Abortion: Responding to Body Autonomy Argument (A different take)

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I think prayer is the only and best thing we can do in many cases. Wisdom and discernment is needed, because fruitless arguing can sometimes do more harm than good, I think. It depends on who you’re trying to convince.

For instance, I have an uncle who is a very intelligent, militant atheist. Arguing about this from any standpoint would be fruitless and fatally jeopardize the realtionship. So it all depends on if you can have a reasonable, calm discussion with the other person.
 
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A lot of what you say I passed by him in previous discussions. He said all rights on contingent upon not being inside the mother. It’s not that he views the preborn as property. It’s an issue of collision of domains. The preborn is in the mother’s personal space and subject to the will of the mother. Yes. A born child is in the mother’s personal space, but it’s exterior, not interior.

I asked him if he would support an abortion prohibition if technology allowed extracting a baby with no serious side effects to mother or child and placing somewhere else to gestate. He said he was open to it.
 
Monica83 said:
When your actions created a dependent human you must provide care until another person can.
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True. He would say the mother does not have to provide care because the preborn person is inside the mother. She allows him to live. It’s her gift to the preborn person, which she is in her right to cut off at any time. This is why I say he goes beyond Roe v Wade. He believes Roe v Wade hinging its decision on viability is a failed reason.
 
  1. While the mother’s actions brought the preborn person into existence, she does not forfeit her right to remove anything inside her.
So they acknowledge that a preborn is human and that the Mother has accepted this preborn human to rent her womb.

If they didnt accept that a pre orn is human then i can see their logic.
But womb rental is 9 months, i dont see how anyone would have the right to kill and evict prior to the entire term.
 
We didn’t hit that particular point, but I think he would say “Abortion for any reason as long as one human is inside another.”
 
So, to his way of thinking then, if you give him the gift of a car, then you have the right to take it back whenever you want to? That wouldn’t be much of a “gift” if the giver can take the “gift” back whenever they wanted to for whatever reason. To my way of thinking, once you give ANY gift, the gift now belongs to who you gave it freely to, and it is up to THEM to decide what they do with that gift. A baby would keep the gift of life and use it to keep growing and to be born.
 
Why is consent valued more for the mother than the human being her actions forced into dependency? The child did not consent to being in a life or death situation on the whim of another. And bodily autonomy is not absolute. There are MANY things we are not allowed to do with our bodies…some of those do not even necessarily involve other human beings like abortion does.
 
I agree. And I told him there is a disparaging term for giving a gift and taking it back, and it’s disparaging for a reason.

He goes on to say the time given is the gift. The mother is just ceasing to continue giving the gift.
 
You are getting close to a point he has a little more difficulty wiggling out of. I put the dependency issue this way.

Imagine if I was in surgery and needed a pint of blood, and he spiked the pint he donated with a drug which would require me to receive regular donations of his, and only his, blood? Would he, knowingly creating a dependency on me, create an obligation to continue providing blood?

He answered saying his blood is keeping me alive, and I should be thankful. I believe he is thinking I needed his blood from the beginning to survive, which is not the case. He moved the goal posts, which is usually a sign he is avoiding ceding a point.
 
His assertion that one’s skin represents the boundary where the rules change about who can or cannot be killed is simply arbitrary. It may seem reasonable to him but it is nothing less than an escape from the reality of mammalian reproduction. It’s like arguing against the law of gravity because we find it inconvenient. I could as justifiably claim that I have a right to abort him because he transgresses my (arbitrary) condition where such action is acceptable. Where rules are arbitrary anything can be justified.
 
On that link up above, I read an article about body autonomy. I dont have a link to the article right now, but the argument went something like this:

One day the pregnant mom decides to amputate the legs of her unborn baby. So the doctor performs fetal surgery and amputates the legs. Then the mother decides to make her unborn baby blind, so the doctor performs another surgery to remove the baby’s eyes.

Would the mother be within her rights to do this? After all, the baby is still within her skin. Would he say that she can give birth to a legless, blind baby if she wishes?

I would HOPE that he would say no–that the mother has no right to mutilate her unborn baby, even though the baby is still residing in her womb.

If we all agree she can’t mutilate the baby and still provide life for it, how is it then justified to murder the baby and rob it of its life entirely?

Also, what about a mother who drinks heavily through the pregnancy or does drugs continuously, despite the very probable chance the baby will have birth defects and/or be born addicted to the drugs? What about a mother who frequently engages in unprotected sex, exposing the baby to disease? Or an HIV+ mother who refuses to take the medicine that would protect the child from contracting it?

Would he think the mother within her rights in these cases as well, because the baby is still within her skin? These scenarios happen every day to countless helpless children. If he thinks the mother is justified here…I don’t think I have any other arguments to make. 😥
 
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Thats true-a placenta does not feed the fetus until 9-10 weeks. The embryo/fetus lives off of the corpus luteum(which was already in the egg) until then.

And the biological reality of reproduction does not grant one human being the right to force another into dependency, then kill him/her if unwanted. That should be considered before sex. Would he feel a pet should be “thankful” to an owner for feeding/sheltering it who one day decides to shoot it because unwanted/inconvenient/old/unadoptable after all these years? I think he would probably disagree with that for some reason.
 
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