[eggsbenedict]

>A government that does not respect the bodily autonomy of women isn't going to respect privacy for too long if it enables the former.

For the record, I don't have a problem with abortion. Obviously I think it should be a last resort, but the impression I get is that most people who get abortions view it that way too.

That said, framing the debate around abortion purely as a question of bodily autonomy always seemed to be a very dishonest way of engaging with the debate. The issue at stake for most people(again, I don't care!) who oppose abortion is not that women are getting a medical procedure done to themselves, but that, in their view, a 2nd and entirely different person is killed as the result of this procedure.

But, many people who bring up the slogans of bodily autonomy already know this. By ignoring the core debate and taking this alternate tack, they get to:

    1.) Smear their opponents' position as purely misogynist and obfuscate the core of the debate, and

    2.) Signal their own loyalty to their political tribe, by demonstrating their unwillingness to even engage with the "other side." 

The real question at the center of abortion rights legislation is not "should women be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies," it's "at what point does a fetus become a person, entitled to the same legal protections that other people have."

The inverse of this question is actually very interesting:

"What is it that makes a fetus NOT a person?" Maybe it's the lack of consciousnessness/low brain activity? Then, should we be allowed to kill braindead and comatose people arbitrarily? And anyway, we don't even know what consciousness is to begin with.

Or maybe, they just don't look like people, so we don't have to treat them that way? Well, that opens up a pretty ugly can of worms.

Or maybe it's the fact that the fetus is completely physically dependent on the mother's body? That's an interesting proposition, but then again, so is every baby until just days before it leaves the womb, and almost nobody is arguing the morality of ultra-late-stage abortions.

So you immediately end up with all these (admittedly) edge-cases that demonstrate some of the moral and legislative complexity of this issue, not to mention its entanglement with the federal-state-local American legal system, which is what Roe v. Wade really addresses to begin with. I'm not doing this as some kind of "gotcha!" or takedown of the whole concept of abortion. Just asking that on this forum we don't trick ourselves into believing the sound-bite version of things.

Yet again, I don't really care either way whether people get abortions or not. In general it seems like something that's impossible to legislate out of existence anyway. But I always fail to see how this is a simple question of women's bodies and evil government overreach.

[simonh]

The US courts have already ruled that you cannot coerce someone to donate bone marrow in order to save a life, on the basis of bodily autonomy. The contention is that pregnancy is a similar case and the pregnant woman is withdrawing her consent to allow the foetus to depend on her body.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFall_v._Shimp

[betwixthewires]

Like the parent said, this is a tricky topic.

I wouldn't call these two scenarios equatable though because in one instance a person is compelled to do something they have nothing to do with, whereas on the other hand they're performing a (very interesting) biological function. I've also heard an argument about implied contract, when you perform the function to create the dependency voluntarily and create it, you're committing to the dependency. It's somewhat compelling, but my point only is that these two situations don't match up fundamentally.

[simonh]

I agree, also I think that argument justifies the mother somehow withdrawing the supply of life support to the foetus but not forcible eviction. We don't allow a property owner to open the door, shoot a squatter and drag out the body. I was only providing the argument as made by pro-lifers.

Personally I'm a Brit and I'm satisfied with the consensus here. I'm simply not willing to support coercing women to forcibly carry babies to term against their will, even if the foetus does have a right to life. Even accepting the pro-life argument, the resulting savage life ruining oppression of vulnerable women necessary to actively enforce that view is utterly abhorrent to me. It's a hypothetical, but even if I was vehemently pro-life I still like to think I wouldn't support such policies.

[Barrin92]

>The real question at the center of abortion rights legislation is "at what point does a fetus become a person

I think this is disproven by the fact that even extreme pro-life advocates generally carve out exceptions in case of rape or incest, which ought to be irrelevant if the personhood of the child was the factor that is actually in question.

This debate doesn't add much depth because killing is not automatically murder, and there are plenty of cases in which killing is justified to preserve autonomy, including of course of animals most of which have more claim to autonomy or protection from harm themselves than an early stage fetus.

>"Then, should we be allowed to kill braindead and comatose people arbitrarily"

Probably not arbitrarily, but if its in the interest of a person who still has a working brain then I would say it's hard to find a coherent argument to not answer that question with yes.

[betwixthewires]

I tend to agree with your first sentence, it is a hypocritical inconsistency. Either you believe the fetus is a distinct person, or you don't. A carve out allowing for what you say is murder for a crime the "condemned" isn't responsible for is reprehensible, again, if you believe abortion is murder. I've met pro life individuals who only allow for a carve out in the event the mother faces a tangible risk of being disabled or killed by continuing pregnancy, and I tend to respect their intellectual consistency.

[cycomanic]

The issue with that intellectual consistency, is that the same people oppose sexual education and contraception which has been shown to significantly reduce abortions (let's not even talk about all the cases where they support killing of born people). If they do not support sexual education and contraception, they are not intellectually honest, they are not pro-life, but want to push a specific world view.

[betwixthewires]

I don't think I've ever met a person that believes contraception should be illegal, I'm sure they're out there though. I'd be willing to bet that set of people is far, far smaller than those that think abortion is wrong, and I wouldn't call contraception particularly controversial or opposition to contraception a mainstream view by any means.

Sexual education is another topic, a lot of people oppose it to one degree or another, we all have ideas about what a kid should learn about and at what age, it isn't that unreasonable to say that a parent should have the final say in their children's education, but with that should come more responsibility which it seems many parents don't want to take on.

[fzeroracer]

>The real question at the center of abortion rights legislation is not "should women be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies," it's "at what point does a fetus become a person, entitled to the same legal protections that other people have."

This question has been resolved for years. The government has weighed abortion vs viability and has put reasonably limits on abortion. The pro-life constituent seek to entirely ban abortion past fertilization and even want to ban contraceptives.

I'm not interested in debating anyone that's pro-life anymore because there is no debate or movement to be had. The goal of overturning Roe v Wade isn't a debate, it's a demand. And you should be fighting demands that seek to take away rights with a hard no.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Is abortion a right?

I think it should be, but it is not an enumerated right subject to the 10th amendment. Nor is there a federal law. We have been living with a restriction placed on states by a court decision.

I wish on the last 50 years someone attempted to make it an actual right or even a law.

[trs8080]

> That said, framing the debate around abortion purely as a question of bodily autonomy always seemed to be a very dishonest way of engaging with the debate.

Maybe /you/ think it's a dishonest way of engaging with the debate. Most people who are pro-choice consider framing the issue as murder as dishonest.

> Then, should we be allowed to kill braindead and comatose people arbitrarily?

> Or maybe, they just don't look like people, so we don't have to treat them that way? Well, that opens up a pretty ugly can of worms.

These questions are not part of any rational debate.

[DharmaPolice]

>Most people who are pro-choice consider framing the issue as murder as dishonest.

I don't think OP was saying it is murder but that it's helpful to have some argument why it's not murder (since there are some that claim that it is). If someone says "Meat is murder" and I say "I have the right to eat what I want" then I've not really responded to their argument and to some it might even sound like I'm implicitly accepting their premise.

I am obviously pro-choice and I do understand the people arguing against abortion rights are doing so in bad faith in most cases but I am still not sure why there is such reluctance (in debates I've seen) to not demolish the "fetus=human being" argument which is put forward as the primary reason to ban abortion.

[betwixthewires]

Why do they consider that framing dishonest? Or I should ask why you consider that framing dishonest, I don't want to ask you to speak for other people.

[qsdf38100]

The people with usual pro-life discourse are also pro-guns, and generally are only pro-life when it comes to fœtuses…

So them insisting they care about life is just dishonest. It’s obviously to enforce their archaic views of the world. It’s not even written in their beloved Bible, it’s a made up concern.

If you buy into this pro-life bullshit, you’re either being manipulated or dishonest.

[Ancapistani]

This seems to be an obvious strawman of an argument.

First, you assert that being pro-gun implicitly means being pro-death. This is not the case. I and many others who are vehemently pro-gun feel the way we do because we believe that self-defense is a fundamental right of a human being, and that possessing and carrying the means to effectively defend one’s self is the practical implementation of recognition of the right.

Second, you assert that gun rights are about enforcing one’s view on others. This is also not true for anyone with whom I’ve discussed this issue. Gun rights advocates see this as about preventing people from imposing their will on others by force.

Third, you implicitly assert that all gun rights advocates are Christian. This is demonstrably false.

Fourth, after asking the reader to take the above assertions as fact, you accuse anyone who disagrees with you as being ignorant of their own biases or a liar.

People don’t have to agree. That’s fine. You may be surprised to discover that people who hold different views from you do so because they form those views from different lived experiences. All it takes is a little empathy.

[cycomanic]

Without getting too much into the argument, you make a couple of logical fallacies.

> First, you assert that being pro-gun implicitly means being pro-death. This is not the case. I and many others who are vehemently pro-gun feel the way we do because we believe that self-defense is a fundamental right of a human being, and that possessing and carrying the means to effectively defend one’s self is the practical implementation of recognition of the right.

The argument does not need to be that pro-gun means pro-death, but can mean self-autonomy/self-defense over being forced to do something. That same argument could be made for an abortion, e.g. the mother uses it as a last means of self-defense over being forced to care for a child for the rest of their lives.

> Second, you assert that gun rights are about enforcing one’s view on others. This is also not true for anyone with whom I’ve discussed this issue. Gun rights advocates see this as about preventing people from imposing their will on others by force.

Actually they said pro-lifers want to force their view onto others. He also said pro-lifers are typically pro-gun, however that does not logically imply that all pro-gun proponents are pro-life and want to force their view onto others.

> Third, you implicitly assert that all gun rights advocates are Christian. This is demonstrably false.

Again all (most) pro-lifers are pro-gun does not imply that all pro-gunners are pro-life. That's logically incorrect.

[qsdf38100]

If we were really debating the question of whether a fœtus is a person I’d be more open to "opinions".

But that’s not what’s actually going on with that debate on a national scale.

You can’t deny that it almost never comes genuinely because someone is curious. It’s not a philosophical question. we ever need to "debate" it because it’s pushed down Americans throat by people with an obviously reactionary political agenda. I don’t believe those who adhere to this political package and pretend to care about a feotus when they don’t care about his mother’s life. Could we stop pretending it’s not about controlling women?

[betwixthewires]

I wouldn't say that. To take another example, you might not think it's society's responsibility to house homeless people while also thinking it is wrong to kill them. So expecting people who think (what they believe to be) murder should be illegal to then want to take good care of the world is dishonest, the second does not follow from the first.

[fzeroracer]

But if society kicks out the homeless people during a particularly cold winter season and they happen to die of hypothermia, then that's deemed acceptable.

The reality is that the second often does derive from the first, it's just enough degrees separated that they don't feel the cognitive dissonance. It's the same reasons why the pro-life constituents are often against increasing welfare and aid for single mothers, as George Carlin once brought up.

[MarkMarine]

This whole diatribe isn’t on topic for this article, and doesn’t really fit on hacker news. Your Facebook page is a better place for this kind of content