4 ms·

Fetuses aren't people (it could be argued that they become people some time between the second and third trimester, but that's not really relevant because D&C i

Fetuses aren't people (it could be argued that they become people some time between the second and third trimester, but that's not really relevant because D&C is almost never done in the third trimester). Pregnant women are people. Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? >>>IMO at that point you’re essentially asking who deserves to live. The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop.

shepherdjerred 2y ago
My view is that fetuses are people. > Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The mother made a choice (ignoring cases of rape) to have sex which could, even with contraceptives, lead to the outcome pregnancy. > What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? IMO, both parties deserve to live. If a fetus threatens the mother it should be terminated for her health. If the fetus doesn't, then the mother shouldn't (morally) have an abortion. > The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop. You're missing the point of my question about "who deserves to live". Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  > Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The common example of the violinist analogy disagrees here. You are under no obligation to provide continuing physical support to another person, even one everyone agrees is fully grown/sentient/alive/etc. Similarly, you are under no obligation to donate your liver/kidney/blood, even if you already promised to do so, even if not doing so will cause someone's death. In every case except abortion, we respect medical bodily autonomy to an extreme degree. And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis (see "Savior Siblings"). > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. Not always, lots of people desire medically assisted suicide. Blanket assuming that everyone desires to live regardless of circumstance is factually incorrect.
  - credit_guy 2y ago
    > And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis. This is incorrect. Parents have a duty to care of their children. Parents whose children die because of parental neglect end in prison.
    - tstrimple 2y ago
      No parent has been convicted of neglect for not donating organs or blood to their children. They haven’t even been charged because it’s literally not a crime. This comment makes zero sense.
      - credit_guy 2y ago
        “ to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis” is literally what parents are expected to do.
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    My dead body has more rights than a pregnant woman. Even after death, I have final say in how my organs are used and I can decline to let anyone have them.
- benlivengood 2y ago
  > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. Sure, but if you wait ~5 seconds when trying to conceive a child then that first potential person won't exist and a different one will instead (different genetics and subtly different environments). We always and continuously make choices about which (and whether) potential individuals will actually exist. As a fetus ages its expectation of existing in the future increases over time but never to the extent that its' mother expects to exist, so expected utility of mothers exceeds fetuses in every scenario. If we had magical technology we'd simply instantiate all the possible people from scratch and let them enjoy preferring to live. As it is we have to choose the best limited set of individuals who get to exist, and part of that means not allowing a slave class to exist whose sole or primary purpose is reproduction to the exclusion of their own happiness and agency.
  - sorryimgreen 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - benlivengood 2y ago
      > You're thinking of this in a very strongly technical way that comes across as so callous and is tough to even read from a human perspective. I have strong empathy for people in general, and sympathy for fetuses (I have no memories of that time to empathize with but I assume it would be mostly comfortable and familiar unless disturbed) who may have some conscious experience (still understudied to my satisfaction). Therefore the only way to adequately compare outcomes is technically to avoid bias caused by emotional bias e.g. toward babies that I think most mammals have. Babies are tiny, cute, vulnerable, and we have a natural tendency to protect them and extend that protection forward to children and backward to fetuses. > From a purely technical perspective not really. A fetus age 8 months has probably a 95% chance of living to 75 more years. A mother age 35 probably only has a 95% chance to reach 30 more years so the baby is kinda more valuable here if you like using cold calculations to value human life. But similarly to 35-year-olds vs. 75-year-olds we only in extremis compare their expected QALYs for decision-making, as in mass casualty triage or for organ transplants. There are, of course, many people who willingly make the calculation and offer their own life to save another's life, and probably numerically highest the women who freely decide to favor the survival of their unborn offspring over their own health. I favor choice because I trust individual women to be the most accurate in deciding the value of their own QALYs vs. the expected QALYs of another, which is also generally the accepted standard for all of society. The only exception I am aware of is military drafts where individuals are explicitly expected to lower their own expected QALYs to increase everyone else's expected QALYs. > Nobody is saying this. If a woman gets pregnant and she didn't want it to happen, that sucks. It really does. But this is the biology they were born with and as human beings we know that sex can cause babies. If I love committing insurance fraud then surely I should accept the risk of doing so right? (given that my participation in said fraud was consensual) I'd respectfully disagree and continue to claim that many people are still attempting the reproductive and child-rearing subjugation of women in the world today. Biologically, fetuses are unavoidably at risk of death before birth. It probably sucks for fetuses that die before birth, but neither fetuses nor women consented to being embodied in a universe where these biological realities exist. Knowledge of our place in the world doesn't alter that; knowing that they are at risk of pregnancy does not make women any more personally responsible for fixing the situation than fetuses are responsible for keeping themselves alive until they're born. Biology dealt us all a suboptimal card in many ways; we can be sad about that and grieve the human cost of it. We shouldn't force responsibility onto each other, especially unfairly. I don't see any proposals for every man having to enter a lottery to receive one unwanted baby who they are legally the parent of at a probability equal to what women are naturally exposed to.
- cess11 2y ago
  "My view is that fetuses are people." So you're fine with early term abortion, at least up until week 9.

shepherdjerred 2y ago

My view is that fetuses are people. > Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The mother made a choice (ignoring cases of rape) to have sex which could, even with contraceptives, lead to the outcome pregnancy. > What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? IMO, both parties deserve to live. If a fetus threatens the mother it should be terminated for her health. If the fetus doesn't, then the mother shouldn't (morally) have an abortion. > The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop. You're missing the point of my question about "who deserves to live". Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.

joshuamorton 2y ago
> Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The common example of the violinist analogy disagrees here. You are under no obligation to provide continuing physical support to another person, even one everyone agrees is fully grown/sentient/alive/etc. Similarly, you are under no obligation to donate your liver/kidney/blood, even if you already promised to do so, even if not doing so will cause someone's death. In every case except abortion, we respect medical bodily autonomy to an extreme degree. And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis (see "Savior Siblings"). > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. Not always, lots of people desire medically assisted suicide. Blanket assuming that everyone desires to live regardless of circumstance is factually incorrect.
- credit_guy 2y ago
  > And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis. This is incorrect. Parents have a duty to care of their children. Parents whose children die because of parental neglect end in prison.
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    No parent has been convicted of neglect for not donating organs or blood to their children. They haven’t even been charged because it’s literally not a crime. This comment makes zero sense.
    - credit_guy 2y ago
      “ to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis” is literally what parents are expected to do.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  My dead body has more rights than a pregnant woman. Even after death, I have final say in how my organs are used and I can decline to let anyone have them.
benlivengood 2y ago
> I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. Sure, but if you wait ~5 seconds when trying to conceive a child then that first potential person won't exist and a different one will instead (different genetics and subtly different environments). We always and continuously make choices about which (and whether) potential individuals will actually exist. As a fetus ages its expectation of existing in the future increases over time but never to the extent that its' mother expects to exist, so expected utility of mothers exceeds fetuses in every scenario. If we had magical technology we'd simply instantiate all the possible people from scratch and let them enjoy preferring to live. As it is we have to choose the best limited set of individuals who get to exist, and part of that means not allowing a slave class to exist whose sole or primary purpose is reproduction to the exclusion of their own happiness and agency.
- sorryimgreen 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - benlivengood 2y ago
    > You're thinking of this in a very strongly technical way that comes across as so callous and is tough to even read from a human perspective. I have strong empathy for people in general, and sympathy for fetuses (I have no memories of that time to empathize with but I assume it would be mostly comfortable and familiar unless disturbed) who may have some conscious experience (still understudied to my satisfaction). Therefore the only way to adequately compare outcomes is technically to avoid bias caused by emotional bias e.g. toward babies that I think most mammals have. Babies are tiny, cute, vulnerable, and we have a natural tendency to protect them and extend that protection forward to children and backward to fetuses. > From a purely technical perspective not really. A fetus age 8 months has probably a 95% chance of living to 75 more years. A mother age 35 probably only has a 95% chance to reach 30 more years so the baby is kinda more valuable here if you like using cold calculations to value human life. But similarly to 35-year-olds vs. 75-year-olds we only in extremis compare their expected QALYs for decision-making, as in mass casualty triage or for organ transplants. There are, of course, many people who willingly make the calculation and offer their own life to save another's life, and probably numerically highest the women who freely decide to favor the survival of their unborn offspring over their own health. I favor choice because I trust individual women to be the most accurate in deciding the value of their own QALYs vs. the expected QALYs of another, which is also generally the accepted standard for all of society. The only exception I am aware of is military drafts where individuals are explicitly expected to lower their own expected QALYs to increase everyone else's expected QALYs. > Nobody is saying this. If a woman gets pregnant and she didn't want it to happen, that sucks. It really does. But this is the biology they were born with and as human beings we know that sex can cause babies. If I love committing insurance fraud then surely I should accept the risk of doing so right? (given that my participation in said fraud was consensual) I'd respectfully disagree and continue to claim that many people are still attempting the reproductive and child-rearing subjugation of women in the world today. Biologically, fetuses are unavoidably at risk of death before birth. It probably sucks for fetuses that die before birth, but neither fetuses nor women consented to being embodied in a universe where these biological realities exist. Knowledge of our place in the world doesn't alter that; knowing that they are at risk of pregnancy does not make women any more personally responsible for fixing the situation than fetuses are responsible for keeping themselves alive until they're born. Biology dealt us all a suboptimal card in many ways; we can be sad about that and grieve the human cost of it. We shouldn't force responsibility onto each other, especially unfairly. I don't see any proposals for every man having to enter a lottery to receive one unwanted baby who they are legally the parent of at a probability equal to what women are naturally exposed to.
cess11 2y ago
"My view is that fetuses are people." So you're fine with early term abortion, at least up until week 9.