Remember that awful Calvin Smith video I got halfway through? I finally finished it. It was painful.
Script below the fold.
Hey, friends…
I have been neglecting youtube for a while. One reason is that I’ve been busy with classwork, but that’s not the main reason. The main reason is that I assigned myself an obligation that I’m choking on right now.
My last video was about the first half of this terrible Christian video by Calvin Smith, titled “How one atheist accidentally made the case for god 10x stronger”. I was the “one atheist”. He wrapped my words in apologetic bullshit and tried to claim that I was making a case for god, but nah, that’s silly. So I made one video about the bad first half, and said I’d get around to the second half later.
And that promise has been hanging around my neck ever since.
That second half is awful and stupid, and every time I listened to it, because I wanted to be responsible in my analysis, I hated the video a little more, and I hated Calvin Smith even more. He’s a pretentious hack who can’t assemble a coherent argument, and can never look beyond his ignorant presuppositions. I did not want to watch this video, and I didn’t want to shovel through his garbage ideas, and I especially did not want to deal with his lies and his obnoxious mannerisms.
Good work, Calvin Smith, you silenced me on YouTube for a few weeks by being egregiously idiotic.
But not today. Today, I told myself to muscle through the noise and get something done, so that I would never have to listen to Calvin Smith ever again. I ruthlessly cut down his long-winded noise to a few short clips, and will try to address them now. Be strong, everyone, I’m diving in.
[clip 1]
His goal here is to tie evolutionary thinking to abortion, which is how I ended up in this segment. He is not, however, ever going to get around to linking my views on evolution to my views on abortion.
One thing I have to mention that drove me crazy is how often he cuts to pictures of his hands opening books, flipping through the pages, or running his fingers over lines. He never names these books, he doesn’t actually read from them, and it’s all a performance to give the impression that has serious, literary sources, but he doesn’t. He just has his Bible. Who needs to read them if you just use them as a prop?
But now he’s going to give the Calvin Smith version of the pro-choice argument.
[clip 2]
So we’re arguing that the early conceptus is just a “clump of cells”, and that it’s “not a human baby”, and that it “can’t be murdered”. That’s fine, but he never gets around to justifying why those positions aren’t true. A blastula has some significant organization, but it is a “clump of cells”, and it is not a ” baby”, and while some Republicans are trying to declare that termination of a pregnancy is murder, that is not a position hallowed by history or tradition. Even the Christian Bible does not treat abortion as murder! People have always recognized a substantial difference between a fetus and a baby, with different penalties for induced abortions vs. infanticide, and traditionally, at least until the politicization of abortion in the 1970s, there was a boundary defined by the “quickening”, or that moment in the middle of pregnancy when the mother felt the fetus move, that was when the fetus was alive. These are not hard and fast boundaries.
Also, I have to mention something else that drove me crazy. The latin phrase “id est”, which is abbreviated “i.e.”, is for the written form only. When spoken aloud, say “that is,” which sounds more natural. True pedants know this. Calvin Smith says “i.e.” constantly throughout the video, and he sounds like a yokel.
Next he’s going to make some assertions about the definition of a human being.
[clip 3]
While lingering over a clip of a cute newborn, he says “The choice as to whether you will willingly destroy an innocent human being or not, i.e. [ick] whether you should have the choice to murder someone.”
I would not question whether that baby was innocent, or human, but I do think it’s debatable whether it’s a “being” or “someone”. That’s the crux of the argument that he is ignoring. At what point in development does that “clump of cells” become a being or a someone or a person, deserving of respect and good treatment, rather than an insensate tissue with no thoughts or feelings? We have a range from a fertilized oocyte to a gurgling cooing baby, where do we draw the line? Only a fool would claim to know exactly where the boundary is, and claiming that it’s at the moment of conception is ludicrously stupid…just as stupid as decreeing that a baby is an automonous intelligence only at the instant they breech the vagina.
Now brace yourself: Calvin is going to hold an old book under an antique lamp and explain what modern science has to say.
[clip 4]
He makes a series of claim. The first I agree with.
“You are human from the moment of fertilization”
Yes, true, you’re nothing else. But that modifier is doing a heck of a lot of work there. To say that something is human is only a statement about its origin. I can hold up my hand and say, “this is HUMAN”, but that does not mean that it is an independent thinking agent that I can send off to run errands at the grocery store.
If I find a footprint in the mud of my yard, I can announce that, since it is a HUMAN footprint, I can send it on a march to the garden. I can’t. That would be silly.
Like wise, if I sent you to our bathroom, and you found poop floating in the toilet bowl, if I brought in a forensic expert to analyze it, they might be able to determine that it was a HUMAN poop, but that does not imply that we should endow it with a divinity degree and send it off to teach sunday school.
That is not how the word works. It modifies the object it is attached to. I am not impressed with people who throw around the word “human” as if it has the magic power to bring mundane things to life.
Now if you instead say “human being” or “person”, those are words I will recognize as demanding some degree of dignity and meaning.
Next he said,
“all of your DNA is there from the beginning”
Sure, I will mostly agree, but personhood is not a deterministic propery of your DNA. That takes something more, something that he ignores and lies about in his next comment.
“your personhood is intrinsic, and it is just a matter of time and development, not some increasing quality of substance before we clearly see this new human being.”
Absolute nonsense in every word.
What is personhood that it can be intrinsic? Does he think your personality, your feelings, your entire history of chance events is somehow encoded in your DNA? No scientist will agree with that.
It actually IS a matter of time and development, with your self being progressively shaped by your experiences. Change happens, it’s unavoidable. I can say that the death of my grandmother when I was 12 was not a predetermined event, but it did strongly influence my personality and how I saw the world.
And yes, there is an increasing quality of substance over time. Embryonic me before the closure of the neural tube was qualitatively and quantitatively profoundly different in substance from the old man you see now. There’s a whole host of significant changes that affect us in development. To quote Wolpert, “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.” One could quibble with it, but it’s still a fact that the quality of our substance does increase over time. Let’s not forget puberty in there, either!
The heart of his argument is dead and stupid. It relies on his belief that the self, or dare I say the soul, is fixed and unchanging from conception to graveyard, and to hold to that he has to deny the reality of what he has experience.
From that foolishness he’s going to retreat to his nameless random books and flip through the pages without comprehension.
[clip 5]
“the root cause catalyst for the downgrade of western culture” is all those other churches that have accepted the fact of evolution. “Evolution provided atheistic bible skeptics and naturalists a way to undermine the foundation of all Christian doctrines, the book of Genesis, while simultaneously building up a powerful and aggressive materialistic platform, from which to launch humanistic teachings and beliefs into society.”
Cool. That is a truly inspiring passage.
“Evolution provided atheistic bible skeptics and naturalists a way to undermine the foundation of all Christian doctrines, the book of Genesis, while simultaneously building up a powerful and aggressive materialistic platform, from which to launch humanistic teachings and beliefs into society.”
>
How about some more good news?
[clip 6]
We are abandoning the authority of god’s word! Hallelujah! God’s words are cruel and barbaric, and I’m happy to be leaving them. And replacing them with humanist values? Even better.
Is Calvin trying to encourage us to further efforts?
Now he warns the liberal churches that they’re doomed to failure if the accept science and evolution.
[clip 7]
I don’t see that adopting evolutionary ideas has led to spectacular failure. Rather, the increasing influence of evangelical Christianity is leading to our downfall. Maybe Christian churches that accepted reason and a rational approach to the natural world would be stronger and less likely to fail, unlike those churches that spark a crisis of faith whenever someone explains a rainbow with principles of refraction, or when someone digs up a dinosaur bone in their backyard.
But you do you, Calvin Smith. And do continue to preach an apocalypse for your faith.
[clip 8]
What a happy way to end this video!
While you’re in a blissful glow, dreaming of collapsing churches, do remember to click on those link and subscribe buttons, and you might as well also visit patreon.com/pzmyers. Cheer me up some more.
Not true.
Your immune system cells are constantly creating new genes by somatic mutagenesis and recombination in your B and T cells.
The adaptive immune system.
Rarely, paternal mitochondrial DNA, present at fertilization and eliminated, persists in adults.
“Yes, paternal mitochondria (and their DNA) can be found in adult humans, but it is exceptionally rare.”
This isn’t true.
40% of all zygotes end in miscarriages.
We don’t call those people, issue them a death certificate, and have a funeral.
They aren’t recognized as a person under our laws.
Off-topic: Moth & butterfly navigation.
.
Professor Eric Warrant et al will publish an article in Nature, showing the Australian Bugong moth is using quantum effects to navigate with the magnetic field.
A protein called cryptochrome takes up a blue photon which generates a substance (at this point I lost the thread; it was Swedish radio news interviewing Warrant) something something magnetic field, navigating vast distances across Australia.
See upcoming issue of Nature for details.
-And now back to Calvin Smith, who is so clueless I doubt he would survive the Australian Outback for an afternoon.
Raven @ 1
“40% of all zygotes end in miscarriages.”
.
This is important. The pope who was immediately before John Paul II – the one who died after a week – knew this fact and may have been about to change the CCs attitude to abortion & family planning, because clearly if Zod allows so many zygotes to die, this phase of human development does not count as ‘human’ yet
.
Very few people are aware of this fact. Am I the only one who reads books about odd popes?
…also most of these miscarriages happens so early they are mistaken for menstrual bleeding.
This contributes to the widespread ignorance.
Nah. raven’s point is a weak retort using an irrelevant consideration, so the opposite of important.
Arguing from a premise where “miscarriages = abortions” doesn’t work, because the true distinction is intentional termination (abortion) vs. natural termination (miscarriage).
Analogically, for most of human history (and in some regions today) the infant mortality rate was roughly 50%; that is, roughly half children died of natural causes (disease, malnutrition) before reaching adulthood. So the claim is equivalent to someone arguing in the 1700s that “An infant is not a real human person because 50% of them die naturally before growing up anyway,” that would be a logical error.
(A fetus is not a baby in the same way a baby is not an adult)
John Morales @ 5
A stronger case might be the passage in OT (Numbers?) that approves of inducing miscarriage if the husband suspects the wife/property of the husband got pregnant with somebody else.
Birger, your claims about your popish erudition do not hold up.
Maybe that is why very few people are aware of your ‘fact’.
cf. https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/pope-john-paul-i-s-defense-of-life-undimmed-by-his-brief-papacy
He was tentatively for birth control (not abortion!) but submitted to the Magisterium:
https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/john-paul-i-and-pill-he-wanted-change-accepted-humanae-vitae
PZ, now you know what the people at God Awful Movies go through every week.
Some films may only be 70 minutes long while feeling like 70 years They are not even ‘good bad’ movies like at Mystery Science Theater 2000.
I refer you to the Cristian film from Nigeria titled ‘Vultures Of Horror’.
Or ‘Level’, the documentary proving the Earth is flat.
John Morales, I stand corrected about events 45 years ago. My memory is, alas, not perfect.
OT – the absence of a box for comments at the ‘infinite thread’ implies a new section is imminent. Part forty-one in latin numerals.
Birger, you’ve got 70% of the comments here. Think before posting. Consolidate your thoughts. Avoid off-topic comments.
OK.
Much is made here of the embryo not being human because it is only a “mass of cells” and therefore ok to abort, while we would never abort a fetus 8 1/2 months old because it is clearly human and could survive outside the womb. But is it not the case that that same embryo may eventually become that same 8 1/2 months old fetus and the same human being on birth. It’s easy to see why those against abortion would be as much against the termination of the embryo as the fetus. I have never being able to think of a good argument against this. My own life would have been prevented by the termination of the embryo just as much as of the fetus. I don’t remember this being discussed though it must have been.
Yes, but that continuum can be continued; e.g. there is contraception (conception prevention), which vitiates the argument about abortion. Nothing to abort.
(Ahem, sorry for the wordplay, jejune of me, I know_
chesapeake @13:
Hypothetical people that may exist in the future… do not exist.
How many people is a fertilized egg, zero, one, several?
Is a grain of sand a heap?
The Problem of the Many: “the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. […] that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans.”
The egg that gave rise to you, was part of your grandmother, when your mother was under construction.
#15 “that same embryo may eventually become”
Hypothetical people that may exist in the future… do not exist.
And the 8 month old fetus does not exist as a functioning human. Where do you draw the line?
It really is the same to be human being from conception on. Aborting at conception or 8 months is terminating the same future human. How do you say it’s ok? I’m not arguing against it. I just don’t know the answer.
chesapeake @16:
Identical twins would disagree.
“your personhood is intrinsic, and it is just a matter of time and development”
Nice of these people to finally agree that I’m a person, not some weird freak they want to use for rhetorical points
chesapeake @13:
2/3 of all conceptions fail to produce a live birth. That means for every 1000 live births, another 2000 are aborted naturally, most in the first trimester. By comparison, the medial abortion rate in the US is about 200 per 1000 lives births. Nature regards human conception as provisional at best, but generally largely disposable.
if Nature (or god) is discarding 2000 ‘humans’, why should anyone care about the other 200?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Spontaneous_abortion_in_humans
Well, yeah. It’s a problem with the core of Christianity — church teachings are compared with the wealth of knowledge we built with science, and that comparison is always going to make Christianity look bad. Churches go liberal, they have one or two generations of people who are happy with church life. Their descendents understandably get bored with church and abandon the franchise altogether.
Christians have two tactics they can use to avoid their religion’s demise: lock in and pump out more indoctinated kids than their opponents, and destroy public education. It’s no surprise that they’re trying to do both.
chesapeake @13
I have never seen anyone, anywhere say that an in-utero fetus developing in a human is not human.
Provide several citations.
Out of all the religions, why specify Christianity?
(Your language is revealing; not all religions have churches)
You are an ignoramus.
I literally was bred and inculcated into Catholicism, and could not be more atheistic than I am.
The Jesuits had me in boarding school at the right age. They failed.
As for destroying public education, that is moronic.
Other than the religious aspect, there is nothing wrong with Catholic schools or their curriculum.
—
I can assure you from life experience that practicing Catholics turn a blind eye to contraception, and even to abortion as may be needful. Doctrine ain’t practice, the priests turn a blind eye to such stuff.
I was a Catholic from christening to about the age of 15ish.
I accomplished all of the Sacraments available to me at the time. (4/7)
Then it became too difficult to even pretend.
So I went to the default setting.
chigau @21: Not germane to the topic, but there was Mary Toft, a famous hoax.
Phillipbrown
“ if Nature (or god) is discarding 2000 ‘humans’, why should anyone care about the other 200?‘
Many many people.
And all about some.
Does no one agree with or see my point?
What I always find interesting about Smith’s sort of lunacy — and as noted above, it’s not restricted to Christianity, or even to Abrahamic religions — is the failure to even think about other “intentional ending of human life” problems using the same framework… and whether that reaches a similar result, and how. For example, the arguments Smith makes can, and should, be applied to the death penalty — anyone’s death penalty system.
It almost never does get such consideration; and if it did, that would also inform the beginning-of-life considerations he wants us to blindly accept (and it really doesn’t matter all that much what that beginning point is). Or perhaps he should read his own book at Romans 12:19† and following, and ponder that; and, for that matter, ponder the very meaning of “vengeance,” and perhaps even Matthew 22:21 with the additional proviso that no matter what his ambitions, not everyone subject to this Caesar (whose laws he wants changed) is xtian and has a similar conception of “what is nonsecular” in the first place.
† With the vast majority of evangelizers (again, regardless of religion), that’s the equivalent of telling new computer users to RTFM, meaning the whole thing and not just the subsection on how to turn on the power. And it’s just about as effective.
chesapeake
You are not ethically obligated to construct a hypothetical Olympic gold medalist just because there’s raw material at hand. “Sometimes there’s one of those in the end” doesn’t apply. Because when construction is abandoned, there are definitely zero in the end to worry about. Imagining a particular future and not bringing it about is not a loss.
You can’t point to the first cell as the present-day embodiment of a specific future because the end result is not encoded in the cells. The cells are signaled by circumstance to tell them what to become (or not). Environment is integral to the trajectory of development, including active participation by the parent. You’re not hand wringing about every maternal lifestyle decision that shifts the trajectory toward a different imaginary person.
Skin cells have been turned into eggs, fertilized, and implanted, resulting in healthy mice. The first step or two has sort of been done in humans. Would potential people affect how you ethically evaluate your skin, deciding to keep it all to yourself?
@ 22 Morales
This is fatuous fallacy on your part Morales. That a tactic did not work in one instance is not evidence it was not a tactic.
Since you’re so enamoured of “AI” I asked the Google “AI” if said tactic existed:
Why don’t you argue with the slop machine and tell it it’s an ignoramus. (No need to hurry back.)
@ 20. Trump supporting bad faith troll “beholder”
There’s also the other old tactic brute force and repression of alternatives. That’s the extra tactic you have helped give the Trump cult Christianists just as you helped the Project 2025 mob enact their program by undermining the ONLY ALTERNATIVE to them, Kamala Harris and the Democratic party,
Think Handmaid’s Tale, Crusades and Spanish Inquisition. That’s the type of regime that they want where they get to literally destroy and murder and crush their opposition and that’s, again, what you were working for when you opposed the ONLY ALTERNATIVE to it for year after year. Time you faced that reality, changed your views and apologised as the very inadequate least you can do, troll.
.***
@28. Trump troll’s support troll Silentbob :
Your continued failure to answer the questions here:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-a-senile-fool-run-the-country/comment-page-1/#comment-2309411
is noted. Don’t you hurry back here till you have answered those.
PS. Have you apologised to chigau (違う) yet?
PPS. Seems we need a new Infinite thread here again.
chesapeake sounds like a time traveler arguing that because his future exists, people in the past are morally obligated to recreate it exactly, denied their right to choose their own future out of the infinite possibilities.
I am late with this comment as I have been traveling, but I did want to suggest that, for the abortion debate, the issue is not biology but law.
To call a few cells “human” could be dismissed as a mere adjective, but I am happy to regard a few cells as a human being, albeit at an early stage of development. In terms of the abortion debate, however, that is pointless. As an argument, it lacks connecting propositions that would somehow render it illegal to kill/terminate a human being, yet we kill/terminate human beings regularly, and it is this missing proposition that is the issue, not the initial claim that a small cluster of cells is a human being. To argue that abortion is wrong because killing a human being is wrong is a circular argument, one that flies in the face of legal killing of even adult human beings.
The “personhood” issue seems to me to be the crux, and that is no doubt why conservative states have pushed for the adoption of “personhood” bills that assign personhood to the fetus. Whether or not we call a fetus a human being is irrelevant: what is critical is whether a fetus is a “person” in a legal sense. And what that means was summarized years ago by a prominent legal scholar who said, simply, that the first right of personhood is the right not to be killed. So if we assign personhood to a fetus, the fetus immediately acquires the right not to be killed. If, as is the case in every state in the U.S., we assign personhood to a ‘newborn’ infant, that infant acquires the right not to be killed, and to do so is infanticide, and is illegal in every state.
Some twists to underscore this point: in many traditional societies, personhood is not granted to a child until it is several months old, and infants younger than that can be — and have been — killed without that killing being in any sense illegal. It’s personhood that is the issue, not whether the child is a “human being”. From the other point of view, in times of war or other military conflict, we strip enemy combatants of their personhood (sometimes signaled by using derogatory labels for them), which allows each side in a conflict to kill the other, legally. Similarly, where capital punishment is legal, an execution can be held because the guilty party has been stripped of his/her personhood, or at least that facet of it that grants the right not to be killed.
Sorry to ramble, but I would like to see more emphasis placed on the actual legal issues rather than, in my view, irrelevant biological matters in the abortion debate.
However “personhood” is defined, I feel it is less important than bodily autonomy.
As many people have pointed out, (in the U.S., at least) you can not be forced to donate your organs after death, without permission. Even if it would save the life of another person. Even if that person’s life is threatened due to your actions (say, through drunk/reckless/negligent driving). You can’t even be forced to donate blood to save someone’s life.
Not to be dismissive of the efforts to examine and define “personhood”, I just feel that however it is defined, it is not a valid reason to deny bodily autonomy.
Some of this is just the tired old slippery slope argument.
When does a zygote become a person, legal or otherwise.
A huge amount of our life is standing on slippery slopes looking at situations that are 50 shades of gray.
We just use our evolutionary history, our minds, and our common sense and deal with them.
In this case, we draw the line at 22 weeks or so.
It’s not arbitrary. At this gestational age, the fetus is capable of living outside the uterus, albeit only sometime and with a lot of hi tech help.
They also don’t have anything even close to what we would call a mind and consciousness.
“At 24 weeks, the brain lacks the necessary physical connections. Nerves from the senses are not yet linked to the cerebral cortex. Reflexes like flinching or moving are automatic and non-conscious.”
I’ve yet to see in this thread where the walking incubator, sometimes call a woman, is a legal person with rights and functioning minds capable of making their own decisions.
Forced birthing and female slavery have their own set of ethical problems.
I would not question whether that baby was innocent…
Whereas Christians who adhere to “original sin” doctrines must perforce deny that claim.
… “the root cause catalyst for the downgrade of western culture” is all those other churches that have accepted the fact of evolution.
I did a little search for “which church first accepted evolution?” and struck out, but still would like to yank Calvin Smith’s chain about implying zero “downgrade of western culture” pre-1859. I also wonder, microscopically, what that says about all the churches which “have considered allegorical interpretations of Genesis since long before the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution, or Hutton’s principle of uniformitarianism. A notable example is St. Augustine (4th century)…”
Abortions took place long before Darwin, long before Augustine, long before Christ, and long before whenever Judaism began. Ergo, western culture was doomed before it began – much like the human race, per Smith’s preferred mythology.
BTW, the bible defined legal personhood as babies one month after birth.
It is listed as such in 4 places.
Females are valued as people at 3/5 of a male.
Where have we seen something like this before?
This is BTW, common even today in some cultures.
In some African countries, the interval is 3 months after birth before they are given a name.
This is because neonatal death is so common that no one wants to get too attached to a baby that dies.
@lochaber, exactly. Bodily autonomy comes first (otherwise, of course (/sarc) we would have laws everywhere compelling men (against their will, crucially), to donate a kidney, half a liver, blood, bone marrow etc. to their sons/relatives/any-bloody-one who was a match and would die without it).
@ lochaber — the whole of your comment concerns what is allowed: in other words, legal issues. “Bodily autonomy”, whatever you mean by that, might be the way that some communities/societies justify the legal issues, but in the end they are legal issues, and justifications are culturally arbitrary. How do we know that? Your culture doesn’t decide how many brains you have, but it does decide if and when abortion is legal, if and when abortion is illegal, and what extenuating circumstances might apply in grey areas.
“Personhood” is often defined in social sciences and law as the ability to be the agent of meaningful action — this is called the “agentive” theory of personhood — and it is widely applicable to cultures around the world. Thus, in our own Western history, “quickening” was a sign of agentive capacity; acquisition of a soul was a sign of agentive capacity; and in other cultures it can be the ability to understand language that is the public sign of agentive capacity.
As for “bodily autonomy”, your examples have little to do with the abortion issue, and might suggest the opposite of what you seem to be proposing, since you CAN decide to donate organs at death, and you CAN decide to donate blood. The only relevance I can imagine off the top of my head is that you cannot be forced to undergo an abortion, but that is not really a key issue in the abortion debate. The question is when, how, and under what circumstances you CAN have an abortion, and what legal issues it preseents.
davetaylor @37:
See: the violinist argument.
Someone carrying a fetus, who does not want to, is experiencing a violation of their bodily autonomy. There body is being used, against their will, to incubate the fetus.
I don’t care why/how/when the fetus got there, who it has the potential to become, what some religious sect says, if a person does not want to carry a fetus, they should not be forced to.
A person should have ownership and control of their own body. Without bodily autonomy, one can’t really have any other rights.
CA7746, that ‘violinist’ thought experiment tries to reframe the issue as an act of omission rather than one of commission.
(Benefits of a Catholic education! ;)
If you don’t own and control your own body, what are you?
A slave.
The forced birthers are always also female slavers.
FWIW, carrying a fetus to term is work.
It is a recognized occupation these days and anyone can hire a surrogate if they have the money.
And, what is nonvoluntary work without compensation?
This is the definition of…slavery.
@38 Thanks for the comment.
Your source notes that “Thomson says that abortion does not violate the fetus’s legitimate right to life but merely deprives the fetus of something – the non-consensual use of the pregnant woman’s body and life-supporting functions – to which it has no right.”
Whether or not a fetus has a “legitimate right to life” is both a legal question and is contestable. Roe v Wade adopted a Solomonic answer to the “right to life” issue by making it clear that during the first trimester of gestation there is no right to life, during the second trimester an emerging right to life can place limits on abortion, but not fully, and in the third trimester a right not to be killed is well enough established that abortion is only (or primarily) available to save the life of the mother.
One feature of the abortion debate that renders such rights contestable is the fact that the legality or illegality of abortion is handled quite differently in other cultures. American conservatives often speak of god-given rights or a “legitimate right to life” as though they have discovered some universal Truth, but all such claims are cultural in nature and often contradict competing claims from other cultures.
@lochaber #39 and @raven #41 – yes. Absolutely, unequivocally, 100%
@ 39 Lochaber writes:
“A person should have ownership and control of their own body. Without bodily autonomy, one can’t really have any other rights.”
This formulation makes “bodily autonomy” a form of private property rights: your body is your private property, as are your body’s components. So, the key is the right to private property, of which there are numerous forms, including the private body. That is the legal issue: theft is illegal, whether of bodies or cars. And we know that when we look at the history of slavery in the U.S., where there was no “bodily autonomy” for enslaved people: their bodies were the private property of their owners. In other words, rights of private property.
But phrased so simplistically, is the “bodily autonomy” proposal also an argument against the legality of abortion? The “personhood” debate in various conservative states asserts the “bodily autonomy” of a fetus – even a zygote. It’s a bit too facile, legally, to suggest simply that the “bodily autonomy” of the mother/pregnant woman is violated by a fetus she doesn’t want – any more than she could argue for the killing/execution of her spouse who she no longer wishes to live.
That’s why this is a legal matter of the rights of personhood, which can be – and pretty much always are – developmental and variable.
@ ^ davetaylor : NO.
Your body isn’t merely “ÿour property” it is you.
If you cannot tell the difference between someone’s land or clottes or books and their very selves, well, there’s really something wrong with you.
@ ^ Clothes obvs not the typo.
No, someone’s right to bodily autonomy is NOT the same as property rights. You mistakenly thinking otherwise does NOT make that so.
Also if you cannot tell the difference between a spouse and a fetus then, again, something terribly messed up with you.
No it ain’t facile but deep and a vital, key significant difference not a minor one as you seem to imply.
The Conversation – How abortion laws focusing on fetal viability miss the mark on women’s experiences (2025)
Pregnancy and childbirth were the primary cause of death in adult women before modern medicine.
You can natter on about fetal rights but that’s not going to change the fact that the health and welfare of the pregnant person is necessarily privileged over the pregnancy.
Abortion will continue to be a necessary procedure due to this fact. Sometimes pregnancy goes horribly wrong and the only way to save the mother is to terminate.
Was it that common? I would have thought infections and common diseases like Tuberculosis and pneumonia claimed an order of magnitude more victims.
Tethys @48, beholder @49.
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure – How dangerous was childbirth in the past? (2024)
My genealogy research going back 300 years shows that far more ADULT women died from childbirth than of infectious diseases. This doesn’t improve until circa the late 1800’s and modern medicine invents infection control and the ability to perform a cesarean section without killing the mother.
Disease would impact any population equally, and occasionally wipes out entire families, especially children. Pregnancy risk on top of disease risk only affects the female population.
In any case, arguing about fetal rights or property rights is entirely irrelevant. The life of the person carrying that pregnancy should absolutely be privileged above the pregnancy.
@46 StevoR
Well, simply asserting your belief doesn’t make it valid or true. What exactly do you think “bodily autonomy” means? What it is about “autonomy” that is different than being inalienable? — “Property” takes many forms, and the history of slavery makes it clear that bodies are property as well as cars, books, etc.
I have to admit that I’m relying on my lawyer wife’s knowledge of legal theory here, but I think she makes a perfectly compelling point.
That’s just plainly false. Sky Captain quoted a better handle on the numbers involved.
Both times, though, (and you really brought attention to it by putting “ADULT” in all caps) I wonder why you’re including all adult women in this sample when a.) 94% of child bearers survived their pregnancies and b.) childbearing is restricted to a smaller subpopulation, while incidence of infections and potentially fatal disease is not.
I have multiple quibbles with the Cambridge article, as it is making claims that are entirely unsupported by any type of reliable or comprehensive data on maternal mortality for the general population.
Also my ancestors aren’t English, and it was exceedingly common for men to have multiple wives die of childbirth itself or complications following birth.
My records are in agreement with this statement from #50.
And this
One Gx5 Uncle was a blacksmith, one of whom married a Midwife after his first wife died in childbirth. The village records record a huge improvement in both maternal and infant mortality after she arrived, despite the regular occurrence of cholera and other disease outbreaks still killing people.
Tethys @54.
Those ARE important caveats. That author is a 19th/20th c historical demographer focusing on maternal mortality in England, Scotland and Wales—including designing a 2026 cause-of-death coding framework that extends the WHO’s system for archaic terms for disease. CV also has I think present-day demography in Nepal, India, and Uganda.
The article’s further reading list linked an American journal article “Maternal mortality in the past and its relevance to developing countries today” (2000).
/Cited for lack of comprehensive data and international difficulties, not a presumption of your ancestry.
The question of “personhood” is really not that hard to answer: a fetus becomes a full person when it is no longer inside the body of another person. One cannot ascribe personhood to a fetus without significantly degrading the personhood of its bearer. That cannot even be done in theory, and in practice, as we see every time we try, the results are always atrocious. Our Constitution (as amended) recognizes an INALIENABLE right to be secure in one’s person; and being pregnant does not diminish or nullify that right. QED (that’s Latin for DUH).
Nobody has mentioned the distaff side of abortion; its prohibition yields desperation and ‘backyard’ abortions, with a heavy cost in lives and health outcomes. Banning it doesn’t preclude it!
I think you were making a small joke, but distaff has a very specific meaning. It is not a synonym for alternate/converse/ or flip side.
I am pretty confident that most women are of the opinion that they don’t need the state to infringe on their right to control their own reproduction and reproductive system.
Tethys, it was metaphorical, and insidiously endorsing you.
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/distaff-meaning)
I used the phrase “distaff side” to figuratively (in this context) to shift focus to the female perspective given the specific health outcomes of abortion policy, as a contrast to abstract political or moral debates.
For anyone who can get (or is) pregnant, it’s not an abstract consideration, and certainly not something that should be universal regardless of specific circumstances.
—
FWIW, I’m on record as noting I think any pregnant person should be able to abort at any time, so long as it’s an informed decision. No need for exculpatory excuses, ever. Of course!
Ah, insidious endorsement. Cool.
Abortion on demand is a bogeyman of the Bible thumpers who imagine they should be able to dictate women’s reproduction rights.
Most elective abortions occur very early in pregnancy.
Fewer than 1% of abortions occur in the third trimester. Usually this happens because medical tests reveal that fetus is not viable due to a rare genetic condition, and continuing the pregnancy will have the same end result, but also entails pain and suffering for the non-viable fetus. Before about 7 months gestation the central nervous system has not yet developed to the point where a fetus can feel pain.
If a pregnant woman’s life was endangered by her fetus once it reached viability (as in Chesapeake’s 8 months example) it would be delivered via emergency c-section. No murdering is involved in either scenario.
davetaylor @52:
UN Population Fund – State of the world population (2021, pdf)
Pages 55-56 have those definitions.
Pages 17-31 discuss indicators to measure progress in empowering exercise of reproductive rights (3 survey questions asking if one has self-determination in health care, using contraception, and rejecting intercourse—requiring all three). Indicators established by the “2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development” of 2015.
Page 17’s chronology put ‘autonomy’ itself early and later paired with ‘bodily’ since the 90s. However page 33 quoted US suffragist Lucy Stone from 160+ years ago.
Wikipedia – Autonomy