533
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
533 points (98.9% liked)
News
23364 readers
4025 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because a fetus isn't a person. Until birth it is considered a part of the mother, specifically to prevent stupid and unsustainable rulings like this one. If your mother was killed by cancer, are you going to take her tumor to court and put it in prison? No, you wouldn't, that would be ridiculous. Because a tumor can't choose its actions. Neither can a fetus.
After development and birth, when the child can think and act for itself, sure it's a person. Inside the womb? It is an organ, it acts and thinks like an organ (by which I mean, it doesn't) and can hold no legal responsibility for anything because it is not a thinking being.
Do I find this to be sad? Sure, absolutely. I'd prefer every fetus in the world to be loved and wanted and born without complication into a life of ease. But you and I both know very well that that is not the reality of the world.
The entire argument here is that if we consider a fetus a person, then we should apply self-defense laws to pregnancies. I'm pointing out why "self defense" against a person who has done literally nothing is ridiculous. I was writing my previous posts under the assumption that a fetus is a person, the same as in the original post.
But I also believe that there's no point in drawing arbitrary lines in the sand where a human organism/being/whatever you'd like to call it becomes a person. The minute you do that, it opens the door to whoever is writing the rules this week to decide things like "humans who are in a coma aren't people anymore" or "humans without a certain level of intellectual ability aren't people." That isn't a level of authority that I would entrust to any mortal human being. Would you?
Organs are components of an organism that support its life functions. A fetus is not a component of an organism, but is an organism unto itself. If it were an organ, then it would be something a woman is born with and develops naturally as she grows. Women are born with egg cells, true, but they don't become fetuses until they are fertilized and undergo a degree of development.
That is certainly one part of the issue here.
Dont get me wrong here, I do absolutely understand your viewpoint here I think. Especially as regards the slope that lawmakers can use to slip down. This is a tricky and nuanced subject, which is why I'm largely in favor of leaving it the fuck alone. That's kind of the context of the entire post that we're debating in the comments of. If a fetus becomes legally declared to be a distinct person then suddenly half our legal code can be used in absurd and self-inconsistent ways. Currently that is not the case but some people very much want it to be that way.
Personally, I say a person becomes a person when they prove themselves an independent thinking being and they retain that status until their death. Babies, generally speaking, become independent thinking beings upon birth. Before that they are still biologically attached to the mother, thus not independent and therefore subject to the will of her person, and after that they move and think on their own and have become their own being. A person who is in an unresponsive coma is still considered a person because they attained personhood and have not yet died, but even today there are legal loopholes for family to decline further care for the comatose person. That probably won't change. If your family has hope for you you'll stay alive and if they don't then they can order your death, I don't really see how you get around that in a world where comas still happen.
Right now we have a shaky, but stable enough legal framework around this sort of thing that's been put together over a couple hundred years of people thinking about this. But if we go poking at things that are core to the legal code, such as "what is a person", things start falling off of it.