The argument of “bodily autonomy” when it comes to abortion is purely hypocritical, because everything that is so claimed to be hated - abuse of the body, acting without consent, harmful to the condition of living - is what is EXACTLY what is being done to the unborn child.
18 comments
Yep, its an entirely circular argument. I've never heard anyone really give any sort of convincing explanation as to why sauce for the goose isn't sauce for the gander, and looking through the comments I see I'm to remain disappointed.
Really people, stop hiding behind specious arguments to avoid difficult points and make yourselves feel better and just accept that abortion involves killing a human. Then you can actually move on to the ACTUAL argument, which is why you think that killing is justified (which I certainly consider it is).
Here is the key difference. Women are sentient beings, while a fetus is not yet sentient. A fetus lives off a woman and has life-long consequences for her. Even if you believe a fetus has equal rights to a human woman, forcing her to carry a pregnancy would still not be ethical. I cannot demand you give me a pint of blood, even if it would save my life, and giving blood is far less risky and inconvenient than pregnancy. You want to give a fetus rights you would not give any living human.
>fap ologetics
...I bet the whole concept of abortion gets you hard, though.
Why do you think that all Repubican administrations since Roe vs. Wade have done less than fuck all to repeal that law? It's one of the reasons why the likes of you still vote for them.
Otherwise - if the likes of you got what you wanted: abortion banned in perpetuity - what else would they have in their armoury to keep themselves electable: meanwhile, certain women in the US go on 'holidays' to Canada, Mexico etc...!
Non-sentient potential children do not have rights. Even if potential persons did have some rights, those rights would be defeated by the rights of women to carry pregnancies to term or to abort those pregnancies.
I think a legit argument can be made that abortion should be illegal in most cases beyond a certain point because the potential child has become somewhat safely viable outside the body of the woman.
That unborn non-child can have its own bodily autonomy in six or seven more months, and can make its own decisions about consent eighteen years after that. Your rant is like someone picking a blossom off a tree and saying "Oh no, I just killed an apple!"
BTW, "science" and "apologetics" don't really belong together, do they?
The anti-choice crowd simply can't grasp that an embryo/fetus has no bodily autonomy, period. Hey, nobody asks to be born, either.
This is just typical BS that aims to degrade women and attempts to state they shouldn't have control over their bodies or reproductive choices...
Warren McIntosh:
Really people, stop hiding behind specious arguments to avoid difficult points and make yourselves feel better and just accept that abortion involves killing a human.
If your definition of 'a human' means that a non-sentient cell or clump of cells is 'a human' because it's a human cell or clump of cells, then an appendectomy involves killing 'a human', and jerking off is genocide.
@Warren McIntosh:
It's not a circular argument at all, because the point of bodily autonomy is that it doesn't trump another person's, ever.
Let's say for the sake of argument that a fetus IS, for all biological, legal, and moral purposes, a person. Doesn't matter in the slightest. A woman would still be entirely within her rights to abort a fetus she was carrying.
Why? Because bodily autonomy means you own your body and are the only arbiter of decisions regarding it. Anyone using your body for any purpose can only do so with your informed, explicit, and ongoing consent. You are under no obligation, and cannot be legally coerced, to allow another person to use your body for anything, even if they'll die otherwise. No one has the right to use another person's body to stay alive.
A woman who gets an abortion is merely revoking her consent to the use of her body. She's not "killing" the fetus any more than someone who chooses not to donate an organ to another person is "killing" them. You may not think that's much of a distinction in a moral sense, but legally, it's extremely important. To frame the issue of abortion in terms of a "justified killing", as you did, is facile and misses the point entirely.
Until the fetus is capable of making a conscious decision, it has no claim to autonomy.
Only one entity in your argument has the ability to make a conscious decision: the mother, because only the mother is conscious.
The embryo has no functioning nervous system, and as such can't experience any abuse, consent, harm or anything else. The woman can experience all this, as her nervous system is fully developed (unless she's an underage child-bride), and thus she ought to have bodily autonomy.
If you don't believe in bodily autonomy; why don't we force you to donate blood ever couple of weeks, and to donate one of your kidneys, some skin-tissue and your hair? If women should be forced to be used as host by a parasite, why not force you to be of use to others?
According to the Bible, life begins with a breath.(Gen 2:7)
Okay, say you're right. Now imagine that your loved grandfather is dying, and the only way to save him is to undergo a surgery that will permanently alter your body, carry the risk of complications that could cripple or kill you, and keep farking you up for almost a year later.
Do you have the right to say no? Of course you do. And so does the woman who's pregnant.
It's terrible, but less terrible than forcing someone to go through that instead of aborting a clump of cells that can't feel anything and aren't aware enough to know what's going on.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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