Politics: Statues coming down II

[TIDE-HSV]

When a fetus becomes "human" is indeed the very heart of the issue. Ancient Jewish law had a lot of wisdom in it, in proclaiming that a fetus becomes "human" when it can sustain independent life of the mother. I still hold to this. The definition of "human" has become absurd. To call the union of two cells, unimplanted in the uterus "human" is absurd. Even when a group of cells has begun to pulse and seize on that as a "heartbeat" is equally absurd. This is my opinion and I do not believe that pro-choice people will be looked back on as equivalent to slavers is correct. Unless we've become a theocracy...

 

[Huckleberry]

I see what you are saying, but I do not think I was begging the question. I was drawing the analogy between those who denied the humanity of black people (or Jews in Nazi Germany) and the realization (which I'm fairly certain is general today) that black people and Jews are, in fact, people.

To answer your question, if abortion on demand as a means of birth control had been restricted or banned, and then someone were to prove to me, to my satisfaction, that a pre-natal infant is not a human being, then what I would feel was this: a bunch of unwanted babies would have been born whose mothers did not want to carry them to term. That is not nothing for the women involved, but the ethical weight between one (pre-natal infants and the death of the infant) and the other (inconvenience, perhaps severe inconvenience, of the mother) might lead one to err on the side of the least bad outcome.

This is where we fundamentally disagree. To me, this is not settled by proving exactly when life begins. Bodily autonomy does not disappear because someone else believes fetal life has moral value. No person has the right to use another person’s body without consent, and the government should not be able to force someone to remain pregnant and give birth against their will.

I also think calling pregnancy and childbirth “inconvenience, perhaps severe inconvenience” badly minimizes what is being demanded of the woman. Pregnancy is not just an inconvenience. It can involve serious health risks, permanent physical changes, financial consequences, and family consequences. For me, bodily autonomy is the final determiner. The state should not have the power to compel one person’s body to sustain another.