That said what I said holds: this is not a clear-cut case of rights, because the rights of two entities are in question and they are in conflict. Is a handful of cells with human DNA a person? Of course not, it's less biologically developed than an ant. Is a fetus that's developed for 8 months a person? Yeah, at that point it could exit the mother and be a (somewhat) functioning being. Where do we draw the line? At what point is a fetus a person? And from there, we can determine where its rights to not die at the hand of another person begin. And yes, we have to factor in the health of the mother, the health of the fetus, etc into these decisions.
This is, and always has been, a nuanced issue.
My mom marched with Operation Rescue during the summer that culminated in the bombing of an abortion clinic, and later the execution of the Dr that ran the clinic, in his own church, during service, while he was collecting offerings as an usher.
I know in painful depth every detail of how these people think.
It is not nuanced on their side. They outright reject empirical facts. They believe the earth is only 6000 years old, that the dinosaurs died in Noah's flood, and that evolution is a myth, not the central mechanism of all biology.
They do not care about the facts other than pattern matching them as rhetorical thought ending cliches.
They believe because they had an imaginary conversation in their head once, they are now born again, and have a private telepathic phone line to absolute truth. When they feel certain about something, it's the will of god revealed to them through the holy spirit. When other people express opposing certainty, it's because they have been tricked by the devil.
There is no good faith debate on the basis of facts or nuance with these people. You could spend years refuting every single thing they believe on a factual basis beyond any nuance or doubt, and they will blink, look at you, and then say something like "I know what's true in my heart of hearts."
Every single detail of how they talk about this and the actions they take make clear their actual grievance is regulating women's sexual behavior outside of their theocratic conception of marriage.
There is no need to defend these people as some sort of morally principled people confused by the underlying nuances. They are no where near that intellectually honest on the subject.
So you would support an abortion procedure on a fetus after 8 months and two weeks of pregnancy? If you believe this to not be a nuanced issue, then are you in opposition to the original Roe vs Wade ruling that determined personhood for a fetus once it reaches a viable age for survival, and you instead support the ability to abort a fetus all the way up to the moments before birth?
> There is no need to defend these people as some sort of morally principled people confused by the underlying nuances.
I'm confused which one of my comments leads you to believe I'm defending the anti-abortion crowd. I was responding to a comment saying that this is an issue of bodily autonomy rights only. It's not. There are the rights of the unborn child at play as well, hence the nuance.
Most pro-lifers in the upper echelons of intellectual and professional life are probably silent, fearing reprisal.
Go read and learn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rescue_(Kansas)
Wichita is stuck in Kansas, a conservative state yes, but the average person you'll meet there is very similar to who you'd meet in any of the major metro areas. They are captive to a conservative rural minority in a microcosm of the same effect at national scale. "Go to crazy places" is a completely inadequate deflection. You know it.
My family's church went into schism in response to the Tiller murder. The strongest condemnation on the anti murder side was basically "they shouldn't have done that in a church." I cannot recall a single person out of hundreds that condemned the murder (or bombing) itself directly. The closest is my father, who maintains a "abortion should be outlawed except if rape" perspective. Additional useful information here is he failed to know my older brother was sexually abusing me in his own house.
I know "what if" style contrarian takes are an addiction on this forum, but please, do not engage in hypotheticals on this issue if you are not actually familiar and plugged in. You are doing evil purely in the service of some forum warrior "what if I actually have the smart take here" nonsense. These people know they're hypocrites drowning in dissonance. It's central to their mindset. Not only do they not care, they will double down on it every time.
That is irrelevant. At most, where you draw the line could affect what type of abortive procedure doctors would be allowed to employ - if you believe that the fetus is a person, you could mandate that the doctors must remove it from the mother's body without harming it.
But just as you have no obligation to allow someone into your home (and are in fact perfectly within your rights to murder them if they refuse to leave), you have no obligation to grow another person inside your own body.
There is no nuance here. There are only fallacies employed by people who desperately want to uphold some perceived status quo from time immemorial.
It's also important to note that there isn't even any reason to believe ancient Christians considered abortion forbidden or immoral. This is a much more modern invention, one given steam by the desire to oppose sexual liberation.
I find this an interesting argument, but I have to note the difference: the person in your home is willingly violating your space. The fetus is not willingly in your body, and is given no chance whatsoever to leave without being harmed.
So I don't find personhood irrelevant here, and I think the nuance still applies.
> There are only fallacies employed by people who desperately want to uphold some perceived status quo from time immemorial.
So for you, rights begin at birth? I'm not judging, I'm trying to assess your solid position.
> It's also important to note that there isn't even any reason to believe ancient Christians considered abortion forbidden or immoral. This is a much more modern invention, one given steam by the desire to oppose sexual liberation.
I believe this to be irrelevant to the discussion. I think we've already determined that modern anti-abortion Christians are, as a group, often hypocritical. But the discussion has diverged from them and is now about when rights are assigned.
This is an interesting point, but I believe the castle doctrine doesn't make this distinction: if you find someone on your property who you didn't give prior permission to enter, you may murder them, regardless of whether they were there willingly (or even knowingly). For example, if you wake up in the middle of the night to a loud bang and find someone jutting out from your broken front door and shoot before asking questions, you will not be accused of murder or even manslaughter if that person was actually thrown into your house by someone outside.
> So for you, rights begin at birth? I'm not judging, I'm trying to assess your solid position.
I think a compromise where rights begin at viability makes enough sense. I would also be OK with allowing women to request a fetus be removed from their body even after it becomes viable, but not through procedures that are intended to kill it - for example, I could see an argument where a woman should be allowed to have an elective C-section to remove an 8 month fetus/baby from her body, who she could then abandon in the care of the hospital. But, I don't think it would be OK to request a procedure where an 8 month fetus is killed in utero and removed.
For non-elective procedures (where the life of the mother is at stake) the discussion is more open-ended, I believe.
Essentially, the right of the mother to her own body is quite obviously separate from the fetus' right to life. People who seek to conflate them are typically doing so with ulterior motives.
As someone else was pointing out, taking the extreme view of fetal personhood, while still correctly recognizing a woman's right to her own body, one should seek to (a) prevent any procedure that outright kills the foetus, (b) demand the mother carry the pregnancy until it is viable, (c) allow only late term "abortions" where the fetus is removed from the mother's body and kept alive on life support.
I think the difference here is that there's no "a wild fetus appeared" but rather something intentional happened (intercourse of some kind). There's some level of acceptance/invitation here. If you invite someone into your house and they accept, that doesn't give you license to immediately kill them.
Granted, there are things like rape which need to be part of the equation.
I've said it a number of times in the comments but I will say it again: I think the original Roe vs Wade ruling had a great stance on the issue: once a fetus is old enough to survive, it receives personhood. I still think this is the most acceptable of all outcomes.
> I think a compromise where rights begin at viability makes enough sense. I would also be OK with allowing women to request a fetus be removed from their body even after it becomes viable, but not through procedures that are intended to kill it - for example, I could see an argument where a woman should be allowed to have an elective C-section to remove an 8 month fetus/baby from her body, who she could then abandon in the care of the hospital. But, I don't think it would be OK to request a procedure where an 8 month fetus is killed in utero and removed.
I think we see eye to eye here.
> For non-elective procedures (where the life of the mother is at stake) the discussion is more open-ended, I believe.
Right: which life is more important? Difficult questions, and survivability factors have to come into play here.
> Essentially, the right of the mother to her own body is quite obviously separate from the fetus' right to life. People who seek to conflate them are typically doing so with ulterior motives.
Separate rights with intersection at a point of conflict (assuming the fetus wants to live, which of course cannot be reasonably determined). I don't know if you're considering acknowledging of this conflict a "conflation" but if so, then I have to disagree.
> As someone else was pointing out, taking the extreme view of fetal personhood, while still correctly recognizing a woman's right to her own body, one should seek to (a) prevent any procedure that outright kills the foetus, (b) demand the mother carry the pregnancy until it is viable, (c) allow only late term "abortions" where the fetus is removed from the mother's body and kept alive on life support.
This seems to tip the scales in favor of fetal personhood over female bodily autonomy. I'm not a woman, but I think I would find it horribly painful to carry the child of someone who raped me and I'd likely want to get it out of me as soon as possible.
Are you saying this is a hypothetical position that anti-abortion people should support, assuming they were being logically consistent? If so, then yeah, that would seem to make sense.
Yes, that would be at least logically consistent of them.
I could argue that ability of an organism to survive on its own is not a requirement nor a sufficient criteria for neither personhood (a legal construct) or anything in lines of sentience, self-awareness and sapience (philosophical constructs commonly associated with a person, although it's not a clear cut - e.g. a person may become incapacitated and is still considered a person).
You're misunderstanding me here (and I think this is the crux of a lot of "liberal" misfire on this and other issues): I don't think they're hypocrites, I think they're operating on different axioms from me (and probably you) and their views are entirely self-consistent. Absolutely reprehensible axioms to me, but they're not idiots.
There is a minor hypocrisy in framing, but it's not really important and you never have to talk long before the real axioms come along. Just look at this subthread's dissenting views and find the cases where people subtly or overtly admit that "life" is relative, and the innocence of the child is key. Then consider: innocent compared to who?
They do not believe that people have a right to life. They believe innocent people have a right to life. Once you understand that, what they say makes more sense. The mother who has a child out of wedlock (rarely will they consider the possibility a married person might need or want an abortion) and the man in your house demanding food have a thing in common: they both broke a rule considered sacrosanct and they both "knew what they were doing had consequences" (never mind broken condoms, hormonal birth control not working for medical reasons, let alone more obvious things like rape).
It's not hypocrisy. Most people who fall on the side of "pro-life" arguments believe these things for reasons that make sense to them, and not always for religious reasons.
If a single mother struggles it's because she deserves it. If her child suffers for that struggle it's her fault. So long as there's something or someone to blame, you can ignore the question of how you could have prevented the problem in the first place.
In fact, if you provide her support, you might be rewarding her infidelity. And then people will perceive that as a reasonable thing to do and more people will do it and then and then and then....
But the important thing is that she didn't "sin" by "killing the baby". If the baby dies after it's born, it's also her fault.
Like I said, there's no hypocrisy there. Being a hypocrite isn't the worst thing someone can be. It's entirely possible to have a perfectly (or as perfectly as humans are capable of) self-consistent worldview that is also incredibly cruel. I think a lot of people have lost sight of that.
At some point people started to believe that conservativism was about "preserving the past" but that's subtly wrong. It's about "preserving hierarchies". Recognizing that all people are worthy of life is contrary to the idea that some people deserve what's coming to them.
> 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.
This is a shallow read. Why do they believe the baby should be protected from harm and not the mother who wants to or needs to end the pregnancy? Or the person who broke into your home?
I've literally never had or seen a conversation about abortion with a pro-lifer that when it went down this rabbit hole didn't eventually get to the idea that the innocence of the child matters more than the life of the child (and thus the lack of innocence of the mother).
Yet when my friend lost a child to a miscarriage, they grieved.
It's interesting to note when people latch on to starkly dehumanizing rhetoric such as you've displayed. It's not just in the abortion debate.
A lot of people really want this question to be black and white, and struggle to make it so, but it really isn't and never will be.
Why do you want other women who did not choose this way to go over the potentially even more terrible thing of birthing a child at significant health risks she half-loves (as hormones are powerful things), half-hates? That just kills 2 people mentally.
Parasites are organisms that reduce the host's fitness while giving nothing in return. Babies are the exact polar opposite of parasites. They are literally the entire reason you're alive as far as evolution is concerned.
I'm sure any reasonably intelligent and good faith person would parse "Evolution is concerned" as a metaphor, just like they parse "The computer looks up the ip address in the DNS server" or "The atom shares some of its outer electrons".
>not all pro-social behaviors are directly reproductive
How is this relevant ?
And it's relevant because even if you assume that there's some magical driving force to persist a species, there are ways individuals contribute to it other than having offspring. Thus, it is not their sole purpose.
This is trivially true, a computer's entire reason for existence is to be used by a user, and looking up DNS servers is a crucial part of what makes that happens.
Similarly, a living organism entire reason for existence is to manufacture copies of itself, and, for female mammals, that means carrying babies.
>People don't have an "evolutionary purpose,"
This is just semantic hair-splitting. Planets don't have a 'purpose' either, but every single one of them finds a star and goes around it, and the ones that don't just can't find a star close enough. It's fair to say that, in a very real sense, planets only exist to revolve around stars, their very being necessitates it. This doesn't mean they are "aware" of it.
People are similarly machines made and remade by evolution to do a single thing : spread copies of themselves. It doesn't matter that evolution "didn't mean" to make them that way, they are that way anyhow. And they will behave that way.
>there's some magical driving force to persist a species
It's not magical, it's all the hormones and electricity flowing inside every part of you. You can see it on a screen and measure its concentration.
>Thus, it is not their sole purpose.
Yes it is, Evolution doesn't care that you founded a startup or worked for SpaceX, unless those things increase your genetic copies somehow.
You can write something like "if we look at it from a lens other than biology" before your statement to make it more correct, but I was replying to a person who compared pregnancy to a parasitic relationship, therefore they were invoking biology. Biology, in no uncertain terms, makes it quite clear that this is bullshit. Every living organism, in biology's book, is a self replicating machine made for nothing but spreading copies of itself.
The other meaning you want to use necessarily require intelligent design - there is no higher level goal to a human’s life in itself, as that would require something designing it for such. Though sure it depends on religious interpretation as well, but then higher level goals are usually claimed - so decide whether you mean the biological cause for our existence which is simply a side effect of a population that grows and is fit to their environment, or some chosen Deity’s higher level goals for an individual. None of those makes us primitive replica generators.
You said that babies are parasites, this is just factually false (aside from being dehumanizing and disgusting, but that's typical for most mainstream pro abortion arguments, so I will just ignore that aspect). A parasite isn't just "any organism that lives inside me and makes me feel pain", by that definition, your own immune cells would be parasites in some cases.
Outside of popular movies and video games, parasites are organisms that are
(1) typically of a different species than their host(s), and
(2) depend on 1 or more host for their entire life and reproduction cycle, and
(3) manipulate the host(s), usually maliciously, for their benefit while giving no benefit in return.
You can also add a (4)th point about the host(s) usually not "knowing" they are being manipulated, but maybe that will get too philosophical, I can't be sure if parasitised animals realize anything is wrong with them, but the safe thing to say is that
(4) the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite. It is said that sexual reproduction itself is an anti-parasite countermeasure: the 2-way genetic mixing serves as a "jammer" to make life hard for parasites.
Points (1) and (2) are trivially false for babies. Point (3) is also false, but more subtly : the baby isn't "manipulating" the mother's body, it is itself a piece of the mother's body that gained independence, and the mother's body is adapted to willingly give it whatever it needs to survive and thrive. Point (4) is trivially false as long as the mother's impregnation wasn't due to rape.
I don't understand where all the philosophical baggage about "Design" and "Purpose" came from, I'm just correcting your sloppy use of "Parasite". A female human’s body is a machine perfectly adapted to having babies. This isn't a normative statement about that body's 'higher' purpose or what it 'should' do, just an empirical observation that refutes any similarity between babies and parasites, because parasites are invading entities that exploit "bugs" and "vulnerabilities" in the bodies they inhabit and control, while babies are first-class entities that have dedicated machinery and full, intentional support from any healthy female body that hosts them.
It would be like opening a python interpreter and being shocked that you can do Arbitrary Code Execution at the prompt, *that's literally what an interpreter is*, that's what it does, why it's designed and implemented. You haven't discovered a vulnerability, you just discovered an interpreter. Hosting babies is why the female primate body is adapted the way it is, there is nothing parasitic (read as: 'incidental', 'invading', 'foreign') to it, parasitism is when you exploit a body against its own fitness, just like a security vulnerability is exploiting a program against its own purpose. A python interpreter executing arbitrary python code isn't a security vulnerability, and a female human hosting a human embryo isn't parasitism.
So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements, but just to clear things up, Oxford’s dictionary only has this as a “requirement”: “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense.”
And this is absolutely true of human babies, technically, no matter how disgusting the notion is. Technically true is still true.
And no, the female body is not made for bearing children. Women usually have the ability otherwise evolution would select against them, but babies are not “first-class” in any way, otherwise there would be no such thing as Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus). There is no design in evolution, it is a spaghetti code where the vulnerability of a vulnerability happened to be a feature over time and everything seems to be working statistically good enough in extant species, just enough so that they can reproduce enough to not go extint.
Off course there is plenty of any thing in biology, I was describing every single parasite I know of or read about.
You can remove that requirement from the list if you want.
>I sure hope you don’t mean manipulation in a sci-fi brain controll way,
That would be ridiculous. I meant 'manipulate' as in "cause something to happen for your own benefit" which is an extremely boring way of saying that the parasite has all the agency, the host body is not cooperating with it. Unlike a baby, which the host body is bending over backward to host and nurture, the parasite is 'making its own living'.
>how the hell knowledge even come into the picture
Did you just mis-quote me on that? Because I remember quite clearly that this isn't my actual 4th point, it was a philosophical remark that I said could be a 4th point, my actual 4th point was
>>the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite.
Do you have problems with that as a necessary requirement for parasitism?
>So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements
3 out of 4 of them are true when you take the time to interpret them as I meant them, and the 4th isn't exactly wrong either. I'm curious as to your definition of "made up".
>Oxford’s dictionary
Dictionary definitions are frequently less accurate than domain specific definitions.
>an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species
>this is absolutely true of human babies
Uhm... human babies are another species?
>the female body is not made for bearing children.
The entirety of this statement truth value rests on a semantic game played on 'made'. You define 'made' as necessarily requiring an intelligent design, whereas I define it simply as whatever happens when a process produce behaviourally-consistent artifacts. The vast majority of planets revolve around stars, therefore planets can be said to be 'made' to orbit stars. The vast majority of female bodies are well-equipped to carry babies, therefore female bodies can be said to be 'made' to carry babies.
When I say 'made', I don't necessarily imply a 'purpose' or a 'designer', I'm simply pointing out the sheer consistency of a form to its function, the female body is as suitable to carrying children as a planet is suitable to orbiting stars.
>Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus)
Well, every program has its bugs :). How common is Rh disease? How many healthy babies are born for every baby attacked by Rh? Your own immune system turns mad sometimes and start killing you from the inside, does that imply that your immune system is not a machine with killing threats as the main purpose?
>good enough
This is underselling it. It's not hit or miss with a 50-50 or 70-30 %, the things you describe are extraordinarily rare, rarer than computer bugs and manufacturing defects in human-made machines.
Your actions didn't cause the squatter to come into the house, while it's the pregnant woman's actions that caused the baby to form inside her. A better analogy would be you advertising free food and residence, then changing your mind after a squatter comes to take you on your word.
I personally believe you shouldn't kill a squatter as long as no credible threat to your life exists, you can always remove by force, non lethal weapons are a thing. I also believe you don't have the right to terminate a being's life when you're the one who started it in the first place, no matter how much you dress it up in colorful language and fanciful thought experiments.
It's a fundamentally treasonous thing to do, to invite someone into life then quash them like a fly at the earliest inconvenience.
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.
Unless you think they'd all be ok with a squatter coming into their house and demanding food and that they wouldn't use their guns on them. But they think a mother should be required to literally risk her life in order to support a being she may not have chosen to create.
You don't need to give the benefit of the doubt here. You don't need to believe disingenuous arguments just because people say they're what they mean. 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.