Pro-lifers hate women and want to control their bodies. Pro-choicers hate babies and care about their own convenience more than the lives of children.
Or, alternatively, pro-lifers honestly, truly believe that fetuses are children, in which case it is obviously the proper choice to restrict abortion. Pro-choicers honestly, truly believe that personhood does not begin at conception, in which case there’s little room for abortion to be ethically wrong.
Until both sides start addressing each other’s actual arguments, this subject is not going to cool off. You won’t convince a pro-lifer who sees fetuses as children by wrongly claiming they want to control women. You won’t convince a pro-choicer who sees personhood as developing later by insisting that they are a godless baby-killer.
‘Enlightenment centerism’ is so tiresome
There’s no argument against bodily autonomy. Everything else is either blind sentiment or disingenuous bullshit.
Yeah there is. It’s used all the time. You can’t do something with your body that hurts another person directly.
This applies to murder outside the womb and also to murder of people inside the womb.
In no other situation is opting out of supplying blood, organs, etc to another person considered murder. It’s hard to imagine any government that required you even to give blood as anything but the extreme end of tyrannical, authoritarian, and monstrous. And, yet, this is the reality that women are subjected to.
We don’t even force dead people to give up their organs. Literally, dead people are considered to have a greater right to their bodies than pregnant women. Abortion is a wildly inconsistent legal standard.
So you don’t believe in a right to self-defense?
Don’t both sides this, this isn’t a both sides situation. I’m sure that there are some pro-choice people who do genuinely believe that life begins at conception and a foetus is equal to a living child but a) They are just categorically scientifically wrong, so it doesn’t matter what they think, and b) they are not the ones who are leading the charge for changing the laws, the ones in power who are pushing the narrative are doing it to distract their voting base from actual problems.
Besides if they genuinely cared for the babies then there are many many other things they could get animated about that would actually make a positive impact on the lives of children, like more affordable/free healthcare, more paid maternity and paternity leave, and better social programmes to help struggling parents etc. They’re just mad about it because it’s the issue of the year that right-wing media told them to be mad about – they haven’t actually thought about it much beyond that.
And even if they weren’t wrong about the science (which to be clear they definitely are) it doesn’t matter, because banning things like abortions doesn’t stop people wanting them and getting them — it just makes people do them in unsafe ways (ways that are much more likely to cause the death of the prospective mothers). If the religious right actually wanted to reduce the number of abortions then they should be pushing for thing like; better sex education, easier access to affordable/free contraception, the removal of “abstinence only” teaching practices — things which have been conclusively proven to reduce abortion rates!
I agree. That’s why I think pro-lifers should not be allowed to get abortions and pro-choicers should be allowed to. Problem solved, and no one’s freedoms are infringed.
So many social solutions can be handled this way too. Don’t like gay people? Don’t be gay, but don’t stand in the way of others who are. Drinking is against your religion? Don’t drink, but don’t stop others from drinking. Most of our problems with these debates is that people try to impose their rules and limitations on others and that simply isn’t fair.
I don’t think you really got my point. If you truly, honestly believed that doing something resulted in the death of a child, of course you’d want to prevent anyone from doing it. We already have a law against murder, and surely you wouldn’t say “then they just shouldn’t murder people, but don’t try to impose their beliefs on me!”
The point is that, from the perspective that fetuses are children, restricting abortion is the most logical and consistent approach. This is unavoidable, and you can’t change their minds if you don’t address this. The way to sway a pro-lifer, then, is to demonstrate that a fetus doesn’t have personhood.
@Metaright “The way to sway a pro-lifer, then, is to demonstrate that a fetus doesn’t have personhood.”
No, first you have to persuade them that the life of the fetus bearer is worth something more than being an incubator.
Which you will never do.
People who are anti-abortion fanatics may or may not believe that a fetus is a baaaaaby, really. But what they really do not believe in is the personhood of the placenta owner.
And until you find a way to convince them that a real, living, breathing human being with feelings and rights who already exists independently has rights, including that to life unburdened by an unwanted pregnancy for any reason, you won’t convince them of anything else.
@Metaright “Until both sides start addressing each other’s actual arguments”
Really, no.
The entire anti-abortion thing has been wrought from nothing, for the express purpose of working up conservative voters. Like the anti-drag thing, the anti-‘woke’ thing, etc.
The ‘actual’ argument on the forced birther side comes down to whether a person capable of being pregnant has bodily autonomy. That side completely denies this. You simply can’t have a rational argument with people who want you dead, injured, or tied to a life with children you don’t want and/or can’t afford. Who think scooping out a clump of cells with no independent thought or existence is worse than an 8 year old being forced to bear a child to term, an adult dying of sepsis or giving birth to a ‘baby’ incapable of survival or a life free from pain and severe disability.
Their argument basically comes down to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”. Keep women barefoot, pregnant, and uneducated.
Don’t you dare to try and both sides this.
OP is relying on a strawman themselves by continuing to use the term “pro-life” to represent the anti-abortion side of the argument. One can be in support of legal, safe access to abortion and still feel that abortion is against their own moral values.
A true “pro-life” stance should by its very definition include the lives of those who could potentially be harmed by carrying a high risk or unwanted pregnancy to term, as well as those of the children born into situations in which their basic needs are unlikely to be met. And yet, far too often we see those who label themselves “pro-life” completely ignore the value of these lives.
Sidestepping the fetal personhood argument for the moment, the fact is that no one has a right to your body but you. You cannot be coerced to donate an organ, so it stands to reason that you also cannot be coerced to carry an unwanted pregnancy.
If the pro-choice movement focused on rhetoric like that more, I think it would have much more success. Of course, that’s only if the pro-life people are receptive to having their minds changed.
It’s a solid argument but the problem is that it concedes the fetal personhood argument which is far from settled. And conceding that point leads to a whole bunch of, frankly, nonsensical legal implications down the line (not just about abortion but about nearly everything) so it doesn’t really make sense to move on from it.
