a chance at living longer (and yes, some of them like organ donation in particular carry some risk of death for the donor). Abortion definitely takes away any possibility of living from another person.
I don't buy the bodily autonomy argument. Yes, ~half the human population bears the burden of carrying children, and no, that's not fair. Everybody (men and women, of all generations) should be invested in living in a society where we don't create incentives for anybody to kill anybody else, up to and including not having sex outside of some setup/framework where any children produced will be loved and cared for.
If we can't agree to something like that, then it seems like we would have to collectively accept that murder isn't all that bad.
> I would wager most pro-life people only want: fetuses to have personhood and abortion as a contraceptive to be outlawed.
IME, most in the pro-life movement, of those, only want abortion to be restricted (and that largely as a means to enforce particular views of gender and family roles); fetal personhood isn't an end-goal but a means to get to abortion restrictions. No one ever argues for any other consequences for fetal personhood.
> As a pro-lifer I would be willing to compromise on abortion: allowed for extraneous circumstances (mother in danger, rape, incest, etc.).
How can you reconcile allowance for rape and incest with fetal personhood as a real moral position on not just an instrumental PR tool to get restriction on abortion? Would you support allowing a mother to kill a newborn because it was fathered in rape? Would you allow either parent to kill a newborn because it was a product of their consentual incest?
> I don't see how it matters whether the fetus is alive or not. If it can't survive outside the mother then the mother has the right to kill it.
This is a valid position to hold, but hardly a non-controversial one. We have, as a society, agreed that the state’s role is to step in to defend the defenseless in cases of large power asymmetry, as would be the case here. Indeed this general principle is usually a leftist position.
> Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
Actually it does (speaking generally, not to your specific example). Criminal or civil negligence is a thing.
> I had an argument recently with someone who is anti-abortion and his opinion is that life starts when sperm and egg meet. Anything preventing implantation of an egg is essentially killing of a baby
This is a pretty common opinion among anti-choice people. One of the many divides in views on abortion is between people who believe life begins at birth vs. before birth, with a significant number of the latter believing life begins at conception.
EDIT: Obviously views on abortion are complicated and vary widely. All I'm saying is that it's really not hard to find people who will tell you life begins at conception (and by that logic, believe that killing a fertilized egg is equivalent to killing a baby).
> I think part of the problem with abortion is the left argues that "it is not a life"
I don't think this is accurate. Getting a typical pro-choice person to discuss the fetus at all, much less whether it can be called alive, takes some serious cornering (I am pro-choice, to be clear).
> I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder.
That's the entire point! You're not objecting to abortion. You're objecting at some point in time and only when it's medically unjustifiable. But those moral thresholds are different for every individual and there are medically justifiable situations, which is exactly why no individual should be able to impose their personal beliefs as a law which declares those medical situations as unjustifiable.
You're welcome to have moral objections and believe they are the most correct or reasonable, but they have no bearing on the concerted efforts of religious groups and individuals to outright ban access to medical care. And that's the discussion at hand, which you keep conveniently ignoring. Many people have total opposition to all abortions in all situations and specifically for religious reasons, which is what actual, real-life politicians are implementing as we speak.
Someone else having an abortion (whether you believe it's murder or not) doesn't infringe on your rights. But you imposing your beliefs in a way that affects someone else's medical care is absolutely infringing on their rights. These are fundamental concepts of our democracy.
> But also, this is a "well actually" that attempts to dodge the substance of my post to chip away at it.
I'm not sure it is. Your assertion was a central tenet of your argument. Abortion, although I totally agree with it being allowed, is admittedly a messy issue, and I can see why it's polarizing. Trying to frame that as an example for why women supposedly don't have equal rights is IMHO disingenuous.
> the fetus is a person then aborting them is denying other people's freedom.
Even if it is a person, you completely fail to take into account the mother as a living human being.
Should we save someone in need of a kidney by forcing someone else to give up one of theirs? Not even another person’s life worth more than forcing away the freedom to bodily autonomy - and pregnancy does take an insanely huge toll on the women’s body, so she should be the only arbiter in deciding what she does with it. And “she chose to have sex” is not a valid argument, it is basic human need, and even with protection it is not 100% safe, shit happens.
Of course no sane person talks about aborting in like the 8th months or so, but early enough it is absolutely not a huge deal, especially that not doing so would just break two people - a mother that didn’t want to become one, and an unloved child.. who does it benefit?
>> the people advocating for outlawing abortion are also convinced it's a rights issue: the rights of the unborn child.
> This is a nice fiction but it doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny most of the time. Largely the "pro-life" people also believe in things like self-defense laws and the castle doctrine, which require that you not believe anyone has a real right to life.
Huh? I know people are really tempted to construct straw-men to make their opponents look like hypocrites, but this one is especially weak.
> You don't need to give the benefit of the doubt here.
Eh, no. You do, otherwise you end up with nonsense like what you wrote next.
> Dig a little deeper and understand what they really believe: women with unwanted pregnancies deserve to have it carried out against their will because they think they've sinned.
You may be able to find an example of that, but I really doubt that's the motivating idea for the vast majority of the pro-life movement. I would bet money what most of them "really believe" is that a fetus is a baby and that baby should be protected from harm.
> Well this is a problem with society then, yes? Does your suffering give you the right to kill another being (Since we still have not determined when life begins you have to admit this is a possibility.)
I think you have this backwards. Since we haven't defined when life begins and we know the person carrying the fetus is alive we must choose the rights and well-being of the living over the unknown. Otherwise we open ourselves up to allowing legislators to assert that this or that cell might be alive and therefore requires equal protection under the law.
> What you're now alluding to is a different claim than the one I responded to
Yes, because you were only responding to half of the sentence. My advice would be to respond to full sentences even when inconvenient.
I'll add, I'm not making a claim about personhood nor citizenship, I'm pointing to where the grey area is. How that becomes an insistence is something you'll only know.
Finally, I do not agree that accepting the personhood of a foetus would necessarily outweigh the woman's rights, as again, it would come up against bodily autonomy - another grey area that I hope would be ruled on to be as absolute as possible.
> To me, arguing that a person has no obligation to care for an unborn human they created is no different than arguing that a person has no obligation to care for a 1 month old they created.
Except, in our society you do not have that obligation. Just leave them at the hospital.
Of course, you will have to create odd situations where this doesn't work to support your flawed argument, because you're a luddite and have a smol brain.
There are FUCKING ZERO situations outside of abortion where you can give up your care for the baby while pregnant, nevermind the many other differences where pregnancy is much more serious for the mother than having a 1mo old.
Why? Determining what is and isn't life is based on human reasoning, judgement, and morality. Have you found an alternate approach that was somehow missed by everyone else? :)
>If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.
Perhaps you missed the stem cell therapy treatment context that was being discussed. We're only talking about embryos, not pregnancy.
> This is not the case. Even if the foetus is a human person, body autonomy tells us that no person should be forced to give up their own bodily well being in ensure the survival of someone else.
Exactly. I think it helps to steer the debate towards the assumption that the fetus is a human being since it exists. The mother does not have the right to kill it as it would be murder. However, the mother has the right to stop her pregnancy since it is her body. Now the kick is: These two statements are not contradictory! If the fetus is viable then his life can be saved by the doctors, otherwise it will die. In either case, it is not the (legal) responsibility of the mother.
Of course, the mother would be probably a douchebag if she tries to interrupt a pregnancy at 8 months, but that's a different issue.
I think it's telling that instead of defending the core of your position, that abortion should always be allowed, you're falling back to periphery issues, such as what to do when the life of the pregnant woman is threatened by the pregnancy. Many (most?) pro-life people would agree with allowing abortion in such cases, and it's really a sideshow to the main question.
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