atara
Bluelighter
I mean, basically a nonviable fetus seems less sympathetic than a pig. And I ate a pig...
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...last night. Anyway, that makes it pretty hard for me to worry about other people killing fetuses.
But I'd also draw another line at what's called quickening at roughly sixteen weeks. It's when the fetus starts moving, and in some old legal systems it was the point at which a fetus was considered alive. Generally, this corresponds to the ability of the brain to activate the peripheral nervous system, something we would normally consider essential for an organism to be alive, since it would die almost instantly otherwise. I find it hard to believe that killing something which has never been capable of centrally activated movement would be worse than killing, say, an insect. If a baby was born like that, we'd probably have to let it go unless we could repair the problem.
Nonetheless, I find the argument in A Defense of Abortion pretty convincing. You can't be forced to render care for someone who is human and alive, and gestating a fetus is rendering care.
And yet even that isn't the real problem with anti-abortion laws. The problem is that in practice abortion bans are a huge disaster every time they've been tried, and inevitably lead to either draconian consequences for women suspected of getting an illegal abortion or widespread, dangerous illegal abortions, often both, and also a great deal of poorly cared-for newborns crowding orphanages and generally making life miserable for every child without parents, plus widespread actual infanticide, both of which always happen. It's always seemed insane to me that people want to bring this back, because instead "people" who have never known life will miss out. Like, a person briefly exists, experiences nothing, and then dies -- this is worse than a world where women regularly die from botched back-alley operations, children starve, poverty spreads, etc?
checks notes
...last night. Anyway, that makes it pretty hard for me to worry about other people killing fetuses.
But I'd also draw another line at what's called quickening at roughly sixteen weeks. It's when the fetus starts moving, and in some old legal systems it was the point at which a fetus was considered alive. Generally, this corresponds to the ability of the brain to activate the peripheral nervous system, something we would normally consider essential for an organism to be alive, since it would die almost instantly otherwise. I find it hard to believe that killing something which has never been capable of centrally activated movement would be worse than killing, say, an insect. If a baby was born like that, we'd probably have to let it go unless we could repair the problem.
Nonetheless, I find the argument in A Defense of Abortion pretty convincing. You can't be forced to render care for someone who is human and alive, and gestating a fetus is rendering care.
And yet even that isn't the real problem with anti-abortion laws. The problem is that in practice abortion bans are a huge disaster every time they've been tried, and inevitably lead to either draconian consequences for women suspected of getting an illegal abortion or widespread, dangerous illegal abortions, often both, and also a great deal of poorly cared-for newborns crowding orphanages and generally making life miserable for every child without parents, plus widespread actual infanticide, both of which always happen. It's always seemed insane to me that people want to bring this back, because instead "people" who have never known life will miss out. Like, a person briefly exists, experiences nothing, and then dies -- this is worse than a world where women regularly die from botched back-alley operations, children starve, poverty spreads, etc?
