To anyone reading this thread and thinking pro-lifers aren't really this extreme, yes, they really truly are.
Many absolutely want the death penalty for abortion, or at least murder level prison sentence.
No amount of logic and reasoning gets to them. No arguments about the value of the mother's life. No arguments about the legal protections of bodily autonomy, and the slippery slope of setting precedent to violate that. No education about the inherent messiness of pregnancy and difficulty to actually tell the difference between a natural miscarriage (medically termed 'spontaneous abortion') and an intentional abortion. No nuance on the chilling effect for doctors who will start to refuse to give women the treatment they need when it risks unintentionally causing a miscarriage.
These people have an extremely underdeveloped concept of morality and ethics, where everything is black and white. And they pose an immense danger of ripping us as a society back into the dark ages of justice.
I say this as someone who was raised deeply religious and ravenously prolife. I marched in protest with life tape over my mouth and in front of abortion clinics as a child. This is really how these people think.
>No arguments about the legal protections of bodily autonomy,
It's not about your body autonomy, it's about taking the life of an unborn child, who clearly does not not belong to your body as he has a different DNA.
If you want body autonomy, you can pull a tooth or cut a finger.
If an unborn child is really independent of the mother's body, then you should be able to take it out - it is independent after all! If it doesn't belong to my body, what responsibility do I have for it?
As in an emergency C-section? If it's late enough in the pregnancy that doing so wouldn't unnecessarily harm the baby, then I'd think it would be fine.
So you believe that if the fetus is incapable of life outside the womb, the woman is legally obligated to keep it parasitically attached to her? That's a new right that no other person has, and you have to legally justify why a fetus has this special right.
At what point in pregnancy do you believe a fetus becomes a person deserving of protection under the law that violates a woman's right to bodily autonomy and privacy?
> So you believe that if the fetus is incapable of life outside the womb, the woman is legally obligated to keep it parasitically attached to her? That's a new right that no other person has, and you have to legally justify why a fetus has this special right.
If you discover a stowaway on your airplane while you're in the air, you're legally obligated to keep him onboard until you land. This isn't a new right, though, it's just his right to life trumping your right to property.
> At what point in pregnancy do you believe a fetus becomes a person deserving of protection under the law that violates a woman's right to bodily autonomy and privacy?
Magical thinking. You are dangerously misinformed on the medicine side and overloaded with medieval fantasy.
Those of us that actually live in the 21st century just look at your belief structure as naive — however we are now in a different phase where your ignorance is causing real harm. I read today that Drs are too scared to prescribe potentially life saving but potentially teratogenic medicine in forced-birth states due to miscarriage risk. Absolutely unacceptable! Get your medieval bullshit out of our modern world.
So you're holding the well being of poor children (whom everyone agrees are people with rights) hostage for the sake of not yet viable or autonomous fetuses?
I don't believe non viable or non autonomous fetuses are people. But even if they are, nobody has the right to live if they must be parasitically attached to another person's body, including you or I. Someone can certainly volunteer themselves to save a person in that position, but they can't be legally forced into it.
There's an argument to be made that I can agree with that more developed fetuses that are close to birth and can theoretically survive out of the womb should be extracted alive, but abortions of that kind are an extreme minority of all abortions.
It doesn't matter what I think. Now states can decide for themselves without having the federal government force them. Because everyone is pro-life beyond a certain threshold - its just a question of when.
Why is state the right level to decide? There's a ton of variety of opinions within states. Why not leave the decision to the county level? Why does the state get to force their decision on counties?
Then again, there's a ton of variety of opinion within counties. Rural and urban areas are often starkly opposed. So why does the majority opinion of the whole county get forced on everyone?
Then again, there's a ton of variety between households in any locality. Why should the larger locality get to force it's majority opinion on dissenting households?
Then again, there's variety of opinion between individuals in a household. Why does the majority opinion of the household get forced on dissenting individuals?
The weird obsession with states rights isn't a genuine argument. It's just the level of authority that allows your particular opinion to get maximum power over people, because it can't win at the federal level.
If you actually cared about overbearing government on this issue, you would argue to leave the decision up to the people directly affected, and be pro-choice.
> you would argue to leave the decision up to the people directly affected
Sure, let's do this. Just make sure you require unanimous consent, count the baby as one of the people directly affected, and don't treat a lack of a clear, conscious response as "yes, I'm okay with being killed".
I also support the rights of unborn persons, but I don't support giving them extra special rights that born people don't have.
I do not have the right to force you to give me your kidney, even if I need it to stay alive. Even if you intentionally poisoned me and that's the reason I need a new kidney, I still don't have the right to violate your bodily autonomy to take it.
Why do you believe fetuses have the special right to violate a person's bodily autonomy?
Because of the unique circumstances /temporary biological dependence.
Murder is a permanent solution to a temporary problem (dependence). The right of the fetus to life outweighs the right of the mother to not be inconvenienced.
I also support things like mandatory maternal leave, better access to healthcare, etc. I just don’t support the termination of otherwise-viable pregnancies for convenience, which is the VAST majority of cases.
>The right of the fetus to life outweighs the right of the mother to not be inconvenienced.
A fetus that cannot survive in the abscence of the mother is not a human being. It is a clump of cells, little more than an unusually organized tumor.
I find your rhetoric less than persuasive. Are you going to accept responsibility for the inevitable consequence of the unavailibility of abortion? Not in the executive's airy sense of "I'm willing to accept that risk" but tangibly, on the dotted line, in the "every unplanned pregnancy taken to completion is your problem now" sense? Are you going to accept the responsibility for their rearing in a loving, stable household? Are you going to commit to the lifelong sacrifice that is parenting those children? Are you willing to pay, in time and taxes for the State to be able to fund and hire proxy parents, and to administer the higher number of wards of the State?
Unless you are, I believe you have no place trying to push the things you are on other people. As abortions often short-circuit lifetimes worth of suffering that would be on the horizon for the unborn, because existence in the world without that is surely thus; you are the one condemning them. If you aren't already taking in babies, your pontifications about the relative virtue of someone else's exercise of bodily autonomy don't ring to me as the basis for reasonable State enforced policy.
I don't shortchange my countrymens' liberties, and I'm willing to be convinced to see your view if your group is willing to prove to me they have skin in the game. If you're just trying to push policy out of some misguided sense of "it's the popular thing to do", begone.
If you're ready to talk orphanages and more spending on social workers which includes a living wage, and sufficient funding to hire, retain, and train sufficient numbers of them to make a reasonable dent in the increased case load this will inevitably create, and real penalties and teeth to things like abusive treatment in facilities for wards of the State. Then we can talk.
No guarantees on being convinced, but I can entertain hearing it out.
> A fetus that cannot survive in the abscence of the mother is not a human being.
Were polio victims who couldn't survive in the absence of iron lungs also not human beings?
> Are you going to accept the responsibility for their rearing in a loving, stable household? Are you going to commit to the lifelong sacrifice that is parenting those children? Are you willing to pay, in time and taxes for the State to be able to fund and hire proxy parents, and to administer the higher number of wards of the State?
Is it okay to want post-birth infanticide to stay illegal without being willing to accept full responsibility for everyone else's unwanted children who are already born?
You can't be forced to donate your kidney, but if you previously decided to do so (or even if it were harvested from you without your permission), you can't later kill the recipient to take it back.
A better analogy is if you need continuous blood donations.
Even if I consent to give you some now, I'm not obligated to continue to give it to you every day, even if you'll die without it and it's only for 9 months.
Moral reprehensible? Maybe. Legally enforceable. No. That's a rabid hole of allowing the government to violate people's bodily autonomy and privacy that you really don't want to go down.
Dont talk to me about hurting people. You literally support chopping children up in the womb - people who suffer and die alone, for the sake of convenience.
Preventing a fertilized egg from implanting is not chopping a child up, but that is one form of abortion. It is a potential child, it is a microscopic clump of cells.
Please note that many times these pregnancies self terminate (miscarry), which could be construed as God aborting the pregnancy (if one believes in such).
> Please note that many times these pregnancies self terminate (miscarry), which could be construed as God aborting the pregnancy (if one believes in such).
SIDS is a thing too, but that doesn't mean it should be okay to intentionally kill newborns.
