Abortion: A Brief Comment

Caption:

Picture: Is it really just… your body?

betterthanabortion: “My body, my choice.” only makes sense when someone else’s life is at stake.

fandomsandfeminism: Fun Fact: If my younger sister was in a car accident and desparetly needed a blood transfusion to live, and I was the only person on Earth who could donate blood to save her, and even though donating blood is a relatively easy, safe, and quick procedure no one can force me to give blood.  Yes, even to save the life of a fully grown person, it would be ILLEGAL to FORCE me to donate blood if I didn’t want to.

See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.”  It’s this… cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon.

Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death.  Even corpses get bodily autonomy.

To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expenseive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical.  You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died.

You’re asking people who can become pregnant to accept less bodily autonomy than we grant to dead bodies.

albinwonderland: reblogging for commentary

I’ll expand about the topic of abortion later, but I saw this yesterday off of iwastesomuchtime.com and decided that it needed to be addressed.

From what I understand, fandomsandfeminism’s [FAF] argument is that since everyone has an unalienable right to use portions of their body as they see fit, then a person has the unalienable right to decide what they should do with portions of their body. 

In light of betterthanabortion’s [BTA] comment, “’My body, my choice’ only makes sense when someone else’s life is at stake”, I think FAF’s comment is a non-sequitur (I’ll talk about non-sequiturs later) because BTA’s argument seems to say that a fetus is not part of a person’s body, and therefore does not fall under the definition of “bodily automony”.  FAF then goes on to define what bodily autonomy is.

To simplify, I think the exchange went something like this:

BTA: A fetus is not part of the mother’s body, and therefore doesn’t have the right of bodily autonomy.

FAF: Bodily autonomy gives us the right to decide what to do with our organs, blood and other portions of our anatomy.

FAF doesn’t really address the issue (a fetus is not part of the mother’s body); FAF assumes that a fetus is naturally part of a mother’s body, and the mother has the right to decide what to do with her body.  If a fetus is part of a mother’s body, then FAF’s argument is sound, but FAF doesn’t prove that a fetus is part of a mother’s body; FAF just defines what “bodily autonomy” is.

FAF briefly mentions that they don't believe that a fetus is human, which I think would have better addressed the issue.

For the most part, I think the issue over abortion can be summarized as this: at what point of time does a fetus become a human?

Many arguments in favor of abortion say that the early stages of a fetus isn’t a human; that an acorn is not a tree.  The argument that an acorn is not a tree is true, but to say that a baby is not an adult is also true. 

If I plant an acorn from an oak, it will become an oak tree.  If I plant a pine nut, it will become a pine tree. Same thing with walnuts, almonds, and avocados.  If we follow this logic, then a human fetus will become (barring unforseen circumstances) a human adult.  Stage of development is then irrelevant in the context of this argument.

The real question then is if it is ethically correct to terminate baby humans, or to terminate any human.  I think these questions are more interesting in the pro-choice/pro-life debate. 

For now, I think it is important to look at people’s arguments and see if they actually address the issues being brought up.  In my personal experience, I’ve met a lot of people who base their arguments on their assumptions without going through the tedious process of seeing if their assumptions are sound in the first place.  FAF seems to have the relevant information to back up their opinion, but appears to deem it unnecessary to bring up that evidence.  People not addressing the topic and going on tangents is yet a another topic to discuss.

This Tuesday, I’ll be continuing my thoughts on prophecy.  See you there.