My opinion of abortion
There’s this concept called “bodily autonomy,” which basically means that your body is your own and nobody gets to (ethically) do anything to it without your consent. It also means you can do anything to it you want to do, or have things done to it if you consent to it. Bodily autonomy is supposed to apply even to corpses.
I like this idea, and I hope it spreads, because in my opinion it is a majorly important idea, that I regard as being even more important than the old “do unto others as you would have them do unto you / love thy fellow human” bit found in so many religions. If all people actually valued bodily autonomy and lived by that rule, then that would be the end of rape, physical assault, and murder, and possibly other things as well. It’s much more broad than “don’t murder.” And so, I consider the idea of bodily autonomy to be more important to me than many Christians think of the ten commandments.
Bodily autonomy also means that if you have the capability of hosting a human larva in your abdomen, you are the only person who can say whether that larva gets to grow in your body or not. Nobody else has a say in whether your body can host that larva; not your spouse, not the President, not the Pope, not even God can ethically force you to carry that larva even a second longer than you want to.
Before you argue that bodily autonomy applies to the larva, too, it doesn’t. At least 90% of all abortions are performed when the larva is the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. It isn’t complex enough to think yet at that point, as it most likely doesn’t have anything remotely resembling a brain yet, nor can it live on its own outside the womb. It doesn’t have thoughts, it doesn’t have feelings, and if souls exist it doesn’t have one of those either; at best it’s just another part of the host’s body at that point, and we don’t call appendectomies or tumor extractions murder. At worst, it’s basically a house that hasn’t been fully constructed yet, let alone put on the market or sold to an owner. So no, it doesn’t have bodily autonomy. To have bodily autonomy, you have to be capable of thought at the barest minimum, you have to have a brain, and you preferably have to be able to communicate in some fashion, or to be old enough to have been able to communicate if for some reason you didn’t develop that ability.
Oh and the other ~10% of abortions are performed only in an emergency, for instance: the mother is going to die if she gives birth to it and/or the larva isn’t viable and thus won’t survive on its own anyway. The idea that there is anyone advocating for killing actual viable infants as opposed to an unthinking clump of cells the size of your pinky finger, or a non-viable infant that at best is going to have a very short and very agonizing life, is utterly fictional. Literally nobody on the planet is advocating that. Literally nobody is willingly going through nine months of Hell only to decide “Nah, I think I’ll kill it instead.”
And anyway, if someone were to change their mind like that, they’re perfectly within their ethical rights to decide that, because it’s their body, and so it’s their decision and theirs alone. Of course, the law wouldn’t let them, which is stupid. Even assuming the larva is old enough to be viable, there’s still the fact that giving birth is extremely risky for human beings, so much so that even without some complication that’s totally obvious beforehand, the woman could still die giving birth. So if she changed her mind eight months into the pregnancy, that is still a valid choice.
And yet even in that hypothetical situation, it still wouldn’t happen, because by that point it’s at least equally risky to abort the fetus as it would be to give birth to the thing, so any medical professional worth being called such would instantly veto it because if the odds of survival are equal either way, you might as well just finish the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. Since most people are going to defer to the doctor’s judgment on that, it’s a non-issue really, but if someone was foolish enough to ignore the doctor’s advice and decide to terminate it that late into the pregnancy… well, they’d have a hard time finding someone who would, and it would still be a profoundly foolish decision if they did find someone who would do it, and the law would not look kindly on it, but from an ethical standpoint it’s still their body, and thus their decision. From an ethical standpoint, the law doesn’t really have an ethical say in the matter. (Not that they’re going to care; governments, in general, are about as ethical as a ring of child molesting assassins-for-hire.)
But to reiterate, that is a highly hypothetical situation, and AFAIK nobody is that foolish in real life. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone were that foolish. But they’d be an extreme minority if they even exist at all. The true point being that you can be pro-life and also be pro-choice at the same time, because the right to bodily autonomy, if properly respected, would apply equally to all people, and it would apply equally to all pregnant people, whether they wanted to keep the larva or not.
So yes, if bodily autonomy was a right held in the utmost respect by everyone on the planet forevermore, there would be no more rape, murder, or physical assault, and absolutely nobody would question a womb-bearer's right to decide whether their body gets used to host a human larva or not, ever again.
This was cross-posted from http://alex-antonin.dreamwidth.org/282772.html
You can comment either here or there.
I like this idea, and I hope it spreads, because in my opinion it is a majorly important idea, that I regard as being even more important than the old “do unto others as you would have them do unto you / love thy fellow human” bit found in so many religions. If all people actually valued bodily autonomy and lived by that rule, then that would be the end of rape, physical assault, and murder, and possibly other things as well. It’s much more broad than “don’t murder.” And so, I consider the idea of bodily autonomy to be more important to me than many Christians think of the ten commandments.
Bodily autonomy also means that if you have the capability of hosting a human larva in your abdomen, you are the only person who can say whether that larva gets to grow in your body or not. Nobody else has a say in whether your body can host that larva; not your spouse, not the President, not the Pope, not even God can ethically force you to carry that larva even a second longer than you want to.
Before you argue that bodily autonomy applies to the larva, too, it doesn’t. At least 90% of all abortions are performed when the larva is the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. It isn’t complex enough to think yet at that point, as it most likely doesn’t have anything remotely resembling a brain yet, nor can it live on its own outside the womb. It doesn’t have thoughts, it doesn’t have feelings, and if souls exist it doesn’t have one of those either; at best it’s just another part of the host’s body at that point, and we don’t call appendectomies or tumor extractions murder. At worst, it’s basically a house that hasn’t been fully constructed yet, let alone put on the market or sold to an owner. So no, it doesn’t have bodily autonomy. To have bodily autonomy, you have to be capable of thought at the barest minimum, you have to have a brain, and you preferably have to be able to communicate in some fashion, or to be old enough to have been able to communicate if for some reason you didn’t develop that ability.
Oh and the other ~10% of abortions are performed only in an emergency, for instance: the mother is going to die if she gives birth to it and/or the larva isn’t viable and thus won’t survive on its own anyway. The idea that there is anyone advocating for killing actual viable infants as opposed to an unthinking clump of cells the size of your pinky finger, or a non-viable infant that at best is going to have a very short and very agonizing life, is utterly fictional. Literally nobody on the planet is advocating that. Literally nobody is willingly going through nine months of Hell only to decide “Nah, I think I’ll kill it instead.”
And anyway, if someone were to change their mind like that, they’re perfectly within their ethical rights to decide that, because it’s their body, and so it’s their decision and theirs alone. Of course, the law wouldn’t let them, which is stupid. Even assuming the larva is old enough to be viable, there’s still the fact that giving birth is extremely risky for human beings, so much so that even without some complication that’s totally obvious beforehand, the woman could still die giving birth. So if she changed her mind eight months into the pregnancy, that is still a valid choice.
And yet even in that hypothetical situation, it still wouldn’t happen, because by that point it’s at least equally risky to abort the fetus as it would be to give birth to the thing, so any medical professional worth being called such would instantly veto it because if the odds of survival are equal either way, you might as well just finish the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. Since most people are going to defer to the doctor’s judgment on that, it’s a non-issue really, but if someone was foolish enough to ignore the doctor’s advice and decide to terminate it that late into the pregnancy… well, they’d have a hard time finding someone who would, and it would still be a profoundly foolish decision if they did find someone who would do it, and the law would not look kindly on it, but from an ethical standpoint it’s still their body, and thus their decision. From an ethical standpoint, the law doesn’t really have an ethical say in the matter. (Not that they’re going to care; governments, in general, are about as ethical as a ring of child molesting assassins-for-hire.)
But to reiterate, that is a highly hypothetical situation, and AFAIK nobody is that foolish in real life. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone were that foolish. But they’d be an extreme minority if they even exist at all. The true point being that you can be pro-life and also be pro-choice at the same time, because the right to bodily autonomy, if properly respected, would apply equally to all people, and it would apply equally to all pregnant people, whether they wanted to keep the larva or not.
So yes, if bodily autonomy was a right held in the utmost respect by everyone on the planet forevermore, there would be no more rape, murder, or physical assault, and absolutely nobody would question a womb-bearer's right to decide whether their body gets used to host a human larva or not, ever again.
This was cross-posted from http://alex-antonin.dreamwidth.org/282772.html
You can comment either here or there.