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.
Kearns doesn't say what her position is. Presumably if she believes she occupies the "high moral ground", she opposes abortion in all circumstances, no exceptions. She should say so. More "pro-life" people should advocate this position more stridently, instead of equivocating about compromises and leaving it to the states. It would make for a more honest discussion.
And anyone who pretends Bill bleedin' Maher is some kind of leftist spokesperson is arguing in bad faith.
Abortion is murder. And the crime scene is inside a sovereign uterus.
If abortion is murder, then by definition all women who have abortions collaborated in murder and must at least get life in prison, right?
God is a murderer. https://www.mattball.org/2020/08/abortion-and-god.html
Yep. Noah's flood being just one spectacular example.
WTF is a "sovereign uterus", are there other kinds?
Okay, wtf is a "sovereign uterus" or is this some kind of jape.
So if a mother dies giving birth, can we charge the baby with murder, too?
Mom's life isn't worth it, even though for most abortions, we're talking a sanitary napkin filled with blood?
Get real. Abortion is necessary medical care, not murder.
But forcing women to give birth is definitely spiritual rape.
Forcing a woman to give birth at the wrong time in her life leads to poorly-raised, potentially anti-social children.
Letting her wait until a better time results in children who will have a better chance. Those kids would most likely not have been born had she been forced to give birth earlier.
Those who make abortion a crime are denying life to those later children, who would have been born in better circumstances.
I like that argument. Not one I've heard or thought of before. But it's true. By forcing birth when the woman isn't ready for it, you're most likely denying birth when she is, when the odds of successfully raising said child are better.
I think it's an important point that needs to be emphasized more. I call them the "lost children."
Take for example a woman whose fetus tests for a genetic disorder. If she is able to have an abortion she may go on to have several healthy children in the future. If not, she may spend her life caring for a severely disabled child. Which is more "pro-life?"
I don't think the government can answer that question. So let the woman and her doctors decide.
I've seen that argument before. It was made by Ursula K. Le Guin in her essay "What It Was Like" about her own abortion. She was pregnant in college and had an abortion. If she hadn't, she says, she'd have been stuck with that child and would never have had the three wanted children she bore later on in marriage. (Probably, also, she would never have been able to embark on her literary career, and then we'd all be worse off.)
I'll look that one up. This is a point I always like to emphasize, especially with my Catholic relatives - legal abortion can be "pro-life" as well. The point is not so much how many children are born, but what circumstances they are born into.
Yup. Makes me think of all the women who have had abortions and then later in life had several children. If she'd had the first child the others could never exist, but that doesn't matter.
Single mom struggling to care for herself and her unplanned child versus someone who's prepared and committed to the life of raising a family.
Pro lifers don’t really believe it’s really a human baby at all stages. Thus the old gotcha question, “if there’s a fire in an IVF clinic and you only have 30 seconds to get out do you drag out an unconscious 30 year old technician or do you grab as many frozen embryos as you can carry?”
If they truly believed every stage was a human baby they’d leave the tech to die. But none of them would.
And if they truly believed it was murder they’d make no exceptions for rape or incest as most of them do. The few that don’t are ridiculous, but I will at least give them the credit for moral purity.
Arguing that people fail trolley car problems isn’t as powerful argument as you think.
Because you don’t think pro lifers would behave this way, or because you think the scenario is inapt?
that's not what he's arguing (as i take it). the point is there IS no trolley car problem in the case of frozen embryos and actual people at risk. no one, including pro-lifers, would have a moment's hesitation deciding which to save. because none of them truly believe a microscopic cluster of a few cells is equivalent to a human person.
The same point can be made any number of ways. Anti-abortion people claim to believe that zygotes are fully human, with all that entails. Except they do not act this way outside the narrowly constrained topic of abortion politics. The possible examples are endless. Here is one: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2020/03/09/the-silent-anniversary-that-proves-its-all-a-lie/
Arguing that common sense and the practicalities of the real world are less valuable than some abstract, abstruse, unprovable supernatural construct is also not as powerful an argument as you think.
I believe fully in abortion rights. However, I don't agree with this argument. The reason being is when you are forced to make a choice -- a very contrived one in this thought experiment -- you will make a choice, regardless of what the moral value of that choice is. To wit: if I have to make a choice between dragging out a technician or my child, who happens to be in the clinic, I will save my child. It doesn't mean that the tech's life is less important. Maybe he/she has three kids of their own -- but I had to make a choice.
Whether the embryo is "alive" or a "person" is irrelevant. (Scientifically, the fetus doesn't even have the brain connections for consciousness until around 28 weeks, which means it is unaware of anything, including its existence and/or termination.) The core question is: does ANYTHING or ANYONE have the right to force a woman to donate her uterus to support it against her will? If I can't be forced to donate my blood, bone marrow or kidney to save my BORN child's life--if I can refuse to do so for any reason, even if my child will die as a result--then a pregnant woman cannot be forced to donate her uterus (and indeed, her entire body) to perpetuate an unwanted pregnancy.
This is why I've come to the conclusion that the government should butt out of this decision entirely. No restrictions at all, because the overwhelming majority of elective abortions are done before thirteen weeks, and the rare third-trimester abortions are almost always tragedies. Either way, pregnancy is too complicated to be regulated, and the government has no place sticking its nose into a woman's body and business.
Agree up to a point. You can be forced to care for your born child. Besides the termination of your parental rights, failing to do so can result in criminal prosecutions for neglect.
Besides, what Kevin says is right: Almost nobody agrees you should be able to terminate a pregnancy by killing an unborn and healthy fetus/baby just days before full-term. And good luck finding any doctor wiling to assist if that's what you want. Roe had it right: no restrictions in the first trimester, restrictions in the second trimester but mostly favoring the reasonable wants/wishes of the mother, and more significant restrictions in the third trimester, which generally disfavor abortion absent some compelling reason.
"Agree up to a point. You can be forced to care for your born child. Besides the termination of your parental rights, failing to do so can result in criminal prosecutions for neglect."
This is a huge strawman argument, since what redheadedfemme said is that no one can be forced to donate any body part even if not doing so would cost a child's life.
It's a strawman argument because in the real world no one carries a pregnancy for nine months and then aborts for no good reason.
"It's a strawman argument because in the real world no one carries a pregnancy for nine months and then aborts for no good reason."
Exactly! It's a self-solving problem. Even if someone, because of mental illness, did want to terminate their pregnancy days before delivery, no doctor would take on that task.
Not a straw man argument because it really wasn't part of the point I was making/responding to, which is nobody really agrees that society has zero right to impose any kind of restriction on abortion whenever the fetus is still in the womb.
Yes, super late abortions are almost non-existent, but that doesn't mean a law restricting them in some reasonable way is morally indefensible. I'd be fine with a law prohibiting abortion after the 35th week absent a compelling medical justification. How about you?
And as for my aside, just because you can't be forced to give a kidney to a child really has no bearing on the uniqueness of pregnancy. Again, I go back to Roe. Most people agree that at some point society has the right to recognize the life of the fetus and impose reasonable limitations on abortion. As Kevin said, they just disagree about where that point is.
Doctors routinely surgically terminate pregnancies just days before full term. However, they don't kill the fetus/baby in the process. The procedure is called a Caesarian section.
REDS RULE!!!!
If they actually think it’s murder they have to believe the murderer should be punished. Murder for hire is a special circumstance in most places and the penalty is life imprisonment or death. How many “pro-life” people are calling for that?
The questions should be "how many want to call for that", but feel they can't.
From reading what Kearns wrote, I'm inclined to believe that she's not very good at debate. She doesn't have a real understanding of the different sides of abortion.
For decades, the definition of death in every U.S. jurisdiction is brain death, i.e. the cessation of function above the brain stem. Doesn’t ’brain life’ seem to be something we should consider as essential before conferring the status of a legal person on an embryo? If stopping support machinery for what had once unquestionably been a constitutionally-protected human life is not murder, how can that charge be applied to an organism that has never had cortical activity in the first place?
The last time I looked into this, all that was known is that cortical activity seems to begin in the second trimester, likely closer to the end than the beginning. I hope we know more now.
By "moral high ground" in this snippet, I think she means "stronger emotional appeal" rather than "best moral case."
And I think she's probably-- I'm guessing here because I don't want to read her whole piece right now-- probably taking that approach in order to elide or finesse her position's ultimate basis in a religiously-rooted understanding of when "human life" begins. Like Kevin, I don't think that's something that can be scientifically identified as a definitive point in gestational time. But there are religions that insist such a definitive point exists, and that they know what it is.
Until very recently, and then only in certain jurisdictions (hi, Alabama!), explicitly religious reasoning on abortion had no chance in the public square because it was (virtually) universally understood to violate the religious establishment clause of the Bill of Rights. So people like this writer needed to find other avenues of persuasion, and emotional appeals are traditional and often effective. I think she's probably encouraging a more effectively emotional mode of arguing for a position that would, if it succeeded, establish a particular religious view as law. That isn't something anyone has a right to do by any moral scale I know of.
There are some anti-abortion people who are truly sincere. In the political arena, they are just interested in calling their opponents "baby-killers!" so they can get their tax cuts and cut off health care for poor pregnant women.
Kevin opines that Shape is a key determinant for many people as to what qualifies as human.
2022-07-05 How to make friends and influence abortion wafflers
https://jabberwocking.com/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-abortion-wafflers/comment-page-2/
A large majority of moderates on both sides have feelings that are basically shaped by shape. That is, they don't think a little ball of cells looks human but they do think that a sonogram taken at 18 weeks does. That's why they mostly approve of Roe v. Wade. They don't care if it makes legal sense, they only care that it jibes with their intuition.
(and)
... how do we take advantage of the shape thing? After all, it makes a lot of sense for a pattern-matching species like us. If it looks human, it probably is human.
Garrett Hardin argued that burning down a house was not the same as burning up the plans for a house, particularly when there was a stack of additional house plans available. An early stage embryo is a plan for a human, not an actual human.
The choice that a living, breathing, thinking human must sacrifice their life for one that does none of the above is disgusting.
It doesn't matter if they believe it's murder: Because they're willing to maim and murder innocent lives to enslave them to hope to bring a life into the world.
It's not moral, it's instead evil they do - down to their misleading title of 'pro-life' when they're promoting more death.
I think you a little off, Kevin. It is very common in my experience for the pro-choice side to resist, often very vehemently and stubbornly, the statement the a (human) fetus is a human being, often prefaced by “living” or “innocent”.
In fact, you did just that, by eliding over those words and talking about “murder” instead. It’s unclear from your post whether you meant “A fetus is not a human being and therefore destroying it is morally permissible” or “A fetus IS an innocent human being but destroying it is morally permissible regardless”.
It’s almost as if you made the NR’s point for them. Even in front of all of us, you couldn’t admit that the fetus is an innocent human being. Can you be explicit on this point? Or if you disagree with it, explain why?
Define "human being." Is a human stem cell a human being? Is a human zygote a human being? Is a human embryo a human being?
No, yes, yes.
Now you are making NR’s point by again dodging the question.
LOL! I'm not dodging the question, I'm pointing out that the question is nonsense. You can make a human from an adult stem cell, so how is a human stem cell not a human being but a zygote (which is mostly a collection of stem cells) is?
The notion that "human beings" have a start point is biologically meaningless. The notion that legal protections begin at some specific point is arbitrary. We can stipulate that legal protections begin somewhere and also admit that the stage at which those protections begin are biologically arbitrary.
Good explanation! Thanks. At one time, there was a lawsuit by Jewish persons that calling an early stage zygote, fetus, or whatever a "person" and granting it full human rights violated their religious freedom.
Their definition of "personhood" was when the baby was actually born and took its first breath. Assuming it was able to take a breath. If not, then it was simply a tragedy, not a "murder."
You can make a human from a wheelbarrow of sludge with sufficiently advanced technology.
A (human) stem cell is not a human, nor is any individual cell in your body. With sufficient effort and transformation they could be made into one, but what something you could be and what it is are very different concepts.
A (human) zygote is alive, a unique member of our species, and grows as long as it is kept in a suitable and common environment, without an external modification of the zygote. Give the gigantic number of single-celled organisms on earth, it’s ridiculous to claim that humans (or other multicellular organisms) are not alive or individuals until they reach some threshold that you personally are making up. You sure won’t find such a concept in a biology textbook.
"No, yes, yes."
By your logic that means that IVF clinics keep a bunch of humans frozen, locked up, and deprived of food and oxygen.
So I imagine you support closing all of them down, incarcerating anyone who subjected these humans to such abuse, and for the immediate release of said humans?
And on that topic, to live a human requires oxygen and substenance, and trying to freeze a human would lead to death. So how come none of these applies in this case? Perhaps because they are not humans yet?
I think Kevin was pretty clear that he doesn't consider a fetus a human being. I certainly don't, and I find the suggestion frankly ludicrous. I usually assume anyone who claims to believe this is either being hyperbolic or disingenuous.
If you ask people whether women who have had abortions should serve long prison sentences of face execution, my guess is that you will find relatively few who agree, which would suggest that even forced birth supporters don't really believe this.
I think you have a fault equation.
You say the pro-choice faction "will not a (human) fetus is a human being, often prefaced by “living” or “innocent."
And claim I insult you, later on, you say, " Even in front of all of us, you couldn’t admit that the fetus is an innocent human being.
So I'm going to be very, very blunt: I dont' have to hold a funeral for my used sanitary napkins, either. And innocence has nothing to do with it. I was innocent the first time my christian-great-uncle molested me, too. Nobody gave a crap, even though everybody knew about him.
You want me to attribute some sacredness to what happens after a heavy period, and I'm not having any of it. Yes, it is human, of human genes. No, it is not sacred. and I would say it is never sacred until she consents to it or it can survive and thrive without her, whichever comes first.
That is my moral stance. I believe her consent is the sacred thing, a bonding spiritual contract with her child.
Is a human body in which cortical function has ceased a human being? However you answer that, the legislatures and/or courts of every jurisdiction in the U.S. has decided that it is not a person protected by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution; therefore ceasing life support is not murder.
Weird, it's like you don't think that the person who's pregnant is deserving of life or health, to make the argument that they must sacrifice it for this potential one.
It's disgusting and evil.
I’ve conceived four times and had one live birth. No one, not even the most ardent “pro-lifer,” considers me a mother of four. And one pregnancy was anembroyonic, which means that literally no embryo formed when the blastocyst implanted— I have no idea what their so-called morals dictate in those cases, although I’m very glad my body cleared things out without medical intervention (e.g., medical abortion).
No, they don’t really believe it. They seem to believe that the blastocyst/embryo/fetus/prospective person should be left to develop no matter what, in a sort of existential crapshoot, but that’s still not the same as thinking that it’s an actual human.
Most human conceptuses don't go to term. God is the greatest abortionist of all time.
It’s true that children born to better-situated mothers do better on average. But, per Derek Parfit, the children that aren’t born (whether aborted or never conceived (for the record I’m pro choice)) *may* have had a life worth living. By not being born they certainly won’t. A child born later is simply not the same child delayed a bit.
Well, Hillary Clinton might have been president but for Stormy Daniels accepting a payoff.
Al Gore might have been president but for counting the entire state of FL.
Might have beens don't have much heft in the real world. And children that might have been are interesting to talk about, but have as much impact on things as Presidents Hillary Ciinton and Al Gore did.
But they get to play with the unicorns in Meinong’s Jungle …
People claiming the moral high ground vote for Trump, the most immoral person ever to run for President. So much for morals!
“We pro-choicers are happy to acknowledge the argument that abortion is murder. What choice do we have? ”
I don’t think that’s the case. I see commenters here and other places all the time who refuse to acknowledge that is the argument from the pro-life crowd. Instead, they assert the pro-life argument is simply a desire to “control women” and is just some form of misogyny. There’s no acknowledgement it comes from sincere moral beliefs.
"I see commenters here and other places all the time who refuse to acknowledge that is the argument from the pro-life crowd. Instead, they assert the pro-life argument is simply a desire to “control women” and is just some form of misogyny""
I think you're straining here. What do you mean by 'acknowledge?" That you've heard the point, or that you give it moral credence in the debate?
Do you pro-life advocates ever 'acknowledge' they're making a big demand of women, a potentially life-threatening demand, when they find they're pregnant but did not intend to get pregnant? Or when they did intend to get pregnant and then discovered daddy is budding wife-beater?
I fully admit pro-lifers think they're debating from a moral stance. But there's a pro-choice moral stance too: no woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy, just as no woman should be forced to have an abortion.
Then we can discuss Daddy's rights; and I believe all this debate would mostly vanish if we did that: He should have a right to consent to fatherhood, to surrender his parental rights if he does not want the child.
Right now, I believe men think it's okay to force a woman to carry a child because they don't have a right opt-oui of being a daddy after they got lucky,
I guess I'm just thinking of the many back and forths I've had where I'm explaining my (more or less) pro-life stance. It stems from my belief that human life is sacred and abortion is extinguishing a human life. I've had many people say, essentially, I really don't care about human life I just hate women and want to control their bodies. They do not accept or acknowledge my basis for my opinion.
It's that kid of nonsense that made me disagree with Kevin's blanket statement that pro-choicers are happy to acknowledge the argument that some see abortion as murder. In my experience that is often not the case. They deny that we could be motivated by anything other than misogyny.
And to answer your question, yes, I do acknowledge that any pro-life laws make a big demand on women. That's why its not a black and white issue for me (or for most people, I don't think).
For an example of what I'm talking about, see NotCynicalEnough's comment below (posted 4/16/24 at 8:28 AM).
An excerpt:
"I don't acknowledge that most anti-abortion proponents think that abortion is murder. I acknowledge that that is what they say, but I still believe that the vast majority of them have zero interest in the fetus and a huge interest in punishing sinners. But only the women, of course."
So, you support a massive expansion of free prenatal care, universal health care, free access to contraception and support for the expanded child tax credit? I didn't think so.
What is your point?
Just because you think life is 'sacred,' leaves out women's consent.
Is just a bridge too far for you, Atticus?
You make a big ask of them, but dont' respect their own opinions on the matter because you think something is 'sacred?' Get over your own high opinion of yourself, man. Like I said; that 'sacredness' is just a messy, stinky lot of blood in a period product (that she probably has to pay sales tax on.) Lack of those products keep young women out of school in many 3rd world countries.
I don't get it. You are probably not very comfortable with my talk about periods and tampons; if you can't even go there, what the hell right do you have to dictate any other thing?
Can I decide your sperm is sacred and punish you for spilling it, too?
Get over yourself. If you want spirit in this, stop trying to dick women into having children they don't want. Then maybe we can get on with viewing children as actually being sacred and worth caring for properly.
Ahh, the guy here who brings us bigotry and telling us trans lives aren't worth living wants to play gotcha with his forced-birth agenda. Of course he's willing to kill and maim women as long as he gets his digs.
I think the abortion debate should be considered in terms of contract law rather than trying to raise unassailable, holy standards.
After all, if we want to claim that a pregnant woman has to undergo nine months of body realignment in order to preserve a human life, how is it that the rest of us get a pass on paying a little more in tax to make sure that everyone has life-preserving access to healthcare?
If there is a social contract that we have to make sacrifices in order to preserve life, shouldn't the latter be a more immediate result than the former?
Or, we could take the position that an act of heterosexual intercourse is an implied contract to carry to term any pregnancy that results ... which raises obvious questions about rape, failed contraceptives, etc. And which also raises questions about what we think the role of sex in our lives should be in the eyes of the law.
Furthermore, it is my considered opinion that the State of Israel does not deserve to exist.
" how is it that the rest of us get a pass on paying a little more in tax to make sure that everyone has life-preserving access to healthcare?"
I get your heart is in the right place here, but a 'little more in taxes" and "life-preserving access to healthcare" does not reimburse one for the toll of pregnancy on one's body. It's easy for some. For others, it's a like walking through the Valley of Shadows.
I didn’t take the argument as suggesting compensation for carrying a pregnancy; I took it to be, if we regard every human life as so valuable that we would force women to undergo the stress and risk of carrying every pregnancy to birth, should all of us not make the minor effort of paying a bit more in taxes to support universal health care (and thus ease and extend the lives of those already born?)
Well, that's a cheap way to ease your conscience.
While we're at it, can we force every man to have a DNA test so that we can clearly identify his children; and maybe imprison him if she didn't consent to the pregnancy? Castrate him if he forced her?
That would ease my anger at men, after all. And the rest of the supposedly good men who want to ignore the behavior of some men can rest at east about forcing women to bear children.
You misread. See KenSchulz' response.
And you're pretty rude and obnoxious.
Furthermore, it is my considered opinion that the State of Israel does not deserve to exist.
I think Fred Clark at Slacktivist is very helpful on this general point. As he has pointed out many, many times, on some level the vast majority of pro-life people don't really believe that abortion is murder or the equivalent of murder, because their behavior is wildly inconsistent with holding that belief. See, e.g., https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/10/24/no-5k-for-the-biggest-killer-so-does-anyone-really-believe-its-a-killer/. I think they think abortion is wrong, but at some point, their conduct shows they don't believe it's murder.
I just don't know how you can say that 'they don't believe. . .'
I'm sure some don't. Some obviously do. And I know more than a few pro-choice women who, when push came to an inconvenient pregnancy, opted to commit what they thought was murder.
But in general, any time you're ascribing a single belief on a complicated topic to millions of people, just don't. It does not work well.
I, for instance, firmly belief abortion is murder: it ends a human life. But I'm firmly pro-choice, too; it's not a life that can sustain itself, and its right don't override the mother's rights. But having an abortion still ends a life.
If we can't try to understand and describe large groups of people's beliefs, then we will be very limited in any attempt to discuss or analyze religion or politics or many other social phenomena. And if people argue that their beliefs should be the foundation for laws binding and governing everyone else, they have to accept they will be scrutinized. If they don't want that scrutiny, they shouldn't be trying to build laws around them.
I'd also note, it was the pro-life person whom Kevin quoted who attributed a broad, single belief to the pro-life movement: "that what’s being aborted is an innocent human person." But you didn't seem to have any problem with her broad, groundless assertion; it was just my questioning it based on observable behavior that you responded to by asserting that "just don't." Why is her statement fine, but my pointing out that it seems flatly inconsistent with most of their behavior wrong?
Kevin coincidentally made this exact point a decade ago— https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/08/how-many-people-really-truly-believe-abortion-murder/
He detailed how a Steve DesJarlais, a Republican congressman, got caught encouraging/coercing women to have abortions. The Right collectively shrugged and went about voting him back into office. Do some people truly believe abortion is murder? Absolutely. There are just very, very few of them.
Excerpting Kevin’s piece: “… I’ve never really believed that much of anyone really, truly thinks that abortion is murder. If you look at actions, rather than words, it just doesn’t add up. Lots of people oppose abortion, but with very few exceptions, they very plainly don’t react to it the same way they react to a genuine murder. Their emotional response gives the game away, even if they’ve convinced themselves otherwise intellectually.
DesJarlais is a good example. If he had encouraged the murder of two children—real murder, of kids who were a year or two old—he wouldn’t merely be having a tough primary. Regardless of whether he had managed to avoid conviction for his acts, he wouldn’t even be able to run for office, let alone be even odds to win. He’d be a pariah. That’s how people react to actual killing. But it’s not how they react to encouraging abortion. As long as DesJarlais is otherwise on the right side of the culture wars, it’ll be shrugged off as unfortunate but not disqualifying.“
A woman has no ethical obligation to subsume her rights in deference to a zygote the size of a pomegranate seed.
The "abortion is murder" assertion rests on the idea of fetal personhood. Fetal personhood is not the law in the US, which is why GOP-controlled state legislatures have been passing fetal personhood laws. The IVF kerfuffle shows that these lawmakers didn't really think through the consequences of the idea.
The idea that the rights of a fetus take precedence over those of the mother is rooted in religious orthodoxy, not morality.
I believe that forced birth laws will have some unforeseen consequences too, which will play out in the courts. Forcing someone to give birth is slavery, and slavery is illegal in the US. That should have been the basis for Roe all along.
Given:
https://jabberwocking.com/florida-bans-abortion-but-allows-vote-to-make-it-legal-again/ I would have thought you would have gone with an image from later in development/when most women would be having an abortion.
Rule #1: Conservatives never argue in good faith
Has anyone mentioned that there is another life involved? A life that is already fully formed, breathing, and thinking? No one on the pro-life side gives a flying xxxx about the woman's life. Why must a woman's life be sacrificed for the potential life of a zygote? Doesn't she get any consideration? A woman gives her body, her health, her autonomy, and sometimes her life for a pregnancy. Doesn't that count for something?
It's about the soul. Which most people (but not me) think of as unitary, not as something that slowly comes into being. That being so, the arbiter of when the soul enters the body is God, failing that Mother Nature. Surely He (or She) wouldn't expel a fetus with a soul already in it? Since He (or She) does provoke miscarriages until the 12th week, more rarely until the 20th week, that should be the religious limit. Not conception for God's (literal) sake. That would be blasphemy: calling Him a babykiller.
I don't acknowledge that most anti-abortion proponents think that abortion is murder. I acknowledge that that is what they say, but I still believe that the vast majority of them have zero interest in the fetus and a huge interest in punishing sinners. But only the women, of course. If they were really pro-life they would have a heck of a lot more interest in using tax money to care for actually born children instead of, say, prioritizing tax cuts for the ultra wealthy and killing Muslim children. You can't over estimate the amount of mush religion has put into people's brains.
There are two issues, one whether pro-choice people agree that abortion is murder, clearly the great bulk do not, and the other is whether pro-choice people believe that the anti-abortion position is driven by a belief that abortion is murder.
It seems clear that most people are bothered by the idea of abortion, in general at least, they seem to be much less bothered by their own particular situation because they know if they choose to get an abortion it will not be frivolous, but that most people do not think abortion is murder. That is why the exceptions are so uncontroversial except among the politically driven. I think we are seeing the degree to which people really don't think abortion is murder in how the various pro-choice referenda are doing compared with what polls suggest they should be doing.
But it is true that many pro-choice people doubt that even the people who would ban abortion without exception really believe that abortion is murder, rather than believing that abortion is murder because they want to outlaw it, and don't want to allow the various exceptions that could be used to allow bad abortions.
Part of the reason for this is that the people pushing the abortion bans seem to have given so little consideration to how abortion actually works that they seem to be surprised that there is such a fine line between abortion and miscarriage in some cases, have not considered whether pregnancies that threaten the mother are actually viable, etc. But another reason is that the anti-abortion movement is so continuous from the anti-contraception movement from which it derived. One can see that from the hate that is directed at Margaret Sanger who was not actually an abortion supporter, but was almost monomaniacal in her support for access to contraception. All of the dishonest attacks on her predate the issue switching from contraception to abortion. And yet they survive within the movement, which was not about murder when it was about contraception.
You get this a lot with this kind of issues driven by the religious right. So, for example, the attacks on transgender rights seems to have been modelled on the attacks on abortion with just a word here or there switched out.
"In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal. Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception."
"Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:
'God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.'"
(What happened? The right wing money/power machine decided murdered babies was a cash/vote cow.)
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
Bringing an unwanted child into the world is immoral. Forcing women to bring an unwanted child into the world is worse. Abortion advocates, especially 'liberal' politicians, rarely rebut the arguments of the forced birthers with the immorality of forcing women to give birth to unwanted children, and that is where abortion advocates cede the moral high ground.
This is a bit too categorical. If you looked around I am sure you would find many unwanted children who were very much wanted once they were born. We have to admit that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is a choice of the smaller evil, a weighing between the interest of the pregnant woman and the potential human being. There is ambiguity there.
Practical experience shows that the only fair way to set rules for this decision is to put into the hands of the woman concerned.
The assertion abortion is murder of a human being requires a rebuttal on the same level of moral certainty. Advocates for women's reproductive rights should argue bringing an unwanted child into the world is immoral and that forcing women to give birth to an unwanted child is as bad as forcing women to abort wanted pregnancies. Furthermore, women's reproductive rights advocates should encourage and reward women with unwanted pregnancies to abort. The women's reproductive rights debate cannot be practically discussed when the opponent bases their argument on abortion is murder. The opponent's moral standing has to be framed as authoritatively cruel.