When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it claimed to be removing the judiciary from the abortion debate. In reality, it simply gave the courts a macabre new task: deciding how far states can push a patient toward death before allowing her to undergo an emergency abortion.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit offered its own answer, declaring that Texas may prohibit hospitals from providing “stabilizing treatment” to pregnant patients by performing an abortion—withholding the procedure until their condition deteriorates to the point of grievous injury or near-certain death.
The ruling proves what we already know: Roe’s demise has transformed the judiciary into a kind of death panel that holds the power to elevate the potential life of a fetus over the actual life of a patient.
Philosophically, the law should not involve itself in trading on lives. I actually find this heartless abortion position more consistent than the others and appreciate the soulless honesty of it.
The fact that nearly everyone agrees there should be at least some cases where abortions are legal means pretty much everyone believes that abortion should be legal and just hasn’t fully thought out the underlying ethics.
Because it means basically no one really believes in the unconditional right to life of a fetus - if it has an unconditional right to life, it doesn’t matter if it came from rape or incest and it doesn’t matter if it’s going to die within minutes of being born and it doesn’t matter if it’s life threatens the life of its parent. None of those factors should remove the right to life.
And so since pretty much everyone agrees there should at least be exceptions for some of these situations we must conclude that there is not an inviolable right to life. We clearly think that the right to life of a fetus is just fundamentally lesser from the right to life of an independent and viable living person.
Meanwhile the right to autonomy over your own body still looks pretty unimpeachable to me. Seems to be that the state continues to have no right to forcibly modify or control your body and that it can sooner limit basic freedoms like movement and association before it violates that. The only time we seem to think it’s okay to violate body autonomy is if the person has a fetus in their uterus.
What conservatives really want is to be able to dictate the calculus. They want to be able to tell people with a uterus what to do. They want to pick and choose who is and isn’t pregnant and offer as little agency as possible to the individuals. That’s always been the most important motivation and goal to these abortion bans. They want a breeding slave class and they’re just too dishonest with themselves to admit it.
A rape exception alone shows they are totally inconsistent on the question of “life” and “rights.”
The thing is, even an exception for the life of the mother shows that same moral inconsistency. If allowing a mother to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the fetus is acceptable, the other way around – allowing the fetus to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the parent – is just as acceptable. And it makes no difference if that preservation of life is 85 years or 15 minutes – the right to life isn’t contingent on how long your life may be.
These fake ethicists try to claim there’s a fundamental difference between performing an abortion and prohibiting an abortion, but both of these are positive actions taken by the state that engages in trading lives. If you want to argue on the morality of what a doctor or pregnancy’s choice to be part of an abortion, have at – there’s reasonably room for debate there – but there must be no intervention from the state.
I think it’s immensely charitable for a person to carry a baby to term. One of the most selfless things you can do. If you carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because you feel you owe it to this total stranger growing in you, you’re a damned saint. But our society does not mandate that kind of charity.
And pregnancy can be incredibly hard on a woman. My wife’s pregnancy was really tough. Especially with morning sickness, which she had for the whole nine months. She wanted a child as much as I did, but I never even broached the subject of having another kid, because of how hard it was for her to have the first one.
Some people love pregnancy. Some pregnant women go through their pregnancy feeling terrific. They’re the lucky ones.
I’d like a lot of these anti-abortion people to look up what an episiotomy is. And watch a video of a C-section. Even safe pregnancy in a medical setting is really unpleasant and painful in so many ways.
Slight tangent that I feel worth mentioning. There is recent good news for women like your wife. After being ignored by medical science for who knows how long, a more solid understanding of the underlying cause of pregnancy sickness has been reached. The hormone human chorionic gonadotropin or sensitivity to it.
The lead researcher has a pretty tragic past due to having severe, intractible pregnancy sickness. I heard an interview the other day with her where she recounted being so ill that she was unable to even speak. At the same time, she was told by her doctor that it was all in her head and she was doing it for attention. Her pregnancy sickness got so bad that she was unable to carry to term and was very much at risk herself.
But out of her fucked up situation came her drive to prove that the cause was biological and, with this breakthrough, there are now targets for medications and therapies that can be explored.
Ah well. We’re in our middle forties. Too late for her now (not technically, but not a good idea). I’m glad other women will not go through it though.
Yeah. Likely late for my wife as well but, still nice to know that it is a definitively biological thing and that there is real hope for it to be treated for others.
I like your reasoning here and I will keep it in mind if I get sucked into another one of these conversations, since I don’t have a uterus and don’t think I should ever have any say in what people who do, choose to do with them. The only thing I’m uncertain about is:
I’ve always felt the opposite. Maybe I’m just a contrarian or a misanthrope, but deciding to be a parent always seems selfish to me. It may just be my limited experience, but for all their good intentions, even looking past minor character flaws, I’ve never seen a parent raise a child in a truly flourishing environment. It always feels like they’re trying to relive their youth vicariously through their kids and I see so many negative traits and fears reinforced until they become personality flaws. I’ll have to think about this more.
Well, that’s a little sad, that you’ve only seen the bad side. Personally, I’ve seen good parents that let their kids be themselves, and bad parents that try to relive their childhood through their kids or turn them into mindless copies.
I think they’re right that the action itself is selfless. But just like a person can donate to a charity just to make themselves look good, one can carry a child for the attention.
Many ethical stances around abortion aren’t phrased around the right to life, because usually ethics has a pretty hard stance on that right. So the real ethical question isn’t about the unconditional right to life, It’s actually about your right to another person’s body or bodily autonomy.
Generally it breaks down to, just because a person requires the use of your body to survive does not mean you have a moral or ethical requirement to provide sustenance (your body) for that person.
Qoute from a nytimes article:
Phrasing it as right to life automatically discounts the real ethical question, does this being have a right to my body?
Thomson does directly address the right to life of the fetus in A Defense of Abortion, the underlying essay that the violinist parable comes from (it has several other allegorical arguments aside from this one that are, in my opinion, even better but weirdly don’t get referenced much). The violinist story only really addresses rape, but the others do not require a starting act of violence to make similar arguments.
She outright grants the life-from-conception argument. And argues for why it’s just not relevant by showing a series of examples that make plain the typical person’s instinct – that autonomy over your body is supreme to the right to life of another and refusing to be charitable to a stranger is not the same as murder.
In my mind, no one has ever come close to rebuking her argument, though many have tried. The fact that both pro-life and pro-choice people continue to argue about when abortion becomes unethical is very frustrating. I wish the whole “it’s just a clump of cells” crowd would shut up because that’s utterly unpersuasive to someone who believes in life from conception. It’s just a moot point. Even if the fetus is a full human being with all relevant rights from the moment of conception, abortion is still not murder; it is permissible.
I recommend the essay, it’s not a very challenging read (compared to the greater cannon of philosophical essays, at least). It’s probably been 15+ years since I last read it and it still lives strongly in my mind.
I appreciate the added context, but a bit thrown. I was trying to call out your comment that people don’t believe in a unconditional right to life, by trying to say it’s not the right to life that is questioned. But, you’re clearly well versed on the matter.
What part of the pro-choice movement do you think doesn’t believe in the unconditional right to life? Because to me, I don’t think anyone takes the stance that a fetus (baby?) that can survive on its own should be killed.
Or am I just being nit picky in your wording?
No one is advocating for killing babies. That’s kind of the point, though: abortion is not killing babies. If babies die after abortion, that isn’t murder. That’s just death. And whether or not the baby can survive post-abortion doesn’t factor into that, at least from a position of pure ethics.
But it’s preferable to not let the baby die. We didn’t deny it’s right to life. So if the pregnancy can be terminated without letting the baby die and without a serious adverse effect on the parent, we should do that. What’s fundamentally different after viability isn’t the morality, it’s just what is possible.
I’m pretty inarguably pro choice and I do not think we ought to ban any abortions. Yes, including late term, viable babies. The focus on viability is denying the unconditional right to life. It’s trying to negotiate about when that right emerges in order to make the arguments easier. And it’s an inherently weak strategy because it’s totally subjective. Even when the point of viability occurs is subjective.
If we want to keep babies alive, we should create incentives to prevent abortion and remove disincentives to carrying to term. In the case of a viable fetus, we should make sure the cost of giving birth is not higher than the cost of termination for someone who wants to not be pregnant anymore. But autonomy over your own body is always supreme over right to life. Always.
Not to even get into the fact that late term abortions are definitionally extremely complex , emotional, complicated situations where we definitely do not need the government imposing ridiculous catchall rules.