Abortion question

[Russell_SA]

So I was listening to the Atheist Experience show out of Austin TX and they were discussion the abortion issue in the US.

The argument against abortion was what Christopher Hitchens puts forth: The fetus is a human just at an earlier stage of development, just as a child is to an adolescent is to a teenager, and so on. So the fetus is a group of people that are targeted for removal from society and as a society, we should guard all groups of people from being targeted this way because if we have it in our culture to be able to compartmentalize what we are doing to one group and not to the rest, then one day our group may be the target because the society has developed a comfort level of being about to think that way.

The argument against abortion was what the hosts of the Atheist Experience presented:
Everyone has a right to life in our culture. So the fetus has a right to life.
No one has a right to use someone else’s body for survival without that person’s consent.
So, the fetus has a right to life, just as everyone else does, but it does not have the right to force the mother to continue using her body to sustain it’s life against her will. This is granting special rights to a fetus that is not granted to any other group of people in our society. For instance, a father can not be forced to use his body to keep his son alive if his son needs his father’s body to sustain him. (Say for example, the father was driving and caused the accident that put his son in this condition where his father’s body was needed to save his son’s life.) The father must consent, at the hospital, to allow the hospital to use his body to save his son’s life till the son heals in 9 months.

So until we pass laws that allow the hospitals to force the parents to use their bodies to save their born children’s lives, we can not force mothers to use their bodies to keep their fetus alive.

 

[Vonsalza]

I’m not sure your point is completely correct as it corresponds to the law.

People can be, and have been, issued charges for failing to render assistance. Like watching a kid drown and doing nothing to render assistance if you were capable of providing life-saving assistance.

Obviously it’s not common and obviously the “capability” is subjective. But have people been charged for failing to bodily help? Sure.

So there is some level of obligation we have to our fellow man. Perhaps even in-utero.

You could also argue that if a pregnancy was an unacceptable outcome, you have an moral obligation to your potential living-but-would-be-aborted fetus to refrain from child-generating activity.

 

[Thom18]

It would be one thing (and a horrible thing at that) for a mother to not seek help if she knew something was wrong with her pregnancy, letting the fetus (since you use that term) die of natural causes. It’s quite another thing to stab the developing child in the head, cut it apart inside the womb, and suck it out with a vacuum.

Similarly, it’s one thing for a father to refuse to give his son what he needs (blood, organs, etc.) to survive an accident. It’s quite another thing for the father to cause that accident which requires him to need his father’s help.

 

[Lenten_ashes]

“I’ve noticed that everyone that is for abortion has already been born”

-Ronald Reagan

 

[sugarmouse]

Are we really going to say that if you choose to engage in an activity that you know makes babies, you have absolutely no responsibility towards the child you created? As people have pointed out, abortion is not simply “refusing to care” for the baby, but actively killing the child. No one has the right to kill a baby.

Let me give you a thought experiment that (I think) originated with Josh Brahm and his colleagues…

A mother with a three-week old baby wakes up one morning to find herself in the bedroom of a log cabin. The cabin is completely snowed in, and she’s unable to leave. In the next room, she discovers a note from the people who have kidnapped her:

*You and your baby are safe. You will remain in this cabin for nine months, and then we will come to set you free. You will find that there is plenty of food, baby formula and firewood to last you that time.
*

Sure enough, in the kitchen finds the supplies as promised, more than enough to last nine months. She hears a baby crying in the next room, and rushes in to find a crib, and inside…not her baby, but another baby.

Six weeks later, the police locate the log cabin and plough through the snow to get inside. “Thank goodness you’re safe!” the officers say. “We’ve arrested the kidnappers, and they’re on their way to jail. Oh, by the way, is there a baby in here?”

The woman replies, “There was.”

The police go through to the next room, and find the baby lying dead in the crib. “What happened here?”

The woman says, “I was just so stressed out by this whole thing. I didn’t want to feed it. Anyway, why should I have to take responsibility for its care?”

Now, would anyone argue that the woman has no responsibility towards this baby? Whether we like it or not, when a woman is pregnant with a baby, she is the only person in the world who is able to look after them. Again, we’re not even asking the woman to do anything - during pregnancy, you do not have to actively care for the child, because it’s a completely natural bodily process that takes care of itself. Rather, we are saying that the woman cannot actively kill her child.

But pregnancy is different, people argue, because it means caring for someone with your body. So let’s change one aspect of the thought experiment:

There is no formula milk in the cabin. For the baby to survive long enough to eat solid food, the woman is going to have to breastfeed them (remember that she is a new mother and is producing milk).

Now, we can agree that breastfeeding is different from bottle-feeding, but is it so different that in one scenario the woman has a responsibility towards the child, and in the other she can literally let the baby starve to death? I don’t think so.

But again, abortion is not simply “withholding care”. So let’s add another element to the thought experiment:

At the end of the kidnapper’s note it says, *If you kill the baby, then we will let you go immediately.
*

Now, this is a better analogy to pregnancy, where a woman can “escape” the situation of being pregnant by having an abortion. Is it okay for the woman to kill the baby in the crib to escape her predicament? Then it is also wrong for a woman to kill her son or daughter in her womb in order to get out of pregnancy.

 

[minkymurph]

So I was listening to the Atheist Experience show out of Austin TX and they were discussion the abortion issue in the US.

The argument against abortion was what Christopher Hitchens puts forth: The fetus is a human just at an earlier stage of development, just as a child is to an adolescent is to a teenager, and so on. So the fetus is a group of people that are targeted for removal from society and as a society, we should guard all groups of people from being targeted this way because if we have it in our culture to be able to compartmentalize what we are doing to one group and not to the rest, then one day our group may be the target because the society has developed a comfort level of being about to think that way.

The argument against abortion was what the hosts of the Atheist Experience presented:
Everyone has a right to life in our culture. So the fetus has a right to life.
No one has a right to use someone else’s body for survival without that person’s consent.
So, the fetus has a right to life, just as everyone else does, but it does not have the right to force the mother to continue using her body to sustain it’s life against her will. This is granting special rights to a fetus that is not granted to any other group of people in our society. For instance, a father can not be forced to use his body to keep his son alive if his son needs his father’s body to sustain him. (Say for example, the father was driving and caused the accident that put his son in this condition where his father’s body was needed to save his son’s life.) The father must consent, at the hospital, to allow the hospital to use his body to save his son’s life till the son heals in 9 months.

So until we pass laws that allow the hospitals to force the parents to use their bodies to save their born children’s lives, we can not force mothers to use their bodies to keep their fetus alive.

I had to read this one a few times to get my head around it - I’m thinking as I go.

The matter is infinitely more complicated that the manner in which it is stated here.

As I understand it - correct me if I am wrong - what is being argued is if we have a law that prevents woman from having an abortion, there should be a corresponding law that compels parents to use their bodies to save their born children’s lives, and the fact this law does not exist renders the current state of the law arbitrary or disproportionate?

The fact there are laws that prevent women having abortions is argued to be tantamount to forcing them to have a child on application, but it ‘forces’ them by omission. A law that would grant authority to hospitals to force parents to use their bodies to save their child would require them to act. The law makes clear distinctions between acts and omissions and acts and omissions are treated differently. Thus, this comparison is problematic in a legal sense.

The law currently imposes a duty of care on parents in regard to their own children. If we attribute human status to the unborn and subsequently the right to life, which incidentally is a qualified right and not an absolute right at law, would this impose a duty of care on the mother? Or in fact the father? If so, it would it not have involve provided the unborn with a uterus in which to grow and thrive as in the absence of a uterus it will surely perish? If the law would not impose a duty of care on the mother, how would this impact on the current state of the law in terms of the duty of care imposed on parents of born children?

In regard to the issue of ‘force.’ Situations in which a parents ‘body’ would be needed to save a child that I can think of are; blood transfusion, bone marrow donation, organ for transplant. There may be others this is all I can think of. How do we compare the degree and nature of the force required to compel a parent to donate blood, bone marrow or an organ with that exerted on the pregnant mother by a fetus?

If we subscribe human status at law to the unborn we would also have to consider if the murder of pregnant woman constitutes a double homicide. If it does, how do we reconcile this with not forcing the mother to keep the fetus alive in a legal sense?

In short - this argument in my view just can’t go anywhere.

 

[1Lord1Faith]

Russell, your argument makes it seem like the fetus willed itself into existence. But, the mother is the individual responsible for creating the fetus; the fetus does not force itself on the mother, it is the mother that forces the fetus, so to speak. The mother has an obligation to care for any life she creates, as does the father.

 

[1Lord1Faith]

Russell, your argument makes it seem like the fetus willed itself into existence. But, the mother is the individual responsible for creating the fetus; the fetus does not force itself on the mother, it is the mother that forces the fetus, so to speak. The mother has an obligation to care for any life she creates, as does the father.

 

[mVitus]

Russell, your argument makes it seem like the fetus willed itself into existence. But, the mother is the individual responsible for creating the fetus; the fetus does not force itself on the mother, it is the mother that forces the fetus, so to speak. The mother has an obligation to care for any life she creates, as does the father.

This argument works except for rape. Hence the cabin logic of sugarmouse seems more promising.

 

[Russell_SA]

I’m not sure your point is completely correct as it corresponds to the law.

People can be, and have been, issued charges for failing to render assistance. Like watching a kid drown and doing nothing to render assistance if you were capable of providing life-saving assistance.

Obviously it’s not common and obviously the “capability” is subjective. But have people been charged for failing to bodily help? Sure.

So there is some level of obligation we have to our fellow man. Perhaps even in-utero.

You could also argue that if a pregnancy was an unacceptable outcome, you have an moral obligation to your potential living-but-would-be-aborted fetus to refrain from child-generating activity.

Isn’t it a different issue when discussing the difference between handing someone a branch to pull them out of a ditch vs the state forcing you to give them access to your body, such as a kidney, blood, etc. to be pulled out of the ditch?
The child in the car that the father put there would cause the father to be morally obligated then to use any of his body to save the child’s life because the child in the accident was an unacceptable outcome as well correct?

 

[Russell_SA]

It would be one thing (and a horrible thing at that) for a mother to not seek help if she knew something was wrong with her pregnancy, letting the fetus (since you use that term) die of natural causes. It’s quite another thing to stab the developing child in the head, cut it apart inside the womb, and suck it out with a vacuum.

Similarly, it’s one thing for a father to refuse to give his son what he needs (blood, organs, etc.) to survive an accident. It’s quite another thing for the father to cause that accident which requires him to need his father’s help.

If the father put the child in his car and then had an accident, not his intention to put the child in the accident, and then the child needed the father’s body to survive in the hospital for another 9 months to recover. That would be the scenario I believe. We currently do not allow people, regardless of the situation, to be forced to use their body for the aide of another person’s benefit, even to save a life. But we do for a fetus. Isn’t that granting special rights to one group of people and not to everyone else? That’s the situation I believe it was argued. In your father example, either way, he has a choice to not act and to not use his body. The mother does not get that choice.

So how they disconnect the fetus from the mother is an issue for you. The argument was about whether the fetus has a right to be hooked up to someone else in the first place. Like the child in the accident his father caused. Does the father, waking up in the hospital with his son attached to his body to survive, without his father’s consent, have a right to stay hooked up to his father after his father decides not to use his body to save his son? Currently, the father still has a right to disconnect his son and sue the hospital for violating his body. It was medical assault. That’s the point being argued in the discussion.

 

[Russell_SA]

“I’ve noticed that everyone that is for abortion has already been born”

-Ronald Reagan

This is a woman’s health issue and a woman’s position on this holds more weight than a man telling women what they should do or how to address this issue.

 

[Russell_SA]

Are we really going to say that if you choose to engage in an activity that you know makes babies, you have absolutely no responsibility towards the child you created? As people have pointed out, abortion is not simply “refusing to care” for the baby, but actively killing the child. No one has the right to kill a baby.

The father putting his child in the car and then getting in an accident was the case presented as a similar issue. He engaged in an activity that put his child at risk. But he gets to sue the hospital if the father woke up to find he was hooked up to his child against the father’s wishes. It’s medical assault. Hence the point of the conversation. Everyone has a right to life, but not a right to someone else’s body to save their life. Death row inmates are not forced to give up their body parts for their victim’s survival for instance.

 

[Russell_SA]

As I understand it - correct me if I am wrong - what is being argued is if we have a law that prevents woman from having an abortion, there should be a corresponding law that compels parents to use their bodies to save their born children’s lives, and the fact this law does not exist renders the current state of the law arbitrary or disproportionate?

The argument was presented that a special group of people, fetus’, have special rights that no one else has access to. The right to someone else’s body to sustain their life. Everyone has a right to life, but no one has a right to their life at the expense of someone else’s body. That is why we do not force death row inmates to give up their body parts to their victims and why the father that caused the accident that injured his kid can sue the hospital for medical assault if the father woke up in the hospital and was found hooked up to his kid. The father also has the right to disconnect himself from his kid too. That is the case that was presented and argued.

 

[Russell_SA]

The law currently imposes a duty of care on parents in regard to their own children. If we attribute human status to the unborn and subsequently the right to life, which incidentally is a qualified right and not an absolute right at law, would this impose a duty of care on the mother? Or in fact the father? If so, it would it not have involve provided the unborn with a uterus in which to grow and thrive as in the absence of a uterus it will surely perish? If the law would not impose a duty of care on the mother, how would this impact on the current state of the law in terms of the duty of care imposed on parents of born children?

Parents do have a legal duty to the care of their children, but the parents are not required to go as far as to be forced to give up their body for the care of their children. We do not force parents to donate blood, marrow, organs, etc. to save their child’s lives. It is medical assault if the state forced parents to undergo that treatment to save their child’s lives. Same as it would be medical assault to force death row inmates to give up their bodies to their victims. As I see it, we would have to impose a duty of care to the level of the fetus that we would for the born children. Where the children have a right to their parent’s body just as much as the fetus does.

 

[Russell_SA]

Russell, your argument makes it seem like the fetus willed itself into existence. But, the mother is the individual responsible for creating the fetus; the fetus does not force itself on the mother, it is the mother that forces the fetus, so to speak. The mother has an obligation to care for any life she creates, as does the father.

The father that forced their child in the car and then had an accident that required their child to survive by being hooked up to their father would be the same situation correct? But the father can sue the hospital for medical assault and ask to be disconnected, even if the results kill his child. So for the rights that the fetus has, we would have to grant that right to any child regardless of their development level. At this point, the argument illustrated that special rights are granted to the fetus that is not granted to any other person. Or is that not the case as the thought experiment went in the discussion I presented?

 

[Lenten_ashes]

This is a woman’s health issue and a woman’s position on this holds more weight than a man telling women what they should do or how to address this issue.

And the “health issue” label gets tossed around quite frequently, as if 1/2 of all mothers are in serious danger of perishing if they have the child.

When in actuality, the number of women in any sort of danger is an extremely low percentage.

And in regards to forcing women to allow the unborn to use their body…well, in most cases nobody forced that woman to consent to unprotected sex. Choices come with consequences, in all aspects of life. Shouldn’t be any different here…if you don’t want the child, there are adoption centers out there, and even the baby Moses law. Do the right thing.

 

[Russell_SA]

And the “health issue” label gets tossed around quite frequently, as if 1/2 of all mothers are in serious danger of perishing if they have the child.

When in actuality, the number of women in any sort of danger is an extremely low percentage.

And in regards to forcing women to allow the unborn to use their body…well, in most cases nobody forced that woman to consent to unprotected sex. Choices come with consequences, in all aspects of life. Shouldn’t be any different here…if you don’t want the child, there are adoption centers out there, and even the baby Moses law. Do the right thing.

Just commenting on the issue that when medical issues about women’s health, the panel almost always never has women on it.

In the situation that was discussed, the example that someone used was: a father puts their child in a car and then has an accident.
So to put this in terms of your example: No one forced him to consent to the risk of driving. His choice came with consequences, in all aspects of life. Shouldn’t be any different here…if he doesn’t want the child, then he could sign away his parental rights to the state and have someone else be hooked up to his unconscious child to keep his child alive instead of using his body. But he should just do the right thing and keep himself hooked up to his child for the next 9 months as his child recovers.
But the argument goes: if the father wakes up in the hospital and is hooked up to his child, then he can sue the hospital for medical assault and get the hospital to disconnect him from his child. The child has a right to life but not at the expense of someone else’s body, even their own parents. The person has to give consent before they can have their body used to support the life of an other person. This is why we do not force death row inmates to give up their bodies for their victim’s survival for example. That was the point argued.

 

[Thom18]

This is a woman’s health issue and a woman’s position on this holds more weight than a man telling women what they should do or how to address this issue.

Women’s health issue? Nothing about ending an unborn child’s life has “women’s health issue” written on it.

And somehow a man’s opinion means nothing, despite the supreme court that passed Roe vs Wade being all male? Obviously we need to overrule Roe vs Wade until we have an all-female court to rule on it again.

 

[Lenten_ashes]

Just commenting on the issue that when medical issues about women’s health, the panel almost always never has women on it.

In the situation that was discussed, the example that someone used was: a father puts their child in a car and then has an accident.
So to put this in terms of your example: No one forced him to consent to the risk of driving. His choice came with consequences, in all aspects of life. Shouldn’t be any different here…if he doesn’t want the child, then he could sign away his parental rights to the state and have someone else be hooked up to his unconscious child to keep his child alive instead of using his body. But he should just do the right thing and keep himself hooked up to his child for the next 9 months as his child recovers.
But the argument goes: if the father wakes up in the hospital and is hooked up to his child, then he can sue the hospital for medical assault and get the hospital to disconnect him from his child. The child has a right to life but not at the expense of someone else’s body, even their own parents. The person has to give consent before they can have their body used to support the life of an other person. This is why we do not force death row inmates to give up their bodies for their victim’s survival for example. That was the point argued.

Not sure we can equate reckless behavior like a drunken binge that led to a one night stand, with driving to the corner store to pick up the morning paper.