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.
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.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.
Most states have laws regarding causing miscarriage via assault, even California so there are investigations already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now hopefully in the future the argument won’t strike you as odd.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By this definition we couldn't consider any killing sanctioned by the state to be murder.
Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder. Any argument that sidesteps the morality of abortion is not going to convince anyone.