It all comes down to the other people. The only parts of male “sexuality” that I want controlled are rape and abuse, scare quotes because it freaks me out to consider violent perversion in the same category as loving and/or pleasureable, consensual sex. The reason for this desire comes from that fact that when a man (or a woman, though this is much less common and should be acknowledged as such) exercises his “sexuality” by raping someone, he has violated their bodily autonomy.

I suppose that this could be summed up with the old “your rights end where mine begin.” I have no interest in telling men what to do with their bodies. I don’t want to outlaw certain sexual positions or fantasies. Masturbate as you like, have sex with whoever you want, as long as that’s what they want too. But rape is wrong. Not because I said so, but because it forcibly denudes another of their rights.

I do not believe that a first trimester fetus is a person. As does Amp, I believe that personhood occurs gradually, and so am more willing to obstruct third trimeser abortions than first. But as far as I’m concerned, a first trimester fetus is not a person. Thus, abortion does not infringe on their rights, because they don’t have them.

Outlawing abotion, then, controls women’s sexaulity, which infringes on their rights. Expecting men to not rape women does not infringe on theirs. As far as I know, the only people who do want to control male sexuality are the homophobes and bigots.

Also. Birth control, if used properly, is 96% effective. We do many things in our daily lives that are far more risky. Therefore, to force a woman who has properly used birth control but still become pregnant to give birth is morally repugnant.

Amp, that’s nice of you, but I did satellite tv tech support for 2 years and people do that ALL THE TIME.

Your own comment on the subject was “I am arguing that people who voluntarily engage in heterosexual vaginal intercourse are voluntarily reducing their own autonomy by engaging in behavior that is known to lead to the creation of new human life - a voluntary reduction in autonomy that is not engaged in by the victim of rape or coercive incest.”

But if you’re looking at the father’s behavior, then what you’re really saying is that whether a woman may abortion depends entirely on the behavior of the man; she has no say nor influence in the matter. Gee, that’s an improvement.

We permit the killing of innocent human life, when that killing is necessary or subordinate to some greater good. Your argument depends on their being some absolute prohibition on such killing - but there is no such prohibition.

No, Robert, that is not my argument at all. My argument is very simple: if a fetus is an innocent human life, then it is deserving of the same value as a born human life, and we may not kill a fetus unless we could kill a born human for the same reasons.

“The mother’s autonomy,” or “the baby was the result of rape” are not reasons we permit the death of a born person. Necessity, coercion, self-defense; these are justifications for homicide. We don’t permit a mother to kill her child after birth not because there are alternatives, but because “loss of autonomy” is not a justification for killing. If it were, then a woman who could not get anyone to adopt her child would have a justification for murder.

Yes, there are many situations where we permit the loss of life. There are very few where we excuse an affirmative act whose entire purpose is to end a human life that would continue without that affirmative act. “Loss of bodily autonomy” is not generally one of them.

That said, it IS refreshing to see you advocating so strongly that innocent life should be protected.

I always did. I just don’t have much patience for the notion that the relative value of the innocent life depends on how it got into the womb.

If a criminal has a hostage, it would be in the greater good for the police to allow the hostage to die in order to catch the criminal. Right? So if they come out of the bank or whatnot, carrying the person in front of them, the police should just open fire. The one innocent person will die, but the greater good is served - that criminal is not allowed to run free.

This, to me, is equal to the argument for abortion for rape victims. I would not support the police opening fire on a hostage, because I have put a value on innocent human life.

The examples you give don’t seem analogous to allowing a rape victim to get an abortion. When a police officer kills a bystander, that is an accident. When non-combatants are killed in war, they are not (supposed to be) targeted directly. When an abortion is performed on a woman who was raped, the intention is to kill the fetus, and that intention is directly carried out.

The events you list are unfortunate accidents that society has to cope with. In this argument, they would seem slightly more analogous with making the raped woman HAVE the baby. She would be the ‘victim’ in the ‘greater good’ of protecting all life.

Because, again, how does one quantify how much suffering is worth taking a life? There are alot of lines to be crossed and redrawn before I would say that argument is logical.

What if a raped woman has twin fetuses? Does her suffering outweight two lives? How about if they were triplets?

What is a raped woman is held by her rapist for eight months before she can escape? Can she still abort?

You are saying raped women can ‘protect their autonomy’ by aborting a fetus, but non-raped women must surrender their autonomy to society and keep their baby. The argument being that the consensual sex-having women entered into the pregnancy willingly.

Let’s shift the analogy you used… a woman wants to have sex. THAT is her intention, not pregnancy, and not abortion. The sex is the goal. Just as, in war, the goal is… what ever the goal may be. To topple a dictatorship. To free a people. To take over a country. Whatever. Now, she can plan out her ‘attack’ so she reduces the risk of pregnancy, by using brith control. But sometimes, accidents happen, and innocent lives are lost.

Or, to use an older analogy of yours - a woman is driving and is taking all precautions with ehr driving, but by some freak accident she kills a pedestrian. Now… is that woman going to go to jail? That person is 100% dead, and all so this woman could drive to the store for some ice cream. But before she is convicted of vehicular manslaughter, you’d have to prove some sort of negligence on her part. If she really took precautions and drove safely, she would not be blamed. Would she be shunned by society for having killed a man for ice cream? No, I sort of doubt it.

Do you understand how your view seems inconsistant? You are saying that a fetus has a fixed value, a value worth protecting, but not in all cases. We don’t see how you could feel that way, and REALLY care about the fetus. If a woman is raped, why not federally fund her pregnancy and therapy, and help with adoption? With abortion, the baby, an innocent, is killed!

Basically, when it comes down, it’s because I don’t think of a fetus as being a person. So, I don’t feel the need to protect it. But when I think of real innocent people, I would not kill them to protect someone from trauma. If a raped woman was held for nine months, and had the baby, I would not allow her to kill the baby, regardless of the ammount of suffering she would incur from it’s continued living (and I don’t think you would either, of course). I mean, I am very VERY against the killing of innocents. I just don’t see a fetus that way.

I do not understand the greater social good that is being advanced by letting some women but not others have an abortion. I don’t know how or why you came to the conclusion that pregnancy is more threatening emotionally or physically to a woman who has been raped than it is to any other woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy. By harping on the “voluntariness” of the act (the one thing you can know for certain about a pregnancy that isn’t technically the result of rape) you are clearly buying into the notion of pregnancy as punishment, for all of your denials, because you would make rights contingent on antecedent willingness to engage in sex. It also helps you to avoid pesky questions like, well, what if it wasn’t rape but it was done to avoid getting into a nasty fight with a sometimes abusive partner? It’s your own personal bright line.

To try to summarize: If the pretext for intervening is the protection of innocent life then giving permission to abort to some bearers of innocent life but not others is nonsensical, especially if one subscribes to the view that pregnancy is naught but a nuisance and an inconvenience (which is how many permit themselves not to bother worrying about harm to the mother from continuing a pregnancy).

If pregnancy is more than an inconvenience and a nuisance, then to forbid abortion to those who have been careless simply on the grounds that they have been careless (whatever else their situation) is akin to refusing to assist those whose peril is the result of negligence (like refusing to try to rescue someone in a car accident because you know that they were drinking while driving). Why should the police or fire or rescue squad risk their own lives to save such a miscreant?

And this is to overlook that there are many, many people who really don’t agree that the unborn has sufficient worth at each stage of its being to overcome the normal right one has to do with one’s body what one pleases, or that such a metaphysical question is one that we normally leave to the judgment of those most affected by how one might answer it. There is a societal consensus Robert, and it is that at around the time of viability (and really a few weeks or even a month beforehand), what is inside a uterus is sufficiently close to a newborn that we do limit the choices one has in its disposition. But the focus is on the fetus — and women who have been raped are just as much subject to that consensus as any others as, in my judgment, they should be.

There are many on this board who don’t agree with that consensus, just as there are many who don’t agree with societal consensus on any number of important life and death issues (capital punishment, for instance).

Cops kill bystanders, by mistake or by accident. (Like that Brazilian man gunned down in London - who may or may not have been innocent.) The loss of life is tragic and regretted - but is better than the alternative, of creating an environment where the police never use deadly force and the “bad guys” take full advantage of that fact.

In wartime, soldiers kill innocents - sometimes by the thousands. Sometimes this is a case of a misguided bomb. Other times it is a case where a decision is made to attack a target despite the presence of innocents in the area. The loss of life is tragic and regretted - but better than the alternative of losing the war and having MORE innocents destroyed.

Firefighters sometimes have to make awful decisions - do we hose down THIS row of houses, or THAT one? Do we charge into the Trade Center and try to rescue people, or do we stay out and protect our own? Either way, innocent people run the risk of dying.

Protection of innocent life is a strong cultural value; it could stand to be made stronger. Part of that strengthening ought, in my view, to be a renewed commitment to nurturing young life and children. But regardless of that, this cultural value does not rise to the level of an absolute trump card - “that would kill innocent life, and is thus forbidden”. It is an unfortunate necessity of life that innocent lives are sometimes risked, and sometimes lost, in the service of values which temporarily or situationally are more important than the protection of life.

That said, it IS refreshing to see you advocating so strongly that innocent life should be protected.

Since we’re making an exception for rape or nonconsensual incest, it seems like we’re basing it on the FATHER’S sexual behavior, not the mother’s.

But of course, that equally valid framing doesn’t permit abortion hardliners to sputter about punishing women.

It’s not a rhetorical game, Robert: it’s simple logic. If a fetus is an innocent human life, then we give that fetus the same rights and protections that we extend to all human life, and we don’t permit anyone to kill a fetus unless we would give that same permission for killing a born human being.

We permit the killing of innocent human life, when that killing is necessary or subordinate to some greater good. Your argument depends on their being some absolute prohibition on such killing - but there is no such prohibition.

Instead, we have a very strong cultural value against killing innocents - but an explicit recognition that occasionally it is directly necessary, or is tragically-but-acceptably part of seeking some greater good. Innocent people died digging the Panama Canal, and the people sending them there knew that it would happen. In fact, innocent people die on ANY construction project more involved than a one-lane road - engineers can generally project how many deaths and maimings there will be.

In the case of society permitting abortion in the case of rape, we basically say “there is a good which we wish to protect - the life of this innocent creature. Unfortunately in this case, your right to autonomy has been compromised, by the actions of an external agent. Because of this, our society will accept your decision to end the life of this innocent creature - a decision we would normally condemn - because we value your autonomy and your right to decide whether or not to open your body to new life.”

Sometimes - depending on the circumstances - one right is weighed more heavily. After birth, we don’t permit rape victims to kill their children - because after birth, there are other options available and it is not necessary to infringe on the mother’s rights to protect the right of the child.

“Simple logic” is inadequate for moral reasoning.

This isn’t a Congressional hearing, Robert. You can just say you think that the courts shouldn’t touch abortion but you think that the legislation in your state should mimic Roe.

Your view of this (if this is your view, and not just a rhetorical ploy whose point escapes me) is flawed

You keep saying that, yet you back it up with nothing other than platitudes (”I am capable of weighing two conflicting values”) and snippiness (”If your moral compass won’t permit two conflicting values, then you have my sympathy”). Oh, and a blatant misunderstanding of the law regarding killing in self-defense.

It’s not a rhetorical game, Robert: it’s simple logic. If a fetus is an innocent human life, then we give that fetus the same rights and protections that we extend to all human life, and we don’t permit anyone to kill a fetus unless we would give that same permission for killing a born human being.

To say that abortion is acceptable in cases of nonconsensual sex only is to treat an unborn life differently than a born life, and to allow justifications for taking unborn life that we do not extend to born life. Your claim that the law permits killing to “protect autonomy” is nonsense.

As soon as you start looking into the circumstances of conception, you have stopped treating the fetus as a human being–with all the protection the law grants a human being–and started basing the worth of its life on the mother’s sexual behavior.

As far as “weighing rights” goes, if a fetus is a human life, then we weigh rights the same way we do with babies. A woman should absolutely have the right to abort if she is in danger of grave bodily harm or death from the pregnancy and the abortion is necessary to save her life. That is self-defense. Unless you are willing to say that mothers should be allowed to kill their five-year-olds if the kid affects their “autonomy,” of course.

I would be amenable to a law in my state that attempted that balance in a democratic fashion.

Please explain, again, how the mother’s ‘autonomy’ trumps an innocent baby’s right to life as long as that baby hasn’t been born yet.

It doesn’t.

You can speak in terms of trumps and absolutes and moral equations where only one factor has value and all the rest are irrelevant all day long, mythago. Your view of this (if this is your view, and not just a rhetorical ploy whose point escapes me) is flawed, and I don’t endorse it. I’m not going to accept your incorrect framing.

Robert believes that women getting abortions for certain reasons should be shunned by ’society’, though he has left what exactly that is vague. Her family? Neighborhood? Country?

Now, how much shunning are we talking about? Robert is currently under no obligation to, say, speak to his wife, daughter, sister, etc, ever again if they have an abortion he disapproves of.

On the other hand, how far can he go before it falls under discrimination or abuse laws?

This conversation keeps dancing between personal morality and action. Whenever one seems to be reaching a point, it dances back the other way.

Ah, then you are a supporter of Roe v. Wade, which is grounded in balancing the state’s interest in preserving fetal life and the woman’s right to autonomy?

Please explain, again, how the mother’s ‘autonomy’ trumps an innocent baby’s right to life as long as that baby hasn’t been born yet.

Nope. Balanced rights. If your moral compass won’t permit two conflicting values, then you have my sympathy.

But mine does permit it, and so I reject your reductionist characterization as incorrect.

This is called “self-defense,” not “protecting her autonomy.” The law does not recognize a waste-the-bastard justification, however you or I might feel about it. Nor does it ground the right of a rape victim to defend herself on her “autonomy.” Rape is rightfully considered great bodily harm, and that’s a situation where deadly force is justified.

Your ignorance of the law aside, if the issue in abortion is the taking of an innocent life, then the woman’s autonomy is irrelevant, just as you admit that you believe “But I forgot to use birth control!” would be an irrelevant argument.

A pro-lifer would feel sorrow for rape victims forced to carry to term, but would acknowledge that, terrible as such a thing might be, it cannot justify the murder of a baby. A faux-lifer says “well, abortion is OK in cases of rape or incest” because their opposition to abortion hinges not on the value of a human life, but on the mother’s sexual behavior.

YMMV.

Oh, if you really believed in the concept of YMMV outside abstract discussions, Robert, I think a lot of bandwidth could have been saved over the last several months. :/

Nonsense. A person about to be victimized by rape is certainly empowered, under most circumstances, to end the life of (probably) her attacker. (Under some odd circumstance where she could easily and safely escape, most people would generally expect her to do that instead…but not all of us. I’d have no problem with her pulling the trigger.) Rape is certainly a violation of autonomy, and protecting that autonomy is valid self-defense.

Nations fight wars to defend their autonomy.

A slave who kills his master is striking out to re-assert his autonomy.

Autonomy is one of the things that we most often kill to defend, it seems to me. Certainly it is one of the most defensible reasons for killing.

If a fetus is innocent life, then the woman’s autonomy is irrelevant.

I am capable of weighing two conflicting values. A fetus can be innocent life, and a woman’s autonomy can be important, at the same time. That this makes the moral decision difficult does not have causal power to make one of the moral considerations involved irrelevant. YMMV.

In no other way do we allow somebody to intentionally and deliberately take a human life because they wish to “protect their autonomy.”

If a fetus is innocent life, then the woman’s autonomy is irrelevant. Period. I realize you do not like that argument, because then you have to admit that rape victims shouldn’t be allowed to kill their babies, and it makes you look like a great big meanie.

By the way, both you and your fictional neighbor are guilty of the same crime.

Applying this analogy to a fetus requires supernatural reasoning: Who is the Plaintiff/Victim here?

Not the fetus. Whereas a drowning man has an interest in you not engaging in a false rescue, a fetus has no interest in the woman not engaging in false pro-creation; the fetus would not be born in either event. No detrimental reliance here.

Maybe the man’s sperm or DNA is the Plaintiff/Victim. If only Woman X had refrained from having sex, the man might have declared, “If you won’t put out, I’ll find someone who will!” and then had sex Woman Y who might be willing to bring a (different) fetus (involving the man’s sperm) to term. But instead, the man (3d party) relied the willingness to have sex (deceptive conduct) of Woman X (Defendant) to the detriment of the sperm/DNA’s interest in self-perpetuation (Plaintiff/Victim’s interest).

Maybe the fetus’s soul is the Plaintiff/Victim. Maybe souls exist prior to fetuses, and are dolled out to fetuses in order of conception or something. Thus the soul has an existing interest in being allocated to a fetus that will be born, and they rely to their detriment when people create fetuses that they don’t bring to term because they lose the opportunity to be assigned to some different fetus. That is, the soul allocator (3d party) relied on the pregnancy (deceptive conduct) caused by the man and woman (Defendants) to the detriment of the soul’s interest in being born (Plaintiff/Victim’s interest).

In short, I think the swimming tort analogy doesn’t work. But there are other social duties - most obviously, the duty of a parent to care for a child. I didn’t use it as an analogy because that duty seems infinitely mushy. For example, I am not aware that a parent has a duty to donate a kidney to his kid, even if the kid would die otherwise, but I’m also not aware of a court that has ruled on the question. With so much ambiguity about the extent of the relationship, it’s not very useful for an analogy.