http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/arkansas-abortion
The state of Arkansas has just passed the most restrictive abortion ban in the US, severely limiting abortion after 12 weeks. The debate is moving closer and closer to reaching a definition of when life officially begins, with the rationale that once the baby has a heartbeat, or brainwaves or the capacity to feel and think or the potential to exist outside the womb, abortion becomes straight up murder.
On the surface, that seems like a reasonable way to approach the whole issue. We have quantifiable standards for withdrawing life support from individuals who are deemed to no longer be alive in any meaningful sense of the word, so why not use those same standards to determine when life begins?
If life is considered to have ended when an individual has no brain activity, and can no longer think or feel or perceive the world, then why can’t life be considered to have started when an unborn baby shows evidence of brain activity and perception and emotion?
Here’s why:
Every day, in the United States of America, more than 6000 people require bone marrow transplants to save their lives. The National Bone Marrow Donor registry has more than 17 million volunteer donors, which is pretty pathetic given that the population of the country exceeds 300 million.
Lots of worthy organizations actively promote people to get on the registry, but that is all they can do. They cannot legally compel people to donate their bone marrow, no matter how many lives that would save.
There are more than 70 000 people in the US waiting for organs which, when transplanted, will save their lives. And yet only 30-40% of people have signed their organ donor cards, and of those, only a handful will have suitable organs for donation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/opinion/15satel.html?_r=0
Organ donation is entirely voluntary, as it must be. The state cannot compel any individual to relinquish their organs against their will, even when that person is dead. It doesn’t matter how many lives those organs might save: that fact is immaterial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodily_integrity
What is material is the fundamental concept that a human being cannot be owned. The only person that owns you is YOU. Your body is your own personal property and it cannot be bought, sold or traded by the state or anyone else without your explicit permission.
The debate over when a baby becomes fully human is therefore immaterial. No baby can exist without using his mother’s body and organs for life support, and those organs and that body belong to her and it is the sole province of the woman to decide how and when and under what circumstances her body will be used by ANY OTHER PERSON.
Including her own child.
I don’t believe there should be ANY restrictions on abortion of any kind, and I’ve written before about the wisdom of consigning children to be raised by mothers that would prefer to kill them. The only way to know if a mother wishes to kill her unborn child is to give her the option.
And I’m not saying there are no GOOD reasons to have an abortion. Sure there are. Not wanting to bring a child into a life of poverty is an excellent reason. Do we need more poor people? I think we need to help the ones we have. Not having the ability, for whatever reason, to take adequate care of a child, whether that is because you are too young, or you have other children, or you are suffering from mental illness are all good reasons to not have that baby.
There are really fucking terrible reasons to have an abortion, too. Killing a baby because you don’t like his gender is pretty awful. Killing a baby because she has Down Syndrome is also just gut-wrenchingly horrific. Killing a twin because your apartment is too small is just straight up evil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/the-two-minus-one-pregnancy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
The REASON a woman wants to kill her baby is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter why. The fundamental question is WHO OWNS HER BODY?
To me the answer is simple: you own your own body and you cannot be compelled to use any part of it to save someone else’s life, against your will. The state will not hold you down to take blood, bone marrow or a kidney, no matter how many lives that would save.
And the state cannot force you to save the life of your baby by allowing him to use your body, unless you consent to that, willingly and freely. And just as you can change your mind, at the last minute, about donating bone marrow, and you can withdraw your consent to have your blood used for transfusions, women can change their minds about being pregnant at any stage of the game.
We hold people responsible for their own decisions precisely because we DO think they own their bodies. All of your decisions are YOUR decisions, good or bad. You are free to pretty much do whatever you want to your own body, because it’s YOUR body.
That right must extend to everyone. Every 90 seconds someone on the organ waiting list dies, while millions of usable organs are buried or cremated because their owners did not consent to saving someone’s life. That’s shitty.
Do you really want to live in a world where that ISN’T your decision?
I don’t.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Im not against abortion, as Im not against death sentences or euthanasy. Im pro death.
Still, all the discussion about if the fetus is a living being or if it’s a legal person etc are rationalizations to avoid the bad feelings of killing your own child. And it IS killing your own child. Since the moment you get pregnant, that thing has its own ADN and is your baby, it’s a human being and feeds of your body, but it’s not your body.
If you want to do it when they are more vulnerable, heck, LIVING inside of you, do it. But honor that death.
Now if mothers to be can decide at any moment that they want to kill the baby, why shouldnt the fathers have the same right?
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The minute the baby grows inside the father and relies on the father’s blood and organs and body, he has the right to decide if that baby lives.
I agree that women desparately want to avoid feeling horrible for killing their own children.
That’s the flipside of my argument: with great power comes great responsibility.
As ever, women want the power, but none of the responsibility, even when that responsibility is just owning up to your own conscience.
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As we speak the father is legally binded to support the child and its mother, so why shouldnt he be able to terminate that living being and get out of it?
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here’s a reasonable restriction: 2-3 months before the actual abortion to think about everything that can or will happen with the baby being around. this prevents abuse and gives those who would actually want to take care of the child (like, maybe the father?) to talk you into letting them take care of it. otherwise, no abortion for you. too many don’t ever take the time to think about what having the child means and what it could do for them. who knows, the child could be the motivation you need to get yourself out of poverty or whatever. though i do agree with abortion if no one who could take care of the child has the mental stability for it or other such dis-qualifiers.
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I understand your rationale, but I do disagree. My body may be used to create life, but at no time did I ever mistake my baby as being part of my body. My feeling is that once a child is viable outside the womb, it should not be allowed to be aborted.
But I don’t think we should go outlawing abortion. If we want people to act like grownups we have to give them the opportunity to make decisions that fall in line with their own morality and not try to push our own values on everyone else. I think the best way to reduce the number of abortions in this country is to give men the automatic option to opt-out on being the father to a child they didn’t choose to conceive. If a man is willing to sign away his rights to the child (no contact at all) then he should absolved of all financial responsibility. I bet you’d see a lot fewer “accidental” pregnancies if that were to happen.
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I disagree. You argue that one’s right to control one’s own body is effectively the first and foremost right of a human being; I would say that this is patently not true. Which is worse, kidnapping, or murder? Murder, I think most people would say. Violating a person’s right to live (put more accurately, their right not to be killed by another human being) is more fundamental than the right to have absolute control over one’s body (violated in the case of kidnapping). The choice, then, if you accept that two individuals are in fact persons, then given the choice that you must either kidnap one, or murder the other, every sound juristic school of though would agree that it is more just to allow commit the lesser offense (kidnapping).
One can argue in favor of abortion by arguing that it isn’t a person. But if it is (at some point in the pregnancy at least) a person, then what you’re essentially arguing is that a child’s right to live is conditional to its biological independence from its parents. In which case you may as well support legalized infanticide. After all, why should society force parents to feed their children? Their money, their property, their time, their choice.
There are always exceptions of course, the obvious being pregnancies resulting from rape (which hopefully would almost never happen, as all victims should be given the morning after pill) and the physical health of the mother: one may legally employ deadly force against human being of course in self-defense, even if said other person is not aware of the threat they propose. But that is a small minority of cases.
Ultimately, as I see it, late term and partial birth abortions are effectively infanticide. By draw an arbitrary line at birth? Removing something from a vagina does not make it a person; it is as arbitrary a line any.
And it isn’t a question of choice; the matrix analogy is beyond absurd. Women have choice: they have the choice whether or not to have unprotected sex; the same choice men have. What they demand is the right not to have to live with the consequences of their choices, even at the expense of someone else’s life.
I also disagree with your earlier stated belief that it is better for a baby who’s mother doesn’t want it to be killed than to live with a mother who doesn’t even want it. You must realize how presumptuous it is to purport to define what makes life worth living or not worth living. There are plenty of people who’s parents didn’t want them who, now adults, would probably take offense at the suggestion that they would be better off dead because of the fact.
One only has freedom of choice up to the point where one’s choices threaten other persons; especially when the presence of said persons is the direct result of one’s own choices. That, to me, is a pretty fundamental legal principle.
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Aborting one’s child because one simply doesn’t want it is the pinnacle of refusing to be responsible for one’s actions. When a person has consensual unprotected sex (the cause of the overwhelming majority of abortions), pregnancy tends to result. Therein lies the choice. Wanting to be sexually liberated but free from the obligation to even let their offspring live when their existence results from their escapades sounds to me like the definition of all rights, no responsibilities.
‘Owning up to one’s own conscience’ may make one more enlightened or self-realized or whatever, but it doesn’t change the moral or legal acceptability of what induced the pangs of conscience in the first place. A thief who knows he’s a thief and willingly accepts that his choices make him a thief can hardly claim immunity from either laws against thievery, or the fact that thievery is wrong and a violation of the victim’s rights, simply because of his self-awareness as a thief. If anything, in fact, a self-aware thief is one who is more ready to accept punishment for his actions.
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The current laws can say otherwise, but technically 50% of the baby belongs to the father. From day one. It has 50% of his genetic make up plus the father also decides the sex.
I consider all this “it is in my body so it’s mine” a toddler’s argument. This is not a nail or a tooth that you own and remove anytime. This is another life and it is only 50% yours.
Very interesting how you JB end up siding with feminism after all.
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Questionable whether bodily autonomy even exists. People are forced to undergo medical treatment, police and military authorities can do pretty much what they want with you, suicide is illegal. Women at least have the choice about whether to get pregnant, and despite the sob stories, almost all women today getting abortions chose to risk it. Roe was a lesbian (!) who had already given away two children!
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I disagree.
Child’s body=/=Mother’s body.
They have a different genetic code, therefore she cannot claim ownership of it. Each human genetic code in America has Constitutional and moral rights. The mother cannot intentionally, willfully deny them to her child without extreme and extenuating circumstances.
The baby is also completely reliant on outside care once it is out of the mother’s body as well. Leave a baby for several days with no care, and it is likely to die.
Birth control or not having sex is the mother’s choice. The consequences of her actions are not something she has the right to evade just because someone can inject poison into her uterus and vacuum out her bad decision. Abortion is just another aspect of Feminist desire for having all the privileges and freedoms, but none of the responsibility.
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People who need my bone marrow to live also have a different genetic code. Doesn’t matter. You still can’t force me to give up part of my body so that other person can live.
And once a baby is born, ANYONE can care for it. That isn’t true for a pregnant woman. Only HER body can sustain the baby.
She can’t be forced to use her body to sustain someone else’s life.
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JB, to support abortion with a justification of ‘no-one should be forced to have their body used involuntarily’ (as in your examples of having body parts forcibly relinquished) is a deeply flawed analogy.
Your analogy would only make sense if the woman was forcibly impregnated. That would be a crime and a forcible use of her body.
In the vast majority of cases, that’s not what happens. It’s far more likely that the woman risked sex without proper contraceptive measures. That was the real ‘choice’. If a pregnancy results, that is a consequence of a poor choice.
Pregnancy is not a disease. Abortion is not a therapeutic cure to a disease.
Abortion is a technological INTERVENTION sought out in response to a poor choice (not forced) for which a potential life is being sacrificed.
I can understand early stage abortions (especially something like the morning-after pill), but these late stage abortions are very troubling. We’ve had incidents in late-term abortions where the baby was still alive. In a case widely reported in the media, a late-term aborted baby, who was still alive, was placed in a stainless-steel dish and left to die alone in a room. The crying could be heard from outside the room for 45 minutes, before it subsided and the baby eventually died. I believe that in response to such ‘uncomfortable’ situations, unborn babies in late-term abortions are now first injected with a poison, to ensure the baby is dead, prior to the procedure.
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Sorry you see it that way.
50% of the baby DOES belong to the father, insofar as you see babies “belonging” to anyone. But 0% of HIS body is involved in gestation (nothwithstanding the original genetic contribution that made the baby possible in the first place).
And I don’t think the average feminist would like my argument that women who kill their own children would make worthless mothers in the first place.
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“arguing is that a child’s right to live is conditional to its biological independence from its parents”
Yes. That is exactly what I am arguing.
“In which case you may as well support legalized infanticide”
Bullshit. A baby needs care, but it does not have to come from the parents. Anyone can care for a baby once it is born.
Only the woman who is pregnant can gestate that baby.
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In almost all cases it was a direct action on the woman’s part that resulted in the creation of that person. Her actions caused that person to exist.
No action on a person’s part created or caused the condition of an individual that would require them to recieve a bone marrow transplant.
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I agree. That is deeply troubling. Babies who are “aborted” and are still alive OUTSIDE THE WOMB, should have all the protections of any other person.
What you describe is murder. There are only about a million parents who would happily have taken that child and raised it.
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This philosophy of an absolute & total right to your own body, even when it might conflict with the right of another, even to the point it requires the death of an innocent other so as not to inconvenience your body (which is quite well adapted for the obligation in question) makes *my* body really sad, hurt, and really angry. My organs, especially my brain, continually suffer due to someone who would make such a choice. So I guess I get to kill them, huh?
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People who require lung transplants might have been smokers or coal miners. Both choices. Still doesn’t matter. Whether another person caused the condition that requires my tissue is irrelevant. You can’t force me to surrender my tissue to save another person no matter WHY they have the condition.
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Steven, I feel your pain. The thought of third trimester abortions makes me feel absolutely sick.
But I am not willing to give up my own bodily autonomy to prevent those women from being an utterly vicious monster.
What kind of mother would that woman make anyways?
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By your analogy of transplants, the only thing you have the right to do is deny the person a transplant, not shoot them in the head.
So, a woman can stop eating and deny the baby the nutrients to grow, but she cannot intentionally kill it.
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But denying them the transplant IS effectively shooting them in the head. They’re gonna die without the transplant.
I think my analogy works.
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Yeah, you’re really digging a hole now. It’s not 1840. In my neighborhood, wimmins is sex-edukated an has a butt-load of contraceptive options. Yet here comes prego. Wanting ‘rights’. And complaining about an onerous gestation burden on the operation of her blood, organs and what-not. So much for edukashion, huh? But her absolute ‘rights’ require another to die. What an fascist. Actually, a bully too. You’d have thought she would’d know how her pussy works — rather than simply knowing how to work her pussy. It’s purely trope-on-a-rope arguments to counter that the father can’t do gestation so has no choice. Nyah, nyah. Let him, or *anyone* else offer to receive the child. Yes, they may ‘belong’. (Not a bad word.) If gestation was *all* that was required, I’d say fine — here’s a small stipend. (Some women say they enjoyed their pregnancies.) And in return, since you’ve made it abundantly clear you can’t be responsible with your… um, organs (even to the point of requiring another’s death), we will make certain you won’t have your precious ‘right’ impeded for a few months ever again. Hop up on this sterilization table, dear. It’s the least you can do for the life that was sacrificed. You know, because your organs ‘n such. What kind of mother is that? The kind that loses the right to mother/murder again. Fair enough.
Or how about… sometimes it seems fun to get *my* body rip-roaring drunk. Granted, my driving gets erratic somewhat. As a consequence (a word I love) I sometimes run over people. “Even women and children!” But there should be no consequence because that would most likely infringe on my body. And my ‘right’ to it. Whew! Lucky me. And get this! Fortunately, my birth-year lottery kept me out of the draft, otherwise I would have had to go have the same argument with those right-denying military people. “Hell no, my body won’t go!” Damn, why didn’t I remember all these pearls when I filed taxes! 😦 My body doesn’t want to work for everyone else’s stinkin’ roads and edukashions and free shit.
This is difficult and you do not have the answer. Stay open.
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Doh! Nearly forgot. You say you have bodily autonomy. Haha. No you don’t. You have a ideal, politically supported by an affluent civilization. Ideal. Not a moral absolute. But you’re polishing it with some I-got-mine-you-get-yours shine-ola.
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This is difficult and you do not have the answer. Stay open.
You got that right.
😦
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Maybe. If there’s enough ‘bodily autonomy’ left over once she’s had her fill, and she decides to bequeath it. And doesn’t change her mind. Again. Otherwise, you’re oppressing Her. Stop that, pig! Haha!
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Mark, I would argue that abortion forces and compounds the results and the responsibility for womens actions. Even if they’re unaware of it. Their bodies go through such drastic hormonal shifts because of those actions that I believe it scars most women for life.
Whether they’re aware of how they’re damaging their bodies and psyche is a whole other argument.
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I believe there were studies where women who had abortions tripled their breast cancer rates and increased their death in childbed by 197% for up to three abortions.
But since feminists are desperately trying to deny women information on anything negative about the act, up to trying to ban sonograms and claiming it’s like going to the hairdressers’, I doubt this will ever make it to the mainstream.
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JB,
As Tarzanwannabe and Wilson point out, many people are being forced to use their bodies in various ways by governments around the world, yet there is no outrage over conscription, or people disallowed large sodas within NYC limits and their ability to get fat.
By your reasoning, should a conjoined twin who has their shared heart on his or her side be allowed to cut off and kill his or her twin if they tire of this onerous lifestyle? After all, he or she is the only one who can support the heart-less twin.
If I own the only iron lung in town, can I switch it off at any time when I want to, for any reason? The patient, after all, is utterly dependent on me and only me to continue their life. My right to bodily autonomy dictates that I have the right to extend my finger any time and push that “off” button.
Even by your own reasoning, if your metric is dependency, then abortions should be banned once the baby is viable and should merely be removed via c-section.
Any sort of responsibility towards another human being involves one’s action or inaction, and hence limitations on one’s actions and one’s body. The “why should we force a child to grow up with a horrible mother” argument skirts dangerously close to the quality of life argument (“why should we let children be born into grim situations/with disabilities/poverty?”), which then begs the question of why not round up all the poor, disabled and otherwise lacking and kill them “to prevent poverty and suffering”, like the ancient Carthagians did? If it is okay to kill a child to prevent them from being abused, then why does CPS exist? It assumes the child will stay with the mother and not be adopted out or cared for by another, and that the mother will not change her mind about the unwanted child in the end.
I respect you, Mrs. JB, but I can never agree with you on this, so we shall just have to agree to disagree – while the time lasts. Whatever else you may think of Tarzanwannabe’s words, he is right: bodily autonomy above all else is not a right, it merely is an ideal with our current society is obsessed with. Once society falls, that question will not be relevant any more.
***
At the risk of soapboxing here:
It is my belief that any right, imagined (because it actually is a privilege) or otherwise, no matter how inviolate or sacrosanct anyone thinks it is, will eventually be rescinded once it is abused. Not necessarily by the conscious actions of anyone or any group, but by natural law, if it comes to that. The peoples of the West have repeatedly abused their votes to get free stuff, and it strikes me as no surprise that their countries are rapidly degenerating into tyrannies. Their rights to free speech, to assembly, to no arrests without a warrant – all of these are rapidly dissolving, while being cheered on by the populace themselves.
I don’t think it’s hard to argue that women by and large have rabidly misused the power of life and death, and I foresee that they will soon lose it – either one way through forced abortions under tyranny, or the other when the lights go out. Mrs JB, both you and most of your commenters are on the same side of the spectrum – we can all agree the act is evil, but whether it is a necessary evil or not is a matter of contention. As opposed to those who claim that a child should be allowed to be killed one hour, one year, or three years after birth.
People by and large have proven that they can’t handle freedom, they don’t want freedom, and in fact, that they absolutely hate it, instead preferring someone to tell them what to do via Oprah. So be it.
Pestilence is rapidly making a comeback, partly due to the massive misuse of antibiotics and retrovirals, and I foresee it will put a quick end to this miserable “sexual liberation” business. Completely untreatable syphilis is already out and about, coupled with gonorrhea that’s impervious to all oral antibiotics and chalmydia that has no symptoms whatsoever save infertility (no more pesky unwanted babies, just catch the clap!). Giving a woman oral sex is already rated more dangerous than smoking when it comes to mouth cancer in men thanks to HPV, and the list stretches on…
We have sown the seeds, and the whirlwind waits to be reaped. Soon, we’ll have more pressing questions than abortions on our minds.
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A couple of additional points, Mrs. JB:
Your argument about organ transplantation seems analogous to the Violinist Argument, which has been refuted.
“One of the most sophisticated case for pro-choice comes in the form of what Dr. Judith Jarvis Thompson called the violinist argument. Briefly, this argument goes like this: Say a world-famous violinist developed a fatal kidney ailment and the Society of Music Lovers found that only you had the right blood-type to help. So, they therefore have you kidnapped and then attach you to the violinist’s circulatory system so that your kidneys can be used to extract the poison from his. To unplug yourself from the violinist would be to kill him; therefore, pro-lifers would say a person has to stay attached against her will to the violinist for 9 months. Thompson says that it would be morally virtuous to stay plugged-in. But she asks, “Do you have to?” She appeals to our intuitions and answers, “No.”
The strength of this argument is that it grants the full humanity of the fetus and therefore sidesteps the rather poor arguments we saw above. The weakness of this argument is that it is an argument from analogy. Arguments from analogy destruct if they rest on fatal disanalogies.
Besides many of the other problems pro-lifers have pointed out, here’s a big one. Thompson seems to make a distinction between consent to pregnancy and consent to sex (as Beckwith and others point out). But it seems that pregnancy is the designed result of sex, even though it may not be the desired result. It would seem that our sex organs have the purpose of being ordered towards procreation. Applying this to the violinist then: What if I engaged in an activity, say, spelunking, that regularly created rare kidney diseases in violinists? Say that every time I dropped 50 ft into the cave, a violinist was almost sure to develop the disease that only I had the blood type to correct or fix. If I did so, should I not be hooked up to him, voluntarily or not? Say that there was protection, some kind of spelunking helmet. Say that it was not 100% effective. If my helmet ripped, should I be attached to the violinist? Or say I tried to “pull up” before I hit 50 ft. Unfortunately, it felt so good to decend that I pulled up a little too late and my right foot passed the 50 ft mark. Should I be attached to the violinist? I don’t see why not. Indeed, say that the statistical evidence was that the first two people that ever spelunked together would eventually cause 6 billion violinists to come down with rare kidney diseases, I dare say the Society of Music Lovers, and almost everyone else for that matter, would call for abstaining from spelunking unless you agreed to take care of the violinists until they got better. This seems fatal to Thompson’s argument.”
So, by your own words,
“You can’t force me to surrender my tissue to save another person no matter WHY they have the condition.”
By your reasoning, I should be allowed to go around creating kidney diseases in violinists and then refusing to do anything about it, and society would be horrible and judgemental for calling me a cur and expunging me into the snowy wastes with a stick and piece of jerky like I deserved.
Good. Might you call for an end to conscription immediately? No one should be able to force another to surrender their bodies and lives to save people back home no matter why they’re in danger. I know I certainly didn’t have control over my body when I was conscripted, and was severely punished if my organs and tissues didn’t make the physical fitness standards.
The question was never about bodily autonomy, because that is violated in so many ways in everyday life with nary a peep from anyone. It was about having the power of life and death over another human being, and such a heady power it is that one can be so reluctant to give it up even when one admits it’s being so rampantly abused. Like my sister was fond of saying, girls gotta keep their options open, right?
As I said, though, this point will soon become moot, so perhaps all this discourse is pointless. Ah, we shall wait and see.
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Hmmm, I find it interesting you would call this murder, after all, nothing was done proactively to end the life of the baby after it was outside of the womb – it was simply abandoned and left to die. On the other hand, I believe that if a mother does this to a newborn then that is a serious offence.
So, that beggars the question: Considering the above, was the act of removing this VIABLE life from the womb an act of murder? Isn’t that really just another way of asking whether late-term abortions are murder?
What about injecting the unborn with a poison to ensure that it doesn’t survive a late-term abortion because it’s believed that it may otherwise survive? Would you call that murder?
So, do you still feel the same way about late-term abortions?
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Correct. Consider that religious fundamentalists insist there is “free will”. Political fundamentalists insist their “rights” be unimpeded by responsibility and no oblige to the affected other(s). Yet neither free will or rights are found in nature. Nature’s “morals” are two — survive, reproduce. And that’s applied in aggregate with no respect for the lot of the every individual. The social animal develops a civilization that affords more than nature offers. More each century. More, but not limitlessly more. One’s rights will sometimes conflict with another’s. That’s what we have here. And tough-girl is willing to kill a kid.
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“Deeply troubling” does not begin to describe the horror of this scenario. I love you, JB…when you are right you are really right. But here you are wrong. This is a classic ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ situation. A woman who allows herself to become impregnated has forfeited her right to kill another for her own convenience. In the case of rape, as awful as that is…killing an unborn child does not erase the fact or the horror of the rape. In fact, delivering the child and allowing said child to grow up in the loving care of an adoptive family may be more healing than the attempt to just d&c it away. If we can’t respect life from its inception then I fear we don’t respect life at all.
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A full term baby requires its mother and or father (or a surrogate parent) to provide resources for it to live…for years and years. After my kids were born, my body (and my husband’s) worked to provide food and shelter and education for them…for 18 years. By your argument, we could have killed them at any time..or at least locked them out of the house to fend for themselves at any age.
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Unless the child is a threat to her life. It is murder period. There are after all many infertile couples willing to adopt unwanted children. And other foster parents.
Its not her body her choice. What then is the choice of the baby? Also what about the father?
Also abortion is traumatic to the woman both psychologically physically.
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Then there is the moral dimension to all this. If indeed the child is a product of rape. Is it his/her fault that they were given life by a criminal act?
Why should a child die for the crime of one or more of their parents? What choice does the child have in all this?
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Oh fun! Abortion debate. Think I’ll go watch Terms of Endearment for the comic relief.
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I know a person who had a third trimester abortion. That one percent of all abortions. She was a Catholic, the reason she waited so long….it would have been her forth child, she had three kids under four at home. She was in a hospital for weeks on dialysis and her kidneys were shutting down. The fetus was anencephalic (only had a brainstem, no forebrain). If the mother waits until an anencephalic baby is born it usually lives a few hours to days, sometimes even weeks outside the womb.
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Oh that is just tragic. I can’t even imagine. It seems so cruel to describe that as a “third trimester” abortion.
I had a second trimester miscarriage of a very much wanted baby, followed by a massive haemorrhage, and at 16 weeks my baby was unmistakably a human being.
It turns my stomach to think of someone deliberately killing their baby at 16 weeks, but then a case like the one you describe above comes along and I don’t know what to think.
It’s pretty horrible.
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You’re right, they will die, but you aren’t actively killing them. You are passively refusing to help. They still have the chance of a breakthrough or another donor. Nature ends their life, not a pair of forceps or a vacuum.
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Are there actually people out there who believe that there is life before birth who think aborting a healthy baby from a healthy mother can be an ethical decision? (Not you, JB – you clearly think it’s NOT ethical, but removing the freedom that allows people to make the unethical decision is even worse. Which is an interesting point I’d never considered before.)
I think abortions are probably almost always more analagous to manslaughter than murder. It isn’t murder if you don’t realise that it’s a person you are killing. If you shoot someone dressed in a convincing bear suit, you didn’t intend to kill a human being, so it’s not murder. If you shoot a bear believing it to BE a person in a bear suit – it’s attempted murder!
Here’s another analogy to consider. Suppose you are holding onto someone who is dangling over a cliff. If you let go – they will fall to their death. Do you have the right to just decide to let go? Allowing someone to die due your inaction is different from causing someone to die through your actions.
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JB,
I have enjoyed reading your blogs, but this one is just wrong. You expose Feminists for their ridiculousness every day and yet here you are today embracing that same fuzzy thinking. We must all use our bodies to earn a living, right? Males are drafted to fight wars and die, right? We are forced to pay taxes, forced to be vaccinated, forced to attend public schools. So how can you argue that we OWN our bodies. We clearly do not.
I wish we did. But owning you OWN body means you baby owns it’s OWN body too. For 9 months after you chose to have sex, your body carries another soverirgn body. Your right to kill does not trump your bbie’s right to life. What is wrong with you….. Signature1
Bill Sanders – Centrifuge Specialist SANDERS EQUIPMENT COMPANY 3505 Tarpon Woods Boulevard, I-408 Palm Harbor, FL 34685 USA 727-773-0077 (fax: same) http://sandersequipment.com
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Still, your analogy doesn’t work. Your actions cause someone to need a transplant to live. If you refuse to donate and they die, you’ll prob be charged with manslaughter at very least. You are not legally compelled to donate to save the life you put in danger, but you’d better if you want to avoid going to jail for causing an innocent’s death.
Likewise, the fetus’s condition (inside a woman who doesn’t want it) is a result of the mother’s actions, not some random tragedy like being diagnosed with a disease like cancer.
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Late to the party ,but I want to add in certain cases you don’t own your body legally. Siamese twins where one twin relies on the organs of the other to survive being the primary. No matter how much the twin with all his organs wants he won’t be allowed to separate if it means the death of the other twin. Abortion is is as close as it’s going to get to that legal precedent. Not only that,but abortion depends solely on when life begins legally. Once the baby can survive outside the mother it is granted legal rights and considered alive at that point and thus abortion is depriving a person of the god given rights they have.
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