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[Arizona] says, you're pregnant for up to two weeks before you're pregnant.
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I guess it comes down to the quantity of the selfishness. Simply putting your whims and desires ahead of others is one thing, however elevating the priority of those whims and desires to the point that obtaining them is an active (in this case fatal) detriment to others isn't wholly comparable. Let's make a little fun example for no other reason than I just watched the awesome Alec Baldwin speech from Glengarry Glen Ross and have money on the mind.
Scenario A: Selfish guy wants to get ahead in his business, and his co-worker tells him of an awesome idea, so Selfish guy steals the idea and takes it to his boss to get a big bonus himself. The other guy is pissed, but at least he still has his job.
Scenario B: Selfish guy is competing for a job with a group of co-workers, so he fabricates some evidence that gets his competitors wrongfully terminated so he can reap the benefits of the new job.
Okay, it's nowhere near a perfect analogy, I'll concede. But the basic principal is the same. There's a fine line (at least in my mind) between trying to get a leg up and actively doing serious harm to people and/or the environment around you to achieve that leg up. I'm a believer in the "greater good", and fuck anyone who puts themselves that far ahead of it. And in my mind, poorly justified abortions are an active detriment to that "greater good". Yes, it's all potential and theoretical and all that nonsense, but it seems invariable that the world has been robbed unwittingly at some point because a certain person or persons were never born. Or we may have had the next Hitler aborted, who the fuck knows, right?
So to me, they connect. A person who is getting an abortion for an arbitrary reason, not because they or the child face a greater health risk than other pregnancies or because the child is a seed of rape/incest, is putting themselves ahead of the betterment of our crappy civilization. Again, we can't know. What's done is done, unless we can prove Multiverse theory (along with the intertwined Many Worlds Theory) and then find a way to view those alternate possibilities. Unfortunately, we'd need more than even a TARDIS for that.
Summary, a selfish person could unwittingly be fucking us all over if their kid they aborted may have been someone of importance, or even someone who did a little good in their lives. He may have been a good father, or an accomplished musician or writer, or she could've been a cop or who the fuck knows. But the absolute moment that embryo is terminated, so does any and all other possibilities for what might've been. And yeah, I understand that the odds are probably stacked against any unwanted child, but that doesn't mean they're destined to be a bunch of sociopaths and purse-snatchers. Look at Tim Tebow: his parents considered aborting him (for potential health reasons though, not economic). Other this his massive hard-on for Jesus, I'd say he's turned out pretty well (and done more good in his twenty something years than many people ever will in their lifetimes).
Maybe the same could be said about contraception, that it's denying life, yadda yadda yadda... but I guess it's just where I happen to personally draw my line. You're not killing anything, so I suppose that's it. Once that spark of life is ignited and its potential for being more than it is now grows, what gives a person the right to decide that it's better off dying then and there? But that's where my argument falters: we can't see the future, so it's impossible to know what true harm we are or aren't doing.
That's fairly insane. The world cannot have been robbed of something which never existed. Not to mention how insultingly simplistic you're making the choice to have an abortion.
Here's a brief that the Governor filed earlier (spoilered for big..ish):
And I find your viewpoint lacking in vision.
And there's nothing simplistic about having an abortion, and I regret giving you that impression. When a person chooses to have an abortion, then the person their child would've grown up to be, everything they would've touched and effected, is essentially nullified of their future influence. Maybe it is insane, I won't deny it, but it's up to that person making the decision of life or death whether or not the child can truly have a future or do some good in this world or if they're doomed to a lifetime of misery and harming everything around them. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm still pro-choice. Just doesn't mean I agree with the ratio of those who chose one way or the other.
I just, I don't even understand this argument. Particularly this bolded part.
Personally, I don't know if I could ever go through an abortion. I also don't have a uterus so I'd never be making that call. You are making the argument that all the pastors in the world spew out to shame women into not having abortions.
No woman should have to sit and think about "the greater good of the world" when making this decision, that's just stupid and its insulting and yes, it's insane. A woman should be making this decision based on what's best for her and her potential child, not some crazy vision of a future whatever.
Well, in fairness, the Church of Scientology - allegedly - uses abortion as it's go-to means of birth control. They can't have babies crawling all over their various slums, and they think any kind of drug use (and this - again, allegedly - includes Spermicide, condoms, morning after pills, birth control pills, etc) will bring about the apocalypse, but their members still fuck each others' brains out because that's what people do.
A few testimonies have come out involving van loads of girls being driven to clinics for abortions. Pretty disgusting stuff.
In the end, it's not my decision, it sure isn't your decision, and by extension of these two things it's no business of the government being proded by religious groups.
You realize birth control can fail, right? You understand that is a thing that is possible?
I don't think any of this addresses the tensions I highlighted.
The original question regarding selfishness was "Whose interests are being disregarded in the case of abortion?" your analogies and argument assumes that there is a party, other than the woman, with interests that are being ignored in the case of abortion. I assumed that the party in question was the unborn foetus (hence the problem of potential is not actual, and the weird metaphysics). However, you've specified that the injured party is society itself via the "greater good". This isn't a good solution - once we define what we consider to be goods it is an empirical matter to determine the likelihood that the foetus will significantly contribute to those goods and weigh this against the bands (some qualitative e.g. The wishes of the mother, some quantitative e.g. Environmental and economic impact) and from then it seems far from favoring the pro-life position or even simply being a push. However if we assume arguendo that we should be concerned that the foetus may potentially be a great musician, writer or father, shouldn't we be equally concerned that they might be a bad person or be involved in a drunk driving accident killing a great father, doctor or writer? Particularly given that unwanted children are more likely to develop antisocial behaviours.
However, I would contend that your line "Or we may have had the next Hitler aborted, who the fuck knows, right?" gives the game away as far as this line of reasoning goes. It makes it clear that you are not arguing in favour of the greater good because not preventing someone who would do immeasurable harm to the world from doing so is in fact working against the greater good. With this line, you admit, implicitly that it isn't a concern a principled concern for the greater good at all, but something rather different.
However, your preamble to your analogy involves the passage "an active (in this case fatal) detriment to others" which means that we are talking about the foetus afterall (as well?), and so we're simply back at the start - if we're dealing with a "potential human being" then we aren't dealing with a human being, and it's unclear whose interests are being trampled in this regard without a great deal of metaphysical argument. So that critique still stands as well.
And you've still got a lot of work to do in terms of defining what we should and shouldn't define as selfish behaviour - as I note, the analogy you give smuggles in the idea of there being another party whose interests are not being addressed, and still doesn't provide a good general principle by which to distinguish selfish behaviour - the operative question being is any act in one's own self interest ahead of others' selfish? How do we distinguish between good self-interest and bad-self interest? The question of what, specifically you mean when you say selfish still needs to be addressed, vague handwaving and analogy doesn't cut it.
All of which is to say, despite adding another thing to confuse the issue into the mix (the "greater good") you haven't answered the fundamental questions we initially began with.
As an aside, I note that you argue in favor of the greater good, in this instance but immediately jumped onto a slippery slope/reductio ad absurdum in response to @Canteloupe's expressing their position (which I too believe is fundamentally flawed) on abortion as being in favor, in part due to the greater good with regard to population control. Needless to say, generalising the principle that we should be forced to do things with our bodies and accept radical curtailing of our autonomy for the greater good fairly quickly leads you into the same territory that you used as a bludgeon against @Canteloupe.
EDIT: I forgot that I really wanted to point out that your exception in the case of health or rape is particularly unusual. Neither actually works.
If we take your idea that the potential for a foetus to become a significant figure in our society, then the sky is more or less the limit - why should the mother not sacrifice her health in favor of the possibility that the child might be the next Ludwig von Luther King Jr? The mother probably isn't doing anything interesting anyway. Unless she's Aung San Suu Kyi our theoretical Leonardo DiDarwin could potentially make a much greater impact than she could.
The question of rape has exactly the same problem - except the potential of the mother isn't relevant, as her life continues anyway!
Rape exceptions in general are incompatible with principled objections to abortion - if it's wrong to abort a foetus/zygote, then it's still wrong even if it was conceived in rape. Every single argument you've marshaled applies equally well to the case of pregnancy resulting from rape, why is it ok in the case of rape, but not in the case of consensual sex?
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
Pro-choice or pro-life, anyone who describes the process of pregnancy and childbirth as an "inconvenience" is a silly goose. As is anyone who thinks women are farm animals - you know, just give the kid up for adoption, if you keep it away from her for a couple of days she forgets all about it, amirite?
Apothe0sis, rape exceptions are indeed incompatible with principled objections to abortion only when the actual, underlying principle is the life of the fetus. When the underlying principle is "well she should have kept her legs shut" or "we can't get this legislation passed without a rape exception", then it makes perfect sense.
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It also makes perfect sense if one looks at it from the perspective of negative vs positive freedoms.
If you engage in acts knowing the possible outcome is pregnancy, then the negative freedom of the foetus' right to life outweighs your negative freedom to self autonomy over your body, whereas if it's forced upon you, then your right to self autonomy supersedes that of the foetus, in much the same way one might argue that if you take careless actions that deprive someone of their kidney, you would be obligated to donate one to them - whereas you're not obligated to give one to a random stranger in need.
This is ultimately what I was trying to get the robot to admit, but alas I got sidetracked on "what constitutes a human being" tangent that he was still unable to succinctly describe.
"One might argue" anything, but I'm not aware of any developed nation where you would be forced to donate a kidney if your carelessness leads to them losing a kidney. You might be criminally punished if what you did was a crime; you might be civilly liable and forced to pay money damages to them. Outside of Thoughtexperimentvania, though, you wouldn't have to give them a kidney (even assuming that you were a compatible donor).
Limiting the argument to "bodily autonomy" feeds right back into the "inconvenience" nonsense, also, which assumes that being pregnant is like getting up on a commercial break for more snacks and returning to find the cat curled up in your chair. Being pregnant is a lot more physically taxing and dangerous than just 'oh, something is taking up space in my uterus'. It always flabbergasts me how often people handwave this, particularly when it's the same people rhapsodizing about the Sacredness of Life.
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Edit: And China, sort of.
"Bodily autonomy" is about the right to control one's own body; certainly a very important right, but it doesn't really acknowledge that pregnancy is a thing with consequences beyond 'you have a baby'. Anti-choice apologists like to pretend that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term is nothing more than a minimal violation of an abstract principle. (If you fall asleep and I draw dicks on your face with washable marker, I've certainly committed battery and violated your bodily autonomy, but it's a pretty low-impact violation; you wash off the marker. That's about as serious a consequence as anti-choicers would like to pretend comes with pregnancy.)
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It appears most anti-abortion/pro-lifers feel pregnancy is a joyous occasion.
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Interesting argument. How about if you engage in acts that are statistically certain to increase unwanted pregnancies? Should people enforcing abstinence only education be legally required to adopt a certain percentage of the inevitable results?
I'm in the camp that dislikes abortion, but is pro-choice. It's not my right to place my beliefs on others.
Let's Play Mass Effect - Set 6 Updated 9/8/2012
Except that the most famous defense of abortion by far is the violinist thought experiment, which precisely justifies abortion in cases of rape regardless of the personhood of the unborn baby. Which means this post is either an embarrassment, because you don't understand the violinist argument, or it's shamefully intellectually dishonest.
--LeVar Burton
What can I saw mythago, when we do agree, we agree entirely. I obviously am aware that the latter stances are compatible with the rape exceptions. My intention was two-fold, the first was to give our anti-abortion interlocutors enough rope with which to hang themselves and the second and rather more facetious: "I wouldn't call those stances principled."
As for the "inconvenience" of pregnancy, I was gathering some choice quotes about his from the thread. The sheer range and magnitude of manifestly negative effects that pregnancy can and does have on a woman's life is incalculable. In these discussions there is a focus on health and pregnancy, and even then, only such a narrow part thereof - the direct and immediate mortal consequences while hugely significant are only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other effects on things as important as career and financial matters not to mention a whole range of things that would scarcely occur to any of us who haven't been pregnant.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
Because seriously; pregnancy isn't wonderfully easy of course. But fuck me if it doesn't have an awesome result (as long as the child is wanted).
Because murder of a child or adult affects more than that person. It affects their friends and family, to start. Abortion doesn't affect anyone except the parents, and they are the ones choosing to do it.
Console yourself with the knowledge that this will never happen, then.
I do not consider children to be "awesome".
That thought experiment only has 2 options: you volunteered to hook yourself up to the violinist or you were hooked up to it against your will. I dont know how you could engage in behavior that has the possibility in resulting in you getting hooked up to a random person for 9 months. And even then the thought experiment doesnt take into a lot of considerations like what is going on in the person's life prior to and after getting hooked up to the random violinist.
I think its more likely that people will have less children and will have them later in life. There are plenty of women who dont want children now but do want them in the future.
... It makes no statements one way or the other about abortion in situations other than the one it's exploring.
And not related to my point in any case, which is that it is absoluteley possible to have principled objections to abortion and allow for rape exceptions. As evidenced by the violinist thought experiment which provides support for just that, and anyone that has spent any amount of time on the topic of abortion has no excuse for not knowing and understanding that.
--LeVar Burton
The violinist example is laughably flawed; a fetus is not a full-grown person, and has no viability outside the womb. Hell, it doesn't even always have viability inside the womb.
... and...
--LeVar Burton
Oh right, my bad for not opening quote trees.
And what?
The whole point of the violinist example is it focuses on the rights of the fetus vs. the rights of the mother without getting bogged down in the debate over when life begins. So it's a bit amusing that you're calling it flawed on the basis of an argument it was created to circumvent.