The Effect of "Abortion Rights" on the Political Landscape

[Tombs]

Sometimes it is necessary to speak for another person, and sometimes it results in the end of their life. Euthanasia and abortion can both be an act of mercy.

And this is precisely where the ideological divide rests.

I just don't understand how that can be expanded into a consistent check and balance that decides the morality of taking a life that is not a direct threat to others.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

I'm betting on them trying to use the Commerce clause as justification.

That would be funny if it weren't true.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

I can’t speak for “the left”, but personally I have no problem with the next of kin deciding to withdraw life support from a loved one in a persistent vegetative state…not out of convenience though, out of compassion.

For me, this raises the question, what about cases that involve more than simply withdrawing life support? In a late-term abortion, the child is fully capable of surviving outside the womb. In very late-term abortions, he/she can even do so without extraordinary medical intervention. So abortion in those cases is not equivalent to withdrawing life support, it's equivalent to taking action to deliberately end someone's life.

And this is precisely where the ideological divide rests.

I just don't understand how that can be expanded into a consistent check and balance that decides the morality of taking a life that is not a direct threat to others.

I agree with Tombs, here.

I would really like to hear how you understand/define a person's right to life, because it seems like you believe a person's right to life is somehow tied to or contingent upon their "agency", or their ability to communicate, and if they rely on others to do that for them, then their right to life can "belong" to that other person/persons. I'm curious if I'm getting that correctly or not.

If I understand correctly, you argument on abortion essentially comes down to the idea that since a fetus has zero agency, and the fetus is entirely dependent upon the mother, then the mother has the exclusive right to say if the fetus should live or die.

Now, laying aside my unaddressed questions about what you mean by "agency", and the examples I gave above which, to me, prove that a fetus has some basic level of agency, there is a deeper issue I see with your argument.

You have been willing to be logically consistent, and say that if an adult has no agency whatsoever (like a person in a vegetative state) then those responsible for their care get to say whether they live or die.

The trouble is, if we continue applying this logic consistently, then what we have is a situation where the right to life is not regarded as absolute, but is tied to a person's ability to communicate, take care of his/herself, or in short, their "agency", as you put it. So if having 0% agency, like a fetus or a person in a vegetative state, makes one's right to life belong 100% to those who care for that person, than shouldn't having only 10% agency mean that your right to life belongs 90% to those taking care of you? Or, to put it another way: above, somebody pointed out that a newborn is still dependent on others to survive, just like a fetus. Your response was that a fetus is reliant on only one person, the mother, but a newborn can be taken care of by anyone. But the question left by this, is: if a fetus being reliant 100% on the mother means that the fetus' right to life "belongs" to the mother, and can be revoked by her, doesn't it follow that if a newborn is 100% reliant on society, then the newborn's right to life "belongs" to society, and can be revoked by society? If nobody in society wants to care for the newborn, can we just leave the newborn to die of exposure, like the ancient Romans did? (There's grounding in tradition for you, too!) Or just be more compassionate and give them a quick death?

If you want real life examples rather than hypotheticals, look at what's happening in the UK in the cases of Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans, and Indi Gregory. In all of these cases, these children were on life support, and since healthcare in the UK is exclusively paid for by the government, it was up to a judge to decide whether or not to continue care for them. In all 3 cases, a judge decided that it wasn't worth caring for them, and ordered them removed from life support against the parents' wishes. But the kicker in all 3 cases is that the judge also ordered that the children were not allowed to leave the country in order to seek medical care elsewhere. In at least one case, funds had already been raised, and a spot secured in a foreign hospital, with an airplane literally sitting in the airport reserved for an emergency flight to take Charlie to that hospital. But the judge presiding over the case ordered that the parents not be allowed to transfer their son. Essentially, the judge was using your logic: since Charlie relied 100% on the UK health system for his care, his life belonged to the UK health system, and they could do anything they want, up to and including holding him trapped in their hospital while they stop caring for him with the intention of letting him die, all against his parents' wishes.

It's a path that I don't think you've considered where it's leading. A lot of us see where this sort of logic ends up, and it's a place we really don't want our society to go.

 

[Expat]

So if my Son in Law is a worthless POS I can feel free to put him out of his misery.

 

[KLB]

The trouble is, if we continue applying this logic consistently, then what we have is a situation where the right to life is not regarded as absolute, but is tied to a person's ability to communicate, take care of his/herself, or in short, their "agency", as you put it.

What is your stance on capital punishment?

 

[oze]

So if my Son in Law is a worthless POS I can feel free to put him out of his misery.

If I understand the pro-abortionists' logic, no. Only his mother could kill him.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

What is your stance on capital punishment?

I believe that capital punishment is, generally speaking, immoral. In my mind, executions should only be used as a last resort in extreme circumstances where it is the only possible way to protect innocent lives. An example would be a convicted murderer, with a proven history of multiple murders, and a high likelihood of continuing to murder more people if he escaped, along with some sort of extreme circumstances that preclude a reliable way of securing him for life imprisonment, such as a poor region in a "wild west" type situation and no reliable prison infrastructure, or perhaps a high-up mafia/cartel boss with a high likelihood of bribing his way out of jail or having his goons break him out.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess, however, that you have a point to make on the abortion debate. I'm curious what that point was, so if the point would have been easier to make if I held the more common conservative position that capital punishment is moral to use punitively in cases where a person has been convicted of murder, with proof beyond any possible doubt, as a means of deterring future murderers, then, for the sake of this conversation, if I did hold that view, what would the point be?

 

[oze]

What is your stance on capital punishment?

Murder the babies, baby the murderers.

 

[KLB]

I believe that capital punishment is, generally speaking, immoral. In my mind, executions should only be used as a last resort in extreme circumstances where it is the only possible way to protect innocent lives. An example would be a convicted murderer, with a proven history of multiple murders, and a high likelihood of continuing to murder more people if he escaped, along with some sort of extreme circumstances that preclude a reliable way of securing him for life imprisonment, such as a poor region in a "wild west" type situation and no reliable prison infrastructure, or perhaps a high-up mafia/cartel boss with a high likelihood of bribing his way out of jail or having his goons break him out.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess, however, that you have a point to make on the abortion debate. I'm curious what that point was, so if the point would have been easier to make if I held the more common conservative position that capital punishment is moral to use punitively in cases where a person has been convicted of murder, with proof beyond any possible doubt, as a means of deterring future murderers, then, for the sake of this conversation, if I did hold that view, what would the point be?

I was curious if you actually believed what you said, that the right to life was absolute. You do not.

That was all I was asking.

 

[KLB]

Murder the babies, baby the murderers.

You have issues if that is what you got from my question.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

I was curious if you actually believed what you said, that the right to life was absolute. You do not.

Wrong.

What makes you say that?

 

[KLB]

Wrong.

What makes you say that?

You specifically gave an example of where you approve of killing someone. How then can you claim think the right to life is absolute? It's pretty clear logic. Absolute means no exceptions.

 

[oze]

You have issues if that is what you got from my question.

I did not attribute that sentiment to you. But yeah, I have issues. It's the abortion uber alles crowd with which I have them.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

You specifically gave an example of where you approve of killing someone. How then can you claim think the right to life is absolute? It's pretty clear logic. Absolute means no exceptions.

Because the right to life is not a vague concept that exists as a separate entity; it is something that each person has on the individual level. Since there is more than one human being on this planet, it is possible for situations to arise where one person's right to life is pitted against another's.

The only situations I approve of killing someone in are situations where killing that person is the only possible means to preserve innocent lives, due to that person seeking to end those lives. This is not an exception to the right to life; the person being killed still has a right to life. It's just that they've created a situation, by their own choices, where it's either their right to life or another's. NOT killing them would be ignoring the right to life of the innocent people they are murdering. Again, it's not an exception to the right to life, it's just recognizing that reality sometimes doesn't let you keep everyone's right to life, and you either have to protect the innocent, or let the innocent have their right to life violated.

 

[DadSmith]

I reject the “life with full legal recognition at conception” concept entirely. It isn’t founded in tradition, law, scripture, or biology,

Scripture wise.

Psalm 139:13
For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb.

Jeremiah 1:4-5
Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying: [5] "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations."


Biology teaches that a single cell is life.

So human life starts at the fusion of the sperm, and egg.
A human being (i.e., a human organism) is composed of human parts (cells, proteins, RNA, DNA), yet it is different from a mere collection of cells because it has the characteristic molecular composition and behavior of an organism: it acts in an interdependent and coordinated manner to “carry on the activities of life.”

The conclusion that human life begins at sperm-egg fusion is uncontested, objective, based on the universally accepted scientific method of distinguishing different cell types from each other and on ample scientific evidence (thousands of independent, peer-reviewed publications).

 

[LeftyGunner]

For me, this raises the question, what about cases that involve more than simply withdrawing life support? In a late-term abortion, the child is fully capable of surviving outside the womb. In very late-term abortions, he/she can even do so without extraordinary medical intervention. So abortion in those cases is not equivalent to withdrawing life support, it's equivalent to taking action to deliberately end someone's life.

I answered that indirectly upthread. It is my position that the life a pregnant woman ends with an abortion belongs entirely to her, that she has the same right to end her unborn child’s life as she has to end her own.

I agree with Tombs, here.

I would really like to hear how you understand/define a person's right to life, because it seems like you believe a person's right to life is somehow tied to or contingent upon their "agency", or their ability to communicate, and if they rely on others to do that for them, then their right to life can "belong" to that other person/persons. I'm curious if I'm getting that correctly or not.

This is a difficult discussion to have without getting into the weeds about what rights really are.

A their root, rights are social permissions built into the framework of a shared culture.

Rights are a purely social construct, a concept only applicable within a functioning social framework. Rights are necessarily a work of consensus. A single person living alone in a wilderness has no need for rights…we cannot infringe our own rights, and who else is there infringe upon them?

No right is absolute, and no right is unabridged.

If I understand correctly, you argument on abortion essentially comes down to the idea that since a fetus has zero agency, and the fetus is entirely dependent upon the mother, then the mother has the exclusive right to say if the fetus should live or die.

You are correct to a point…and I sincerely appreciate the effort you made to get to that point with me.

I believe a person has absolute authority over their own body. A welcome pregnancy may become unwelcome, and a woman may choose to revoke her previously enthusiastic consent to gestation and delivery. A woman has an absolute right to empty her uterus…or even remove it entirely…at any point in her life. Even during pregnancy, and regardless of the consequences to the unborn.

Until birth, her gift of life is the mothers to give…or take away at whatever time she chooses, for whatever reason she chooses.

Now, laying aside my unaddressed questions about what you mean by "agency", and the examples I gave above which, to me, prove that a fetus has some basic level of agency, there is a deeper issue I see with your argument.

You have been willing to be logically consistent, and say that if an adult has no agency whatsoever (like a person in a vegetative state) then those responsible for their care get to say whether they live or die.

The trouble is, if we continue applying this logic consistently, then what we have is a situation where the right to life is not regarded as absolute, but is tied to a person's ability to communicate, take care of his/herself, or in short, their "agency", as you put it. So if having 0% agency, like a fetus or a person in a vegetative state, makes one's right to life belong 100% to those who care for that person, than shouldn't having only 10% agency mean that your right to life belongs 90% to those taking care of you? Or, to put it another way: above, somebody pointed out that a newborn is still dependent on others to survive, just like a fetus. Your response was that a fetus is reliant on only one person, the mother, but a newborn can be taken care of by anyone. But the question left by this, is: if a fetus being reliant 100% on the mother means that the fetus' right to life "belongs" to the mother, and can be revoked by her, doesn't it follow that if a newborn is 100% reliant on society, then the newborn's right to life "belongs" to society, and can be revoked by society? If nobody in society wants to care for the newborn, can we just leave the newborn to die of exposure, like the ancient Romans did? (There's grounding in tradition for you, too!) Or just be more compassionate and give them a quick death?

You are correct, for my view to be consistent I would have to view the right to life as non-absolute...and I do.

If you want real life examples rather than hypotheticals, look at what's happening in the UK in the cases of Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans, and Indi Gregory. In all of these cases, these children were on life support, and since healthcare in the UK is exclusively paid for by the government, it was up to a judge to decide whether or not to continue care for them. In all 3 cases, a judge decided that it wasn't worth caring for them, and ordered them removed from life support against the parents' wishes. But the kicker in all 3 cases is that the judge also ordered that the children were not allowed to leave the country in order to seek medical care elsewhere. In at least one case, funds had already been raised, and a spot secured in a foreign hospital, with an airplane literally sitting in the airport reserved for an emergency flight to take Charlie to that hospital. But the judge presiding over the case ordered that the parents not be allowed to transfer their son. Essentially, the judge was using your logic: since Charlie relied 100% on the UK health system for his care, his life belonged to the UK health system, and they could do anything they want, up to and including holding him trapped in their hospital while they stop caring for him with the intention of letting him die, all against his parents' wishes.

It's a path that I don't think you've considered where it's leading. A lot of us see where this sort of logic ends up, and it's a place we really don't want our society to go.

Your points about the failures of public-sector health services are valid. My only argument is that all human institutions tend to be flawed, and wherever we rely on them we need to be sure they are evidence-based, results-driven, responsibly and ethically managed, and include robust mechanisms to observe and improve them.

 

[Ingomike]

No right is absolute, and no right is unabridged.

Inalienable rights are just that, inalienable…

 

[loudgroove]

Inalienable rights are just that, inalienable…

100% agreed!

 

[AndreusMaximus]

I answered that indirectly upthread. It is my position that the life a pregnant woman ends with an abortion belongs entirely to her, that she has the same right to end her unborn child’s life as she has to end her own.




This is a difficult discussion to have without getting into the weeds about what rights really are.

A their root, rights are social permissions built into the framework of a shared culture.

Rights are a purely social construct, a concept only applicable within a functioning social framework. Rights are necessarily a work of consensus. A single person living alone in a wilderness has no need for rights…we cannot infringe our own rights, and who else is there infringe upon them?

No right is absolute, and no right is unabridged.



You are correct to a point…and I sincerely appreciate the effort you made to get to that point with me.

I believe a person has absolute authority over their own body. A welcome pregnancy may become unwelcome, and a woman may choose to revoke her previously enthusiastic consent to gestation and delivery. A woman has an absolute right to empty her uterus…or even remove it entirely…at any point in her life. Even during pregnancy, and regardless of the consequences to the unborn.

Until birth, her gift of life is the mothers to give…or take away at whatever time she chooses, for whatever reason she chooses.



You are correct, for my view to be consistent I would have to view the right to life as non-absolute...and I do.



Your points about the failures of public-sector health services are valid. My only argument is that all human institutions tend to be flawed, and wherever we rely on them we need to be sure they are evidence-based, results-driven, responsibly and ethically managed, and include robust mechanisms to observe and improve them.

Well.

I don't really have much left to say.

In general, a discussion about moral principles has to have some point of agreement to start from. It looks like we've finally dug down to the very core of what the two of us believe regarding human life and human rights, and we just have a fundamental difference in the premises we start with.

I guess from your standpoint, starting with the premise that no human being has any rights to begin with, and a human's rights are just social constructs conferred by the consensus of their fellow human beings, then I can't really argue against abortion from that premise.

There is one logical inconsistency in your post, though:

No right is absolute, and no right is unabridged.

I believe a person has absolute authority over their own body.

I'm going to guess, though, that this isn't so much an underlying inconsistency in your position, but just a mistaken bit of wording.

For instance, you obviously don't believe that an unborn child has absolute authority over their own body.

It seems to me like the whole argument over the extent of a woman's bodily autonomy is secondary: the real point of disagreement between us is that you don't believe in absolute rights, while I do. You believe that a person's right to life, liberty, or anything else, may be contingent on who they rely on for survival, how much ability they have to communicate or make their own decisions, etc. So from that standpoint, of course you could say that a fetus has no rights, because of its dependence on the mother and its location within her body.

The scary part to me is that you actually do follow through with logical consistency based on your starting premise.

Honestly, the more I think about this conversation, the more it scares me. I'm glad we've been able to discuss this civilly, I think, for the most part (or at least I've tried to be, my apologies for my failures.) I've had lots of discussion with people where we disagreed vehemently, but at the end of the day I always felt like we were talking past each other in some way, and probably had something fundamental in common that we just couldn't get to. This is one of the rare occasions where I don't feel that way. I don't like to call any human being my enemy, but it sounds like you and I have such fundamentally opposed beliefs on the most basic questions of human morals, that we are probably going to spend our entire lives struggling for completely opposite goals when it comes to our laws and our society, and the framework they should be built upon.

I'd hate to end our discussion on such a sour note, but I really don't know what else there is to add?

(Edit: well, one thing I would normally add when I don't see further discussion as getting anywhere, is that I'll pray for you. I've kind of stopped saying that, though, because I've found it sounds like a passive-aggressive way of saying "Oh boy, you're really a lost cause, only God can help you now." Which I don't mean to say. But honestly, I bear you no ill-will, and I will say a prayer for you in good faith. Sadly, it just doesn't sound like our fundamental differences are reconcilable.)

 

[KLB]

Because the right to life is not a vague concept that exists as a separate entity; it is something that each person has on the individual level. Since there is more than one human being on this planet, it is possible for situations to arise where one person's right to life is pitted against another's.

The only situations I approve of killing someone in are situations where killing that person is the only possible means to preserve innocent lives, due to that person seeking to end those lives. This is not an exception to the right to life; the person being killed still has a right to life. It's just that they've created a situation, by their own choices, where it's either their right to life or another's. NOT killing them would be ignoring the right to life of the innocent people they are murdering. Again, it's not an exception to the right to life, it's just recognizing that reality sometimes doesn't let you keep everyone's right to life, and you either have to protect the innocent, or let the innocent have their right to life violated.

To me a person that has an absolute belief in a right to life would not take another life, period. That person would literally allow someone else to kill them before they would kill that other person. Anything less is not absolute. The rest of us believe in a right to life, but we all have our exceptions.