The gap in the abortion debate is wider than I thought
This is how I used to think the abortion debate worked: Everyone agrees that abortion means killing a living being of some sort, but they disagree on whether it's morally equivalent to killing a born human, a pet, an insect, or a bacterium.
But I've seen a few things that made me question the "everyone agrees it means killing a living being" part.
The first was an open letter written by a pregnant woman to the fetus she was aborting. The gist of it was: I'm sorry, I love you, but I'm not in a position where I can be a mother to you at the moment, but I look forward to meeting you in a few years when my life is more stable. I thought: no, you won't meet them in a few years, you'll meet their younger brother or sister. And maybe the writer was just using the word "you" in an imprecise, poetic-licence kind of a way. But then I saw some other things along the same lines.
The second was an article about a woman who had an abortion and went on to get married and have three kids, and it asked the question of whether it would have been better if she'd gone through with the original pregnancy, probably never met her husband, and thereby aborted the three kids she has now. As if "aborted" just meant "prevented from coming into existence". I'm pretty sure they didn't even put it in quotes or say "effectively aborted" or "as it were, aborted" or anything.
The third was someone using the word "aborted" in reference to a hypothetical future superintelligent AI if the biological species that would invent it is wiped out before they get that far. (I guess there's scope to debate whether they meant "aborted" like a fetus or "aborted" like a process, but I think they meant the former. And even if you abort a process, that usually means it's already started; it's not about preventing some hypothetical future thing.)
We don't really have a single succinct word for "prevent from coming into existence". I guess we don't need it very much outside of sci-fi, since usually in real life there's no occasion to refer to a specific entity that is prevented from coming into existence. (Either sci-fi like with the superintelligent AI mentioned above, or time travel; time travellers sometimes go back to eliminate Hitler or whoever, and they could do this by killing him as a child, or causing his mother to miscarry him, or keeping his parents apart so that he is never conceived.) But I think to some people "abort" does mean "prevent from coming into existence". So if the letter-writer in the first example believes she is preventing her hypothetical child from coming into existence, by the same logic there's no reason why the child she does bring into existence a few years later shouldn't be the "same" child.
So I used to think "life begins at birth" was a practical statement about the point where we as a society legally recognise life beginning, confer rights on a person, start counting their age, etc - but now I'm wondering if it's actually meant as an ontological statement about when life literally begins, and if, in the view of the people saying it, a fetus is as much a nonexistent, hypothetical person as a sperm and egg currently inside two people who haven't met.
And I used to think that the debate was between one side saying "Yes, we recognise that a woman's bodily autonomy is important, but we think an unborn baby's life is more important, so sadly we have to sacrifice bodily autonomy to save it" and the other side saying "Yes, we recognise that a fetus's life has some value, but we think a woman's bodily autonomy is more important, so sadly we have to sacrifice the fetus to preserve that." But actually maybe the second side might be saying "A woman's bodily autonomy is important - why on earth do you want to sacrifice it just to avoid preventing a hypothetical future person from coming into existence, when quadrillions of hypothetical future people fail to come into existence every day?"
(I don't have any clear-cut answers myself. It's a horribly difficult topic. I would definitely say it's killing a living being, and I think I'd tentatively say morally equivalent to a pet: not to be done lightly, shouldn't be done just because it's inconvenient to you, probably OK if done to spare it suffering, and people who are considering it are probably in a painful position already and should be treated with sensitivity. I'm somewhat reluctant to give my own views at all, even tentatively, because they might cause controversy and detract from the main point of the post, which was a new understanding of where some other people are coming from. But I was worried that if I didn't say anything about my own views, I would be taken as saying I had come round to the view that it's just preventing a hypothetical being from existing, whcih is not the case.)
But I've seen a few things that made me question the "everyone agrees it means killing a living being" part.
The first was an open letter written by a pregnant woman to the fetus she was aborting. The gist of it was: I'm sorry, I love you, but I'm not in a position where I can be a mother to you at the moment, but I look forward to meeting you in a few years when my life is more stable. I thought: no, you won't meet them in a few years, you'll meet their younger brother or sister. And maybe the writer was just using the word "you" in an imprecise, poetic-licence kind of a way. But then I saw some other things along the same lines.
The second was an article about a woman who had an abortion and went on to get married and have three kids, and it asked the question of whether it would have been better if she'd gone through with the original pregnancy, probably never met her husband, and thereby aborted the three kids she has now. As if "aborted" just meant "prevented from coming into existence". I'm pretty sure they didn't even put it in quotes or say "effectively aborted" or "as it were, aborted" or anything.
The third was someone using the word "aborted" in reference to a hypothetical future superintelligent AI if the biological species that would invent it is wiped out before they get that far. (I guess there's scope to debate whether they meant "aborted" like a fetus or "aborted" like a process, but I think they meant the former. And even if you abort a process, that usually means it's already started; it's not about preventing some hypothetical future thing.)
We don't really have a single succinct word for "prevent from coming into existence". I guess we don't need it very much outside of sci-fi, since usually in real life there's no occasion to refer to a specific entity that is prevented from coming into existence. (Either sci-fi like with the superintelligent AI mentioned above, or time travel; time travellers sometimes go back to eliminate Hitler or whoever, and they could do this by killing him as a child, or causing his mother to miscarry him, or keeping his parents apart so that he is never conceived.) But I think to some people "abort" does mean "prevent from coming into existence". So if the letter-writer in the first example believes she is preventing her hypothetical child from coming into existence, by the same logic there's no reason why the child she does bring into existence a few years later shouldn't be the "same" child.
So I used to think "life begins at birth" was a practical statement about the point where we as a society legally recognise life beginning, confer rights on a person, start counting their age, etc - but now I'm wondering if it's actually meant as an ontological statement about when life literally begins, and if, in the view of the people saying it, a fetus is as much a nonexistent, hypothetical person as a sperm and egg currently inside two people who haven't met.
And I used to think that the debate was between one side saying "Yes, we recognise that a woman's bodily autonomy is important, but we think an unborn baby's life is more important, so sadly we have to sacrifice bodily autonomy to save it" and the other side saying "Yes, we recognise that a fetus's life has some value, but we think a woman's bodily autonomy is more important, so sadly we have to sacrifice the fetus to preserve that." But actually maybe the second side might be saying "A woman's bodily autonomy is important - why on earth do you want to sacrifice it just to avoid preventing a hypothetical future person from coming into existence, when quadrillions of hypothetical future people fail to come into existence every day?"
(I don't have any clear-cut answers myself. It's a horribly difficult topic. I would definitely say it's killing a living being, and I think I'd tentatively say morally equivalent to a pet: not to be done lightly, shouldn't be done just because it's inconvenient to you, probably OK if done to spare it suffering, and people who are considering it are probably in a painful position already and should be treated with sensitivity. I'm somewhat reluctant to give my own views at all, even tentatively, because they might cause controversy and detract from the main point of the post, which was a new understanding of where some other people are coming from. But I was worried that if I didn't say anything about my own views, I would be taken as saying I had come round to the view that it's just preventing a hypothetical being from existing, whcih is not the case.)