I think the position that the zygote is where the rights start is bad. I concede it is where life starts, but life is just not a very good designation for that. If anything it should be about suffering or a nervous system - something beyond just replicating cells.
Since vast majority of abortions happen in the early stages anyway, often the late stage ones are particularly tragic situations where the mother wanted to carry the baby to term, but can't for health reasons. It's why I'm in favor of broad rights and think that despite the fact it is ending a life, we're better off on net for women to retain that capability (the state shouldn't be getting involved).
I can understand a reasonable person disagreeing and thinking at some point the fetus is developed enough and shouldn't be terminated without cause (basically the law in Denmark, France, etc.). I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.
There isn't a constitutional right, there's a good-faith disagreement, and the finding of a constitutional right in Roe was always a bit tortured [0] and the blow back from this has been unhealthy for our democracy (imo).
This is a nuanced position that doesn't fit well into partisan politics, it's also a third rail topic - but it's where I've ultimately landed (for now).
- people are forced to give birth against their will
- people are not
Saying this is a State issue or that it should be decided legislatively ignores that this is a fundamental human rights issue for people who can become pregnant. No legislative regime should be able to force someone to give birth against their will.
There's a "but what about the rights of the fetus" argument, but here again you're faced with two unsatisfying possibilities:
- you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent
- you allow no exceptions, which is wildly extreme
So again, granting individual rights to a fetus is a radical position that our society largely won't accept. It moots the conception of "when does life begin", or, I would actually argue that society has pretty much decided this already:
- Society does not support killing children
- Society supports abortion in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant person
- Society agrees abortion does not kill a child
(again see here that deciding that a fetus is a child if it was not the result of rape/incest, or its carrier will survive the pregnancy is wholly irrational)
I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no. It's possible to try to have policy that understands the tradeoffs here and tries to get the best outcome we can despite them even though it's messy. It's why I think "life" isn't the right determinant.
So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
That said, again my personal position is it's better on net for society to allow women full discretion here - but I don't think these kinds of casual constraints are irrational or inconsistent.
Oh, I personally believe that and I think most people do. Sorry, maybe we've lost the plot on this a little:
> The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.
I argue that society has already decided this. Nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. This is all squarely within what Americans support.
> I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.
I argue that the constitutional rights of the embryo/fetus (such as they are) do not outweigh the constitutional rights of the pregnant person. If someone thinks an embryo/fetus has rights, they have to contend with a bunch of unpalatable things [0] (criminalizing many popular forms of birth control, IVF, the morning after pill, miscarriages, stillbirths, etc.). At the most extreme end--personhood--they have to either defend a brutal no exceptions regime, or an inconsistent exceptions regime where you're deciding whether or not an embryo/fetus is alive based on some irrelevant circumstances.
> So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
But again, I also argue that society has already decided this. We actually agree with the current regime: nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. Why do we need to punt this to the States? Why are States rushing to put stricter and stricter controls on abortion?
The answer is that Republicans fomented a moral panic in the 70s in order to pull evangelical votes. They proceeded to push misinformation into the public about abortion, the kind of people who get abortions, and why they get abortions. This distorted the public view. Again, in reality the state of abortion is what the vast majority of Americans support. There's no need for this to be an issue anywhere. It's a wedge issue pushed by a craven political party in order to gain power. That's literally the beginning and end of it.
[0]: https://harvardcrcl.org/the-many-problems-of-personhood/
Birth is caused by pregnancy. Pregnancy is caused by sex.
There’s a simple way to avoid being “forced” to carry a pregnancy to term: either don’t have sex, or use one of the many contraceptive methods - use two if you are really worried!
Yes this doesn’t work in all cases, in cases of rape for instance - but that is why abortion laws often make exceptions for rape, fetal abnormality, risk to life of the mother, etc. Abortion is not the binary black-and-white issue that is presented in American politics, most countries have quite some nuance in their law on abortion.
Returning to the case of merely undesired pregnancies, restricting those abortions does not force anybody to do anything, it commits them to the logical consequence of their action that resulted in the creation of a new human.
Balancing the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn is the responsibility of the law. It is not satisfactory to cede all rights to the mother, nor to cede all rights to the unborn child, as the two extremist positions in the US seem to want to do.
Roe and Casey actually both balanced the state's interest in fetal life with the mothers liberty, Roe with the trimester framework and Casey with the viability line. I urge you to actually read them.
[1]: https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2016/05/sex-gender
[2]: https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender
[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934/
>science
What you call "Science^TM", I actually call a bunch of ideologically motivated sophistry with no hard evidence behind it. Science isn't based purely on authority, a bunch of "Science^TM" organisations spouting nonsense on their public facing web page doesn't make the nonsense science, it just reduces the organisations' credibility.
>politeness
Politeness is just what true believers call conformity. Its not a good trait to be polite to delusions.
I also find it amusing you invoke politeness on what is supposedly to be a factual matter. Is it a matter of "politeness" to say the earth is round?
Science has prestige nowadays, so many people (including many actual scientists!) are motivated to associate unrelated ideological positions with it in order to exploit that prestige for the benefit of those other positions. IMHO, when someone says something like "I believe in Science," they're usually talking about that unrelated ideological stuff.
It may surprise you, but women are people.
I hate delusions.
>women are people
I thereby propose that all nouns be cancelled, since everything in the universe is a Lump Of Atoms, we don't need any more nouns to express ourselves.
A Lump Of Atoms sat on a Lump Of Atoms to eat a Lump Of Atoms with a Lump Of Atoms on the side.
Just kidding, I know how language works. It works by assigning names to patterns. If several names are assigned to the same pattern, the most specific and distinct one is used. Women is the most distinguishing name for the pattern "people who spawn people", and refusal to use the name is associated with a lower critical thinking and higher conformity to ideological fashions.
It might also surprise you that these laws tend to be strongly supported by Republicans. For example, this bill cosponsored by all Rs that (failed) to make it enforced Federally: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s3236
Clearly it is not hard for a lot of people in the US to imagine this, since that is what they believe.
Well if they do, they're not acting like it. For example, miscarriages are pretty rampant. If there were a disease that affected people the same way miscarriages affect embryos and fetuses, it would be a bonkers plague that reduced our population to a a fraction of what it is. I imagine people would be acting differently than they are if we really equated humans with fetuses on this level.
Or we can go full personhood. How do we discern the will of a 14 week old fetus? What constitutes child abuse? When do child support payments start? Can fetuses sue for damages? What do their free worship rights look like? Do fetuses have a right to medical care? Can a fetus earn income and pay taxes? Do fetuses count towards population for apportionment?
I don't doubt the sincerity of people's held positions on abortion. What I do doubt is the rationality, and the more I dig into it, the more I find tons of ignorance about women, fetuses, and pregnancy.
I think fossuser got it exactly correct: there is a good-faith disagreement here. The disagreement is "when does a citizen come into existence?". This is what lawmakers are supposed to decide - we elect them to draw a line in the sand. Denmark's line seems extremely reasonable.
Fair! Well, a couple things.
First, many abortions are not chosen. We can go a little further and say many conceptions are not chosen (assault), but it's a little irrelevant, so I'm just noting.
Second I'm not comparing abortions to miscarriages. I'm comparing miscarriage (a thing that affects embryos and fetuses) to a disease that affects born people. In doing so, I note the different reactions people have to miscarriage (it's natural and unavoidable) to the reactions people have to a disease that statistically killed as many born people as miscarriage kills embryos and fetuses (the vast majority of us die, it's very very bad).
To me, this is strong evidence that we value embryos and fetuses differently than born people.
How many? There is a survey floating around the Internet that asked ~2000 women in 2003 about abortion reasons, and about 80% or so said what amounted to "Pregnancy was too inconvenient". Was that updated ?
>many conceptions are not chosen
Again, how many? That same 2003 survey had 0.1% as the percentage of women who reported rape as the reason they aborted. People are arguing against the common case, the common case I'm seeing is celebrities and middle class women writing op-eds about how without abortion they would have never gotten that raise and pregnancy demolished their career.
>I'm comparing miscarriage (a thing that affects embryos and fetuses) to a disease that affects born people.
I think pro abortion folks have this common failure mode where they notice the non-linearity of the brain's moral response on abortion, and think that it points to a deeper hypocrisy or contradiction somewhere in the anti abortion stance.
Here is a couple of examples of things where people believe something but "don't act like it" :
- Vegetarians and Vegans (I'm one of them btw) believe that hundreds of millions of sentient, moral-consideration-worthy persons are murdered in the most brutal and cowardly fashion each year, and that doesn't turn them catastrophically mad or into genocidal terrorists.
- Climate Change believers (I'm one of them btw) believe that our (in)actions now is setting the stage for the death of tens of million and the suffering of hundreds of millions of human and non-human animals, as well as uncountable billions of damage in material resources. They don't seem to be doing much except shouting, just like standard politics.
- Believers in the harm of smoking (I'm... Ah screw it) think that 1.1 billion people are actively killing themselves by poisoning, and slowly poisoning those around them, 7 million people are killed each year due to this mass voluntary poisoning, more than 1/10 of WW2. And yet, I don't see any crusades (except the usual advocacy).
The point is, what you're describing isn't new. It's what I called the brain's "Non Linear Moral Response" above, your brain saturates. One death makes you cry, two deaths make you scream, 3 make you want to gouge your own eyes off, but 10 just make you numb. And beyond 50 or so its just meaningless data. Your brain isn't equipped to respond meaningfully to tragedies at scale. That's probably for your own good.
I'd love it if you can link it, until then I'm gonna ignore it.
> Here is a couple of examples of things where people believe something but "don't act like it" :
I'm actually sympathetic to this! Humans are pretty great at tolerating outrageous things. The effective altruism movement is essentially all about this, or yeah, like your last paragraph.
My point isn't simply "they don't act like it". My point is that there are lots of other, easier things pro-life advocates could do to reduce abortion rates, but they focus on controlling women. My hypothesis here is that the pro-life movement is fundamentally misogynistic, and wholly uninterested in measures that would reduce abortion rates while allowing women to be 1st class Americans. The point is to make women 2nd class Americans again.
I couldn't find what I had in mind, but here's a visualisation of a 1998 meta study[1], where the reasons for abortion are broken down. In the US, abortion due to fears about the mother's health is (eyeballing it) less than 2%, fetus defects? less than 2%, "other" (which presumably include rape)? Less than 1% and that's being generous.
So, the 3 reasons where I support, grudgingly as the lesser evil, abortion account for about 5% of total abortions. 1/20. 19 out of every 20 abortion is because abortion defenders have made baby killing an acceptable contraceptive solution. More than 60% of the cases is one variant or the other of "Baby is too inconvenient", the rest is slightly more defensible versions of it ("mother was too immature", "partner was not ready"). You're, essentially, killing something extremely, dangerously, close to a human, because the very people who brought it to life changed their mind. Why, why did they bring it to life in the first place?
>My point is that there are lots of other, easier things pro-life advocates could do to reduce abortion rates
You don't have the right to tell people how they should fight for their principles. An animal rights activist might choose to educate, or save street animals, or campaign against raising cattle, or blow themselves up in a slaughterhouse. People enact their principles in a variety of ways, you just notice those who choose the methods you find most reprehensible. But this doesn't mean other people aren't doing other things.
>My hypothesis here is that the pro-life movement is fundamentally misogynistic
I'm trying to be charitable here but you're making it extremely difficult, so here are some facts
1- I'm not American, but I can be described to have moderately pro life views, in that I think abortion should be always banned, except for the 3 reasons I listed above, which (after proof) would bypass the ban at any moment in the pregnancy.
2- It's not misogyny to hold women accountable for their actions. Pregnancy is the direct result of the women's actions, it is fair for the woman to bear responsibility for it. Indeed, countless contraceptive variants (male variants soon to exist in mass production) have decoupled pregnancy and consequences of women's actions to a very high degree, so it's even less defensible or justifiable to get pregnant then change your mind. As Progressives are extremely fond of saying in other contexts, "Freedom Doesn't Mean Freedom From Consequences", irresponsible women are as free and as first-class as anyone, they are just not allowed to kill babies for their convenience, especially when they had every chance to prevent that baby from being born in the first place, or wait months and abandon it to someone else.
3-50% or so of women are against abortion in the United States, and men are divided roughly equally, so its remarkable that hating women is this diverse of a position, you would think that it would be more male-skewed than this.
4- Abortion is philosophically complex and a morally treacherous. A big part of my pro life bias is as a counter reaction to the obnoxious moral certainty of the progressive variant of abortion defenders, those who find it morally okay to "shout their abortion" and compare babies to cancer and parasites. I, quite frankly, want to punish those people. If I detect any kind of moral uncertainty or recognition of the fundamental evil you're flirting with when you argue for more permissive abortion, I'm usually inclined to show some moral uncertainty of my own.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion#/media/File%3AAGIAb...
Is your pro-life position such that you only allow an exception for the life/health of the pregnant person, even in the 1st trimester? That's pretty radical.
> You don't have the right to tell people how they should fight for their principles.
Society has the right to balance people's interests. People who can become pregnant have (I think obviously) a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy, as does every free person. The state has to balance that interest--indeed that right--against others' pro-life positions. My argument is that there are lots of compromise measures that actually work to reduce abortion bans without doing things like increasing the death rate of pregnant people [0]. 70% of people who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially. It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty.
> I'm not American, but I can be described to have moderately pro life views, in that I think abortion should be always banned, except for the 3 reasons I listed above, which (after proof) would bypass the ban at any moment in the pregnancy.
Just to be clear, your views are not moderate, they are extreme. The vast majority of people support unrestricted abortion in the 1st trimester. Further your position--again--leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.
> Pregnancy is the direct result of the women's actions
Again you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.
> ...irresponsible women...
Ah, here we are. This is misogyny. Birth control fails. People are assaulted. Some people are in abusive relationships where they're unable to use birth control yet forced to have sex. Please learn about this issue before you start impugning others.
> 3-50% or so of women are against abortion in the United States, and men are divided roughly equally...
This is wrong, or at least wildly unnuanced [1].
> A big part of my pro life bias is as a counter reaction to the obnoxious moral certainty of the progressive variant of abortion defenders, those who find it morally okay to "shout their abortion" and compare babies to cancer and parasites.
I get this. But I think you're taking out your frustration on the wrong people here. There were nearly a million abortions in the US in 2020. Practically none of those people are taking to Twitter and doing the kinds of things you're talking about. They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.
> I, quite frankly, want to punish those people.
This is misogyny too.
[0]: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/abortion-restrict...
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/244097/legality-abortion-2018-d...
Plus fetus defects and rape/incest/whatever. Those are the only 3 reasons someone may be allowed to kill the future human they brought in my book.
>That's pretty radical.
And that's okay, radicalism is a good thing when the mainstream is morally bankrupt. I also think people shouldn't kill insects unless harmed by them and that animal cruelty's (by adults) punishment is jail and\or death. Those are radical positions, but they are only so because the mainstream doesn't recognize the fundamental evil they are allowing, not because I'm deliberately being a troll or an extremist who go out of my way to become a radical. The simple principle "If something can feel pain, it deserves not to feel pain" can lead you to astonishing mismatches with people and their accepted morality.
>People who can become pregnant...
Women.
>... have a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy
Which they have, right until it affects another person. Nobody is legislating to force women to be pregnant, just that if they do become pregnant, then that's a life over there, and a life that they brought into existence as a result of their actions on top of that (Rape is an explicit exception, I don't have to say this one more time), they don't get to have "Autonomy" over a body that isn't theirs. "But that body is inside theirs" well my friend they put it there, they have to wait till it get out on its own, or until it threatens their own life. Nothing else is acceptable.
>increasing the death rate of pregnant people
Again, they are called women, and my position above (and the vast majority of others) would make sure that their life is never threatened. And the decision we're discussing never said anything about banning abortion in general.
>70% of [Women] who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially
And most violent murders is done by poor people to poor people. What should we do first : criminalize murder or help people out of poverty? I would like if we can do both, and if it was up to me I would try the second as hard as I can for as long as I can before the first. But the first has to be done, and now is as good a time as ever.
>It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty
As an anti-natalist, there is nothing I would like more than people to stop having children, especially children they will drag into poverty. But the solution is not to legalize killing proto babies, this argument will lead you to "We should bomb children in Afghanistan and Syria, since they have a vastly lower quality of life waiting for them", and who knows, maybe that's correct, but even I, moral radical as I'm, am not yet ready to accept that.
Acceptable solutions can be
- Widespread popular education and contraceptive availability
- Societal shame around having children when you're poor
- Adoption
>your position leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.
>you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.
I don't know why you keep saying that when I have repeatedly said that all those should be exceptions to any abortion ban. Every single one of those things is one of the 3 (and only 3) reasons I think abortion should be allowed, *at any time in the 9 months*.
>This is misogyny.
Very well then, so let it be. I'm a misogynist.
>Birth control fails
Not in 99.9% of the cases when you use it correctly, responsibly and redundantly, and the rest is an acceptable risk that you bear the consequences of when you accept it.
>People are assaulted. >Some people are in abusive relationship
So rape? It's a good thing then that this is one of the very important exceptions, as I said about 3 or 4 times now.
>They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.
And we help them by, among countless other things, making it illegal to do the wrong thing. Nobody decent benefits from convenience abortion.
>> I, quite frankly, want to punish those people. >This is misogyny too.
Thank you, I will wear it proudly. It's my utmost pride and pleasure to hate people who don't respect life, life that they're the reason it exists in the first place. If hating the subset of women who are like that is misogyny, then misogyny is a moral duty.
Theoretically yeah, but the stats [0] pretty much moot it. Some quick clips:
- 79.3% of abortions were performed at ≤9 weeks’ gestation
- nearly all (92.7%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation
The point here is that "nearly all" abortions occur very early in development. It's hard to imagine that something the size of a chocolate chip has "individual rights", especially when balanced against the rights of the pregnant person.
This is important because as you move through the trimesters, cases become crushingly tragic [1]. We're talking things like "we probably thought your fetus was abnormal in the 2nd trimester but you couldn't bring yourself to do it until the 3rd", cancer, fetal death, etc.
There's this myth that it's like Celebrity Deathmatch out there: women vs. babies, but the stats are clear: nearly all abortions happen in the 1st trimester, and then when they don't it's typically scheduling or something very tragic happened.
All of which should force us to ask: what's the urgent need for regulation on this?
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10426234/