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Except it is every clear that they don't care about the life of the fetus either since the publicized cases pretty much all involve a fetus that would die within hours of birth.
6th Grade Biology taught us that an 'ectopic pregnancy' is, by definition, unviable. By their own Book, God creates ectopic pregnancies so They can have the pleasure of destroying an innocent soul.
Philosophically, the law should not involve itself in trading on lives. I actually find this heartless abortion position more consistent than the others and appreciate the soulless honesty of it.
The fact that nearly everyone agrees there should be at least some cases where abortions are legal means pretty much everyone believes that abortion should be legal and just hasn't fully thought out the underlying ethics.
Because it means basically no one really believes in the unconditional right to life of a fetus - if it has an unconditional right to life, it doesn't matter if it came from rape or incest and it doesn't matter if it's going to die within minutes of being born and it doesn't matter if it's life threatens the life of its parent. None of those factors should remove the right to life.
And so since pretty much everyone agrees there should at least be exceptions for some of these situations we must conclude that there is not an inviolable right to life. We clearly think that the right to life of a fetus is just fundamentally lesser from the right to life of an independent and viable living person.
Meanwhile the right to autonomy over your own body still looks pretty unimpeachable to me. Seems to be that the state continues to have no right to forcibly modify or control your body and that it can sooner limit basic freedoms like movement and association before it violates that. The only time we seem to think it's okay to violate body autonomy is if the person has a fetus in their uterus.
What conservatives really want is to be able to dictate the calculus. They want to be able to tell people with a uterus what to do. They want to pick and choose who is and isn't pregnant and offer as little agency as possible to the individuals. That's always been the most important motivation and goal to these abortion bans. They want a breeding slave class and they're just too dishonest with themselves to admit it.
A rape exception alone shows they are totally inconsistent on the question of "life" and "rights."
The thing is, even an exception for the life of the mother shows that same moral inconsistency. If allowing a mother to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the fetus is acceptable, the other way around -- allowing the fetus to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the parent -- is just as acceptable. And it makes no difference if that preservation of life is 85 years or 15 minutes -- the right to life isn't contingent on how long your life may be.
These fake ethicists try to claim there's a fundamental difference between performing an abortion and prohibiting an abortion, but both of these are positive actions taken by the state that engages in trading lives. If you want to order on the morality of what a doctor or pregnant person does, have at -- there's reasonably room for debate there -- but there must be no intervention from the state.
Well, that’s a little sad, that you’ve only seen the bad side. Personally, I’ve seen good parents that let their kids be themselves, and bad parents that try to relive their childhood through their kids or turn them into mindless copies.
I think they’re right that the action itself is selfless. But just like a person can donate to a charity just to make themselves look good, one can carry a child for the attention.
Many ethical stances around abortion aren't phrased around the right to life, because usually ethics has a pretty hard stance on that right. So the real ethical question isn't about the unconditional right to life, It's actually about your right to another person's body or bodily autonomy.
Generally it breaks down to, just because a person requires the use of your body to survive does not mean you have a moral or ethical requirement to provide sustenance (your body) for that person.
Qoute from a nytimes article:
Phrasing it as right to life automatically discounts the real ethical question, does this being have a right to my body?
Thomson does directly address the right to life of the fetus in A Defense of Abortion, the underlying essay that the violinist parable comes from (it has several other allegorical arguments aside from this one that are, in my opinion, even better but weirdly don't get referenced much). The violinist story only really addresses rape, but the others do not require a starting act of violence to make similar arguments.
She outright grants the life-from-conception argument. And argues for why it's just not relevant by showing a series of examples that make plain the typical person's instinct -- that autonomy over your body is supreme to the right to life of another and refusing to be charitable to a stranger is not the same as murder.
In my mind, no one has ever come close to rebuking her argument, though many have tried. The fact that both pro-life and pro-choice people continue to argue about when abortion becomes unethical is very frustrating. I wish the whole "it's just a clump of cells" crowd would shut up because that's utterly unpersuasive to someone who believes in life from conception. It's just a moot point. Even if the fetus is a full human being with all relevant rights from the moment of conception, abortion is still not murder; it is permissible.
I recommend the essay, it's not a very challenging read (compared to the greater cannon of philosophical essays, at least). It's probably been 15+ years since I last read it and it still lives strongly in my mind.
I appreciate the added context, but a bit thrown. I was trying to call out your comment that people don't believe in a unconditional right to life, by trying to say it's not the right to life that is questioned. But, you're clearly well versed on the matter.
What part of the pro-choice movement do you think doesn't believe in the unconditional right to life? Because to me, I don't think anyone takes the stance that a fetus (baby?) that can survive on its own should be killed.
Or am I just being nit picky in your wording?
No one is advocating for killing babies. That's kind of the point, though: abortion is not killing babies. If babies die after abortion, that isn't murder. That's just death. And whether or not the baby can survive post-abortion doesn't factor into that, at least from a position of pure ethics.
But it's preferable to not let the baby die. We didn't deny it's right to life. So if the pregnancy can be terminated without letting the baby die and without a serious adverse effect on the parent, we should do that. What's fundamentally different after viability isn't the morality, it's just what is possible.
I'm pretty inarguably pro choice and I do not think we ought to ban any abortions. Yes, including late term, viable babies. The focus on viability is denying the unconditional right to life. It's trying to negotiate about when that right emerges in order to make the arguments easier. And it's an inherently weak strategy because it's totally subjective. Even when the point of viability occurs is subjective.
If we want to keep babies alive, we should create incentives to prevent abortion and remove disincentives to carrying to term. In the case of a viable fetus, we should make sure the cost of giving birth is not higher than the cost of termination for someone who wants to not be pregnant anymore. But autonomy over your own body is always supreme over right to life. Always.
Not to even get into the fact that late term abortions are definitionally extremely complex , emotional, complicated situations where we definitely do not need the government imposing ridiculous catchall rules.
And in any event, once it's out of the womb, it needs to get a job and pull itself up by its bootstraps and eventually stop eating avocado toast if it wants to afford a studio apartment.
Don't forget not owning a phone, having Internet/Netflix and/or a TV.
I still chuckle about an article called "boomer economics", or something like that, which demonstrated how much a certain set of people distort the costs of things like the above vs. the reality. Tvs are exceptionally cheap as compared to, say, 1970s prices, phones are nearly essential, as is the Internet and the cost of Netflix (and avocado toast) is negligible compared to making rent/mortgage.