Only the "daughter" you refer to is arguably not a person, such as to be able to own things and to have rights equivalent to those of the mother.
Several years ago this point was part of the core of a discussion that ran over the course of two threads and something like sixteen months. And here you can postulate a basic political difference between two sides; in our community, the people who used the language and arguments familiar to our neighbor's position were simply incapable of discussing it. Here we are, over six years after that spectacle started, and the reason you find yourself making the point you do is that these others are not obliged to change their argument, ever. No matter how many times you swat it down, debunk it, wreck it, dissect, vivisect, index, backengineer for validity, or whatever, the advocates don't care; they will simply line up and repeat themselves anew because there is always someone to play the sucker.
Here's the historical reality: Everything about the argument uses custom terminology, such as reference to child or daughter. It is pseudoscience intended to respond to a particular point in the American abortion discussion. I can look back
nearly five years↗, for instance, discussing an American legislative question:
The Court refused to establish personhood in Roe. Review section VI of the Opinion of the Court for the Court's historical review, section IX.A for the Court's consideration of Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, and IX.B ¶2 for the Court's refusal to establish personhood:
Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
That's from the thread that
follows the debacle I mentioned at the outset.
The passage quoted from
Roe v. Wade is the point of what becomes our neighbor's anti-abortion argument; that is, it has been the point the whole time.
The first sentence of the Roe quote notes the proposition of "life at conception", which means, as I happened to mention
two months ago↗, legal personhood is assigned at the time of cortical reaction, or, at the latest, fusion of the secondary oocyte. And the point of that mention in December was a grim joke about persistence. Because the second and third sentences of the Roe citation answer the life at conception proposition in the first: The Court refused to resolve that question, and explicitly stated it was, compared to history, "not in a position to speculate as to the answer". Over the last forty-six years, the response from anti-abortion advocates has simply been to insist and persist, as loudly as possible.
And as the sixteen-month debacle reminded in its time, the pseudoscientific discussion of "life at conception" wasn't really about what
our neighbor↑ describes as the "child … inside the mother's body"; while you, in the present discussion, consider a woman's human rights—("the same protection as the mother")—the pretense you are addressing presupposes to reject such a proposition. At this point, because of our neighbor, I can even haul out the old joke about Bela Lugosi as an overgrown fetus.
In the American discourse, the anti-abortion argument generally never moves past this persistence. Their discursive innovation is the outpouring of fallacies in order to avoid the question. But the Court said it would not speculate as to "when life begins", and the anti-abortion response has been to simply insist on a definition for forty-six years; and as I noted several years ago, even attempted to legislate ontology in order to force their unscientific definitions into law.
It is very difficult, in the American discourse, to compel a different discussion; when it comes to emotionalism in lieu of logic, market dimensions, to speak nothing of dynamics, suggest it nearly impossible to cover every iteration fast enough. Looking at various components of that larger discourse, it
seems diverse institutions invested in women's {
health access rights, reproductive rights, right to choose, civil rights, human rights, &c.} spend their time covering spot surface outbreaks of what really is more akin to a massive, smoldering peat fire. And whether for particular religious sentiments, or refashioned for other political contexts, rhetorical arsonists, as such, are plentiful. The effect is that, forty-six years later, the only real question for those advocates is how to force their definition.
This thread actually starts in a weirdly scrubbed context that you might recognize as similar to the rebranding of Creationism as Intelligent Design; it may have taken until
#102↑ to
explicitly introduce religion, but the rhetoric throughout has been to type, and the posts plagiarized from the
Family Research Council↱ (#
72↑,
80↑,
85↑) only make the point.
In our own small corner of the Universe, though, there really is no reason for these advocates to change°, learn, evolve, or whatever. Quite literally
none. A question arises whether or not particular advocacy can occur without fallacy, and, strangely, the answer is only uncertain in the way nothing can be certain; otherwise, the answer is that in forty-six years, a range of political arguments simply do not occur without an accompaniment range of pseudoscience and fallacy
a priori.
The question becomes significant in its own context: Does the refusal of inconsistenly-applied pseudoscience necessarily silence the larger issue advocacy? If the answer is somehow affirmative, perhaps the problem is in the construction of the issue. If one cannot argue the point without fallacy, why?
And the reason none ever answer for this is because they have no reason to. It's not that I disagree with your tutting admonition in #222—(
"You can't just repeat your claims while ignoring the specific questions I put to you above"). Nor is it an unfamiliar refrain; what I've learned over time runs, approximately:
Okay, sure, he can't, but why not? Who says? There are answers to those questions, sure, but they do not seem to apply around here; our neighbor has precisely no reason to not simply repeat himself while ignoring the specific questions you put to him. Not only is that how this particular issue advocacy behaves in the world at large, here at Sciforums, the practical reality is that nobody will actually stop him from just repeating his claims while ignoring the specific questions you put to him.
The discussion doesn't move because one general side either cannot or simply will not move on from pseudoscience and fallacy. Here is a conundrum: To what degree is it yours, mine, or anyone else's, who happens to disagree with these people, to write their argument for them? That is, the issue isn't
entirely fallacious, is it? Perhaps I might be able to write their argument, for them, and better than they can, but I still don't believe it, and they will simply complain when I take it apart at the predictable points.
The other thing I can't do, in such a case, is contain the argument to just one issue; there is a lot of concomitant peripheral and collateral damage that must eventually be accounted for. Furthermore, the whole thing gets really complicated, so it's not like the advocates would use the argument, or be capable of adjusting it to the moment. In the end, writing their argument for them would be wasted effort at best, likely setting the discussion back for giving them yet another excuse for the sloth of repeating their insistent pseudoscientific fallacies.
____________________
Notes:
° On the point of plagiarism, it should be noted the FRC probably either doesn't care, or might even condone this sort of use; the document is, after all, titled, "The Best Pro-Life Arguments for Secular Audiences"; ironically, the byline omits the woman described as one of the authors. However, another aspect that stands out, here, is that despite being called out on the paste job (#
73↑,
83↑), SetiAlpha6 continues, attempting only slight revisions to the text, because the purpose of hiding its origin is to hide its origin; not to steal it, but to present it in a superficially modified context, separate from its nefarious and religious history, as if this Christianist lexicon and syntax would occur without the religious impetus, much akin in this aspect to the purported difference 'twixt Creationism and Intelligent design.
Schwarzwalder, Rob. "The Best Pro-Life Arguments for Secular Audiences". Family Research Council. (n.d.) FRC.org. 17 February 2019. http://bit.ly/2V10irf