by Cpt._Funkotron » Fri May 03, 2019 1:57 am
I'm %100 pro-choice, and I think the whole abortion process should be government funded and as accessible as possible, but I think any pro-choice argument that doesn't hinge on one or both of the following two points:
1) That embryos are not people
2) That even if they were people, fully sentient and perfectly virtuous and best friends with baby jesus, the medical autonomy of the mother over her organs, air, digestion and blood is inviolable and she has the right to rescind the use of her body at any time she likes. The hypothetical rights of the embryo are irrelevant, no matter how the woman wound up pregnant in the first place.
seems either at best to be missing the point, or at worst to be kind of evil. Not like Ramsay Bolton evil, I mean the banal everyday kind of evil. The "would have supported slavery", kind of evil. I think of these two points like elevator cables. Both of them hold up the "abortion is okay" car in my mind, but either of them could support it independently. With neither, car plummets down the shaft, and I think abortion would have to be classified as murdering a child, which would have to be opposed to the fullest extent possible, I feel. People who concede that abortion is by definition murder and support it anyway scare the shit out of me.
This is mostly going to be me propping up strawmen since I don't have direct quotes to draw from right now, but I've personally heard people say these things often enough that I hope y'all would agree that these are generally common sentiments and I'm not presenting them unfairly.
Argument: "People will figure out ways to do it anyway, you're just making it unsafe"
- My response: We're not talking about a harmless vice here, under the logic that embryos are people and that mother's right doesn't come first, we're talking about murder, something which most people agree ought to be against the law. Nothing can be completely eliminated just by making it illegal, that doesn't mean you should just not ever bother. Furthermore, murder is pretty much the ultimate crime, so while I oppose the death penalty, corproal punishment, or really any kind of retributive justice as a concept, I'm also not generally sympathetic of someone who inadvertently kills or severely injures themselves in the course of murdering a child.
Argument: "But most unwanted pregnancies are to poor uneducated people, surely you don't want more children born into poverty"
- My response: You know we've got people in poverty up and walking right now, if it's okay to kill a child to save them from growing up in poverty, why not kill the grownups while we're at it? Because this whole argument is a bunch of classist bullshit. No one needs to live in poverty, we have now and have had for quite some time the means to provide a reasonable level of comfort for everyone, what we lack is the will to make it happen. And don't start in with that Malthusian bullshit about the dangers of overpopulation, that's been discredited for over a century now. Fun fact, when people have good education, freedom of movement, economic stability, knowledge of and access to contraceptives, they tend to not have as many children, which is why wealthy western nations tend to have native birthrates below the rate of replacement. Furthermore, even though there is theoretically a point at which it wouldn't be physically possible to have any more people, nobody actually knows what that's going to end up being since since technological innovation means the capacity is always seems to be growing. Lastly, no one who ever suggests killing people as a solution to overcrowding includes themselves or people like themselves as candidates for destruction. 'Half the universe' really meant half the universe minus Thanos.
Argument: " I personally think it's evil but other people should be allowed to do it"
- My response: The fuck do you think 'evil' means? This argument either presupposes that abortion isn't really murder, which is arguing completely past the point in question, or this rejects the idea that morality has any kind of universality whatsoever. 'Sorry Kunte Kinte, I don't like slavery and would never own slaves, but I don't think there should be a law against it'. When I use the word evil to describe an action, I use it to describe something that I think no one should ever do, including but not limited to myself. To be clear, I'm not religious, and I don't believe in natural law. I believe that determining right from wrong is an ever-progressing human endeavor which is often flawed and probably never perfectable, but is nevertheless a noble and necessary pursuit. I'm not denying that legitimate differences of opinion exist, I am denying that using that as an excuse to abdicate any kind of responsibility to finding and enforcing common standards, refusing to even engage in the process, is what a good person does.