We don't use this standard of reasoning for anything else. If abortion is murder then it ought to be banned regardless of how effective the ban may be.

Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder. Any argument that sidesteps the morality of abortion is not going to convince anyone.

Abortion is clearly not murder. Treating it as such has horrible implications.

Let’s start with the belief that life starts at conception. With this belief, a fetus is equivalent in protection to a newborn. Following this, voluntarily ending it is murder.

Then what about miscarriage? If a newborn were to die under unknown circumstances, there should be an investigation. Should then all pregnant people be investigated for potential negligence or abuse for this already traumatizing situation? 1/3 to 1/2 of all fertilized eggs never implant. Should these be scrutinized? I cannot see how one can say a fetus and newborn deserve equivalent protections and then fail to give them.

Further, what about support for abortion exceptions for incest or rape? If the pregnancy in this scenario went to term and the child was born, one wouldn’t then support that murdering the newborn was OK.

If you don’t believe these things, then you don’t believe newborns and fetuses deserve equal protection. You only happen to believe specific fetuses deserve one specific protection.

States have have recently passed laws have added in exceptions for the things you've brought up.

Also looking up the definition of abortion in this case is important:

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/abortion.h...

    For the purpose of surveillance, a legal induced abortion is defined as an intervention performed by a licensed clinician (e.g., a physician, nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, physician assistant) within the limits of state regulations, that is intended to terminate a suspected or known ongoing intrauterine pregnancy and that does not result in a live birth. Most states and reporting areas that collect abortion data report if an abortion was medical or surgical. Medical abortions are legal procedures that use medications instead of surgery.

I’d like to engage, but I’m unsure what your point is.

Adding exceptions is antithetical to the belief it is murder. One does not get to murder another person because they were a child of incest. On the other hand, not adding an exception for abortion is monstrous.

If you agree that forcing a woman to give birth to a child of rape or incest is monstrous, then maybe you’ll agree abortion isn’t murder. If you think it’s not monstrous, I hope it never happens to you or someone you love just to be taught a hard lesson in empathy for others.

I’m unsure why you’re quoting the definition of a legally induced abortion and why you feel it important to your argument.

> Then what about miscarriage? If a newborn were to die under unknown circumstances, there should be an investigation.

Most states have laws regarding causing miscarriage via assault, even California so there are investigations already.

You’ve missed the point in the quote you pulled. Assault is hardly an unknown circumstance.

To draw the parallel to a newborn, some pass away from SIDS, some from abuse, some from malnutrition. Investigations are performed in suspicious circumstances. Sometimes it truly happens to be random or unknown or unpreventable.

If one were to treat fetuses the same, wouldn’t one want to verify there was no abuse or neglect? I.E. the causes are unknown, it could be a random natural event, it could be due to someone’s actions, the only way to know is to investigate. To my knowledge, nobody currently gets investigated for a miscarriage of unknown cause. One can only hope it stays that way.

> what about support for abortion exceptions for incest or rape?

If you’ve been paying attention, exceptions for incest and rape are being thrown out of the window in most red states. That was a pre supermajority compromise. Now that the supreme court is a conservative supermajority, the compromise position is no longer desirable for conservatives. They have the power and they are using it.

I’m aware and it’s terrifying. Traditionally most anti-abortion advocates supported the exception, and I still believe most Republican voters support the exception.

But they elect extremists to govern.

I’d like to believe being more aware of the extremism would temper voters towards moderation, but I fear instead history proves the voters are more likely to have their views shift towards extremism.

> Then what about miscarriage?

This argument has always struck me as odd. A miscarriage is, for lack of a better word, a random natural event. People die from random natural events all the time.

Do you really believe all miscarriages are random and that none are due to alcohol, drugs, malnutrition, or other reasons?

Now hopefully in the future the argument won’t strike you as odd.

It's not murdered, the amass of dividing cells called a fetus isn't viable on it's own. When that fetus is unwanted, abortion is comparable to removing a tumor.

> We don’t use this standard of reasoning for anything else.

Yes, we do. All kinds of things are viewed as immoral and not criminally punished, or punished less than things viewed as equally or more immoral, because of the perceived social cost/benefit of the alternative.

It is murderously insane to consider only the problem addressed and not the impacts of the policy response in setting government policy.

If you drink and drive and cause a car crash that requires you give a blood transfusion is it murder to refuse? I think hardly anyone would say that, because society has decided the right of bodily autonomy is paramount. I don't see abortion as any different from refusing to save someone you hurt in a car crash you caused.

In the United States a warrant is sufficient for a compulsory blood test to check blood alcohol levels. If we accept that proving guilt in court is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy than so too would saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions.

Morally however, I also do think it's wrong to not give the blood transfusion because the burden is small and the cost of not doing so is large. Whether it rises to the level of murder is a tougher question that I think would depend on intent.

Do you think a suicidal pilot has the right to stop flying a plane mid-flight even if she knows that no one else on the plane will be capable of landing it?

> If we accept that proving guilt in court is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy than so too would saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions.

But we haven't decided that saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy. That's the whole point, society has decided that you can refuse to give the transfusion, even it leads to a death you essentially caused.

Society has already decided that proving guilt in a drunk driving case is a sufficient reason to violate bodily autonomy. I argue that saving a life is far more important than proving guilt for a fairly petty crime, therefore by the already accepted standard, it would be permissible to force the transfusion for this purpose.

> Do you think a suicidal pilot has the right to stop flying a plane mid-flight

Interesting example, but I don't think such a pilot whould cares about rights.

The better question might be - what could you do to force such a pilot to fly the plane, and it appears that you could only plead - they would not be afraid of being shot (which is illegal anyway), and torture is very clearly illegal.

I agree it would be difficult to force a pilot to fly a plane, in this way it's not quite analogous. However, imagine if by some miracle the plane is landed without the pilots help– passenger happens to be a pilot, stewardess talked over the radio how to execute a crash landing etc. Should the pilot be charged with any crime upon safely reaching the ground?

>I think hardly anyone would say that

On the contrary, I think it would be very popular to say that someone who directly caused the crash out of negligence should be required to give blood to save the victim.

You're referring to a version of the violinist argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion#The_viol...

Your version is actually pretty similar to a normal pregnancy (the woman brought about the pregnancy through her actions and now has to decide whether its morally okay to stop the babies' use of her body).

I think it's very hard to justify abortion along these lines and might be easier just to try to show that the fetus is non-human and doesn't have rights.

In this _particular_ case, I think it would indeed be considered vehicular homicide if you drove drunk and killed someone. If you could and did save them by giving a blood transfusion, then you would likely still be guilty of some crime for hitting them in the first place, but not homicide.

But that doesn't change anything - even if this person is a criminal, you still would not be allowed to use their blood for a transfusion without their concent. No additional crimes would result from the refusal itself.

Sure, change drunk to really tired and reconsider.

Most people believe you are obligated to provide basic care (food, water, shelter). Anything above that is not an obligation and not murder. That is not to say you shouldn't go above that, but just that it is not murder if you don't provide anything above the basics.

<<Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder. Any argument that sidesteps the morality of abortion is not going to convince anyone.

This is an interesting comment. It is not your job to do anything unless you are actually paid by an entity that has a vested interest in an outcome. Your argument structure does not have to follow predetermined steps ordained by the high priests. All these arguments are not going to convince anyone. For better or worse, most have already made up their minds a long time ago. Just to make it all more confusing, GPT-chan showed clearly you simply cannot trust online fora ( or, frankly, based on Amazon's raise the dead skill, phone conversations ) to have real humans anymore ( although you could argue, this was clear during last net neutrality debate and how comments there were not written by individuals).

But going back to the crux of your argument, I disagree. This is HN. Morality will not impress people here. Rational discourse is a path forward if it is intended to sway anyone.

> Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder.

Sure, and your job is to argue that abortion causes the death of a viable human life.

Murder is defined as "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another."

Abortion isn't that.

You'll need to carve out a definition of "viable" that excludes late term fetuses that could survive outside the womb but includes born babies that cannot survive without the care of adults.

Yeah I reject that definition and am not particularly considered with dictionary definitions when determining what is moral.

By this definition we couldn't consider any killing sanctioned by the state to be murder.

There are people for whom this is about control. There are people for whom this is about preventing murder. The two groups, while they may overlap, are not the same; they just vote the same on this topic.

If abortions are bad, then it's good if fewer people get them, whether or not the reduction is spread evenly across different demographics.

If abortions are bad, why are the same people who want to ban abortions the ones who want to ban contraceptives? That would do a lot more to reduce abortions in reality than any law can.

That's a straw man. Only 6% of Americans think birth control should be illegal, https://today.yougov.com/topics/health/articles-reports/2022....

>If abortions are bad, why are the same people who want to ban abortions the ones who want to ban contraceptives? That would do a lot more to reduce abortions in reality than any law can.

I would imagine they believe the point of sex is to conceive. Both those things prevent conception.

I agree. They are not actually trying to reduce the number of abortions, they are taking a religious/moral position.

If drugs are bad, then it's good if fewer people get them, whether or not the reduction is spread evenly across different demographics.

Therefore it's okay to use racially-targeted methods of enforcement and arrest poor, ethnic minorities, etc. as long as we get at least a little drug reduction out of it.

If abortions are bad then providing birth control and sexual education to prevent unwanted pregnancies would be good, right? But those are going to be gutted next.

Hmmmm....

I would think programmers of all people can understand complex problems do not have simple solutions. There are variables to weigh, numbers to be analyzed.

And that’s not even getting what is “good” and “bad” and if a laws purpose is to outright outlaw them without thinking of other measures and consequences.

Ah, but this is where it gets fun. Different power centers see abortions from different perspectives. The state wants ( and benefits from ) more taxpayers, while corporates benefit from ensuring workflow is not interrupted by biological needs.

a lot packed into that if - eg you are including categories such as rape victims who are expected to die in childbirth, feel like you should be explicit in the true extent of what you're advocating

When would someone who's expected to die in childbirth be saved by an abortion but not by an emergency C-section?

Because they didn’t have their body subjected to those last, most difficult months of pregnancy.

My own surprise (but very wanted!) pregnancy was easy the first few months - I even skied up through week 16, but around week 30 I started developing back pain and intermittent numbness in some of my toes that is still around, after nearly two years and lots of physical therapy.

And I was always considered to be having a “healthy” pregnancy, and was pretty healthy beforehand. Only unusual thing is that I was 40.

For a more extreme but still realistic hypothetical, I have a severely physically disabled friend who weighs about 60 lbs and requires regular mechanical breathing assistance. She is, as far as she knows, just as capable of getting pregnant as I am. She also knows that she would not survive more than a few weeks of pregnancy.

There are many people capable of becoming pregnant who live somewhere between these two extremes.

Here’s one update:

The horror is already starting. A nurse sent this message to a nurse on TikTok who has a large platform:

I don't have a platform so I can't reach people like you can, but please share this! I work in ** on a small niku/l&d floor. Our trigger laws went into effect immediately after the decision. ofc we had a woman walk in with an ectopic at 11:30pm last night. We had to basically sit on her until the doc could speak with a lawyer. Her ectopic RUPTURED. She then did not get her procedure done for another 9 hours because the doc was working with the lawyer for so long trying to work around the laws and not lose his license. By the time she had her procedure she had over 600cc of blood in her abdomen and she almost died. I am so scared of how often we as nurses are going to see things like this now and not be able to do a damn thing about it. We're all livid at huddle tonight, several of my coworkers were in tears.

I don't think any states have a trigger law that doesn't have an exception for the mother's life being in danger. This makes me doubt the veracity of the rest of the anecdote.

If the emergency C-section is to get the non viable fetus out , how is that still not an abortion?

The only alternative I can think of is that a women should carry the non viable fetus into term for 9 whole months instead of getting it out of her as soon as she can.

Modern hospitals can save babies born as early as 22 weeks. If a full-term birth would kill the mother, then a date between 22 weeks and full term should be chosen that maximizes the chance that both mother and child survive.

Not just women, you're also talking about forced pregnancy/birth of for instance 11 year old girls

I would imagine the states that outlaw abortions will have significantly fewer. Is there any evidence that comes close to suggesting the rate of abortions is the same now as prior to RvW? America has an abortion rate in line with former Soviet countries and exceptionally higher than most of the western world. It has disproportionally harmed the population that it supposedly “helps”. The eugenicist roots of the founders of the largest supporter should be evidence enough for the goals of that movement.

Other well-off western countries have much cheaper and convenient access to hormonal birth control. In the country I live in, Germany, a month’s supply of pills is about 10 EUR retail, no insurance. On the public insurance the vast majority of women have, they’re 5 EUR/quarter. For women and girls under 20, they’re free.

Should you end up pregnant, it’s illegal to fire you for any reason, and you must either be accommodated or put on paid leave. During that first year of Covid, any nurse or doctor or other employee that had to work with the public was put on paid leave if pregnant if something non-public-facing couldn’t be found for them.

We also get 2/3 of our previous net salary for up to a year after the birth to stay home with our babies, and that was as a mother with a well-employed husband. There is further assistance for women in harder circumstances.

Granted, abortion is (was?) more strictly controlled here. You have to go for “conflict counseling,” but it’s available from both of the major churches (the Lutheran church’s organization aims to help you if you want to go through with the pregnancy, but will give you information on the costs and logistics of termination), other religious associations, as well as secular organizations with a pro-choice point of view (e.g.: ProFamilia). After the 12th week, however, you can only get an abortion if your life or health is in danger, or the fetus has a serious abnormality. Yes, Down Syndrome is an accepted ground for termination, but social support services for mentally-handicapped children and adults are far more comprehensive and reliable here than in the US.

Result? One of the lowest abortion rates in the world among countries where women (mostly) have bodily autonomy.

Maybe that rate of abortion, as it was in Soviet countries, is due to the lack of contraception and family planning in the US. That is tied to the structure of the health system.

Why is it that people that want to outlaw abortion, and are willing to pay for the policing and prosecution resources necessary to enforce that law aren't willing to invest the same amount into contraception that would have a similar effect.

Is it better to clean up after an oil spill, or ensure that the spill doesn't happen in the first place?

The logic that a fetus is a person comes from the inevitability of birth starting at conception — as long as no one interferes, a human person will eventually be born. Therefore, ending the pregnancy early means that person will never be born, so it’s tantamount to killing a newborn baby.

Once you accept a fetus is a person, this same logic can also be extended to argue that life starts at ejaculation; impeding sperm from fertilizing an egg prevents the birth of a person, and is therefore tantamount to murder the same way abortion is.

It’s much more a tenuous an argument, which is why it’s only made by the most extreme people. But I guess that explains why Clarence Thomas is pushing to make contraception illegal today.

> Why is it...

Because it's more exciting to punish Bad People for doing Bad Things than it is to create systems where the Bad People don't want or need to do Bad Things as much.

Illegal abortions don't get recorded in the same way as legal ones do, so the "statistics" are meaningless.

I see no merit in a society that allows unwanted unloved children to be born and lives to now be chained down for 18 years minimum. I

would rather a productive person today then a who knows what 20 years in the future.

Unwanted or unloved by whom? Visit a foster/adoption group and you’ll meet plenty of people wanting to give kids a safe, loving environment. (I’m not saying any particular foster program is adequate, rather the idea that a child is “unwanted” or “unloved” is a fallacy.)

The wealthy/connected are probably better at getting away with murder/theft/rape/etc too, it doesn't mean we should legalise it in the name of equality. Also, nothing prevents further restrictions on abortion in the future, for those that still can get them.