YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
You generally can't remove a baby without violating their bodily autonomy. Most abortions involve essentially blending the baby up and scraping them out.
In the hypothetical future where we do a C-section to remove the clump of cells that will be come a baby, or the partially formed baby without killing it in the uterus, you are then ok with abortion? Regardless of the baby's viability outside the womb?
That's just straight up weird, children have been almost universally considered to be of greater moral worth than adults for all of human history.
I feel like we don't even live in the same reality if you think this is remotely true. The revealed preference of pretty much all civilizations, cultures, creeds, and faiths is that children as a class are not given any special consideration. Individuals love their children and the children of friends and family (aka the tribe) but the children of the other tribe? Absolutely not. Anyone with even a basic understanding of history should know this.
- Infant exposure in ancient Rome and Greece: unwanted newborns were abandoned or killed; this was a recognized social practice.
- Medieval and early modern European infanticide and abandonment
- The Children’s Crusade (1212)
- Massacre at Béziers (1209) during the Albigensian Crusade, women, children, and the elderly were massacred.
- Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) a major Christian sectarian massacre in France; children were not spared in the broader slaughter.
- European transatlantic slave trade: children were trafficked with adults, and many died in transport and enslavement.
- Industrial child labor in Britain children were heavily exploited in factories and mines under brutal conditions.
- Great Irish Famine / workhouse regime: mass death and child suffering occurred under British rule, including harsh workhouse conditions.
- Congo Free State under Leopold II mass atrocities under a European Christian monarchy; children were among the victims of forced labor and terror.
- German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904–07) women and children were imprisoned and worked under lethal conditions.
- U.S. American Indian boarding schools: Native children were forcibly removed, abused, and many died in the system.
- Canadian Indian residential schools: church-administered schools subjected Indigenous children to abuse, malnutrition, disease, and death.
- Holocaust: Jewish children: Nazi Germany and collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children.
- Holocaust: Romani children: tens of thousands of Romani children were murdered.
- Nazi “euthanasia” program / Aktion T4: disabled children in institutions were systematically killed.
- Armenian Genocide (1915–16): children were deported and killed along with the wider Armenian population.
- Holodomor (1932–33) a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that starved civilians, including huge numbers of children.
- Bengal famine of 1943: mass death from famine under British wartime rule, with children among the dead and malnourished.
- Great Leap Forward famine: Chinese state policies caused catastrophic famine; children were among the millions who died.
- Khmer Rouge Cambodia: mass death through starvation, forced labor, torture, and execution affected children on a huge scale.
- Rwandan genocide (1994): children were murdered along with the broader Tutsi population and other targets.
- Biafra / Nigerian Civil War starvation crisis: mass starvation devastated civilians, especially children, becoming a global symbol of famine.
- Carthaginian child sacrifice: thousands of urns with burned child remains have been found at Carthage’s tofet.
- Aztec and related Mesoamerican sacrificial systems: large-scale human sacrifice included children in some rites tied to rain and fertility cults.
Do I need to keep going?
If children occupied a universally elevated moral status in human societies. Then history should show near-taboo protection. It does not. It shows repeated infanticide, sacrifice, enslavement, starvation, institutional abuse, and massacre of children across civilizations, including Christian and Western ones. You may believe children deserve special moral protection, but history does not support the claim that humans have generally treated them as a uniquely sacred class.
Only utilitarian ethics (and similar deranged branches of ethics) would reach the conclusions you're suggesting.
Incorrect, a deontologist could easily reach the same conclusion, or a consequentialist. It just requires different values.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.
I think this analogy smuggles in a bunch of separate elements that actually break is usefulness as an abortion comparison.
- First, Alice wrongfully harms Bob. Bob is an already existing, independent person with his own standing in the world. Alice’s act is a rights-violating aggression against another person’s body. That is why criminal responsibility attaches so cleanly.
- Secondly, the analogy smuggles in illegal and negligent conduct. Drunk driving is already wrongful because it unjustifiably endangers others. Consensual sex is not wrongful in that way.
A better analogy would be something were you voluntarily did something that carried a known risk of creating a needy dependent condition and in that analogy whether you had a duty sustain it's life. I think that is why organ donation is common analogy. We usually do not infer from “you knowingly took a risk” to “you must surrender bodily autonomy for months to sustain another life.” Even if I cause someone to need my kidney, the law generally does not force me to donate my kidney.
And to be clear consent to sex is not identical to consent to gestation.
Regardless I think my general argument here is: Taking a known risk does not automatically create an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
which, by the way, violates their bodily autonomy
I made a response to this same argument: here. The baby is violating my bodily autonomy, me removing them from MY body does not violate their bodily autonomy. Their inability to survive outside of MY body is not my problem. Pro-lifer's want to assign more moral weight to a baby than to a human, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for it.
To be clear you are asking me to unpack a very complex and complicated topic that only marginally relates to the abortion topic in that they affect similar values. For similar levels of effort I'd like you to address how you can be pro-life yet not immediately donate your body and all your organs to help everyone who needs organ transplants. After all if bodily autonomy is not sacrosanct, and some humans have more moral worth than others, shouldn't we forcibly remove organs to help those of more moral virtue?
Or we can stay on the topic at hand...
pro-life absolutist
At least you are honest and consistent. I can respect that. I am near enough to a pro-choice absolutist, so I doubt we'll ever agree. Furthermore since I think humans are of equal moral worth (barring edge cases) and I am not religious, I don't see how I will ever consider a "child" (even granting a clump of cells is a child) of more moral worth than an existing human being. And thus be willing to abrogate the rights of one to support the rights of the other.
make society pay for it.
Normies hate this one clever trick: Don't pay. An expansion of equal rights around this topic is perfectly compatible with a reduction in social welfare to disincentivize anti-social behavior.
nobody actually believes this
Nobody "mainstream" actually believes - I fixed it for you.
With easy available contraceptives, access to abortion, and equality around parental consent rights, if Alice wants to have Bob's baby to lock him down, and Bob withdraws is parental consent within an appropriately timely manner. Alice can chose to have an abortion or chose to carry the baby to term without the societal assistance of social hand outs, her choice.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
biting the bullet on a lot of other topics in a way that would make you a libertarian.
Too Late...
YoungAchamian
2d ago
There is no right of exile that Society recognizes for the condemned.
There used to be, Britain famously exiled people to Australia. There are other examples if you want me to fish for them. Obviously modern society is a lot more complicated, and I'd say American Society is more on the retributive side of the spectrum.
A right to bodily autonomy does not automatically mean no one may ever physically constrain you under any circumstances. It usually means your body is not available for arbitrary use, domination, or violation by others. Imprisonment, on this view, is not justified because the state suddenly owns your body. It is justified, if at all, as a limited response to prior rights-violations under a public system of rules. Incarceration is one of the ways a society tries to reconcile one person’s liberty with everyone else’s security
They definitely have no such thing. At no point in my life have I felt like I have had full bodily autonomy.
And you somehow think this is a good thing, the pinnacle of moral virtue that we should aspire to? Just because the system is flawed doesn't mean we can't dream of a better one, a more principled one.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Oops yeah I read that wrong. I'm used to having the opposite opinion of everyone during discussion here. Makes me a bit too in "fight" mode.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I mean this gets into how a social group enforces rules, there are a lot of gray areas. For example, if I kidnap you and hold you hostage is that ok because society believes that imprisoning people is ok? What if I commit you to an insane asylum against your will while you are perfectly sane?
I'd argue that holding someone against their will for no reason other than you can is wrong, and there are a bunch of different lens you could use to explain why.
However, if I violate some social compact around what constitutes lawful behavior in my tribe what are my options? Non-Exhaustively:
- I could fight tooth and nail to prevent punishment, this will likely lead to my permanent expulsion from the tribe, or attempts to harm/revenge me for my transgression.
- I could accept the punishment for that transgression of my own free will, after which I might be allowed back into the tribe. This doesn't preclude me from professing or agitating for my innocence or a reduction in the punishment under circumstances.
Scale these up from tribes to modern society and I'd argue the intuitions follow. Realistically a criminal could fight their incarceration, its up to them if they think losing/being treated as an enemy of a society is worth that cost. They could escape to the wilds and form their own tribe, or wait until such unjust rules are overthrown. They can accept the punishment in hopes of re-integration afterwards. They have lots of options, but fundamentally they have the right to bodily autonomy, just as members of a society/tribe have the right to associate with individuals they want to. There's tension there, but I don't see the conflict.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Can someone get out child support payments purely because they didn't "consent" to fathering the child? No! We give them the old adage of "Man Up" and "You play you pay", and rightfully so.
Just because the West is gynocentric and hypocritical about something doesn't mean the argument is wrong. Realistically Men should be able to opt out of child support if they didn't consent to pregnancy, assuming a world where abortion is legal. It logically and morally follows.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Explainability/Interpretability in modelling is often directly anti-correlated with predictability. Modern AI/ML is a very good example of this. Highly flexible models often gain predictive power by learning complex, distributed, nonlinear structure that is hard for humans to summarize cleanly.
I'm looking for a grand overarching theory of society
Societal Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Game theory is probably your best starting point. Assume the fitness function is the resilience of such a system to survive + the desire of participants to propagate it/adopt it/live in it. Develop the theory from there.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Both sides of this debate have decided on a universal stance. Both want their moral system to apply to everyone, even people that aren't buying into it. They both want dominion and to ban the other.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.
Pregnancy is a risk of sex but it is not a 1:1 relationship.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of this pregnancy"
So what if you didn't consent to lung cancer, you have lung cancer. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of lung cancer"
YoungAchamian
2d ago
And this is what I was getting at earlier:
But I'm not blue tribe, I'm a libertarian. It should be pretty clear that I value the sanctity of bodily autonomy very highly. So it would follow that I view the removal of that right as pretty catastrophic.
Can you make the actual argument around collective amnesia clear. Because if you are just arguing the teleology of sex then I point you to this comment I just made link. What was said about Christian assumption of a default universalism applies to your comment/argument as far as I can tell.
Just as your right to swing your fist ends where my noise begins.
Technically so does the babies... which is why I can remove their body from mine, after which I have no say in their bodily autonomy. Their rights end where my body begins. Their dependence on my body and their lack of right to my body is morally consistent. If the technology existed to incubate those babies until they were fully formed then I imagine it would be considered correct by my morals to do so. After all who doesn't want to keep existing. However the lack of a technology existing does not suddenly make morals change.
Contrary to your last point, the reason either of us are benefiting at all entirely comes from the moral wealth of my side of aisle, I’d argue.
I didn't realize your moral side was now claiming total ownership over any and all children and births across the universe? Isn't that a bit of an arrogant and grandiose claim? My parents were trying intentionally for children. I don't think you can claim me. What about my dignity to not be enslaved? Of if I dress a certain way and walk down a certain street in a bad neighborhood do I lose that dignity?
YoungAchamian
2d ago
The exploration of the purpose of things is called teleology.
I link you to this Other Post. I understand what teleology is, but I disagree on your authority to tell me what the telos of something is. Sex is complicated and it will never be decoupled from reproduction but the belief that the telos of sex is solely reproduction is smuggling Christian moral values that are not given. Sex is also about pair-bonding, pleasure, marital alliance, kinship formation, status/politics, ritual or cosmic symbolism and sometimes exchange or obligation within a social system. Many cultures and many religions have a very different teleology about sex, what is your evidence that yours is the correct one?
This is a common problem with Christians and cultural Christians. They are close-minded in that they believe their morals are the one true moral system. Then they argue from that stance without ever identifying that the moral precepts of Christianity are not universal or with the understanding that their moral precepts are even Christian-derived in the first place.
Because children are innocent by definition.
Again, you are using the Christian moral definition of innocence. As a non-Christian, I lack the same moral foundation and definitions you do, so trying to use them to tell me what is and what is moral is not tenable. Make an argument stand on its own two feet instead of just dictating your definitions from a book. I disagree definitionally that children are innocent. Children as a class are merely human spawn. They have as much innocence as any human. Ork babies are no more innocent than Ork adults, Goblin children, elven children, borg children, romulan children, klingon children, Yuuzhan Vong children and all permutations otherwise.
“Your body” is no longer “your body,” at the point it involves the life and death of someone else. That’s the entire point.
We are going to disagree irrevocably about this. "My Body" is always my body, morally it is wrong to remove bodily autonomy from a being regardless of the reason. I don't think you can convince me that any form of slavery regardless of the cause will ever be ok. I'm not a consequentialist, and am not a utilitarian. The freedom to bodily autonomy is a quintessential natural right and it requires Tyranny to override that.
I'd go as far to say you benefit from this as we currently aren't harvesting your organs against your will because it will save the lives of multiple other people. Afterall "your body" is no longer "your body".
I also did not bring up organ donation, please highlight where I did.
Precisely. You chose the risk. And now you live with the consequences of said risk.
Show me the law or the penal colony where we condemn smokers to die of lung cancer without any chance of treatment.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I'd be curious to know if there are serial abortion users. If the average user of an abortion is 1-2 times in the life it makes it really hard to track historical usage for insurance to be an applicable analogy.
The problem with bringing in insurance is that insurance is a pool of other people's money. If you were a smoker and you could self-finance your chemo we would absolutely treat it. We just draw the line at paying for care of people engaging in risky behaviors with known risks continuously, from the group/collective funds. By that logic, medicare/universal medicine will not pay for your abortion if you engage in known risky practices, like sex without contraception, but you may finance it on your own. I think that is a fairly acceptable stance, and consistent. But it's not really engaging with the general moral fault line here.
If there were laws on the books that forced smokers to suffer lung cancer and we refused to treat them, that would be more akin to the anti-abortion argument. I'm sure I could come up with dozen more foreseeable situations with risks that people would really dislike care being denied for.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...
Nonsense the bible says the earth is 6,000 years old and humans were formed directly by God in the garden of Eden. The only ancestor of human women is Adam's rib. Stop cherry picking the bible...
Sex came first, and sex is for reproduction
Then why don't humans have a 24/7 365 fertility window. Other animals have it. Obviously sex is ONLY for reproduction. Except apparently not. Listing different forms of reproduction isn't really an argument. You've made a claim that sex is only for reproduction, give some evidence of this, listing a risk/probabilistic outcome of sex doesn't suddenly prove that.
but I'm OK killing people who deserve to be killed, I just don't think they should be innocent children.
And besides a sky-hook, what moral evidence do you have that this view is the moral correct one. It's not like Christians have never killed children either. Why are children considered so innocent that they demand special consideration? Would Alien Children warrant the same consideration?
YoungAchamian
2d ago
The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body.
The baby is dependent on me for survival. If I wish to use my body for something other than its survival and would like to remove it, I am within my rights to remove it. If someone else would like to put it in their body or test tube for its survival they may. It's not my concern. If the baby would like to form a contract with me to exchange value for its continued use of my body, then it should make an offer.
You’re the one who chose to commit the act.
I chose to take a risk. Much like when I decided to smoke a cigarette. Just because the lung cancer became a sentient clump of cells doesn't entitled it to my body or preventing me from attempting to get rid of it.
What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.
I forgot the "fighting for existence" is such a moral rectitude that it permits the overriding of any other beings rights. Let me quickly go tell my boss he needs to pay me a bajillion dollars because I am "fighting for my existence"
YoungAchamian
2d ago
As the new Tyrant of America is is now my degree that premartial sex is limited to Anal or Pegging only. Anyone caught doing something as disgusting as "a penis in a vagina" before marriage shall now be forced into 18 years of indentured labour.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.
There are a lot of foreseeable consequences to a lot of actions. We as a society don't stop people from trying to mitigate them or prevent them. In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.
Do you want to make a stand that any and all foreseeable consequences of actions now require you suffer them with no renumeration or mitigation allowed regardless of the situation?
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I think the passenger analogy doesn't really apply well here because the passenger in a car still displayed agency in determining the risk/reward of getting into the car. A baby doesn't display any agency on being conceived.
But if you want me to stake a position, then even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no. It's my body and you can't morally compel me to use it.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Probably because a 1/6 chance of killing yourself is a risk that most people think is too much. Especially when there is only a marginal reward.
I don't think that risk/reward ratio really applies in Sex or Driving.
Sex is literally FOR babies,
I must have missed the part of health class where they discussed how human females are fertile 24/7 365 days a year. Instead of the short window around the ovulation cycle. Or that how when females are not fertile it is not possible to have sex with them. You should submit your new revolutionary information to the latest medical journal, this could be a major breakthrough on human bodily functions!!
Sarcasm aside, you are smuggling in a moral argument to a functional argument that does not follow it. Just because you believe that sex = babies doesn't mean its actually true from a purely biological functionality fact(which you are also wrong about). I think I could construct several purely biological functional arguments for various other things that you would strongly disagree with.
You are essentially using arguments as soldiers for principles you don't actually care about. Make your real argument that God/bible says abortion is wrong and be done with it.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I think that would be an actually interesting philosophical question, especially if we examine our response to other situations where people engage in actions intentionally that effect other people but then change their mind. In some situations like contract law, we enforce the prior agreement, but in others like a promise to aid or a charitable donation we don't enforce compliance.
It's a question of how much bodily autonomy you have depending on the cost of your bodily autonomy on other people.
Only if you think values are zero-sum.
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