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.
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.