In addition, you give more insight than you know when you write:

Not a good analogy. Getting your picket picked when you are walking down the street is an extraordinary situation that is not something that is reasonable to expect; it is not connected to the act of walking down the street in the normal course of events. What we’re talking about is more like handing someone your wallet and then reporting it stolen.

Take a good look at the assumption you make when examining this –admitedly not real;I have never had my pocket picked in a strange town– situation, vs. the assumption you make when discussing a sexually active hetero female. In the former, you assume with no actual cues from me that I was in fact, taking reasonable precautions in my mythical trip to this mythical beach resort. I was carrying my wallet and making a good-faith effort to watch and hold onto it. Presumably, I was not consciously wandering into a strange/”bad” neighborhood and waving lots of “tempting” designer goods around.

OTOH, your view of a sexually active hetero female makes absolutely no assumption that she may have taken very reasonable precautions and STILL found herself pregnant with an unwanted child. This is a really, really important lack of symmetry, RonF. You might want to think for a spell about what that assumptions says about your own views of women and the rights we are mature and cognizant enough to deserve.

So are you of the opinion, then, that opposition to the right to have an abortion is all about women’s autonomy and not about destruction of potential human lives? That voicing concern about the latter is simply a “convenient excuse” to restrict the rights of women in general?

Absolutely. Name me a country in which if women made the rules abortion would be illegal. Then persuade me that women anywhere have less respect for the sanctity of actual human life than men do.

I still see a lot of equal protection issues being brought up. How many other people who kill people because of the extreme burden placed on them will claim they should be exempt from criminal conviction.

Look at the Menendez brothers. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that everything they claimed about their parents was true. One could argue that the burden their parents placed on them over the years far exceeds any burden on any woman to carry a baby for 9 months. Couldn’t they claim an “excessive burden” defense? Specifically, since Eric alleged that his body was used against his will over many years by a sexually abusive father, couldn’t he claim a similar defense to a pregnant mother? He even claimed that there was no way for him to extricate himself from the situation and therefore the burden, according to him, was inescapable. Of course, that is the defense the brothers claimed but that defense did not fall under “justifiable homicide” and wouldn’t have even if everything were true. You simply can’t kill someone because they place an enormous physical, financial, or psychological burden on you.

There are quite a few cases of women who killed their kids because of this same kind of excess burden. Remember Andrea Yates, the post-partum depression mom who drowned her 5 kids in the bathtub. She certainly felt an enormous psychological and physical burden, but we all thought her actions were murder and I doubt anyone here would condone them.

At best, one might claim the pregnancy situation is unique in that there is no possible way to relieve yourself from the burden short of killing the fetus (sounds very Menedez like). Even then, I think that is a hard case to make. We are nowhere guaranteed by the Constitution to not have burdens placed on us from which there is no escape. Many claim that the burden of poverty is inescapable. Certainly, there are many physical defects and injuries which impose burdens on us that are inescapable. If you accidentally injure me to the extent that I become a quadriplegic, you have caused an extreme physical burden on me from which I have no escape. That still doesn’t justify me killing you. So, even the unique burdens of pregnancy in the end are not really that unique. And an escape from those burdens is not necessarily guaranteed by the Constitution. At best, it is a weighing of constitutional rights and the right to life of someone always trumps a right to liberty claim.

Someone who engages in sex that can lead to pregnancy knows that there is a risk, even if they use birth control, that pregnancy can result…. If [a woman] voluntarily accept that risk, and [she gets pregnant], doesn’t [her]acceptance of that risk mean that they should accept the consequences? It seems to me that there is a level of consent here to initiate the creation of a life that is dependent on their body, and that therefore there is an obligation to carry though on it should it happen.

This line of argument always frustrates me because what it’s really about is not abortion per se, but rather the social and cultural meaning of heterosexual intercourse. The fact that pregnancy is a possible consequence of reproduction does not mean that a woman who becomes pregnant has consented to that pregnancy and must therefore accept that consequence as irrevocable. The assumption that she must, it seems to me, has a lot more to do with patriarchal ideas about intercourse as the way in which a man “possesses” a woman, as a form of colonization, than with the ostensibly inviolate sanctity of the life that has begun to grow inside her womb. Indeed, if it were really the sanctity of that life that was at stake and not the patriarchal, male dominant fear of women in control of their own sexuality, then there would be no need to invoke this kind of patriarchal moralizing about heterosexual intercourse to begin with. One could simply assert that the fetus is a person and that to abort it is therefore murder without passing judgment on the act of intercourse that led to the fetus’ conception. The fact that the antiabortion movement does not separate its opposition to abortion from the view of intercourse that RonF invokes only goes to show how much the opposition to abortion really is, in RonF’s own words, “simply a ‘convenient excuse’ to restrict the rights of women in general.”

They also knew that part of the deal was that if they were wounded, there were medics, doctors, etc. whose job it was that they would be tended to.

Is this not “part of the deal” for women also? Along with the risk that they may become pregnant through engaging in sex, they also know that there are medics and doctors whose job is to tend to the woman, either through the pregnancy to birth or through abortion.

Would you say that a woman should not expect to have medical attention throughout her pregnancy if she decides to continue it? I would assume you would agree that this medical support is both expected and required. Should her decision be to end her pregnancy, the same medical attention should be expected and required.

They also knew that part of the deal was that if they were wounded, there were medics, doctors, etc. whose job it was that they would be tended to.

Similarly, women who have sex know that part of the deal is that they live in a free country, in which the government does not force childbirth upon unwilling pregnant women.

And just as refusing to give soldiers medical care can’t be justified by saying “they’ll know that’s the deal when they choose to sign up,” refusing to allow women to control their own medical decisions can’t be justified by saying “they’ll know that’s the deal when they have sex.”

Maybe wounded soldiers who genuinely wanted to serve democracy (or even just earn a living) should not be tended to by medics when they are shot and bombed. They knew the risks.

They also knew that part of the deal was that if they were wounded, there were medics, doctors, etc. whose job it was that they would be tended to.

Maybe if I have my pocket picked on my trip to an L.A. beach resort, I should decline reporting it to the cops because I knew the risks.

Not a good analogy. Getting your picket picked when you are walking down the street is an extraordinary situation that is not something that is reasonable to expect; it is not connected to the act of walking down the street in the normal course of events. What we’re talking about is more like handing someone your wallet and then reporting it stolen.

This issue of disconnecting the fetus from the source of its life brings up something else that troubles me strategically about Kyra’s analogy: the way in which antiabortionists romanticize the fetus-as-person’s essential innocence: it did not ask to be conceived; it has no idea what is happening to it; it has never done anything wrong, etc.–and how that innocence is then used to demonize women who choose to have abortions. Here, too, I think there are differences between removing a fetus and refusing to donate an organ that could be exploited by someone arguing against Kyra’s analogy. In the case of a refused organ donation, the person who is refusing has done nothing actively to bring about the death of the person who needs the organ; the potential donor simply has chosen not to act. A woman who aborts a pregnancy, on the other hand, has consciously, knowingly, committed an act that can have no other result for the fetus but death. Perhaps more to the point–again, I am imagining counterarguments to Kyra as a matter of strategy, not trying disprove the premise she is trying to argue–because a pregnant woman has already begun to support the fetus and is, in fact, withdrawing that support, it could be argued that the more appropriate analogy in terms of organ/tissue donation would be to someone who donated an organ and then took it back. Flesh this analogy out with the fact that the person taking organ back is the donor’s own mother and you have a perfect recipe for depicting women who have abortions as cold and heartless inhuman creatures essentially no different, in the eyes of the people making this argument, and perhaps even worse (remember the fetus’ essential innocence), than those mothers who kill children who are already born.

In other words, the problem I see in Kyra’s argument is that it does not take into account how assigning personhood to the fetus can bring into play the mother-child relationship in ways that could ultimately be used to undermine the argument she is trying to make, which is why I think it is important to argue from a pro-choice position against the fully individuated personhood of the fetus–and I should stress that I do not mean we should therefore see the fetus as no different from any other organ in a woman’s body. It seems to me we can see the fetus as a living thing that, because it is not yet individuated, does not yet possess the full rights of personhood. This is why I referred to the Jewish position on abortion: you do whatever is necessary to protect and sustain the fetus’ life, even violating laws that would otherwise carry the death penalty, but the fetus’ life never trumps the mother’s–because a person-to-be who is not yet in the world cannot have the same status as a person who is. It is this difference in status, in Jewish law, that makes the killing of a fetus in the process of aborting it something other than murder, and I have always understood it to be this difference in status–though I realize it was not derived from Jewish law–that makes it possible to argue that a woman’s decision to have an abortion should be a private one in which the state has no business interfering. I’m not talking here about what has been argued in the courts; I’m talking here about what I always understood was the underlying premise of the pro-choice position.

It is certainly true, as Kyra points out, that a pregnant woman who has an abortion is not interested in killing the fetus per se, but in removing it from her body, thus ending her support of it, but I did not write in my original post that killing the fetus was the point of an abortion. What I wrote was that if you think it is permissible for a woman to kill a fetus–and if you believe it is a woman’s right to remove a fetus from her body, you also believe it is permissible to kill the fetus in order to do so or as a result of doing so, or, to put it another way, you believe at the very least that it is permissible to arrange things such that there is no other result than that the fetus will die–if you believe this, then I don’t think you can also believe that the fetus is a person in the same sense that I am as I sit here typing this post. Indeed, I think Kyra’s equation of the killing of a fetus after it is removed from a woman’s body with euthenasia actually highlights the fetus’ second-class status in this regard, and it is another reason why I think that, strategically, her argument is problematic. The question of whether and under what circumstances a person who has not actively chosen euthenasia can be euthenized, and then the question of who has the authority to make that decision for him or her, is an extremely complex one, especially when the person who is sick has not indicated her or his perference about who should have that decision-making capability. However, once we allow that somebody else can make that decision, then we have defined the person who is sick as somehow less fully a person than the one by whom the decision to euthenize will be made. It does not mean the sick person is no better than a vegetable–even if he or she is in a permanently vegetative state–but it does mean his or her personhood no longer exists as it did when he or she was in full command of her or his faculties. The same thing, it seems to me, is true of the feuts in the scenario Kyra lays out. Killing it may in fact be the merciful thing to do, but the fact that it has no say in the matter, that it cannot have a say in the matter by definition, means that it cannot possess personhood in the same sense, say, that the woman does who decided to abort the fetus in the first place. In other words, I don’t think Kyra’s argument works strategically because it can be used to undermine the assumption she says she starts with, i.e., that the fetus is a person. I realize she started with this assumption to see if she could make the argument for fetal personhood work in favor of a pro-choice position, and I do think her argument is a forceful one. But I also think that, ultimately, for the reasons I have outlined here, her argument would do more harm to a pro-choice position than good.

It’s interesting in this context to consider the way in which the Talmud arrives at the position that non-therapeutic abortions are premissibile, because it posits a scenario in which the permissibility of the abortion rests not on the woman’s personal decision, but rather on the state’s interest in protecting and preserving the woman’s quality of life, but since this response has already gone on long enough, I am going to post the rest of what I have to say on my blog, http://itsallconnected.wordpress.com.

Yes.

On r.a.m she has repeatedly said that abortion is a right because a man cannot be forced to give his living child one of his kidneys, both healthy, to save her life. The kid was eight years old and dying.

I can’t find her citing the case she got this from though I could ask her if anyone wants it.

1. They will try to claim that Roe decided the personhood issue (which it did not) and that the fetus is not a person and doesn’t have 14th amendment rights. The court will naturally have to explore Roe and they will determine that there is nothing wrong with UVVA. This will set up the paradox that Sen. Kerry alluded to. Emboldened, some red state will pass a law against abortion using the new personhood argument that was settle in the UVVA appeal and Roe will be undone once that state law is appealed and upheld.

2. They will try to claim that UVVA is an equal protection violation because it treats differently two classes of killers who commit the same identical killing. In doing that, either the court will strike down the abortion exemption or they will invalidate UVVA altogether. The first is a best case scenario for anti-abortion people but even the latter only delays the inevitable as again some really red state will pass a fetal protection law that does not have an abortion exception and the courts will have to uphold it.

The beauty of it all is the makeup of the court won’t matter.

So, by now you are saying “that gengwall is nuts!” That’s great. The more you ignore these possibilities the more caught by surprise you will be when they happen. On that day, a depressed Sen. Kerry will get up in front a shocked nation and say “I told you so”.

Maybe wounded soldiers who genuinely wanted to serve democracy (or even just earn a living) should not be tended to by medics when they are shot and bombed. They knew the risks.

Maybe if I have my pocket picked on my trip to an L.A. beach resort, I should decline reporting it to the cops because I knew the risks.

Maybe my parents should have aborted me and my two siblings. Any one of us could have inherited the congenital disease my father had– though only one of us actually did. For that matter, maybe I should forgo any medical care for this disease and just let it run its course. After all, once I was in my teens, I knew there was a risk that I could develop it. A truly consciencious and deserving person would have tracked down a healthy kidney to replace of her bad ones years ago. Right ? Sure, I have done what I can to be healthy and defer or avoid any problems, but I haven’t literally done EVERYTHING– so in your universe, I can only do the right thing by resigning myself to suffering, expense, disability and death.

Ron, that tack is beyond pathetic and I dearly wish that your camp would just let it go already.

Someone who engages in sex that can lead to pregnancy knows that there is a risk, even if they use birth control, that pregnancy can result, and that the above situation can result. If they voluntarily accept that risk, and the above situation does ensure, doesn’t their acceptance of that risk mean that they should accept the consequences? It seems to me that there is a level of consent here to initiate the creation of a life that is dependent on their body, and that therefore there is an obligation to carry though on it should it happen.

So are you of the opinion, then, that opposition to the right to have an abortion is all about women’s autonomy and not about destruction of potential human lives? That voicing concern about the latter is simply a “convenient excuse” to restrict the rights of women in general?

I just love our senators’ reverance for life, at least as long as it’s in a woman’s uterus. One minute, opposing abortion as the taking of life, the next defending a CIA led missile strike against another sovereign nation that took the life of 18 men, women and children, but apparently, not the intended target. Defending it and then saying they would do it again if given the opportunity. So, as we know, none of this rhetoric is about preserving human life, but exerting control over women’s bodies.

What strikes me as it always does whenever the Senate interviews judicial candidates who can make decisions that impact women, is that whether or not they are Republican or Democrat, those asking the questions are almost always men. Lines of usually White men, asking the questions and few of the people in the media are asking questions about that fact.

Roe’s already been so badly damaged, not by the USSC, but by the actions taken by anti-abortion movements outside the court system. Whether it’s violence, or intimidating landlords not to renew clinic leases, and many other ways. And as far as our political parties, we have one that is content in giving away all our rights at once, the other chooses to give them away piecemeal…while still demanding our loyalty at election time.

Gengwall, “life” and “personhood” are not the same thing. Of course “life,” in the biological sense you’re talking about, begins at conception. But to assume human life is the same as personhood is to assume what’s at issue.

Regarding this passage from Roe:

If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment. Roe opinion section IX.A.

…The federal law you refer to in no way obliges the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. The “finding” referred to in Roe can be interpreted to refer to a medical and scientific finding - not a law passed by Congress. Otherwise, Congress could have simply passed a law the day after Roe was decided saying “congress has found that a fetus is a person,” and that would have overturned Roe. But of course Congress doesn’t have that power, because the Supreme Court is not required to accept Congress’ findings.

To quote Clarence Thomas:

We know of no support… for the proposition that if the constitutionality of a statute depends in part on the existence of certain facts, a court may not review a legislature’s judgment that the facts exist. If a legislature could make a statute constitutional simply by “finding” that black is white or freedom, slavery, judicial review would be an elaborate farce. At least since Marbury v. Madison (1803), that has not been the law.

So just because Congress passes a law, doesn’t require The Supreme Court to accept the “findings” of that law when judging cases or precident.

Finally, if you’re worried that a discussion of life and personhood is off-topic for this thread (and it is), you can go ahead and post in this thread instead.

OK, I looked but I wasn’t able to find any post offering biological facts that life begins at conception. (It appears there isn’t even a consensus among the participants as to what constitutes life/personhood.) In any case, there was one person (clarence, on page 5 I think) who did try to offer a biological definition (I paraphrase: life is defined based on certain shared characteristics like respiration, metabolism, waste elimination, etc.), but who, unfortunately, displays a lack of familiarity with basic anatomy/physiology when reaching his conclusion. (A fetus does not, and most importantly, cannot breath/eliminate waste/etc. Those are maternal/placental functions.)

As well, I think Kyra underestimates the significance of call the fetus a person when she compares a fetus to any other organ inside a woman’s body, because if the fetus is a person then it is, by definition, not an organ.

Richard, you’re misinterpreting my analogy. I was not comparing the fetus with an organ to be donated, I was comparing it with the recipient of donated tissue. I.e, I’m applying personhood and the attatched rights thereof to its situation, and seeing what results. My conclusion is that pro-lifers include under the banner of “right to life” something more than any born person’s right to life includes, and something that no born person is ever entitled to: the right to the use of another person’s body as a means of medical help or life support.

the fact is that if you believe it is permissible for a woman to kill a fetus simply because she wants to (and if you are pro-choice that is what you believe; and I suppose I should be clear here and state that I am pro-choice), and you also believe that this killing is not murder, then there is no way that you can believe that the fetus is a person

The point of abortion, the reason people get abortions, is not the killing of a fetus. This has managed to be the center of attention because it’s what the pro-lifers take issue with and what the anti-choicers have latched onto as a convenient excuse for attacking women’s autonomy. But the entire point of abortion is to get the fetus or embryo out of the woman’s body, and detatched from her, so that she is free from supporting it and carrying it around everywhere she goes.

The difference between abortion and murder is the difference between abortion and infanticide—after a baby is born, it makes no demands on a woman’s body that would be fatal if they were not met. The woman no longer has a pregnancy that she doesn’t want, and the baby, unlike the pregnancy, can be passed off to someone else to care for (adoption, hiring a nanny, whatever) if she doesn’t want it. Abortion exists because there’s no other way for a pregnant woman to cease having a pregnancy to deal with the way a birth mother can cease having a baby to deal with.

An early-term fetus needs a uterus and blood supply (and all the things that contribute to that blood supply, i.e. lungs, stomach, kidneys) to live, much as a cancer patient may need blood transfusions, bone marrow transplants, perhaps a new kidney, to live. The cancer patient, whose personhood is established, is not entitled to anyone’s blood, bone marrow, kidneys, or anything else without consent from the person who has them. No one can be forced to donate them, not even the mother of the person who needs them. And if the patient dies, the cause of death is their cancer, not murder by the person who did not donate.

Now, in abortion, generally, the fetus is killed. However, if it were removed alive, it would not survive—it would die for lack of the various things the woman donates during pregnancy. Thus removing it alive is pointless from a preserving-life perspective, so it is killed, and this killing, when it would die soon anyway, is basically euthanesia. Now if you consider euthanesia to be murder, that’s your perogative. However, the disconnection of a fetus from a woman’s body is simply her exercising her right to refuse to donate her body any longer. The death of a fetus is caused by its inability to survive in the outside world with any known medical technology, and is no more murder than the death of a cancer patient who is cannot find a willing donor.

By the way, I did say fetal protection laws could be justified by the woman’s emotional attatchment to the fetus (women who are pregnant because they want a child generally have an attatchment to what will become the child they want), and the fact that a person who causes the death of a wanted fetus has essentially forced the woman to have an abortion against her will. This would not be murder, but something different; still, it can be protected by law without assigning personhood.

Gengwall—Right to life does not include right to someone’s body. If the fetus can’t survive once the woman has removed her support, that’s its problem. She can offer her support, but it can’t be demanded or forced. Fetal personhood can establish a fetus’s right to not be killed, but it has no right not to be removed and disconnected from a woman who doesn’t wish to be pregnant. Basically, if a fetus is a person, she can’t have it killed, but she can have it kicked out.

In any case, you wanna prove it? I still think it becomes a person when it is born and draws breath.

Thank you for the link; I’ll go take a look. Re the UVVA act, I should’ve made it clear that I was addressing the issue/asking for definitions from an absolute biological perspective. Legal/political pronouncements are irrelevant in the face of medical reality.