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by rootusrootus 1455 days ago
IMO comparing vaccination to women's bodily autonomy is a bad faith argument. Vaccination is about protecting society -- the protection it offers individuals who get the vaccine is incidental.

Anti-abortion folks have a stronger argument, IMO, by focusing on the liberty of the unborn child. Both sides refuse to give up ground, however, for political reasons. The logical conclusion is that there is a point somewhere on the scale between 0 and 9 months where a fetus gains enough liberty to qualify for rights of its own that can be balanced against the rights of the mother. I hope some day we can come together to define that point and codify it.
3 comments
roenxi 1454 days ago
> IMO comparing vaccination to women's bodily autonomy is a bad faith argument.

That seems a somewhat inflammatory lead, but as far as I can tell you haven't explained or argued for it. It is obvious that the people who want to criminalise abortion believe it is about protecting society; if it were their babies they wouldn't need to criminalise it.

So far the only hard evidence about the COVID vaccines is that they offer excellent individual protection. It appears that the community protection just involves reducing the rate of spread rather than the reach, and since we're dealing with an exponential process it potentially has little practical effect. We ran a natural experiment in Australia that suggested there was no community protection effect. The spread of COVID through the community was basically instantaneous when lockdowns lifted in December [0].

[0] https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html

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mlyle 1455 days ago
> to qualify for rights of its own that can be balanced against the rights of the mother.

I'm not sure how much I agree. If you were grafted to my arm and that was keeping you alive... I would think it would be within my rights to remove you.

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calvinmorrison 1455 days ago
Arguments don't matter, in the end, really
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mlyle 1455 days ago
In the long run, "in the end", arguments are all that matters.

Sure, not many mature people are convinced. But people growing up and developing their positions are influenced. And even those of us who are not fully convinced tend to build some nuance into our positions to cope with the stronger arguments.

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