> 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.
> 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.
> I assumed it was a decision relating to a woman's reproductive rights.
But, you realize it's largely a question of axioms, right? Two sides are talking past each other because they take their axioms for granted as self-evident.
It's simply a question of a woman's reproductive rights if you take it as axiomatic that a fetus isn't a person.
I don't take it as axiomatic that personhood begins at conception, but if I did, it would all of a sudden be a question of balancing the rights of two people instead of just the woman's reproductive rights. We don't have a clean scientific definition of personhood. The fetus is genetically distinct and is essentially a parasitic larval human. Scientifically, it's just tissue, but so am I. The real question is if it's a person, and that's a legal and moral question that is largely axiomatic.
The reality is that very few of us have a problem with aborting an unviable fetus or early abortion in cases of rape, very few of us support aborting a perfectly healthy fetus minutes before birth, and hard science doesn't provide us many clear lines somewhere in the middle.
>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.
> 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.
>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.
Oh please. Cool it with the strawman arguments. It's boring.
They aren't owned by the state. They simply can't kill the human growing inside them. That's it, that's all it is.
We don't need to drop to analogies and hyperbole, we have the language to describe what is happening. A woman, in most instances, chooses to have a baby grow inside of them. But regardless of how it got there, at a certain point that baby deserves human rights.
That point is all that's up for debate. At what point does a baby become a human with rights to life.
One side argues birth, one side argues conception. The vast majority decided viability 22 weeks (disturbing imo but neither here nor there).
My human right to free speech stops at the point it harms someone else.
I don't see why these rights would be any bloody different.
If you want to debate this issue you need to be willing to define when a baby becomes a human, because THAT is the only thing being debated here.
> 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.
> Nobody seems to want to answer the question, which is quite telling actually.
You're still missing the very important context of the original comment you replied to, so I'll self-quote:
> Arguing these minutae is highly unproductive. It's much better to start from common ground, and a supermajority of Americans believe that the choice should be between patient and doctor.
You're ignoring this, and going straight back to debating minutae, and using a completely ludicrous case that (a) nobody wants to be legal and (b) is already totally illegal without any kind of abortion law.
> I guess to understand the position I would need to understand what reasoning would justify an abortion at 39 weeks
See, you keep claiming that I'm in support of an abortion at 39 weeks. I didn't take that position, did I? Look to Canada, whose Supreme Court ruled that this is a matter between doctor and patient. But, doctors are highly regulated with regards to their behavior and ethics, and gosh, they aren't running around murdering babies like the example you keep trotting out, are they?
> The long-term justification for abortion will likely have to be rooted in ideas of justifiable homicide
Not at all. Don't define an unborn fetus as a person.
You staged the setup with a question, then only included qualifications that inherently would also include an unborn fetus: alive and human. I say we must include having been born as a requirement to be a person.
The definition of a person no longer includes the unborn. An unborn fetus is an unborn fetus, it is not a person until it is born. There, I just solved your pre-arranged problem.
> "you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent"
I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no. It's possible to try to have policy that understands the tradeoffs here and tries to get the best outcome we can despite them even though it's messy. It's why I think "life" isn't the right determinant.
So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
That said, again my personal position is it's better on net for society to allow women full discretion here - but I don't think these kinds of casual constraints are irrational or inconsistent.
> 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.
>> 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.
> 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 know, and I'm sure you know, that's the real issue. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex.
Hard disagree that the abortion issue is primarily about consequence-free sex. You stated the issue in the first line:
> A fetus isn't a person.
Pro-life people vehemently disagree about this, and it's not coming from a place of prudishness. They are outraged because they feel like babies are being killed.
> It's not killing someone. A fetus isn't a person.
Isn't a fetus kind of like a tadpole? Sure, we may quibble that it isn't a person, but it is still a living being on the way to maturity. Killing a tadpole is killing _something_, right?
> I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no.
Oh, I personally believe that and I think most people do. Sorry, maybe we've lost the plot on this a little:
> The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.
I argue that society has already decided this. Nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. This is all squarely within what Americans support.
> I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.
I argue that the constitutional rights of the embryo/fetus (such as they are) do not outweigh the constitutional rights of the pregnant person. If someone thinks an embryo/fetus has rights, they have to contend with a bunch of unpalatable things [0] (criminalizing many popular forms of birth control, IVF, the morning after pill, miscarriages, stillbirths, etc.). At the most extreme end--personhood--they have to either defend a brutal no exceptions regime, or an inconsistent exceptions regime where you're deciding whether or not an embryo/fetus is alive based on some irrelevant circumstances.
> So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
But again, I also argue that society has already decided this. We actually agree with the current regime: nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. Why do we need to punt this to the States? Why are States rushing to put stricter and stricter controls on abortion?
The answer is that Republicans fomented a moral panic in the 70s in order to pull evangelical votes. They proceeded to push misinformation into the public about abortion, the kind of people who get abortions, and why they get abortions. This distorted the public view. Again, in reality the state of abortion is what the vast majority of Americans support. There's no need for this to be an issue anywhere. It's a wedge issue pushed by a craven political party in order to gain power. That's literally the beginning and end of it.
> Even if it is a person, you completely fail to take into account the mother as a living human being
The point is that if the fetus has reached personhood stage then it becomes a matter of dealing with a conflict of freedoms between two people. Too often both sides in abortion debates fail to realize this.
> Of course no sane person talks about aborting in like the 8th months or so
Ahh, but note that all your bodily autonomy arguments apply just as well at 8 months as they do at 3 months, maybe even more so as the fetus is having a bigger impact on the woman's body at that point.
> Clearly it is not hard for a lot of people in the US to imagine this, since that is what they believe.
Well if they do, they're not acting like it. For example, miscarriages are pretty rampant. If there were a disease that affected people the same way miscarriages affect embryos and fetuses, it would be a bonkers plague that reduced our population to a a fraction of what it is. I imagine people would be acting differently than they are if we really equated humans with fetuses on this level.
Or we can go full personhood. How do we discern the will of a 14 week old fetus? What constitutes child abuse? When do child support payments start? Can fetuses sue for damages? What do their free worship rights look like? Do fetuses have a right to medical care? Can a fetus earn income and pay taxes? Do fetuses count towards population for apportionment?
I don't doubt the sincerity of people's held positions on abortion. What I do doubt is the rationality, and the more I dig into it, the more I find tons of ignorance about women, fetuses, and pregnancy.
> I don’t understand how you can say something like that with a clear conscience
Not the gp, but my position is that equating a fetus to a person is a fallacy based in the idea that it's a potential person. Which however means it's actually not one. Human beings have language, thought, self-awareness, memories, knowledge, experience, friends, family, hopes and fears. A fetus, wild speculations aside, has none of these. A dna is just a long molecule, not necessary and not enough to attribute humanity. A developed brain and a sense of self instead are both necessary and sufficient. A fetus has neither.
> I think almost every reasonable person would agree that any fetus who can survive outside a mother is a person
That's problematic right there. A child can't survive without any support until some years after birth, and the age at which a foetus can survive with support keeps getting younger due to technical advances. At some point fully artificial wombs will be able to allow a foetus to survive outside their mother from conception.
Deciding personhood based on our tech level doesn't seem very reasonable.
> My personal view is that personhood requires a mind
That seems more reasonable. Attainment of consciousness seems like a reasonable differentiator, but there's a difficulty is in establishing when that is.
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.
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