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.

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'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.

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.

Plus fetus defects and rape/incest/whatever. Those are the only 3 reasons someone may be allowed to kill the future human they brought in my book.

>That's pretty radical.

And that's okay, radicalism is a good thing when the mainstream is morally bankrupt. I also think people shouldn't kill insects unless harmed by them and that animal cruelty's (by adults) punishment is jail and\or death. Those are radical positions, but they are only so because the mainstream doesn't recognize the fundamental evil they are allowing, not because I'm deliberately being a troll or an extremist who go out of my way to become a radical. The simple principle "If something can feel pain, it deserves not to feel pain" can lead you to astonishing mismatches with people and their accepted morality.

>People who can become pregnant...

Women.

>... have a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy

Which they have, right until it affects another person. Nobody is legislating to force women to be pregnant, just that if they do become pregnant, then that's a life over there, and a life that they brought into existence as a result of their actions on top of that (Rape is an explicit exception, I don't have to say this one more time), they don't get to have "Autonomy" over a body that isn't theirs. "But that body is inside theirs" well my friend they put it there, they have to wait till it get out on its own, or until it threatens their own life. Nothing else is acceptable.

>increasing the death rate of pregnant people

Again, they are called women, and my position above (and the vast majority of others) would make sure that their life is never threatened. And the decision we're discussing never said anything about banning abortion in general.

>70% of [Women] who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially

And most violent murders is done by poor people to poor people. What should we do first : criminalize murder or help people out of poverty? I would like if we can do both, and if it was up to me I would try the second as hard as I can for as long as I can before the first. But the first has to be done, and now is as good a time as ever.

>It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty

As an anti-natalist, there is nothing I would like more than people to stop having children, especially children they will drag into poverty. But the solution is not to legalize killing proto babies, this argument will lead you to "We should bomb children in Afghanistan and Syria, since they have a vastly lower quality of life waiting for them", and who knows, maybe that's correct, but even I, moral radical as I'm, am not yet ready to accept that.

Acceptable solutions can be

- Widespread popular education and contraceptive availability

- Societal shame around having children when you're poor

- Adoption

>your position leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.

>you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.

I don't know why you keep saying that when I have repeatedly said that all those should be exceptions to any abortion ban. Every single one of those things is one of the 3 (and only 3) reasons I think abortion should be allowed, *at any time in the 9 months*.

>This is misogyny.

Very well then, so let it be. I'm a misogynist.

>Birth control fails

Not in 99.9% of the cases when you use it correctly, responsibly and redundantly, and the rest is an acceptable risk that you bear the consequences of when you accept it.

>People are assaulted. >Some people are in abusive relationship

So rape? It's a good thing then that this is one of the very important exceptions, as I said about 3 or 4 times now.

>They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.

And we help them by, among countless other things, making it illegal to do the wrong thing. Nobody decent benefits from convenience abortion.

>> I, quite frankly, want to punish those people. >This is misogyny too.

Thank you, I will wear it proudly. It's my utmost pride and pleasure to hate people who don't respect life, life that they're the reason it exists in the first place. If hating the subset of women who are like that is misogyny, then misogyny is a moral duty.

> 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.

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.

No it is not the case. Because people against abortion are frequently primary against what abortion allows women to have - fear free sex and empowered life. And even when it is not primary concern, these are pretty big concerns still.

If anti abortion people were about saving life, they would be promoting easier to access health care, help to babies and mothers and so on. It never happens.

Your moral compass isn't accounting for the logistics of pregnancy. At any point during a pregnancy or childbirth, complications can arise which risk the mother's life, and a medical decision is most often made to save her instead of a potentially healthy child. By both medical and legal definition, this is still an abortion. To declare that it's not ethical to abort in these situations is a declaration that it is ethical to kill the mother. So, we very much do not agree that the ethics of abortion are obvious or even quantifiable.

> Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.

I think you missed the point here, or I wasn't clear enough. Given that the spectrum of ethics doesn't allow for a standard threshold of "murder" and we've already established that abortions are a medical necessity, the only case against the right to abortion boils down to being personally offended by someone else's actions. If medical care can be decided by personal offense and codified into a law that is guaranteed to be harmful, then we don't actually have the freedoms described in the Constitution.

> Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case. [...] It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.

Freedom of speech protects the moral threshold discussed earlier. Right to privacy protects medical information. Freedom of religion is based on separation of church and state, which means religious beliefs shouldn't hold any bearing at the federal level, particularly because they may directly contradict the beliefs of another religion. These are all fundamental concepts of our democracy, and it is absolutely the court's job to uphold them when challenged.

And the case law does exist (it's the one which just got overturned), so even if you were correct about the court's responsibility, then they just did the opposite of what you're purporting that responsibility to be.

If you discover a stowaway on your airplane while you're in the air, you're legally obligated to keep him onboard until you land. This isn't a new right, though, it's just his right to life trumping your right to property.

> At what point in pregnancy do you believe a fetus becomes a person deserving of protection under the law that violates a woman's right to bodily autonomy and privacy?

Fertilization.

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.

Well there is a second body during abortions as well. The fetus has a body. Unless you think a woman grows an extra 2 arms and legs. A woman also has 2 hearts and 2 sets of gentials?

>It does reduce the number of abortions a small amount, and it also increases the number of women who die during them, when they get them anyway.

I think protecting the most innocent and vulnerable amongst us is more important than a person who will take a dangerous action. It isn't an ideal situation but you have to choose one to protect. At least artificial wombs are starting to be a thing and may prevent this issue in the future.

>What actually reduces abortions is reducing pregnancy in the first place. Something that has been repeatedly shown is achieved through provision of birth control, and actual sex education. Doing that results in a much greater reduction in abortions, and doesn't come at the cost of killing women.

In terms of birth control, some (not sure the percentage) are abortive. They allow conception but prevent the implantation. This is on reason why some are opposed to some birth control.

Like I said in my previous post, we live in a two party system. We don't live in a system where you can vote for additional things like this and restricting abortion. You can't just say prolifers don't vote for these things because there is no other choice for them.

>I honestly don't know what you're trying to say here? No one has removed anyone's rights to their baby - again, the only right being removed here is a woman's bodily autonomy.

I believe if you are not granted protection from being killed than any other right is secondary. You can't exercise any other right if you are dead. When 99% of abortions are not due to rape it is hard to justify removing another person's (the baby's) rights when the other person (the mother) consented to an action whose sole biological purpose is procreation.

>In fact, by forcing women to carry unsafe pregnancies to term you may end up forcing them into sterility. So not only did you remove their right to abortion, you remove their ability to have children later.

Abortions can also lead to sterilization as well.

>The arguments you are making take the color of "pro-choicers want abortions", which is a standard lie promoted by pro-lifers. The states that are electively pro-choice are also the states that provide contraception, birth control, some semblance of sex ed - things that actually reduce abortions.

Like I said, prolifers have no option to vote for someone who will restrict abortion while expanding the other things.

>I do not understand why you think I have not tried to understand. I understand your position very clearly. It is not complex.

You refuse to understand that a fetus is another person that has rights and just say prolifers only want to control woman. It sure sounds like you don't understand.

>You believe abortion is wrong, and therefore you believe that it doesn't matter what a woman may believe, that they should not have bodily autonomy.

I believe a woman has full autonomy over her body, just not the foetus' body.

>Currently this is limited to abortion, but given you believe that women do not have any constitutional right to bodily autonomy, there is no reason you cannot decide that woman should lose other rights in future.

And you wonder why I say you don't understand the other side.

>I am not being facetious, and I am not being hysterical.

Debatable.

>Numerous governments, left and right wing, liberal and conservative, have at numerous points in history determined that women should be involuntarily sterilized (which I guess stops abortions, so yay?) for a variety of reasons - that were mentally ill, gay, non-white, ...

In the US, which we are talking about, this was almost entirely on the left. Eugenics was quite a popular fad with progressives.

Regardless, I think pretty much everyone now is opposed to forced sterilization.

Some places have forced abortions. It isn't relevant to the discussion.

>See, the problem is that once you say someone does not have bodily autonomy, then you have stated that the government has permission to control those victim's bodies.

>It's not "just one thing", the debate about abortion is the debate over whether a woman gets a say in what happens to her body.

I fully agree. That is why I believe babies should have equal rights.

What is stopping a government from removing rights from infants, toddlers or even adults if you can remove rights from babies?

This hill we are on sure seems slippery.

>The pro-life position is that women do not.

The prochoice position is that babies do not have rights.

Excellent point; thanks for the insight.

> My point is simply that we don't have a human right of reproduction.

While society does have interests in many aspects of reproduction, I think those are greatly outweighed by fundamental liberty and the sanctity of your own person. As an important principle (not an absolutist rule, of course), we shouldn't tell people, including women, what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.

Also, governments have a dangerous track record with such policies. They've resulted in forced sterilizations and abortions, for example, and ethnic and religious discrimination.

Says who? By that logic, abortion should be legal until birth, and even the most liberal countries in Europe reject that position.

Virtually everyone, including the Roe itself, recognizes that the mother’s right to bodily autonomy has a limit. The question everyone grapples with is where to draw the line.

Birth is caused by pregnancy. Pregnancy is caused by sex.

There’s a simple way to avoid being “forced” to carry a pregnancy to term: either don’t have sex, or use one of the many contraceptive methods - use two if you are really worried!

Yes this doesn’t work in all cases, in cases of rape for instance - but that is why abortion laws often make exceptions for rape, fetal abnormality, risk to life of the mother, etc. Abortion is not the binary black-and-white issue that is presented in American politics, most countries have quite some nuance in their law on abortion.

Returning to the case of merely undesired pregnancies, restricting those abortions does not force anybody to do anything, it commits them to the logical consequence of their action that resulted in the creation of a new human.

Balancing the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn is the responsibility of the law. It is not satisfactory to cede all rights to the mother, nor to cede all rights to the unborn child, as the two extremist positions in the US seem to want to do.

In that you don't already comprehend, I doubt I'll be able to aid in your understanding, but here goes nothing.

The state allows men to exercise control over their own reproductive systems more completely than women.

It really is that simple.

Men have all options available e.g. vasectomy, wearing condoms, etc. Women on the other hand see the "party of small government" lead the charge into their hospital rooms, dictating to them what rights they have insofar as control of their own reproductive systems goes.

If men also could get pregnant, it wouldn't be discriminatory. That the only reproductive control technique to be denied women is a technique only available to women, any laws to restrict such techniques are inherently discriminatory toward women.

The attempts to restrict abortion effect women's rights directly, far more so than men, many of whom vanish before a child is even carried to term.

Does that help clear it up?

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.

> 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.

No. You either have bodily autonomy (My body, my choice!) or you don't. For the record I happen to support abortion (and in fact think society would be better off if many of the people in Washington DC had been aborted), but I oppose hypocrisy and logical fallacies.