The abortion paradox

[genkaus]

That seems to be a very arbitrary measure.

It's not arbitrary at all. You should know by now that I consider the woman's right to choose what happens to her body to be above every other consideration. She has the right not to be forced to host another entity inside her and the right to opt out of that situation anytime she wishes. Whether or not that entity survives that separation is irrelevant.

And it seems more reasonable to me that many more adamant pro-abortion advocates. Many decisions boil down to a judgement call and I can understand why someone would believe this to be one of them. Generally, I believe people should try to base life and death choices on firmer criteria or at the very least defer in favor of the possibility that we are talking about a human life even if it is unborn. Especially when we are talking about late-term abortions or those currently considered to be on the edge of viabiity. Is there really that much difference between three-months and four. And when we look at an ultrasound of a very early term fetus, for all intents and purposes, it looks human.

You mistake my intent. Whether or not that fetus is actually "human" is irrelevant. You can declare the egg to be a human for all I care. All that matters here is the woman's right not to be forced to support anything in her body that she doesn't want to.

Hypothetically, suppose I have some rare degenerative disease and you have a specific mutation that makes you immune to it and the only cure for me is getting weekly blood transfusions from you which may or may not cause long term health problems. Do you think that just because both of s are humans you are morally obligated to sustain my life? Do you think that if you started doing so, you're obligated to continue in perpetuity? It's the same principle here. It doesn't matter if the woman makes the choice to have the fetus out of her body at conception or in four months or in nine months. If she wants it out, it should be taken out. Whether it survives beyond that would be up to the person who then takes on the responsibility of that entity's well-being.

To be clear, I'm not accepting the argument that the fetus should always be considered a human being or it becomes one at some point in pregnancy. I'm saying that even if it was, it wouldn't make a difference.

With respect to choice, I'm reminded of the movie, Crimes & Misdemeanors. In it, Martin Landow plays a doctor that murders his mistress to prevent his wife from discovering the affair. His brother, played by Jeffery Orbach, arranges the hit. Raked by guilt the doctor threatens to confess the crime. To this the brother replies, "The time to confess was to your wife about the affair. Not now. This is murder." My point is that the time to make reproductive choices is before pregnancy, either by contraception or abstinence. Once a child has been conceived, I believe the parents have tacitly assumed a moral responsibility for the being they created and primary responsibility for the care of the child until it becomes an adult. There are appropriate time windows in which to make choices and a time after which one must live with those choices.

That's an interesting story you chose. So, in your story, the doctor makes a mistake (the affair), refuses the chance to correct the said mistake (confession), commits an even more immoral act to cover up that mistake (murder) - and the morally correct path for him to take was not to rectify any of the above. Drawing the parallel, according to you, the parents have made the mistake (failing to abstain or contracept), they don't get a chance to correct that mistake and the moral thing for them to do is to persist in that mistake?

On the other hand, on what basis do you determine that they have "assumed the moral responsibility" that'd affect them for years to come on the basis of one mistake?

Some other people have argued that by my logic, people should also allow diseases to progress naturally without medical intervention. This argument is severely flawed. Pregnancy is a natural function of the body. A healthy pregnancy is not a disease or bodily malfunction that requires medical treatment.

You should really look up the meaning of the word "natural" before using it so casually. The first definition I came across was "Existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind". And since it takes two to cause a pregnancy, I'd say that all pregnancies are artificial.

If you are referring to "ordinary course of events" definition, then all pregnancies are unnatural. Consider what percentage of a woman's life is she going to be pregnant. Average life expectancy for a woman is around 70 years and, assuming she has 3 kids on average, the time she spends pregnant is a little over two years. That is, two years, out of the 70, that her body is completely out of whack - that seems pretty outside the ordinary course of events to me.

If you are simply saying that natural means what occurs in nature, then we are back where we started - other diseases occur in nature as well. And even when you have a fever, your body is performing its perfectly normal function of fighting off the infection. So your argument that medical treatment should only be invoked in cases of diseases or bodily malfunction, simply doesn't work. All you are going for is a special pleading argument.

Also, I don't know where you live, but even a healthy pregnancy, requires a lot of medical treatment. There is a reason why the maternal mortality rate and the infant mortality rate are considered measures of a country's development.