There are many huge sins that are perfectly legal. For example, eating pork, killing cows, and working on the Sabbath are much worse sins according to their respective religions, and yet they are perfectly legal activities.

For legal matters, the only thing that matters is balancing the rights of one individual with the rights of everyone else, and with the good of society of large. From all of these points of view, allowing access to early term abortion is a clear net win, even if it infringes on the rights of a kinda sorta potential person (the fetus). As the fetus gets closer to being an actual person, the equation changes.

Murder is a sin in most (all?) religions. It's also against the law. It's not against the law because it's a sin. It's against the law because it violates another person's rights.

Some people view abortion in the same light. They think you're killing a person and they think that should be illegal.

And, yes, even lots of atheists like me get increasingly uncomfortable with abortions after the first trimester. And it's not because of any religious doctrine.

I think your argument was much better suited for an issue like gay marriage where -- no matter how you look at it -- nobody's rights were being violated, and it was entirely based on religious doctrine and tradition.

> And, yes, even lots of atheists like me get increasingly uncomfortable with abortions after the first trimester. And it's not because of any religious doctrine.

I did say that I think abortions after the early stages of pregnancy are a more complicated question.

However, legal personhood and religious personhood are and should remain separate concepts. Even more, the legal question of abortion is not settled even if we accepted that legal personhood begins at fertilization - the interests of the mother, and of society, can still outweigh the rights of that legal person.

And as a religious person, you should be able to separate your personal belief that someone is committing a sin when having an abortion, and ending a life, from the rights and needs of that person. Just like we expect people who hold cows as sacred animals not to seek to stop us from killing and eating cows.

The desired outcome is to change the culture by making it too dangerous to wait to raise kids or reproduce at all without the resources to medevac to treat a complication.

Of course, one could argue that pro-choice folk are equally susceptible to dogma, but it's not as though they're forcing pro-life folk to have abortions.

But some of them are doing exactly that: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/world/europe/abortion-men...

Furthermore, more than 50% of pro-life folk identify religion as their greatest source of guidance for deciding right from wrong (compare with less than 20% for pro-choice folk). [1]

So yes, most pro-lifers are driven by their religious beliefs.

---

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...

I'm all for freedom of religion but I personally would rather not have laws that apply to everyone be based on the religious beliefs of a portion of the population which it seems like a good portion of religious people are trying to do.

Separation of church and state please.

Abortion epitomizes a hard moral problem, and frankly I doubt we'll ever be able to solve moral quandaries the way we can solve differential equations. However, I have zero desire in having the solutions legislated based on some group's religious beliefs.

Making sin illegal is just importing the set of rules from a religion into your existing law. If you believe these rules are the direct word from an infallible deity then it calls into question the need for mortal laws at all. If however you think that sins are idiosyncratic to each religion and often even to sects within a religion then you have to allow for the fact that they may have been created by fallible mortal means. If you allow for this, then you have just imported a mortal law in an effort to improve your mortal law. Even worse, religions can have sins like "you are not allowed to worship any other religion", which directly contradicts your existing law and would be extremely divisive regardless.

Imagine if the government made sin illegal, but chose Buddhism for the list of sins? Would you feel ok with this? Or maybe Shinto? How about Satanism? Or even if they did choose Christianity, but settled on Seventh Day Adventists? Separation of church and state is essential for a stable and diverse democracy.

So maybe god said not to kill or not to murder. Ok, the killing thing seems pretty simple, but the Catholic supermajority of the Supreme Court has no problems with the state killing someone, but they won't let a mother do it to her baby, so maybe in that case they think it's a murder, which is almost definitely against Christian doctrine, at least that part of the Old Testament.

I figured since it was so confusing, I'd just ask Jesus since he's God's messenger and he's got a facebook page where I can contact him. He's actually big on the first breath thing - they can just recycle the soul into another host body up until then anyway, but every once in awhile they fuck it up and put a male soul into a female body or vice versa and then that's a whole thing and The Republicans have a problem with that too.

Their religious beliefs absolute affected the legal situation.

We had much stricter rules about when liquor could close, open, etc. Laws against drunk driving were stricter.

There’s no constitutional right to alcohol. But there is separation between church and state.

But the issue wasn’t “church” (or mosque) it was the fact that everyone really hated alcohol and didn’t want their neighbors drinking it.

Why? There are plenty of legal jurisdictions that have laws influenced by religion. Israel and Saudi Arabia are the 2 countries that come to mind. But Utah also has plenty of laws that are influenced by Mormons- and no one is complaining about the liquor laws there.

If a group of citizens banded together to form a city, and then, collectively passed a law prohibiting people from walking outside after sunset on Friday - is that wrong?

We already have religious groups that have decided that physician-assisted suicide is OK - and it is illegal for Drs to not-perform them.

Why can't Christians form together and make laws to align with their religion?

Yes, it is wrong - it infringes basic human rights of that person. Israel and Saudi Arabia are wrong and in violation of obvious human rights for some of their religious laws, as are Iran, India and many other countries.

> Why can't Christians form together and make laws to align with their religion?

No one should be allowed to do so, because it infringes natural human rights.

There is no such thing as natural human rights. It's something that gets redefined by the dominant cultures constantly.

If Christians want to live under Biblical Law, let them. if Muslims want to live under Sharia, let them. If Jews want to live under Jewish Laws, let them.

Most religions trample on most of the rights that we now understand to be fundamental, so theocraies are something to be despised and feared.

To be very clear: religious belief and practice, as long as it is not imposed on non-believers, is not a problem. The imposition of your religious beliefs on others - theocracy - is the problem.

Not even the international declaration of human rights is signed by all countries. Rights are not given, they are political and need to be declared and defended, constantly.

If those people are causing actual harm to the community then it should be brought up through the secular legal process where lawmakers will weigh the harm to the community vs. the harm to personal liberty before deciding if the law is worth it.

They don’t make me follow their rules. But they are still subject to civil laws.

You've never talked with people from Utah have you?

But, while I was in Utah for a ~week I saw plenty of (probably tourist) people be very surprised that there was a big distinction between the bar area and restaurant area of restaurants as those seated in the restaurant area _must_ purchase food if they're having alcohol.

What are you basing that on because I live there 3 months a year and I assure you I bitch about it nonstop!

Polling has shown that 72% of the country supports per-trimester restrictions with essentially open access in the 1st, increased restrictions in the 2nd and emergency only in the 3rd.

I know you’re going to ask for a source, but I don’t remember where I saw it.

I was not claiming I'm making a unique statement or coming up with some novel arguments, I was only arguing against the points of GP.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-o...

Some polls show that of the Americans that support abortion, support drops after the first trimester.

I'm calling BS on the original op statement that 72% of Americans support abortion.This seems like the shy republican polling problem in 2016 all over again.

Those are two separate claims that can easily both be true. A big problem with polls about abortion is that its not actually a well defined term (how many weeks? is mothers life in danger? rape? etc).

> This seems like the shy republican polling problem in 2016 all over again.

Not quite on topic, but polls did not give hilary a 100% chance to win the 2016 election. Polls are extremely good at predicting events (compared to say a literal coin flip) but lower probability events do occur. Go flip a coin a bunch of times and you'll get 2 heads in a row (25% chance! thats even worse than what 538 gave trump [1]).

[1]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

Unless your country has an official religion. Making the sins of that specific religion illegal would not not make sense there.

People are going to have different opinions, and societal norms and beliefs shape that. If I walked up to you and cut off your head, I’d be arrested and called a savage killer. If I was in the army and called in an artillery strike that fit the rules of engagement and killed 500 people, I might be lauded as a hero.

Abortion is a tough issue as it touches on so many issues. When does a mother’s life outweigh the child’s? When does the child outweigh the mother? When does the mental health of the mother outweigh the life of the child? When does the ability to support the child factor apply? Should a woman be able to use abortion as “free” birth control?

Different people will answer those questions differently based on their beliefs and perspective.

Personally, I’m pro-choice because I don’t think the law should make these decisions, as they are difficult, situational things that have nuance. I find aspects of abortion horrifying, but I respect that it’s none of my business.

How would you apply this to Gianna Emanuela? Do you think that she wasn't a person even well past when she was viable?

I agree it has nothing to do with whether it's sinful or not. Basic human rights stand for religious as well as non-religious people. Therefore anyone can push human rights in the way they want, whether they're the Catholic Church or not.

> There are many huge sins that are perfectly legal. For example, eating pork, killing cows, and working on the Sabbath are much worse sins according to their respective religions, and yet they are perfectly legal activities.

Again, the things that are illegal, do not undermine the basic human rights. So, in modern society, eating pork shouldn't lead to death (which doesn't, not even in religious terms) but same goes for working on sabbath. ONLY if you subject yourself to it, and only then, you, personally, waive the human right to live.

> For legal matters, the only thing that matters is balancing the rights of one individual with the rights of everyone else, and with the good of society of large. From all of these points of view, allowing access to early term abortion is a clear net win, even if it infringes on the rights of a kinda sorta potential person (the fetus). As the fetus gets closer to being an actual person, the equation changes.

I think we're on a very bad slope here. The question of whether something is good for society at large is the one the Nazi's followed as well. By that, we should think of the rights of every single individual. Therefore, killing a human is not allowed, unless it's for the inevitable life of another human, there should not be a question what the answer is. Neither as a fetus, nor as an "actual person"

Identity politics and their resulting policies should be avoided at all costs. We should focus on the individual and their rights, and the group, or society if you will, will benefit.

There is virtually no legal decision that does not balance the rights of the individual with those of society. Most clearly, when a law punishes an individual, especially with jail time, that is a way of putting the rights of society before the rights of that individual.

Even more importantly, the question of abortion clearly puts the right of a woman to have the freedom to use her body in conflict with the right of the being growing inside her uterus. There is no way to legislate this without curtailing the rights of one of these beings (even if we don't consider the fetus as a person, non-human beings still have rights under the law of most countries).

The immediate political debate in the U.S. isn't about zygotes, but rather fetuses. The Dobbs case involved Mississippi's 15-week ban. Under Roe, states cannot ban elective abortions even at 15 weeks. At 15 weeks, the baby is a fetus, it has hands, feet, a face, and thumbs that it can suck. https://visitantlit.com/2012/11/19/pregnancy-week-15.

Most of the developed world has deemed that a human life at that stage warrants a certain level of protection. Most of the developed world acknowledges that society has a right to intervene after that point. Even if they recognize exceptions to that rule, they simultaneously recognize that society has a right to protect those lives and a good reason is required to extinguish them. For example in liberal and non-religious Denmark, abortions after 12 weeks require unanimous approval of a special committee, with an appeals process that kicks the decision up to the Ministry of Justice: https://abortion-clinics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Denma...

It's not just debate – it's already in law. Oklahoma HB4327[0], signed into law in May, outlaws abortions on "a human fetus or embryo in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth." (It explicitly permits contraception, Plan B, etc)

The National Right to Life Committee, the largest and most important anti-abortion group in the US, has created a model law that likewise classifies an "unborn child" to mean:

> a living individual organism of the species homo sapiens throughout all stages of the unborn child’s development within a pregnant woman’s uterus from fertilization until birth

[0] https://legiscan.com/OK/text/HB4327/2022

[1] https://www.nrlc.org/wp-content/uploads/NRLC-Post-Roe-Model-...

A very odd counter. It's worth pointing out that the GOP is beginning to follow the NRLC's playbook on this in Texas: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/15/1111383520/texas-abortion-law...

I understand why folks want to focus on the radical position that some parties have advanced, and not the fact that the actual law in the US for the last 50 years was quite radical in the opposite direction.

You might be thinking "but this is one of those emergencies that has an exception right?" But that's not how the bans work. Even when the law allows for emergency procedures there are no doctors in the state qualified to perform them, nor any hospitals or clinics that will allow it due to the legal liabilities. Even with a fully justifiable reason the parents are forced to travel hundreds or thousands of miles on their own dime to get the necessary procedure. Even if the mother's health is on the line and she's not fit to travel you still need to get her across state lines, and if you are in the midwest or the bible belt she may just have to die, just to satisfy an overly simplistic "moral" position.

If your moral position requires you to torture newborns until they die you need to re-evaluate it.

When a baby is going to be in constant pain for its entire life due to medical complications it is really hard to justify bringing them into the world.

You're incorrectly assuming that in substance there is no difference because all late-term abortions are the result of medical emergencies or genetic defects. In Germany, which bans abortion after 12 weeks but contains exceptions for fetal and maternal health, only 3% of abortions are performed after 12 weeks:https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/nine-out-of-10-abortion.... In the US that number is more than twice as high, at 7%.

Given the 600,000 abortions in the US each year, getting our number down to the German rate would affect 24,000 abortions of fetuses that most developed countries have deemed to be worth protecting.

It would seem radical to deviate from your chosen standard to set a limit at 0 weeks. It does not seem radical to enforce a standard that is only one week different from the one you’ve chosen.

The Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs set a 15 week ban, with exceptions after that for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities. That was consistent with both the consensus view in Europe, and American public opinion: https://www.wsj.com/articles/support-for-15-week-abortion-ba.... But under Roe, the Mississippi law was unconstitutional.

Roe is an outgrowth of American libertarianism. In the 1970s, several high courts in developed countries heard abortion cases alongside Roe. The only one to find an affirmative “right” to an abortion was the US. Courts in France and Italy found it to be a matter for the legislature (except Italy found a right to exist when the woman’s life was threatened). Germany’s high court went further and found legalized abortion to violate the Basic Law’s right to life.

No, it's already law that currently 10 states have bans on all abortions past 6 weeks, restricting women's control over their own body. But feel free to move to Texas where a 12 year old daughter could be raped and forced to carry a baby. Sounds like freedom to me. /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_in_the_United_Sta...

So your straw-man of a 32 week abortion isn't applicable at all.

It's not a straw man. It's a hypothetical test of his reasoning. He says viability doesn't matter to his argument, but throws out that induced birth could be an option. His argument is not that "abortion should be illegal at viability, but you should be able to induce birth". You are twisting his words.

> Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy.

What does "at least induce labor, if viability is possible" mean to you?

Also I support abortion and I'm a social democrat FWIW.

Personally I'd just prefer to base it on fetal viability (which was the standard). That's roughly 25 weeks or so (some variation and debate). If a fetus were to come non-viable after that, or endanger the mother, I think that should be back on the table too.

Can chalk it up to a different in interpretations I guess.

you left out the "at least induce labor if viability is possible," so maybe we're just interpreting the comment differently

But I'm not a native speaker so that might very well be wrong.

Even in this extreme case though, if said 10-year-old victim were 1 hour away from being able to give birth, I don't think it would make sense to allow an abortion (though of course a C-section can be performed at any time). So clearly there is some line, even for the most extreme cases.

It's the oldest and largest national anti-abortion organization in the United States, hardly the fringes. They do a lot of campaign financing.

> It's the oldest and largest national anti-abortion organization in the United States, hardly the fringes. They do a lot of campaign financing.

IHMO, whether it was fully understood by the GP or not, "extremist organization, way out on the fringes" was probably in relation to the US Democratic Party, not American politics in general.

It's toxic, misleading, and annoying, but I think a lot of rhetoric nowadays is trying to manipulate the "Overton window" to partisan advantage rather than debate the issue itself.

Even more so if you were to present this explicit situation - I'd bet even some of the most religious people you find would be hard pressed to say that a ten year old girl should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term.

> More than a third of abortion opponents (36%) say it should be legal if the pregnancy results from rape, with 27% saying “it depends” and 37% expressing opposition to legal abortion even in this situation https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abo...

...and the largest anti-abortion organization in the country agrees with the decision to deny her healthcare. Does that match their constituents' beliefs?

Is the agreement by the largest anti-abortion organization in the country to deny her healthcare in line with their constituents' beliefs?

Yes. Also, I was specifically talking about contraception, not abortion.

Half of the problem here is that reasonable people think this will be a states' rights issue with reasonable exceptions that local people can all agree on, but with which others might differ. Whereas what's actually happening is that extremist state legislatures are seizing on the issue to pass the most restrictive abortion laws they possibly can, and the GOP at the national level is salivating over the prospect of a national abortion ban as soon as they regain control of the government (see statements from VP Pence, Mitch McConnell, and various House republicans). People thought throwing the issue back to the states would be the end of it, but it's clearly not.

It wasn't like we had a referendum and reasonable people voted for this to be a states' rights issue. Rather, we never had an abortion law or anything in the constitution that could reasonably be interpreted as a right to abortion, so the Supreme Court overturned RvW. What we need is a federal law (Amendment?) that protects abortion access for the most extreme cases (i.e., the cases where a healthy majority of Americans agree).

What then happened is that a president elected by a minority of the country appointed extreme Justices, who were confirmed by a Senate that also represented a minority of the country, and they made a unilateral decision based more on their personal religious beliefs than the actual law. Rather than settle the issue as they thought it would, they have thrown the whole country into abject chaos. A lot of reasonable people, and in fact highly distinguished legal scholars (including decades of Justices) interpreted the Constitution as supporting Roe, so calling them unreasonable is, I think, not right and adds insult to injury.

What is certainly unreasonable is where we have landed. State legislatures are passing the most extreme laws they can possibly can, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Forcing 10 year olds to flee a state to get an abortion because she was raped is not reasonable. Forcing mothers to wait until an ectopic pregnancy has ruptured before providing abortive care just because a heartbeat is detected on an unviable fetus is not reasonable. Just this weekend the Idaho GOP moved so far as to advocate for no exceptions at all even to save the life of the mother. That's not reasonable, that's extremism.

Far from this being an issue thrown to the states, now the GOP is turning toward a nationwide abortion ban if they retake the government. This is completely unsustainable and will likely tear this country apart.

I probably agree with some/much of the spirit of this paragraph, but I don't think "every person could make up their minds about <ending a life>" is a reasonable state of affairs--I want it codified in law as with homicides--generally prohibited with exceptions for a few extreme cases (e.g., self-defense). I think we should also strive to avoid the problem as much as possible by minimizing unwanted pregnancy (improve access to birth control). We should also invest more in family, adoption, and foster services on the backend. I think it's totally fair to criticize pro-life people for failing to support these sorts of programs while also advocating against abortion.

> What then happened is that a president elected by a minority of the country appointed extreme Justices, who were confirmed by a Senate that also represented a minority of the country, and they made a unilateral decision based more on their personal religious beliefs than the actual law. Rather than settle the issue as they thought it would, they have thrown the whole country into abject chaos. A lot of reasonable people, and in fact highly distinguished legal scholars (including decades of Justices) interpreted the Constitution as supporting Roe, so calling them unreasonable is, I think, not right and adds insult to injury.

I think packing the courts is reprehensible (as were many actions of that particular president), but we need court reform to prevent this kind of abuse in general. However, I believe (though I suspect you will disagree) that this is largely an orthogonal issue--I don't believe this court acted on their personal religious beliefs, but rather I believe (as do many prominent pro-choicers, by the way) that Roe v. Wade was extremely tenuous and the proper channel for establishing abortion policy is legislative.

> What is certainly unreasonable is where we have landed. State legislatures are passing the most extreme laws they can possibly can, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Forcing 10 year olds to flee a state to get an abortion because she was raped is not reasonable. Forcing mothers to wait until an ectopic pregnancy has ruptured before providing abortive care just because a heartbeat is detected on an unviable fetus is not reasonable. Just this weekend the Idaho GOP moved so far as to advocate for no exceptions at all even to save the life of the mother. That's not reasonable, that's extremism.

I agree with this, but again, the answer is legislative--the Supreme Court is responsible for interpreting the Constitution, and it's eminently plausible to interpret the Constitution as being silent on abortion. We should have passed some sensible abortion legislation decades ago.

Agreed, I was implying that it was left up to the individual within the bounds set by Roe and Casey, which had limits that worked. It seemed that most of the debate of the past centered on exactly the cutoff, which is an important issue but much different than the current debate of "should women have access to abortion whatsoever?"

> though I suspect you will disagree

I do disagree. The reason is that at least two of the Senators who confirmed the Justices who concurred with the Dobbs decision have come out to say they felt at least one of those Justices, one who squeaked by with a 50 vote margin, lied to them during his highly politicized confirmation process. If this were a straightforward matter of poor jurisprudence, then it would be enough to say that. Instead, there was a certain level of at best coy obfuscation, to at worst outright fingers-crossed deceit during the confirmation processes. That makes it impossible for me to see the decision as anything other than motivated by ideology. They said what they needed to in order to get confirmed, and as soon as the majority was solidified, they immediately used their power to do what they wanted to all along.

> Roe v. Wade was extremely tenuous and the proper channel for establishing abortion policy is legislative.

Perhaps it was tenuous according to some, but it was also tested in court, reaffirmed, and part of our social contract for 50 years. Maybe the stick holding up the roof of your house isn't the best, but it's still holding up the roof, so perhaps we shouldn't just get rid of it one day in June because it's not the best? Why isn't anyone thinking about the roof?

> I agree with this, but again, the answer is legislative

I don't think the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agrees. There's nothing in their opinion that would suggest to me that they wouldn't strike down Roe codified by the Congress. My reading of the opinion is that they would strike down any right to abortion not enshrined in the Constitution as an amendment. Amending the Constitution to protect abortion is neigh impossible, and so I don't think we will have anything close to a codified Roe v. Wade as long as the majority of the court remains conservative. Instead about half the states in the country will outlaw abortion full-stop, no exceptions; while the other half services the women and children fleeing those states seeking healthcare, likely maintain the same safeguards offered by Roe in the first place.

> There's a lot of middle ground between banning all abortions and allowing all abortions

Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others?

As a rhetorical tactic, do you have a lot of luck with obvious deliberate obtuseness?

This is actually not entirely true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

"Safe-haven laws (also known in some states as "Baby Moses laws", in reference to the religious scripture) are statutes in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants with statutorily designated private persons so that the child becomes a ward of the state. All fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have enacted such statutes.[1]"

I assume these are meant to prevent infanticide among other reasons but yeah, you can just give up the baby. Apparently you can't just drop them off in most cases, as I thought you could, I think in the movies they show parents just leaving them on the steps. You have to find a responsible party to hand them too.

Post 32 week abortions are debate within a debate because people aren't really talking about the same thing, much more than other parts of the abortion debates. Many on the pro-forced-birth side would have you believe that this is a common occurrence. The pro-choice side would say that abortion is a difficult decision in and of itself and if someone is choosing abortion after 32 weeks, it must be an exceptional case, and we should respect the parent-doctor relationship to make that decision.

Being in a situation where I'm at the 32 week mark with my wife, I can't imagine many people choose to knowingly wait this long, and then just have an abortion for "funsies". Pew Research suggests it is less than 1% after 21 weeks (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...).

But I also think it's helpful to cede some ground to the moderate pro-lifers. If we can acknowledge that 32 week fetuses are empathetically "infants in a difficult locale", to me it's clear that there is some legal burden there. I don't think the opinion of one woman and that of any one doctor she can find willing to agree with her are sufficient grounds for killing a fetus at that stage. Not all people make good choices, and thinking things deserve protection from bad choices.

I'll also add that the criminalization of late-term abortions rests heavily on

1. Guaranteed access to early-term abortions regardless of circumstances

2. Mid-term abortions under specific circumstances.

3. Affirmative defense for late-term abortion given even narrower circumstances, i.e. bodily risk to mother.

With those guarantees, and only with those guarantees, I think the argument can be made that a mother with a late-term pregnancy has willingly undertaken the responsibility to carry that pregnancy to term, and therefor aborting that late-term pregnancy may be treated similarly to a parent harming an infant. But I'll reiterate: only with those guarnatees. And, of course, lots of places don't have those guarnatees right now, which is why this is a "debate within a debate", as you say. And this is the smaller and less impactful of the debates.

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/laws/abortion-laws/

By definition, a fetus becomes viable if it is likely to sustain survival outside of the uterus. It has to be able to survive without extraordinary medical measures.

Doctors determine whether a given fetus is viable. They make this decision on a case-by-case basis.

Typically, a fetus becomes viable around the 23rd week of the pregnancy. Doctors also consider a fetus to be viable once it weighs at least 500 grams.

At the end of the day childbirth is dangerous and expensive and our US social safety net is terrible. If we truly respected life in this country there are better ways to show it than outlawing abortion.

Since you've cut off the only other option available to her it is on you to come up with the solution that works nationwide for hundreds or thousands of mothers every year.

Not exactly 32 weeks, but close:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/abortion-doctor-kermit-gosnell-gui...:

> "Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered. ... The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping,'" the report alleged.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/doctor-kermit-gosnell-found-guilt...:

> Prosecution experts said one was nearly 30 weeks along when it was aborted, and it was so big that Gosnell allegedly joked it could "walk to the bus." A second fetus was said to be alive for some 20 minutes before a clinic worker snipped its neck. A third was born in a toilet and was moving before another clinic employee grabbed it and severed its spinal cord, according to testimony. Baby E let out a soft whimper before Gosnell cut its neck, the jury was told; Gosnell was acquitted in that baby's death.

IIRC, all that stuff was done in an actual licensed abortion clinic.

Also you have a weird kind of argument that seems to pivot on the false assumption that the issue is how gruesome the act is, not the act itself.

It was implicit in your response. The acts I cited were gruesome, and your response implied the response should be to replace them with better-regulated, more antiseptic version of the same act.

It's possible the interpret your comment as an extremely aloof statement of fact without implicit policy advocacy, but that interpretation strains credulity.

Unless you somehow believe that doing so without providing a safe/regulated alternative will magically result in women no longer having health-threatening pregnancies or reliably deciding to persist with their pregnancies no matter what (despite all the evidence to the contrary from other parts of the world with very limited legal access to abortion), then I can't see how you could not advocate for better-regulated facilities.

And just in case there's any doubt as to my position - if a woman pregnant at 30 months were to decide she was no longer able to continue the pregnancy, such that live birth was not an option for whatever reason, and there were a way that the foetus could be safely and readily aborted with no risk of harm to the mother, then absolutely she is the only person who can reasonably make that choice. The rest of us have no right to insist we know better, no matter how much we may dislike the result (and yes, I would absolutely be saddened to know that foetus was robbed of its chance to develop into a human).

So your issue isn't so much with snipping the spinal cord at 30 months, but but whether the scissors are dirty or clean?

> it's hard to imagine there's a significant number of mothers of sound mind who would deliberately abandon their child such that it has no chance of survival.

I don't see how either of these quotes fit into a discussion about abortion/childcare law. Shouldn't the law make as clear as possible when it is illegal to abort a pregnancy or give up the care of an infant? The argument that "nobody will ever/has ever (that we can think of) do something so horrible as that" does nothing but muddy the water.

Let's just assume that at least one person in the future wants to abort their healthy 39 week fetus, and at least one person in the future wants to abandon their infant. These would hardly be the most surprisingly immoral things ever done by human beings.

Criminal laws exist in part to express society’s moral norms. Abandoning babies to die isn’t illegal because it’s a widespread problem. It’s illegal because it’s wrong.

But if your point is that the Venn Diagram intersection between pro-choicers and folks who want to decriminalize infanticide is not a null set you’ve made it.

I can't say I have a strong position on infanticide. There are undoubtedly cut and dried cases where an adult deliberately terminates the life of a newborn baby that should be classified as criminal acts. Abandoning your own child probably deserves a separate legal classification.

that's not really a good analogy because prior to donating the kidney, the kidney recipient isn't dependent on your kidneys, whereas at the moment of conception the zygote/fetus is dependent on the mother's body. A better analogy would be being able to take back the kidney after it's been donated, although that's also flawed because you're not really giving anything up when you're getting aborted.

My intuition is that most people would say the would-be donor is at least immoral in this scenario, and many would say should be subject to punishment. Curious where you fall on this.

1. for lack of a term for people who have changed their mind.

First of all, pregnancy is overwhelmingly a choice (of course there are exceptions)--it's not our hypothetical organ donor's fault that the hypothetical recipient needs an organ, but it is the parents' "fault" that an unborn child (recall we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread) needs to be born insofar as the child's life is the result of a risk the parents knowingly entered into (again, there are exceptions).

Secondly, if our hypothetical organ donor backs out, our hypothetical recipient can get an organ from another donor--with few exceptions, there's no way to transfer a pregnancy (at least not outside of some extremely early window).

If a person poisons another person deliberately and causes their kidneys to fail, it is not an acceptable punishment to take their kidney and give it to their victim. This remains true even when the victim will die and has no other organ source available.

Right, did you miss my disclaimer?: "recall that we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread" (based on upthread: "I'll just add that many people who are pro-choice believe that the issue of whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant.")

> "fault" is too strong a term even in quotes

Yeah, I put it in quotes because I wasn't sure what the analogous term is. "responsibility" is probably better.

> If a person poisons another person deliberately and causes their kidneys to fail, it is not an acceptable punishment to take their kidney and give it to their victim. This remains true even when the victim will die and has no other organ source available.

It's not about punishment, but about making the victim whole. But as discussed elsewhere, I think this analogy is broken for other reasons--specifically, an abortion is an active procedure to kill a dependent party who would most likely otherwise survive, while our analogy posits a dependent party who would die without active intervention. The analogy postulates the state requiring an intervention to preserve life, but an abortion ban is a prohibition on interventions which stop life.

> The ability or non ability to alternatively source organs doesn't logically lead to a change in consequence.

But your analogy doesn't capture the responsibility of the donor for willfully creating the circumstances in which the recipient needs a kidney. Moreover, abortion is a procedure which actively kills a child which would likely otherwise live (without intervention); your analogy supposes a person who would naturally die without intervention. I'm sure we could contort your analogy to make it account for these things, but doing so would exhaust its utility.

At this point we've added mode of consequence to the analogy, but it seems you're introducing yet another constraint: active and passive intervention. I'm afraid I'll have to stop this here. It appears as though you will continue adding complexity until with the intention of forcing your result. Sorry, I don't debate with people acting in bad faith.

If you're really deeply committed to this analogy, we would have to suppose a world in which everyone knows that voluntary sex produces children with an organ deficiency which can only be satisfied by a donation from one parent.

> At this point we've added mode of consequence to the analogy, but it seems you're introducing yet another constraint: active and passive intervention. I'm afraid I'll have to stop this here. It appears as though you will continue adding complexity until with the intention of forcing your result. Sorry, I don't debate with people acting in bad faith.

Pointing out that your analogy fails to capture the relevant dynamics isn't "acting in bad faith".

EDIT: Removed some snark.

We probably still would not force an organ donation in such a case, still leaving it entirely up to the person, but their choice could affect the consequences for them depending on how and why they caused the person to need the organ. If they choose to donate and save the person then they might only be looking at some kind of endangerment charge for causing the person to need an organ. If they choose to let the person die they might be looking at murder charges.

It might help to analogize with some other examples: say for instance I get into a car crash with another driver and am compensated by an insurance agency. It makes no difference to me that the money comes from the insurance account rather than the other person involved. The end result is the same for me - I can repair the damage. Would it seem as though other people are much more concerned in the other driver paying the obligation themselves? Or perhaps there are other reasons?

The more that I think about this, the stranger it gets. It feels like a categorical imperative-type argument to justify their own obligated existence.

The government already has rights over your bodily autonomy in many ways; just the right to incarcerate someone is controlling their body pretty dramatically. They regulate where your body can go, and to an extent what you can put into your body.

Yes it does seem backwards. However, nobody here is making that argument.

> I'm over here trying to find a minimum amount of government authority over our bodies

Perhaps I'm just splitting hairs at this point, but "No one, not even the government, should have more authority over your body than you." is just such a broad brush that it's trivially refuted for certain scenarios. Maybe you're talking about medical authority?

In any case the rule of law is very concerned with what happens when rights collide. It is possible -- perhaps common -- for individual's rights to be in conflict.

Maybe. It has much less rhetorical flourish though ;) I still think it's a valid ideal and even if realistically unobtainable in the absolute, it still incredibly worthwhile north star.

Also, mandatory organ donation after death should be obvious table stakes for a pro-life person, if they were logically consistent.

There's nothing inherent to the pro-life position that would require mandatory organ donation between parents and children or anyone else whether before or after death.

The pro-life position is that human life is so precious that preserving the human life of the fetus it is more important than any right the mother may have. There is no logical reason this argument would stop after birth - the mother (and presumably father as well) should maintain this obligation of preserving the life of their child by any means that don't require them to give up their own life.

Being legally required to, say, donate blood for their child should be a no-brainer, if you bleieve that the preservation of your child's life should be a legal requirement that trumps any other right you may have (except your own right to life). Donating their organs to their child after death should also be an obvious legal requirement.

Exceptions for rape are much more common among those who also accept at-will termination of pregnancy up to some gestational age (e.g. at-will abortion up to 12 weeks, or up to 20 weeks in cases of rape).

Edit to add: the vast majority of active pro-life campaigners are also opposed to sex education and free contraceptives, once more proving that the question of consensual unprotected sex is not in any way at the forefront of their ideology.

It seems like you're conflating "pro-life" and "people who want to ban abortion entirely". The pro-life position includes people who want to ban abortion in the general case even while allowing abortion for exceptional cases.

> Exceptions for rape are much more common among those who also accept at-will termination of pregnancy up to some gestational age (e.g. at-will abortion up to 12 weeks, or up to 20 weeks in cases of rape).

Agreed, but that doesn't refute pro-life people having rape exceptions (multiple groups can allow for rape exceptions).

> the vast majority of active pro-life campaigners are also opposed to sex education and free contraceptives, once more proving that the question of consensual unprotected sex is not in any way at the forefront of their ideology

Can you source this claim about the majority of pro-life campaigners (also, why does that seem indicative of pro-life people in general)? Also, even if it's accurate, I don't think it constitutes proof of much--in particular, they could hold that it's not the government's job to provide sex education or free contraception (I personally favor the government providing both of these, by the way).

In any case, rather than arguing about ONE pro-life position, it seems like it would be better to acknowledge that there can be multiple specific positions within a movement. I'm certainly happy to concede that the pro-life movement includes many people with extreme positions, why can't we agree that it includes some more moderate positions as well?

Yes, but pro-life people are more likely to see “balancing mortality risks” cases as exceptional than “circumstances of parenting” cases.

Just like people opposed to deliberate homicide in general are more likely to see “self defense” as an exception than “the existence of the person killed reminded me of a bad thing that that person didn't cause”.

Rape victims are an issue that resonates particularly strongly with people who see the central issue as one of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy, not those who see it as about the fetus as a human life.

> Rape victims are an issue that resonates particularly strongly with people who see the central issue as one of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy, not those who see it as about the fetus as a human life.

There are some pro-life people (per the parent's claim) who believe that a child's life is so precious that it overrides the mother's right to bodily autonomy even in rape cases; however, this doesn't mean that they care less about rape victims than people who care about bodily autonomy--for example, they could care the same amount (or even more), but value unborn life even more. Notably, the loudest (most popular?) pro-choice claim is that unborn children don't constitute human life, that they're mere "clumps of cells", so all we can say (at least as far as it concerns people who hold this view) is that they care more about rape-victims than they care about "clumps of cells" which isn't strong evidence that they care a lot about rape victims.

I also think it's reasonable to expect that those who actively campaign to ban abortion are more likely to have more extreme positions than those who simply passively accept these positions. I also think their positions are very relevant, as they have proven to have more sway over public policy than the majority of the population - so combating their arguments is more improtant than combating the beliefs of the more silent pro-life majority.

This is the part I'm most interested in exploring. Absent a debate about "life", under what pretext does this construction arise? It's hard not to view it as a post hoc rationalization of a just world fallacy. Are there any other ways to construct the consequence of a waiver of the right to forego birth that stems directly from the act of sex? Some sort of sex teleology? Something else?

I'm not sure if I understand your question, but the general rule is that the person with agency also bears responsibility (this is a widely-held axiom). In this case, we have parents who have agency to predictably create a life which depends on carriage and birth, and thus responsibility to provide carriage/birth (obviously biological realities preclude an identical share of the responsibility between parents).

> It's hard not to view it as a post hoc rationalization of a just world fallacy. Are there any other ways to construct the consequence of a waiver of the right to forego birth that stems directly from the act of sex? Some sort of sex teleology? Something else?

Again, not sure if I understand your question.

I feel like analogizing here might confuse rather than clarify, but I'm thinking of other cases where agents taking actions waive their rights and how those waivers are socially justified. For example contracts bind people in ways that limit their rights.

Ex: if you and I enter a futures contract for you to purchase wheat from me at a certain price, there is a constraint placed on each of us - me to pay you the money, and you to deliver the wheat. The reason we socially allow such contracts of obligation is to facilitate commerce. We allow for other waivers of rights for other reasons.

What is the underlying social reason for the agency-responsibility regarding pregnancy? I'm genuinely asking with the understanding that there may be multiple reasons, but I don't have an internal sense of agency-responsibility toward pregnancy that apparently others do. Under what principles is such a responsibility formulated?

This possibly confuses things more, but we socially recognize that some rights are non-alienatible, ex: you cannot voluntarily enslave one's self in a legally meaningful way. So there do seem to be some limits to which rights people can consent to void.

No worries!

> I feel like analogizing here might confuse rather than clarify

Agreed--finding accurate analogies is hard for most things, IMHO.

> What is the underlying social reason for the agency-responsibility regarding pregnancy? I'm genuinely asking with the understanding that there may be multiple reasons, but I don't have an internal sense of agency-responsibility toward pregnancy that apparently others do. Under what principles is such a responsibility formulated?

Protection of life. Indeed, as a society we purport to value life (especially vulnerable life) even above commerce.

We also don't let parents neglect children even though this restricts parents' liberties. When you elect into parenthood (e.g., via consensual sex or adoption), you have a legal/moral responsibility to provide vital necessities to your children while they're in your care. Of course, once a child has been born, parents can elect to transfer that responsibility (to the state or other parent/s), but for obvious reasons we can't transfer care of an unborn baby.

Of course, this is predicated on the axiom that an unborn baby constitutes human life.

If yes, in a hypothetical world in which giving a child up for adoption isn’t possible, would you support a parent killing their toddler because they don’t want to have to slave to support them (that is, their autonomy is harshly limited)? If no, how do you reconcile this with your position on abortion (e.g., perhaps you would draw some distinction between slavery/forced-labor and bodily autonomy?)?

This thread is also not about post-birth situations. I'm strictly interested in discussing the construction of a bodily autonomy right to abortion that is not predicated on the aliveness of anything. Maybe you'll have better luck elsewhere.

Medical realities currently play a role in viability calculus so it is a perfectly valid analogy in that medical advances in organ donation being a possibility are equally valid.

Which is fine, but I'd rather people be honest about their arguments rather than dress it up in pseudo-moralism.

The question of abortion is really interesting in that it scratches at a deeper moral question-- precisely why do we consider murder to be wrong?

In my view, there are a few different reasons. One is that we are preventing future consciousness for a being by ending the body's ability to be conscious. That one certainly applies to abortion. But another is that we hurt the people that have relationships with or dependencies on that conscious being. That one doesn't apply to abortion at all.

But you’ve hit on my overarching point. The current pro choice argument is largely nonsense because the atheistic position doesn’t have a good answer to the “why is murder wrong” question.

If you don’t consider life sacred, the majority of our legal system unwinds. It gets even worse considering the pro choice cadre is also anti death penalty

The west is only now truly grappling with Nietzsches God is Dead and few realize it

I think you misunderstand my point. There are many reason murder is harmful, and abortion applies equally for some but not all of them. So the morality doesn't depend "entirely" on any of them (including the two I listed).

I do actually think its worse to e.g., kill a husband and a father of young children, compared to killing a hermit with no social ties. And it seems like society feels the same way-- otherwise we wouldn't hear about how victims are "a father of five" in tragic news stories.

This is an example of taking some oversimple principle, and applying it too consistently without consideration of complicating factors.

If you induced labor at many points after the "point of viability," the baby still has a large change of dying or suffering harm even with long, intensive, and expensive care in a NICU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_termination_of_pregnancy#...:

> Long-term survival is possible after 22 weeks.[59] However, odds of long-term survival between 22 and 23 weeks are 2–3 percent and odds of survival between 23 and 24 weeks are 20 percent.[60] "Intact survival", which means survival of a neonate without subsequent damage to organs such as the brain or bowel is 1% at 22 weeks and 13% at 23 weeks.[60]

That being said, I will _assume_ that you are tying to make a variation of the The Violinist Argument [0] and so I will respond to that instead.

This argument claims that the question of fetal personhood is irrelevant because the mother’s right to an abortion would trump the fetus’ right to life even if he is a person.

The idea is that this situation is analogous to an unplanned pregnancy: against her plans, the woman finds herself supporting the life of an unwanted person and has the right to deprive that person of her bodily support, regardless of what the result is for the parasite.

The key logical flaw lies in its failure to distinguish between killing and letting die. In the context at hand, this distinction corresponds closely to the difference between what might be called ordinary and extraordinary life-preserving measures, whether they take the form of healthcare or some other intervention.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate what I mean by ordinary vs. extraordinary life-preserving measures. If you have fainted on the train tracks, it would be admirable for me to dive in front of an on-coming train and sacrifice myself in order to knock you out of the way. But you are not entitled to have me perform this extraordinary act of heroism. If I do not dive in front of the train, no one would say that I was guilty of manslaughter. On the other hand, you probably would be entitled to my assistance if I am standing idly by and see you collapse hours before a train is in sight. Where exactly to draw the line between ordinary and extraordinary life-saving measures might be fuzzy, but the basic validity of the distinction should be readily apparent.

Having laid this groundwork, we can see that the “Right to Life” is a right not to be killed. It is not a right not to die. The reason that the woman in the story can sever the tubes without violating the violinist’s dignity is because he does not have a right not to die. The tubes are an extraordinary means of preserving his life, and he is not entitled to extraordinary life-saving measures. However, the woman may not stab the man in the heart and only then sever the tubes. In this case, she would be violating his dignity because he has a right not to be killed. This latter scenario most closely resembles an abortion, in which the fetus is ripped or burned to death while still in the womb and only then removed.

Now, why does the abortion procedure go to such great lengths to kill the fetus before removing him? In many early-term abortions, the procedure is simply easier, but not so in late-term abortions. The reason is instructive: leaving a prematurely born infant to die without providing basic care would be illegal, a violation of the infant’s right not to be killed. Like the violinist, an infant is not entitled to extraordinary life-saving interventions, but he is entitled to ordinary sustenance. This includes the baseline level of care necessary for ordinary survival—food, water, oxygen, warmth, etc.—from those responsible for him. Parents who fatally neglect their young children are guilty of killing them, not just letting them die. Regardless of whether the parents want or ever wanted those children, the law understands that they have a primary responsibility to provide the ordinary sustenance to which young children are entitled. If unborn children have the same personhood status as infants, then they should be accorded the same rights. Since the placenta represents the ordinary means by which a fetus obtains food, water, oxygen, and warmth, it follows that he should have the right to remain in his mother’s womb until viability, even if she does not want him there.

The abortion debate is very much a question of personhood.

When Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun penned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion in the United States, he admitted:

> If this suggestion of [fetal] personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] amendment.

The appellant was Roe, and the 14th Amendment states that “no person shall be deprived of life…without due process of law.”

In other words, Roe v. Wade itself acknowledges this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion

FORGET when life begins. It's a red herring. A distraction causing us to diverge rather than agree.

Right now, today, there are countless people needing blood transfusions; but I'm not legally forced to donate my blood to them (I should; it would be great; it would be the right thing to do; but I'm not legally forced to do so).

Right now, today, there are people needing bone marrow or organs; or would like eggs or sperm so they can have a child; or long hair for wigs for cancer-struck; but I'm not legally forced to donate them to these clearly worthy causes.

Lest somebody tries to muddle the issue, I'm also not required to donate blood or organs to my two children, or my sibling, or my spouse; I should, and I likely would, but I'm not legally forced.

.... So even IF we grant that a gamete or zygote or 4 cells or 6 weeks old fetus or whatever are live beings based on whatever definition we agree or fail to agree on; what rational differentiator would cause us to force a woman to donate blood and organs, sacrifice and risk their health for them?

I may have come to this point late, this may be an old perspective to others, but it helped me shortcut a tremendous number of complex and relative arguments, and go back to - "it's a woman's body; where do we get off forcing her to donate it to anybody else?"

At the same time, I must admit I now find it harder to understand and condone the opposing perspective; I see it as forced organ donation for a select subgroup of humanity, and while I'm a moral relativist, that doesn't mean that I don't find some things morally wrong :-/

Because the moral obligations of mothers (and parents generally) to their children are different than the moral obligations surrounding blood donations or anything else. If you said that fathers have a moral obligation to sacrifice their bodies and lives for their kids, either in providing for them or in war, most of the people who oppose abortions would agree with you.

  "Lest somebody tries to muddle the issue, I'm also not required to donate blood or organs to my two children, or my sibling, or my spouse; I should, and I likely would, but I'm not legally forced."

You are not required to get pregnant, and you are not required to donate blood.

Once you are pregnant, or once you did donate blood, you can't take it back.

If you are putting forward "You are not required to get pregnant", I feel that's empathically not a honest discussion point. We can discuss rape, incest, non-consensual sex; and we can discuss consensual sex where precaution was taken against pregnancy that failed; but that sentence is patently and trivially and demonstrably not universally true, so immediately I feel we are not discussing from point of mutual honesty and charity.

Put it differently if that helps: what percentage of people that willingly tried hard to get pregnant, are undertaking abortions? And when they are, why? (we happen to be a couple that had to spend a lot of time money and hardship to get pregnant; but there would still exist scenarios where abortion would feel like a possible scenario, depending on outcome of tests, viability, health issues, etc!).

Similarly, what is "Action to kill"? If I take a morning-after pill, I am preventing a cell from implanting into my body. Somebody can present that as "action taken to kill", but somebody else can take that as "refusal to donate my body". We can take opposing positions on that, but I think understanding that both positions exist is required for honest discussion.

If someone stole blood from you, and if you take it back the person will die, are you permitted to take it back? I don't think you are. Of course most people permit abortion after rape, so you need some other kind of justification for that, but on an intellectual level, this one will not work. You need a different argument.

> We can take opposing positions on that, but I think understanding that both positions exist is required for honest discussion.

That is definitely a very interesting question. I feel you would have to distinguish between a pill taken before implantation (birth control) and a pill taken afterward (plan B).

One prevents it from ever happening, the other destroys something that did happen. To me they are different.

Also, I must point out that none of this discussion informs my position on early abortion (although it does inform my opinion on abortion later on). So this discussion is more intellectual than practical. I say this to argue with your position that this line of reasoning transformed your opinion - I strongly disagree that this is a good line of argument.

I am still on the "where is it in relation to my body" as a point of reference.

If I start a blood transfusion, and they stick needles in my body and start sucking it out, I still have legal right to change my mind and stop giving blood to that other person.

If I start organ donation and they do surgery prep and I'm on the table with my buttocks exposed, I still have legal right to change my mind. It'd be complicated and sorrowful and devastating to others, but I retain that fundamental right to control of my body. I can actively take control and perform actions within my body that may have negative consequences to others, that may not be nice or beneficial to others, but still remain firmly within my control.

It may come to another perspective as well: am I actively murdering the person within me, or am I withdrawing services I am providing to another person within me.

Circumcision: The skin of the penis in male babies can be taken from us with out our consent.

Conscription: Think about drafted war veterans who have lost limbs and such. They should have had the autonomy to keep those body parts, however they were forced to sacrifice them for the sake of the state (think about how we say soldiers give their lives, for their country.)

Also, the organ donation is a variation of Judith Thompsons violinist, which has been criticized already https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Warren.pdf

Yet almost all countries restrict abortion, especially in the later trimesters.

Is forced organ donation really an international norm?

This is currently my personal perspective; I mean not in those words, but yes, today I am that thoroughly pro-choice. This hasn't always been my exact position, I understand it to be extreme, and I am open and even (genuinely!) eager to be persuaded otherwise in the future; but yes - I have yet to see (and it may well exist!) a rational, non-contradictory argument or moral justification to force organ & blood donation before birth, when we don't enforce it after birth.

Is it okay for Liz to knock Cat out, take herself to a hospital, and have the surgeon remove Cat from her body? Or should society force Liz to share her body with Cat?

The opposing perspective would map this closer to the abortion debate than the blood transfusion scenario. I wonder myself which is more relevant and why I have such different responses to the two scenarios.

* X actions ought not to be done, forced organ donation is a type of X action, therefore forced organ donations ought not to be done.

* X actions ought not to be done, forbidding abortion (like forced organ donation is an X action) is a type of X action, therefore forbidding abortion ought not to be done.

But what is X category of actions!?!

Is it:

* Violations of autonomy?

* Deprivations of moral agency?

* Distracting the proletariat from organizing against the capitalist class (why abortion was first legalized!)?

* Causing greater pain and suffering than it relieves?

You never actually take a position on why forcing organ donation is bad. It simply sounds bad, and scares people, so it must be bad.

Why is forced organ donation wrong?

We have abortions up to 12 weeks.

Honestly, I think this is a good situation. It's a super divisive issue and there is no need to argue about it. Christians here accept that most abortions would take place illegally and endanger the mother if it was banned. It's swept under the rug. Pro abortion people think 12 weeks is ok, I mean you probably know youre pregnant by then.

It works. Everyone stays the fuck away from the issue.

I look at the US and think its fucking insane how this issue is being used politically by everyone. It's a terrible issue to make political. And frankly it is the supreme courts fault, as Ruth Ginsberg herself said. The court allowing abortions full stop meant one side won. No questions, no discussion. That is not how a normal society works. You can't ignore all pro life people and say abortions allowed up to birth. It's ridiculous and undemocratic.

It's worth pointing out that this isn't accurate either: "You can't ignore all pro life people and say abortions allowed up to birth". Wikipedia even says that here in the United States "The [Supreme] Court also held that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and prenatal life" (from the 'Roe v. Wade' article) Wikipedia has two citations to support that. I can't decipher the citations myself - I think they might be court cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#cite_note-FOOTNOTE...

Now that it's overturned, we will likely see the us engage in more compromise which will make this less of a divisive issue.

PP v Casey changed that a bit, sure, but that was 30 years ago.

Until they do not.

Legality is a big help for women. In a nod and wink, illegal but permitted regime women's health care is in danger of the political whims of law enforcement disrupting it.

Legality is not perfect protection against the misogynist brigade, but it is definitely a help.

The standard argument here is that an implanted egg left undisturbed will eventually grow into a human, whereas sperm/egg floating around wouldn't.

For that matter, mixtures of uneducated teenagers will, if undisturbed, make a whole bunch of babies.

If you know of a case of a conscious haploid human being please inform us now

The fact is life and death surround us. A single bacteria is roughly as amazing as all the rest of the cosmos combined (as far as we've seen). Each human egg and sperm contain great potential, if only the conditions are right, if only they combine with their environment in the right way. Yet death is everywhere. The miracle of life is destroyed so elsewhere it can thrive.

I'm not convinced losing a single human egg, fertilized though it may be, is especially tragic. At some point it is worth protecting with force and violence (because that's what we're debating in this thread), but not when it's only a few cells.

Indeed, and in the United States, it is a crime for a mother or father (or even most random adults) to neglect a child.

The kidney argument is often used to make the case that a woman should not have to carry a child. However, this argument falls flat.

If you find an abandoned child, you actually... have to take care of it. If you don't, you can be imprisoned. If you're the parent, you'll be imprisoned for even longer. You have a basic duty to care for children, even if not a parent.

> I'm not convinced losing a single human egg, fertilized though it may be, is especially tragic.

I can find a lot of people whose death I would not find particularly tragic. The law -- thank goodness -- doesn't follow the whims of anon291.

We might have record of it happening once for humans in some holy writ, though the baby was considered male, which if genetically male would be impossible for parthenogenesis but not necessarily if the case were simply phenotypically male (like a female hyena). Certainly that story is more common in the US than other similarly derived folklore and myths, like Athena (female, so parthenogenesis is a potential).

She is in the Greek mythos and was worshipped by many. Historical enough for divinity claims, should I be interested in her patronage as a mortal. We can probably find a suitable historical figure to attach that divinity to. Maybe Mary Magdalene from the New Testament, she is already considered somewhat divine in the apocrypha (Christian holy writ arbitrarily not included in the Bible of mostly similar concurrency). Maybe even tie Canaanite and Greek pantheons back together through Asherah.

> Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some plants, some invertebrate animal species (including nematodes, some tardigrades, water fleas, some scorpions, aphids, some mites, some bees, some Phasmatodea and parasitic wasps) and a few vertebrates (such as some fish, amphibians, reptiles and very rarely birds). This type of reproduction has been induced artificially in a few species including fish, amphibians, and mice.

Happens in vertebrates. Hasn't been observed among primates quite yet, but give it time and proper data capture. Thus why mythology (oral embedding of odd events preserved by religious contexts) could provide a single meta-observation in the stories of virgins giving birth.

You then asked for a historical Athena -- not sure why you wanted to go that direction but guessed you wanted to go off topic -- so I went with it.

You're trying to make the point of "can't happen" that eggs self-fertilize. We know they do, though, among vertabrates. That we haven't observed it in humans means one of three hypotheses: (1) it is impossible, (2) it is rare, (3) we don't capture the observation (perhaps the fetuses all miscarry, thus requiring abortion as a medical procedure).

Is there somebody out there I could read who argues that the ethical responsibility to carry a pregnancy to term begins at the moment of egg fertilization, who doesn't also personally believe that extramarital sex and/or birth control are sinful? I am genuinely interested in being proven wrong about my characterization of people who argue for fertilized-egg-morality. I have questions for them, like "how far into the egg must the sperm penetrate before it becomes an ethically significant entity?" and "do documented cases of parthenogenesis in humans indicate that all eggs are ethically significant entities as well?"

Sorry, I vehemently disagree. I remember my parents explaining abortion to me as a child, and I thought it was pretty barbaric. My parents are less 'pro-life' than I am.

> criminalizing birth control.

Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.

> Is there somebody out there I could read who argues that the ethical responsibility to carry a pregnancy to term begins at the moment of egg fertilization,

Sure. Christopher Hitchens was pro-life. There are entire secular organizations. Actually 12% of all pro-lifers have no religious affiliation: https://secularprolife.org/2019/07/the-religious-diversity-o...

There are even leftist orgs who engage in 'direct action', like pro-life Antifa: https://paaunow.org/. Not my cup of tea, since I typically disagree with leftist approaches to argumentation, even though we'd agree in this case. Here's their manifesto (https://paaunow.org/stances). They don't believe extramarital sex is wrong in a moral sense.

Honestly, most of the pro-life movement is not Catholic. Most evangelical and Protestant churches believe BC is fine. Many evangelical churches are okay with extra marital sex.

I'm not saying children aren't inclined to be repulsed by abortion, I'm saying they wouldn't empathize with a fertilized embryo any more than they'd empathize with a sperm cell. In fact they're probably a lot more likely to empathize with the sperm cell since it's moving around.

> Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.

I don't think I understand this.

> Sure. Christopher Hitchens was pro-life.

Thank you for this, it was interesting hearing his perspective. I really dislike his perspective, but it's interesting to hear anyway; it's the sort of example I was looking for.

What I dislike is how totally definitional his position seems. We musn't destroy fertilized embryos because they are humans, and they are humans because... we are defining humans to be fertilized embryos and beyond? Why not ask the question in the first place: Why is it wrong to kill? If it's because of the lost potential life that would have been lived had the killing not occurred, then we must outlaw all forms of birth control. If it's because of the termination of the neurological functions of a human or human-like brain, then there's nothing wrong with destroying embryos. But what is the ethical argument for the cutoff being fertilization? "Potential life" clearly does not work; potential lives are prevented all the time. "Imminent life" doesn't work either; sperm on their way to an egg are imminent life until they hit latex. The moment when "the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte" is very interesting, but so are many other stages that precede it and follow it. I don't see why that stage strikes an ethical chord except in the minds of people who can't separate arbitrary term definition from reality.

What if we defined sexual intercourse this way? Let's find the biological moment where sexual intercourse has technically occurred, and rest our moral judgement on that biological definition. So, for example, rape with a condom is a whole separate class of crime, because sexual intercourse never occurred. Nevermind that the real impact to thinking, feeling people is almost totally disconnected from that specific biological definition we've picked.

In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?

You are writing this as if this is not something we already do. Not in the way you mentioned, but in many states and jurisdictions outside America, rape refers to vaginal penetration with a penis. This is an attempt to define sexual intercourse. Other sexual crimes are classified differently (either as sodomy or sexual assault). This is not because these other crimes aren't equally terrible emotionally, but because PIV rape can cause a child, which is considered worse to do without consent.

> In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?

I imagine it would be the same as his answer to generic trolley problem questions.

But again, you asked for one example. I gave you one. There's actually plenty of secular pro-lifers, modern, old, etc. You should perhaps read more before just pretending it's a primarily religious position. Ultimately, the Christian position on this (best explained by the Catholic church) comes from Aristotelian ethics, not a particularly Christian worldview, or even one that requires scripture to defend. Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights. Perhaps the only 'religious' claim the Catholics make is that humans have rights independent of the status of their brains, because humans are made in the image of God. But frankly, if we were to reject that claim, we would be forced to reject the enlightenment ideals this country and secular liberalism were founded upon (most secular philosophers make little attempt to defend why humans have rights in the first place).

By your own link, it's an overwhelmingly religious position. If you look at the issue globally it becomes even more obvious just how religious it is. I'm interested in the exceptions because they are relatively rare.

> Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights.

Yes, this is exactly the problem. It takes the implications of "human" in well-established ethical systems and attempts to insert the definition of "human specimen" from modern biology. That's not a valid move. Ethicists didn't have embryos in mind when they discussed things like divine rights and deontology.

I'm glad you brought up Aristotle, because he himself wrote on this subject:

"...but when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation."[0]

Aristotle didn't understand the specifics of embryos or implantation, but he was clearly capable of observing that there were stages very early in pregnancy where the thing growing did not yet have sensation, and then further stages where it had sensation but not the sensation of being human. This is astoundingly accurate; props to him.

Applying modern biological definitions to the established ethics of old is anachronistic. You can't just look to the letter of the ancient law and swap definitions from modern, unrelated fields and expect the intent to survive.

0. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.7.seven.html

But that isn't remotely true. Somewhere around 25% of pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage.[1]

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532992/

[1] https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/01/03/in-the-m...

Banning all abortions leaves us in a position where women can be prosecuted for something that happened naturally. Or if not literally prosecuted, left without medical care to deal with a spontaneous miscarriage (as just happened in Texas).

Through a religious lens, it seems these arguments are proxies for "killing a soul bearing being." The key problem is a soul can't be detected - we don't actually know what carries a soul and what doesn't. Through the non-religious lens, the question is what constitutes a being with human sentience. At what point does a collection of cells cross the threshold from a chemical machine to whatever Descartes was referring to when they said "Cogito, ergo sum." Humans are pretty far away from understanding the phenomenon of sentience; AFAICT we don't even know where to look for it. I observe the universe - but I don't know where that "I" came from, where it goes when my cells die, how a random collection of molecules became attached to that "I," or how it stays attached as my cells cycle out throughout my lifetime,

Back to the religious take - depending on when you believe God has endowed a collection of cells with a soul is the moment you would consider stopping that process "murder." This, IMHO, is where things get problematic: that belief is a guess and getting it wrong has pretty massive implications under religion.

An example taken to the extreme: if God allocates a soul ahead of time, stopping a human from coming into the world could be a sin. In other words - abstinence would be preventing a soul from descending to this level of existence. If you abstain from the urge to produce a soul bearing being, and that soul had been allocated, what happens to that soul? Getting this wrong means you could be committing the same sin as "abortion" every time you abstain from an urge to procreate.

On the other extreme: What is special about the moment the Gametes meet? Why would that be the moment a soul gets allocated? Or when the heart beats for the first time? Or when long term memory develops? Getting this wrong means you are doing a pretty great harm to humans for something that may not be a sin.

From the non-religious perspective, I have no idea why my collection of cells is so particularly special that I was endowed sentience when other forms of life aren't. The easy one is human-like meat. Pigs, cows, horses, dog, cat, etc. I see no reason why something so similar to me wouldn't be sentient or why that sentience shouldn't be protected. But it doesn't really stop there - I have a hard time understanding why cows should be so special to be endowed with sentience while a palm tree or tomato plant isn't. I often think about the asparagus in my fridge and wonder if it "died" when it was harvested, or if it is a sentient being slowly starving to death in my refrigerator. Which then leads me down the ethics of consuming any organic molecules - is life just one big murder-dome in which sentient beings compete with one another to be the one that does the eating and not the one that gets eaten?

If you're still with me, I guess what I'm saying is it's messy and people are just guessing. At the end of the day, I wish we could own that these are guesses and approach the conversation with a bit more humility - it's very likely all of us are wrong (myself included) about this entire argument.

I'm sure some people are, but the idea that the only way you can derive ideas like "human life has worth" is from religion feels like a huge step backwards.

It's actually not the only topic on which I think it'd be a lot easier to work as a conservative operative or pundit crafting or delivering arguments against what I believe, than as a liberal operative doing the same in favor of what I believe. I'm not sure if that's true for a lot of people regardless of their beliefs—that is, that it's just way easier to argue something you don't actually believe, in general, so there are also some conservatives on the other side going "man, it'd be so much easier to argue for liberal positions"—or something about the level of nuance or whatever required to vigorously defend current liberal positions versus the difficulty of defending current conservative positions. Hard to judge which is the case, for me at least.

Uh, life sure, but human life? If human life doesn't start at conception, when?

The truth is there is no bright line. Dying is a process, not an event. So is coming into being. Personally, I don't see a zygote as a person. But a 32 week pregnancy is pretty close? Close enough that I wouldn't condone an abortion except in extreme cases.

As an atheist, that definition is as useless as one involving Father Christmas. If you want to define something that has the seriousness of "life" we need to use something that doesn't rely on religious dogma.

Ergo, the clear definition is missing.

What is more, "God comes and brings that person to heaven" is pretty much only applicable to a minor subset of Christianity, which only overlaps about 40% with conservatism, hardly the modal belief or even a sizable plurality. That would be Catholicism, with purgatory. Further, it isn't the most novel of beliefs. That'd be Mormonism, with its "Spirit World" reinterpretation of swedenborgianism, or potentially some theories among Baháʼí adherents.

When you use beliefs to define biological and legal processes, things get murky and edge-case-y really really quick. You shouldn't advocate for using beliefs to define biological or legal processes, especially in a pluralistic society like the US and Western democracies, but also in general. It is a hallmark of bad governance.

This doesn't mean morals and ethics have no place in law. Only that unfalsifiable beliefs shouldn't drive law or science.

A great book on this, which has been life changing for many, is "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Instead we should serve to minimize harm, in which case legalizing abortion is the obvious choice, since criminalizing abortion has never decreased the number of abortions. It has only led to unsafe abortions and higher rates of infanticide.

So if I suffer an accident and suffer brain death, pull the plug. Appearances notwithstanding, I would no longer be meaningfully human.

Conversely a zygote with no brain is less to me than a fly. A fetus with pain reflexes but no higher thought is less to me than a dog. And even a newborn baby is not fully human. Lots of potential is there, but not yet reality.

It will make it a lot easier for the others to win elections.

> But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin? Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester. By this time, preterm infants can survive outside the womb under proper medical care.

To me, it's viability, which is itself fuzzy and gradually getting to be a smaller window. Carry a fetus long enough that it's viable, you should carry it all the way (newly arising complications as an exception). Before that, it's not human enough to outweigh the costs/risks/etc to the mother.

The people that want to pass a national law like the Louisiana law want police interfering with your pregnancy, your contraception, your marriage, your sexual positions and whether you can be openly gay or trans. They have a pliant SCOTUS that wouldn't dare strike down their egregious legislative agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygote#/media/File:Zygote1.jpg

I don't think anyone would mistake that for a human life.

Humans are rarely fully human at any given moment. They sleep, during which they lose the critical characteristic of consciousness. They go insane, during which they lose the critical characteristic of intelligence or reason. They suffer the frailties of youth, during which they are dumber and weaker than many animals. They suffer the frailties of age, during which the same is true. They suffer injury and disability. They suffer under privation and oppression and abuse and fail to develop as they should. None of these things prevent them from being human.

The eugenecists of the early 20th century were scientists. They didn't say the negro was subhuman out of sheer bigotry; they tested the hypothesis. They gave IQ tests and the results were clear -- but they were testing victims of abuse and privation. Were they right to look at the man as he was, at that moment?

They were not. The true understanding of the value of a human being transcends the current circumstance and looks at the whole of life and the whole of potential. It respects what happened in the past and what will happen tomorrow. It respects what could happen with healing, or in a generation.

Sperm are cells. They do cell things. But that zygote - if you protect it - is a creature that will some day write essays. That's why it's human. That's the difference.

There is. The figure that sticks in my head, off the cuff, is that something like in the neighborhood of a quarter or a third of pregnancies end so soon that the woman doesn't even find out she's pregnant -- a miscarriage is mistaken for (and in some ways actually is) a period.

If you want to know how I feel about this, I feel roughly the same as I do knowing that there are wars and oppression and disaster occurring in far away countries in which lots of people die. It is how the world is, and I can't change it. I didn't know those people, but it's tragic.

Turning to personal experience, I have detected an early miscarriage or two of my own. One I wasn't expecting and wasn't sure about, and it felt to me a bit like as if I came upon a dead stranger in the street. Tragic, if distant. One I was expecting and was sure about, and I mourned like the lost baby I felt it was -- she has a name and a grave.

> That makes people who have difficulties to have kids serial killers no?

I don't think so. The law recognizes a difference between trying to kill someone (murder) and accidentally killing someone while not specifically trying to (manslaughter). I think the law is right on this point, and intent matters. There's a funny and fuzzy line here -- manslaughter surely becomes more murderous as you raise the probability, right? Where's the line? I would say that morality is not so simple that you can place the line at, for example, 30% odds. If justice were something computers could do, we wouldn't need judges -- laws would be sufficient. ;) I would say more seriously that judging this sort of situation is a hard and human thing to do, and that philosophers with their pocket calculators tend to miss the point.

I would also say, in the case of trying to conceive, that living is so wonderful that it is well worth a chance of death, even if that chance is quite high. People even as adults generally believe life is worth risk, even extreme risk, and I see giving that chance -- risk and all -- to someone else as a kindness.

> I mean, my aunt had 19 zigotes implanted before she carried one to term, shouldn't this be illegal?

People who share my perspective are generally very uncomfortable with IVF. I certainly am, and would never do it myself. I think if my view were common, it probably would be illegal. But I can't claim this is well settled even within that community.

To be very clear, I don't intend to persuade you to agree with me. I was responding to the above poster who was incredulous that anyone could hold this belief. I do, and I know people who do, and I know communities that do, and you might be surprised by how many people it is, if you think it should be zero.

> Also, doesn't that makes people waiting to have kids (thus increasing the chance of early termination) immoral?

I would say no. And I would also say that the question gets at a deep, deep disagreement that I have with what seems to be a very dominant philosophical viewpoint.

You see, you seem to regard a chance of death as so important that it dominates all other calculations, and decisions must be made optimizing nearly exclusively on that variable. If the chance of a pregnancy being viable is 80% a this age and 70% at that age, it is actually immoral to try at that age.

The perspective I hail from sees this way of thinking as monomaniacal and unhealthy and perhaps a bit narcissistic. Trying too hard to optimize mortality is really beside the point -- everyone dies. You can't change that. And if you want to impact people in a positive way, you should do so writ large and awesome -- not fretting about how many toes you step on. By all means, be careful! But obsessing over that isn't good.

I see living a vibrant human life as much more important than being able to prove your negative impact on your neighbors was optimally minimal to three decimal places. In fact, I think that if you focus on that to such a degree that you neglect the awesome things you're supposed to be doing with your life, you've missed the point of living -- and that in itself is a great sin, tantamount to suicide. By all means, be careful not to hurt people! But making this a central focus out of a fear of judgement sacrifices too much on other axes. I would say that a life characterized by a fear of wrongdoing will always pale compared to a life animated by love. (I would also, paradoxically, say that a life animated by love will actually do a better job of not hurting people, at the end of the day -- both because it is generally more careful and makes better tradeoffs when it is less careful). I suppose that is one way to spell some of the magic of the gospel -- a dependence on grace is a secret key to righteousness because without it you don't have permission to fail.

One peculiar difference is that my way of viewing the world sees a big difference between statistical, unintended death and intentional murder. Paradoxically, I don't have a problem with declaring war, even though you know that statistically speaking innocent people will die, while I do have a problem with intentionally committing murder for a strategic advantage in the same war. I don't even care about the numbers at all -- the first could be a million and the second could be one, and I'd still care about the second much more. I don't care much about numbers and I care a lot about intent.

It is interesting to note that my worldview is Christian and therefore ancient -- forged in a very different world than this one. In the ancient world, infant mortality was high, regular mortality was high, and health care was nonexistent. It is easy to see how working too hard to shave points off of public mortality would have seemed pointless in such a world -- if you are lucky enough to have your life and health, do something with it! That was certainly the take of the ancients on the situation.

It is easy to see how the ancients might agree with me that working to improve public health is cool and all, if that's your calling, but that obsessing over your impact on your neighbor's health is kind of narcissistic and pointless. He's going to die of something else, and likely sooner rather than later, and in the mean time you've wasted your life -- which is precious and since you are lucky enough to have it, you have an absolute responsibility to do something!

The moderns don't see it that way. Since everyone's going to be healthy and long lived, small impacts are worth obsessing over. And somehow paradoxically, since life isn't such an unusual gift, wasting yours isn't a big deal.

Curiously, it's the ancients I disagree with in thinking murder's a big deal. While the Christians certainly thought so, many, many, many cultures saw the murder of the weak, poor, or infants as just... not a big deal. Certainly the Roman culture that Christianity was born in practiced routine infanticide, which the Christians rejected as ghastly.

The ancients held the view that since life was cheap, murdering a few people here and there was no big deal. I (and the moderns) strenuously disagree. The moderns hold the view that since death is rare, slight statistical increases are worth obsessing over, and since life is long and routine, wasting yours on such trivia is no big deal. I (and the ancients) would strenuously disagree.

I happen to think that's because my viewpoint is timeless and correct. ;) But one thing it certainly isn't is modern.

And yet, in the very next sentence, you refer to it as a cell.

I don't think many people claim a zygote is a person. I still don't see any plausible argument that human life begins at some time other than at the point of conception.

I don't know what they actually think, but it seems "life" in that sense might actually be a bit too fuzzy. Gametes are alive, but, for lack of a better term, they're not exactly human. Fertilization is the discrete event that creates an identifiable individual human life. Before that, you have cells that are created and die as a matter of course. After that, you have a more-or-less continuous process of development of an identifiable human organism.

> I would ask that you consider if another person's sincerely held beliefs may be valid when they contradict this point of view.

I think this goes for all sides. One of the major societal breakdowns regarding this that many people seem to think that they don't need to do that, and prefer instead to consider strawmen that reinforce their personal sense of righteousness.

If a sovereign democratic country passes a law to murder 5% of its population, don't we have a moral obligation to intervene and prevent them to do so despite them being free, sovereign and democratic.

My point is: Moral obligations can compel you to ignore any other concept you value if you consider the problem serious enough.

There seems to be no recognition by the anti abortion side that even though roughly half or more of the world disagrees with their stance, they’re just going to ignore that, insist that they’re right, and try to impose their view on everyone else anyway.

This kind of sentiment is overly reductive and misses the point. No proponent of small government wants a government so ineffective that it cannot have laws against murder. I personally don't believe abortion is murder, but many people do, and they're not so libertarian as to "live and let live" on such a topic. I wanted to chime in because I really dislike the fallacy of 'you claim to like personal freedom and small government, but you want the government to enforce laws you support? Curious...'

How do you know this? Is this speculation or logical deduction?

>"If they thought abortion were murder, why are they also against contraceptive use?"

This doesn't represent all pro-life people. This mainly represents Catholics. Being anti-contraceptive is, I believe, an effective strategy for the Catholic Church to produce more Catholics.

>"Over a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage - far more than the number of voluntary abortions - why are they doing nothing to reduce that number? "

Miscarriages are often spontaneous and there is little that can actually be done to save the pregnancy. Additionally, there is a categorical difference between a death due to natural causes and a death due to wilful intervention.

>"And if abortion is murder, why make an exception for rape or incest?"

You're on to something. Plenty of pro-life people take the stance that even these exceptions should not be allowed.

If Christians think abortion is child murder, then of course they SHOULD do everything in their power to stop it.

Honestly the article shows even Europe wouldn't approve of American Abortion. So it's clear this is more than a religious issue and more of an existential one.

The reasoning seems to be: 1) Ending a human being life is wrong 2) A foetus is a human being 3) Therefore abortion is wrong.

It seems much more interesting to me to wonder: Is ending a life always morally wrong?

Not saying I have the answer, I just find the question interesting.

While an interesting avenue to explore, for the general debate it is less useful that discussing when life begins.

If 20% of the population believe in a moral principle, should it be enforced on all? How about 50%, 80%, or 99%?

before you downvote, did I once say that you dear reader, have to participate in this? no, it is a choice. When it is not a choice, that is a root cause for the instant rage that is so common with this topic.

The full decision is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf where you can verify for yourself.

But about the Congressional question, Congress are only able to pass federal legislation if it fits within one of their enumerated powers. And the interpretation of those enumerated powers depends on the Supreme Court. Despite the Supreme Court's silence, I'd bet that they would rule that Congress lacks authority.

If you want to dig deeper on that, Congress's enumerated powers are described well at https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8.... You probably want to focus on the Commerce Clause, that's the one which is the broadest grant of power.

It would be a Hail Mary, but you can also look at amendments and ratified treaties for more sources of Congressional authority. (Remember, treaties only give Congress power to pass laws if they are ratified by a 2/3 majority in the Senate. So we must have ratified it, not just signed. Most that we sign, we do not ratify.)

For example consider the affordable healthcare act (aka Obamacare). A decade ago, the Supreme Court upheld it. This is one of their "healthcare is a legitimate area for Federal lawmaking".

But read their decision at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf and that isn't what they decided. What they decided is that all of it fell under the power to regulate Commerce EXCEPT the individual mandate. However the individual mandate falls under the taxation power. None of this adds up to, "Congress can pass legislation because it is about healthcare." All of it is of the form, "The legislation passed fell under enumerated powers that Congress has."

Here is a sample passage from page 3 about why the individual mandate cannot be supported under the Commerce clause:

> The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.

Now suppose that Congress passed a law mandating universal access to abortion, while Texas has forbidden the same. By the reasoning that I just quoted, Congress' ability to regulate commerce does not extend to compelling Texas to allow commerce where none currently exists.

This does not mean that Congress is powerless. The next legal battleground is going to be over people leaving one state to get an abortion in another. Conservative states would like to ban it. As https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/can-states-punish... says, it is a tossup about whether such bans will succeed. But if there was specific federal legislation to allow crossing state lines for the purpose of abortion, that pretty squarely falls under the Commerce Clause. Because it is interstate commerce, in a commercial activity which actually exists.

That said, your precedent point is important. See page 119 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf for Thomas' concurrence where he says that Supreme Court decisions supporting access to contraception for married couples, for couples to engage in consensual sexual acts (specifically sodomy), and a right to gay marriage.

Abortion rights do not fall by themselves. They are part of a web of related rights that will rise and now probably fall in conjunction.

They have to pass Congress and the Senate with a 2/3 majority and then be ratified by 3/4 of the states.

Congress alone can't change the Consitution.

[1] "In order to pass [ordinary] legislation and send it to the President for his or her signature, both the House and the Senate must pass the same bill by majority vote. If the President vetoes a bill, they may override his veto by passing the bill again in each chamber with at least two-thirds of each body voting in favor."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm...

The procedure for amendments is specified in https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/artic.... There are two procedures, only one of which has ever been used. In that procedure Congress *PROPOSES AN AMENDMENT* (with a 2/3 vote in both houses), then 3/4 of the states have to ratify it within 7 years. Also no involvement from the President is required.

Therefore Congress never passed the 14th amendment. It *PROPOSED* it. And the distinction is significant because Congress itself lacks authority to amend the Constitution.

> Therefore Congress never passed the 14th amendment

Your previous message:

> [Amendments] have to pass Congress and the Senate

Which would be a contradiction given the existence of the 14th Amendment.

So it seems like you're able to use 'pass' in the general sense of formally approve/propose/support when it's a reasonable shorthand. Me too.

It does when it overrides a veto.

> But Congress did indeed pass the 14th Amendment.

No, it proposed it.

My point is unchanged: the legal position in effect from Roe until the Dobbs opinion was that the constitutional guarantee of personal liberty through the 14th Amendment would include abortion. Congress, being a party to the Constitution, had thus already spoken on the matter.

The new decision overturns that position.

The Senate is part of Congress.

You mean something like “they need to be proposed by the concurrence of 2/3 of both the House and Senate, or by a convention called for by the legislatures of 2/3 of the states.”

That avoids much of the conflict.

I think in this particular issue, the challenge is both sides view it as a global issue and they aren discussing on the same terms. On the one hand life does begin at conception, it’s a scientific fact. The question is whether or not it’s worthy of societies protection.

One view is that creation and life should be protected at high cost.

The other world view believes either their life matters above others OR society is better without certain life.

Listen to the arguments, that’s what it boils down to. Quality of life, career, mental fitness, problems with the fetus, removing genes from the pool — it’s eugenics.

I personally pass no moral judgement, to your point, I see both world views. However, it’s painful to watch people not recognize what it is. The discussions aren’t even framed properly; everyone just talks past one another.

Take that all the way to the extreme though and you would need to wait for the zygote to get to the point that it can give it's opinion on what should be done with it's body. After all letting the mother decide would be going outside the bounds of her own body and would be violating another human beings right to autonomy.

Absolute bodily autonomy doesn't even manage to sidestep the issue.

Just think through the consequences of the argument you are making. You've now established the government as the absolute arbiter of that fetuses best interests and given the government absolute control of the environment it relies upon, aka the mother. Should the mother be required to eat a government mandated meal to make sure that the fetus is getting the nutrition required? What if the mother wants to vigorously exercise? Are you going to strap that woman down to a bed and force feed her veggies to make sure the baby comes to term safely?

So you're saying that if a life is reliant on something external for its life, then it isn't autonomous and doesn't have the right to self autonomy?

Wouldn't that mean that we don't have to respect the living will of someone on life support? They are entirely reliant on other people to provide a hospitable environment.

The same would hold true for new born babies, who can't feed or shelter themselves. And, for that matter, that would hold for small children. At what point does a child become self reliant enough that they don't have the right to decide if they want to be alive?

"Just think through the consequences of the argument you are making. You've now established the government as the absolute arbiter of that fetuses best interests and given the government absolute control of the environment it relies upon, aka the mother."

You're being somewhat hyperbolic here. But this isn't much different that what the government does now. Government limits our rights in order to provide everyone with a set of equitable rights. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is what the goal is. And to do that, you have to limit what some people can and can't do in order for everyone else to have those rights.

We have already granted the government authority to act on behalf of those who are too young to make decisions on their own. Children who find themselves abandoned, or in homes that are dangerous, can be removed by the state and placed in a safer (hopefully) environment. This system doesn't always work, but its acknowledged that its better than doing nothing at all.

"Should the mother be required to eat a government mandated meal to make sure that the fetus is getting the nutrition required? What if the mother wants to vigorously exercise? Are you going to strap that woman down to a bed and force feed her veggies to make sure the baby comes to term safely?"

You've pushed the idea to the extreme to prove a point. But what you've shown here is only that an extreme interpretation of this is a bad idea. The other end of this extreme is equally bad. When a mother has total autonomy to decide the fate of her children until they are old enough to live on their own without the support of their parent, then a mother could kill their child right up until they were what, 5 or 6? maybe 10? Or force the child to live under extreme physical or sexual abuse?

A better answer here is somewhere in the middle. At some point after conception a child becomes a person. When that happens, the child should have all the same rights as any other person. They should have the right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" the same as any other. And those who chose to bring that life into the world must accept the responsibility to care for that life until it no longer needs that care. To do otherwise is to invite cruelty and societal degradation.

I don’t think it’s as cut and dry.

How much more so someone who deliberately kills an unborn child?

The early Christian communities also forbade abortion based on the Biblical idea of preservation of life. The Didache, an early Christian writing circa 70-100 AD, forbids abortion[0]:

> "Do no murder children through abortion nor kill them after they have been born."

And this should not be surprising, as Christianity was birthed from Judaism, and Judaism forbids abortion in all but extreme cases.[1]

[0]: https://blog.judahgabriel.com/2022/07/what-did-early-christi...

[1]: https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/39015/is-a-jew-p...

That doesn't in the slightest mean the Bible permits abortion, but it does mean the Bible views abortion different than murder.

The text in question deals with either manslaughter (accidental death) or premature birth. Both are distinguishable from murder, the deliberate taking of a life.

And this is why the punishment is not capital.

And look at the next verse 23 - if they kill the mother they are judged as a capital crime.

The Bible does not consider a fetus a full person, but despite that it does not permit abortion.

On a practical level Judaism takes a middle of the road approach and [sometimes] permits abortion before 40 days from conception (or 57 days as is more commonly measured, from LMP).

The fine imposed for either manslaughter or premature birth indicates the Bible values an unborn's life to some extent. But the text doesn't prescribe punishment for deliberate killing of the unborn child. One would presume the punishment would no longer be a fine. (Indeed, the following verses suggest that if a life is taken, the punishment is capital.)

Your statement about Judaism's view of abortion is misleading. Judaism generally forbids it, and allows for it in only certain extreme cases, such as to preserve the life of the mother.[0]

[0]: https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/39015/is-a-jew-p...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_bitter_water

And also there are bans on euthanasia, which just make people suffer for nothing.

They are leaving the corpses in peace.

Women's bodies are a battle ground now. "Her body, the state's ovaries"

There is no law against vasectomies.

Forced conscription of soldiers. Men literally lose their freedom for long periods of time and are forced to follow orders and charge into battle and risk being killed by the enemy (or by friendly fire or other accident). Survivors often suffer from permanent damage, including physical trauma (e.g., lost limbs and organs) and mental trauma like PTSD.

In fact, I'd venture the church spends more money on these things individually than abortion prevention.

I don't know, this seems like a "live by the sword, die by the sword" situation to me. Either you recognize the authority of the "unelected minority", or you don't. You can't support their legitimacy when it suits you, and oppose their legitimacy when it doesn't.

not to mention Mitch McConnell stole a supreme court seat.

1. Can you link to some cases where you believe that the court has ruled inappropriately?

2. even if we somehow accept that Thomas should be disqualified from serving, the ruling would still be 5-3 in support of overturning it.

>not to mention Mitch McConnell stole a supreme court seat.

explain.