Copernicus66 said:
Does that mean that a womb is necessary in order to determine whether or not aborting a fetus violates its rights, and the rights of the father? Really?
Nope. A brain suffices. Well, for most.
Also note that women cannot draw from the experience of having their unborn child aborted without their consent.
Guard against miscarriage for forty weeks. Or tell it to a woman who lost a pregnancy in a car wreck, or being thrown down the stairs by an abusive partner.
If personal experience was a pre-requisite to hold a valid opinion, only criminals would be defense attorneys, only pedophiles and victims of child molestation would legislate in regards to pedophilia, and only bipolar individuals could treat and medicate suffers of bipolar disease.
Fallacious, fallacious, and interesting to say the least, but seemingly fallacious:
• Criminals as defense attorneys — How does an attorney's interpretation of the law require that he first commit a crime? You would be better off—although still in the realm of the fallacious—to assert that nobody should argue the law unless they've written and enacted legislation.
• Abuse survivors as legislators — One does not need to be raped in order to observe the effects of sex crimes on the community.
• Bipolar as counselors — Have you ever spent time on the psychologist's couch? I ask because I'm curious what you would pay for in mental health counseling. Myself, I don't expect a psychologist to have intimate knowledge of my feelings; that would be my role in the equation. But the psychologist is expected to know something about the general trends of how the mind works. Statistically, A leads to B, or something nearly like it. Statistically, C suggests D. Add up A, B, C, and D, and E is the most frequent result. It doesn't mean the statistical result is always right. But it helps.
Would you suggest that doctors shouldn't treat cancer unless they've survived it themselves?
And yeah, it sucks that the experiences of parenthood for males and females aren't identical, nature is unfair. Deal with it. You can't kill your (and his) baby. Suck it up and live with the consequences.
Easy to say when one will never be pregnant.
Anecdote from a Jesuit school. In bioethics class, we once had a guest speaker, a local doctor, discussing abortion. The teacher tried to argue with him on some basis of Catholic principle. The doctor responded that principles are principles, but "You might be surprised at the number of girls from this school who I've seen in my office." And some of them, he suggested, more than once. Indeed, even activist pro-life mothers would bring their daughters to him for an abortion. Moral of the story: Principles are great and all, but incredibly vulnerable to change if the decision transforms from the theoretic to the real.
Oh please. Could you whine any more? Having a child is not the end of the world. People have been giving birth and raising oodles of children for thousands upon thousands of years, under much worse conditions than modern day single parents in the Western World. Hell, sometimes they even got some satisfaction and joy from it.
These days people are just spoiled. They think that they are entitled to a specific sort of lifestyle which empathises "Me me me!" along with maximal comfort and convenience. That's fine, I suppose, if you don't put said lifestyle in jeopardy by spreading your legs and making babies. Otherwise, be prepared to cop the consequences, whether that be raising the child or adopting it out to a willing 3rd party.
Let's try a theoretical proposition, first. Let's imagine that the only men against abortion also have some degree of immunity against sexual urges. That is, the only men who oppose abortion only want sex when they're ready to reproduce. Were this the case, I wouldn't chuckle so grimly at men who are anti-abortion.
To consider the real, then ... okay, let's give the anti-abortion men their way. And when they find they can't get laid in a morgue because the women are protecting themselves against the consequences of sex, what are they going to say?
Now, I don't know about where you are, but it is not nearly impossible—in fact, it is fairly common—to hear a woman disparaged because she did not want to have sex.
Putting the circumstances together, what we would find is a morbidly hilarious situation in which a man would say, "Alright, ladies, close your legs if you don't want to get pregnant. What's that? You did? Well what's wrong with all you bitches? Don't you like sex?"
The right of the fetus to life supercedes the woman's right to comfort. A man's right to father his child supercedes the woman's right to comfort.
That's your opinion. But I live in the United States, for instance, where that is functionally—e.g., legally—untrue.
Face it: You
do not have ownership over what takes place inside another person's body. If
you want ownership, then have it take place inside
your body. What's that? You can't? Oh, well, sorry. Nature's unfair. Deal with it.
• • •
Iceaura said:
That's kind of the point. It's why the graveyards are not full of buried miscarriages, why no one has to certify the cause of death or fill out a death certificate for a miscarriage, etc.
Excellent point, but not
entirely true.
I once made an argument of principle based on that. Should we oblige women to report miscarriages? Should law enforcement—if, after all, the fetus is a whole and complete human being with full rights and status—investigate every miscarriage as a potential homicide case?
And, of course, some people found that a bit extreme.
However, it's about to happen. At least, the reporting part. See
Virginia SB962, "A bill to amend and reenact 32.1-264 of the Code of Virginia, relating to reporting of fetal deaths; penalty".
Or, as sex columnist Dan Savage points out,
if you've had a miscarriage,
That's a personal tragedy. But have one in Virginia and you may have to report it to the state. Because there doesn't seem to be an exception for miscarriages in this proposed law requiring the reporting of all "fetal deaths" to the authorities.
While it doesn't call for homicide investigations, SB962 presents an interesting possibility. Imagine down at the Fetal Death Investigations office any number of employees absolutely drowning in paperwork. The number of miscarriages reported is a mere fraction of the number that occurs. A woman might experience some pain and drop some blood into the toilet or some-such, and there are several possibilities. One of those, of course, is a miscarriage. And it might be the first and only sign she had that she was pregnant. Of course, it might also just be her body clearing blood from a uterine bruise after especially vigorous sex. So either the office of FDI, or whatever it ends up being called, might end up swamped with "maybe" reports, or thousands of women might end up in breach of the law, even if they don't know they've had a miscarriage. Ignorance is not bliss before the law, after all.