Abortion

[Ninga]

Open for discussion....

This is too long. I could not find a link.
Worthy of your time to read:

‘Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question. However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not.

Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973). Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent. It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional. This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or many lives they would save. That's the law.

Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong. That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees. But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy. She may choose to carry the baby to term. She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between. But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side. Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means.’”

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1. excellent framing, i like this argument.

[Ninga]

3. I thought so too. Simple and reasonable and in my view, understandable.

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4. one thing i really like is that it support a woman changing her mind.

if i think i might donate bone marrow but later change my mind, no one would think for a moment that i didn't have the legal right to do so.

but with abortion, people somehow think that if a woman chose to have sex, or even deliberately chose to become pregnant, that she can't later change her mind for whatever reason and get an abortion. why the hell not? maybe she lost her job or her home or her significant other or found out the pregancy would be high risk or maybe it's just not the business of some jerk republican politician somewhere.

how can these *sshole pretend to believe in freedom and then deny women the right to choose perhaps the single most intensely personal decision of their lives?

[Ninga]

5. Good point. So do we circle back to a long held view that this is not about abortion but

controlling women?

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7. well we knew that part already....

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. Free, on demand, without apology.

[CrispyQ]

6. Abortion and the 13th Amendment - this is the argument that needs to be made.

Abortion and the 13th Amendment

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1031&context=facultyworkingpapers

2010
Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion
Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University School of Law, [e-mail]

I. The basic argument
The Thirteenth Amendment reads as follows:

1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

My claim is that the amendment is violated by laws that prohibit abortion. When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to "involuntary servitude" in violation of the amendment. Abortion prohibitions violate the Amendment's guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates "that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude."6

Such laws violate the amendment's guarantee of equality, because forcing women to be mothers makes them into a servant caste, a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.

This argument makes available two responses to the standard defense of such prohibitions, the claim that the fetus is a person. The first is that even if this is so, its right to the continued aid of the woman does not follow. As Judith Jarvis Thomson observes, "having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person's body -- even if one needs it for life itself."7

Giving fetuses a legal right to the continued use of their mothers' bodies would be precisely what the Thirteenth Amendment forbids. The second response is that since abortion prohibitions infringe on the fundamental right to be free of involuntary servitude, the burden is on the state to show that the violation of this right is justified. Since the thesis that the fetus is, or should at least be considered, a person seems impossible to prove (or to refute), this is a burden that the state cannot carry. If we are not certain that the fetus is a person, then the mere possibility that it might be is not enough to justify violating women's Thirteenth Amendment rights by forcing them to be mothers.

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Parents can't be compelled to donate their organs to their child, even to save the child's life. Why does a fetus have more claim on a woman's body than her child who has been born?

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8. i agree with this argument as well

[Ninga]

9. Yes. True. Thanks. Nt

[CrispyQ]

10. Some good points made here, too.

Posted by a Christian friend of mine. Some of my other friends are not so happy about it.

[Hhodkinson87]

11. Did you write this?

[link:https://www.instagram.com/p/CfRv4WGFaNy/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=|

If not, do you recall who did? Thank you!

[gopiscrap]

12. welcome to DU