AFAIK wrote:You speak as if the fetus just happens to be in a woman's womb and ignore how it got there.
Do you feel that women bear no responsibility for getting pregnant?
You're ignoring some important context here.
Though PoD said
Pants-of-dog wrote:It would be more correct to say that I think personal responsibility is not a relevant factor when deciding who has access to medical treatments.
I do think we can get a sense that we hold people responsbile for the child if they weren't unreasonably coerced into the sexual encounter that created the child. Which would help possibly explain why some exceptions for abortion are limited to rape or why there's new laws being advocated for exempting men from child support when their sperm was used non-consensually (statory rape, rape, misuse of fertility technology, etc).
But when two people engage in consensual sex we do posit an idea of implicit consent to the risk of pregnancy even when risk of pregnancy is diminished because one can't entirely remove the link between sex and reproduction without disrupting reproductive organs.
Though it still needs to be detailed further why consent to sex nullifies a woman's non-consent to a developing child using her body. Because when people have sex, in a sense they don't directly control their reproductive organs, they indirectly do. The idea being that biology simply does its thing, so that people can have sex but both not have wanted a pregnancy to occur, we wouldn't say that they consented to pregnancy. Because it makes no sense to speak of consent to acts of nature, where as in the laws for non-consensual use of sperm, there is a moral agent acting maliciously.
So we get back to the thought that they implicitly consent through consensual sex, but it's not yet clear from this why it nullifies abortion. Would have to dig into implicit consent and argue why it should take precedent over a woman's desire to have an abortion which seems to signify a clear non-consent to the pregnancy. It becomes a case of why is one more compelling than the other, why does the implicit consent entailed in sexual encounter take greater precedent than her non-consent?
Which brings us to the actual issue that one has to argue, the rightness or wrongness of abortion which largely revolves around ideas of establishing when a child has personhood. Because if its too early, one can criminalize women who have miscarriages. But then even after acknowledging personhood, we have to then establish that it trumps the woman's bodily autonomy. Because in the abstract, we don't treat the woman as having a right to kill her child because children aren't viewed as property under liberalism. But by prioritizing her bodily autonomy in terms of not being used by another, we justify her cutting the link which has the consequence of the developing child dying, if its thought to be alive.
Though to really adhere to such an abstract view, we could technically remove the child and have it placed outside the mother where it would die rather than it be shredded or what ever.
Which I suppose is difficult because people tend treat bodily autonomy as an intrinsic good within liberalism that can't be imposed upon without justification, at least in the abstract. And people also treat life as an unconditional intrinsic good where every life is sacred. Which opens up both for arguments about how in practice life isn't treated so sacredly by a person or how bodily autonomy isn't unlimited.
In the end though, I think if people are concerned with abortion, beyond just trying to argue for variations within law, the more substantial task would be addressing the basis for people not wanting to have their children.
Also following the idea of responsibility, both parents are given parental responsibility when they had consensual sex. That some try to posit men being allowed to walk away from providing even minimal child support because they don't want to. But its a false equivalence to state that because a woman has an abortion that it justifies making unequal rights in regards to attribution of parental responsibility based on biology and responsibility in the creation of the child.
That women having a right to an abortion is substantiated on a relevant difference that they can get pregnant and thus can in practice actually have an abortion whilst men can't. That a womans ability to have an abortion isn't depriving the man of any right and thus any perceived injustice due to differential treatment needs to specify how the law is unjust. And how that injustice means that men could be absolved of parental responsibility in the standard two biological parents who consensually had sex.
That differential treatment can be justified when there are relevant differences. So for example a person with disabilities getting rights specific to them being disabled doesn't deprive non-disabled people of any rights. So if someone complained that they wanted to be absolved of some responsibilities because the disabled person in the workplace got some reasonable accommodations.
We'd be like fuck the employee that thinks because they add some ramps for wheelchair access or what ever, that he shouldn't have to do parts of his job. Not perfectly analogous but I think touches on the relevant error in judgement.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
And since babies can survive outside the womb even earlier, there is no substantial difference between a baby two weeks before and two weeks after birth. My sister was born four weeks early. Your differentiation is completely arbitrary.
- By Negotiator
- By FiveofSwords
- By wat0n