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.
> 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)