Abortion Isn't About Fetal Personhood (a response to Douthat)

In terms of meaning, you’re begging the question. Another way to describe it could be, “a woman who does not want to be a mother removes a fetus from her body before it become a child”.

You call the woman a “mother” and the fetus a “child”, and you’re repulsed by what you’ve described. But you’re smuggling in moral intuitions about mothers and children. A description (as or more accurate) that doesn’t smuggle in those moral intuitions is much less repulsive.

Also, I thought you were a libertarian. Don’t we own ourselves?

Delightful irony! If I could impose on you to read just one more (rather long) sentence, the one that begins,

What does that mean?

The accountability & reporting won’t change. A very exploitable loophole. NO!

It means that it would be easier for a woman who wants (1) to get (1).

The pro-choice resistance to rules that do this is that it means many current providers wouldn’t be able to fulfill the obligation, to the point they think this is the real motivation the rules. But part of why the rules reduce access is that there are legal risks to treating the fetus like a child, e.g. malpractice, wrongful death, and even manslaughter. A well-written law could expand access by reducing legal risk, while simultaneously producing more healthy humans.

Hospitals have different accountability and reporting obligations and practices, so I don’t see how it could possibly not change.

But I also think you exaggerate the issues with accountability and reporting; see:

It occurs to me in considering late-term abortions that a question for the pro-choice camp is: does a woman have a right to remove a fetus, or a right to kill a fetus; or, phrased differently, a right to terminate a pregnancy or to terminate a fetus. And this relates back to @HumAnIze’s argument, because another way to ask the question is: do women have the right to refuse to carry a fetus to term, or to prevent being made a biological mother?

And asking it that way creates interesting rhetorical tension. Men are often made to feel as though they should not have a say in abortion politics, because they don’t have wombs and will never be in the position of having to carry an unwanted pregnancy inside them. But because the decision to abort is left up to the woman, men are often in the position of being forced to be a biological father.

I’ve toyed with the idea that a man’s right to terminate legal fatherhood should be equal to a woman’s right to terminate biological motherhood, e.g. if women have until X weeks to abort, men should have until X weeks to relinquish any claim of parental right or obligation over the child. But if the question is between a right to removal of the fetus, and surrendering of parental rights, rather than termination, then men have a lot of common interest in the question

(and of course in all this I am referring to the base interests, to self-interest, and not the nobler philosophical interests to which we should aspire)

Note from every self to every other:

My/your right to bodily autonomy ends where your/my right to bodily autonomy begins. We don’t threaten each other’s bodily autonomy by merely existing. Let the one who delivers the first blow redirect their power to protect the life of the innocent.

What about men taking the vasectomy as the best contraception? I have heard that it is reversible and takes the burden off women to mess with their hormones etc.

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There should be no double standards. And the baby should be included in that.

The hippocratic oath is do no harm. That’s why abortions don’t happen in hospitals. Births do. Am I wrong?

If you restricted fetus removal to when it is least likely to harm the developing baby, and the woman, then abortion would end.

There is a reason they don’t want real stats reported.

There is a reason they want to tell pro-life advocates b.s. like “What YOU did increased abortions or abortion access.”

Reason being — they’re fricken assholes. They are in league with sex traffickers & pedophiles when they kill & hide their evidence rather than hunting them down & holding them accountable. Because convenience killing & baby organ trafficking is very profitable.

And wearing a condom is soooo inconvenient. I like @Bob’s suggestion to get a fricken vasectomy. But not because it prevents the evidence from ever existing, of course. Mandatory vasectomy & mandatory tying of fallopian tubes for every human who conceives a child for which they do not take responsibility (unless she was raped, and opts for adoption). Perform the procedure when they lose/surrender custody. Just like they take away people’s driving (etc.) privileges when they are deadbeat parents. That ain’t enough. Why are they & convicted sex offenders still able to have more kids??? IN THEIR OWN HOUSE!? But that’s a bit off-topic. Unless it isn’t, because they conceived aborted children via rape.

Carleas,

Fantastic analysis and response. I am still a bit confused by the pro-life crowd that seems to only consider the life of the fetus, or somehow deems the life of the fetus more value than that of the mother. Isn’t “pro-life” tantamount to pro rights regarding bodily autonomy? If so, modern conservatives seem to be shooting themselves in the foot any time they condone the infringement of bodliy autonomy. The state’s interest in personhood stops at the potential to become a revenue stream. This is like allowing corporations to create legislation on how we spend our liesure time.

Self,

Fantastic analysis and response. I am still a bit confused by the pro-choice crowd that seems to only consider the choice of the woman, or somehow deems the bodily autonomy of the woman of more value than the life … I mean bodily autonomy … of the fetus. Isn’t “pro-choice” tantamount to pro rights regarding bodily autonomy? If so, modern pregnancy terminators seem to be shooting themselves in the foot any time they condone the infringement of bodliy autonomy. The state’s interest in personhood stops at the potential to become a revenue stream for baby bodies/organs. This is like allowing the abortion/research industry to create legislation on postnatal care.

I can clear up that confusion for you if you’d like. The issue is about the life of a vulnerable developing human being that happens to be inside its mother and is depending on that mother for its own life and continued growth so it can be born into the world. And by the way, bodily autonomy was never a concept the ‘left’ / pro-abortion crowd really cared about, if you doubt that simply look at the issue of compelled vaccinations. Not just with Covid but with so many jabs forced on children in the school system.

No one, at least no one I know and not myself, deems the fetus more valuable than the mother. That would be a misrepresentation. A reasonable position always include the fact that if there is a choice between the LIFE of the mother and the life of the child then it’s already sticky, no clear answer appears. Letting the mother decide in that case seems reasonable, at least at first glance.

Rather, the issue here is that the CONVENIENCE of the mother is not more valuable than the life of the fetus. Abortions are done most often not because the mother is going to die without the abortion but just because she is inconvenienced by pregnancy. She doesn’t care that she can give birth and immediately give up the baby to the hospital and they will take it and give it into the foster system or for adoption, she can absolve her self of all responsibilities at that point. No, even that is too inconvenient for her.

Rights to your body doesn’t condone murdering your own growing child inside of you, just like rights to your property doesn’t condone murdering your children because they were making too much noise in their room and you wanted some peace and quiet. We should accept the premise that all human beings, including developing ones in the womb, have an intrinsic right to life and the threshold for violating that right to life is quite high. Yes there are cases where abortion can reasonably and ethically be considered, but those are edge cases, they are the exceptions and not the rule.

The edge cases (if any - considering all risk to the mother happens after viability) are decisions that can be made in a hospital where everyone cares about the life of the mother and the child equally. We don’t need (or want) the abortion industry to be involved in those decisions (or to even exist).

And I will say (or hope) that most women who have abortions believe the neutralized narrative or language you see on display with Carleas’ posts. Part of me hopes it isn’t actually that they are jaded and make fun of the entire situation like a bunch of hardened killers… like I have unfortunately witnessed in person more than once or twice. It is sickening the state we are in.

Contraception is great, and should be encouraged. My understanding is that vasectomies are not reliably reversible (less than 90% successful), but a permanent vasectomy is advisable for someone who is not interested in getting anyone pregnant and would otherwise use less reliable forms of birth control, or forms with higher side effects (e.g. the pill).

And as I’ve argued, contraception is absolutely a pro-life intervention, and a rational pro-life movement would encourage wider availability of contraceptives and thorough sexual education to encourage their use.

That’s true as far as it goes, but why do you think this weighs in favor of your position? Assuming both woman and fetus have equal bodily autonomy, the fetus’ ends where it claims a right to live inside a woman who does not want it inside of her; and the woman’s ends where it is exercised by the bodily destruction of the fetus. But if the fetus is removed in a way that doesn’t destroy the fetus, then she has not infringed its right to bodily autonomy. Right?

This is the mistake you are making. These are not the same thing.

I don’t think this means what you think it means. A doctor removing a fetus from a woman is not doing harm, any more than a prison doctor who saves the life of a serial offender is doing harm. Saving the serial offender puts every other inmate in danger, but intervening to save their life is still compatible with Hippocratic oath. Similarly, removing a fetus from its mother puts the fetus at grave risk, but if the procedure is done non-destructively, the doctor has not harmed the fetus.

Exposing someone to harm is not the same as harming them.

This is not true. Abortion as a medical procedure is used in hospitals, and performed by doctors, as an intervention to protect the life and health of the mother.

Right, “neutral”. I’m intentionally not describing the situation in the way I think about it, because I’m setting aside the question of fetal personhood.

To his credit, Douthat at least acknowledges “a sincere disbelief in the full personhood of embryonic human life.” A hardened killer believes they are killing a person. Someone who does not believe that a fetus is a person is not the same (even if they were mistaken).

This greatly undermines your credibility. If the actual state of abortion were a problem, it would be sufficient to criticize it without conspiracy theories and wild accusations.

You criticize my neutralized language, but it’s let me hear your arguments and change my views. You should try it.

I agree this is a comparable case, and I’ve seen no mainstream acknowledgement or attempted rebuttal of it (and I’ve seen pro-choice people get mad when it is pointed out).

But it cuts both ways: if it is comparable, and forced vaccination is unacceptable, shouldn’t that push you to be more pro-choice?

I don’t want the state to be able to forcibly take my blood even if it would save lives and the only reason I don’t donate is that it would be “inconvenient” (and not for nothing, substantially less inconvenient than 9 months of incubating a human).

An important function of rights is in allocating decision making power. I get to decide if I give away my blood, and women get to decide if they incubate humans in their bodies. You can believe that we are selfish or cruel or evil, but the right to bodily autonomy gives us the right to make selfish, cruel, or evil decisions with our own bodies, regardless of what others believe about how we should use them – I am the final decision maker on questions of how my body is used.

No, it isn’t. The issue is about how abortions make you feel. Also, by “happens to be”, you mean must be, at least in the vast majority of cases. This is the natural course of human development.

Restricting bodily autonomy to harm onesself or others isn’t new or novel. You see someone harming himself or others, your imulse is to help or at least stop him.

The inconvenience argument might work if you have evidence to support the claim. Abortions seem to be very invasive and take a relatively heavy physical/emotional toll on women. I have never met a woman who used abortion as contraception (which isn’t to say they don’t exist). Perhaps those cases aren’t quite as common as you like to think? Or perhaps raporting personal reasons for an abortion can be difficult, or reveal difficult truths about people involved?

Vasectomies are a matter of convenience but not all men get them. The fact is that invasive medical procedures aren’t easy or convenient at all. Ask yourself how many women you think would willingly subject themselves to such an experience if they.had proper education and support.

Dude, women get abortions because they don’t want to have the kid. Why do you think they don’t want it? Because it would inconvenience their life. Even if they would simply give birth and give it away. The whole carrying it to term and giving birth thing would represent a huge inconvenience for them. Interrupt their regular routines, work, drinking and partying, etc.

Or maybe you think the average woman who gets an abortion is doing it because she thinks the pregnancy will kill her? Lol. What percentage of pregnancies and births end up killing the mother these days? Not that many in western countries.

So what reason do YOU think women get abortions? That seems to be the issue here. They’d rather kill their own child than… what? Spend the money on hospital bills? I’m sure there are plenty of programs out there to help with those medical costs.

Claiming bodily autonomy makes no sense when these same people were, not that long ago, forcing experimental gene therapy into the bodies of everyone they could get their hands on. And where would the right to bodily autonomy trump the right to life of another human being? The right to life is a higher value. Murdering another human being because you will have some inconvenience for the next several months, all because YOU chose to have sex and knew the risks, is pathological in the extreme.

…and there we touch up against the real issue here. Women want to keep having sex risk-free of pregnancy. They want to be like men, having casual sex on tinder or whatever they’re using these days, without the responsibility that comes with getting pregnant. Women’s rights in this area is really about women’s privilege to have casual sex without needing to be responsible for the consequences of that. This was what it’s always been about, way back to the initial feminism days. Women who don’t want kids but who want to fuck a lot.

Sure, nothing wrong with wanting to fuck a lot and not wanting kids, so practice safe sex and all that… but if you actually get pregnant anyway then you have a responsibility to your child. You can at bare minimum give it up for adoption like so many mothers do. But to kill it… bro. That’s literally insane.

I get colonoscopies because it’s more convenient than colon cancer. That doesn’t mean I enjoy colonoscopies. The risk you seem to be overlooking, or perhaps the greater of two evils, to some women is carrying and/or birthing a child they don’t want or can’t properly care for. You put the burden on the state, which already has too many children in the system that aren’t properly cared for.

Also, you seem hellbent on blaming women for unwanted pregnancy, but the convenience to the (often absentee) father-to-be is something you fail to address. Some women are coerced into seeking abortions by partners, family, or friends. Not to mention women who undergo these procedures seem to pay a heavy physical and emotional toll, whereas the father need not even be present.

I personally believe that the Plan B pill, or anything that prevents impantation, carries less moral weight. However, I also don’t think life is particularly special. Why piss and moan that a baby didn’t get a chance to experience suffering and death (because those are your only guarantees in life)? Some people only know hardship and refuse to inflict that reality on a child. You seem to operate under the assumption that any life is prefferrable to death, which is a privileged perspective to have.

I wonder if abortion rates would change if culture dictated that the father usually takes full responsibility of the child.

Addressing these points of yours in order:

I don’t remember saying women enjoy getting abortions.

Putting the ‘burden on the state’ to have a baby in foster care or up for adoption is one thing, killing it is another. Pretty sure where the “lesser of two evils” is here. And there’s no reason necessarily why any child in that system or adopted must not be properly cared for; if you think the system is flawed in that way then let’s find ways to improve it.

Well you don’t get to lump the father into the whole responsibility thing unless he also gets to be involved in the decision whether or not to get an abortion. The point here is that a woman can get pregnant, a man cannot; women know this, therefore women have an extra responsibility when it comes to having sex. This is just a fact, I never said it was fair. And a woman being pressured into getting an abortion doesn’t excuse her of the choice to get it. You can pressure someone into committing crimes and that doesn’t absolve them.

Yes it is true women who get abortions often regret it and suffer deep emotional trauma because of it, and also can suffer physical damage too.

Yes, preventing pregnancy is just fine. As long as no human being is growing inside of her, there’s no human being to kill.

“I don’t think life is particularly special.” Well then, thanks for coming right out with it. Having a view that human life isn’t special or valuable seems to be a common denominator for pro-abortion folks, at least in my experience. Eventually they get around to using this in an attempt to keep up with the debate, as if this somehow scores points for their side when of course it does the exact opposite and shows the truer nature of the people who think mothers killing their own children is just fine.

I never said any life is preferable to death, and I don’t believe that. But even if I did believe that, which I don’t, that would be irrelevant here. The baby hasn’t even been born yet and you want to judge the quality of its life already? That makes no sense.

The culture does dictate that the father take responsibility for the child, he has to make child care payments even if he isn’t living with the mother and child. Why would the father need to take FULL responsibility? It ought to be, and is, a shared responsibilty between both parents.

@statiktech can correct me if I’m wrong, but the point isn’t that it’s not wrong to kill someone, but that creating a life is not an unalloyed moral good. In other words, ending a pregnancy can be an act of compassion for the hypothetical life that would otherwise be created.

This perception that this is universal is similar to a point I made above to Ichthus, i.e. you’re failing to credit what Douthat called “a sincere disbelief in the full personhood of embryonic human life.” That is closer to a common denominator among those who are pro-choice.

Because while I agree with Statik on abortion, I disagree about life: I do think it’s special, that every life is valuable and preferable to death (though he’s absolutely right that that’s a privileged perspective). The state should do a lot to encourage women to choose to carry their pregnancies to term. But they shouldn’t be forced to do it by making abortion or contraception illegal, or tricked into it by denying them thorough sex education.

Women don’t surrender their bodily autonomy when they have sex. It’s true that biological differences have different implications for men and women, but we’re talking about law and policy – biologically, women are perfectly capable of ending a pregnancy, and often do so spontaneously. Biology is not the barrier to bodily autonomy here, the law is.

Men should have an equal right to refuse parental responsibilities. They should be able to notify the woman that they don’t want and don’t accept parental responsibility, and that she can make whatever decision she wants with respect to the pregnancy, and if she chooses to carry it to term, she does so on her own.

“the point isn’t that it’s not wrong to kill someone, but that creating a life is not an unalloyed moral good. In other words, ending a pregnancy can be an act of compassion for the hypothetical life that would otherwise be created.”

The life has already been created, so this is a strawman. No one here, at least not me, is arguing there is an inherent moral good to create lives out of nothing. But once the human life exists, it has inherent moral value.

And again, you don’t get to pre-judge an entire human being’s future life as "not worth it’ before it’s even born. That’s just… incredibly unjustified.

“what Douthat called “a sincere disbelief in the full personhood of embryonic human life.” That is closer to a common denominator among those who are pro-choice.”

You can call it a sincere disbelief if you want, I’m not debating that. I am saying it is a living human being, that’s all. “Personhood” is an important concept and can or cannot be applied to a baby in the womb depending how you want to define the concept. But a more important, morally fundamental value would be the value of human life, in particular a human life that is growing every second of every day toward being born and achieving that sacred “personhood” you mention.

You want to rob it of that future personhood, just because it doesn’t have it right now? But you know it will have it in the future, so why does that fact mean nothing to you? It’s strange for pro-abortion folks to discount the future so sharply and absolutely in this one particular case, especially when you are quite happy to take the distant future into consideration when you pre-judge the developing human being’s future life as somehow not worth living. That’s a blatant contradiction right there.

“Men should have an equal right to refuse parental responsibilities. They should be able to notify the woman that they don’t want and don’t accept parental responsibility, and that she can make whatever decision she wants with respect to the pregnancy, and if she chooses to carry it to term, she does so on her own.”

So zero responsibility? Sex with no responsibility, no maturity, just random fucking like some animals in the wild? Yikes. I beg to differ. A functioning civilization requires at minimum both parents take responsibility for their own children, at least on some level. Making child support payments would be a bare minimum. Ideally, the entire family and extended family and even neighbors around them would all implicitly take on some responsibility for the child. That would be the ideal anyway, although of course we are far from that. Yet it wasn’t all that long ago this was often the case.

If you choose to have sex, and you know it might end up creating a new human life, and then it does create a new human life, why would you morally be able to absolve yourself of responsibility? You engaged in the sex knowing full well what might happen, you took the risk as you see it. Nowhere else I can think of would it be morally or legally OK to knowingly perform an action that could result in X, and then when X happens you get to be like “naw not my problem” and walk away with zero moral or legal accountability. Especially not when the “X” in this case happens to be something as significant as another human being’s life and entire future.

We (in scarequotes) won’t even grant that artificial intelligence, not that we’re original, is personhood. Meanwhile, maybe some artificial intelligence doesn’t grant us personhood (or their advanced — in scarequotes — level of it)? Meanwhile, how do we know a baby doesn’t have personhood upon conception (we should err on the side of caution)? And another question. Some people reason that famous people that contributed a lot to society were almost aborted… therefore, we shouldn’t abort people. But what if those famous people never contributed anything and never got famous? Then we should’ve aborted them? We have weird ways of justifying things/personhood. We should turn the question inward and love the other the way we want to be loved despite our contributions or lack thereof.

As for Carleas’ last reply to me. Life takes priority over bodily autonomy. Otherwise we wouldn’t consider a life sentence more merciful than a death sentence. Abortion is a death sentence for the baby. It’s also a very painful one for babies who are viable, and even earlier than viability.

I don’t believe Carleas’ pretended ignorance on that issue. The data on when a baby is capable of pain in the womb is widely available. You don’t come up with such neutralizing language without knowing the opposing view whose language you are translating into a muted form. I do not have any motivation to continue engaging in this thread.