So imagine a situation where a mother and father have a falling out. By week 6 the mother feels there is no future in the relationship and feels she can't offer the coming child a good childhood on her own. I feel if a child is unwanted by the parents, they are more likely to suffer.
So in this sense, abortion can be a form of harm reduction. It does not reduce ALL harm, but reduces the net-harm across all parties.
Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
Yes.
> Should we abort fetuses who have some disability?
If the parents are unwilling or unable to deal with it every day for the rest of their life, yes.
> I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
That's too big an assumption. But, in any case, not being born, and not having a working brain capable of abstract thought and understanding of the situation, nor a way to express it, they don't get a vote.
Im sorry to say but this sounds like Orwellian doublethink.
> By week 6 the mother feels there is no future in the relationship and feels she can't offer the coming child a good childhood on her own.
Are you saying that a woman probably cannot reasonably provide a good life for a child without a man? I mean, even if she can't then this is an extremely tenuous link. I didn't have a good childhood at all and the scenario I was in personally was actually worse than you described but I turned out to be very happy. Even if I wasn't happy it would be worth living. There are also many people in truly horrific situations in the world - in every country.
In good faith and with much respect I am asking you: do you think that the chronically unhappy people of this world should have been aborted before they experienced this world and without their consent or knowledge? Obviously hard to put a number on it but with the kind of scenario you describe, maybe 20-25% of living adult people have been through?
Imagine a mother who had to give birth to her child and had to care until its adult life, in an abusive way, mistreating the child, hating that one human being and treating like garbage. What is worse, the “murder” of the child or raising someone in those conditions?
The hypocrisy here is that most of the pro-life movement wants the child to be born but does not care at all when it's in the world.
This video[0] shows an example of a politician how empathy makes you realize your error. Every so often, you have your view of the world, but how is important is your view in the expanse of the others?
Should we just begin murdering anyone who might not have a life that we define as good?
That's essentially the argument that I'm hearing, except you're limiting the scope to unborn children.
Though, I do completely understand your point. I just think that even in the worst of circumstances someone would generally prefer to live. I didn't have a particularly happy upbringing, and there were times I wanted to commit suicide, but I'm quite happy with where I'm at now.
Abortions are a way to provide choice to people in tough situations. We have built a world where a lot of people are unable to care for their children in a decent way. In my opinion, that is the crime here.
Blaming these people and calling them murderers, or forcing them into parenthood is just cruel.
If two rights clash, who gets to decide which right wins? There's always going to be exceptions, and a lot of the time I think it makes sense letting the people who will be directly affected make the hard choice. And calling them murderers is not helpful.
Does a mother who forgets to pull the hand break of the car and kills her son, should do jail time?
Does a police officer who shots and kills a person which is in a degraded mental state but threats his life, be accused of murdering?
Does a police officer who shoots a known murderer fugitive without following the standard procedure be prosecuted as a homicide?
See the point?
>>>IMO at that point you’re essentially asking who deserves to live.
The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop.
> Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much?
Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense.
The mother made a choice (ignoring cases of rape) to have sex which could, even with contraceptives, lead to the outcome pregnancy.
> What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman?
IMO, both parties deserve to live. If a fetus threatens the mother it should be terminated for her health. If the fetus doesn't, then the mother shouldn't (morally) have an abortion.
> The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop.
You're missing the point of my question about "who deserves to live". Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
The common example of the violinist analogy disagrees here. You are under no obligation to provide continuing physical support to another person, even one everyone agrees is fully grown/sentient/alive/etc. Similarly, you are under no obligation to donate your liver/kidney/blood, even if you already promised to do so, even if not doing so will cause someone's death. In every case except abortion, we respect medical bodily autonomy to an extreme degree. And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis (see "Savior Siblings").
> I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
Not always, lots of people desire medically assisted suicide. Blanket assuming that everyone desires to live regardless of circumstance is factually incorrect.
This is incorrect. Parents have a duty to care of their children. Parents whose children die because of parental neglect end in prison.
Sure, but if you wait ~5 seconds when trying to conceive a child then that first potential person won't exist and a different one will instead (different genetics and subtly different environments). We always and continuously make choices about which (and whether) potential individuals will actually exist.
As a fetus ages its expectation of existing in the future increases over time but never to the extent that its' mother expects to exist, so expected utility of mothers exceeds fetuses in every scenario.
If we had magical technology we'd simply instantiate all the possible people from scratch and let them enjoy preferring to live. As it is we have to choose the best limited set of individuals who get to exist, and part of that means not allowing a slave class to exist whose sole or primary purpose is reproduction to the exclusion of their own happiness and agency.
> Sure, but if you wait ~5 seconds when trying to conceive a child then that first potential person won't exist and a different one will instead
You could literally say the same about anything. If I left the house 3 nanoseconds earlier on the 15th June 1994 then Covid might never have happened. What's the point here? That literally every entity is expendable because we could have been conceived with a different sperm?
> As a fetus ages its expectation of existing in the future increases over time but never to the extent that its' mother expects to exist, so expected utility of mothers exceeds fetuses in every scenario.
From a purely technical perspective not really. A fetus age 8 months has probably a 95% chance of living to 75 more years. A mother age 35 probably only has a 95% chance to reach 30 more years so the baby is kinda more valuable here if you like using cold calculations to value human life.
Having said this, if there were genuine threat to my wife's life, of course I would save her, even on the brink of birth.
> a slave class to exist whose sole or primary purpose is reproduction
Nobody is saying this. If a woman gets pregnant and she didn't want it to happen, that sucks. It really does. But this is the biology they were born with and as human beings we know that sex can cause babies. If I love committing insurance fraud then surely I should accept the risk of doing so right? (given that my participation in said fraud was consensual)
I have strong empathy for people in general, and sympathy for fetuses (I have no memories of that time to empathize with but I assume it would be mostly comfortable and familiar unless disturbed) who may have some conscious experience (still understudied to my satisfaction). Therefore the only way to adequately compare outcomes is technically to avoid bias caused by emotional bias e.g. toward babies that I think most mammals have. Babies are tiny, cute, vulnerable, and we have a natural tendency to protect them and extend that protection forward to children and backward to fetuses.
> From a purely technical perspective not really. A fetus age 8 months has probably a 95% chance of living to 75 more years. A mother age 35 probably only has a 95% chance to reach 30 more years so the baby is kinda more valuable here if you like using cold calculations to value human life.
But similarly to 35-year-olds vs. 75-year-olds we only in extremis compare their expected QALYs for decision-making, as in mass casualty triage or for organ transplants. There are, of course, many people who willingly make the calculation and offer their own life to save another's life, and probably numerically highest the women who freely decide to favor the survival of their unborn offspring over their own health. I favor choice because I trust individual women to be the most accurate in deciding the value of their own QALYs vs. the expected QALYs of another, which is also generally the accepted standard for all of society. The only exception I am aware of is military drafts where individuals are explicitly expected to lower their own expected QALYs to increase everyone else's expected QALYs.
> Nobody is saying this. If a woman gets pregnant and she didn't want it to happen, that sucks. It really does. But this is the biology they were born with and as human beings we know that sex can cause babies. If I love committing insurance fraud then surely I should accept the risk of doing so right? (given that my participation in said fraud was consensual)
I'd respectfully disagree and continue to claim that many people are still attempting the reproductive and child-rearing subjugation of women in the world today.
Biologically, fetuses are unavoidably at risk of death before birth. It probably sucks for fetuses that die before birth, but neither fetuses nor women consented to being embodied in a universe where these biological realities exist. Knowledge of our place in the world doesn't alter that; knowing that they are at risk of pregnancy does not make women any more personally responsible for fixing the situation than fetuses are responsible for keeping themselves alive until they're born. Biology dealt us all a suboptimal card in many ways; we can be sad about that and grieve the human cost of it. We shouldn't force responsibility onto each other, especially unfairly. I don't see any proposals for every man having to enter a lottery to receive one unwanted baby who they are legally the parent of at a probability equal to what women are naturally exposed to.
Does it matter if they are conscious? Is it the ok to kill a person in a coma if you know he will probably wake up in 9 months? Is it okay to kill someone while they are sleeping? I don't see where consciousness comes into it.
> But similarly to 35-year-olds vs. 75-year-olds we only in extremis compare...
I think you missed what I was trying to convey here, but that was totally my fault. I wasn't clear and I'm too lazy to make a graph to try and explain what I meant. It doesn't really matter though because I in essence agree with you on this point.
> I'd respectfully disagree and continue to claim that many people are still attempting the reproductive and child-rearing subjugation of women in the world today.
I'm sorry I don't understand this sentence. Did you accidentally omit a word?
> neither fetuses nor women consented to being embodied in a universe where these biological realities exist
Yeah, sure! That's life though. I didn't consent to being mortal and having to also watch people I love die. I also didn't consent to being able to listen to beautiful music or experience the thrill of creating. I am placed firmly in a universe I have no control over and I can only be grateful even though it is not even nearly all good. Women are much, _much_ more selective for this exact reason - it is natural. A woman has a huge and heavy responsibility to choose a man who's problem it indeed will be to also look after the baby. She also reaps much greater rewards by experiencing a bond that a man can simply never experience.
The problem of abortion is linked to a society where relationships have been de-stabilized. The cure is not to kill the babies of mothers who are misled and left behind in the wreckage of broken and casual relationships, but instead to foster healthier ways of relating with each other. Society is unfortunately a bit sick at the moment and in recent decades, horrible symptoms like abortion, which were always taboo, are being brought to the surface.
So you're fine with early term abortion, at least up until week 9.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/
It made me change my mind.
I think that some of the considerations being made such as whether or not the fetus is human is not really so relevant, and is missing the point. The child being born into a terrible situation is not really the point either (or at least, is not really the most important point), since there will be better ways to deal with that.
I am against abortion in general, but many of the bans of abortion are way too excessive (banning discussion and communication of information about such things, allowing to sue people without evidence, etc, are probably excessive regardless of what is being banned, though). If abortion seems necessary in this case, the government should not interfere with it (doing so will just make it more messy than it needs to be). However, it is generally better to avoid being pregnant at first, if you are able to do that; and I think that people should not try to have too many children anyways (during these days); such prevention before you are pregnant is better than afterward, isn't it?
But you should still have the right to your own body anyways, and if you are pregnant then before the child is born it is still your body. (There is mistreatment of your own body, but still you properly would have the right to it.)
A better way for the law to handle is that the policies can reduce the need for abortion, rather than trying to affect it directly.
And, sometimes is necessary, that you will value the actual life rather than the potential life, anyways; but, if the mother instead wishes to risk such a birth that might not work and will harm her, that will be her choice to accept or not accept such a risk, I think. I do believe that abortion is "immoral", but that actual situations are not always ideal situations so that such a thing might be necessary sometimes anyways.
Doctors should still provide necessary care anyways. (I think the Catholic church does allow necessary emergency medical procedures that will save the mother even if they have abortion as a side effect, anyways (and yet, many people still don't like that either). Even then, not everyone is or should be Catholic or whatever religion, but that does not make the Catholic church worthless either, even though they (like many large organizations) have done many bad things too.)
I think that many "pro-life" is not a real "pro-life"; they are "pro human birth" without the other consideration. However, this is not true of everyone, so you should not assume that everyone is the same, because it isn't. A real "pro-life" should pro any life including those who have already been born and also the non-human animal and plant life. (Deliberate abortion of humans birth is one thing, but some people like it is more important than everything else and than all other life and that does not make sense and it is wrong.)
What changed my mind here was the realization that this position comes out of Catholic doctrine that defines "a person" at the moment of conception. Once you made that assumption, it's reasonable to say that abortion ends a person's life (aka murder).
This assumption doesn't match biology, however. In the first trimester, it simply isn't a person yet. It's not a proto-person, and it's not simply a cake that needs to finish baking in the oven. Becoming a person takes active work by the mother's body that isn't completed until well into the pregnancy. You could call that point "viability", but it's not a precise instant in time.
If there's no person yet, then it's the mother's body and it's up to that person what they choose to do with their body, just like in every other instance of bodily autonomy.
It's obviously OK if you believe in the same doctrine, but then it's also not a simple case of ethics anymore.
> This assumption doesn't match biology
Ok? How? Because you say so?
> It's not a proto-person
Ok? Again, just because you like to say so?
What is this mythical point of "viability" that you speak of? Let's say we develop sufficiently advanced tech that could incubate a baby from 6 weeks, then would it magically become a person? Back in the 1700s, when babies probably couldn't survive outside the womb if born prior to 32 weeks, was abortion okay until roughly that point?
Your argument is very mixed up.
This problem should be considered moral, not legal.
The only common ground that seems to be available between these two camps is in extreme cases (i.e., the mother's life is at risk or rape). Otherwise, I think they are fundamentally incompatible.
I had a friend whose wife got pregnant and neither one of them knew beforehand how dangerous it would be for her. They definitely wanted the child. But his first priority was his wife. So if it had come down to an abortion or letting his wife die, he was going to choose an abortion.
Even if the doctors thought it was the best course of action for the wife, the doctor would have still been afraid to do it because of criminal liability in todays environment in red states.
My friend and his wife decided to induce labor two months early instead and take their chances. The baby is now a healthy 12 year old.
After seeing what his wife went through, he decided to get a vasectomy and they adopted 5 years later.
There are probably people who are flippant about it, and maybe those people are essentially murderers, but the common case is probably a variety of complex moral dilemmas and special cases to consider, and it's probably a bad idea to jump to the murderer label by default lest you apply it to people who didn't want to have to ask such questions.
Which of those should be coerced to give up a piece of their liver to save your life? Morally speaking…
As someone who's lost a newborn and had to make life-impacting medical decisions leading up to it...
I can't imagine those getting abortions are doing so lightly and don't forever bear their own burdens. Let's support, advise, and trust each other to make our own decisions. I don't know what shoes anyone else walks in and wouldn't presume to make decisions for them.
It can be found on the internet[0], and is only 13 pages. Alternatively I think the wikipedia article outlines her three main arguments quite well[1], and is a quicker read. The most known part is her violinist thought experiment, which can be read to only allow abortion in cases of rape. However, the subsequent parts convinced me that, abortion is moral in general. So long as reasonable steps have been taken to avoid pregnancy.
[0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf
I used to be pro-choice because I thought the motivation for pro-life was religion, and I thought that had no place in determining what others can do.
Eventually I started to see abortion as something closer to murder. Obviously it’s much more complicated than that, but, to me, I view the fetus as a person, even if they aren’t born yet.
There are absolutely cases where abortion can be justified, e.g. for the health of the mother, or if the mother didn’t make the choice to have sex (for example, rape). In this case I feel like it’s still murder; it’s just a terrible situation overall.
In other cases though, I don’t see why abortion should be assisted. Yes, people will try to terminate in other ways. That sucks, but there’s no reason why we should be helping people murder other people just because they might hurt themselves otherwise.
There are a lot of other arguments (like what if the child is born into a terrible situation) that are relevant but IMO at that point you’re essentially asking who deserves to live.
Definitely open to conversation on this/feel free to link any articles that you think might change my mind.