Here’s a statement on twitter:
Blogger said woman's rights over own body extend to abortion even if fetus conscious & writing poetry in womb. I profoundly disagree. 1/2
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 23, 2014
The “blogger” happens to be me, and here’s what I said in full:
We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.
This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.
I think that’s the only reasonable position to take: it is a decision by the host, who bears all of the obligations, and it is not right for others, who will not have to carry that same burden, to dictate what may be done.
How about a thought experiment? Scientists are supposed to like that sort of thing. Imagine that an alien species envelops the earth in a cloud of infectious DNA, and little needles carrying embryos rain down on us. If you’re struck by one, you’ll start growing an alien cyst in your body; it will fester for a bit less than a year, draining you of energy and making movement awkward, before rupturing and releasing a semi-autonomous intelligent creature. This process kills roughly 20 in 100,000 infected individuals, so it only has a small but very real chance of being lethal. The released creature is also going to demand approximately 20 years of full time care from its host.
Just to add an ironic twist, by some peculiar quirk of physiology, human women are totally resistant to the infection, so only men experience it.
Another unique feature of the alien cyst is that it is capable of communication. Shortly after infection, it extends a small neuronal process directly into the host’s brain, and begins talking — reciting alien history, literature, and culture. It’s fascinating stuff. Scholars, the military, and the government have a serious interest in compelling all the infected individuals to carry the cysts and share their information.
Of course, there is also a very simple surgical procedure to remove the cyst at any time, with very little risk; there are also drugs — you take one pill, and the cyst is expelled from your body, relatively painlessly.
What do you do? Personally, I’d find it extremely interesting to have a conversation with an alien intelligence, and if infected, I’d be tempted to keep it. I’m also financially stable with good health care, so I could probably cope with the financial burden, and would get the medical assistance to minimize any risk.
On the other hand, though, if I were more insecure economically, or had risk factors that made carrying the cyst more dangerous, or simply did not want to support this alien entity (maybe I have more interesting and important things to do with my life), who are you to tell me that I do not have the right to resist this invasion? Maybe it has brilliant things to whisper to me; maybe it will be unbearably adorable once the cyst breaks; maybe society is saying it really wants me to share the words of the alien; but ultimately, it ought to be my decision to make the sacrifices necessary to carry this creature. And if it is unwanted, it should be my right to end it. Who are you to tell me that the life of this parasite is more valuable than my own?
Being ordered about what I’m allowed to do with this infection would also be particularly galling if the people most insistent about it also happened to be a group of people who were totally immune from any possibility of ever having to host an alien themselves.
You just don’t want it writing poetry.
Hmph.
@1 – Vogons.
Well maybe you should have been thinking about the consequences more before you got yourself infected.
That’s why you write poetry…imaginary immunity?
Yeah, #3, if we wore more heavy protective clothing, the parasites couldn’t get us.
Why go out at all, in fact?
Foetuses certainly don’t write poetry, but we just as surely know that some people with Down’s.
What would Dawkins do with a poetic foetus with an extra chromosome?
re @3:
yeah dats rite! you didn’t wear yore needle-proof overcoat, and went walking around under the open sky. You wanted to get injected, it’s all yur fault. You gotta pay the consequences for your risky behaviors. yada, yada, yada, boom.
.
Yes, I’m sure Dawkins would be perfectly OK with being forced to be a long term, continuous, blood transfusion donor to poets and other conscious beings. Even he must see that such a donor cannot be ethically obliged to maintain the connection. That everyone has the choice to discontinue at any time, and does not have to justify it with other reasons.
I am sure that D would be perfectly fine with forcing anyone compatible into being the donor if he was the recipient; who needed the blood transfusioning to stay alive (and to keep writing his obnoxious tweets).
I thought about hosting and raising a “semi-autonomous intelligent creature” but I decided to go on vacations and buy toys instead.
These poetry-writing aliens – are they Vogons?
I think I agree with Dawkins here, IF foetusses would be sentient, abortion would be wrong. Do we accept it if people ‘stand their ground’ and go around killing other humans if they think there is a 2/10.000 that person would kill them? Would we accept it if one of a pair of conjoined twins go bored with sharing one of its organs and got a team of doctors to cut off the other twin, leading to its death?
Imposing on the bodily autonomy of another person is wrong (e.g stealing someones blood to save another), but isn’t it less wrong then going around murdering sentient beings?
PZ Just to add an ironic twist, by some peculiar quirk of physiology, human women are totally resistant to the infection, so only men experience it.”
If this was true “alien removal pills and procedures” would be available on demand at the local 7-11 (and covered by insurance).
captaindecker @ 11
I’m sentient and I need one of your kidneys. You’re the only compatible person in a position to provide me with one before I die. It would be wrong of you to refuse.
The Horde is going to surround your house and force you to give that kidney to Seven of Mine. We shall write horrible things about you if you refuse, murderer.
re @11:
Read your hypothetical, again, captaindecker. Can you not see that the organs of a conjoined twin belong to BOTH of them? That body autonomy is blurred in such a twin?
Do not conflate “abortion” with “murder”. I agree, the conflation is due to our inadequate medical technology; but no one is asking for the right to murder, but the right to discontinue this invasion of one’s body by another organism.
Also this:
Depends on the color of their skin.
That’s what they really mean, of course.
@ Seven of Mine
I agree, there are two wrongs here. One is the wrong of the aliens (and you) to claim part of my body for your survival. The other wrong is killing the alien, or anybody else, to prevent you from taking my kidney.
@15, and everybody else
I’m talking specifically about the example PZ made here, in which case the aliens are sentient like us. Aren’t abortion and murder the same in his example, or am I thinking all wrong about it?
to try and cut off captaindecker at the pass, please go read this, especially the “tacit consent” objection and response part, which I assume may be where captaindecker is headed next.
@15
That is a fair point, I was thinking about something like a liver beining clearly inside the body of one of the conjoined twins, but to be honest I’m not sure that is possible. But since we are talking hypotheticals here (at least I am, abortion is a human right exactly because these far fetched notions about sentient aliens are NOT the way things are), it would be wrong to kill one of the conjoined twins if it depended on an organ that clearly ‘belongs’ to the other twin, correct?
captaindecker @ 18
So if I need a kidney at some point in the future, you’ll be totally cool with me showing up at your door with a doctor bearing a scalpel in tow?
For me, talking about these impossible hypotheticals like ” if fetus conscious & writing poetry in womb” is on the similar level as mentioning purple people in discussions of racism or what if a leopard escapes the zoo in discussions about gun rights.
This shit either isn’t possible, or has negligible chances of happening. What does it really contribute to the conversation? Precisely nothing, except making it clear that you either feel insecure in your views or are just that much of an asshole that wanking about some far-fetched hypothesis is more important than the possibility that very same wanking my be making it more difficult for those a bit more interested in abortion rights. Oh, you are pro-choice, but…. Of course there is a but. A what if. What if the fetus is writing poetry in the womb. Sure, it’s impossible. It’s insulting to even bring up that kind of idiotic hypothetical when people are discussing rights that are currently being denyied to a significant number of women, where women are rather left for dead than given right to govern their own bodies.
But what if the fetus is figurin out cold fusion in its tiny little brain. Surely that is a hypothesis worth exploring, right?
It’s not like women being denying abortion is a current problem that many of us would really like to be handled and solved yesterday? Hey, a worthy goal, but there is always a what if or but.
rq and I discussed this in the Lounge, so I’m copy pasting the conversation here:
To answer rq’s last question: I’m not sure about cancer. Can it give priority to Alzheimer’s? THat one is nasty and I won’t support a fetus who doesn’t use its genius to cure Alzheimer’s.
Can we abort the fetus if instead of poetry it just writes patronizing and sexist tweets?
@19 Thanks Carlie that was edifying.
What Beatrice and rq said, exactly.
Maybe there will be room for thought experiments about abortion someday, when women aren’t dying in childbirth and being forced to carry pregnancies to term and dying from treatable diseases that doctors refuse to treat because they’re pregnant and they aren’t allowed to abort. But right now, there is a lot of actual demonstrated harm, all the way to agonizing deaths, because of people being swayed by “what if” thought experiments that can never happen. So no. We don’t have time for that kind of mental masturbation right now.
Jafafa Hots,
Dunno. Is the fetus a part of educated elite?
Because educated elite deserve our respect. Because they say so.
captaindecker #11
You’ve neatly (and, being charitable, I’ll assume unconsciously) separated two actions which are in fact not separate. Would you say that I’d committed murder if the only way to stop someone stealing my blood was to kill them?
I HAVE only one kidney (I lost the other to a terrible infection). If I were to become pregnant, that fetus would be sharing that kidney, and Ireland, where I live, would still make me go through the stated process (unless I could arrange to visit a compliant doctor in the UK for the procedure).
In the scenario we are talking about with CaptainDecker, they would presumably be OK with someone on dialysis taking my remaining kidney, if I was the only acceptable donor, in order to save themselves.
Here’s another scenario. Suppose I were a sentient being and I suffered a condition in which I needed cells from a donor . Could I use cells from the fetus with which I was pregnant, thereby killing the fetus? What if I were to die without the donation within several weeks? You need to understand that Ireland would actually be perfectly OK with me and the fetus both dying if I couldn’t leave the country to get an abortion in time.
@19
Interesting read, though all the ‘criticisms’ listed there are rather stupid, especially the “tacit consent” part, so I’m not headed there.
I just think that if I woke up with a violinist attached to my back I would be pretty angry, but I would also feel guilty about unplugging her. I might still do it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who would think it was wrong to do that, and my only defence would be ‘well, I like me more then her, so thats why I let her die’. Its understandable that people would unplug themselves from the violinist, but would it be moral?
@21
I probably wouldn’t be very cool with that no, but I wouldn’t know what to say to people who’d call me a bit of an asshole for not helping you.
Beatrice
Here’s your next one (cross-posted): regarding Calcufetus: what about a math question slightly less complicated than a Millennium Prize Problem? Say, a Century Prize Problem? What about then, huh? Or, you know, just really advanced calculus?
And – here’s the really tough one – what about a fetus… creating… the atom bomb? Now that’s a genius right there – but what is your moral choice???? Oh, and it writes Lorza-level poetry, too. *boom* Did your head just explode? Because mine did.
Dawkins opens his mouth and out plops a steaming pile of dung:
Then I guess you don’t understand that the right to an abortion is provided by the right to bodily autonomy. Women have that right by virtue of being humans. They don’t lose that right to a fetus, even one that writes poetry. No one has the right to make use of anothers’ body without their permission. Period.
Damn Dawkins, you’re an asswipe. Get the fuck off Twitter. Hell, just stop using social media. Become a hermit. Interact with no one.
Are you ready to kick him to the curb yet PZ?
You’re spot on Beatrice. It’s irresponsible to throw around ridiculous hypotheticals in a debate where the pro forced birthers are already very busy making shit up.
Fuck, I shouldn’t have mentioned morals. I hate people who bring morals into these conversations.
What’s so moral about forcing someone into slavery, into donating their own body unwillingly to maintain the life of a not-yet-human-being of unknown potential? Why is that so moral, if removing that unknown potential from the world is immoral?
I didn’t realize that you wrote poetry. I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry, Mr. Fetus.
Jafafa Hots 223
To some people, patronizing and sexist tweets are poetry.
Or are you a member of the educated elite, here to define ethically and morally acceptable poetry to us?
;)
UnknownEric
Miss Fetus writes much better stuff. I’ve seen it.
Thought experiments are useful only in figuring out why you think the way you do. If it is about, say, the autonomy of the person with the uterus, it shouldn’t matter if the fetus is writing poetry or curing cancer. (Also, if the answer becomes different if you are one of the people directly affected, perhaps you should consider that.)
Hmmm. We shouldn’t abort a fetus because they could potentially develop a cure for cancer.
If I buy a lottery ticket, I could potentially (with a vanishingly small probability) win millions of dollars. Is that a compelling argument to buy lottery tickets? Somebody eventually will buy the winning ticket, and somebody will eventually figure out a decent cure for cancer. Lots of people out there having babies, and they are much more likely to raise someone that can reach their full potential (like cure cancer) if they can afford to raise that child. In addition, more people would be able to move out of poverty if they could choose the time in their lives when they do have children. Fewer poor people, more children well educated, more well equipped minds attacking problems like curing cancer.
rq,
You are making this conversation about abortion really difficult, you know. It was supposed to be really simple. Fuck, sometimes get knocked up, visit an abortionplex and have some coctails with your girlfriends until you are in the mood for some man-meat again.
But you have to go and make me start questioning the morality of killing off some tiny littles cutesy thingy that might be on the verge of solving its first math problem right when the doctor kills it.
Damn you!
captaindecker:
Your life, your decision. You don’t have a responsibility to save the life of others at the cost of your own.
Nor does anyone have the right to use your body against your wishes.
That’s why any question of poetry writing or fully human fetuses still doesn’t change the fact that women should always have the right to choose. It is not the right of any human being to utilize the body of another human without consent. All these cries from anti-abortionists amount to:
A- reducing women to incubators without the choice of deciding whether they want to carry a fetus to term. Doing so removes a woman’s bodily autonomy (which provides the foundation for the right to self defense which is itself another supporting argument for the right to choose-pregnancy is risky. It affects the health of women. They should have the right to decide if they want to incur that risk.) Removing the right to bodily autonomy means women lose one of the rights accorded to all humans, which means women would be treated as less than human. Dehumanization is vile and disgusting.
B- special pleading for the fetus. Why should a fetus get the right to use another humans’ body against their wishes? No existing human being has that right, why should a fetus have it? This would be giving fetuses a right no other human has. We cannot harvest the organs from a deceased person without their prior consent (i.e. cannot use their body without their permission). Fetuses should not have this special right (which is noticeably gone once they’re born).
No, I’m not educated (past 8th grade, anyway) and not elite… but I am male, which gives me bonus points when talking about the ethics and morality of abortion.
See, since I can’t ever get pregnant, I have no skin in the game. I’m an impartial outside observer. I’m able to be objective and logical, not all emotional about it and stuff.
Women have an innate conflict-of-interest. They would recuse themselves if they had any decency.
Oh, good. Another debate over when it is appropriate for my body to no longer be mine. How enlightened and not sexist at all. /s
Stay classy, Dawkins.
This Is Just To Say
I have consumed
the calcium
that was in
your bloodstream
and which
you were probably
saving
your bones with or whatever
Forgive me
or don’t
I’m a fetus
and I don’t care
I did some more thinking thanks to the link carlie posted in 19, and it looks like I was wrong. While I still think it is not nice to kill these sentient aliens PZ mentioned, it is immoral to stop people from doing exactly that, thereby depriving them of their bodily autonomy.
So just like in the real world, law to prevent abortion are immoral, even if there would be sentient aliens.
Thanks everybody for helping me think a bit clearer about this.
Well, hey, thanks for actually being willing to reevaluate, yo. Refreshing change of pace.
captaindecker:
THANK YOU.
Seven of Mine:
I know! It is really nice to see.
Please stop snarking on poetry!
*applause* for ledasmom
Beatrice – like a fetus, I live to make your life difficult. How ’bout them cocktails, then?
Jafafa Hots
I have reviewed your credentials and compared them to mine, and since you are so much more coldly logical and rational than me (you are male and I’m not), you definitely get the upper hand in making decisions for women, everywhere, all the time.
captaindecker
Thank you. Keep thinking, it does you good.
I don’t understand the animosity towards the concept of thought experiments here. It stinks of anti-intellectualism, and it is not remotely helpful. Thought experiments are how you test moral propositions for consistency without actually going out and doing immoral (or impossible) things. They are an extremely useful tool for testing the validity of our moral intuitions and isolating the assumptions that underwrite them. The realism of thought experiments is not relevant precisely because their purpose is to test underlying ideas, not to address the specific situations they describe.
The question addressed by this thought experiment is not whether women should be allowed to have abortions, but what moral principle underwrites their right to do so. No one is proposing sentient baby-poets, or arguing that the real possibility of such means abortion should be banned. Rather, the argument here is whether the reason abortion is acceptable is because women have rights (to bodily autonomy) or merely because fetuses lack rights (due to non-sentience.)
In fact, when I was a kid, most people I knew who were pro-choice went with the latter argument. It is in large part because of thought experiments of this kind that the focus has shifted to women’s rights rather than the absence of fetal rights. I know that it was a thought experiment that persuaded me to switch positions on the topic (though I also know that personal anecdotes are of very limited value.) In fact, the type of resistance to thought experiments expressed here is an essential precondition of the kind of inconsistent moral position that makes the anti-abortion position viable.
In the end we have only two ways to found our morality – naive intuition tainted by personal bias, or reason. The former has already been tried, and on the whole it tends to end poorly. The latter requires thought experiments. Hell, even the simple act of imagining yourself in someone else’s place is, at root, a thought experiment.
They are also used to muddy perfectly clear waters with utter bullshit, and are typically used by those trying to impose their (usually religious based) moral on us.
Thought experiments have their place. Philosophy classes, for example.
stuartsmith:
Beatrice @22 explains why these hypothetical experiments are not a good idea:
Here’s commenter Alethea H “Crocoduck” Dundee (from this thread a few years ago :
Do you live in the world? A frighteningly large number of people do exactly that, and they end up winning elections and getting laws banning abortion passed.
What one? I’m honestly curious, because all of the rationales for abortion that I found persuasive were very grounded in logic and real situations, not the “never possible in a million years” types of scenarios favored by anti-abortion arguments.
captaindecker – thank you for taking the time to read that. Being willing to be convinced by it is even more heartening, but just reading it in the first place is laudable – you’d be surprised at how many people just ignore arguments they don’t like.
*more applause for ledasmom*
stuartsmith, thought experiments can be useful in this way – but given the long and vibrant history of faux-vulcans faux-armchair-philosophising in faux-impartial-intellectual vein about whether women are fully human or not – while actual women around the world are being injured or killed by being denied access to healthcare – people are understandably and rightly very wary of their potential mis-use.
stuartsmith @ 50
It’s such a shame nobody in this very thread explained it. Multiple times.
What if the fetus were writing sophisticated theology?
I have to challenge Dawkins about Dawkins: he disagrees shallowly.
Btw – what’s the “2/2” tweet?
All of the objections to Dawkins’ bullshit tweet have already been covered, but:
What… the… fuck!?!?
Women should be required abort the potentially handicapped, but not allowed to terminate a pregnancy of their own volition because of something that’s never going to happen?
And for what? A penchant for eugenics? Blind, stupid sexism? Petty snipping against PZ for calling Dawkins out on his Down Syndrome tweet? Academic arrogance? All those and more? I’m not very good at reading people, so Dawkins’ motivations elude me.
Well, yes, Stuart, I agree that thought experiments are extremely important and useful in determining moral positions BUT thought experiments don’t happen in a vacuum. Supposing you’re giving a presentation to the NAACP and you begin by saying, “Just as a thought experiment, what would you think about slavery if it could be shown that people of African descent have lower I.Q.s and that this trait is genetic?” Would you feel comfortable doing that? Do you think you’d get a warm reception?
Or, let’s say you’re playing a sex game with a new partner. You are tied up, very well tied up. And the person very calmly asks you to engage in a thought experiment about all the different ways they could kill you now. Just, you know, very objectively and rationally. Maybe the person asking you to do this is also holding a knife.
In other words, there is a context.
Engaging in thought experiments with other people entails a context and the context is part of the meaning. This applies to all communication, not just heavily loaded situations where health, safety and human rights are up for debate. Dawkins is tweeting in a very heavily charged, very social context and — in my humble opinion — enjoying the outrage he is creating.
Tony!, thank you for reposting that outstanding comment from Alethea. (and applause for ledasmom!)
stuartsmith
Maybe this is why you do thought experiments. I do thought experiments to see how ridiculous I can make them before they break down completely.
Because if I was faced with a difficult choice (say, for example, abortion), I do not sit and think about the morality of what I am about to do. I do not worry about some higher-level right/wrong aspect in my decision. I think about what is best, for me, and by proxy my immediate family. I think about how the hell will I support another baby and whether I am willing to take all the risks and whether I can face all my medical fears and how will I go back to work afterward and what will people think of me for trying one more time – but I sure as hell do not think about whether my decision is Right or Wrong in a moral sense.
And this is why I do not do thought experiments to work out some deep, significant moral comparison: because in the practical world, all of that means bullshit, and all this talk of morality stinks of religion.
Pierce
The 2/2 bit is “That really would be murder most foul. I’m pro-choice precisely because (to the extent that) the fetus has no brain to be conscious with.”.
Which is why, earlier in the Lounge, I said this:
Also, in my above comment, abortion isn’t always a difficult choice. It just might be, for me.
Pierce R. Butler #56
Basically just a restatement:
I don’t see how he can be unaware of the issue of autonomy. I’m with chimera @58. Dawkins is trolling.
Dawkins is really assuming that a woman would make the wrong decision, isn’t he? To take this on over to the hypothetical fetus with a cure for cancer, Dawkins is thinking that a woman would just doom the world for her own silly pleasure. He isn’t trusting women.
In the real world, we have sentient women, non-sentient embryos, and a fairly neat dividing line in birth. Since it happens before birth, abortion is totally and only up to the woman.
If you want to talk goofy hypotheticals, I’m going to borrow an argument from the gun nuts. “If a few people die, it is the cost of preserving our freedoms and rights.”
My hypotheticals tend to start with comparisons between pregnancy and rape. Does anybody have a right to your generative organs, no matter how strong their need?
I know a woman who was talking about her decision to prevent pregnancy, who did use the term “alien parasite”.
Rq,
I don’t agree with you. I pretty systematically engage in abstract moral thought experiments before making decisions. Practical and pragmatic concerns may trump them, but there is nothing mutually exclusive about these different ways of addressing a problem.
stuartsmith,
Firstly, this particular hypothetical wasn’t brought up as part of a discussion between Dawkins and “a blogger” about whether they support abortion rights because of women’s rights to self-determination and body autonomy or lack of fetus’ rights because their lack consciousness or self-awareness.
It was a tweet (of course it was), with no context. Not part of a discussion, but plain provocation.
Secondly, context. That’s always important.
So when one pro-abortion person discusses why exactly they are ok with abortion with another, that’s fine. It can be interesting. When they do it in a way that activelly villifies the other’s position, what’s the point?
When Dawkins goes out of his way to show that those who support abortion because they are pro-choice, always, are somehow immoral, what does that accomplish?
He sets an impossible situation in which we could, in practice, never act “immoraly” (immoraly according to him). So we get OMG YOU ARE MONSTERS from someone who supposedly has the same goal – right of women to choose abortion or keeping pregnancy, with no restraints, coercion or oppression… only to accomplish nothing but him feeling smug, and those who are against abortion feeling like they are gaining ground.
Sure, it’s ground that can never be trodden. But it sure sounds nice when pro-abortionists are forced to admit that there exists some situation when they would be anti-choice. What a nice gotcha.
And what a sweet little gap in the doorway, where anti-choicers can set their foot and open the discussion about when exactly a woman’s right to decide whether she wants an abortion should be denied.
Right now, for Dawkins, that spot is a poetry-writing fetus. In the thousand comment threads that tweet is going to spawn, the goalposts will shift, at least to the point of “fetus might become a poet one day” and further, ending up with anti-choicer getting wind in their sailes again.
For what reason?
So that some twit from the “educated elite” could feel good about his own moral superiority. *spits*
A note from the mansplaining Vulcan dudes:
Women and trans men, just calm down and let the cis men ‘splain to you why you can’t be trusted with the responsibility of having a female reproductive system. They’ll tell you when you can decide to continue a pregnancy and when you can’t. Don’t worry. They aren’t mired down in all those silly emotions you have over this issue being entirely real and entirely about you and you’re real bodies and rights. They are totally rational. Why, your suffering and humanity aren’t even taken into account, they’re so rational and unfeeling about this! Isn’t it wise of them to be so above concern or emotion over what happens to women’s bodies? They’re just better at logic than you are. Making up scenarios about poetry writing fetuses is completely rational and absolutely needs to be done so that we can parse out any little loophole in your autonomy, just in case.
You’re welcome.
Sorry, that should have been “female bodies”.
I sometimes fuck up being an ally too.
I once wrote a poem as a proposed entry in an, ahem, pro-life poetry contest.
As I recall, it started “There once was a fetus named Norton”.
I don’t remember if I submitted the thing or not.
chimera
Sure, whatever works for you. I was mostly writing about myself, anyway – sorry if that wasn’t clear. And I really don’t do much abstract moral thought experiments when making my decisions. *shrug* Just seems kind of… pointless (to me).
The argument for choice based on the rights of the host is different from the argument for choice based on the non-personhood of the fetus. The rights of the host argument is attractive because it is starkly absolute, sharing this quality with the ati-choice position. Fundies love their absolute truths. But life is complex and people come into being gradually with no convenient bright line.
What if the sex act occasionally caused a physical conjoining of the two participants in such a way that separating them physically before 9 months would be harmless to one individual but lethal to the other? Could the one end the life of the other? Legally maybe, but ethically, if you have an opportunity to save the life of a person, should you?
It seems to me you can’t evade the hazy, inconvenient “personhood” side of the argument for choice, even though a newborn baby isn’t much different from a 9 month old fetus (which is why most US states make abortion gradually more restricted later in the term).
The advantage of the personhood argument is that it is the same one used at the end of life – you die when your brain dies, not your heart or your earlobe. Personhood is a function of the mind, that comes into being gradually.
The rights of the host can’t be completely ignored however, or the ethics of late term abortion would be indistinguishable from the ethics of infanticide. It’s just not the only consideration.
rq,
YES.
I particularly ♥ reductio ad absurdum.
Does any human being, no matter their development have the right to use another person’s body against their will?
Beatrice @71
… Though this particular thread seems to be mostly absurdio ad reductum.
contrarygymnosperm
There’s this thing called ‘birth’ that rather neatly removes the fetus from a uterus, thus removing its dependence on the host body. That seems like a pretty clear line to me.
stuartsmith @ 50;
There is no general animosity toward the concept of thought experiments on Pharyngula. What people object to is a focus on abstract thought experiments with regard to urgent social justice issues like access to abortion rights (often undertaken by people who do not belong to the social group who are forced to suffer and often die due to the not at all hypothetical real world consequences of the issue under discussion) when real women are really dying, suffering permenant injury, having their quality of life negatively impacted, and being denied their basic right to bodily autonomy (and thus their status as human beings) in their tens of thousands if not millions all over the globe every single day.
The crisis is urgeant, the crisis is now, and cool academic discussions about the intellectual underpinnings of why women should actually be considered human afterall (or why the shouldn’t, if the party arguing happens to fall on the dehumanisung, misogynistic arsehat side of what should be numbered among the easiest moral questions imaginable) can reasonably enough be seen both as a waste of time and as patronising toward the women who are suffering, or are at risk of such suffering at any time just by living their lives, while others pontificate.
I assume from your nym that you are male identified (I apologiose if this is in error) – I myself am a cis/het man; this means that I will never have to undergo pregnancy, no matter how much sex I may have or whether or not contraception devices fail and so on. The fact that my own bodily autonomy, health and very life is not at risk from the prevailing attitudes in some societies toward abortion means that I exist in a state of unearned privilege with regard to this issue. As such, I am beholden to consider that privielge when discussing topics like abortion, and attempt to empathise with the people for whom these risks are in no way abstract, but instead make up the day to day reality of their lives.
Chiding people who may well either die or be effectively enslaved due to our society’s sick attitude toward abortion rights for failing to sufficiently dutifully tug their forelocks at the mention of thought experiments is crassly insensitive to say the least.
Thought experiments do indeed have the place and uses, but it is not when the blood of specific vulnerable social groups affected by particular issues is being spilled all around. This is a time to stand on the principle that women are human too, and have an aboslute right to their own bodily autonomy that cannot be compromised in the name of the expedience of another human being, still less a non-human foetal mass that is in essence a parasite. Dickering over the degree to which women should still be considered human once they get pregnant – and make no mistake, that is what one is talking about when arguing about hypotheticals of the limits of women’s access to abortion services; the degree to which they actually have the right to bodily autonomy, and thus the degree to which society should deign to grant half of spcecies (the half without penises, in a revealtion that should be surprising to no one) that status of ‘human’ – serves to do nothing other than help the anti-choicers to obfusticate the issue the deflect attention away from the reality of pro-creative slavery in the twenty first century.
In the common parlance, you need check your privilege before coming onto a thread about abortion and extoling the virtues of thought experiments to women, many of whom either already have seen the ugly reality of denial of abortion services, or at risk of it in the future.
I like PZ’s alien fetus rain version of a thought experiment because (through weird means) it attempts to invoke “what would you do if you could actually carry a (sentient) life form in your own body?”
Lack of awareness of the personal cost makes it awfully easy for cis men to take unflinching moral stances on issues they haven’t personally experienced or dwelt on at length from a first-person point of view.
(I would venture that many men who disapprove of abortion would not harbor a sentient life form for even as long as six weeks even if the alien fetus was guaranteed to never be larger than half a pound and less painful than a human life form to deliver.) (I’m not sure where it’s going to push it’s way out, though.)
Oh hi, hypothetical day-before-due-date-healty-fetus abortion! I wondered when you were going to show up!
Jackie, I’m still grateful you mentioned the existence of trans people in the conversation. Being an ally is a process, not a state, and yer doin it rite. Thanks.
Dawkins, shut yer fucking noisehole, you trolling shitbag.
A simpler thought experiment could use plain old vampires. For the purposes of the experiment the blood needs to be freshly extracted from a living human, so no blood / plasma packs, no animals, no recently dead. The vampire is not one of those animalistic, mindless depictions, it is not some evil-by-definition Nosferatu terror of the night; but rather of the articulate, aristocratic Bela Lugosi vintage. It is thinking, feeling, and a person in every sense, who just happens to require a very particular diet in order to survive.
The question is then rather easy, I think. Can humans be compelled to be parasitised against our will, or do we have choice over our bodies even at the expense of another being?
“Let’s pretend the fetus is a person.”
“But it’s not.”
“No, no, let’s just pretend…”
“But it’s not.”
“Well, you can’t really know that, so let’s just pretend it is – ”
“But it’s not!”
“You don’t know that and you’re getting too emotional. Just stick with me – pretend the fetus is a person…”
“A FETUS IS NOT A PERSON!”
@rq
Birth is kind of arbitrary, as it can be induced with increasing likeliness of survival after six months of pregnancy. But as a practical matter yes I do agree that birth should be the magic line, with abortion legal and infanticide illegal. I’m not a kook.
@Tony
As social animals we are all interdependent. In the extreme case of one person dependent on one other person physically, then no, no one can use my body against my will. If they need a blood transfusion from me to survive I can deny it. But I would not feel good about that decision. The decision would not bother me at all, however, if the dependent was not an actual person.
@ contrarygymnosperm
Well isn’t that just really fucking magnanimous of you? Fuck off.
Even induced birth is birth. Dependence on host body is over. The end. You should read up on those late-term abortions.
@rq
Then you disagree with PZ, since he says it doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person, and you seem to feel it’s the all-important point. How do you define personhood by the way, scientifically? Surely not by location, or umbilical attachment?
contrarygymnosperm:
Are you aware of the dividing line that is birth? Abortions performed after 20 weeks are quite distinguishable from infanticide.
As for the “ethics of late term abortion”:
Any so-called “personhood argument” is moot as long as the developing embryo/fetus is within the body of a woman. Even a fully developed person with all the rights of a human being does not have the right to use a woman’s body without her consent. Also, see carlie’s comment @19.
contrarygymnosperm
I don’t disagree with PZ. I’m responding to your point about personhood, that the personhood of a fetus should be considered and that it’s all a blurred line and arbitrary cut-off points. Birth is a pretty sharp line to draw. Before birth, it’s the person-hosting-the-fetus’ right to decide what to do with their own body, whether to kick the inhabitant(s) out or not.
@ Seven of Mine
I’m sorry, I meant the “rights of the host argument”, not the rights of the host. Women’s rights are not subject to my approval in any way.
I was trying to explain why you could be pro-choice without supporting infanticide too.
Sorry for my stupid wording.
Anyone have that link to the commenter (can’t remember who at the moment) who used a fence to describe the dividing line between pregnancy and birth?
Holms @ 78;
A good example – can anyone’s biological needs be satified at the expense of another person’s bodily autonomy? The correct answer must always be no; no one can assert rights in any one else’s flesh, whether a foetus or fictional supernatural Transylvanian count.
There is also an easy shortcut option – If it sparkles when exposed to sunlight, kill it. It really is the only humane thing to do…
Since I’m on a roll today, I wonder:
How in hell do we live in a world where PZ expects men would find it easier to thought-experiment about a semi-intelligent alien getting attached to them for twenty years, than simply imagining they were plain old pregnant?
Screw hypotheticals if people can’t find that much empathy in them to relate to others regarding real situations instead of coming up with hypothetical stories that turn the whole problem into a dark fairy tale instead of a real-life problem.
No, this is not me hating on hypotheticals. They can be interesting and informative, even while occasionally being fun.
But in this case, at this point in time? Fuck off.
Hey, imagine if you ate a lot of tapeworm eggs and lost half your weight when they grew up*, while you were locked in a cave that velociraptors (Jurassic Park version) were trying to get into? Doesn’t that make you feel closer to starving people that IS(IS) is trying to murder?
No? Instead, you find the example insulting and minimizing their suffering since I basically turned it into a joke?
Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel.
* I actually read this in papers today, about some woman feeding her daughter tapeworms so that she would lose weight before a beauty competition
@ Tony
Well, my position is that no fetus is a person, so abortion should not be restricted. Others believe that it doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person, the foced dependency of pregnancy means abortion should not be restricted (a very good argument).
I guess my position is just a reaction against conservatives who insist that a fetus is a person. I think lack of brain development and experience proves otherwise.
A combination of lack of personhood and forced dependancy make birth a good dividing line for abortion.
rq:
I fear your reasoning would allow anti-choice people to insist on live births instead of abortions, especially as technology advances. I think it’s dangerous to allow the legal priciple that a fetus has any personhood at all.
The context of Dawkins’ tweets
That context isn’t just the status of current debates on abortion in the U.S. (home of Pharyngula), or in England (where Dawkins lives), or in Europe, or in the world in 2014 (though each of those contexts is a bit different). The context is also professional competition and animosity? between Dawkins and PZ, between bloggers on FtB and other bloggers and blog readers in the intersecting scientific and atheist and sKeptic and social justice communities or populations; who has taken what stand, when, and with whom.
This is a kind of chess. Each tweet is a move, likewise each blog.
contrarygymnosperm:
If you understand this, then you should understand why all women should have full access to abortion with no restrictions. There is never a time when one human being gets to make use of the body of another, even if it’s for their survival.
****
rq:
What gets me with these “fetii are persons” arguments is that people so often cannot list which qualities of personhood a fetus even has to begin with. They just blindly assert it. Is the fetus self-aware? Can it feel pain? Does it have an awareness of rights and responsibilities? It it aware of the passage of time?
No, they never bring these qualities up. But characteristics of personhood have been discussed:
At the end of the day though, it doesn’t matter if a fetus is a person or not, bc no human has the right to make use of the body of another without their ongoing consent.
from PZ: “…carry that same burden….”
Burden? It is a GIFT from my loving god. Who hates you, by the way. Pregnancy is god’s punishment for having sex (just check out my loving god’s curse to Eve). And birth control or (worse yet) abortion is thwarting that hatefilled punishment. THAT’s why you can’t have either.
Exactly. You want fetal person hood, forced-birthers? Fine. Have it. Have it retroactively til the beginning of time and proactively til the end of time for all I care. Your fetus-person still can’t hijack my body to keep itself alive.
Some say that being a city bus would be a ridiculous situation for your grandmother, even if she had wheels. I profoundly disagree.
contrarygymnosperm:
My apologies for misreading you then.
I would like to say that using the personhood status of a fetus isn’t the strongest argument to make, especially given that opponents of abortion are trying to pass fetal personhood amendments. That they’re unable to detail which qualities a fetus possesses that determines if it is human or not doesn’t matter, as they’ve come pretty darn close to getting personhood laws in place.
In addition, focusing on the personhood status of the fetus ignores the woman in the situation. It treats her as if her life, her hopes, her dreams, her wishes, her desires are unimportant. To remove her from the equation is to treat her as if she’s just the means by which a fetus is brought into this world…as if she’s a babymaker. She’s the one carrying the fetus. Her desires are of utmost importance. In fact, her desires in that situation are the *only* ones that are important. Her body. Her choice. The last thing that should be done when discussing abortion rights is to ignore the very rights of the people most impacted by the discussion.
Huh. Color me shocked that the reason Dawkins is pro-choice is NOT because he cares about bodily autonomy and the right of people to control their own bodies.
You know, Dawkins, I’m sure that if embryos were conscious, pregnant women and men would take this into account when deciding whether or not to carry the pregnancy to term. Because they are humans and are capable of examining different aspects of a situation when making a decision. It would still not be immoral of them to refuse to risk their health for 9 months for the sake of another person.
That’s why this move in particular really confuses me (and would be hurtful to me if I were PZ, but I’m not and wouldn’t say he ought to feel any particular way about it). PZ just recently bent over backwards to defend Dawkins as a personal friend in the midst of another of Dawkins’ missteps, and now all of a sudden Dawkins is dredging up a post from 2 years ago to pick an argument about for no apparent reason? I don’t get it.
And let’s be clear: it doesn’t matter whether pregnancy were litrally the safest thing in the world, people get to choose not to be pregnant. Full stop, end of, dusted. All the offensive pseudo-vulcan thought experiments in the world cannot change that simple premise.
@ Tony
We agree that the rights of women are absolutely a sufficient argument for pro-choice.
Strategically, I worry that if majorities of scientifically ignorant people think fetuses are people, that abortion rights will continue to erode, via the personhood laws you cite, and other restrictions.
So, I think that telling those people that it doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person, as PZ would have us do, plays into their hands politically and lets them call pro-choice people murderers.
Anti-choice people need to be shown that most embryos die naturally, and that the definition of life at the end of it also applies at the beginning. We need to defend women against men and women who themselves deny their own right to choose because they think abortion=murder. You’re correct that it’s not the best argument, but I think it’s a mistake to toss it aside for ideological reasons.
@chimera – 23 August 2014 at 10:58 am
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
From CaitieCat,
I second this. I didn’t state this in my own post, but people get to decide what medical procedures they get or don’t get. And if a medical condition is treatable in a variety of methods, a person and their doctor can decide which method is best for their situation. A pregnancy is a medical condition. A pregnant person and their doctor should get to decide what is best.
“A blogger…’
Yeah… just a friendly game of chess.
This latest move from someone who seems to be trying to emulate Bobby Fischer and also hopes to be able to play chess like him.
contrarygymnosperm @ 100
If you think they haven’t been, or that it’s an argument they’re ever moved by when presented to them, you’re very naive.
Thanks to rq @ # 60 & Daz… @ # 62 for RD’s follow-up tweet.
Oopses – html fail in my # 105: Only the “I’m pro-choice …” line can be blamed on Dawkins.
Carlie @98,
I don’t get it either. My comment was really intended for Stuart who was defending playing thought experiments, explaining that there’s a lot of context and a lot at stake here, on so many different levels. I think the personal or professional aspect is not really that important, but it is there. What’s more interesting is the way all the debates we’re having here are getting hammered out, the fact that this is happening, that we are doing this.
carlie:
Yeah, this is really odd.
I’m also curious why (how?) that specific post of PZ’s came to Dawkins’ attention.
It isn’t if it’s your body and you don’t care about the bodies of the pregnant person, it’s arbitrary.
Host?
I’m a person. but hey, whatever helps you advocate against my rights.
Tony,
It’s not surprising once you accept that Dawkins is an asshole.
These thought experiments boarder way too close to the anti-abortion tactic of calling fetuses “babies”. A lot of words parsing out who meant what for situations that will not happen and the real topic get lft in the dust.
Better if people found the beer and taco challenge on Twitter and donated to cause of keeping abortions accessible. (At least in the US.)
contrarygymnosperm
Then we agree.
Which is why there is no point in conducting thought experiments that may imply that the fetus is a person. It’s not, and that’s that, and that is my point.
I’m not sure where you’re going with the infanticide thing, or viability, or murder, since late-term pregnancies are ended by the birth of the fetus – the person whose body it came out of is under no obligation to care for it. The pregnancy is ended, and that’s that.
‘Abortion’ doesn’t mean ‘kill the fetus’ – it means ‘end the pregnancy’. Before viability, it just happens to end at a point where the fetus is unable to survive outside of the host body.
Birth is pretty arbitrary – except as compared to every other fricking stage of the process including fertilization of the egg.
Other than that minor quibble…
A “host” gets to decide when the party is over or if you’re an unwanted “guest” who needs to be ejected.
If you disagree, remind me never to invite you to my place.
It seems to me that the question, as it is posed, is grasping of straws to find a situation where abortion would be immoral by proposing a fantastical hypothetical.
I think however that the question of the right of anatomy of a concious host vs the right of life of a concious parasite is interesting even though it has absolutely no relevance to any abortion debate. I think the question is best framed in respect to conjoined twins. Do a concious parasitic twin have a right to live, even if it infringes on the conjoined twin’s right to autonomy? I do not at all think the question is simple, but I think I’d side with the side of autonomy but only because (as far as I know) conjoined twins often suffers severe health problems and dies young.
A point. (forgive me, if this has been addressed, or is addressed before the end of the thread, I only read 1/2 or so) *let us assume*, just for the sake of argument, that having sex amounts to signing a contract that says, ‘if this sex causes me to become pregnant, I will carry the foetus to term and support it for 18 years.’ As a matter of contract law in the United States, a contract that demands specific performance of personal services is considered involuntary servitude, and illegal under the 13th amendment. If the contract specified damages, that might be enforceable, but any demand that I carry the pregnancy to term would be tantamount to slavery.
Beatrice:
Oh, I believe that.
There’s just this conspiracy theorist in me that thinks one of the PZ’s detractors went to Dawkins and said “look what PZ once wrote!”
(I have no evidence for the above, and it not a belief I seriously hold, but it did cross my mind)
Nope, not logical. The conjoined twins implies some equality, which isn’t present in the fetus/woman case. Which is why hypotheticals can be bullshit arguments, even though some think they are relevant.
Tony,
That sounds plausible, and not like a conspiracy theory.
#116, Tony
Dawkins was aware of PZ’s poet-in-the-womb thought experiment two years ago, when he cited it in his defense of Sam Harris.
See here
Jon Hough, Could you expand somewhat on that clause in contract law, please? Not familiar with it at all.
We already know what men would want if they had the ability to carry a pregnancy. They howl about how they’re on the hook financially for the child with no say in whether they want it, while the woman gets the ability to decide their fate. They demand the ability to forswear responsibility regardless of what the woman decides. Their burden is a much lighter version of forced birth, but they can’t even abide that. They even refuse child support when the child is already born, not a theoretical possibility. We don’t need allegories to figure out men would want full abortive services. They’re already demanding that.
From the link furnished by Carlsten @119, for what it’s worth:
Maybe Dawkins has become confused about the name of Twitter.
Hey, Prof: it doesn’t mean “be a bigger twit than anyone else”. Just FYI.
@ Jackie
As you must know, “host” comes from the “host and parasite” analogy often used by pro-choice people, including PZ above. But don’t let that keep you from enjoying feeling offended.
Björn Carlsten:
I did not know that. Thank you.
contrarygymnosperm, it’s so kind of you to allow Jackie the right to choose what she can be offended by.
I’m so glad we have morally superior people around to let us know what we’re allowed to consider offensive. I’d hate to have to do it with my own limited ladybrain.
Condescending asshole.
Argle Bargle!
There seems to be a lot of that going around, dontit?
@ CaitieCat
Meta-offense! You win!
And proving my point, perfectly, thank you. You only have to give trolls enough time, and they’ll show their ass.
contrarygymnosperm,
Smarmy much?
@ contrarygymnosperm
Because the fact that the term is popular totally makes it against the rules for anyone to dislike the term because it erases the humanity of the pregnant person. No, really. Fuck off.
Jafafa:
I blame it on Dawkins.
Seven of Mine, you have to recognize that because he can’t get pregnant, obviously his opinion is objective and rational, unlike our emotional ladybrain responses, so obviously he can’t be in the wrong in any way, and he gets the right to audit other people’s reactions and sneer at the fools who take their very right to autonomy to be a serious issue.
But please, carry on, asshole, show us more of your condescending Vulcan act. It’s totally novel and entertaining, and we’ve never ever encountered anyone willing to barter our rights as a fun pastime and thought game.
Slavery?
Yeah, well, sort’a, kind’a, raising kids is a sorta kind of “slavery”, and maybe you could argue that under the 13th ammendment BUT
Reminds me of when I was an anorexic teenager and my mother said, “You look like something out of Dachau.”
My friend who was standing right next to me and who was Jewish said, “Dachau? You mother shouldn’t say that. You chose to be anorexic. The people in Dachau didn’t choose to be there.”
I didn’t “choose” to be anorexic, but that’s another story. And I do get the “slavery” analogy.
contrarygymnosperm,
What words you use when you discuss things is important.
Part of the failure of improbable hypotheticals and analogies is that they remove all the realness from the discussion, which I believe in case of discussions about abortion, is detrimental.
So instead of talking about a pregnant person, you suddenly have a host. It somewhat works with the parasite analogy (even though I’m not particularly fond of it), but it completely fails when it comes to alien beings implanting their young in humans (I’m starting to hate that PZ made up this story. It’s just another scenario that makes people avoid talking about the actual problem).
So then Dawkins failed the most basic question about abortion. If your only pro choice when the fetus isn’t doing something artistic, then you’ve missed the entire point. The woman must be OK with the use of her body and that is the only way pro choice works to benefit the female.
Also a question of curiosity if people believe in the end times, why would they be against abortion? Wouldn’t you rather that the anti-Christ is never born than to allow all that death? Still no guarantee but hey at least you would have done something to prevent evil, rather than force people to be subject to the apocalypse. Just saying.
@ Beatrice
You are right, host is a dehumanizing word. PZ said “parasite” but not “host.”
I will avoid that word in the context of pregnancy from now on.
@ Jackie
I am sorry I offended you, and I’m sorry I criticized you for taking offence.
Those people I’ve come across that believe in the end times see it as a GOOD thing, or at least necessary but scary.
I’ve never heard of believers who want to avoid it.
Anyway, not since the 1970s and The Omen.
These days they’d be seriously pissed off at Gregory Peck.
Oooh, thought experiments! Can I play?
Thought Experiment #1:
Let’s assume, hypothetically, that Christianity is true. Specifically (since there are so many doctrinal “flavors”), anyone who believes in and accepts Jesus as their Lord and savior will enjoy an eternal afterlife of love and happiness, and everyone else will endure an eternal afterlife of pain and torment.
Further assume that a woman is pregnant with a fetus that will grow up to be a famous biologist who will write columns and books and Tweets about atheism. He will convince many people (even publishing first-hand accounts from them on a “Converts’ Corner” section of his web site) to abandon their faith and become atheists.
Therefore, if this fetus is carried to term, it will result in many people trading an eternity of happiness for an eternity of torment. Ergo, the only moral decision for the pregnant woman is to abort this future atheist biologist.
Thought Experiment #2
Assume the same facts as in Thought Experiment #1, with the complication that the pregnant woman refuses to see logic and morality and refuses to abort.
As Dawkins’ tweets assert, a woman’s personal autonomy is not the relevant consideration in the issue of abortion — said autonomy, if it matters at all, can be trumped by the rights of even one poetry-writing fetus.
The eternal happiness and torture of thousands of people is surely a more compelling interest than one finite life span of a poetry-writing fetus. Ergo, the case for aborting the atheist biologist fetus is much stronger than the case for not aborting the poetry-writing fetus.
Accordingly, society would be justified in performing an abortion on the mother, regardless of her wishes.
Thought Experiment #3
Same facts as #1, except that the fetus has been born, and grown to become an undergraduate atheist biologist. He has not yet become famous or written his books on atheism, but will do so soon. You come across him when he is in a deep sleep. You are holding a hypodermic needle containing a substance which will instantaneously and painlessly kill a human….. (the rest is left as an exercise for the reader — why should I get all the “fun”?)
“The Myers Counterfactual”. There’s a novel in there somewhere.
contrarygymnosperm
You are a confusing kind of person. Thank you for apologizing, and for taking the time to think about the words you use.
(That’s twice in one thread, people.)
Wes Aaron
But the End Times is when everyone gets saved, and it’s been prophesied since time immemorial (or, you know, about 6000 years ago), and it must come to pass – precisely why the Anti-Christ must be born, or how else will the Will of God be done?
+++
Also, I think I have to apologize for using host-type language in this thread. I’m sorry I’m short of time to re-read all my comments, and mostly I know I meant it in the snarky sarcastic way to make a point, but I may not have always been true to that intent. For that, I apologize.
The end times. I have a Moroccan friend whose parents told me the story of the end times. I don’t know if this is Moroccan folklore or official Islamic version (I haven’t read the whole fucking Coran from start to end, was too violent for me) but this end times story is really striking: In the end times, when you stand before God and he judges you, he will interrogate each part of your body. Right hand, is what this person is saying true? What did you do? Left ear, what have you heard? Mouth, what have you said? Asshole, what did you do? etc. So, your body betrays you to God. Scary stuff.
My last comment was kind of off-topic. Sorry.
How many thought experiments does it usually take to finally arrive at a fully successful thought?
#137 Wes Aaron
I’m also a little bit puzzled why all but the most hardline original sin fundamentalists aren’t enthusiastically pro-abortion. If a foetus is innocent of sin, and therefore not automatically bound for Hell, wouldn’t it be preferable to abort the foetus and thus ensure it a place in Heaven? After all, if you allow the foetus to come to term and grow up, there’s a chance he or she won’t come to accept Jesus Christ as his/her personal saviour, and therefore suffer eternal torment. Why take the risk?
To defeat this logic, as far as I see, the fundie would have to admit that God sees nothing from with sending precious, unborn foetuses to Hell.
Carlsten, I think the fundies would argue that God intended us all to go through the Free Will choice of accepting our saviour or not and that aborting robs the fetus of that choice so that it can’t be damned or saved and is thus against the will of God to test us.
UnknownEric@34:
Heh. Frankly, Mr. Wank-ly you’re a sickening mess…
Hypothetical arguments boil down to “assume a situation in which I am right…”
At this point, I’d like to mention “Arvies”, the Nebula-Award-nominated story by Adam-Troy Castro, in which fetuses are conscious and writing poetry in the womb. And they’re doing many other things in the womb, too… like wielding political power. To be born is to be legally dead.
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/arvies/
RD couldn’t have made it more clear that to him the hability to choose wether to have an abortion or not is awarded by the fetus not being a sentient being, not the woman being one. Fucking hell….can you even really call that pro-choice?
dannysichel
I’m doing bug-eyes right now. That’s just frightening! *shudder*
So if I’ve got this right, to prevent the End Times would be against God’s will and therefore wrong? But wouldn’t preventing the greatest evil by sacrificing your immortality be a greater moral position? You would save untold millions from a painful death and being sent to hell. Hmmm?
Thank you for the responses, I enjoy the arguments against my question and they’re definitely on point with the dogma.
Since it’s their Gods will it cannot be undone and the sacrifice would be futile, therefore, they must ensure it happens so they can have immortality now. Does that pretty much sum it up? They just need to be as immoral as their God and their golden.
Björn Carlsten @145
Definitely a good point.
I have the utmost respect for Richard Dawkins, but I really think it’s time he stepped away from Twitter.
Is it just me or is Dawkins starting to show signs of being completely out of his element, like he has been infected by a nasty case of foot in mouth disease? I mean with twitter, his biology is spot on. I don’t know if he’s been watching a lot of Pat Robertson and it rubbed off on him or if he just doesn’t understand how twitter is not the same as other social media and that you need to heavily moderate yourself otherwise the wolves will come.
Assume a spherical fetus…
So Richard Dawkins has entertained the thought experiment that women are actually full people (who occasionally even write poetry) and has apparently found the premise lacking. Back to using us as arguments when he’s arguing against religion, I guess.
Wes Aron,
This isn’t just about twitter any more.
His notpologies aren’t written on twitter, he isn’t restrained by 140 characters there. And yet, he keeps blundering, dancing around the crap he wrote on twitter without ever acknowledging he was wrong, and apologizing for haters misunderstanding him instead.
For such a brilliant science communicator, he’s shit at conveing his thoughts.
Sorry for getting your name wrong, Wes Aaron.
Alan Wardroper at #153:
After years of rancid theoretical masturbation in public forums like Twitter, coupled with refusing to engage and listen when challengers ask him to take it inside, what little respect I have for Richard Dawkins is now statistically indistinguishable from zero, and I think it’s past time he stepped away from Twitter.
I hereby reiterate my invitation to Professor Dawkins to willingly volunteer for some time listening and reflecting on the Bench-of-Shut-the-Fuck-Up.
Still learning,
Robert
I’ve heard the examples about the patient who needs blood/organs used to justify abortion before, and I think it would help make the comparison more obvious to not refer to abortion as “killing” a fetus.
It isn’t. Leaving aside the fact that the typical abortion is performed on an embryo rather than a fetus, the simple fact is that the abortion doesn’t actually kill it— it just removes it from its host. That an embryo/fetus is an obligate parasite and dies shortly after being removed from its host is incidental, just like the death of the transplant patient when you refuse to give him your organ; refusing to save someone’s life at considerable expense and risk to your own is not the same thing as killing them.
Alan Wardroper:
I can’t fathom this. From his dismissal of women’s concerns in ‘Dear Muslima’ to his generalized statement about stranger rape at knifepoint being worse than date rape, to his comments about how it would be immoral to bring a child with Down’s Syndrome into the world, to *this* comment, Dawkins has demonstrated that he has some problematic beliefs about the rights of women.
He needs to stick to just talking about his area of expertise and/or atheism. Everything else, he ought to sit down, STFU, and listen.
Beatrice
I understand he defends himself without apology outside of twitter but it is almost always something he has done on twitter that has sparked the disconnect. I don’t know if it is that he doesn’t understand how people are interpreting what he is saying differently than he intended (if that is the case) or if he doesn’t remember what is said (so he doesn’t want to admit fault)? It just seems really baffling considering the good things he does, in almost stark contrast, he can do things so wrong.
is he STILL harping on this aborted poet thing? I guess I’ll have to insert shameless self-promotion again, and quote myself from my essay from 2 weeks ago (http://www.secularwoman.org/node/379)
Hasn’t he reached the point of no return? What I mean is, he has tweeted these provocative things, as Tony listed in #161, and any chances of him either stopping that and/or listening to anyone who disagrees seem remote at best. It’s hard to predict what boneheaded thing he might say next, other than it will be insulting, demeaning and ridiculous. I’m beginning to wonder if his tweets are not deliberately provocative, intended to trigger outrage. Whatever his motives might be, is it time to ignore him? Categorize his crap as just that, and not respond?
Wes Aaron
If people were just interpreting differently, he’s had plenty of opportunity to explain himself. As was pointed out, he hasn’t done so.
Most of his apologies, from what I can deduce, amount to ‘You’re all being too emotional about a topic that shouldn’t be emotional’. I may be missing something there, though.
dhall:
As long as he is viewed by the public as a (or ‘the’) face of atheism, I don’t think so.
I think there are two separate issues that are getting conflated.
First, if a woman is pregnant, she and she alone has the right to decide whether to carry the pregnancy to term. Nobody else has the right to make this decision for her, and her right to choose should be a legal right.
That said, there is a secondary issue, which is that it’s possible (and in fact happens quite often) that a person makes a choice that they have the right to make, but for a fuckwitted reason. For example, suppose a woman becomes pregnant with a man of a different race and aborts because she doesn’t want to have a mixed-race child. It is possible to affirm that that was her choice, while at the same time decrying the racism that went into the choice. Sex-selective abortions, in which female fetuses are aborted because she wanted a boy, aren’t unheard of; same issue. If medical science ever reaches the point where a doctor can do a test and determine the sexual orientation of the fetus, and a whole lot of gay fetuses end up getting aborted as a result, that, too, will be her choice, but the fact that it’s her choice doesn’t spare her (or at least shouldn’t spare her) from criticism over the homophobia that went into the decision.
So if a fetus ever comes along who is sentient and writing poetry in the womb, yes, the woman carrying the fetus will have the right to decide whether to carry it to term. Just as I have the right, if a woman being chased by a rapist knocks on my door for help, to slam the door in her face and then watch the rape through my window. That doesn’t mean that such a choice would make her, or me, a praiseworthy human being. Even though in both cases, it really was her, and my, choice to make.
Jadehawk 163: I was just going to drop your link here. ;)
Instead I’ll shamelessly drop my own: I just put Richard Dawkins in my abattoir.
rq @165
I wasn’t saying that he was right in defending himself this way, it was more meant to say I don’t understand his apparent foot in mouth defense. An his condescending defense is more of a dismissal of any fault than an acceptance that he could be wrong. I’m just wondering if it has more to do with his age and mental awareness rather than his intent. I could be wrong maybe he does just want to rile people up but it just doesn’t make sense (not that any of the recent crap he has defended without accepting fault is acceptable).
Sorry having a hard time wording this. I almost want to say it seems more like an old man trying to stay relevant because they feel time and relevance slipping away. I mean this in the nicest way, really. He still has a ton of useful knowledge it just seems he’s lacking the correct tact to apply it at times and it seems to be getting worse, not better.
I also apologize after rereading my previous post I see where I worded it wrong.
Instead it should be in light of all the good things he has done, in almost a weird contrast, I find it baffling that he can do things so wrong.
eeyore @ 167
Nobody is conflating anything. You just made up a whole bunch of shit and attributed it to Dawkins for reasons best known to yourself.
#167 eeyore – ???? Are you really equating a woman’s right to decide for herself whether or not to be pregnant with your right to ignore a terrible crime–not just ignore it, but watch it? Seriously?
eeyore @167
Not impressed with the scenario. First of all you should read the Right to Bodily Autonomy. This is the foundation of why abortions for good or bad reasons should be legal. The scenario really fails to address the simple fact that the woman must carry the child (don’t care whether it is a child or fetus the law is the same) to term, using her body and organs. Since we don’t ever give someone right over another person’s biology why should we for the fetus? Especially when you consider that without easily available abortions centers where is a woman to go when it’s a threat to her very life and well being and let’s not forget the plethora of trap laws that make it a long and drawn tap dance just to get it done.
The U.S. has a long and bloody history of what life was for women before abortions were legal, and it is dehumanizing to imagine that women couldn’t receive medical treatment until they revealed the name of the father and the person who performed the abortion. Then add to this if she could be medically saved she faced up to five years in prison! And the doctor faced a 20 year sentence. Then if you really don’t see the problem yet look at the fatality rate of illegal abortions in Brazil it’s 10%. That means one in ten women getting illegal abortions (because their not legal) which the majority are mothers who cannot afford another child or are women who feel incapable of raising a child. This isn’t victim-less and the effects are long reaching. But now lets add in the fact that medical abortions are safer than pregnancy. And for the final nail in the coffin given that there are 6 million abortions every year at a fatality rate of 4800, if they had to be performed illegally it would be 60000 dead women. I cannot see any reason that whether the abortion is or is not justified (by your definition) that the woman shouldn’t be allowed to protect themselves and must be hostage to their biology.
The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson has an analogy that’s different from yours, PZ, but serves the same purpose. It’s in her 1971 essay A Defense of Abortion. Easily found online.
eeyore #167
I’m not sure why you felt anybody here needed to be told any of the above. Yeah, people whose personal views I dislike, or even hate, still have the right to personal autonomy. Thank you for the amazing insight.
You’re equating somebody donating the use of their own body for up to nine months, along with a further twenty-ish years of direct responsibility to feed and care for another person, with opening a door and giving a person safe haven until the police turn up? Christ, you’re one fucked up puppy, aren’t you.
PZ–You need to throw a wrinkle in your thought experience for Dawkins: The alien parasite he’d get would be a tiny, alien version of Ken Ham, whispering day and night directly into his brain, railing against creationism and screaming about the righteousness of his god and the little pamphlet his god gave unto the aliens to save their souls. If we’re to assume that aliens are anything like us, then a goodly portion of them have to be annoying douches who go on and on endlessly about useless crap, however poetically. I suspect that Dawkins would abort his little parasite, posthaste.
And in case it needs saying again (and again and again): Doesn’t matter how sentient and conscious a being is, it doesn’t have the right to live inside another sentient and conscious being’s body without the host’s ongoing consent.
Seven, No. 170, what did I make up? And more to the point, what did I attribute to Dawkins? I didn’t even mention him in my post.
Dhall, No. 171, what I am equating is the right to make choices that other people find reprehensible, while at the same time recognizing the right of other people to say that such choices are reprehensible. So far as I know, I have no duty to open my door to a crime victim. Would not doing so make me a repulsive person? Yes it would. But it would still be my choice to make. Just as it would be the choice of a pregnant woman to abort a sentient, poetry-writing fetus, albeit a reprehensible choice.
Wes, I started off saying, and have now repeated, that abortion should be legal and it’s her choice, so I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with me about. Unless you think that “it’s my choice” equates to a right to be free from criticism. It doesn’t.
Daz, the whole point of my post is that “it’s my choice” does not equate to freedom from criticism for the choices one makes. People have the right to vote Republican. That doesn’t mean nobody else gets to call them shitheads for having done so.
Just ‘cuz I like what Amanda Marcotte writes: Richard Dawkins and the problem with focusing on abstractions and hypotheticals over the concrete.
Why would she do that? Maybe because there is substantial prejudice against women, minorities (including mixed race people), and gays? Then wouldn’t the best way to prevent these abortions be to reduce prejudice to the point that virtually no one would think of doing such a thing rather than forcing women to bear children that they don’t want. Especially the gender issue, in which you’re essentially saying, “We respect women. Sure we do. We respect them so much that we’re going to force you to have a daughter whether you want one or not. Your reasons for not wanting one are completely irrelevant. We’re going to force you anyway. For feminism and equality.” Yeah, right.
eeyore #176
As I said before, thanks for the amazing insight. Before you told me this, I only supported extending freedom of personal autonomy to people I like and agree with. You have changed my mind and turned my life around with your well-made explication of this subtle point. I have become a better man! I cannot thank you enough.
Oh, and no, you do not get to criticise the decision a racist woman makes to have an abortion. You get to criticise her racism.
“Assume a fetus is a perfectly spherical cow…”
Also: Will Dawkins ever stop being an asshole who thinks logic should trump emotional understanding while failing at both?
Wait a minute…Dawkins is claiming his position on abortion is the logical and unemotional one? Oh, dear. “I profoundly disagree” is not an argument and it sure as heck isn’t a logical argument.
Wes Aaron:
I just wanted to point out here, that the struggle for the right of women to have an abortion is a global one. The bloody struggle you speak of has indeed occurred in the US, but it’s also occurring across the globe as we speak. It’s a long history that’s not limited to the United States.
(I only mention this bc this is a blog frequented by people from across the planet. I think a global perspective can be helpful at times.)
Dianne, and Daz, for the third (and last) time, I’m not arguing that she doesn’t have the right to make the choice, so your repeated insistence that I’m opposed to choice is at this point simply dishonest, and I’m not going to respond to the point again. My whole point is whether someone who disagrees with her choice can criticize her for it. And Daz, I absolutely do get to criticize her for having an abortion if her reason for doing so was racist. Just as I would absolutely criticize someone for closing his door to a rape victim. Even though doing so was his choice. If I think someone made a fuckwitted decision, it’s my right to say so. It’s your right to disagree. Ain’t free speech grand?
And I see you mentioned Brazil, so maybe I shouldn’t have said anything…
I’ve often said that there isn’t a single ‘pro-life’ argument that doesn’t work equally well as a ‘pro-rape’ argument. I’d like to thank Dawkins and his supporters for once again chiming in to prove my point.
What if a child with Down’s syndrome wrote poetry inside the womb?
Checkmate, Hawking … Darwin … Darkwings … thingsy!
At this point, even a non-human monkey with a keyboard taking over Squawkins’s Twitter account – hey, there’s an actual account registered to “Richard Squawkins”, not that I’m surprised – would probably increase the quality of the output exponentially … sad. I think he really should leave writing to
hypothetical fetusesreal sceptics these days. How the Bright-y has fallen, evoking Fremdscham more than anything else. Sabbatwittical NOW!I’m going to second Pierce R. Butler’s mention of Amanda Marcotte’s article. Talking about thought experiments and abstractions is almost always is an anti-abortionist tool to take away rights from women. Where they have abstractions, we have concrete examples of real women dying or living in misery because they’re being denied needed medical procedures.
who cares? it would be HIS choice.
now if you’re asking instead:
“What would Dawkins tell US to do with that foetus?”
…who cares? his opinion does not and should not apply to anyone else.
basically, Dawkins really needs to end this fucking ego trip he’s been on for far too long.
so long as you limit it to saying “I think” instead of “it’s a moral imperative”, then you’re just fine with your own argument.
if Dawkins had in fact done the same, he would have been fine as well… or at least on far less shaky ground.
eeyore @ 176
Ya I did read what you wrote correctly.
The point I was making is good or bad reasons are irrelevant (a non issue) to whether or not an abortion should be allowed. Which is what Dawkins was saying. To do anything different would infringe upon the woman rights to make the decision. You can be against racism but it doesn’t mean that a racist can’t for racist reasons not have an abortion. The point is that simple. As far as receiving criticism for their choice, it is done in private with a doctor so unless you know the individual or are family I see no reason for it to be relevant. And if I knew someone who had done this for a bad reasons you bet I would stand up for their rights to do so. No their not protected from criticism, but that goes for anything you do that others know about.
eeyore #183
Now, if Dianne or I had claimed or implied that you said such a thing, you’d have a point here. Mostly, I criticised the fact that you were statin’ the fuckin’ obvious: that all people, regardless of how nice they are, deserve autonomy. That you managed to throw in an “analogy” that was not only not analogous but bloody despicable, in that it implied that you thought it was analogous, was a kind of unwanted and rather sickening bonus.
No, you do not. What you’re saying is that the act of abortion itself is immoral in certain circumstances. But how can it be, when no one is harmed? It’s no more immoral than tearing up a book. If I tear up a book because I don’t like the fact that the hero is a black person, what is immoral is not the tearing up of the book. What’s immoral is my attitude toward black people. Having an abortion is not immoral. Racism is. Criticise the racism, not the abortion.
Quick point of clarity I mean Dawkins was advocating against bad reasons.
If ” Blogger said woman’s rights over own body extend to abortion even if fetus conscious & writing poetry in womb. ” I profoundly agree. Richard Dawkins is increasingly irrelevant.
Abortion is woman’s birth right. End of story, Dawkins you are an annoying curmudgeon.
Thought experiment: Is there a tweet so toxic and stupid, that even Dawkins could not tweet it?
of course. If there weren’t, we’d be talking about Richard EVERY day.
Eeyore, here’s a little analogy to make it simpler for you.
Some racist writes a filthy screed on-line. He of course has freedom of speech. So, is his *act of writing* wrong and therefore legitimate for you to criticize? Or is it rather that the thing that is wrong, and therefore to be criticized the *racism* that motivated the writing?
anteprepro:
Not if the tweet involves women’s rights.
Tony @182-184
All good. I understand it is a worldwide issue, I’m very knowledgeable about US statistics and history, because I have looked over this argument very in depth with this country. But maybe I haven’t been fair, so here’s some of the more wide reaching stuff.
I was horrified when I saw the fatality statistics of Brazil for illegal abortions 200,000 dead women of the 2 million who had illegal abortions! And if abortions weren’t legal in the UK women in Ireland would be left with no legal option for abortion and they currently have to travel 3000 miles to get one! After what happened to Savita I just couldn’t believe how inept their laws were at protecting women. After her death English court brought sanctions against Ireland, because their laws had no useful way to protect the life of the woman so the doctors couldn’t legally give her an abortion even with her life at stake! Not to mention the 13 year old only after threatening to kill herself and being held in a mental institution so she couldn’t leave the country and get one (at the Vatican’s request) was finally given an abortion after the country had such a big black eye. Ireland had to copy US laws on what determines the safety of the mother to get their laws right. I know there is tons more but these are the ones I recall right away.
I do follow this very closely and with all the research I have done, the debates I’ve listened to, there was only one logical position I could reach. I thank Matt Dillahunty, Tracy Harris, and others of the Atheist Experience, if it wasn’t for his debates and their stories enticing me to look deeper I wouldn’t be nearly as informed now. The days searching for statistics and stories related to the issues so much knowledge.
@chimera: IANAL; my understanding of this area of contract law is based on courses in running a small business and further reading. If I make a contract with my neighbor that says I give him money and then he paints my fence, and he doesn’t paint the fence, *specific performance* of the actions specified in the contract is not among the remedies available to me if I take him to court. I can not have the police force him to paint my fence; this is considered involuntary servitude. This is pretty consistently the way lower courts rule, but hasn’t, apparently, been tested in higher courts– probably because for entities with the resources to appeal a case, it doesn’t really apply. If I have a contract with Sears to install the dishwasher I just bought, I can force specific compliance– in this case it’s not considered to be forcing a dude to do a thing, but rather forcing the company to pay money to find a dude willing to do the thing.
In context, even if I enter into a completely voluntary contract to be a violinist life-support system, I can pull out at any time,and only have to give the money back, or be subject to other penalties as specified in the contract. The only reason anybody starts thinking otherwise is we recognize it as a metaphor for abortion and don’t tend to grant women full autonomy.
Also, I didn’t use the word ‘slavery’ to be inflammatory. If something is illegal because of the 13th amendment, that thing is slavery. As a matter of law.
eeyore @ 176
Oh, spare me the faux confusion. This is a thread about a thing Richard Dawkins said. We’re criticizing that thing. You come along and claim that we’re conflating the right to choose with others’ right to criticize said choice. The clear implication is that what we are criticizing is not what Dawkins meant and that what Dawkins meant is something closer to the nonsense you pulled out of your ass. Fucking disingenuous shitweasels spout nonsense and then when you get called on it try to rewrite the narrative as if the rest of us can’t just scroll back up a bit.
you might want to rethink that a little, given “Vox Day” and the fracas with the SFWA and Nebula(?) awards.
look, I think I see eeyore’s point, weak as it is, that all actions are open to criticism. What needs to be made more clear is that personal criticism should not translate into moral obligation for others, or then to progress to social imperative or laws.
again, Dawkins could legit criticize someone for deciding not to abort, and give his reasons for doing so and why he wouldn’t make that choice for himself (if he even could). but that’s NOT what Dawkins did. He made it a moral imperative instead. moral imperatives are absolutes; they lead to things like laws.
Eeyore’s mistake is in trying to bring up the idea of personal criticism, in a thread where there is good reason to criticize someone for using moral imperatives instead.
Jon Hough, I still find it possibly offensive to use the word “slavery” in this context, but if that is the legal term, than it is what it is. This was not an attempt on my part to sniff out an impolitical view. I really wanted to know the legal details and implications. Thanks.
So, Just wikied “involuntary servitude”. There has been a claim that pregnancy and child raising constitute involuntary servitude.
Seven, No. 200, the faux confusion is yours. What I wrote had nothing to do with Dawkins; it had to do with comments in response to Dawkins which I understood to be making the claim that not only does a woman have the right to make a choice about whether to have an abortion, but she should not under any circumstances be criticized for the choice that she made. Sorry if I need to dumb down my comments for your benefit; I’ll make a point of doing so in the future. (And if you think that’s a nasty response, it’s because so was yours; my firm policy is to show people as much respect as they show me.)
Daz, doing a morally right thing for the wrong reason can at least sometimes turn it into an immoral act. But more to the point, the woman is not the only one who is impacted by the choice she makes (and no, I’m not talking about the fetus.) Since abortions in this country are disproportionately black, there are black leaders, including some who support choice, who are justifiably concerned that if that trend continues, the percentage of the population that is black will decline over time, and that’s not a good thing. (I’ve also heard racists advocate for legal abortion specifically because abortions are disproportionately done on black fetuses.) Some have even gone so far as to call abortion black genocide; I disagree with that characterization, but I understand their fears. So even if I completely agree with the premise that a fetus has no legal interest at stake, the cumulative impact that legal abortion has on the black community — a declining black population — I would understand the criticism it would engender from black civil rights leaders concerned about black demographics. You think blacks have it rough now; just wait until they’re only 5% of the population.
And in response to a possible objection that that simply turns women into incubators, please remember that we aren’t having a conversation about whether abortion should be legal, but rather about whether it’s fair game to criticize women who have abortions. Someone who balances the ethics differently than you do — and not everyone does balance the ethics the same way you do — might conclude that watching the black population slip into the single digits is a greater harm than hurting someone’s feelings by telling her she shouldn’t have an abortion. Not actually stopping her if she’s determined to have one, but calling out a choice that might have serious repercussions for society as a whole down the road.
Just for my own sake of mind, please don’t tell me you actually think this is really happening, because that is a trope that has been pushed by anti-abortionists for decades now.
yeah, Ok, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt before you said this, but now I see where you’re going, and it’s to the same place Dawkins did.
you just don’t get it. You don’t get what is wrong with what Dawkins said.
run the fuck along.
In the future, the moment a woman conceives she will be put into suspended animation while a computer algorithm determines all possible futures depending on whether and when she aborts the fetus. A panel of wise men (all bearing an uncanny resemblance to Richard Dawkins) will evaluate the results and decide whether and when the fetus will be aborted, based on the overall contribution of the fetus and its mother to society. Of course the algorithm will take into account the needs and desires of the woman, but if the panel determines that the best result is for her and the fetus to die painfully in childbirth, well, surely she’ll understand that logically it’s all for the best and her irrational emotional reactions really shouldn’t get in the way.
eeyore:
…on a planet where women are routinely sl*t-shamed and ostracized-at best-for having an abortion. Your comments might not ring so wrong if we lived in a world where it was far more acceptable for women to have an abortion. That is not the world we live in however.
Not all are valid.
Uh, ya. At that point they are beyond rational help. I can’t even imagine what problem there could be with a population going into the single digits.
But more to the point, the woman is not the only one impacted by YOUR choice to criticize her for having an abortion. And if you are making such criticisms in an environment where such criticisms have a high likelihood of having secondary harmful effects on other people, such as other women who are in need of abortions, (such as, for example, the environment we are living in right now), then no, it is not “fair game” to criticize women who have abortions.
eeyore:
Aside from the scare tactics, do you have any evidence to support any of this? Nevermind, I’ll go look on my own…
…
http://www.guttmacher.org/in-the-know/characteristics.html
What was that about abortions being disproportionately among black women?
eeyore:
So he’s not actually confused by your nonsense, just fake confused? It’s pretty confusing why you would think anyone would be doing that.
I would say take it to another thread, but what happens so often nowadays is that what Dawkins says also has nothing to do with Dawkins. So maybe everything’s fair game, every time he gives us a new clusterfuck.
Maybe you could extend these comments a little charity and not interpret them as pure absurdities. The phrase “not under any circumstances” almost never applies. (“Never say ‘never,'” right?)
Anyway, what’s supposed to be the basis of this criticism? If not getting the abortion is supererogatory, then by definition there’s no moral (much less legal) obligation to do it. It’s only a matter of satisfying someone’s desires, not what someone really needs. It’s going above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak. You can ask for it, but you’re asking for too much. So what’s to criticize?
Your earlier analogy of closing your door (and presumably ignoring it and doing nothing else, like calling the police or for someone else’s help) to a person about to be raped is not an example of that. It’s incredible that you would say something so repugnant without even a second thought. And it is also not a “genocide” when somebody freely decides to not create a new living being (a single one, no less, as no one would be deciding this for a group, if it were actually happening as you descibe, though it isn’t).
When I think of someone simply worried about declining demographics among their race, I think of racists and nationalists and so on, because that’s what that is. In short, if there were such people among “black leaders,” and assuming this were any kind of an actual issue instead of merely a bunch of paranoid speculation feeding off of anti-choice propaganda, then their “criticism” would not at all be justified. Following this principle you seem incapable of expressing with any clarity (causing much “faux confusion” which looks a whole lot like the real thing), they would of course be free to criticize whatever they want, however they want; but that doesn’t mean their criticisms are any good. And is it too much to ask that you come up with a decent example, instead of this horrific bullshit? No, indeed, it isn’t.
Tony, #211, the women are in other words poor, who can’t afford to raise another child. I recently saw the tab for a middle class baby to 18 is now almost $250,000. Even at half that, the poor, white, black or Hispanic, cannot afford the cost.
Tony, No. 211, Blacks make up 12% of the population, so if Blacks account for 30% of the abortions, then yes, abortion is disproportionately Black. I did not say majority black, I said disproportionately black; please tell me you understand the difference.
Amphiox, 210, your argument essentially boils down to this: Women who choose to have abortions shouldn’t be criticized because other women might take the criticism personally and decide not to have an abortion. That sounds pretty circular to me.
But hovering over all of this is the notion that someone can’t be criticized for the choices they make. That notion is privilege on steroids. Nobody is immune from criticism for their choices. Nobody. You’re essentially trying to turn abortion into a special case, and it isn’t.
#214 you idiot, blacks have more pregnancies than whites, hence the higher rate of abortions..
And you sound mighty racist, by implying that you consider black women to be too fucking stupid to make their own reproductive choices.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick with this “beyond rational help” thing for the exact angle I was commenting on. That was self aggrandizing of me and my quick assessment. It was also delving into a sorta off topic argument.
Which will lead to destroying the black race, am I right?
Maybe these people, whoever they are, aren’t secretly bent on destroying the race. Intent doesn’t matter, of course, but do you think there are any reasons for this disproportionality? What’s causing it? Whatever that may be, shouldn’t it be the target of any fair and reasonable criticism? Are you aware that poverty is disproportionately black? That being the victim of crimes is disproportionately black? That being profiled as criminals is disproportionately black? That being the victim of all other forms of prejudice and injustice are disproportionately black? For the short time that you’re going to sound concerned about the welfare of black people everywhere (even potential ones that don’t even exist), could you at least try to make it actually look like that?
eeyore, you’re doing that “I’m so Vulcan it hurts” thing again, and pretending that the whole conversation is taking place in a context-free space. It isn’t. Stop trying to pretend it is, and you might find people a whole lot less disgusted with your arguments.
eeyore:
The US Census Bureau projects that the African American population in the US will increase from 12.9% to 13% by 2050.
It’s a growing population. Not shrinking. Small growth, yes, but it’s growing more than the White non-Hispanic population, which will lose 5.5 percentage points in the same amount of time.
eeyore:
I misinterpreted what you were saying.
Valde has a point though:
per the CDC’s Estimated Pregnancy Rates and Rates of Pregnancy Outcomes for the United States, 1990–2008
Yes, let’s criticize African-American women for not bringing more children into a world that throws a massive percent of them into prison for whites to profit from or executes them in the street or visits any other of a large number of indignities on them.
The real target for criticism should be the institutional racism (and its supporters) that inhibits black women from having children—women who are, after all, only acting out of consideration for their potential offspring. And many black women do frame racism as a matter of reproductive justice, because it turns out they’re not idiots in need of a scolding after all.
Reproductive justice for black women
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/08/20/medias-role-attaining-justice-black-missing-persons/
A filk, in “honour” of Dawkins, and his loyal legion of followers, who all see themselves as pure rationalists, above the hurlyburly of such failings as “emotion” and “empathy”:
CaitieCat:
LOL. That was great!
Inevitably, missed a “sexy” and got a “to” where there should have been a “for”. But close enough for not being able to edit.
Holms @ 78:
Can it be Christopher Lee? I’d step up for Christopher Lee. Only to spare someone else, of course. ::puts on altruistic hat::
Gregory Greenwood @88:
I’m right there. Christopher Lee never sparkled in his unlife.
Beatrice @89:
I wonder if it’s because “Ewww no pregnant girly stuff means some guy fucked me eww eww” reactions or “Oh but that’s not possible” dismissal might be too many straight blokes’ first reaction? Make it all cool and sci-fi and not involving Teh Secks that implies they’re like women, and maybe they’ll stop five seconds to listen. Or not, in Dawkins’s case.
insertsymbolshere @121:
Completely agree. It’s the old joke: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
caitiecat @123:
Glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read that! :D
Re the OP and poetical fetuses: I certainly would abort it. Catch me having someone leaving pens and bits of screwed-up paper and probably dirty coffee cups lying around in my innards.
Am I alone in thinking at this point that Dawkins really is just another misogynist ?
::standing ovation for CaitieCat!::
I may be humming this all night now.
eeyore @204
Percent of African Americans year 2000 8.8
Percent of African Americans year 2010 12.6
Percent of African Americans year 2012 14.1
So doesn’t look like that argument based on falling percentage of African Americans against total population has any legs at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity
http://blackdemographics.com/
And as for who should consider these issues, since women who actually can get pregnant are too emotional, I think only menopausal women should consider such issues. Due to no more of those nasty hormones and icky stuff, we are clearly completely logical AND we have hands on* experience to inform us. Further, quite a number of us are also educated and have held responsible positions over our lifetimes, so we also have, in the group, equivalent credentials to men like Dawkins.
(*OK, maybe not hands on, but you can understand me here.)
eeyore #204
Since the only person affected is the woman having an abortion, and since morals deal with human interactions, abortion is neither morally wrong nor morally right. The reasons for having the abortion, under your scenario, may be moral or immoral, but the act itself cannot be because no one is harmed by it.
I’ll skip a bit, since others have dealt with that.
You should, since the foetus isn’t a person by any rational definition.
Again, others have dealt with that in part. But I have to ask, even if your figures are correct,so what?
Are women to be forced, either by law or by social pressure, to breed in order to maintain a demographic? What are we, fundy fucking Christians now, or what?
I entered this conversation thinking you somewhat mistaken, and somewhat given to bad analogy. I now think you’re a bloody shitstain.
2kittehs @226
Your response to Beatrice:
I was thinking it was more that men often trivialize women’s health issues. I’ve found there seem to be two types of men who have bad reactions to women’s reproductive health; there’s the one who can’t stand to hear anything about menstruation or childbirth and seems to think it’s the most disgusting thing on the planet, and then there’s the one who treats it like it’s no big deal and just can’t understand why women complain about it. I’m thinking the men from the latter group would just dismiss it. If I could get pregnant? No big deal. I could take a few months of minor inconvenience. And they’d stop there. No further thinking about it or empathizing with people who can become pregnant.
It’s like that guy a while back. I wish I could remember his name…. he was a politician involved in an anti-choice bill, and a reporter asked him why he thinks a woman might decide to get an abortion, and he fumbles for a bit and ends up saying, “I don’t know. I never thought about it.” Some people who cannot get pregnant just don’t think it’s a big deal and don’t bother spending time thinking about it.
Did anyone notice how PZ and Dawkins, best buds after “Exposed”…
now Richard refers to PZ as “blogger”?
It’s true, the older we get the more immature we get.
He’s not just twitter-er, he the twitter-est!
Yep. I caught that right away.
What a pal.
That’s because PZ Myers is not an academic who has published REAL, dead-tree books, whereas “twitterer” has.
Oh, wait.
Daz:
You should, since the foetus isn’t a person by any rational definition.
Help me. My understanding is that traditional feminists argue for the pro choice position on a personal rights position , and, furthermore, that feminists are loathe to entertain other arguments agianst the anti-choice positon for concern than doing so might imply that the personal rights position might thereby be implied to be insufficient (which it is not) or diluted in the minds of the public.
But we can see from our newspapers and TVs that this strategy is losing! Every day troglodites use the “fetuses are people so abortion=murder” argument to further restict choice, and many localities and even states in the US have become effectively no-choce localities.
I have often argued with consevatives about this issue, and I have found more success discussing the routine inviolability of fertilized cells and spontaneous (supposedly soul-infused) embryos than I have been able to make based on a woman’s right to carry or not, especially with women who themselves would never dream of aborting a fetus, conservative women who conflate their self-worth with their reproductive success.
I believe, with respect to everyone, that arguing that a fetus is not a person has utility, even though it is not a requirement for the pro-choice argument, and that evading this tactic will harm women.
Daz @230
Yeah, the argument comes down to IF the percentage of African Americans in the US population were falling and IF black leaders thought that was bad and IF they attributed the cause to black women having abortions and IF that, in their minds, justified harassing black women considering or having abortions, then shouldn’t a black woman’s right to choose be revisited?
It is one loooong string of convoluted dopery.
contrarygymnosperm @235
Citation of where traditional or other feminists made such an argument. Not familiar to me.
contrarygymnosperm #235
Twasn’t meant as an argument; just a statement of fact. As PZ says in the OP, it wouldn’t matter even if the foetus was “a person,” since no person has the right to demand the use of another’s body.
Lyn M #236
And after all that, the answer would still be “no.” So an irrelevant string of convoluted dopery, to boot.
so will PZ in turn refer to Richard as generic “science popularizer”
“a science popularizer suggested on Twitter yesterday…”
or just “blogger” as well, since the comparison is entirely apt?
Yeah, sex is physical, emotional, messy, dirty (if you are doing it right), open to perversity, and not all about reproduction. Reproduction is physical, emotional, messy, painful, damaging, and dangerous. So let’s all just Vulcan up and discuss them logically.
eeyore
I am curious how you would think what Dawkins said was about criticism and not condemning the act?
It’s pretty much cut and paste his argument. But as for women having abortions for bad reasons, as many have already pointed out this is precursor to condemning the act. And as far as I can tell there is no relevance to the argument. I know some will be aware of this but I figured I’d dig it out of it’s long forgotten grave.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2608716/Woman-4-800-boob-job-NHS-glamour-model-admits-abortion-star-Big-Brother.html
Obviously this would be along the lines of your argument. So let’s review. First of all the show’s producers after finding out her plans to have an abortion publicly announced they wouldn’t consider her for the show. So yes there was a consequence to her poor decision and the producers were well within their rights. So criticism was there because she went public with her decision and when you do, well you pay the price. Second at no point did I find it reasonable to ban abortions because of women like this. However, just as everyone has been arguing the right-wing used it as propaganda to ban abortions. So thought experiment over happened already and people are reacting as predicted. But here is the best part, Dawkins position would have been against the abortion because of the situation. So at any point did anyone say she couldn’t be criticized for getting an abortion for bad reasons, no. The reasons are still bad but the act is legal and therefore I wouldn’t want to ban or complicate the process of abortions because of her bad decisions. But the criticism needs to be about the why not the what.
I did defend her right to abortion to a right-wing friend of mine. Simply put even though her reasons were bad, I cannot in good conscious condemn the act because those who need it, shouldn’t have to face an inquiry just to get the procedure done. It is unnecessary stress and hardship on those who genuinely need it.
@ Lyn M:
They are here. They have a vitriolic and justifiable reaction to anyone who would claim that anyone might restrict a woman’s right to abort a pregnancy. Her body her choice. Other arguements in support of choice are derided as magnanimous mansplaining here, which is fair enough. But there is a difference between ideology and strategy sometimes, especially when you are trying to save millions of women from religiously motivated sexist oppression and suffering or death.
Bottom line is, Dawkins’ position is that women have domain over their own bodies not because they have that innate right, but because of an accident of evolution.
Wider birth canal? Longer gestation? Babies able to be born with brains big enough that they come out crawling and pointing at the kitty cat with a questioning smile and a “wha?” Then though shit, ladies.
contrarygymnosperm:
It does not matter if they’re a person or not. It’s irrelevant. That is the argument many people here have made, including myself, not that it’s wrong to offer other conceivable reason why some particular abortion is okay, like the claim that a fetus (at some specific stage of development) is not a “person” (or that anybody should be “evading” that particular issue). If you also think it’s irrelevant, or not a requirement for the claim, then there’s no disagreement here. But you do disagree if you think this has any moral implications for “late-term” abortions, which is why it’s a colossal mistake to bring up any stages of development besides birth itself.
I also don’t think you do yourself any favors when you argue, by itself, that being a “person” is a sufficient reason why they should not be killed. This is not explanatory, as a reason ought to be. Are there moral agents other than “people”? If there are not in fact, could there be, even in principle? What’s a person? Does this include any non-human animals, or possibly other sentient organisms (i.e., aliens)? How should we act toward them? If they lack a personal identity or aren’t presently having personal experiences (for whatever reason, but would otherwise be a “person”) do those not count? Or is it only if they have the potential for these things, or a very specific kind of potential if they already exist, or if we have a “good reason” to believe it’s “likely” that they have such potential, whatever that means? Once we dig that deep into the claim, in what way exactly is a fetus any different? Etc., etc., etc. Why does your argument apply (or not apply, as the case may be) to any examples like these? Or in other words, what exactly are you doing, when you use the word/concept “person” or “personhood”? And why should anyone else think all of that is exactly the thing the word does in their own minds? What is it doing in your argument, which isn’t already being done much more clearly with the argument that no one, persons or not, has a right to force you to give birth, neither to a person nor to a thing that is not a person?
Also, robots. Somehow it always seems to come down to animals, aliens and robots. And there might be other categories I haven’t even thought of.
So they wouldn’t need to be organisms either, necessarily. Or so I assume. But I guess that’s because I figure “personhood” is just a convoluted and confused way of expressing what morality itself is about: basically, the capacity to have experiences (and for those to be positive or negative). But the nature of morality itself is not the issue, nor is it up for debate when the topic is abortion (because that right, like every other right, should not be up for debate), nor is it likely to be “settled” any time soon, definitely not by ignorant people making grand pronouncements about what a “person” is, or “who” really counts and who doesn’t, or “who” there even is at all.
Wes Aaron @242
I see. Mind being specific with a reference to one quote that fits your comment?
Maybe to clarify I know the story isn’t direct analogous to Dawkins statement but the premise is similar.
I don’t think this is a very good thought experiment for revealing anything about abortion, because it’s designed to get the answer PZ wants.
As I understand past explanations of biology on this blog a man is alive, a women is alive, a man’s sperm is alive, a women’s egg is alive, when sperm and egg meet they grow together, change, become multicelluar, live continues as a process without interruption.
At no point is anything ‘not’ alive, alien, or not part of the people involved. It leaves me thinking a baby is morel ike people budding than anything else.
Anyway my point is the obvious choice of specifying alien is misleading and setting a pre-condition for an answer, so the best it achieves is to ask how a foetus differs from an alien. Well, assuming one accepts the idea that live in continuous and the question of “when does a foetus’ life begin” is meaningless does that change the moral position so easily taken regarding aliens?
Sorry Lyn
eeyore @242
Was the point I was referencing.
is frankly a bit tedious,
Argh! @214 I mean.
toska @231, good points. Thanks for answering. People-who-can-get-pregnant can’t bloody win, can we? :(
Gawd, there’d be a list if all of ’em were asked. A long list.
How did I miss caitiecats’s splendid filk? Howwwwwww?
catiecat, please to accept one solid-gold internets with bonus kitties.
That’s the point of ALL “thought experiments” about abortion.
They’re all “but what if things were NOT the way they are, then what, huh?” and “not the way they are” always involves making the fetus more of a “person” than it is, and making the woman LESS of a person than she is.
See, I can do it too:
“Suppose people reproduced via some kind of budding or by sprouting sentient fruiting bodies… the male spreads his pollen to the wind and wanders off to watch football, and the female’s flowers (pink flowers) would sometimes catch the pollen… and then she would become immobile and sprout a deep taproot to nourish the young… and what if this woman were from Brooklyn and had a career but happened to be pollinated in a field outside Des Moines, and suppose she didn’t WANT to spend the 2 year cycle stuck to the ground out in the rain in a field outside Des Moines, would it be moral for her to pull up her taproot and kill her offspring just so she could selfishly live in Brookyn and continue her career?”
All you have to do to get to a place where it’s “immoral” is totally avoid reality, overimagine the personhood of one and underimagine the personhood of another.
The only pertinent question is “what exactly would motivate you to do that?”
contrarygymnosperm
So is it okay to sacrifice something of ideology (e.g. arguing the idea that a fetus is not a person) in order to achieve a better strategy, if that sacrifice can later backfire in unknown ways (e.g. a fetus is now a person because that argument has been dropped from the repertoire but people-with-uteri are allowed to have abortions, following which they are subject to murder charges)?
The strategy (that I support) is to remind people that a fetus is not a person, but that the person bearing it is a person, since that bearer often gets omitted from the equation – erased, made invisible – to the benefit of the non-person within. Thought experiments that suddenly ‘what if’ define the fetus as a person should be declared invalid because they are based on a false premise.
Because that argument – “let’s pretend the fetus is a person” – attempts to override a person’s right to bodily autonomy by placing all kinds of responsibilities, duties, moralities and guilt onto the person-with-uterus, and that right – to one’s own bodily autonomy – should be inviolable in any and every situation.
All choices about my body are mine and mine alone. So it should be for everyone.
BTW, is there a good, single, umbrella-word for people-with-uteri, other than using long clumsy phrases like people-with-uteri and people-who-can-be-pregnant? I think I saw Jackie (?) use the word ‘female-bodied’ above – is that okay? It rolls out so much better. Any other possibilities?
Jafafa Hots
Your thought experiment makes an excellent story. Tap-roots? Stuck outside Des Moines? A horror story.
Wes Aaron @
So eeyore at 214 is a traditional feminist who has been viriolic, because he or she thinks a woman could be criticized for having an abortion for the wrong reasons?
Didn’t read the comments that way.
And what variety of feminist are you, if any?
2kittehs @252
Bonus kitties? *Faints*
But that seems about right.
Women having abortions for bad reasons? Good!
Because the alternative is having a child, which actually IS a person who can suffer.
rq @254
Totally agree
A funny note though. Even if you grant the fetus is a person or a child it does absolutely nothing to dismiss the right of bodily autonomy. Only people who don’t fully comprehend the right, think it does.
Oh but my favorite statistic is that almost two decades or a generation after abortion was legalized the crime rate dropped to lows not seen since the end of the great depression. And what really makes this even more profound is the states that legalized abortion first saw the drop in crime almost to the day prior to the states that later adopted the practice. If there was such a thing as a smoking gun I think that info qualifies.
@ consciousness razor
It’s perfectly explanatory if you’re the type of person who can’t quite wrap their brain around the idea that the pregnant person is a person. Which is what it’s always about with these conversations. “Please please please can we find some way to say we’re for abortion so I can plausibly deny being a regressive, sexist, transphobic fuck but still not have to concede that women and trans men are fully human? Please?”
Wes Aaron
Oh, definitely! Which is why the personhood argument is a weasel argument. Just a way to erode the bodily autonomy of individuals.
Giliell
Ah, but once it’s out of the uterus, the baby’s on its own! It’s alive, and that’s all that matters. Suffering? Don’t be silly. It could have been not born at all! So much worse! [/snark]
@ eeyore
Yes, shitwit. Comments in response to Dawkins. If you’re correcting comments in response to Dawkins, presumably that means you think your “we can still criticize the reasons someone has an abortion” schtick is closer to what Dawkins meant than what you thought people here were saying. Except that he was really pretty fucking straightforward about what he meant.
Lyn @256
OK. I may have mistaken her argument as being somewhat against abortion, instead of her concerns for it being used to punish women who get abortions. I would like to note that unless it is family or someone the woman discloses the information to it really shouldn’t involve anybody, and if people of a person who has had need of an abortion are subjecting her to more pain and suffering because they disagree, that’s just sick and wrong.
I’m not sure what kind of feminist I would qualify as. I (as a man) think women are entitled to equal rights and that includes abortion on demand without intrusion from the state or religion. I see nothing wrong with making things equal respectively between sexes and races (though I think people is the more appropriate term here instead of sex or race). Hopefully that’s not too vague.
Wes Aaron @263
It’s certainly a longer label, thanks.
I’m done for now.
2kittehs @ 252,
The person who asked that question was Rachel Maddow, live on air. The name of the idiot sitting in the other chair I can’t remember.
eyeore passim,
On criticising a woman’s decision on abortion …
1. In almost every case it will be none of your fucking business.
2. Again, in almost every case you will not have sufficient information to form a view or even to know whether what you have heard is the real reason or the cover story. Apart from the physical and administrative barriers they erect many jurisdictions also ask women to perform mental gymnastics to meet some cooked-up test and retain their autonomy. (See recent case in Ireland – raped woman asks for abortion at 8 weeks, weeks of administrative farting about, 2 psychiatrists say abortion is justified as she is becoming more distressed, refused abortion as she hasn’t actually said yet, “I am about to kill myself.” and so forth.)
3. You do not seem to me to be the sort of clear-thinking but compassionate person in whom a woman with a crisis pregnancy would confide. If I am correct in this then you have less knowledge than commenters above and less than you require.
4. You are entitled to hold any opinion you can come up with and to say it out loud. Once you publish it, though – on fb, Twitter or here with how many million page views – you will be counted, at very least, among those who wish to see women’s access to abortion managed for them as their ladybrains are not up to it.
5 At 4 you stepped across a line, you performed a political act so now your have to take that level of personal responsibility because somebody is sure as hell going to use what you published to justify all manner of things you never intended. (And on matters of race, poverty, demographics I would recommend listening to Tony! unless your sole purpose is further to muddy the waters, which I don’t believe it is.)
VERY big, very long lasting earthquake in the SF Bay Area!!!!
Ok, we’re still here. nevermind.
6.0; minor damage reported in several counties; some power outages.
looks like things will be ok. aftershocks expected, but none large.
Ichthyic
Not enough abortions; try again next time!
O.o I *think* I know what you meant there…
if so, then…
yup. CA has been whinging about a drought I hear….
One giant Tsunami, comin’ up!
if not, this will seem strangely out of place.
Rain of frogs seems suitably viciously sarcastic. “Here’s some rain! HAHAHA!! It’S NOT RAIN!”
Exactly. That’s why thought experiments are so often bullshit.
Ichthyic@232:
It reminds me of when my parents’ marriage crumbled. Mom and dad were “Ethel” or “Jimmy” to one another and when spoken of to family and friends. Then they became “that man” or “the wife” or “the kids’ mom” or “their dad”. I think PZ and Dawkins are headed for a divorce…
I’m a scientist myself, and I’m with comments 52 (and references therein), 54, 58, 60 and many others; I’m much less interested in the underlying ideas than in the real world.
He’s trying to do the same thing he’s been doing for decades. He used to write short articles where he took an idea (based on some more or less recent finding of science), quickly think it through to some unusual, radical and usually unpleasant conclusion, and then publish it in the hope of triggering a discussion which he clearly thought would be interesting and illuminating for him and probably for society at large. Usually there was a mistake in the logic somewhere, and usually most of the reactions he got completely overlooked that mistake but instead consisted of religious shrieks (and hatemail). In short, the exercise was rather useless, but he never seemed to care.
The difference is that now he only has 140 characters to work with, and no editor. Having even less opportunity than before to really think his off-the-cuff ideas through, and no feedback at all before publication, he seems to have stopped thinking them through altogether, not noticing that they need to be thought through more, which might even require knowledge he doesn’t yet have. Dr Dunning, meet Dr Kruger.
Plus, it appears he’s so used to criticism being on this rather entertaining level that he doesn’t even bother reading it to find out if it really is there.
I also think the school he went to was a bad influence on him. Maybe it’s why he doesn’t seem to mind trolling.
And finally, I think he’s one of those people who believe the Internet is somehow not real, as if it didn’t extend beyond their own screen. Do you remember what happened when that sociopath Josh Timonen destroyed the richarddawkins.net forum on a whim, deleting thousands of comments forever?
Heh.
Oh, that one is easy to answer. Pregnancy has positive cultural connotations, and the suffering of pregnant women as well as the burden of raising a child is traditionally hidden from men to a pretty large extent; the point of PZ’s hypothetical is to keep us from going “but that would be wonderful!” and shutting any further thought process down.
Really. You aren’t scared enough yet: half of the people living around you have next to no idea.
Bull-fucking-shit. Professional competition? They clearly couldn’t have each other’s job, and they clearly don’t want it – what would they even compete about?!?
Personal animosity? See comment 98: they’re good friends, and have long been.
OK, now it gets weird.
I like that. :-)
Not over here, where this kind of failure to rescue is a crime.
Heh.
Maybe he actually wanted to protect PZ’s anonymity (without claiming he came up with the thought experiment himself), as if the Internet weren’t searchable.
Dawkins should go away and learn how to Internet.
CaitieCat 223 can haz all teh internetz nao plz.
So imagine if a fetus could write poetry, while ignoring that women can write poetry. Sure, maybe that fetus will change the world, but maybe that woman could change the world without haveing her life derailed or ended by pregnancy. How’s that hypothetical for you?
The problem is that we don’t spent enough time thinking of women as people. Or we grudgingly admit they are people but don’t think of them as important people.
On the other hand… I think we can all agree that if the person attached to your back is not a violinist but is instead a “soft jazz” tenor sax player, detachment is the only moral course of action.
Ichthyic @ # 232 et alia seq: … after “Exposed”…
Other than of Dawkins as a tweet-twit, that hasn’t happened. But it seems the bonding after the Expelled experience has expired.
What? Friends can’t have disagreements and still be friends? Not much of a friendship to start with if that’s the case, was it?
Dawkins made a logical argument. If the embryo/fetus/unborn – whatever – has no rights, then the woman, who does have them, can dispose of it as she chooses. She can give birth to it if she want or abort it if she prefers. It’s entirely up to her.
Thought experiments about poetry-writing fetuses are pointless. At this time, we have no way of predicting whether the fetus will grow to be an Albert Einstein or a Ted Bundy. Even if we did, it wouldn’t matter if the fetus has no rights. The mother would still be perfectly entitled to do away with it, if she chose.
Forget about personhood. It’s too vague a notion to be of any use. The only problem arises if you allow that the right to life of an individual human being should apply from conception to death. In that case, you face the sticky problem of reconciling possibly conflicting rights Does the mother’s right to personal autonomy take precedence over the fetus’s right to life or does the right to life take precedence over all others except in certain carefully-defined situations?
seversky:
Personally, I have no desire to be friends with someone who holds the type of opinions on women that Dawkins does. Especially since he refuses to reexamine his views in the face of the criticism he’s received.
Yes.
No.
If ‘life’ = conception -> death, then why do all the pro-lifers stop caring once the fetus is born and turns into a baby -> child -> adult?
What exactly are Dawkins’s views on women? I mean, as distinct from what the bloggeratti say they are. ISTR that the RDFRS paid for the provision of childcare facilities at a freethought convention back in 2011 or thereabouts. Or is putting your money where your mouth is also patronising, misogynistic behavior?
seversky:
I’m sure he would even let women use his bathroom.
I heard he had a best friend who was a woman, even. So all the public misogyny is totes cool.
seversky,
It looks like you are going somewhere with this. Can we skip the trip and just get to the point?
seversky:
You’ve heard of ‘Dear Muslima’, no?
His comments about stranger rape at knifepoint vs date rape?
His comments about it being immoral to bring a child with DS into the world?
And of course the tweet that inspired this blog post.
These are all examples of Dawkins’ views on women.
Also, this:
Doesn’t preclude him being a shithead with some shitty views about women.
Joking aside, like I asked, what are his views on women? PZ knows the man personally. perhaps he can enlighten us.
seversky
Good for Dawkins. Great work, Dawkins. What a fantastic job, Dawkins. You get a smiley faced sticker for participation today, Dawkins.
It seems that Super Logician of Mt. Logic, Logic Lord Dawkins, and his Logic Knight of Logicality still seem to miss the fucking point. Oh my Logic, what is the Logic coming to?
DID YOU KNOW: Even if a fetus DID have rights, the woman still has rights?
DID YOU KNOW: Making the sole LOGICKY LOGIC of the abortion debate predicated entirely on the fetus having no rights is diminishing the mother’s role in it all and only grants her rights accidentally, as a matter of default, by process of elimination?
DID YOU KNOW: That the right to do what you want with your own fucking body is a rather important element of abortion rights for the mother and it is entirely fucking relevant and is entirely independent of the details of the fetus?
Logic Masters of the Universe, contemplate off in your Philosophy Wank Chambers. Specujaculate over this one (but please, do it in private): Is the argument over abortion an issue of women’s rights or not? If not, why not? If so, why focus entirely on the fetus having NO rights and not focus on what rights that women DO have?
Also typical Logical Dawkins says that abortion really would be murder and thus he could not bear to support the murderous womens if a fetus was clearly a conscious human being. Because typical Totes Pro-Choice Logical Dawkins wants to conveniently ignore the little detail that BEING INSIDE OF HER makes it a touch less ethically obvious than stabbing a random person to death on the street. Because fuck nuance, Dawkins has LOGIC.
So you don’t think the fetus is entitled to the right to life?
So we can go around killing each other willy-nilly since the right to life has no particular standing?
What makes you think they stop caring? When does the right to life, assuming you think there should be one, begin to apply?
seversky:
Not sure who is joking around here, but it’s not me.
You can infer some of his beliefs about women based on the things he says and does.
What does it say about his views of women when he tells them to not be focused on sexual harassment or other problems women have in the US when women have acid thrown in their face in countries governed by Islamic theocracy?
What does it say about his views of women when he shows that his support for abortion rights depends on a fetus not being a person, rather than on the right to bodily autonomy of all women?
What does it say about his views on women when he makes generalized statements about which types of rape are better or worse than other types (as if there’s a difference in rape)?
What does it say about his views on women when he makes a blanket statement about how it would be immoral for a woman to decide to have a child with Down’s Syndrome?
Moreover, what does it say about his opinions of women when they explain their problems with what he says, but ignores them, dismisses them, or doesn’t make an attempt to understand where they’re coming from?
Bear with me. The journey is part of the fun.
seversky 280
Even if the fetus (child, person, or whatever the hell else you want to call it) is granted right to life it still does absolutely nothing to counter the woman’s right to bodily autonomy! This argument is an absurd attempt to shackle her to parenthood which she doesn’t have to do that either! This is a piss poor argument that falls flat on it’s face when examined. If you don’t understand what the Right to Bodily Autonomy is, I highly recommend you research it. But to be kind I will give you the basics, (no person can be forced to have their body used in any way against their will, because every person has the right to a happy and healthy life). Just because you have two kidneys and a person dying could use one to live, doesn’t give anyone the right to take one! The fetus is a separate entity within the woman’s body that requires her biology for its survival. The woman has the right to deny her body be used this way, it’s that simple!
Dawkins problem here is regardless of what the fetus is doing, it’s in no way a viable human being if an abortion is needed to end the pregnancy. When it becomes a viable human being it can be safely removed from the woman! His argument is weak at best and fails to take into account the woman and the hardships she may face. I mean seriously what if she is crippled when the child is born, so she has to go on living her life depending on others where before she was capable of living a happy and healthy life before? This is why not only is her biology hers but her right to happiness would be infringed upon. Any many pro-lifers are OK with the woman being permanently injured (crippled, losing a kidney, and many other permanent remnants are life long) as long as she doesn’t die. There’s no humanity in this. No compassion for the woman. If you destroy the woman’s livelihood to save an unborn child, what kind of life will the child have? This is wrong because none of the pro-lifers are going to provide care to the mother and child.
Your putting undue pain and suffering on another human being, that is immoral.
292 and 294 are looking like the blatant trolling has now begun.
seversky:
No.
People-i.e. born human beings possessed of all the rights that humans have, such as the right to life and the right to bodily autonomy-are the ones with rights. A fetus is not a person. A fetus does not have rights. And even *IF* a fetus had rights, that wouldn’t magically grant them the right to use a woman’s body against her wishes.
Since you appear to be one of those people who think a fetus should have a right to life (while disregarding the right of women to decide what happens to and with their bodies, and simultaneously granting a fetus a right that no other human being has), I’ll repost my comment @92:
Even *if* a fetus were a person, they don’t have the right to use a woman’s body. That’s why your “concern” over the so-called right to life of a fetus are meaningless.
If you’re hear to spout
pro lifepro-fetus, anti-abortion rhetoric, be prepared–you’ll find no sympathy for those odious views here.seversky #294
This is very close to an admission of trolling.
seversky:
You’re new here. We aren’t.
We’ve dealt with anti-abortionists for a long time and we know the tactics they use. Either get to your point and buzz off.
Oh, and given what you’ve said already, if you plan on sticking around, don’t be shocked when people are not nice to you. You can expect rudeness, a lack of civility and many so-called “curse” words.
If it is ‘murder’ if the prenate is sapient, this would also mean that rape victims should be forced to give birth. Which will essentially result in the enslavement of persons with uteri. Bear that in mind, those of you who are arguing against bodily autonomy for pregnant persons. And, by that logic, if forced uterine donation is what is necessary to preserve life, then forced organ donation should be legal as well.
At least our latest troll knows how to blockquote.
seversky
The multitude of excellent educational programs, childcare options for mothers and fathers, well-paid sick leave, assistance for poor families, psychological counselling for those who might need it… little things like that not existing.
Not while it’s imposing on the bodily autonomy of a person who doesn’t want it, by inhibiting their right to life and the pursuit of happiness and etc., no. Because it isn’t a person with rights. It’s a fetus.
I replied to your question, which was very direct: “does the right to life take precedence over all others except in certain carefully-defined situations”, and I replied “no”. Because pregnancy is not a carefully-defined situation. It is one person’s life-threatening medical condition, which they are free to do with as they will. Rights do not apply to medical conditions, otherwise someone’s cancer might decide that it has a right to life, too.
seversky
We’ve borne with people like you far too often. “Journey part of the fun”? Go take a solo trip out of here.
The post in which he expressed his horror at the way women are routinely mistreated in some Muslim countries? Yes.
Which one was that? The legal systems of most countries grade offenses in terms of their severity. We don’t punish a jaywalker in the same way as a murderer. That said, in my view, rape occurs where sexual intercourse takes place without the explicit consent of both parties.
If the unborn child has no right to life then you can make a logical case for aborting DS fetuses. I don’t agree but what does that have to do with Dawkins’s views on women?
He disagrees with an absolute right to abortion? How does that translate to misogyny?
seversky,
And dismissal at the way women are mistreated in western countries. His arguments can easily be applied to rights of atheists as well. Of course, it doesn’t stop him from fighting for science education and secularism in the west.
Seversky
First word, he. This would imply that he could never face this decision and to force others to a standard he wouldn’t be subject to is very misogynistic of him, because it only applies to women.
rq (#302)
Plus, if you add a little race into it, they’ll actively cheer for the death of children, be it Michael Brown or any of the thousands of kids fleeing murderous conditions in Central America.
Also, bodily autonomy. Full fucking stop. End of. If you don’t support it, you’re a fucking forced-birther, and should fuck off back to Fox News, or Conservapedia, or wherever assholes like you congregate. Also, see my 223, and take the last line into personal account.
Shitstain.
Foolishly feeding the troll
He did not express horror, he brought them up as an example to stop a woman in the U.S. to stop complaining about everyday sexism.
Comparing different kinds of rape to jaywalking vs. murder? My. Fucking. God.
Here’s the key point, fuckwit: stranger rape and date rape ARE NOT different offenses. Not only are they not graded, but they are not even distinguished!
The funny part though is that, despite this blatant failing of your counterargument, you aren’t the first one from Team Logic to make it!
He said that it is unethical to NOT abort a Down Syndrome’s fetus. What does that have to women’s rights? Well, he is telling them what they should not be doing….
Congratulations, you may be too stupid or too dishonest to actually deal with on this topic. Great work.
The right to life does not include the right to occupy that body of another. It’s that simple. I can’t even use your kidneys temporarily to save my life. So, why should a prenate have a right that I don’t?
<blockquote
What makes you think they stop caring? When does the right to life, assuming you think there should be one, begin to apply?
That would be the total lack of actions which demonstrate they care (about, you know, living children and adults). Also, every time they vote against a welfare program, or talk about deporting immigrants or refugees, or start another war with another country, that negates at least a few thousand other such demonstrations which are less significant. Last but not least, let’s not forget how little they care about the women whose lives they interfere with, in the process of attempting to care ever so slightly about the “unborn babies” who are supposedly being murdered. As of this moment, they are still in the hole and digging ever deeper.
bah, stupid blockquotes.
This was seversky replying to rq:
It practically answers itself. But I guess somebody has to troll this blog.
seversky:
While dismissing the concerns and problems faced by women in western countries. His comments show that he dismisses the sexism and misogyny in cultures when it doesn’t rise to the level of what women in Islamic countries deal with. It also shows that he dismisses the women expressing frustration at that sexism and misogyny.
First, there’s no “IF”. Have you even read my post upthread that discusses the qualities of personhood? Fetii don’t have those qualities (again: moot point, bc even if a fetus had the same rights as a 58 year old, that doesn’t grant them the right to use a woman’s body unless she consents)
Secondly, it’s a shaming tactic. Dawkins’ generalized statement shames women who would make the choice to have a child with Down’s Syndrome. It’s NOT immoral and women who make that choice should not be shame for it.
His disagreement shows that he doesn’t think women have the right to bodily autonomy at all times. If fetuses became people tomorrow, he would likely not support a woman’s right to choose because he thinks the personhood of a fetus takes precedence. Which would result in women being treated as incubators, as they would no longer have bodily autonomy. I do not support any measures that-regardless of intent-would lead to women (or anyone) being treated as second class citizens and denied the rights they are due as human beings.
You don’t understand the concept of bodily autonomy clearly. It undergirds the right to self defense and is a right that every. single. human. being. has.
It does not end when when a woman gets pregnant. Because of this right that all human beings have-women have the right (though it is sadly not acknowledged by many countries across the world) to decide if they want to be pregnant or not.
I notice that you, like so many anti-choicers/pro-fetus worshipers express such concern for fetii, but very little for women. It’s telling.
I am not sure I am reading seversky right, but they seem to want us to go through the motions of teaching them Abortion Debate 101.
seversky,
Stop trolling. Go away or engage seriously.
anteprepro:
Oh I don’t know about that. I don’t think they’re here for lessons in how to be a decent human being.
Maureen Brian @265
Ah, thank you! That would have been worth seeing. I’m in Oz, so don’t get to see her show.
Hey seversky,
My right to bodily autonomy isn’t a fucking destination at the end of some fucker’s mental ‘journey’.
Please to be fucking off now.
seversky is too mediocre of a troll for me.
I think they do exist but if you are arguing that the provision of such services is nowhere near adequate the I would agree. If you argue that opponents of abortion should be prepared to ensure there is adequate provision of such services then, again, I would agree.
You were a fetus once, just like everyone else here. Does that mean you and the rest of us were nothing more than a parasites or alien infestations imposing on our mothers physical autonomy, to be killed if she felt like it?
I would say rights apply regardless of medical conditions. I’m sure you believe you have a right to life regardless of medical condition and would defend that right just as fiercely as you defend your right to physical autonomy – and you would be right. Why shouldn’t the fetus have a similar right to life?
seversky:
It’s clear you’re not reading the comments directed to you, as I’ve addressed the following more than once:
You’re ignoring the fact that a fetus has to use the body of a woman to survive.
No one has the right to use the body of another human being against their wishes. Not you. Not me. Not a goddamned fetus. If I was dying and required a blood transfusion, I cannot make someone give me their blood. No one is required to do anything with their body that they don’t wish to. No one is compelled to use their body to save my life.
In that situation, we’re talking about the right to bodily autonomy, which you still haven’t acknowledged you understand.
Fetuses are not people. I’ve covered that back @92, and @297. Fetuses do not meet sufficient criteria to be regarded as people. Personhood is more than simply being genetically human.
But as I’ve said multiple times, even if a fetus was a person, they do not have the right to use a woman’s body against her wishes. This is something you pro fetus worshipers cannot understand. You constantly try to frame this as an issue of the rights of embryos and fetuses, while neglecting the right of the pregnant woman carrying the object of your worship. That woman is a human being. She has the right to bodily autonomy. If she is made to have a child against her wishes, she would be denied one of the rights that all humans have-a right which means that no one can force her to do anything with her body against her wishes. That treats her as a second class citizen without all the rights humans are supposed to have. That’s vile and dehumanizing.
seversky:
Pretty much yeah. If you’re going to deny the woman’s autonomy, you’re treating her as less than human. And you grant a fetus more rights than any living or dead human has (see: organ harvesting). You clearly do not consider women human beings (since you’d deny one of their fundamental human rights). Oh, hey I forgot I’ve been nice to you up to this point. No longer: fuck you shitpiston.
Nice emotional appeal there. It doesn’t work, but good try.
seversky @320
Put the straw-man away, and either address the argument or take your immoral argument elsewhere.
seversky @320
Yes, and you know what? I wouldn’t have known the difference because I never would have had a brain or self awareness. Just like the billions of embryos that are miscarried before the woman even knew she was pregnant. Do you mourn for those, too? Or just the ones that are aborted when the woman is making a decision to control her life and her body?
this is the naturalistic fallacy in action.
rights don’t exist outside of the particular population that defined them, for themselves.
we decide who gets what rights when, often based on little more than general appearances.
when can you drive?
when can you vote?
in the end, we try our best to define when rights should be assigned based on what we agree on would be the most value to us to do so.
sperm is alive, eggs are alive, but we don’t assign rights to them.
if you read the decision in Roe V Wade, how did the judges decided when to assign rights to a fetus?
in the end, it’s pretty fucking arbitrary. there are no “natural rights” involved here.
Me? I think it makes sense to assign a right to bodily autonomy post partum.
but then I would, because to me that moment marks the separation between one bodily autonomy and another.
@seversky This is not a mental exercise for your amusement.
So fuck off.
@ seversky
Yes. I get the feeling you thought you were disarming us with unexpected insight when you asked this.
Even if it has a right to life, it doesn’t trump my right to not have another creature inhabit my body for 9 months if I don’t want it to. Exactly the same way my right to life doesn’t trump your right to keep both your kidneys, even if you’re already dead. Exactly the same way the right to life of someone physically assaulting you doesn’t trump your right to make them stop, even if it means killing them.
based on what? your personal opinion?
What about the Terry Schiavo case? who’s “rights” applied there? seems like there were a great many that felt they had a stake in it.
If he was arguing that we should ignore lesser evils while there are greater evils around then I would agree that he was committing a logical fallacy. We should be concerned about all evils. But that wasn’t how I read his “Muslima” post.
As we know now, Rebecca Watson was going back to her hotel room in the early hours after spending time with friends in the bar. A man got in the elevator with her and asked if she’d like to come to his room for coffee. She declined, as she had every right to. He accepted her decision and walked away, exactly as he should have done. Not surprisingly, she was a little irritated at having to fend off such a misguided approach when all she wanted to was get some sleep. She vlogged about it later and simply asked guys not to do that sort of thing. Subsequently, she was criticized by a couple of other female bloggers and a firestorm of outrage erupted around the whole thing.
As I saw it, Dawkins saw the outrage as being about the “Elevatorgate” incident, thought it was a hugely disproportionate response given the way women were being treated in Muslim countries and fired off his ill-judged post. What he didn’t seem to grasp at the time was that “Elevatorgate” was being seen as just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger and more serious problem of widespread sexual harassment of women, even at skeptical and freethought conventions where you would have expected the men to know better. I think the worst you can say of him is that initially he misread what was happening about Elevatorgate. I don’t doubt his commitment to women’s and human rights.
Yes, I read that post and I think it illustrates why the personhood concept is a red herring. Accepting, for the sake of argument, Mary Anne Warren’s list of attributes are typical of personhood, I would have to ask the following question. There are many illnesses or disorders which can impair or deprive an individual entirely of some or all of those traits, does that mean that they become less of a person with fewer attendant rights or even cease to be a person and have no rights at all? Is someone in a coma no longer a person and therefore no longer has rights and can be killed at will?. I would deny that absolutely.
In my view, for what it’s worth, human rights are granted by society to its members, for the most part, regardless of physical or mental attributes, except where age or infirmity makes them unable to conduct their affairs as responsible adults. Human individuals vary widely in both their physical and metal attributes but that should not disqualify them from basic human rights.
If it was a shaming tactic then I disagree with it and I think he is wrong. DS should not disqualify a fetus from the chance of life and we owe respect, at the least, to those parents who choose willingly to take on the responsibility of a DS child.
As I see it, this is the heart of the dilemma if you allow that the fetus has a right to life but the mother does not wish, for whatever reason, to carry it to term. If you insist on the fetus’s right to life because you assume it takes precedence over all other rights, then you impose a heavy burden on an unwilling mother. The woman, of course, also has a right to life so if that is threatened by the pregnancy then abortion becomes an option. Otherwise, the only admittedly unsatisfactory compromise is to deliver the child as soon as is technically feasible and take it away so as to minimize the woman’s burden.
I’m not denying that there is a human right to bodily autonomy which, it goes without saying, includes women, What I am arguing for is the extension of the human right to life (as well as bodily autonomy) to the unborn child which is, after all, an individual human being, albeit at a very early stage of development.
@Seversky
There is no right to occupy and use another person’s body. Period. That right does not exist. No one can use anyone else’s body without consent – and that includes unborn humans.
Get that through your thick skull.
I don’t think you really are understanding what you are saying here.
Seversky, until you discuss the full humanity of the woman, equal to yours, with full bodily autonomy as you have, then you can’t say anything cogent about abortion. In fact, when most women >98% get abortions, you can’t even demonstrate without violating their right to privacy that they are pregnant.
Just another mental wanker who ignores the woman, and can’t see her for the fetus. Never mind he can’t take a direct picture of the fetus without violating the bodily integrity of the woman. At best, a photograph of the woman is obtained. Some folks just can’t picture the consequences of that fact.
Since seversky seems to like hypotheticals…
Say I’m using birth control and it fails, and I become pregnant. Why, exactly, does a creature without any form of consciousness get to harbor itself in my body against my will? Why, exactly, do you get to FORCE ME to carry this entity for 6 months and then FORCE ME to go through either HIGHLY INVASIVE SURGERY or an EXTREMELY PAINFUL induced delivery? Why, exactly, do you get to FORCE ME to have to undergo such non-fatal complications/procedures as episiotomies/tearing, hernias, blood loss, extreme pain, nerve damage, infections, etc? Why, exactly, do you get to FORCE ME to have doctors and nurses shoving their hands up my vagina to check the status of my forced birth? Why, exactly, do you get to FORCE ME to choose that or surgery… when I react really badly to opiods (as in, if I get them I will probably DIE) which means I get to recover from invasive abdominal surgery without adequate pain control, run a real risk of infection and requiring months of recovery?
Why, exactly, do you get to FORCE ME to upend my life for something I didn’t want in the first place?
You may kindly fuck off sideways, into the sea.
seversky @328
In other words, you think the fetus’ supposed “right to life” overrides the woman’s right to bodily autonomy. You see women as second class humans with less worth that a clump of non-sentient cells.
Your use of the oxymoron (more moron than oxy), is where your argument becomes self-refuting. Children are born, and are able to be photographed easily. Your use of unborn implies a fetus, still in the womb. It can’t be photographed without invading the body of the woman. And you therefore, are making refuted claims that should tell you the weakness of your idiocy. Nothing but slogans without any cogency and solid physical evidence….
seversky #328
What you’re arguing is that the former is less important than the latter. That a pregnant woman’s right to bodily autonomy is less important than a foetus’s “right” to use her body. Why?
seversky:
You’re still ignoring key pieces of information: NO HUMAN BEING HAS THE RIGHT TO USE THE BODY OF ANOTHER WITHOUT CONSENT. IF A WOMAN DOES NOT CONSENT TO BEING PREGNANT, SHE HAS THE RIGHT TO END THAT PREGNANCY.
Why?
Because she has the right to bodily autonomy.
Even if you extend that to a fetus, that fetus does not have the right to use her body without permission.
Jumping jesus on a cracker, but you’re dense.
Daz, we mommies are merely the vessels for the all-important fetus, of course! But I’m just a silly female with fuzzy pink ladybrains, so what do I know?
Seriously, I really admire all of you who keep dealing with the trolls, over and over, without losing your cool. I don’t know how you keep it up, but thank you.
why do people think it’s a good idea to dump their garbage into the sea?
Just because you can no longer see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there any more.
;)
this does not help your case in the slightest. For one, the right to life only exists because it’s a logical outcome of the life to bodily autonomy*. For two, when the right to bodily autonomy of one being is in conflict with the right to bodily autonomy of another being, the right to self-defense means that the bodily autonomy of the defender overrides the right of the aggressor; and in the case of pregnancy, it is the pregnant person defending their bodily autonomy against invasion, and the embryo/fetus is the aggressor.
*you do not literally have the right to be alive; if you did, it would be against human rights to die. Instead, you have the right not to have your life prematurely shortened against your will, i.e. you have the right to bodily autonomy from imposed death.
No you’re not.
You’re arguing for giving the unborn child the right to violate the bodily autonomy of another human being, a right which NO HUMAN HAS EVER HAD.
There are only two ways which your argument can be sustained. Either you are saying the unborn embryo deserves MORE rights than any other human (ie it is MORE than human) or the pregnant woman deserves LESS rights than any other human (ie she is LESS than human.)
Which is it?
Seversky @328
What part of, I can give the fetus full rights as a person and it still doesn’t trump the woman’s right to bodily autonomy, did you miss? There is no greater right their equal. Now as to reason why giving the fetus full rights would be absurd. If the fetus has a right to life as you would like to argue then the doctor and the woman would be guilty of murder, which is why if you’d taken the time to look up how the laws were handled before abortions were legal you would have found that the woman faced up to 5 years in prison, and the doctor lost his licence and faced 20 years in prison. Given that Illegal abortions today have a 10% fatality rate vs a .008% if done medically. How many lives are you willing to harm (insanely greater risk of death to women and the families of the women and doctors punished for this action) to save a fetus that has a 90%, damn my bad you said conception, 70-50% chance of becoming a human? And that doesn’t include whether they are born healthy or to good families.
Your position only serves to do more harm to a community than improving social health, it is immoral!
This shit is fun for you? Fuck you. My rights and the ownership of my body are not fun little toys for you to amuse yourself with, you smarmy little douchecake.
It’s super kind of Dawkins to make time for women’s rights in his busy schedule defending human rights.
Agreed. I’ll go be autonomous over here, and any unwanted fetus can go be autonomous over there without any interference from my bloodstream, uterus, or placenta. Fair?
Did Seversky do the ‘birth is arbitrary’ bingo square yet? I don’t see where they did, but I might have missed it.
This is an abortion thread, after all, and I haven’t reposted the Post Test in it yet, so we can’t be done.
no, the worst you can say about him is that he is a privileged, ignorant, asshat, and one can indeed make a good argument for that.
I do. I don’t doubt his INTENTIONS are good, but as the old saying goes…
“the Road to Hell Paved with Unbought Stuffed Dogs”
or something like that.
Dawkins is struggling with the fact that he is actually mentally and educationally unprepared to be making the arguments he makes on social issues.
and frankly, it’s past getting to the point where it’s doing far more harm than good. There are plenty of people interested in social justice issues that are far more engaged and educated on the subjects than Dawkins is, and I see no reason to force an old hound dog to keep trying to perform tricks he was never taught how to do. It’s just… embarrassing to watch.
Rowan vet-tech @333
Quoted For Fucking Truth.
ichthyic @247
So that’s where they ended up!
seversky
Yes.
Exactly.
Exactly. Which is why anyone should be free to choose an abortion, as it is an affirmation of their right to bodily autonomy – specifically, making decisions about the medical condition of their body.
Because (a) the fetus doesn’t have a life because (b) it is not a person. Also, abortion = ‘end of pregnancy’, not ‘kill the fetus’. Death is a side-effect of it not being capable of being a person yet. If it is not a person, it has no rights.
Also, why should a non-person’s ‘right’ to life trump an actual person’s right to bodily autonomy?
I can only hope I have the wits about me when I’m pushing 70 to shut my damn mouth more often than I do now.
I can only imagine I’d be saying something just as stupid on Twitter. I cringe remembering some of the things I have said over the last 30 years.
so, if asked whether or not I think it a good idea for someone to abort or not, I do hope my answer would always be:
“Why are you asking me?”
I’ve had liver ailments for years. A couple of doctors have tried to scare me by telling me there’s a good chance I’ll need a transplant some day.
Just a warning to a couple people in this thread, I’m taking down names for when that time comes.
I have a right to life, you know…
Anri @346
I believe contrarygymnosperm above had the ‘birth is arbitrary’ square above. Does that count?
seversky again
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! I’m sorry, I can’t seem to laugh any louder on this keyboard. Oh, wait – HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! Still not enough.
A fetus is an individual human being? Then it should survive just fine on its own. As V S said above, it can go be autonomous over there. Early stage of development or not, no one single person is obligated to care for another or to sacrifice their physical integrity for another. So, scoot, fetus!
If he INITIALLY misread what was happening there, he would have apologized, publicly, and buried the hatchet with Rebecca Watson by now.
Link me to the tweet where he does that, please.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
An “individual” is a being who can survive on its own, within the context of its evolutionary niche. In the case of humans, a social technological species, that means survive on its own* with the use of whatever social aids that do not violate the bodily integrity of another. That means medical technology as available.
Any fetus capable of that is delivered by induced birth in the event the woman carrying it wants to end her pregnancy, and thus is not relevant to the abortion debate.
Any fetus not capable of that is not an individual human being. Period.
*Lest you want to bring up the example of a person dying of some failing organ, such person is still surviving on their own, and does so until the moment of death, at which point said person ceases to be an individual human being and becomes a cadaver.
So, let’s see, Mr Troll, we have two beings with absolutely equal rights as a matter of principle.
The problem is that they are occupying the same space, a body which was previously the inviolate domain of just one of them but which now has to be shared. Does that mean they each have 50% of a human right or do they each still have 100% – which seems a bit excessive for 8, 16, 32 cells you would need a microscope to see. How you get a microscope up any woman’s vagina without violating both her privacy and her bodily integrity I leave to you to work out.
Time moves on. We still have two beings with absolutely equal rights and occupying the same space BUT – it’s an important “but” – one of them is beginning seriously to impinge upon the bodily autonomy of the other. Even in the early weeks of pregnancy we don’t know whether it will be just throwing up once as you rise each morning or the rarer but potentially life-threatening hyperemesis gravidarum.
And as time goes on the demands of one of these beings on the other grow. Have you ever tried to get on a horse at 8.5 months pregnant? No, neither have I but by the time we get to that stage the idea of the woman’s full bodily autonomy is a bit of a joke.
The only circumstance in which such potential for damage to body, mind, life-plans would not be a crime against humanity is if the woman freely, willingly and at a time to suit her plans agrees to play host to the possible human being and to take the risks which are there for anyone who takes a pregnancy to term.
no need, it’s already been worked out.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/02/07/1554731/transvaginal-probes-under-radar/
Though experiments are fucking awesome, boooo to those who shun them.
In this specific case, it really forced me to think about body autonomy in a different way.
(TBH, I found the transplant example more effective than PZ’s aliens.)
I’d still consider selfish and immoral not to make a personal sacrifice to save someone else (then again I do it everyday when I do not donate to charities).
Regardless we have a right to make selfish choices, removing this right from women would be inconsistent.
I’m disappointed by Dawkins, its petty of him to just say “a blogger” rather than explicitly mentioning PZ.
Gaaaaah! Dawkins, no!
Why can’t he understand that just because there is a chance a person may make an unwise decision does not mean that decision is not that person’s to make?!
Secondly, in the case of a pregnant woman with a (sentient, poetry-writing baby inside), name me one human being on the planet who should have more of a say in the matter than the two people involved? And since the baby is incapable of making the decision, all 100% of it goes to the mother. Say I was a single parent with a 2-year old who was suffering from some serious illness. Well, professor Dawkins, guess who makes the decisions for that 2-year old? No qualms there, right?
Here’s my simple 3-point peace plan to solve all abortion conundrums. These are the only parties who will play a role in decisions regarding abortion in any and all cases.
1. The pregnant woman
2. Her healthcare provider
3. Anyone she chooses to involve in the decision
Note: This order of priority may only be rearranged or otherwise altered by the full consent of the pregnant woman herself.
There. I’ve solved it.
Nobel, please!
I infer that you consider all abortions to be selfish and immoral.
And yet, as the population approaches 7 billion and we are looking at another 2 billion added within the next 40 years or so, one could easily argue that in the larger scale view of things, it is more selfish and more immoral not to abort, generally speaking. Bringing extra children into the world, especially when you are not 100% sure about your capacity to care for them, poses a direct threat to the ongoing ability of existing human beings to preserve their rights to bodily autonomy and life.
This whole aversion to abortion seems to me to be rooted in extremely primitive human social systems, predicated on the outdated assumption that human survival will be aided, not imperiled, by bringing more human beings into the world.
Because donating to charities is JUST LIKE carrying a unwanted pregnancy?
WTF?
Jackie
F.O. donates body parts, that’s why the comparison can be made.
The annoyingly “benevolent” side of sexism aside, the point Dawkins seems to not grasp is that the decision always remains the woman’s. Always. From the very start to the finish. From as soon as the pregnancy is starting to any point at all in the pregnancy.
Just because it’s Wordsworth in the womb (a being breathing thoughtful breath!), does not mean the choice now has to shift to anyone else. Dawkins sees the situation becoming more complex and the decision requiring much more serious contemplation and says, “Things just got too tough for you to handle now. We’ll take it from here.”
That is what his issue is I think. He can’t accept the idea that there’s no difference between a man and a woman when it comes to making personal medical choices. And he can’t accept the idea that the freedom to choose is not affected by the complexity of a situation or by the seriousness of its consequences. It always firmly remains with the party to whom the events are directly happening.
What Sally Strange said. There is a point where mindlessly proliferating life out of a sense of obligation or guilt (for, say, not wanting to seem “immoral and selfish”) decreases the quality of those already living. It contributes to an already excessive load on the environment due to the sheer amount of members of the human species already. So what we have is weighing the alleged selfishness of not letting a fetus use your body to enter the world against the larger but more socially acceptable selfishness of contributing to overpopulation, lessening quality of human life, and overall damage to the environment, in order to ensure your genes are represented in later generations.
I think overall one should just shut the fuck up about “moral” or “immoral” when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Because odds are, whenever they start tut-tutting something as “immoral”, it is because they aren’t taking a broad enough view of the subject. The issues involved are not easy. The ethics are not trivial, they are not clear. The people who pretend they are almost universally full of shit and almost universally work as an attempt towards trying to shame and control women.
I’m late to the party and everyone else has already chewed on the chew toy, but I’d like to add a bit on this anyway.
The short answer to your questions is “yes”. A person who has lost brain activity, the definitive characteristic of a living person, is no longer a person with rights. They are now a body to be used as the nearest relative wills it, either buried or recycled or for that matter stuffed and mounted. The definition of “living person” includes brain activity. An embryo which has, literally, no brain, no stationary neurons to have brain activity with, is not a living person. In the appropriate environment it MAY develop into a living person–or not. Quite a number of early pregnancies simply fail naturally. Far more than are aborted. If you were really concerned about the poetry writing (or not…hard to write poetry with no brain activity) embryos, you’d concentrate on the disease that is killing most of them, not the occasional “murder”.
A person in a coma is a harder question, but the answer is still mostly yes. The medical care of a person in a coma is the responsibility of their next of kin. And if the next of kin judges that it is not in the best interest of the person in a coma to continue to recieve medical care then they don’t. In short, they may well not have the right to be not “killed” at will (i.e. the support system keeping them may be withdrawn). Of course, “coma” is used very loosely in popular speech and there are situations where withdrawing care would be completely inappropriate, but in the situation of irreversible PVS, for example, it is considered often not just moral but the most moral thing to do.
Richard Dawkins still being an ass:
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/503890391062818816
Maybe that was actually supposed to be an actual apology but he is just so Vulcan that he doesn’t realize that his tone is still self-righteous and indignant and it looks like a deliberate attempt to diminish the degree (“only ten percent”!) of his error.
Good grief, Dawkins has his foot so far in his mouth that he’s kicking his own ass.
If there are any more “pro-life” people out there reading, I have one question to ask: If it’s all about the DNA, not about the brain, how do you feel about the following circumstances:
1. The hamster egg assay. In this assay, sperm quality is determined by allowing a human sperm to penetrate (or fail to penetrate) a hamster egg. Is the resulting fertilized egg a precious little baby or a biohazard? Most die without dividing–but some don’t. Are we obligated to find those that start dividing a uterus because babies? Hamster or human?
2. Identical twins: two people or one?
3. Chimeras: one person or two?
4. Mice with human knock-in genes: human or not?
5. Cancer cells: 100% unique human DNA. Is chemotherapy murder? Are Jurkat cells enslaved?
I apologize if this is all too off topic because absolutely none of the above will result in an intrauterine poet, but I’ve never gotten a straight answer to any of the above questions from a “pro-life” person and I’m curious.
Seriously. I want to send the man some cinnamon-scented footrub, because the taste of sweat must be getting really boring by now. It’s the charitable thing to do.
dianne,
Did you leave out the obvious fun one on purpose? :)
They don’t like to be confronted with that one.
anteprepro @368, what, has Dawkins reverted to childhood? That’s the sort of “apology” I’d expect from a bratty little kid.
It’s not exactly “I was wrong. I’m sorry,” is it.
Saad, I left out lots of them. Which one were you thinking of? The cloning issue?
That sounded snarky or is it just me?
I heartily second what Tony said at 31 and 40: “the right to an abortion is provided by the right to bodily autonomy. Women have that right by virtue of being humans. They don’t lose that right to a fetus, even one that writes poetry. No one has the right to make use of anothers’ body without their permission. Period.”
The only thought experiment necessary is to imagine that the man on the Clapham omnibus needs to use your body (whoever “your” implies) as a dialysis machine or some other life support for several months. To bestow that personal service must be in your gift and not coerced. You have the right to say no.
If impugning the morality of a minority is just peachy, what’s wrong with impugning the morality of atheists?
#370 Dianne
Add hydatidiform mole to the list. A mole is 100% human. A partial mole, for example, is really just suffering from an abnormal number of chromosomes. But it is alive, and 100% human. It doesn’t have a brain, but forced birthers say that a brain is not necessary to be a person sooo….any pro-liar who says that the lives of moles should not be preserved is clearly an ableist hypocrite.
Gotta love Dawkins and Twitter.
The Defenders of the Logic Lord:
Neil Brown sez: “Apparently you dared to share your honest views without first consulting the current P.C. bible.”
@markstilwellUK sez: “Well said Richard but your point was still valid .None of us would wish to become downs ,why then do that to a baby.”
And the Blasphemous Detractors:
Colin Culberth: “Why is this an issue you care about? And by care, I mean speak about at length?”
Cath Belcher replies to the above: “because there are certain sections of society he hasn’t offended yet”
Pablo Clark: “Why do you write these bizarre foot-stamping Tweets. It’s infuriating. It undermines you, time and again.”
John Mayo: “This was the correct apology. It didn’t need the thinly veiled argumentum ad populum 10% remark though. Insincere.”
Daniel Nava: “Please let it go!!! At least change the subject.Youve done paedophilia, rape, DS… Do immigration! Its so en vogue nowadays”
Yes, there were actually more detractors than sycophants! That’s how bad Dawkins is getting.
Oh also before that Tweet I linked to before, and all those responses to that tweet above, Dawkins brought up Plato and Essentialism and basically flat out asserted that all of the opposition to his nonsense was based on that. I’m not buying it. Anyone else?
The tweet: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/503826251455668225
Previous tweet that shows that this post is in fact still about his abortion faux pas: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/503787492773232640
His article about essentialism: http://edge.org/response-detail/25366
RQ at 254: “BTW, is there a good, single, umbrella-word for people-with-uteri, other than using long clumsy phrases like people-with-uteri and people-who-can-be-pregnant? I think I saw Jackie (?) use the word ‘female-bodied’ above – is that okay? It rolls out so much better. Any other possibilities?”
The word you’re looking for might be “fertile,” indicating “liable to get pregnant.”
Dawkins’ comments about women and abortion, both about the hypothetical conscious fetus and the fetus with Down’s Syndrome, both ally him with those who would control fertile female bodies instead of letting people make their own moral decisions. They give ammunition to those who would deny that women and trans women are independent moral agents.
That 10% “apology” from Dawkins is interesting.
What’s the percentage of outspoken atheists (like Dawkins) in the general population again?
About 10%…?
Good one, Valde. And, unlike other malignant conditions, moles produce mature tissue so there goes the “but it can’t develop” argument, which was always kind of ablist anyway. Here’s the problem: there’s a similar condition in men in which testicular cancers (or, very occasionally, cancers elsewhere in the body) can also form mature tissue. So if abortion is immoral, surely so too is treatment of testicular cancer.
If Republicans believe it is acceptable to defends one’s home from unwanted person(s) with deadly force, why not one’s body?
@anteprepro (380): my favorite twitter comment so far has been (paraphrasing from memory here) “A Dawkins tweet is like a Game of Thrones episode. There are 140 characters and something unspeakably awful happens.”
It’s ok for HIM to defend HIS home, but not for HER to defend HER body.
What was PZ’s point behind the “Writing poetry in the womb” thought experiment?
It was to state that the reason he is pro-choice is because he believes woman carrying the foetus is the only one who can make a decision about abortion, regardless of how intelligent the foetus is.
The use of an extreme hypothetical, which is also impossible, is to state that no matter how much intelligence a fetus is shown to have, it is STILL within the woman’s rights to abort it. I get it, and I 100% agree.
I suspect that this is to combat common anti-choice arguments which seek to assign far more personhood to the foetus than is true, “but it has a heartbeat, fingers, toes…. look it’s waving!”.
The thing is, if the thought experiment is truly considered, it would imply that foetuses could communicate (with some sort of assistance), and express thoughts as complex as any human. It would follow that foetuses could learn about the existence of other foetuses, and then organize to form foetus lobby groups, possibly arguing for abortion to be illegal. It would certainly be “murder” to kill such a being, despite it living inside a host human. The only possible exception to it being murder would be if the pregnancy risked the life of the mother, and even then you may need to ask the foetus for consent. If this is how pregnancies worked, there would be vast differences in human society. Thankfully, it’s not… so it’s really worth considering.
If some study comes out in the future that says foetuses have some small sliver of intelligent brain function, this would not change my pro-choice (nor PZ’s) position.
If a foetus writes the next great american novel however…. OK this is just silly.
Jeff S
No, the fetus would need to ask the mother for consent to use her body during its development. No matter how intelligent something is, it doesn’t have the right to live off of person’s organs without consent. That is the whole point.
They don’t. They just don’t consider dark-skinned humans “persons”.
We’ve been THROUGH this. Either come out and make an argument that it’s also murder to refuse to donate blood or a kidney or FUCK OFF.
And if the fetus didn’t give consent, would you arrest it as soon as it was born for murder? It was the one that denied its mother the life saving procedure.
But…but…that argument puts MEN in danger and we can’t have that, can we?
I’d like to add, just to head off the argument, that it’s not unknown for it to be possible for a given person to be able to receive blood from only one identified donor. Rare, fortunately, but not impossible. And it’s usual to have only one person who can donate marrow to another person. Yet the McFall versus Shimp case says that you can’t force that one person to donate his or her marrow or blood or organs. Only in pregnancy is force used to compel one person to donate their body to the good of another unwillingly.
These two sentences don’t work together. Either you deny women the right to bodily autonomy or you deny the fetus the right to continue to gestate in the uterus of a woman who does not want it to be there. No other person has the right to live off another’s body without their permission, so what’s your argument for granting this special right to the fetus?
@394 dianne
Not severvsky obviously but my argument would be that while body autonomy allows a legally competent individual to refuse a medical treatment (which would of course include being a blood or organ donor), it doesn’t allow you to demand one. Abortion grants a special right to the pregnant woman rather birth granting one to the fetus.
No, it does not.
Also, a person does have a right to medical treatment, unless I’m missing something here. If I have cancer, I have every right to seek and demand appropriate treatment for that illness. You can’t lock me up and say, ‘No, you can’t go out and have chemo, because I don’t think you need it that bad.’
Abortion is a medical treatment that a woman undergoes to eliminate a medical condition known as pregnancy. There is nobody else involved.
The moment anything or anyone invades the body of another, and uses that body for it’s own benefit, it has forfeited the right to it’s bodily autonomy.
There is NO positive right to occupy and use the body of another without consent. People with uteri are not given ‘special rights’ when it comes to evicting the unwanted prenate. And just because the prenate might *need* the pregnant person’s body for it’s survival does NOT mean it is entitled to that body. I might NEED your bone marrow for survival, that doesn’t mean that I am entitled to it.
@396 rq You have the right to a medical treatment that a physician deems necessary. You don’t have the right to medical treatment on the grounds that it’s your body and therefore your choice.
Well then, chris61 @ 398, a fetus has no right to the ‘medical treatment’ of using my organs. I get to be like the physician and say “You do not need this. Get out.”
#398 chris61
Actually, you do have the right to decide what will happen to you body. People can refuse treatment. And you know what, they can even *choose* certain treatments – such as plastic surgery!
Point being, we do not force people to risk their lives, especially for the benefit of another.
BTW, if women have a ‘special right’ then why is it that fathers are not legally obligated to donate their bodies to their offspring? What if the fetus and pregnant person are sick during the pregnancy, and fetal life can ONLY be saved if the man donates a kidney? For that matter, if the pregnant person is morally obligated to let the prenate use her body for it’s survival, then surely the father should be obligated to donate his organs and tissue AFTER birth, yes? I mean, that would ONLY be fair, right? Forced organ, blood and tissue donation for fathers? Surely you would be in favour of that?
chris61 @ 398
I nominate you to inform all the cosmetic surgeons and orthodontists in the world that they need to seek other employment.
@400 valve Again, my point was that yes people can refuse treatment but they can’t demand a treatment. I can’t demand chemo just because I think it would be beneficial to me. I only get it if a physician thinks it’s beneficial. As for your BTW, you are trying to conflate refusing a medical treatment ( the man has the right) with demanding a medical treatment (only a pregnant person the right)
@399 rowen The fetus isn’t demanding a medical treatment to use your organs. In most cases that is what happens without intervention and in fact if continuation of the pregnancy requires a medical treatment to the fetus the legally competent pregnant person has the right to refuse that treatment.
So people don’t have the right to ask for medical treatment for conditions that are making them ill and putting their life at risk? News to me.
@ 403 dianne
Of course people of any gender have the right to ask for medical treatment for conditions that they believe are making them ill or putting their lives at risk but getting that medical treatment is at the discretion of the physician. A person’s right to body autonomy allows them to refuse a treatment against medical advice but doesn’t allow them to select one.
#402
Yeah, so if your life and health are at risk, a physician has the right to tell you to fuck off and die if they don’t think your health is at risk?
This is a fucking red herring anyway. The fetus does not have the right to inhabit my body against my will for the same reason you can’t be forced to donate organs and for the same reason you’re allowed to defend yourself from an attacker.
@ 401 Seven
No they don’t because as long as the services they provide are legal and as long as they deem the services medically necessary (that’s the doctor, not the patient) and as long as there are patients who can pay for them, cosmetic surgeons and orthodontists can keep as busy as they like (although in many cases in the USA at least health insurance providers won’t pay for the services).
@chris61 You really are ignorant.
Here are some of the common side effects of pregnancy. Pregnancy is not a state of health. Abortion is 14x safer than birth. And birth itself, if induced by another means, would be classified as torture. Furthermore, what a fetus does to a woman, and I will list it below, would be considered a violent assault if someone was to do it to you. And people have the right to defend their bodies from assault.
Normal, frequent or expectable temporary side effects of pregnancy:
exhaustion (weariness common from first weeks)
altered appetite and senses of taste and smell
nausea and vomiting (50% of women, first trimester)
heartburn and indigestion
constipation
weight gain
dizziness and light-headedness
bloating, swelling, fluid retention
hemmorhoids
abdominal cramps
yeast infections
congested, bloody nose
acne and mild skin disorders
skin discoloration (chloasma, face and abdomen)
mild to severe backache and strain
increased headaches
difficulty sleeping, and discomfort while sleeping
increased urination and incontinence
bleeding gums
pica
breast pain and discharge
swelling of joints, leg cramps, joint pain
difficulty sitting, standing in later pregnancy
inability to take regular medications
shortness of breath
higher blood pressure
hair loss
tendency to anemia
curtailment of ability to participate in some sports and activities
infection including from serious and potentially fatal disease
(pregnant women are immune suppressed compared with non-pregnant women, and are more susceptible to fungal and certain other diseases)
extreme pain on delivery
hormonal mood changes, including normal post-partum depression
continued post-partum exhaustion and recovery period (exacerbated if a c-section — major surgery — is required, sometimes taking up to a full year to fully recover)
Normal, expectable, or frequent PERMANENT side effects of pregnancy:
stretch marks (worse in younger women)
loose skin
permanent weight gain or redistribution
abdominal and vaginal muscle weakness
pelvic floor disorder (occurring in as many as 35% of middle-aged former child-bearers and 50% of elderly former child-bearers, associated with urinary and rectal incontinence, discomfort and reduced quality of life — aka prolapsed utuerus, the malady sometimes badly fixed by the transvaginal mesh)
changes to breasts
varicose veins
scarring from episiotomy or c-section
other permanent aesthetic changes to the body (all of these are downplayed by women, because the culture values youth and beauty)
increased proclivity for hemmorhoids
loss of dental and bone calcium (cavities and osteoporosis)
higher lifetime risk of developing Altzheimer’s
newer research indicates microchimeric cells, other bi-directional exchanges of DNA, chromosomes, and other bodily material between fetus and mother (including with “unrelated” gestational surrogates)
Occasional complications and side effects:
complications of episiotomy
spousal/partner abuse
hyperemesis gravidarum
temporary and permanent injury to back
severe scarring requiring later surgery
(especially after additional pregnancies)
dropped (prolapsed) uterus (especially after additional pregnancies, and other pelvic floor weaknesses — 11% of women, including cystocele, rectocele, and enterocele)
pre-eclampsia (edema and hypertension, the most common complication of pregnancy, associated with eclampsia, and affecting 7 – 10% of pregnancies)
eclampsia (convulsions, coma during pregnancy or labor, high risk of death)
gestational diabetes
placenta previa
anemia (which can be life-threatening)
thrombocytopenic purpura
severe cramping
embolism (blood clots)
medical disability requiring full bed rest (frequently ordered during part of many pregnancies varying from days to months for health of either mother or baby)
diastasis recti, also torn abdominal muscles
mitral valve stenosis (most common cardiac complication)
serious infection and disease (e.g. increased risk of tuberculosis)
hormonal imbalance
ectopic pregnancy (risk of death)
broken bones (ribcage, “tail bone”)
hemorrhage and
numerous other complications of delivery
refractory gastroesophageal reflux disease
aggravation of pre-pregnancy diseases and conditions (e.g. epilepsy is present in .5% of pregnant women, and the pregnancy alters drug metabolism and treatment prospects all the while it increases the number and frequency of seizures)
severe post-partum depression and psychosis
research now indicates a possible link between ovarian cancer and female fertility treatments, including “egg harvesting” from infertile women and donors
research also now indicates correlations between lower breast cancer survival rates and proximity in time to onset of cancer of last pregnancy
research also indicates a correlation between having six or more pregnancies and a risk of coronary and cardiovascular disease
Less common (but serious) complications:
peripartum cardiomyopathy
cardiopulmonary arrest
magnesium toxicity
severe hypoxemia/acidosis
massive embolism
increased intracranial pressure, brainstem infarction
molar pregnancy, gestational trophoblastic disease
(like a pregnancy-induced cancer)
malignant arrhythmia
circulatory collapse
placental abruption
obstetric fistula
More permanent side effects:
future infertility
permanent disability
death.
#405 valde
Don’t know about other countries but unless a physician believes that your life is at immediate risk then yeah, pretty much. In particular the AMA states that medical personnel can’t be forced to perform any medical treatment that they are morally opposed to.
So now we’re at a point where the little poet and I are supposed to drag on a legal dispute over each one’s rights regarding my body.
Shenanigans, I say! We now how the legal system (everywhere) is. By the time he fetus gets the court ordered eviction, it will already be toddling and scribbling its poems on living room walls.
Besides, I really don’t want to know how the fetus will meet its laywer to discuss their strategy in private. Ugh.
In this thread, pro-choice people arguing with other pro-choice people about how pro-choice they would be given impossible hypothetical biological scenarios.
Some are even getting mad.
chris61
Exactly, and as noted above, pregnancy is a medical condition that places the pregnant person’s life at risk. Of all kinds of things, up to and including death. It’s a far more dangerous condition than, say, needing straighter teeth because they’re a little crooked.
Also, I wasn’t aware that breast enlargement was 100% always medically necessary. Huh. Learn something every day!
chris61
For future reference, if I ever become a doctor, I am morally opposed to providing any treatment to you. Go find another doctor.
Jeff S
You’re either pro-choice or not, there’s not ‘more pro-choice’. Either you understand that an abortion is a pregnant person’s choice because it’s their body, or you don’t.
It’s the impossible biological scenarios that some people insist on bringing up because somehow, that should alter the fact whether a person’s body is theirs to do with as they please or not.
Jeff S,
Yes, well, that happens when impossible hypothetical scenarios reveal people who say they support you would easily turn on you.
If only someone hadn’t made up the stupid scenario…
Beatrice
Sign language via ultrasound. Look away, look away!!!
@ 408 Valde,
Pregnancy is as much a state of health as puberty or old age both of which are also associated with side effects. I don’t have the right to demand treatments for either of those conditions either unless a physician agrees. Again my point being I have an absolute right to refuse treatment but whether I get a treatment or not depends on the physician.
@Chris61
Aww..so if you are dying of cancer and it’ll take 6 months I can tell you good luck, but I am morally opposed to treating your cancer?
lol
And no, doctors *cannot* discriminate based on their morality.
A doctor could refuse to give you antibiotics because s/h/i/t believes that bacteria are moral beings, and that the medicine will kill off innocent bacteria. So no, of course not.
Please try to sound like less of an ignorant moron. Thanks.
chris61 @407
Your argument is that nobody can have a treatment done that isn’t considered medically necessary. If you’re right about that, cosmetic surgeons and orthodontists are indeed out of work because cosmetic surgery and braces are often not medically necessary. You can’t have it both ways.
Jeff S @ 411
Did you get lost on your way to 4chan?
#416
Pregnancy is not the default state for persons with uteri. It is a very dangerous state that maims, kills and injures. And we do not force people to risk life and limb to save another.
What you are doing is saying that ‘pregnancy is natural therefore it’s good and normal’ which is a fallacy. Sex is also natural, and it comes with side effects. That doesn’t mean that it should be 1) forced on people 2) those side effects not treated because it’s ‘natural’
Again, your ignorance is showing. I am honestly rather embarrassed for you. Try to come up with some better arguments that are not massive fallacies.
And again, no, a physicians moral qualms do not in fact override a patient’s right to treatment. Which is why a physician can’t by law turn you away if he is morally opposed to killing innocent cancer cells.
Umm, no. Puberty happens to everyone, and so does old age. If pregnancy happened to everyone, inevitably, at a certain specific point in their lives, this wouldn’t be a conversation.
And yes, I can demand treatment for problems related to puberty or to old age if I want to (otherwise we wouldn’t have creams for acne (some even need prescription!) and we wouldn’t bother with Alzheimer’s research). I can demand treatment from my doctor, because it is my body to do with as I please.
But Valde, what’s a uterus for, if not to be filled with babies all the time????
“”For anti-choicers, the fact that someone can make a baby means that making babies is what she is for. People mistake the term “objectification” to mean “looking at with lust,” but what it actually means is “reducing someone to an object to be used.” Sexual objectification is assuming that because women turn you on, they are for sex, instead of a person whose sexuality should be an expression of their agency. What anti-choicers engage in is reproductive objectification. Women are among an array of objects to be used. The refrigerator is for storing food. The bookshelf is for holding books. The woman is for making babies. You no more give her a choice in the matter than you would give your refrigerator veto power over what food it hold because it didn’t like your method of shopping.”‘
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/26/todd-akin-is-just-tip-iceberg/
JeffS,
Just look the at the pattern of that kind of scenario:
I’m pro-choice
BUT
Here is the list of hypotheticals where I wouldn’t be pro-choice:
– fetus capable of writing poetry in the womb
– fetus solving math problems in the womb
– fetus curing cancer
– fetus preparing “Use public transport – save the Earth” signs for its first protest when it gets out
…
– some other impossible scenario
Nice moral debate, for those who can waste time wanking about something they don’t have to experience. Just keep it in private, folks, please.
So what does bringing that kind of shit up tell me?
1) Ok, you’re pro-choice and you just want to tell me that I’m lucky fetus can’t sing Ave Maria from in there because in that case you would be ok with forcing me to carry the pregnancy.
Um, thanks for sharing, I guess. Could you not talk to me ever again, please? Thanks.
2) You’re really good at thinking up scenarios where you would be ok with forcing me to stay pregnant. I am slightly worried by your enthusiasm.
3) Could you practice your philosophical chops on some topic that isn’t so hot, and where your make believe stories aren’t used by people who want to deny my right to, well, deny my fucking rights?!.
Thanks.
And so on. You notice how it’s all negative. Especially notice the effects in the last point.
That‘s why people who are pro-choice are arguing in this thread.
chris61
First, as stated by rq @421, pregnancy is not something that every person goes through as a part of life. But let’s say that your statement is correct. If there was an easy, safe cure for old age, should that cure be restricted from people by law?
And you keep bringing up the right of physicians to refuse abortions if it is against their morals. No one is saying every physician should be forced to provide abortions. There are physicians out there who are willing to give them for any reason, whether you like it or not. Lawmakers, though, have no place in the decision, and if a physician refuses to provide an abortion, the pregnant person can go to another physician who is willing to perform the procedure. No matter how much you want all physicians to declare abortions are not medically necessary, it isn’t going to happen, so stop arguing as if you believe this has already happened and pro-choicers are demanding that all physicians be forced to perform abortions.
@420 valde
taken from guttmacher.org
Within weeks of the Roe decision in 1973, Congress adopted legislation proposed by then-senator Frank Church (R-ID) that permits individual health care providers receiving federal funding or working for entities receiving such funding to refuse to perform or assist in performing abortions or sterilizations if these procedures violate their religious beliefs or moral convictions. The provision also prohibits discrimination against health care providers because of their nonparticipation—or participation—in abortions or sterilizations.
At least as related to abortion, states quickly emulated, and expanded, the federal model. More than half the states adopted laws by the end of 1974, and currently, 45 states allow health care providers—whether or not public funds are involved—to refuse to participate in the delivery of abortion services. Only three of these states require providers to notify patients of their refusal. Moreover, while 39 states protect providers who refuse to participate in abortion from discrimination, only eight follow the federal law in also protecting those who do choose to participate.
@chris61
That is irrelevant. You stated that if a physican has ‘moral qualms’ about something that won’t immediately kill you, then they have a right to refuse.
So if your cancer won’t immediately kill you, and your physician thinks that cancer cells are valuable moral beings, should he have a right to deny you chemotherapy? yes or no?
@rq: yes, I’d feel obliged to do it. WTF is wrong with you?
If my daughter needed a kidney and I was the only possible donor, I wouldn’t think twice to give her one of mine.
I’d expect any parent to do it.
And no, I wouldn’t consider a clump of cells “my daughter”.
Imposing this legally in any way would be a terrible idea though. Personal choices and context do matter. I think I made this clear.
Jesus, I understand that the people here have had their faith in humanity stolen, but your aggressiveness is badly misdirected.
Valde,
I would say that a physician may have a good reason to deny chemotherapy treatment, such as, “I work in an urgent care facility and we don’t do that here.” But if, for any reason, a physician had moral qualms about chemotherapy, they would not be employable in a facility that provides chemotherapy. I’d say the same goes with abortions. A physician who would refuse to provide abortions based on moral grounds has that right, but they don’t have the right to do that while employed at a facility that provides these services.
For fuck’s sake chris61, we’re all well aware of the state of abortion laws in the US. We don’t need you to lay it out for us, ignorant ass.
@toska
Exactly. And chris61, however, is trying to argue that no uterine-owner should receive treatment for the dangerous condition that is pregnancy because it won’t *immediately* kill the pregnant person.
F.O.
I’m being aggressive? News to me. And it was your comparison: “I’d still consider selfish and immoral not to make a personal sacrifice to save someone else (then again I do it everyday when I do not donate to charities).” Donating to charities is not like sacrificing bits and pieces of yourself for someone else’s sake. Unless you’re made of money, of course – or donating body parts. Both of which, though intriguing, are unlikely.
I’m glad you would choose to save your daughter, but would you do the same for a stranger? How would you feel about either situation if you were obligated to do it, by law?
Yes, you were clear that personal choice is what matters. But your comparison about personal sacrifice was really… stupid.
Valde,
But you see, what chris61 has figured out is that every physician agrees that abortions are bad, so not a single one will willingly provide them, and pro-choicers are just trying to violate physicians’ rights by forcing them to go against their morals. That’s the argument I’m seeing, anyway.
Valde
Obviously, chris61 is not factoring for things like eclampsia, which can appear suddenly and kill quickly. Also, ectopic pregnancies. Although those might not be ‘immediate’ enough.
Hey chris, take a look at this, a doctor does abortions because he wants to help pregnant persons:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2014/08/i-do-abortions-because-i-am-a-christian/
“”Dr. Parker makes the trip to Mississippi from his home in Chicago twice a month. He’s Harvard educated and gave up a career as college professor and obstetrician to become an abortion provider. The realization that this would be his civil rights struggle is what he calls his “come to Jesus” moment, and he became an abortion provider on the day that Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his church.””
OMG, can you imagine that, little Chrissy? And actual ob/gyn who believes that abortions are *necessary* for the health of women!!!!
Thank you chris61, for standing up for all of those physicians who work in abortion clinics who just wish they had the right to deny providing abortions. I’m sure they all secretly believe the same way you do.
Or we could start discussing reality, if you want.
A physician’s “discretion” is circumscribed by the professional standards of his or her specialty. A physician may use his or her discretion to refuse to provide cancer treatment to a patient who requests it for whatever reason but if it turns out that the patient did indeed have cancer for which the treatment that was not provided was standard of care, the physician is subject to sanction from his or her professional organization, up to and including loss of licensure.
And the standard is not medical “necessity”, it is medical benefit. That is, does the benefit provided outweigh the risks and other negative side effects of treatment. It does not have to be “necessary” any more than clothing is necessary.
Also, at least I. canada where I work, a physician who refuses to provide treatment for moral objections is still required to refer that patient to someone who CAN provide the treatment in question, in a timely fashion.
Ok, ethics of not treating someone…
A physician is not required to take a new patient on if the patient’s life is not in immediate danger and they can reasonably receive care elsewhere.
A physician can not refuse emergency treatment if they are capable of providing it.
A physician can refuse to provide a given treatment if they are not qualified to provide it, but they are required to provide a referral to someone who is qualified and able to provide care.
A physician is allowed to dismiss a patient from their practice if they feel that they can not give good quality care to the patient for any reason, but they must give at least 30 days notice to the patient and continue to provide care during that 30 day period.
A physician is not required to include any particular procedure in their practice, but an OB that can’t do a D & C is a bit like a surgeon who can’t do an appendectomy. It just doesn’t make sense.
A patient is not allowed to demand a particular drug or technique, but they can demand that the physician do their best to provide a certain outcome, i.e. the patient can demand that their cancer be treated but they can’t demand that adriamycin be used as part of the treatment.
If there is a substantial difference of opinion between the physician and the patient as to what would be in the patient’s best interests, the physician must offer to refer for a second opinion.
Medical necessity is not required for a procedure to be ethical: There are only a few situations where botox is medically necessary and none that I know of where liposuction is. Yet these procedures are common because people want smoother brows and less fat.
Citation needed from a proven deceptive person. Or you are WRONG.
Since EMS services do not have teleportation magic, medical is in fact never given for conditions that are “immediately” fatal. The victims of those conditions go straight to the Morgue. Medical care can only be provided for conditions that are NOT immediately fatal, but threaten to become fatal at a future time of variable determinacy.
But what if the bacteria were writing poetry in your bloodstream? You never know for sure. It’s at least as likely as the poetry writing fetus. Best make antibacterials illegal. Just in case.
Beatrice
First of all, I didn’t bring this up, it was brought up by PZ Myers and then commented on by Richard Dawkins. This isn’t something I’d ever say to someone in person, ever, because what the fuck would be the point? On a thread where people are already discussing this ridiculous hypothetical, sure I’ll weigh in.
What enthusiasm? Again I did not think up this scenario, merely commenting on it already being discussed. The scenario being discussed is a terrifying one, and in no way anything that I’d wish was the case.
I seriously doubt that any anti-choicers out there are going to use a tweet from Richard Dawkins criticizing a hypothetical and impossible biological scenario of a foetus writing poetry to bolster their arguments, and if they do, Fuck them. Their arguments are already terrible and not based in science, why venture into Science fiction? I honestly fail to see how any of this could be used. Concern about this discussion leading to the denial of anyone’s rights is misplaced.
Clearly, this is an impossible science fiction scenario.
In the real world, foetuses are not intelligent, communicative, sentient beings with equal humanity as their mother.
In the real world, I believe a woman has the right to do with her body as she wishes. Humans have rights, and the only human involved in a pregnancy is the woman.
You can argue that it’s a waste of time to discuss it, but its certainly a bigger waste of energy to be upset by mere discussion of it.
Na…it depends on what you mean by “dead”. Someone with no heartbeat and no breathing may well recover if they get immediate treatment…someone with no viable brain, never. So no heartbeat goes to the ED with someone pumping on their chest all the way there whereas someone with no brain left goes to the morgue.
I last posted here a few months ago. I think I remember chris61 from last times. Is he one of those idiots who perioodically returns to torture people with shit arguments?
Also, there’s not much need for a thought experiment.
And we can be 100% rational about it.
The world we live in is an awful place for millions of people.
Just by numbers alone, among them there are poets, geniuses and whatnot.
Many of them will die of starvation, violence, diseases.
We can agree that many of them could be saved just by donating to some worthy charities.
For non-poor people, the sacrifice of money is easily a much lesser sacrifice than undergoing pregnancy.
Yet we make the selfish choice to let those die so that we can buy tastier food or more comfortable clothes.
We let worthy people die every day out of selfishness, and we accept it.
How is this different than letting a woman avoid a major personal sacrifice to save the life of a worthy human?
I’d say it looked more like an insult, sarcastically given!
yup.
What disgusting dishonesty from Chris61, though hardly surprising given his odious track record here.
If you went to an orthopaedic surgeon demanding to have your broken femur fixed, he can refuse if he examines you and determines to the best of his professional judgement that your femur is not, in fact, broken. (and if his judgement is WRONG, and you do in fact have a broken femur, he is liable for malpractice if you should choose to sue him).
Similarly, a woman does not have to right to demand an abortion from a physician if she is not pregnant. But if she is a PREGNANT woman, then abortion is, de facto, medically appropriate, if she wants one.
Abortion does not grant ANY additional rights to the pregnant woman that the man with the broken fetus does not have.
not that I’m a fan of Greg Bear any more, but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Music_%28novel%29
Jeff S @ 443
Anti-choice people make these arguments all the fucking time. There are people in this fucking thread agreeing with him. Do you really think there aren’t people who cast votes based on those ideas? Do you really not think there are people who read this stuff from someone as influential as Dawkins and feel validated? You’re sitting there in a position to never have to worry about this shit happening to you telling people to whom it actually fucking happens that they’re getting worked up over nothing. FUCK. OFF.
See Valde? Now that there is a prime example of a crap argument. start off agreeing with a premise, then assume the contrary is relevant, then take the contrary as part of your next argument.
it’s almost like a bait and switch.
Actually, considering this is our umpteenth discussion of the issue this year alone, it IS a waste of our time and energy. Consider that, as since you want to discuss it, and nobody else does, where does that leave you and your ego?
That’s simply ridiculous. Others have covered it already. I will just take a moment to laugh.
Demanding it and getting it are two different things. You can always make demands, as you do have a right to speak freely. Indeed, you have this right, like so many others, even if you don’t live in a country with authorities who agree and are willing to “grant” this right to you, as if third parties fucking matter when it concerns you alone….
Does this just amount to saying an abortion doctor needs to act like any other doctor, ethically speaking? Because that’s a trivial fucking point.
If someone has no access to a physician, what then? Is it no longer a “treatment” or no longer something a person has a “right” to do? And if not, what happens? What if there’s more than one physician, not “the physician” whose decision supposedly every person must heed? Your rights depend on which physician it happens to be? Do people otherwise depend on the existence of accessible (and correct and good) doctors for their own basic human rights? Or would they have them even if every doctor on the planet suddenly vanished? Or is this only supposed to really count when the subject is abortion?
Only people entirely disconnected from the reality of the US could even THINK that these arguments are irrelevant to the state of women’s rights in the US.
I mean, how the fuck do they think rights are DECIDED to begin with? fucking magic?
Ohh, I do love the ‘pregnancy is just like breathing’ form of argument. A common tactic is to claim that the pro-choicer is a *misogynist* for stating that pregnancy is not a state of health. Since, according to the forced birther, pregnancy is ‘natural’ and ‘what women were made for’ it is therefore wonderfully healthy by *design*, and that any disagreement with that belief means that the pro-choicer hates women and thinks that they are defective.
/eyeroll
…rights, how the fuck do they work?
it’s the appeal to nature fallacy; same ones the homophobes (ironically) use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
being eaten by a fucking tiger is natural too.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/sarah-palin-responds-powerful-way-richard-dawkins-support-aborting-syndrome-babies/
egad, are you really this disconnected? really?
#458 Ichthyic
I spend the majority of my time debating abortion on the Secular Pro-Life Perspectives blog. The majority of their arguments are some form of the naturalistic fallacy. The prenate is entitled to the pregnant person’s body because the uterus was made for it, because it needs the uterus to survive, because pregnancy is healthy and wonderful etc.
They are also fond of the oft repeated responsibility objection argument, which has one glaring flaw – if the prenate’s rights are dependent upon *how* it was conceived, then I guess it doesn’t have any intrinsic right to life? So, in other words, prenates are *not* valuable moral beings, and their entire worth is related to what the pregnant person did, or did not do, to become pregnant.
Valde (#445)
You probably remember the indefatigable chris61 from this delightful thread.
#461
Yeah A. Noyd, that’s the one that I participated in. What a fuckwit.
Seven of Mine
I think I see now.
Someone could deliberately misunderstand Dawkins as meaning “if a foetus is considered a person, then you should be anti-choice”. Those same people will then make some argument that a foetus should be considered a “person”, and thus it follows that everyone should be anti-choice.
I think it’s clear that this is NOT what Dawkins is saying. Dawkins would argue to the death with anyone suggesting a foetus or embryo is a form of sentient human life. Dawkins is saying that it is precisely this informs his opinion on abortion. He believes in the human right of women to terminate a pregnancy, the foetus is not a human and thus has no rights in the matter.
The day I see someone on the religious right saying that RIchard Dawkins has it right on abortion it will be a cold day on the surface of the sun, especially given his controversial comments on DS diagnosed foetuses.
If we want to worry about how idiots will use and abuse our statements, then I guess everyone ought to shut up about any issue that is remotely controversial… To criticise someone for saying something that others might deliberately misinterpret to suit a completely different agenda is a bit silly.
If pregnancy were supernatural, and your uterus were haunted by an unborn (undead?) baby, should you call the ghostbusters or should they call you? What does the contract look like? I really want to know.
while that part is probably true, you being able to read his fucking mind about what the content of that would be is laughable.
WE HAVE TO. fuckheads end up passing laws too, or have you not been paying attention all of your life?
dude, you’re downright dangerous to democracy.
Jeff S:
I hope you’re aware that pregnancy is risk to the health of a woman.
@Nerd of Redhead: it’s the second time I see you assuming that every single poster here has a duty to read the comments on this blog since the Dawn of Time.
Newsflash: you are not the only person in the world, and there are a lot of newbies that come here to discuss things and don’t have the material time to read the zillions of comments on all your favorite blogs.
If the question was settled already point us to the relevant material or shut the fuck up and stop trolling the newbies.
Jeff S
No, you don’t see. People make these arguments all the damn time, with or without Dawkins. Dawkins is not the first person to go “what if the baby is the next Mozart?!” and expect others to be taken in by it. People are out in the real world, right now, at this very moment advocating against abortion rights, and legislators are listening to them based on many of these same kinds of arguments. They’re out there right now, in front of abortion clinics harassing people on their way in.
Are you fucking kidding me? That different agenda is my fucking rights. My basic fucking humanity that is actually, out in the real world, steadily being chipped away at by legislators. It’s fucking happening. And you think it’s silly to criticize someone for perpetuating those ideas? I’ll say it again. Fuck off.
In defense of Dawkins, he made amply clear in several tweets that he’s a staunch pro-choice for the very (and only) reason that he does not consider the fetus a human being.
I disagree with him, but he did made his position very clear.
Anything else is quote mining, and none is safe from that.
Evidently, it’s not being a woman, with her own right to bodily autonomy no matter how sentient the thing may or may not fucking be, which informs his opinion. So he’s pretty fucking uninformed and should therefore shut the fuck up, I suppose.
Except when he doesn’t, because I’ve seen him talking about “early abortions,” but I won’t bother looking for the link right now. On his website somewhere. An abortion which came too late is one that happened after a successful delivery, which cannot happen. He should go back to discussing how awful it is when sophisticated theologians dream up absurdities and ignore facts, because that’s something so easy even an idiot like him could pull it off reasonably well.
It’s almost amusing that you think there’s any legitimate controversy to be had. There are idiots, like you (or even me sometimes), but that does not make for a controversy.
Are you sure you’re not deliberately misinterpreting him (or deliberately ignoring some of his statements or failing to verify your interpretations), in an attempt to save whatever respect you might still have for him?
Yes, F. O. He made it very clear that he’s pro-choice, not because pregnant people are people with rights, but because fetuses aren’t people with rights. Not the same fucking thing. Pregnant people get to choose by process of fucking elimination; first we have to check with the fetus. Are you writing poetry in there? No? Ok, then I guess we’re safe to let the pregnant person choose.
Why would you try to discuss something without finding out what conversation you’re jumping in the middle of? If you want to talk about time, how about the time that people like you are wasting asking questions that have been answered already on the very same page you’re commenting on ? That’s just plain lazy. Someone has already taken the time to write down an answer to your question, all you have to do is read it. Nobody is obligated to repeat themselves just because you don’t know how to hit control+F.
Right here on this thread. Seriously, how hard can that be? Are you so inept at using the internet that you don’t know how to find information printed on a page?
Valde @445:
Incidentally, I believe chris61 identifies as a woman.
consciousness razor
The issue of abortion should NOT be controversial if everyone had a good understanding of science, a respect for human rights, and were unmoved by bronze-age religious dogma. However, to state that the issue of abortion is not controversial is asinine. I certainly don’t think it is a “legitimate” controversy in that it is justified, but I certainly think it is a real one.
Yes. Please point me in the direction of some evidence that Richard Dawkins is not staunchly pro-choice. He may not be pro-choice for all the reasons that you would like him to be, but his position is very clear.
If you want to participate in good faith in a long-running conversation that has already been ongoing for some time before you joined it, then yes, you DO have a duty to read enough of the previous comments to know the basics of what the discussion is about.
You would not blindly interject midway through a conversation between football enthusiasts without knowing what a quarterback is, would you?
This is basic human courtesy.
Do you have none?
And why must the regulars be the ones to repeat themselves for the hundredth time, when a little research by the newbies would show they have been answered many times over. As I said, ego. Yours.
Frankly, given his misogyny, his position is as clear as mud. Something about poets in the womb????
If you threw a sharpened sword into an empty room, would it not be responsible to consider who might be in that room, who might end up picking up that sword, and what it might be used for?
The pen is mightier than the sword.
So why should the responsibility be any less?
F.O.:
Interesting that he isn’t pro-choice because he supports a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. He frames his support for abortion around the fetus, whereas I frame my support for abortion around the rights of women.
But then I’m not convinced he either understands or knows about the concept of bodily autonomy and how important it is to human rights (having just finished ‘The God Delusion’, there are three examples that spring to mind where a discussion of bodily autonomy is noticeably missing- in his discussion on abortion, with regard to child sexual abuse vs child psychological abuse, and with regard to euthanasia; fast forward to now, and I see no indication, given the types of shit he tweets, that he has considered bodily autonomy or is overly familiar with the concept).
Amphiox
I see…. so “Please refrain from criticizing the president, as it may inspire someone to attempt an assassination.”
“Please argue in favour of updating a science textbook, with new information, because then intelligent design crowd will use it to undermine science as “constantly changing its mind”!”
No, you are not responsible for how others deliberately misinterpret your positions in order to further their own nefarious agendas.
Typo above.
“Please do NOT argue in favour of updating a science textbook, with new information, because then intelligent design crowd will use it to undermine science as “constantly changing its mind”!”
chris61:
It is far too early in the week to be making such idiotic statements.
Bodily autonomy is a right that all human beings (those granted personhood) possess. It isn’t lost if a woman becomes pregnant, and pregnant women have the right to exercise their bodily autonomy by choosing to end their pregnancy. There’s no “special right” that enters the picture*. The right to make decisions about their bodies does not change when a woman is pregnant. There’s just an embryo/fetus living within and off of them. If they don’t like this situation, they can end it, because say it with me again no one has the right to use another person’s body against their wishes. If any “special right” is in the picture, it’s being added by anti-abortionists/fetus worshipers when they try to say that women shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions. They’re saying that a fetus has the right to trump a woman’s bodily autonomy–and that is a right that no human being has.
*though I can guess where you’re coming from on this, given your opposition to abortion
Jeff S
Nobody is deliberately misinterpreting him. He said what he fucking said. He’s pro-choice because fetuses aren’t writing poetry in the womb and not because women are people who have their own fucking right to not have their body invaded by an unwanted fetus. Which plays perfectly into the idea that most of this country already has that women are not people with rights in their own right but only by process of elimination or by virtue of their relationship to some man. He is using his influence to validate misogynist cultural attitudes that people already hold. He is fucking wrong and he’s causing harm and the rest of us have every right to criticize him for it even if the almighty Jeff Fucking S thinks it’s silly to care about being treated like an actual fully human person.
Jeff S, either provide evidence that the fetus is more human than the woman who carries it, or shut the fuck up. Only an absolute loser without honesty and integry wouldn’t do either honorable method.
Jeff S:
Dawkins’ comments show that he supports abortion rights for women based on the lack of personhood of the fetus, rather than on the fact that women are humans with the right to bodily autonomy. Can you not see the difference between the two?
I bet he sincerely believes that he is. Having delusions about that doesn’t make it true, though.
But fine, you want me to deliver it to you, indisputably right in front of you in plain fucking English, I dug up that article (from just a few days ago) that I mentioned. His entire attitude toward this is bad enough, but citing that is just too nebulous for some people I guess (or it lets them look for a slippery way out of facing reality). This is by Dawkins.
First, note all of the set-up and the explanation for this article, not just that particular sentence. This is what he supposedly means, after thinking carefully about his choice of words. The emphasis is mine:
Then there’s more blithering, about his “haters”:
Then again here:
Is all of that fucking clear enough for you, Jeff? Crystal fucking clear, I hope.
The funniest part:
He presumes wrong. He does not speak for people who are pro-choice, and if his statements above are any indication, he never will. While you remain deliberately clueless and obtuse, Jeff, neither will you.
Seven of Mine
I must have missed the part where he said that women don’t have the right to abortions. Maybe it was in your head?
My goodness, you literally said “Nobody is deliberately misinterpreting him” and then in the next sentence deliberately misinterpreted what he said. Why? Probably because you dislike Richard Dawkins and have found many of his previous statements to be offensive, and view him to hold misogynist views. Not because that is the opinion he expressed in this case.
Can he not be pro choice because women are people and have the right to bodily autonomy AND because foetuses are not humans and therefore have no conflicting rights.
The hypothetical issue is that if in some science fiction scenario where foetuses WERE intelligent, sentient beings capable of expressing their thoughts, more intellectually advanced than a current real child, and equally as human as the mother, it introduces a second PERSON into the issue. In this case, Dawkins feels that aborting the foetus would be a “murder most foul”.
That’s his statement. If that offends you, fine.
It isn’t relevant because that isn’t the reality, nor is it even remotely close to reality. He’s anti-choice is a completely impossible science fiction universe. The horror!
And who the fuck, other than an anti-choice fuckwit, cares about this bit of nonsense. Once you understand that, you get out point. either fish or cut bait, but don’t pontificate so you don’t have to cut bait, which RD did.
Tony
Of course I can see the difference. However, I reject that these reasons are mutually exclusive.
If the fetus was sentient, intelligent, capable of communication, and equally human as the woman, somehow in some science fiction scenario, then two equally human people in the scenario have rights. One does live inside the other, and is dependant on the other for survival, granted. This would change the abortion issue considerably.
In reality, Dawkins and science in general agree that the fetus is NOT a form of sentient life, it is NOT a human and has no rights, and especially no rights that would conflict with the rights of the mother. In this situation the decisions of the mother is all that matters.
People do still remember we are talking about a completely impossible scenario… right?
Jeff S
Sure he could, except that’s not what he said. Funnily enough, you even go on to quote what he said:
If the fetus was a person, he would not support the pregnant person’s right to choose. He would consider it murder. That position is not compatible with valuing the bodily autonomy of the pregnant person. If you accept that bodily autonomy is inviolable, then the fetus being regarded as a person won’t change your position on abortion because it’s fucking irrelevant.
Jeff:
I’m not saying they are, but I am saying that Dawkins has not made it apparent that he is *ALSO* pro-choice because he values a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. As I pointed out upthread, I just finished (literally, today) reading The God Delusion. When he discusses abortion, he doesn’t mention anything about a womans bodily autonomy. When he discusses euthanasia, he doesn’t discuss bodily autonomy. When he {disgustingly, I might add*} talks about how psychological abuse to children is worse than child sexual abuse, he doesn’t mention bodily autonomy. In his tweet that set this thread up, he makes his support of abortion rights contingent on fetuses not being sentient. In consciousness razor’s #486 you can see more of his “support” for abortion. He keeps talking about “early abortion”, as if that matters. Whether it’s one month, 9 weeks, or 8 months, a woman has bodily autonomy and had the right to make decisions about her body. She has the right to terminate a pregnancy at any time because of her bodily autonomy. If you have evidence that Dawkins understands and embraces the concept of bodily autonomy and how important it is to the right of women to have an abortion–please present it. I’ve shown that he doesn’t even consider the right to bodily autonomy in several cases where it is extremely pertinent.
Impossible though it may be, it still illuminates Dawkins’ thought processes. He supports abortion only so far as the fetus isn’t sentient.
*I found it disgusting because he minimizes the effects of child sexual abuse not because I feel children aren’t damaged by psychological abuse (I do believe they are).
Any scenario where the woman’s right to chose isn’t under her absolute control isn’t hypothetical. Somebody will believe that is true. Which is the problem of hypotheticals, versus reality, in mental wanking arguments. Which is why you need to determine the facts, not what you would like to think are the facts. Which Dawkin’s fails to do, since he is so “Vulcan” with his fuckwittery.
Or simply a fetus developing a nervous system. That’s neither hypothetical, nor fictional, nor would that be advanced compared to …. well… anybody, really. As a biologist (or “science communicator” or whatever brands himself now), I expect him to have some idea of approximately when that is and how that happens. The fucker.
@482 Tony,
Let me make this simple. All I’m saying is that since abortion isn’t something a woman does with her body by herself (at least not in the case of a medically safe abortion) then the rights of other people come into play. Women have the (legally protected ) right to exercise their own body autonomy but not that of a nurse or doctor who is morally opposed to abortion.
* in fact I support legalized abortion just not on the grounds of a woman’s right to choose or because a fetus isn’t human.
chris61:
I already knew that you don’t consider bodily autonomy to be a highly important human right. You don’t need to remind me.
chris61:
Any other medical procedures you think doctors or nurses should be able to opt out of because they’re “morally opposed” to it?
chris61 @494
The problem is that legislators, who are mainly lawyers, are restricting abortion access. If a doctor or nurse doesn’t like abortion then they should refer the woman to someone who doesn’t have such moral qualms. Or are you supporting the Catholic position that it’s better for the woman to die or have an unwanted child than have an abortion because Baby Jesus cries when a fetus is aborted?
If you’re morally opposed to being a doctor, you shouldn’t be a doctor. Unless somebody is forcing you to be one, your autonomy is not being violated. Therefore, you are completely full of shit, chris61.
Jeff S:
No, it would still be entirely up to the woman, and still none of your damn business. Yeah, she might be less likely to abort, and you might be more likely to offer her money, but it would not change her right to body autonomy.
And see, bodily autonomy is very much what the magic fetus hasn’t got. It doesn’t have a right to its own body, because properly speaking it doesn’t have a body yet. It has a blobby bit that, as you say, requires full-time care, yet it has no insurance, no income, no cash. If it had money, or if you want to kick in, the woman might make a deal, but surrogate mothers aren’t cheap. (I would charge extra for all the poetry, me.)
Leaving the magically-mindful mindfuck out of this, as completely pointless, we get back to the fact that a real fetus hasn’t a mind yet. The lights aren’t on, there’s nobody home.
Somebody asked how the abortion issue got all popular in the last few decades. I read that some political person was looking for a hot-button issue to mobilize the Christian right into political activity. He tried a couple things that flopped, then tried abortion. He didn’t really care about it, God doesn’t care about it, nature doesn’t care about it, but by the dog, the conservatives care about abortion. (If they’d think about it — ever — they’d realize that they should be for it.)
rights don’t exist outside of the particular population that defined them, for themselves.
we decide who gets what rights when, often based on little more than general appearances.
I agree. Rights, in practice, are rules which regulate the way we behave towards one another in society, nothing more. We work them out and refine them amongst ourselves.
Exactly
Nor to blastocysts or embryos or fetuses, as yet. That doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds. If enough people were to change their minds about the fetus’s right to life, they might eventually get one.
You mean where they dodged the central question:
Again, I agree. I wasn’t arguing for “natural rights”. The human right to life is no more a natural right than the right to bodily autonomy. They are what individual human beings have agreed amongst themselves should be granted to all members of that society. I agree with the right to bodily autonomy and privacy. I’m simply advocating that the right to life be extended to conception or thereabouts.