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Depending on your philosophical leanings, banning abortion actually grants bodily autonomy to the entirety of the not-yet-born population. I'm not expecting yo

Depending on your philosophical leanings, banning abortion actually grants bodily autonomy to the entirety of the not-yet-born population. I'm not expecting you to accept that philosophical position, but I hope it explains how the governmental policy is only an overreach to the extent that a particular unprovable and unfalsifiable philosophical position is correct.

kaba0 4y ago
I don’t know, is an unborn fetus an American citizen? Because the mother definitely is, right now, without any doubt - and pregnancy is a very dangerous, sometimes even lethal state, with long-term serious health problems. I don’t see any defensible arguments to strip bodily autonomy from a current citizen, it’s not a zero sum game (I’m sure you can create some ad absurdum situation where stripping someone of their rights “for the greater good” turns out very nightmarish). These matters should only be discussed by the mother and her doctor, that’s it.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
And the next logical step is to make it illegal to ejaculate except inside a woman and ban birth control, because they're preventing the sperm and egg from becoming a human being, which they clearly want to do. Those cells need autonomy! Birth control is injustice!
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  I suppose someone could have the philosophical position that women have a moral duty to turn all their egg cells into human lives, but just because we can imagine such a biologically impossible position doesn't mean that you can declare all positions other than your own to be completely unreasonable. There is a much brighter dividing line between gametes and embryos than between pre-viability and post-viability embryos, so just on the basis of legal certainty it would be better to say that life starts at conception. I also think that it is philosophically parsimonious to define human beings as unified entities with distinct DNA from their parents, otherwise each skin cell should have its own human rights (which would mean that obese people get to cast more votes than skinny people). In any case, given that there is ambiguity on where to draw the line, the safest approach is to pick the earliest practical point, since mistakenly protecting non-humans is better than mistakenly manslaughtering entities that we later concede were humans. If we take the view that every gamete has to become a human life, then nearly everyone in the country should be arrested as soon as they reach puberty.

kaba0 4y ago

I don’t know, is an unborn fetus an American citizen? Because the mother definitely is, right now, without any doubt - and pregnancy is a very dangerous, sometimes even lethal state, with long-term serious health problems. I don’t see any defensible arguments to strip bodily autonomy from a current citizen, it’s not a zero sum game (I’m sure you can create some ad absurdum situation where stripping someone of their rights “for the greater good” turns out very nightmarish). These matters should only be discussed by the mother and her doctor, that’s it.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

And the next logical step is to make it illegal to ejaculate except inside a woman and ban birth control, because they're preventing the sperm and egg from becoming a human being, which they clearly want to do. Those cells need autonomy! Birth control is injustice!

dane-pgp 4y ago
I suppose someone could have the philosophical position that women have a moral duty to turn all their egg cells into human lives, but just because we can imagine such a biologically impossible position doesn't mean that you can declare all positions other than your own to be completely unreasonable. There is a much brighter dividing line between gametes and embryos than between pre-viability and post-viability embryos, so just on the basis of legal certainty it would be better to say that life starts at conception. I also think that it is philosophically parsimonious to define human beings as unified entities with distinct DNA from their parents, otherwise each skin cell should have its own human rights (which would mean that obese people get to cast more votes than skinny people). In any case, given that there is ambiguity on where to draw the line, the safest approach is to pick the earliest practical point, since mistakenly protecting non-humans is better than mistakenly manslaughtering entities that we later concede were humans. If we take the view that every gamete has to become a human life, then nearly everyone in the country should be arrested as soon as they reach puberty.