Madeleine Kearns says this about abortion over at National Review:
The pro-life side can afford to acknowledge the best pro-choice arguments — a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, the intense difficulties an unplanned pregnancy can cause, the asymmetry of reproduction between the sexes, etc. They have counter-arguments for each of them.
But the pro-choice side cannot afford to acknowledge the legitimacy of the pro-life argument — that what’s being aborted is an innocent human person. If they did, they’d lose the moral high ground.
What does this even mean? What moral high ground? We pro-choicers are happy to acknowledge the argument that abortion is murder. What choice do we have? We just don't believe it. We don't believe there's any moral valence to ending this:
Most people agree with us, as the almost unanimous support for IVF suggests. But as the embryo grows it becomes more and more human-like, and at some point it's close enough to human that most people think it shouldn't be aborted short of an emergency. Obviously that point is a gray area, and just as obviously, people disagree about where it is and who gets to decide.
There's no science to settle this. Nor is there any particular moral high ground. Just a vast gulf of different opinion.
Just because you say that an embryo or a fetus in various stages of development is an "innocent human person", doesn't mean that it is. This reminds me of St. Anselmo argument for the existence of god: if I can imagine the most perfect being, then it must exist and be called god. Just because you call a fertilized egg -- whose lifespan in most cases is hours or days, as most fertilizations don't' stick -- a person, doesn't immediately give validity to your claim.
A person is someone who is born of a human mother. Beyond that, it's a continuum, where the thing has a 25% chance of becoming a person. You don't hold a winning lottery ticket because it is possible for the numbers to come up.
This is a good comment, thank you.
In a world of forced birth, do we charge an infant with murder if its mother dies from complications of pregnancy? Why not? If the first thing that child does is murder its own mother, how can it be innocent?
We don't. And the pro-life crowd has always tried to avoid the notion that women are guilty of murder when they chose an abortion.
Seems to be like a tacit admission that this stuff is physical and dangerous and not to be taken lightly and certainly not to be forced.
You switched from “innocent human being” to “innocent human person”. By doing so you made NR’s point: you can’t admit a fact and will slap together word-salads and straw men to hide it.
What does 'innocent' have to do with it?
Is the mother not innocent because she's had sex?
I use "person" because I think that it has a more precise legal definition; or, perhaps, because personhood is what we should be discussing. I have no problem with defining a human being as an animal born of a human mother. An embryo or a fetus in various stages of development is not a human being.
But “person” was not what NR was challenging. Additionally, using the law to justify the law is circular reasoning.
NR wants you to admit that a fetus is “an” “innocent” “human being”. Do you deny this? Is so, are you denying a/an, innocent, or human being?
There human cells there.
They are just cells; and they contain a blue print for a human being.
They are not a human being, however, that requires a mother to happen provide a womb where the blue print can be activated and grow.
Without her, there is nothing; she is essential. Through history, women have loved being mothers. And they've always sought to control it, too; spacing children properly, avoiding them if their health were in danger; aborting them with penny royal and Queen Anne's Lace when the women needed to bring on the menses.
NR is building a fault construction, and I myself prefer the age-old notion of quickening; a life has quickened.
But even after quickening, I would always put the mother's life first if there is any question of balancing rights.
I also remind you that a cesarean is an abortion; an end of pregnancy.
“They are not a human being, however”
You are simply wrong. There is no point of development where after which a multi-cellular organism becomes a member of its species, while before it was not. No such concept exists in science and drawing some arbitrary line would be useless.
Leave being wrong about science to conservatives. It makes we liberals look bad.
Trolley problem scenarios are misguided. It's more that we pro-choice folks believe that a woman's right to bodily autonomy is a greater value than any potential life form in a womb. And we also have counter arguments for every argument the forced birthers have.
Right. Google on 'The tethered violinist' variant of the Trolley problem.
The tethered violinist is only relevant in cases of rape, where like in the analogy the person being ask to save another is not at fault for the at-risk’s person’s situation.
Why? Because you say so? This particular trolley is deployed as a valid argument when talking about abortion in a philosophy class. So who do you think I should believe? You, with your flat assertion? Or someone who has a PhD in (moral) philosophy?
Arguement by assertion style does not play well with this paricular crowd, and I thought you'd figured that out on your own early on. Maybe not, in which case, I just did you a solid.
It was an immediate objection to Thomas’s analogy and is clearly correct. It’s even pointed out on the Wikipedia page for this topic.
Thomas then came up with even more contrived scenarios, but they weren’t much better.
If you are in a dangerous situation through MY actions, not yours, my obligation to help you is obviously much higher than if it was your fault or a third party’s fault or a random act of God.
Why does 'critics say' equate to 'clearly correct'? What did I just say about argument by assertion and no, it isn't logically valid to back up an assertion by making another at one remove. Who are these 'critics' and what other arguments do they deploy against abortion? You should have researched further. More seriously, why do you not point out that 'critics say' without mentioning the counterpoint? That's dishonest, and indicates bad faith. Finally, this is a wikipedia article (Did you even look at the edit history?) Why did you stop there instead of researching further?
Now please answer my original question, either justifying your secondary assertion that 'critics say' equates to 'clearly correct', or by abondoning that premise entirely and replacing it with another.
The quoted text is just defensive. As usual, they have to lie about their opponents to make the case.
Kevin treats it straight, but I don't have to pretend there's any reason for assuming good faith here. It just declares that one can't support womens' agency without secretly agreeing with Randy Terry. Which is obviously, laughably false when stripped of the careful setup, but is about typical of NR's respect for their readers.
If you believe that a soul comes into existence when a new zygote's DNA is formed, then obviously any kind of abortion, including as a result of rape or incest, is intolerable.
To most people that argument then has to deal with the real world in ways that are themselves intolerable, so most people simply don't bother with the theology and are fine with abortion being limited somewhere between 0 and 9 months and the debate just becomes a question of where on that spectrum to go and everything else is sturm und drang.
Darn good thing you can never get pregnant.
Pregnancy is physical. It's demanding. It's often disgusting. It changes women's bodies physically in ways you cannot imagine.
Before modern medicine, it was the #1 cause of death for women and it remains a dangerous and risky proposition for many women.
All your thoughts about are unwelcome; you completely want to disregard the physicality and risk because you've got no skin in the game.
Intolerable indeed.
Get back to me when you've spent some time pondering that it takes two years to recover from giving birth. That women spend five or six weeks bleeding after, and live for months sleep deprived. And that's only if the survive pregnancy and birth.
It's not some spiritual lark when new souls are made, it's a long difficult draining process that hijacks the body.
It's irrelevant when the soul arrives... Unless you don't think women qualify. There's a person who's already living who will be maimed or killed if they can't sever that relationship
Much of the Forced Birth crowds’ argument comes down to theology: Most of them believe in the existence of a soul linked to an afterlife. And Grandma isn’t really dead; she is smiling down from above. The baby that died is in Heaven now. It’s ultimately impossible to counter arguments based upon no evidence, especially when they have been embraced since early childhood. Agnostics and atheists need to come out of the closet to start. And then progressive and moderate religionists need to accept them as neighbors.
An argument without evidence isn't really an argument, or so I would think. And even if it were, at the least, little to no weight would be attached to it.