I get where you're coming from; people who make careers out of abortion ethics zero in on conception as the question. But as you and I are playing out in this thread, it's really unsatisfying to try and answer. We don't agree on what life is, and as a result we're forced to decide what the default is:
- people are forced to give birth against their will
- people are not
Saying this is a State issue or that it should be decided legislatively ignores that this is a fundamental human rights issue for people who can become pregnant. No legislative regime should be able to force someone to give birth against their will.
There's a "but what about the rights of the fetus" argument, but here again you're faced with two unsatisfying possibilities:
- you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent
- you allow no exceptions, which is wildly extreme
So again, granting individual rights to a fetus is a radical position that our society largely won't accept. It moots the conception of "when does life begin", or, I would actually argue that society has pretty much decided this already:
- Society does not support killing children
- Society supports abortion in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant person
- Society agrees abortion does not kill a child
(again see here that deciding that a fetus is a child if it was not the result of rape/incest, or its carrier will survive the pregnancy is wholly irrational)
> "you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent"
I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no. It's possible to try to have policy that understands the tradeoffs here and tries to get the best outcome we can despite them even though it's messy. It's why I think "life" isn't the right determinant.
So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
That said, again my personal position is it's better on net for society to allow women full discretion here - but I don't think these kinds of casual constraints are irrational or inconsistent.
> I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no.
Oh, I personally believe that and I think most people do. Sorry, maybe we've lost the plot on this a little:
> The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.
I argue that society has already decided this. Nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. This is all squarely within what Americans support.
> I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.
I argue that the constitutional rights of the embryo/fetus (such as they are) do not outweigh the constitutional rights of the pregnant person. If someone thinks an embryo/fetus has rights, they have to contend with a bunch of unpalatable things [0] (criminalizing many popular forms of birth control, IVF, the morning after pill, miscarriages, stillbirths, etc.). At the most extreme end--personhood--they have to either defend a brutal no exceptions regime, or an inconsistent exceptions regime where you're deciding whether or not an embryo/fetus is alive based on some irrelevant circumstances.
> So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
But again, I also argue that society has already decided this. We actually agree with the current regime: nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. Why do we need to punt this to the States? Why are States rushing to put stricter and stricter controls on abortion?
The answer is that Republicans fomented a moral panic in the 70s in order to pull evangelical votes. They proceeded to push misinformation into the public about abortion, the kind of people who get abortions, and why they get abortions. This distorted the public view. Again, in reality the state of abortion is what the vast majority of Americans support. There's no need for this to be an issue anywhere. It's a wedge issue pushed by a craven political party in order to gain power. That's literally the beginning and end of it.
> - people are forced to give birth against their will
Birth is caused by pregnancy. Pregnancy is caused by sex.
There’s a simple way to avoid being “forced” to carry a pregnancy to term: either don’t have sex, or use one of the many contraceptive methods - use two if you are really worried!
Yes this doesn’t work in all cases, in cases of rape for instance - but that is why abortion laws often make exceptions for rape, fetal abnormality, risk to life of the mother, etc. Abortion is not the binary black-and-white issue that is presented in American politics, most countries have quite some nuance in their law on abortion.
Returning to the case of merely undesired pregnancies, restricting those abortions does not force anybody to do anything, it commits them to the logical consequence of their action that resulted in the creation of a new human.
Balancing the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn is the responsibility of the law. It is not satisfactory to cede all rights to the mother, nor to cede all rights to the unborn child, as the two extremist positions in the US seem to want to do.
Oklahoma's ban doesn't have such exceptions. None of the new trigger bans allow for abortion in the event of fatal fetal abnormality. These laws don't countenance the facts of pregnancy; instead they essentially frame it as slut shaming, which you're also doing here. Contraception fails. People are assaulted. Pregnancies often go awry. The issue transcends promiscuity.
Roe and Casey actually both balanced the state's interest in fetal life with the mothers liberty, Roe with the trimester framework and Casey with the viability line. I urge you to actually read them.
the unborn have no rights. their existence is attached to an already autonomous and free human being. I can choose to kill the bacteria in my body. I can choose to kill a parasite. I can choose to kill an unborn fetus.
Gender as separate from sex is not a thing. Those links are supposed medical professionals (there is no evidence a medical professional wrote that feces, actually) who should know better spinning in circles and bending backwards to contort reality to fit "how cultural groups see themselves", apparently referring to the one mass-deluded cultural group that invented the concept of sex-independent gender.
>science
What you call "Science^TM", I actually call a bunch of ideologically motivated sophistry with no hard evidence behind it. Science isn't based purely on authority, a bunch of "Science^TM" organisations spouting nonsense on their public facing web page doesn't make the nonsense science, it just reduces the organisations' credibility.
>politeness
Politeness is just what true believers call conformity. Its not a good trait to be polite to delusions.
I also find it amusing you invoke politeness on what is supposedly to be a factual matter. Is it a matter of "politeness" to say the earth is round?
> What you call "Science^TM", I actually call a bunch of ideologically motivated sophistry with no hard evidence behind it. Science isn't based purely on authority, a bunch of "Science^TM" organisations spouting nonsense on their public facing web page doesn't make the nonsense science, it just reduces the organisations' credibility.
Science has prestige nowadays, so many people (including many actual scientists!) are motivated to associate unrelated ideological positions with it in order to exploit that prestige for the benefit of those other positions. IMHO, when someone says something like "I believe in Science," they're usually talking about that unrelated ideological stuff.
>Okay. Why you do you feel the need to tell everyone that?
I hate delusions.
>women are people
I thereby propose that all nouns be cancelled, since everything in the universe is a Lump Of Atoms, we don't need any more nouns to express ourselves.
A Lump Of Atoms sat on a Lump Of Atoms to eat a Lump Of Atoms with a Lump Of Atoms on the side.
Just kidding, I know how language works. It works by assigning names to patterns. If several names are assigned to the same pattern, the most specific and distinct one is used. Women is the most distinguishing name for the pattern "people who spawn people", and refusal to use the name is associated with a lower critical thinking and higher conformity to ideological fashions.
- people are forced to give birth against their will
- people are not
Saying this is a State issue or that it should be decided legislatively ignores that this is a fundamental human rights issue for people who can become pregnant. No legislative regime should be able to force someone to give birth against their will.
There's a "but what about the rights of the fetus" argument, but here again you're faced with two unsatisfying possibilities:
- you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent
- you allow no exceptions, which is wildly extreme
So again, granting individual rights to a fetus is a radical position that our society largely won't accept. It moots the conception of "when does life begin", or, I would actually argue that society has pretty much decided this already:
- Society does not support killing children
- Society supports abortion in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant person
- Society agrees abortion does not kill a child
(again see here that deciding that a fetus is a child if it was not the result of rape/incest, or its carrier will survive the pregnancy is wholly irrational)