Except they obviously don't, actually, or they wouldn't so regularly permit abortion in the case of rape or incest, nor would fertilization-preventing birth control be so often mislabeled as 'abortifacents'.
Preserving life may be the stated goal, but if you look at the actual actions taken, it's obvious that it's actually about controlling sexuality.
And they only give a shit because media has effectively manufactured outrage.
Fox News, CNN, msnbc, all have one goal and it's to push discussions from a class war (loaded term, I know) to a culture war.
As a male, I also care because the issue directly impacts people in my life that I care about. The pro-life side of the aisle is directly and viciously assaulting their bodily sovereignty and potentially their health and life.
The pro-lifers might be fighting for some nebulous "unborn" who they will likely never know and never have any real obligation to, but I'm fighting for my partner, my daughters, my sisters, my friends. And I'll be damned before I let some disgusting religious extremists create a system that enslaves them.
Everyone is born, and this everyone is impacted by the right to kill the unborn. Every human being has a stake in this.
This clearly does not hold up for children after birth. I can't deposit my infant in the desert and withdraw my consent to provide for it. This would be murder.
It is only in the privilege of modern society where we have such an abundance of resources that we have collectively consented to allocate a percentage of our commonwealth to the care of unwanted infants and children through orphanages and foster care, that we can treat infanticide as barbaric murder. You can sever your responsibility to you child by surrendering them to the state, so severing your responsibility by leaving them to die of exposure is indeed unnecessary and barbaric.
I personally believe that in the future, when we develop artificial wombs, we may revisit the question of abortion and require that women "abort" by having the fetus extracted alive and transplanted into an artificial womb. Preemie care is effectively the state of the art for "artificial wombs" and the current record survival is 21 weeks of age, which is just shy of the third trimester. This would also then require us to collectively allocate money and resources to caring for and raising these unwanted infants in an expensive medical setting.
However, I suspect we'll develop near perfect, side effect free, and reversible birth control before this happens, so the issue of abortion may mostly resolve itself on its own. That is, unless the religious extremists get their way and ban birth control too, which the current leaked court decision seems like it's paving the way for.
Until then, keep your moral outrage out of people's bodies.
Have you actually talked to anyone on the other side of this issue? Most are consistent on not allowing it- even when the rapist is a skin color you think they hate.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americans-vi...
Even among the most extremist group, white evangelicals, a larger percentage favor legal abortion in the case of rape than a blanket ban.
But as someone who was myself raised in these extremist groups, I fully echo your perception that most vocal pro-lifers wouldn't be willing to carve out a rape exception. But this does seem to be a case of the screaming minority drowning out the silent majority.
The link I provided clearly shows that of white Evangelicals when asked specifically about the question of abortion in cases of rape, 40% said it should be legal, 34% said it should be illegal, and 24% said it depends. Are you referring to something else?
Also, white Evangelicals are VERY far from the majority, which means over 50%. They are at best the purality, with evangelical protestants of all races making up 25% of the US population. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
In fact, it looks like religious "nones" are growing so fast that the previous link is already out of date and they have already surpassed evangelicals to become the largest "religious" category (when you break down the larger Christian category). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-...
That just seems like pragmatism. An unqualified ban would be voted down or struck down by a court. They might just be crafting legislation they feel they can pass.
From an ethical standpoint, the unborn child has a right to life that is not invalidated by the means or character of their parents.
Unless of course you’re arguing from a eugenics point of view, but I doubt that’s the angle you’re coming from. The two major exceptions I see are:
1) medical experts determine the life of the mother is in danger, such that the child will kill the mother.
2) scientific, repeatable evidence shows the fetus is non viable
Fundamentally this means you are fine with children giving birth to children. Today, usually when an 11 or 12 year old girl is raped by her relative or authority figure, the pregnancy is aborted and that little girl is allowed to move on with their life. After this decision comes down, abortion will be criminalized to the point of charging it as homicide. Young girls will be forced into social isolation at a young age to bear children that may in fact be their siblings. That, or they will undergo illegal and dangerous abortions which will end up killing them or putting them in jail for 30 years. Either way, the "Save The Children" crowd think they won one for babies, but the horror stories are just beginning.
From the book description...
> Most arguments for or against abortion focus on one question: is the fetus a person? In this provocative and important book, David Boonin defends the claim that even if the fetus is a person with the same right to life you and I have, abortion should still be legal, and most current restrictions on abortion should be abolished. Beyond Roe points to a key legal precedent: McFall v. Shimp. In 1978, an ailing Robert McFall sued his cousin, David Shimp, asking the court to order Shimp to provide McFall with the bone marrow he needed. The court ruled in Shimp's favor and McFall soon died. Boonin extracts a compelling lesson from the case of McFall v. Shimp--that having a right to life does not give a person the right to use another person's body even if they need to use that person's body to go on living-and he uses this principle to support his claim that abortion should be legal and far less restricted than it currently is, regardless of whether the fetus is a person.
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Roe-Abortion-Should-Legal-Even...
So, the ethical and legal question of abortion is not just one of if or when the fetus is a full human deserving of equal protection under the law, but one of when it is legally permissible to coerce a person into having their body used to preserve the life of another. Answering that question the wrong way is a potential legal slippery slope for all people, not just fertile females.
As a person who was raised fiercely pro-life, these are the kinds of ethical, philosophical, and legal considerations that I was never taught. All you ever hear in that world is "It's a baby! Murderers!"
I am now fiercely pro-choice, but I still consider the question of abortion to be a difficult one with no easy answer. However, I fundamentally believe that one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone, so even if you could prove to me that the fetus is conscious at the moment of conception, I would still never surrender a woman's right to sovereignty over her body.
Just to continue the discussion, in the case where the fetus is the product of a consensual sexual relationship (not rape), morally does that make a difference? In that case are you now ethically required to save the fetus's life?
The fetus would not exist had it not been for your actions and perhaps should not have to suffer pain and death (depending on how long the pregnancy is).
Not arguing for or against, im of the opinion that its very personal and complex.
It partially comes down to the question of whether the act of consenting to sex necessarily implies consent to carry a baby to term. It's not clear that that's true. It's not even clear that if you did consent to get pregnant, that you have a continuous obligation to take the baby to term.
To build an imperfect analogy, consider a case where you have been asked to start donating blood every week because you have a rare blood type, and there is a sick person who will die if you don't donate. Let's assume you consent and begin donating. Do you have a right to revoke consent and stop donating at any time? What if the blood donation is taking an unexpected, significant toll on your health? What if the doctors determine that despite the donation, the receiver isn't getting better and will definitely die in a matter of months? What if you changed you mind and you just don't want to anymore? Do we really want to live in a society where once you've given consent to have your body used, you can't revoke it afterwards?
To build another analogy, let's say you behave recklessly and drive drunk getting into a car wreck with your friend and they get seriously injured and hospitalized. It's so bad that they need an organ donation and you're a match. Are you legally obligated to surrender your bodily autonomy and give up an organ to save your friend's life? We might say that's the ethical thing to do, but can we say that we want that to be a legal obligation and you will be coerced by the violence of the state into doing it?
The relationship between a mother and her child during a pregnancy is not an artificial construct: it's not created by legal obligations, not by societal norms. It's a basic reality that all just laws and mores simply have to recognize. Similar to how gravity is simply a physical reality: any rational understanding of the natural world just has to recognize that massive objects exert force on other massive objects.
The relationship between McFall and Shimp, on the other hand, was predicated on legal and social conventions. Bone marrow donation is not a normal, naturally occurring process. Shimp did not have a natural obligation to donate bone marrow to his cousin, though it would have been an extraordinary gesture of charity towards McFall.
The error of the abortion argument here is in asserting that the natural relationship between mother and child is the same as any other sort of contractual relationship between consenting adults in the modern world. This is simply false. Mothers do have a moral obligation to their unborn children. Their bodily autonomy is not absolute, and they do not have the right to abort their child in the same way that Shimp had the right to refuse to donate bone marrow.
> so even if you could prove to me that the fetus is conscious at the moment of conception
Based on _this_ assumption, then I would add the following:
Rights are not absolute. Yes, the woman has the right to bodily autonomy, but it can't infringe on the baby's basic right to living. Similar to how you have the right to bear arms, but that right can be limited or forfeited if you start to threaten to shoot random people. That's why we say both matter.
The question is when it is permissible to sever or alter these relationships. Catholics might say that divorce is impermissible because the husband/wife relations is sanctified by god and is permanent. They might say that god never makes mistakes mismatching the soul (self) with the body. They might say that god blessed the woman with a relation with her fetus.
For those living back here in reality, there is no god setting up these relationships with a grand plan. We are the collective authors of our future, and it's up to us through conversation and education to decided what kind of world we want to build. Maybe we'll decide that the old ways are good, and maybe we'll decide that they're not.
Ultimately, the choice is up to us.
https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
Ex: "Women's rights" disguised as "the right to have sex without consequences" regardless of gender?
Ex: "Right to life" disguised as "the obligation of people to live the lifestyle we want to force them to live"?
Fundamentally, the pro-choice side of the aisle is the side of individual sovereignty and freedom. That includes preserving your right to live a more traditional, conservative life if that's what you so choose. I'm personally of the opinion that many, if not most, women when given sufficient information and life experience, would choose the more traditional, motherhood/housewife lifestyle.
Conversely, the pro-life side of the aisle is one of coercion and slavery. It's the side that attempts to force people (specifically women in this case) to serve the role that the conservative elite want them to serve, regardless of whether or not they consent to it.
In my opinion, the pro-life/anti-abortion ideology is fundamentally un-American, undemocratic, and has no place in a free and open society that values individual sovereignty.
The expansion of individual choice and sovereignty is one of the key outcomes of progress in civilization and society. Everything we've been doing for the past 12,000 years has been driven by the desire to be free to consume more, work less, and have more freedom to explore our selves and existence. Never before have there been so many people with the freedom to live such an intense variety of lifestyles.
Collectivist responsibility still exists, e.g. taxes, public health, rules of the road, because we will always live in resource constrained world where people necessarily must interact with each other. But more and more, we are able to carve out larger pockets of individual freedom.
It would be incredible to live in a world were we had such control over the spread of disease, that vaccination mandates becomes unnecessary. It would be incredible to live in a world where forced military drafts are long gone. Just like it is equally incredible that we now get to live in a country that doesn't allow chattel slavery.
I fail to see a legitimate reason as to why we must socially regress and revoke a woman's choice over the sanctity of her body.
Assuming everyone's consenting and taking care about diseases, why is this a bad thing? Outside the strictures of religious morality?
> the right to have sex without consequences
Men effectively have this right. Why shouldn't women? We already do a lot to make this a viable lifestyle for everybody (namely, treating STDs inexpensively), why not make it equally available to all?
Uh, what? Men with guns will come to your house and take you to jail to enforce “consequences”.
Men aren't free from at least financial responsibility for their biological offspring. Some people actually make the argument that since women have the right to abort, men should have the right to their own "financial/legal abortion" of their parental rights and responsibilities if the woman chooses to keep the baby against his consent.
Up until what point—until the baby is born? Or in Texas, would they have to decide in the first 6 weeks? Or are you arguing that the man should have the right to do this when the child is 1, or 5, or 10 years old?
Why would this situation differ from requiring people donate kidneys or a living liver donation when another humans life is at stake? Why don't I have a right to your kidney if you can go on living just fine after the procedure?
A much better analogy might be where you have a special blood type, and there's a person somewhere who needs regular transfusions of your blood in particular to continue living. No other blood will do, only yours.
In this analogy, we can first agree that the healthy person has no obligation to begin donating to the sick person, and this is strongly supported by legal precedent in the US at least. If there exists a frozen embryo, it is not legally justifiable to force some healthy woman to have it implanted.
We could also probably agree that if the healthy person is kidnapped and their blood taken against their will, they have no obligation to continue. This would give us an abortion exception for the cases rape and incest.
But the open question might be, if the healthy person consents to start donating, do they have the right to rescind their consent at anytime, say after 3 months of consistently donating blood? Do they have the right if they learn that donating blood so regularly is rapidly destroying their own health and is putting their own life at risk? Do they have the right revoke consent if the doctors are quite certain that the sick person will die in 3 months? Do they have a right to revoke consent just because they don't want to do it anymore, even though the sick person will die?
You're right about the true nature of the debate: it's really at which point during the pregnancy is the unborn child to be considered a full human whose right to life it is imperative to respect?
Women aren’t brood mares at the beck and call of others. There is no right to inflict one’s progeny on another.
And, if the unborn are so vital, then they should be protected before and after birth, possibly until they’re an adult. Don’t see anybody saying that they have to provide medical care to the mother and unborn child. Or, are others allowed to kill the child (pr permanently cripple it) just not the mother?
There is an extremely negative consequence if you try to regulate a person who is a grown persons body.
I would only buy the argument of respecting a life if we also extend this to way beyond a child in the womb, and to everyone living. Until we do that, there's no excuse to control a person's body.
You don't want to, no one is forcing you to abort.
The discussion here is "who is forced to do something". This child in the womb would not be able to live without the life of the mother. Therefore their "choice", if you can even call it that, is irrelevant.
(I honestly don’t have a strong stance, but both sides have equivalent arguments and what bothers me is people refusing to acknowledge that)
The right to dispose of any unwanted child the mother cannot or will not care for herself is one that, like in vivo abortion, women will exercise irrespective of whether the law permits it. Poor indigenous women in Brazil allow their sickly babies to starve all the time.
Conclusion: any society that does not allow humane infanticide within the first year is literally Handmaid's Tale.
When someone brings out the "her own body" line, they're begging the question about the fetus. It's a dishonest rhetorical device. We aren't going to solve this by yelling dishonest rhetoric at each other; that hasn't worked for 50 years. We have to actually address the real question.
Not considering the woman's point of view is treating her as if she's nothing more than an incubator, which comes back to "enslaving or murdering women".
And flushing her body of a fetus (or an embryo) is absolutely an action a woman may take upon her own body.
Compromise is made harder by three things, one is the parasitical relationship that only disadvantages a woman (who doesn’t want a child), the second is that a woman’s body flushing a fetus is a natural occurrence, and third is that occasionally the removal of the fetus, dead or alive, is medically required for the woman to survive.
The bans on abortions being proposed are not compromises.
skizm>Abortion is a big issue ... because one group of people view it as literally murdering a child and another group see it as a minor medical procedure...<"
That is, it is a religious dispute and religious disputes are impossible to settle by negotiation or compromise.
In reality it is a matrix with time on one axis and extenuating circumstances on the other.
1. Are human beings _human beings_ beginning with conception?
2. Is it ever licit to kill an innocent human being intentionally?
W.r.t. (1), if you answer "no", then the second question is moot. It may still be the case that abortion would be morally illicit, but that would be a different question. If you answer "yes", then you must answer the second question. If you answer "yes", then you are a utilitarian/consequentialist. The conflict has largely shifted to the second question over time.
(For the sake of clarity, the word "intentionally" is important. Treating an ectopic pregnancy to save the mother by removing the affected implanted tissue will result in the death of the unborn, but this is not an intended consequence, only a tolerable side effect given what's at stake. These sorts of situations are not the subject of the abortion debate.)
They are unavoidably entangled with the abortion debate, because so many of the legislators and public are ignorant of such fine distinctions, and allowing a total abortion ban in the US _will_ result in maternal fatalities in these situations.
It's why you will hear of mothers suffering and dying from sepsis due to a dead baby rotting in their wombs.
That's one reason why it's not binary.
Many people also answer yes to #2 based on circumstances, even if this means that they are utilitarians or consequentialists.
Even the consideration of intent you mentioned adds at least one factor to the matrix.
First, most people don't have a single yes/no answer to point 1, and for better or worse they probably don't view "human being" as a binary state. Some of them believe that a fetus gradually becomes a human at some nebulous point in time, some believe that it's a "potential person", some believe that it's a person with caveats. Secondly, a decent chunk of them also believe that non-humans should have some moral right, and that there might be situations where the state has a compelling interest in preventing certain outcomes even where there is no clear individual harm (for example, a nontrivial number of people are uncomfortable with constructing high-level systems to allow abortions on the basis of neurodivergence, even if they believe that each individual abortion decision on its own is justified).
But lets say someone answers #1 with, "yes, and they should have full human rights". Then we go to point #2, and the short answer is that people who believe that it's literally never moral to intentionally kill someone are exceedingly rare (I've gotten to know maybe one person total in my entire life who I considered to be genuinely a strict deontologist). Utilitarianism is also not a binary conclusion for most people, most people believe that individual rights are worth protecting in at least some cases where they could intentionally be used to cause harm, but in other cases should be blocked because of the outcome -- and they often differ on where they draw those lines and what rights they think are most important to protect. The vast majority of people in the world tend to be somewhat utilitarian in some situations, and somewhat deontological in other situations.
So now there's question #3 which you hint at but don't actually raise -- are abortions intentional deaths or are they closer to the scenario you describe with ectopic pregnancies, where the actual goal is just the removal of the unborn and protection of the mother and as a side effect the unborn dies? This is somewhat closely related to the privacy/autonomy argument that gets brought up; that trying to save unborn lives is great and if you can keep an aborted child alive you're welcome to do so, but that concern has to be subservient to preserving bodily autonomy and preserving the patient's health -- in other words, I've heard people argue that abortion is primarily about stopping pregnancy, and that the death of the unborn is just an unfortunate side effect. And once again, a lot of people don't have binary opinions about that either; it's not uncommon for me to see people who draw lines at very different places and based on very different criteria even when they at first say something that sounds like a simple yes/no answer. Culpability for harm in general on many issues can be complicated to talk about sometimes.
And then we go on to question #4, which wasn't brought up at all: regardless of the morality, how prudent is it to legislate abortion? And once again, there are a diversity of opinions on this, not just in regards to abortion, but in regards to the fundamental question of when and how our government should legislate morality even in situations where someone with moral value is getting hurt. In fact, a large number of US debates that are separate from abortion also intersect with this question. Some people believe that the state needs to preserve absolute autonomy regardless of the morality, some people believe that it would be reasonable for the state to impose morality in some cases, but that it's likely to get it wrong or have so many unintended consequences that it should only rarely impose morality. This also intersects a little bit with the privacy arguments people raise: is the government qualified to make broad rules about very individual health/parenting decisions, especially regarding risky pregnancies -- and is it reasonable to ask people to "prove" to the government that their pregnancies are risky?
And then of course question #5, which is whether abolishing abortion is the most effective way to reduce abortion. See also drug legalization, where you'll occasionally run into strict drug critics who believe that recreational drug use is harmful and should be discouraged, that still want to see it legalized. Once again, most people don't have a binary answer to this question because there are a lot of restrictions and regulations a government can impose beyond just banning/allowing something, and even people who are primarily concerned about reducing abortion rates might disagree about which policies actually work to reduce abortion rates.
All of those questions, on their own, will get you different answers if you ask different people. The problem is that saying no/yes to each question isn't enough on its own to create a perfectly logical policy that everyone in the world will just agree with based on first principles. There are a lot of possible answers someone might give to both questions that boil down to either "sometimes...", or to "yes/no, but..."
And that's not to say that there aren't better or worse answers to those questions, it's just to say that a lot of people claim the reason conversations about abortion are stalled is because there's nothing else to talk about and everyone knows perfectly what they believe and there's no way to sway anyone, and in reality it's more that conversation is stalled because public opinion isn't perfectly resolved and many people just feel really uncomfortable and confused talking about it because it's very contentious and has a lot of stigma -- which ends up being kind of self-reinforcing because the more that people reflexively avoid the topic the less they tend to learn about it and the fewer opportunities they have to try and nail down their views.
I've read the problem there was actually Roe v. Wade itself. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to prematurely decide the issue, which twisted the politics around it into a question of "how to control the Supreme Court" that is resistant to nuance (because the court is so insulated from normal politics).
Without Roe v. Wade, the debate would have probably eventually settled on the question you proposed in nearly all jurisdictions, though with some setting a number that Roe or Casey forbade.
Abortion is a big issue that will continue to come up because one group of people view it as literally murdering a child and another group see it as a minor medical procedure. In reality the debate should just be "how many weeks into pregnancy should it be allowed?", but that's hard to sell in a campaign so politicians will go hard one way or the other.