Leontiskos wrote: ↑June 28th, 2022, 11:17 pm
Objectively speaking, who is standing up for the vulnerable? Those who are trying to defend human fetuses from death, or those who are fighting for a right to abort human fetuses?
My patience with the rhetoric of the Left is waning quickly, and this business about "protecting the vulnerable" seems to be little more than heavy rhetoric.* An objective observer who knows nothing about the issues would quickly come to the conclusion that, in the abortion debate, the Right is attempting to protect the fetus' life and the Left is attempting to establish a right to abort the fetus. When the Left tries to recast themselves as the
defenders of the
vulnerable, I cannot stay quiet.
Now of course the Left sees a right to abortion as a necessary means to equality between the sexes, but this is hardly a straightforward matter of protecting the vulnerable, much less those who
have no recourse (note that throughout history those who truly have no recourse are always labeled non-persons or at least non-citizens, and this is always done for legal reasons).
* The (also rhetorical) notion floating around that anti-abortion laws do not make provision for victims of rape or those dealing with ectopic pregnancies is simple not true. If it were true then the Left could honestly claim to be protecting the vulnerable, even though these cases constitute only a tiny percentage of abortions. In reality the Right is also keen to protect such vulnerable individuals, and the laws reflect this.
Those who suffer the most in absence of access to abortion are the most marginalized (socioeconomically). If it were really about protecting life, then the right would be foaming at the mouth to protect those fetuses if they do develop and become born; most of which would be into poverty or even abject poverty to wholly unprepared parents.
Bodily autonomy can't just be ignored. As it stands today, in my state, a corpse has more autonomy than I do: if a person doesn't wish for their organs to be taken to save another person's life, even though they're dead, it wouldn't be legal to force organ removal. If a person has an organ or a rare blood type that's desperately needed to save another person's life (even if it won't kill the person in question to do it), they can't be forced because they have bodily autonomy.
Do you think that we should enforce laws to force people to give up organs, blood, plasma, etc. if it would save someone's life that objectively needs it from
them to survive? If not, why not?
You say that people in history have denied personhood to victims as a method of oppression, but surely you can see the fallacy in thinking that
every challenge to personhood is of this nature.
So, we have to do this. Is abortion killing a person? What goes into the concept of personhood?
Is it having human DNA? Well, hair cells and cancer cells and all sorts of things have human DNA. A corpse has human DNA. Do all things with human DNA have the same moral obligations towards them? We don't assign the exact same moral obligations towards a corpse than we do to a living human person: if I slap a corpse in the face, it might still be considered bad, but on most cultures certainly less bad than slapping an innocent live human in the face.
So why do we feel as though a corpse has different moral obligations than a live person, what properties make up the difference? Instead of beating around the bush I'm just going to suggest something (and I'm not trying to be exhaustive just yet) like sapience and sentience have to play a part, because a lot of us would consider someone like Data from Star Trek TNG to be a person even though he doesn't have human DNA. Seems like the
important part has nothing to do with the human DNA.
People seem to intuitively think that there are different moral obligations to humans at different stages of development. Consider if there's a fire at a fertilization lab and you only have time to save a tray with 10 fertilized embryos (with some kind of guarantee that you can implant them and get fetuses and babies from each one) or save a 6 year old child. I bet very few people would intuitively say that they'd save the tray of embryos and leave the child to burn. We have to ask ourselves: why?
The pro-choicer, at least not this one, isn't saying that we have
no moral obligation to fetuses. We're saying that it's complicated, and it has to be weighed against other moral obligations like bodily autonomy, quality of life for mother and child, considerations like rape, incest, ectopic pregnancy, using IVF for struggling would-be mothers (which destroys embryos), and so on. It's a moral calculus. It's not as easy as "fetuses are human persons therefore they trump the mother in all respects."