Anti abortion should = pro birth control. One GOPer gets it.

[dx713]

True. That does say they are hypocrites who use dishonest rhetoric to achieve whatever political outcome they want. However, I'm pretty sure that few pro-choicers support that position.

I don't think I have ever heard of a "pro-choice" person also advocating for murder charges with regard to an unborn fetus. Perhaps Jolly Penguin would like to provide some examples.

I don't agree with Jolly Penguin at all, but I am such an example. Well maybe not all the way to "murder", but for legal repercussion for causing a miscariage or forcing an abortion.
But with the qualification of a WANTED unborn fetus.

The difference between a parasitic bunch of cells and a developping baby is not to be found in biology, it's in the future parents emotional investment. Ergo, for me, aborting an unwanted pregnancy is fine, causing a willingly pregnant woman to miscarry is a crime against her family.

 

[arkirk]

This makes one minor error. The idea that the objection to abortion has anything to do with the fetus. In general, the Pro-Life movement wants to eliminate birth control.

So what? They are a bunch of assholes attempting to ruin a lot of women's lives for the sake of only "god" knows what. They are often Catholics and other religious nuts. Birth control is the best approach to reducing the incidence of abortion. The problem would be nowhere as serious as it is if religious people had not interfered with teen agers getting accurate information and support on contraception. The OP has it right.

 

[ronburgundy]

I don't think I have ever heard of a "pro-choice" person also advocating for murder charges with regard to an unborn fetus. Perhaps Jolly Penguin would like to provide some examples.

I don't agree with Jolly Penguin at all, but I am such an example. Well maybe not all the way to "murder", but for legal repercussion for causing a miscariage or forcing an abortion.
But with the qualification of a WANTED unborn fetus.

The difference between a parasitic bunch of cells and a developping baby is not to be found in biology, it's in the future parents emotional investment. Ergo, for me, aborting an unwanted pregnancy is fine, causing a willingly pregnant woman to miscarry is a crime against her family.

It cannot be an added charge that presumes that the fetus is a person. All violent crimes are crimes against organisms with legal recognition as a person. No harm to a fetus can be charged as a violent crime with respect impact on the fetus itself, without endorsing it as a legal person. And if it is a legal person, then any harm that the mother does to it is equally a violent crime. You cannot have it both ways. Do we allow parents to commit violent crimes against their own kids that they cannot against others kids? No. The same must apply to a fetus. Whatever violent crimes on a fetus that apply to other people would have to apply to the mother.
A mother's desire to give birth cannot be made legally relevant to the definition of a fetus as a person. That leads to the absurdity that it could be a person one week, then not a person the next, then back to a person, etc.. It would also mean that the way the mother treats her own body in any way that might negatively impact the fetus is equal to child neglect and abuse. It would mean that smoking while pregnant is the same as forcing smoke down a newborn infants lungs. And whether it was a crime would hinge entirely upon whether the mother said she wanted the baby. Its just not workable as a definition. There needs to an objectively observable clear criteria for when it obtains personhood that once obtained cannot be taken away.
Any additional crimes related to harming a fetus via harming the mother have to be defined with respect to impact on the mother who does had person status, such as the added psychological harm to the mother due to loss of the fetus maybe could be part of the consideration in punishment and/or in an added civil suit.

Thanks for coming forward as an example, though. I am pretty sure I had heard people take both positions. I have also heard spousal abuse activists who are mostly pro-choice try to also argue for additional crimes charged when a fetus is lost due to abusers of pregnant women. Which is equally untenable and exposes a rhetorical dishonesty if/when they argue for pro-choice as though the fetus is an ethics-free cluster of cells (which as I pointed out before is not a neccessary argument to defend pro-choice). I sympathize with the emotional sentiment of wanting more punishment when a fetus is lost in an attack on a women, because more harm was done , but you need a different basis for that argument. Whether something is a person must be based upon objective biological issues and not whether someone "wants" it.

 

[Rhea]

Do we allow parents to commit violent crimes against their own kids that they cannot against others kids?

Well, other than spanking, no.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The one way in which many pro-choicers are dishonest is in pretending that killing the fetus has absolutely zero ethical considerations and acting and arguing as though it is an inanimate non-life with no ethical value. It absurd that the fetus goes from that state to being a full human with immense ethical value based solely on the millisecond between being on one side or the other of the birth canal. This doens't undermine the fact that their position is sincerely rooted in choice and they do care for life in general more than most anti-abortionists do. They deny any ethical considerations for abortion partly as a political strategy to not give anti-abortionists any leverage, and partly as a psychological defense to avoid any negative feeling or guilt about abortions. This stems from wrong-headed notions that feeling bad or even guilty after an action means you did the wrong thing and should not have done it. That's bullshit. Sometimes their are unpleasant things about all the options.

In my experience most pro-choicers don't go with this dividing line in the first place.

For example, I go with first consciousness. The one fundamental difference between humans and animals is our mind--thus I think any definition of what deserves protection must be based on mental attributes. Likewise, should it be legal to kill an ET that shows up? Again, mental attributes. Something which possesses no mental attributes (a fetus before first consciousness, someone whose brain is fried and will never be conscious again) can't possess what's worth protecting.

Since we can not actually identify first consciousness yet we should go with the low bound value for it--when the brain begins to function. That's about the 7th month, we should put the dividing line a bit before this. Thus I'm happy with the 6th-month dividing line we have now.

- - - Updated - - -

That is an excellent point. It really does say something.

It says that such extreme anti-abortionists have little regard for women and their suffering including a definite increase in suicides if raped women were prohibited abortions. It does not indicate they care about protecting human life. Their stance on death penalty, war, welfare, lunch programs, and contraception availability and education is what says something about their concern for human life, and it says that it is extremely low among most anti-abortionists.

Somebody making you unhappy enough you want to commit suicide is not a justification to kill them.

Thus rape is irrelevant in the abortion argument.

 

[PyramidHead]

The one way in which many pro-choicers are dishonest is in pretending that killing the fetus has absolutely zero ethical considerations and acting and arguing as though it is an inanimate non-life with no ethical value. It absurd that the fetus goes from that state to being a full human with immense ethical value based solely on the millisecond between being on one side or the other of the birth canal. This doens't undermine the fact that their position is sincerely rooted in choice and they do care for life in general more than most anti-abortionists do. They deny any ethical considerations for abortion partly as a political strategy to not give anti-abortionists any leverage, and partly as a psychological defense to avoid any negative feeling or guilt about abortions. This stems from wrong-headed notions that feeling bad or even guilty after an action means you did the wrong thing and should not have done it. That's bullshit. Sometimes their are unpleasant things about all the options.

In my experience most pro-choicers don't go with this dividing line in the first place.

For example, I go with first consciousness. The one fundamental difference between humans and animals is our mind--thus I think any definition of what deserves protection must be based on mental attributes. Likewise, should it be legal to kill an ET that shows up? Again, mental attributes. Something which possesses no mental attributes (a fetus before first consciousness, someone whose brain is fried and will never be conscious again) can't possess what's worth protecting.

Since we can not actually identify first consciousness yet we should go with the low bound value for it--when the brain begins to function. That's about the 7th month, we should put the dividing line a bit before this. Thus I'm happy with the 6th-month dividing line we have now.

The only way we can declare something conscious is functionally, which is a combination of verifying it has the internal apparatus for consciousness (a sufficiently complex brain) AND observing that its behavior resembles that of uncontroversially conscious beings. As it stands, a fetus after six months may satisfy the first condition, but the second condition isn't satisfied until quite some time after birth. With respect to consciousness and other 'worth protecting' mental attributes, a newborn does not obviously display what you call the single fundamental property that separates it from another species of animal. It appears to have no concepts, no long-term memory, no object permanence, no self-image... in short, none of the distinguishing characteristics we normally associate with consciousness. It merely has a brain that is in the process of developing those characteristics. If that's enough for your dividing line, why is a blastocyst, which is also in the process of developing consciousness, not worth protecting?

 

[ronburgundy]

In my experience most pro-choicers don't go with this dividing line in the first place.

For example, I go with first consciousness. The one fundamental difference between humans and animals is our mind--thus I think any definition of what deserves protection must be based on mental attributes. Likewise, should it be legal to kill an ET that shows up? Again, mental attributes. Something which possesses no mental attributes (a fetus before first consciousness, someone whose brain is fried and will never be conscious again) can't possess what's worth protecting.

Since we can not actually identify first consciousness yet we should go with the low bound value for it--when the brain begins to function. That's about the 7th month, we should put the dividing line a bit before this. Thus I'm happy with the 6th-month dividing line we have now.

Consciousness is not a sufficient criteria. Plenty of organisms have consciousness and yet we grant them no rights or personhood. Regardless, the fuzzy uncertain approx range at which consciousness emerges (and varies for every pregnancy) would not serve as any kind of defensible basis to view it as an ethics free cluster of cells then suddenly a full person with full ethical consideration. It is at best a fuzzy continuum in which it has some level of ethical status the increases over time, but it can never have full personhood rights until post-birth because it is not physically distinct from someone who already has full personhood rights, the mother. The fetus being inside the mother's body is by far the clearest and most objective dividing line between whether it can be given full personhood or not. Only post birth does the mother's actions upon her own body not have direct incidental impact upon the child. When one thing is fully inside of another person's body, it is logically impossible for them to both exercise rights of personhood.
The birth canal is the most intellectually defensible dividing line between full personhood and something less than that. My critique of pro-choicers is when they acknowledge the importance of this dividing line, but go too far in arguing and acting as though there is nothing in between full personhood and being nothing but a cluster of cells with zero ethical consideration, as though a living thing developing toward humaness and personhood but just a few weeks shy is no different than a wart. Even a pre-consious fetus should have more ethical status than a wart.
The problem is that the law needs to allow women full control and thus not interfere any more than they would if it was a wart. But that is not because it is the same as a wart ethically or emotionally, but just because the mother's personhood rights are the only one's in question and thus only her own ethical considerations should impact her decision.

- - - Updated - - -

That is an excellent point. It really does say something.

It says that such extreme anti-abortionists have little regard for women and their suffering including a definite increase in suicides if raped women were prohibited abortions. It does not indicate they care about protecting human life. Their stance on death penalty, war, welfare, lunch programs, and contraception availability and education is what says something about their concern for human life, and it says that it is extremely low among most anti-abortionists.

Somebody making you unhappy enough you want to commit suicide is not a justification to kill them.

Thus rape is irrelevant in the abortion argument.

Most pro-lifer's stance on other issues prove that they have no problem with people being killed. Their stance has nothing to do with caring for life, but rather control over reproduction and forced obedience to God's authority, which is not the same thing. The fact that they go to the extreme of not allowing it even for rape is not evidence that they care for life that much (which is what Jolly and you were trying to imply). It is evidence of their disregard for the welfare of women. They are putting their desire to control women's reproduction and enforce obedience to God above the suffering this would cause. Thus, it isn't relevant to their stated "arguments" because such argument are dishonest lies that have nothing to do with the true basis of their position. It is highly relevant to revealing the character of anti-abortionists.

 

[ronburgundy]

Do we allow parents to commit violent crimes against their own kids that they cannot against others kids?

Well, other than spanking, no.

Actually, other people spanking kids is not in itslef illegal either. What is illegal is violating a parents prohibition against other's spanking their kids.
As long as the parent's don't mind, its perfectly legal. Its allowed when the hitting is deemed mild enough to not be abuse, and thus it isn't actually criminal violence. IT is actually a bullshit incoherent aspect of the law that parents can prosecute others for crimes like "assault" just for a spank that the parents themselves could get away with. Assault is either assault or not, and a third party's approval or it should have no bearing on whether it is a crime. The current law basically treats kids like property without their own rights not to be spanked, but whose owner (parents) have a right to say who get to touch them. It is really a property crime that gets prosecuted like it is a violent crime, even though if it was a violent crime then the same act would be illegal for the parents too.

 

[PyramidHead]

Consciousness is not a sufficient criteria. Plenty of organisms have consciousness and yet we grant them no rights or personhood. Regardless, the fuzzy uncertain approx range at which consciousness emerges (and varies for every pregnancy) would not serve as any kind of defensible basis to view it as an ethics free cluster of cells then suddenly a full person with full ethical consideration. It is at best a fuzzy continuum in which it has some level of ethical status the increases over time, but it can never have full personhood rights until post-birth because it is not physically distinct from someone who already has full personhood rights, the mother. The fetus being inside the mother's body is by far the clearest and most objective dividing line between whether it can be given full personhood or not. Only post birth does the mother's actions upon her own body not have direct incidental impact upon the child. When one thing is fully inside of another person's body, it is logically impossible for them to both exercise rights of personhood.
The birth canal is the most intellectually defensible dividing line between full personhood and something less than that. My critique of pro-choicers is when they acknowledge the importance of this dividing line, but go too far in arguing and acting as though there is nothing in between full personhood and being nothing but a cluster of cells with zero ethical consideration, as though a living thing developing toward humaness and personhood but just a few weeks shy is no different than a wart. Even a pre-consious fetus should have more ethical status than a wart.

Your view is hardly intuitive, since when we normally talk about personhood we are talking about something about the person, not something about his position relative to the birth canal. There may be other considerations that arise when a baby is no longer dependent on its mother's body, but those are changes in the external environment, not in whether he is a person or not. It is no less strange to suggest the birth canal confers personhood than any particular moment that occurs in the womb.

Rather, personhood is something that is slowly gained after birth, and the newborn is progressively more of a person as it acquires those traits (whatever they may be). This fits our usual understanding, since the acquisition of personhood is simultaneous with changes in the person himself, not in his spatial location. What I am suggesting is that nobody is born a person.

 

[Shadowy Man]

What I am suggesting is that nobody is born a person.

This probably results in the word "person" not having a useful definition.

 

[dx713]

I have two problems with your stance, ronburgundy:
First, you declare my "parents emotional investment" criteria problematic because it is verifiable by no psychological *physiological* difference. My reasonning is that it is because there is no biological difference that we have to use that criteria.
Second, your portray the typical "pro-choicer" position as somehow having the illusion that position relative to the birth canal making a biological difference. Mine, as a "pro-choicer", and most I have discussed with, does not. Our position is simply a "less harm" principle: however we value the fetus developping consciousness, it cannot infringe on the woman bodily autonomy. So, we have to err on the "abortion right" side of the debate to safeguard the "bodily autonomy" principle. (note that this also does apply as a moderation to my first position)

All this being actually in support of the OP: this debate would be unneeded in a lot of case with easy, informed, and not forbidden by some personal issues like religion, access to contraception (and, in general, a saner view of sexuality).

 

[Keith&Co.]

We could just use the Bible's standard: Life begins at first breath.

That would solve a lot of the OPs problems, if the conservatives could understand that their source material doesn't say that an IUD is taking a life.

 

[PyramidHead]

What I am suggesting is that nobody is born a person.

This probably results in the word "person" not having a useful definition.

How so?

 

[Shadowy Man]

This probably results in the word "person" not having a useful definition.

How so?

Well, it becomes very fuzzy. Like the word "adult", but even more vague. You have to start defining the properties of a "person" and then figure out when any given individual has acquired those properties. If there's more than one property then you have to figure out how many and to what degree these properties need to be obtained to be considered a "person".

How would you define "person" if personhood is something obtained after birth?

 

[Jarhyn]

How so?

Well, it becomes very fuzzy. Like the word "adult", but even more vague. You have to start defining the properties of a "person" and then figure out when any given individual has acquired those properties. If there's more than one property then you have to figure out how many and to what degree these properties need to be obtained to be considered a "person".

How would you define "person" if personhood is something obtained after birth?

It is the expression of ability to function as a unit in a lamarckian collective as a peer rather than a leech or darwinian adversary. At least a according to my ethical model. Different models will have different definitions of person, corrwsponding to how vague that model is.

Lamarckian strategy necessitates more minds is better, so there's a vested interest to produce more minds with the least amount of resource usage. So it's not ethically necessary to not abort, or even lose a teenager on occasion, but if it's cheaper to get another member of the collective by scrapping a teen that needs a lot of help to fix, and starting fresh with a baby, the baby gets the resources. If it's better to fix the teen than raise a new one, then you fix the teen and scrap the baby. There's more to it than that, obviously, but it's about making contributing members of society without wasting societally limited resources invested into the young. The earlier an abortion happens, the more acceptable the loss.

 

[prideandfall]

Nobody calls themself Pro-Death or Anti-Choice, but that is how each side views the other.

/raises hand
technically i have, actually, on these forums, multiple times.

i know, i'm one lone asshole and it totally doesn't count as any sort of representative sample, i'm just chuckling at being a pedantic shit about it.

 

[PyramidHead]

Nobody calls themself Pro-Death or Anti-Choice, but that is how each side views the other.

/raises hand
technically i have, actually, on these forums, multiple times.

i know, i'm one lone asshole and it totally doesn't count as any sort of representative sample, i'm just chuckling at being a pedantic shit about it.

Me too, actually. No joking, I am very pro-abortion. It's partly out of envy for the aborted.

 

[PyramidHead]

How so?

Well, it becomes very fuzzy. Like the word "adult", but even more vague. You have to start defining the properties of a "person" and then figure out when any given individual has acquired those properties. If there's more than one property then you have to figure out how many and to what degree these properties need to be obtained to be considered a "person".

How would you define "person" if personhood is something obtained after birth?

In the moral sense? Depends on the morals, but let's boil it down to compassion. A person can be described as something that can suffer in the unique way a reflective mind can suffer. And it's a fuzzy line, to be sure. More self-awareness, more ability to place oneself in hypothetical situations, greater appreciation of the existence of other minds, more long-term planning, more discrimination between pains and pleasures, more evidence of forming mental models... all of these factors make a being more vulnerable to more pronounced suffering (at least that's my opinion, but I don't think of it as a controversial one), and create stronger preferences in the being, which didn't exist when all it could do was dimly sense the surroundings, consume energy, and cry. There is no bright demarcation, to be sure, but I find it more reasonable to grant personhood gradually, as a human being gradually begins to resemble a person in the ways I mentioned, and not simply by virtue of lacking an umbilical cord.

 

[ronburgundy]

I have two problems with your stance, ronburgundy:
First, you declare my "parents emotional investment" criteria problematic because it is verifiable by no psychological *physiological* difference. My reasonning is that it is because there is no biological difference that we have to use that criteria.

There is a massive biological difference between a fetus being inside the mothers body and outside of it. In addition to being a massive and objective and directly observable to all type difference, it is about as meaningful a difference as could exist in terms of the issue of individual rights. The fetus inside another body is not biologically and individual, thus the notion of individual rights cannot possibly apply to them.
Also, the problem with your "does the mom want it" criteria is not just that isn't physiologically observable, but that it isn't observed in any form most of the time.
A mother can (and many do) alter her desire to have the baby from one moment to the next, and 99% of the time no one else but her has any basis to know, thus no one can know but her whether the fetus is a "person" with rights and even if they know one moment, the do not know the next. It undermines the principle of personhood if it can be revoked once given, so the moment the mother first decides she wants it, it must become a person and can never lose that status. That means mothers could not change their mind, and it means the fetus inside her the same rights as a newborn which means her own actions from smoking or drinking, etc. become acts of criminal child endangerment. Do you want to go down that road? Because that is what any effort to treat harming a fetus as criminal violence entails.

Second, your portray the typical "pro-choicer" position as somehow having the illusion that position relative to the birth canal making a biological difference. Mine, as a "pro-choicer", and most I have discussed with, does not. Our position is simply a "less harm" principle: however we value the fetus developping consciousness, it cannot infringe on the woman bodily autonomy. So, we have to err on the "abortion right" side of the debate to safeguard the "bodily autonomy" principle. (note that this also does apply as a moderation to my first position)

The only reason the fetuses life "infringes upon the woman's bodily autonomy" is because it is on the inner side of her birth canal. So, which side it is on is the most critical factor in whether it can be killed. That is my whole point and your own justification for pro-choice confirms it. IT is not a biological individual until it is no longer inside of her. Until then, it is a part of her own body and thus it is logically impossible for them both to have full rights over their body. That is why full personhood cannot be granted until it is outside of her. And thus why other people doing things that harm a fetus itself cannot be a from of criminal violence against a "person".

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Consciousness is not a sufficient criteria. Plenty of organisms have consciousness and yet we grant them no rights or personhood.

I know that--I'm not saying it's sufficient, I'm saying it's necessary. Perhaps we will revise the threshold upwards at some future point. I'm simply picking a point where the issue can't exist and saying it's safe.

The birth canal is the most intellectually defensible dividing line between full personhood and something less than that.

It's a clear line but that doesn't make it a valid line. The nature of what you are protecting isn't changed by the act of birth.

Most pro-lifer's stance on other issues prove that they have no problem with people being killed. Their stance has nothing to do with caring for life, but rather control over reproduction and forced obedience to God's authority, which is not the same thing. The fact that they go to the extreme of not allowing it even for rape is not evidence that they care for life that much (which is what Jolly and you were trying to imply). It is evidence of their disregard for the welfare of women. They are putting their desire to control women's reproduction and enforce obedience to God above the suffering this would cause. Thus, it isn't relevant to their stated "arguments" because such argument are dishonest lies that have nothing to do with the true basis of their position. It is highly relevant to revealing the character of anti-abortionists.

But that's not actually a pro-life position.