Our (now healthy, five year old) son was definitely killing his mother from the womb; her liver was about to shut down due to HELLP syndrome when we did an induction. 50 years earlier and she and my child would be dead. This does actually kill people today: https://www.propublica.org/article/die-in-childbirth-materna... is an account of a neonatal ICU nurse who died from HELLP five years before my wife's doctor caught it. Childbirth can be really scary and dangerous.

I feel grateful you shared that story to talk of the dangers of pregnancy and also really really grateful that the medical field is improving with dealing with that condition and that both your son and his mother survived.

Arguments like this don't win the hearts and minds of people (maybe not your intent). Calling fetuses/babies parasites may sound to you like a clever analogy but to most other people it just sounds crass.

Oh I don't like the argument at all. I felt disgusted even writing it. I also don't like the argument of using self-defense as a reason to shoot people or the death penalty or frankly the assumption that other people have evil intent. I think the vast majority of us are trying our best and accidentally hurt people (EDIT: and that people feel hurt after our actions, not necessarily caused by them but more likely correlated).

But I do believe that some people who are pregnant and would like abortions may perceive the child as being parasitic (not a parasite, as I also don't like to attach strict labels of badness to one's identity but to focus on behaviors).

So I agree it sounds crass and yet think if others want to use self-defense for other arguments defending their harm to others, I don't see why that same argument couldn't apply here.

You're right, but I hold hope for an enlightened electorate that makes careful decisions when prohibiting other peoples' rights. This analogy is useful in exploring that space.

100%. The court took this decision away from human beings. You no longer get to choose when you procreate. At some point, the court says no longer your choice.

> The court took this decision away from human beings.

No, the court remanded the lawmaking decision to the states, as it should be.

There's this section of the CA-NV border known as "state line", which has a litany of casinos just right on the NV side of that border. The notion that different states have different laws is a fact we've accepted since the founding of our country.

When AZ bans abortion, Arizona women will be mildly inconvenienced by a three hour drive to the CA border, as other matters of state law divergence have always been. Nobody has lost their rights.

Cynically, I'd suggest that abortion rights aren't even the issue at hand - lots of people seem very angry/afraid that after a century of DC slowly arrogating all available power and authority to itself, that this power might flow back the other way.

> No, the court remanded the lawmaking decision to the states, as it should be.

I'm ok with this argument, as I believe that legislatures, national and state, should write laws to address these issues, not rely on court precedent.

> Cynically, I'd suggest that abortion rights aren't even the issue at hand - lots of people seem very angry/afraid that after a century of DC slowly arrogating all available power and authority to itself, that this power might flow back the other way.

I disagree that this is the main reason, because SCOTUS just basically said the NY state law against guns in public was unconstitutional, and Congress is passing a national gun law as we speak.

So I find it hard to believe that it's just about state's rights, because it's giving states some rights in one week while also taking away other rights.

Not everyone owns a car. Plus, that's just AZ women. A woman in Miami will likely have a 14+ hour drive to get an abortion.

When you find yourself explaining an ordinary biological process, especially one that millions of people regard as wondrous and miraculous, in this manner, does it not inspire you to take any sort of pause and wonder if you're engaging in a kind of special pleading? Intellectually and emotionally, is this really how you want to characterize pregnancy? I think one should be careful not to arrive at monstrous conclusions in service of political ends.

I have a child, and will likely be having another. I love them dearly. But to pretend that the birth process was "wondrous and miraculous" is papering over reality. It was bloody and gruesome. My wife was given an epidural to help control the very significant amounts of pain. During the birth, there was blood everywhere. While the newborn was being attended to by nurses, my wife had her vagina stitched back together. And to this day she deals with prolapse, which is where her organs drop out of her vagina. Among my friend groups, this was one of the easier/more routine pregnancies.

I agree with you. I felt disgusted writing it. For me, pregnancy inspires feelings of wonder and magic and awe. Yet for others, pregnancy may cause them to feel fear, pain, and hopelessness.

I don't want to characterize pregnancy this way, I also don't want to characterize almost any human interaction this way. I prefer to believe that we all have good intentions and sometimes accidentally hurt people and that most of us are trying our absolute best to minimize pain and maximize joy, especially to those around us. So what can hurt me is how so many mothers may feel pain whether they keep the baby or abort, and we often demonize them for making one of the hardest and most gut-wrenching decisions in their lives. That's not to say I don't feel pain for the unborn child, I also feel the pain of the lost life. But I also feel the pain for the child who is born and kills the mother, or who is born and is resented by the mother or abandoned.

I feel pain all around the situation and it hurts me that we can be so quick to demonize the unborn child or the mother.

> Your comment actually made me think of something I had never considered: perhaps the mother's right against the child is self-defense.

I doubt that argument would get far in the case of most abortions, but it might work in cases where the mother's life is at much more risk than is normal for pregnancy, especially where the pregnancy has gone so wrong that there is almost no chance the baby is going to make it.

Yeah, I think it'd be more obvious in cases of extreme physical harm, but harder to argue in cases of lesser physical harm or even in terms of emotional harm, regardless of how extreme.

The mother's choice to have sex creates the organism in the first place. That adds complexity to the topic not addressed in your argument.

Many of the abortion bans going into effect soon/now have no exception for rape

Woman's choice is removed in circumstances of rape and I agree that that very much changes things. Rape accounts for less than 0.5% of abortions though, so while very important to consider, it'd be incorrect to assume that all abortions are due to rape.

https://abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/

Banning abortion except in the cases of rape would, however, result in many fewer abortion providers and make it inaccessible for many victims of rape. There's also implementation difficulties: do you need some kind of certificate from the legal system saying you were raped (way too restrictive), or is it just a matter of self attestation (for pro-lifers, likely a big enough hole to make it meaningless)?

Ah yes, a website like that wouldn't cherry-pick statistics, would they? Considering it is literally an anti-abortion website?

"What's best for the child" is often the argument used there - since the child did not commit the rape, the argument goes, it shouldn't be punished for it.

Notably the same argument has been used to set the precedent that male rape victims are also compelled to pay child support to their rapists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer

The case you linked does not support your argument.

There the alimony decision was based on the rape victim giving consent from the standpoint of the civil laws which also govern parental relationships. That did not matter for criminal law because the victim was underage.

Not that I agree with the court here, but it is completely different from what you described.

That's part of the logic (basically overriding the definition of statutory rape to be "not rape" if the underage child enjoyed it)

But there are a bunch of similar decisions here: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

And the common theme is just because the parent is raped, doesn't override the rights of the child.

It's easy to see how that logic would be extended from child support to abortion.

So states that ban abortion are also pushing for easy access to contraceptives, right? That would be logically and morally consistent, no? Unless, perhaps, the motive for such laws is unrelated to the welfare of the humans (child and mother, both) involved.

Why is the mother's choice to have sex relevant?

If you believe that abortion is murder, how the child came to be is irrelevant.

The only way that the mother's conscious choice to have sex factor's into the equation is if the intent of abortion laws is not to protect children, but rather to punish women who choose to have sex.

It's a weird self-defense argument when the reason the child exists at all is because the mother and some dude brought it into existence in the first place. That seems a key piece the metaphor should include.

Fair point. I don't like the self-defense argument in general, as we will often put ourselves into a dangerous situation and then claim we were acting in self-defense when someone attacks us, e.g. the Kyle Rittenhouse situation, being unaware of how our actions escalated the conflict.

But just strictly going from the legal sense, I imagine there's a lot of leeway in defining self-defense with regards to whether one chooses to enter into a situation where one is likely to be attacked.

Yeah, there's a lot of complication for sure, even in "real" cases of self-defense (e.g., if you talk a bunch of shit to someone, and they attack you, and then you shoot them, how self-defensy is that?) I would prefer not do weird metaphorical gymnastics in discussing abortion -- it's pretty straightforward what the relevant tradeoffs are. I wish the nation could just battle it out over those, facing the hard choices directly.

I agree I don't want to do metaphorical gymnastics, and yet law and the interpretation of it can be exactly that. I mean often SCOTUS is trying to extrapolate meaning from 1-2 sentences in a Constitution written over 200 years ago, using many metaphors to do so.

I also don't feel very clear on what are the relevant trade offs, but maybe it's more clear to you. What do you see as the relevant tradeoffs?

You could decompose the issues many ways, but it seems like some of the principal components are:

Component 1: human life is valuable, and ending a human life is a serious matter not just for the individual, but for society

Component 2: personal autonomy, esp wrt control of one's own body, is one of the most profound of freedoms, and one of particular importance to the American people

Most Americans would probably agree that these two components explain the majority of the 'moral variance' on the issue. So then it's a matter of making an uncomfortable choice between them: when do we value human life less than autonomy? Answering that question will almost certainly require some further difficult reckoning:

Sub-component 3: what really counts as a human life? A person born without a brain? A brain dead patient? A patient reduced to the level of an animal due to Lewy Body Dementia? A 8.9 month old unborn baby? A 4 week fetus? A fetus that isn't viable outside the mother's body?

Sub-sub-component 4: what do we count as viable? What amount of medical intervention is allowed for a fetus to be considered viable?

And then things like:

Intersection {1,2}: What about when a person wants to exercise autonomy to end his own life, but is unable / unwilling to do so by himself? Should it be legal to enlist someone to help?

Etc. Tradeoffs all the way down. Seems more productive to admit that they exist and that you're taking a position. I agree with you that when making a legal ruling metaphor may be required (e.g., saying that the right to commercially transact is a kind of free speech), but in the current context it seems totally gratuitous. Specifically, if we're talking about making exceptions when the mother's health is at risk, that's easy to discuss explicitly -- human life is important, but the fully realized adult life is more important than the nascent life of the fetus.

I really appreciate how you broke this down, including the components you chose, and agree I'd rather have discussions based on such a structure than on more abstract metaphors. Thank you.