Its really disturbing. In important ways, these forced birthers give more rights to fetuses than to real human beings.
If I kidnap someone and hooked them up to a dialysis machine that is keeping me alive by letting me use their kidneys, this person would be under no legal obligation to let me use their kidneys. They would be in their right to unplug themselves and let me die.
The challenge is that your analogy is not a perfect analogy and doesn't actually represent the moral position of the pro life folks.
In fact there probably is no perfect analogy because there is something unique about the gestation of a human fetus that cannot be captured by comparing it to an individual organ.
From the pro life view a better analogy is that you donated your kidney and now have changed your mind and want it back. Can you take it back thus causing the death of the donee? Probably not, but from the pro life perspective that's pretty close to what a woman who willingly became pregnant and wants an abortion is asking to do. The tougher, but still imperfect analogy, is if your kidney was stolen, given to a child, and the innocent recipient child had no role or say in whether they received it. Can you still demand your kidney back leaving the child to die? That scenario gets closer to the questions about rape and life and health of a mother. Those could be interesting questions, but they still don't quite capture the uniqueness that is gestation.
You wake up one morning to find you are plugged into a machine that is plugged into a stranger. Your organs being used to sustain the life of a person you have never met. The process by which this other person is using your organs is painful, makes you sick, will last a long time, and has a chance to kill you. Should you be under a legal obligation to continue to allow them to use your organs?
The asymmetry here makes sense to me. Progressives want to do alot of Progressive things and so they have to talk about that and tell people they are More Progressive then their primary opponent. Thats how you end up with dumb extreme stuff like the democratic primary positions on Climate and Medicare For All. Conservatives mostly just want to NOT do the Progressive things and also to give rich white people big tax cuts. They used to have Grover Norquist and the no-taxes pledge, that had a moment when it was very influential.
"A 17-year-old girl and her mother have been charged with a series of felonies and misdemeanors after an apparent medication abortion at home in Nebraska. The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication to induce abortion online...."
There's a little sleight of hand here because of the difference between using human as an adjective and as a noun. A person is someone who has developed the capacity to function outside the womb.
“they don’t say that women who seek abortions should be prosecuted for murder or that people should mourn miscarriages the way they would the death of a child.”
Maybe not the former but some absolutely do the latter. I guess there’s not a lot of organized advocacy around trying to get other people to do it, but I know e.g. pro-life folks who list names of miscarried pregnancies along with their born children on social media profiles.
At some level, I think the answer is pretty clear - Trump or DeSantis would sign the rightmost national abortion ban that they could get through Congress. And given the depth of the conservative movement's commitment on this issue, that bill would be H.R. 1 from a future GOP trifecta.
This is a great article that gets at one of the most underrated forces in American politics - that is, political media's relative lack of interest in clearly informing people about the actual likely policy consequences of elections. For the reasons Matt explains, there tends to be more pre-commitment to policy priorities on the Democratic side, such that voters can be pretty sure a Democratic trifecta will make social programs more generous, fund clean energy, etc. But when Trump and DeSantis stay silent on abortion, they are following a longstanding conservative movement tradition of hiding the ball on their most unpopular policy views. Neither George W. Bush nor Trump made a big deal publicly about the welfare-state rollbacks they ended up pursuing in office - they both chose to make different issues salient and (in Trump's case) just straight up lied about their position on social program cuts. Recognizing the unpopularity of their desire to cut Social Security and Medicaid, they hid the ball in order to win.
All that to say - I'm not sure that just asking Trump or DeSantis about a national abortion ban would be very insightful. They'd probably reply by making hazy statements about traditional family values and/or changing the subject to critical race theory, and they would surely take advantage of the conservative movement's message discipline to hide the ball as long as they could rather than take an unpopular position in public. But it would be VERY valuable if the political press spent less time on horse-race analysis and second-order takes about messaging savviness, and more time doing the back-to-basics work of straightforwardly informing people about the likely policy consequences of the choices they face. President Trump’s first term is the reason abortion bans are now on the table, and a future President Trump or DeSantis would sign one at the federal level. And perhaps, on balance, this is what the public wants (although I hope not). But my hot take is that hiding the ball on massively consequential policy stances is bad, and we shouldn't let important political figures do it.
It's not as if Trump is regularly giving press conferences where journalists could ask him questions. Desantis on the other hand, they should be trying to get answers from him.
I would like to know what they think too. I would also like to know what Dems think. We need to drill down just a little with all these politicians. Matt mentioned some of the politically extreme positions of conservative groups. That’s fair. When does Planned Parenthood become pro-life? We all (I hope) are pro-life at some point? The question is when in a pregnancy? Where are your gray areas and what are the factors (rape, health of the mother, etc.) that form your exceptions to the pro-life position?
Matt’s curiosity should be extended beyond merely Republicans.
Some people are never pro-choice. I think morally this is actually a simple and understandable position. I disagree with it but I get it. But most pro-choice people acknowledge that there is a point where the idea of abortion becomes a moral problem. They become pro-life. It’s fair to ask them when and under what circumstances?
Liberals want to believe that, post-Roe, abortion is a wedge issue on the right. But I suspect that Democratic politicians who used to push for expansive abortion rights will find it hard to thread the needle between activists' demands for unfettered access to taxpayer-funded abortions and the middle-ground that is the majority public opinion. It's really hard to imagine a state-wide or national election where the two candidates stake out extreme positions on either side, but also hard to imagine how they navigate their primary elections without having to out-flank opponents who proudly stake out extreme positions.
I mean, I just Googled "Is Ron DeSantis pro-life" and got a slew of hits for articles complaining that DeSantis keeps dodging questions on the issue. So it seems like the media are asking, he's just not answering yet.
It's not really important what DeSantis is asked -- and what he answers -- with regards to abortion. His actions will be far more important. Right now he's laying low and doing nothing to change Florida's 15-week limitation (a law he signed), his thinking presumably being that he has a general election to win (hopefully overwhelmingly, he no doubt feels) and he doesn't want to do anything to rock that boat.
The 15-week ban is popular among the general public and would probably serve him well in the 2024 general election. But how well will it sit with conservative media and the primary electorate? Not too well. So following November, should he choose to declare against Trump, he will be under fierce pressure to move to Trump's right on abortion and cleave the evangelicals away from him. It will then be in his political interest to push the most aggressive abortion restrictions he can. It's the only way he can counter Trump's "three Supreme Court Justices."
That will tell us what we need to know. Not journalists' questions today which if he has any ability he'll just slide right by.
Matt's post and a bunch of the comments make me realize that lots of otherwise very informed people are simply unaware of the basic argument for the impermissibility of abortion. I don't mean to suggest that the argument is unassailable, but like you guys aren't even engaging with it.
1. A fetus, from conception or very shortly thereafter (implantation at the latest), is a human being (i.e., a living organism of the species Homo sapiens).
2. All human beings have a right to life (or if you don't like rights talk, it is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being).
3. So, abortion is always wrong (since it's the intentional killing of an innocent human being).
Science, not philosophy or theology, gives us reason to believe (1), and it's not seriously debatable. So all the action comes down to (2). And of course lots of people reject (2). But...it is really hard to articulate an alternative principle about which humans it's wrong to kill that doesn't have extremely implausible consequences. (E.g., Tooley's principle, consequentialist principles, etc.) I'm not saying this demonstrates that the above argument is sound, but it shouldn't be a mystery why people think abortion is always wrong, and it doesn't have anything to do with theology.
Edited to add: the reasons pro-lifers don't support the prosecution of women who procure abortions are explained above.
Science says nothing about what "a living organism of the species Homo sapiens" is. At least, I don't see anything in science that makes clear what the difference is between an organ and an organism. Does science tell us whether the ant or the ant colony is the organism? Does science tell us whether the community or the cell of the slime mold is the organism? Does science even tell us whether the chicken or the egg is the start of the life cycle?
"Science says nothing about what "a living organism of the species Homo sapiens" is."
You can't really mean that, right? Are you suggesting that it's a scientifically open question whether you and I are organs or organisms? The difference between an organ and an organism is, I would have thought, one of definition. I guess science doesn't tell us *that*. But science does tell us what falls into which categories. Of course, there are tough cases, but that doesn't mean that there aren't clear cases.
I would argue that's not a scientific question *at all*
Categories like "organism" and "species" are just tools humans use to help us keep track of and understand the facts of the world. But you and I can agree on all the facts, and then disagree on where to draw the category boundaries anyways, perhaps because we have different use-cases or think about the world differently. And if we do, there's no experiment that could be run, no observation that could be collected, that would necessarily be able to say one of us is right and the other is wrong. We're just both doing what's useful to us.
I think this is a problem with your argument in its entirety, really. Why should I think that the definition of "organism", as it's useful for some biologists, should line up with the definition of a "being" as it's useful for someone affording moral or legal rights? What of the biologists who find different category boundaries useful? Should they afford rights differently? It's not a connection that I see having much merit
Categories like 'organism' aren't just arbitrary human tools, they figure in scientific laws and explanations, and it's their role in those laws and explanations that gives them non-arbitrary boundaries. But that's neither here nor there. I'm not assuming that the biological concept of a human organism lines up with the concept of a person. (1) is a purely descriptive claim about when human organisms come into existence. (2) is a substantive moral claim, and of course it's open to dispute. My point is that it's hard to find a better principle than (2), and (2) is prima facie plausible anyway (notice the comments saying it's "not in doubt"), and so it shouldn't be hard to understand the motivation for the pro-life position.
The concept of "organism" that figures in various scientific laws and explanations is going to be different for different laws and explanations. I think there will be some laws and explanations for which a colony of eusocial insects will be treated as an "organism" and some laws and explanations for which the individual insects will be; there will be some laws and explanations for which the trees of an aspen or the fruiting bodies of a fungus are treated as "organisms" and others for which the rhizomatic root structure is; there will be some laws and explanations for which slime mold cells will be treated as "organisms" and some for which the individual cells are even when they are in the unified phase; there will be some laws and explanations for which unhatched (and possibly even unfertilized!) bird eggs will be treated as "organisms" and some laws and explanations for which they won't; and relevantly to our main point, there will be some laws and explanations for which mammalian fetuses will be treated as "organisms" and some laws and explanations for which they aren't.
I was not claiming that they're arbitrary--as I said, they are justified by their usefulness to people in understanding the world. What I'm saying is that where their boundaries are drawn is not a scientific question, although it is in-part going to depend on scientific fact. A category like "organism" is much like a free-body diagram: a useful tool for thinking about scientific things, but not a scientific result in itself.
If you're "not assuming that the biological concept of a human organism lines up with the concept of a person" then why is (1) relevant at all? Let's say I accept (2), then we're left with the question of "what's a human being?". How do I know if a fetus is one?
It appears to me like you appeal to (1) to answer this, which is exactly what I am objecting to--whether or not some biologists consider it useful to call something an organism seems to have no bearing on whether or not we should afford it rights. Or else can I get an abortion only if I'm a biologist who doesn't find that perspective useful in my day job?
Or do you answer this some other way? In which case, why have you included (1) at all?
I have some specific replies to the points you guys are making, but I think we're losing the forest for the trees. I've provided an argument, but I'm not sure exactly what premise you're objecting to. Perhaps it will be useful if I restate it as follows:
(1) According to the biology 101 definitions of 'organism' and 'human', a new human organism comes into existence at conception or shortly thereafter.
(2) All human organisms (according to the biology 101 definitions) have a right to life.
(3) So, abortion is wrong (since it's the intentional killing of an innocent being with the right to life).
The argument could use a little polishing (the parenthetical in the conclusion should really be unpacked as further premises, I can do that if necessary), but it's not clear to be what premise you are objecting to. I think you must be objecting to (2). And that's by far the most contentious premise, among the informed at least. But my point wasn't that (2) was unassailable, just that it's prima facie plausible, and there aren't any other principles about which human organisms have the right to life that are clearly more plausible. And hence that the motivation for the pro-life view shouldn't be a mystery to anyone. Anyhow, am I right that ultimately you guys are objecting to (2)? If so, do you have a different principle about which human organisms have a right to life that that you think is more plausible? If so, please do tell, and then we can argue about the relative plausibility of the two.
If we start with the idea that adult humans are organisms and that individual cells are not, then science tells us a lot of things about what distinguishes those. But at different stages of fetal development, what science tells us is lots of ways that those fetuses share things that adults share, and lots of other ways that those fetuses lack things that adults share. Science doesn't tell us which of those are essential to being "a living organism of the species Homo sapiens".
I don't mean to deny that there are clear cases - in most of these cases, we *define* the concept by *starting* with clear cases. But the point is that science doesn't answer the question of what stage in the development something fits the category, unless we start with a pre-scientific definition of what we want from the category.
Right, but this is one of Scott's most wrong essays. Sorry, I can't explain why without writing an essay of my own, but even if Scott were right the seeming upshot would be that it's a matter of negotiation whether we classify human fetuses as human. That being a matter of negotiation certainly doesn't settle the negotiation in favor of the pro-choice side, and if it is nothing more than a matter of negotiation then it seems easy to understand the motivation of the pro-life side: they think/feel that killing fetuses is wrong, and so they're trying to negotiate our conceptual boundaries such that killing them is considered wrong.
> they think/feel that killing fetuses is wrong, and so they're trying to negotiate our conceptual boundaries such that killing them is considered wrong.
Yes, that seems to be what is going on, which I think is totally fine. I happen to disagree up to a point, and ultimately the democratic process will have to be used to come to a compromise.
I can't tell how much we disagree. I think science tells us about species, and their membership conditions. I also think there is a relatively clear "scientific" definition of 'organism', by which I mean the definition that's used in biology and medicine. And I think it's clear, by that definition, that fetuses are organisms, and, using the membership conditions for species, clear that they're human organisms.
Is there one definition for “organism” used in biology and medicine? I would have thought it’s like “gene” or “species”, where we usually use it in clear cases, but there are dozens of competing definitions that give different results for the marginal cases.
I've had a chance to quickly look over the first two articles linked in the Wikipedia article on organisms. The first discussed four conceptions of organism (addressing the colonies concern you had), all of which are (I think) satisfied by fetuses. (One conception would say that twins are single organisms.) It's hard to say for sure because some of the conceptions are only very loosely defined.
The second paper is easier to excerpt, so:
"The first view defines an individual organism as a living entity in which the fitness interests of its components are aligned such that little or no actual conflict is expressed". On this a fetus is an organism, right?
"The second view defines an individual organism as a living entity in which the components are interdependent on one another for reproduction, such that fitness is exported from the lower to the higher level, and the whole organism reproduces itself to create a similar entity with heritable fitness". This also seems to classify fetuses as organisms.
"The third view defines an individual organism as an integrated functional agent, whose components work together in coordinated action analogous to the pieces of a machine, thus demonstrating adaptation at the level of the whole organism". This also seems to classify fetuses as organisms.
The authors defend their own view, which doesn't get a nice definition like the ones above as far as I can see, but which would also (I think) count fetuses as organisms. In both articles the basic structure seems to be that we start with the idea of a 1-1 correspondence between genome and organism, noting that this doesn't work in some cases, and then considering what to make of that. But since fetuses always have a distinct genome from their mothers, this sort of strategy seems unlikely to deliver a conception of organisms on which fetuses aren't distinct organisms.
Sorry this is sort of sloppy, but I figure you'll want to dig in for yourself anyway if you think it's important.
I won't pretend that I'm an authority on this matter, but my semi-informed understanding is that there's a definition that appears in textbooks and is used for almost all practical purposes, and that counts fetuses (within 2 weeks of conception at the latest) as organisms. And I would expect that you're right that there are edge cases that call for refinements of this definition, and that there are various competing refinements. But I expect that most or all of those refinements, if not politically motivated, will count fetuses as organisms, since they satisfy the "standard" definition so clearly. But I could be wrong about this--I'm less willing to bet about this than about the claim that fetuses are alive. It looks like the wikipedia article on organisms has some helpful links, maybe I'll poke through them later when procrastinating.
This is amusing. There is no "scientific" consensus that life starts at conception. That's Catholic dogma (perhaps shared by some other Christian denominations), nothing more. No. 2 is not in fact in doubt (or under debate), it is rather no. 1 that is the problem.
If you believe in no. 3 it's not at all clear why abortion is not murder ("intentional killing of an innocent human being" *is* the definition of murder in most legal systems) or shouldn't be prosecuted, and I don't see where it's "explained above"?
Luckily, I didn't say there was a scientific consensus that life starts at conception, I said that science gives us reason to believe that a new human organism comes into existence very early on in the pregnancy, either at conception or shortly thereafter. I believe this contains a perhaps dated overview of the relevant facts: https://philpapers.org/archive/SMISD.pdf
"No. 2 is not in fact in doubt (or under debate), it is rather no. 1 that is the problem."
I'm sorry, but you're just wrong, at least if you mean to be talking about the actual debate between informed people, not what people on the streets are talking about.
You didn't? Silly me I thought "not seriously debatable" means just that, but clearly you meant something else entirely? As to "the actual debate" I find your latest comment, as the original comment, very ironic. You claim to enlighten pro-choice people ignorant about the pro-life stance about it, but in the process reveal your own ignorance of the pro-choice worldview.
C'mon, this is supposed to be a place for intelligent debate. As is extraordinarily easily verifiable, what I said was that it isn't serious debatable that life begins at conception, OR SHORTLY THEREAFTER.
And what claims have I made about the pro-choice worldview? Do you mean the above? Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other: I know some uninformed pro-choice folks on the streets would debate (1). My point was that it wasn't scientifically debatable. The most influential and important and well-regarded pro-choice arguments all concede that fetuses are alive, since that's not, as I said, seriously debatable.
The entire debate, or at least a major part of it, is precisely on what counts as a person, when life begins for the purpose of personhood. You can extract a cell from your body and sometimes keep it alive and replicating but that does not make it a person. When life begins in the sense of when that which started as fetalized egg became a person is not a scientific question and is at the heart of the abortion debate. If you’re unaware of that, and think pro choice people (or “serious” pro choice people) agree with pro life people on this point and that there is anything close to a consensus (scientific or otherwise) that an embryo/fetus “from conception or shortly thereafter” is a person, then you are radically misinformed, and not just about the views of the majority of Americans but of the majority of people throughout history.
Again, c'mon, please look carefully at what I've written before publicly dismissing it. I never said that it was uncontentious that personhood begins at conception, or even shortly thereafter. I said it was (scientifically) uncontentious that a new human organism comes into existence at conception, or shortly thereafter. The word 'person' didn't appear in my argument at all. We could introduce it if you like: 'person' (in these debates at least) basically means 'individual with a right to life'. By that definition, (2) is equivalent to the claim that all human organisms are persons. That claim is not a scientific one, as you note. And that claim, like I've been arguing all along, is at the crux of the debate about abortion. My point is that it's prima facie quite plausible, and that the alternatives to it all have implausible consequences. And so it shouldn't be so mysterious why pro-life people have the views they do.
Thanks for engaging with the argument! But I don't think denying someone your kidney is killing them, or more generally, that failing to save someone is equivalent to killing them. You and I could save at least a couple of starving kids right now by donating to Oxfam, but almost nobody thinks that the fact that we aren't doing that means that we're killers, or equivalent to killers. So I don't think a right to bodily integrity is needed to explain why donating a kidney in your scenario isn't morally required. What I do think your point shows is that, even if fetuses have a right to life, perhaps "evicting the fetus from the mother's womb" could be justified as a form of "failing to save" the fetus. The analogy with abortion breaks down (in almost all cases) because (in almost all cases) the fetus is killed, not just delivered and left to die on its own. But perhaps your reasoning could justify delivering a fetus prematurely knowing that it will certainly, or almost certainly, die.
"Yes, every once in a while a state legislator will pop off about how pregnant women should be forced to carry non-viable fetuses to term. But in general, that’s considered amateur hour stuff, and savvy politicians don’t do it. They just also don’t come out and say, “okay, here are some situations in which I think abortion should be legal.”"
Is this true? The Indiana bill had a number of exceptions where abortion would be legal: rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and when the life of the pregnant person is at danger [1]. That's basically laying out situations where abortion should be legal. And it's actually more expansive than I would have expected. In particular, I would not have expected an exception for fatal fetal anomalies, which is something that doesn't come up much in the popular press but has come up in the SB comments.
Relatedly, I'm guessing that conservatives will be more willing to bend to political reality than you'd expect. E.g. here are some quotes from the National Review in the aftermath of the Kansas vote:
"...be willing to compromise. Compromise is painful when it means leaving some children to their deaths; no later progress can undo that. But it is how progress in a democracy works. And pro-lifers now have the advantage on that score. The pro-life ideology is that all human life is sacred at every stage and should be protected in law, but a law that protects some lives is better than a law that protects no lives. A 15-week abortion ban concedes nothing to principle, as opposed to political reality." [2]
The "leading lights of the anti-abortion movement" may be opposed to any compromise, but the politicians pushing the laws certainly are:
"[pro-lifers] also need to defend a positive pro-life agenda that can garner sufficient public support. If they want to achieve lasting protections for the unborn, pro-lifers should know that more than 75 percent of Americans nationwide have consistently said they support an exception for abortions in the case of rape (which account for 1 percent or less of all abortions). Congressman Henry Hyde, one of the greatest pro-life statesmen, allowed this exception in 1993 in order to save his amendment prohibiting federal Medicaid funding of elective abortions that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. That exception has been part of the federal budget ever since. The lesson then, as now, is that it would have been a grave error to insist that no lives should be protected unless all lives are protected." [3]
Contrast that last sentence to some discourse you hear from the left (e.g. "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere").
I think it's crucially important to remember that the Pro-Life movement is not monolithic. Sometimes pro-choice advocates forget this (and I think Matt runs dangerously close to the edge here). I personally identify as Pro-Life. I think a fetus is a human being, in some form or another, and that the unborn child must be given far more weight than pro-choice activists suggest. An unborn child is not a growth, it's not a tumor, it's not just a random collection of cells: it's a human. The conceit of the pro-choice movement is that a woman gets the sole decision on when something goes from being "just a bunch of cells" into her baby. I think that's wrong, I think deciding when we recognize life to begin is an important societal discussion, and not something we can flippantly dismiss with slogans like "my body my choice" and debates on freedom.
That being said, I ALSO think it's obvious you cannot give an unborn child the same rights as a baby, or the mother. That is also nonsensical. The problem with the Roe political landscape is it permanently locked us into a situation where the pro-choice side won an unequivocal victory on a complex issue. It was genuinely strange that the US Supreme Court acknowledged abortion to the point of fetal viability as a constitutional right, while most European countries had at least stated bans on abortion after 12-15 weeks.
At this point I expect Republicans to start fracturing (not as a party but into camps) on where they stand on abortion. Some will call for more European style bans, while others will remain steadfast in their absolutism. I also expect Trump to lead the more moderate camp.
A lawyer can’t talk to an unborn child, we cannot discern what the unborn child might want, the unborn child has no history to draw from. The unborn child is entirely dependent on the mother to live and unlike a baby: the mother can’t abandon it or give it up for adoption.
To me it’s clear the life of the mother must come before the life of the unborn. That is simple logic, especially since most fetal anomalies will result in the death of the unborn child anyway.
The unborn child can plausibly only have two rights:
Right #1: a right to be born
Right #2: a right to not be exposed to toxins which will make its life unbearable (alcohol being the obvious example)
A baby has more rights and concerns. The mother has more as well.
The big question in the abortion debate is when the unborn’s rights (listed above) supersede a mother’s right to control her body? The second question is who gets to decide? The pro-choice argument on the latter has largely been the mother and the mother alone; while demurring on the former (but generally supporting the notion that it should be as long as possible).
1) A just fertilized egg - completely non-viable outside the womb, some (too-high) likelihood of miscarriage - depends entirely on the mother for all survival. No brain function (no brain cells!) - no heartbeat - none of that. Pregnancy also carries _some_ small risk to the mother.
2) A preemie baby _about_ to be born 6 weeks early. Pregnancy situation is otherwise healthy (assume no extra risk to mother)
(I'm going to say lifeform here as a neutral term because I wasn't sure what to use - please don't read anything into it)
The lifeform in situation 1 isn't even guaranteed to survive to be born if the mother tries to do everything right and imposes significant costs on her.
The lifeform in situation 2 could survive without the mother's intervention if you give it just a little time to be born, and it's much farther along otherwise.
Since I don't believe in a soul, it's obvious to me that the lifeform in situation 1 has fewer rights than the one in 2.
Even believing in a soul, the one in situation 2 is just much more likely to be born even if everyone tries everything right.
I don't claim that this will convince you - some things depend so strongly on our axioms and first principles that they cannot be bridged - I only say that this is why it is "obvious" to me. (Although I can't speak for Benjamin to be sure.)
(I'd also note that most people don't _want_ to abort in situation 2, those are very rare anyway unless the mother's life is at risk)
One reason a subset of ultra-maga types want the band is that it a.) gives states reasons to prosecute godless “slutty women” and as a nice bonus, own the libs.
For those types, it was never a good faith argument.
Correct. Not sure how they square their desire to prosecute women whose cultural mores they don't like with the fact that if they found out they'd impregnated someone they wished they hadn't, they'd push the gal in question to get an abortion in a heartbeat...
Ok this really irks me - this is the quality level of Captain Planet villain motivations.
The _goal_ isn't more pollution. The _goal_ is cheaper (whatever it is that causes pollution).
Heck, if they found a way to reduce the current pollution controls to 99% of their current level by reducing 50% of the cost of the tradeoffs, you'd probably support that too, because that money could be used on lots of other things we want to spend money on.
If we can't understand why the other side of an issue believes they have it correct (and instead always think "they're in the pocket of big <WHATEVER>" then it's hard to come to an agreement.
I know you love to troll on Twitter, but this just bothers me when its on your substack.
I think he means spell it all out. As in don’t say “deregulation” specify what specifically you want to deregulate. In order to lower pork prices I support increasing the ability of pig farmers to dump pig waste in streams and rivers. Yes it will cause environmental damage but lower prom prices are worth it.
The way I read it, he said this in context of what "the groups" on their side would ask for. Nobody "asks" for more pollution. The NRA doesn't "ask" for more victims of gun violence.
The left doesn't "ask" for regulations to put people out of work, it doesn't "ask" to raise gas prices 3x so that nobody can afford to buy gasoline.
I agree that pressing people on what actual regulations they want to change is a good idea - let's discuss the actual tradeoffs, and in some cases benefit from status quo bias or ickiness (your policies would support <1%> more pig waste in streams!), but that's not how his text read to me.
MattY has some tropes that he repeatedly uses about Republicans regarding low taxes and pollution. Amusingly, they are almost exactly what a Sunrise activist might use against a neoliberal such as himself - still supporting capitalism and wanting to use gas to pollute the air or supporting the creation of nuclear waste instead of all "clean" energy.
Its really disturbing. In important ways, these forced birthers give more rights to fetuses than to real human beings.
If I kidnap someone and hooked them up to a dialysis machine that is keeping me alive by letting me use their kidneys, this person would be under no legal obligation to let me use their kidneys. They would be in their right to unplug themselves and let me die.
The challenge is that your analogy is not a perfect analogy and doesn't actually represent the moral position of the pro life folks.
In fact there probably is no perfect analogy because there is something unique about the gestation of a human fetus that cannot be captured by comparing it to an individual organ.
From the pro life view a better analogy is that you donated your kidney and now have changed your mind and want it back. Can you take it back thus causing the death of the donee? Probably not, but from the pro life perspective that's pretty close to what a woman who willingly became pregnant and wants an abortion is asking to do. The tougher, but still imperfect analogy, is if your kidney was stolen, given to a child, and the innocent recipient child had no role or say in whether they received it. Can you still demand your kidney back leaving the child to die? That scenario gets closer to the questions about rape and life and health of a mother. Those could be interesting questions, but they still don't quite capture the uniqueness that is gestation.
No, its a perfect analogy.
You wake up one morning to find you are plugged into a machine that is plugged into a stranger. Your organs being used to sustain the life of a person you have never met. The process by which this other person is using your organs is painful, makes you sick, will last a long time, and has a chance to kill you. Should you be under a legal obligation to continue to allow them to use your organs?
To me, the answer is obviously not
The asymmetry here makes sense to me. Progressives want to do alot of Progressive things and so they have to talk about that and tell people they are More Progressive then their primary opponent. Thats how you end up with dumb extreme stuff like the democratic primary positions on Climate and Medicare For All. Conservatives mostly just want to NOT do the Progressive things and also to give rich white people big tax cuts. They used to have Grover Norquist and the no-taxes pledge, that had a moment when it was very influential.
"A 17-year-old girl and her mother have been charged with a series of felonies and misdemeanors after an apparent medication abortion at home in Nebraska. The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication to induce abortion online...."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion
Great job, guys. Keep telling me how witch hunts against women are just a liberal fabrication.
And yet Meta promised to protect the abortion rights of its own employees (these promises were always nothing more than PR stunts):
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/companies-that-will-protect-employee-access-to-abortions-rcna35265
There's a little sleight of hand here because of the difference between using human as an adjective and as a noun. A person is someone who has developed the capacity to function outside the womb.
“they don’t say that women who seek abortions should be prosecuted for murder or that people should mourn miscarriages the way they would the death of a child.”
Maybe not the former but some absolutely do the latter. I guess there’s not a lot of organized advocacy around trying to get other people to do it, but I know e.g. pro-life folks who list names of miscarried pregnancies along with their born children on social media profiles.
At some level, I think the answer is pretty clear - Trump or DeSantis would sign the rightmost national abortion ban that they could get through Congress. And given the depth of the conservative movement's commitment on this issue, that bill would be H.R. 1 from a future GOP trifecta.
This is a great article that gets at one of the most underrated forces in American politics - that is, political media's relative lack of interest in clearly informing people about the actual likely policy consequences of elections. For the reasons Matt explains, there tends to be more pre-commitment to policy priorities on the Democratic side, such that voters can be pretty sure a Democratic trifecta will make social programs more generous, fund clean energy, etc. But when Trump and DeSantis stay silent on abortion, they are following a longstanding conservative movement tradition of hiding the ball on their most unpopular policy views. Neither George W. Bush nor Trump made a big deal publicly about the welfare-state rollbacks they ended up pursuing in office - they both chose to make different issues salient and (in Trump's case) just straight up lied about their position on social program cuts. Recognizing the unpopularity of their desire to cut Social Security and Medicaid, they hid the ball in order to win.
All that to say - I'm not sure that just asking Trump or DeSantis about a national abortion ban would be very insightful. They'd probably reply by making hazy statements about traditional family values and/or changing the subject to critical race theory, and they would surely take advantage of the conservative movement's message discipline to hide the ball as long as they could rather than take an unpopular position in public. But it would be VERY valuable if the political press spent less time on horse-race analysis and second-order takes about messaging savviness, and more time doing the back-to-basics work of straightforwardly informing people about the likely policy consequences of the choices they face. President Trump’s first term is the reason abortion bans are now on the table, and a future President Trump or DeSantis would sign one at the federal level. And perhaps, on balance, this is what the public wants (although I hope not). But my hot take is that hiding the ball on massively consequential policy stances is bad, and we shouldn't let important political figures do it.
> Nobody needs to make pro-pollution pledges
Maybe we should add "Captain Planet villains" to "generic Republican candidate" in early 2024 polling. I suspect the results would be disheartening.
It's not as if Trump is regularly giving press conferences where journalists could ask him questions. Desantis on the other hand, they should be trying to get answers from him.
I would like to know what they think too. I would also like to know what Dems think. We need to drill down just a little with all these politicians. Matt mentioned some of the politically extreme positions of conservative groups. That’s fair. When does Planned Parenthood become pro-life? We all (I hope) are pro-life at some point? The question is when in a pregnancy? Where are your gray areas and what are the factors (rape, health of the mother, etc.) that form your exceptions to the pro-life position?
Matt’s curiosity should be extended beyond merely Republicans.
Some people are never pro-choice. I think morally this is actually a simple and understandable position. I disagree with it but I get it. But most pro-choice people acknowledge that there is a point where the idea of abortion becomes a moral problem. They become pro-life. It’s fair to ask them when and under what circumstances?
Liberals want to believe that, post-Roe, abortion is a wedge issue on the right. But I suspect that Democratic politicians who used to push for expansive abortion rights will find it hard to thread the needle between activists' demands for unfettered access to taxpayer-funded abortions and the middle-ground that is the majority public opinion. It's really hard to imagine a state-wide or national election where the two candidates stake out extreme positions on either side, but also hard to imagine how they navigate their primary elections without having to out-flank opponents who proudly stake out extreme positions.
I mean, I just Googled "Is Ron DeSantis pro-life" and got a slew of hits for articles complaining that DeSantis keeps dodging questions on the issue. So it seems like the media are asking, he's just not answering yet.
It's not really important what DeSantis is asked -- and what he answers -- with regards to abortion. His actions will be far more important. Right now he's laying low and doing nothing to change Florida's 15-week limitation (a law he signed), his thinking presumably being that he has a general election to win (hopefully overwhelmingly, he no doubt feels) and he doesn't want to do anything to rock that boat.
The 15-week ban is popular among the general public and would probably serve him well in the 2024 general election. But how well will it sit with conservative media and the primary electorate? Not too well. So following November, should he choose to declare against Trump, he will be under fierce pressure to move to Trump's right on abortion and cleave the evangelicals away from him. It will then be in his political interest to push the most aggressive abortion restrictions he can. It's the only way he can counter Trump's "three Supreme Court Justices."
That will tell us what we need to know. Not journalists' questions today which if he has any ability he'll just slide right by.
Matt's post and a bunch of the comments make me realize that lots of otherwise very informed people are simply unaware of the basic argument for the impermissibility of abortion. I don't mean to suggest that the argument is unassailable, but like you guys aren't even engaging with it.
1. A fetus, from conception or very shortly thereafter (implantation at the latest), is a human being (i.e., a living organism of the species Homo sapiens).
2. All human beings have a right to life (or if you don't like rights talk, it is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being).
3. So, abortion is always wrong (since it's the intentional killing of an innocent human being).
Science, not philosophy or theology, gives us reason to believe (1), and it's not seriously debatable. So all the action comes down to (2). And of course lots of people reject (2). But...it is really hard to articulate an alternative principle about which humans it's wrong to kill that doesn't have extremely implausible consequences. (E.g., Tooley's principle, consequentialist principles, etc.) I'm not saying this demonstrates that the above argument is sound, but it shouldn't be a mystery why people think abortion is always wrong, and it doesn't have anything to do with theology.
Edited to add: the reasons pro-lifers don't support the prosecution of women who procure abortions are explained above.
Science says nothing about what "a living organism of the species Homo sapiens" is. At least, I don't see anything in science that makes clear what the difference is between an organ and an organism. Does science tell us whether the ant or the ant colony is the organism? Does science tell us whether the community or the cell of the slime mold is the organism? Does science even tell us whether the chicken or the egg is the start of the life cycle?
"Science says nothing about what "a living organism of the species Homo sapiens" is."
You can't really mean that, right? Are you suggesting that it's a scientifically open question whether you and I are organs or organisms? The difference between an organ and an organism is, I would have thought, one of definition. I guess science doesn't tell us *that*. But science does tell us what falls into which categories. Of course, there are tough cases, but that doesn't mean that there aren't clear cases.
I would argue that's not a scientific question *at all*
Categories like "organism" and "species" are just tools humans use to help us keep track of and understand the facts of the world. But you and I can agree on all the facts, and then disagree on where to draw the category boundaries anyways, perhaps because we have different use-cases or think about the world differently. And if we do, there's no experiment that could be run, no observation that could be collected, that would necessarily be able to say one of us is right and the other is wrong. We're just both doing what's useful to us.
I think this is a problem with your argument in its entirety, really. Why should I think that the definition of "organism", as it's useful for some biologists, should line up with the definition of a "being" as it's useful for someone affording moral or legal rights? What of the biologists who find different category boundaries useful? Should they afford rights differently? It's not a connection that I see having much merit
Categories like 'organism' aren't just arbitrary human tools, they figure in scientific laws and explanations, and it's their role in those laws and explanations that gives them non-arbitrary boundaries. But that's neither here nor there. I'm not assuming that the biological concept of a human organism lines up with the concept of a person. (1) is a purely descriptive claim about when human organisms come into existence. (2) is a substantive moral claim, and of course it's open to dispute. My point is that it's hard to find a better principle than (2), and (2) is prima facie plausible anyway (notice the comments saying it's "not in doubt"), and so it shouldn't be hard to understand the motivation for the pro-life position.
The concept of "organism" that figures in various scientific laws and explanations is going to be different for different laws and explanations. I think there will be some laws and explanations for which a colony of eusocial insects will be treated as an "organism" and some laws and explanations for which the individual insects will be; there will be some laws and explanations for which the trees of an aspen or the fruiting bodies of a fungus are treated as "organisms" and others for which the rhizomatic root structure is; there will be some laws and explanations for which slime mold cells will be treated as "organisms" and some for which the individual cells are even when they are in the unified phase; there will be some laws and explanations for which unhatched (and possibly even unfertilized!) bird eggs will be treated as "organisms" and some laws and explanations for which they won't; and relevantly to our main point, there will be some laws and explanations for which mammalian fetuses will be treated as "organisms" and some laws and explanations for which they aren't.
I was not claiming that they're arbitrary--as I said, they are justified by their usefulness to people in understanding the world. What I'm saying is that where their boundaries are drawn is not a scientific question, although it is in-part going to depend on scientific fact. A category like "organism" is much like a free-body diagram: a useful tool for thinking about scientific things, but not a scientific result in itself.
If you're "not assuming that the biological concept of a human organism lines up with the concept of a person" then why is (1) relevant at all? Let's say I accept (2), then we're left with the question of "what's a human being?". How do I know if a fetus is one?
It appears to me like you appeal to (1) to answer this, which is exactly what I am objecting to--whether or not some biologists consider it useful to call something an organism seems to have no bearing on whether or not we should afford it rights. Or else can I get an abortion only if I'm a biologist who doesn't find that perspective useful in my day job?
Or do you answer this some other way? In which case, why have you included (1) at all?
I have some specific replies to the points you guys are making, but I think we're losing the forest for the trees. I've provided an argument, but I'm not sure exactly what premise you're objecting to. Perhaps it will be useful if I restate it as follows:
(1) According to the biology 101 definitions of 'organism' and 'human', a new human organism comes into existence at conception or shortly thereafter.
(2) All human organisms (according to the biology 101 definitions) have a right to life.
(3) So, abortion is wrong (since it's the intentional killing of an innocent being with the right to life).
The argument could use a little polishing (the parenthetical in the conclusion should really be unpacked as further premises, I can do that if necessary), but it's not clear to be what premise you are objecting to. I think you must be objecting to (2). And that's by far the most contentious premise, among the informed at least. But my point wasn't that (2) was unassailable, just that it's prima facie plausible, and there aren't any other principles about which human organisms have the right to life that are clearly more plausible. And hence that the motivation for the pro-life view shouldn't be a mystery to anyone. Anyhow, am I right that ultimately you guys are objecting to (2)? If so, do you have a different principle about which human organisms have a right to life that that you think is more plausible? If so, please do tell, and then we can argue about the relative plausibility of the two.
If we start with the idea that adult humans are organisms and that individual cells are not, then science tells us a lot of things about what distinguishes those. But at different stages of fetal development, what science tells us is lots of ways that those fetuses share things that adults share, and lots of other ways that those fetuses lack things that adults share. Science doesn't tell us which of those are essential to being "a living organism of the species Homo sapiens".
I don't mean to deny that there are clear cases - in most of these cases, we *define* the concept by *starting* with clear cases. But the point is that science doesn't answer the question of what stage in the development something fits the category, unless we start with a pre-scientific definition of what we want from the category.
Reminds me of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
Right, but this is one of Scott's most wrong essays. Sorry, I can't explain why without writing an essay of my own, but even if Scott were right the seeming upshot would be that it's a matter of negotiation whether we classify human fetuses as human. That being a matter of negotiation certainly doesn't settle the negotiation in favor of the pro-choice side, and if it is nothing more than a matter of negotiation then it seems easy to understand the motivation of the pro-life side: they think/feel that killing fetuses is wrong, and so they're trying to negotiate our conceptual boundaries such that killing them is considered wrong.
> they think/feel that killing fetuses is wrong, and so they're trying to negotiate our conceptual boundaries such that killing them is considered wrong.
Yes, that seems to be what is going on, which I think is totally fine. I happen to disagree up to a point, and ultimately the democratic process will have to be used to come to a compromise.
I can't tell how much we disagree. I think science tells us about species, and their membership conditions. I also think there is a relatively clear "scientific" definition of 'organism', by which I mean the definition that's used in biology and medicine. And I think it's clear, by that definition, that fetuses are organisms, and, using the membership conditions for species, clear that they're human organisms.
Is there one definition for “organism” used in biology and medicine? I would have thought it’s like “gene” or “species”, where we usually use it in clear cases, but there are dozens of competing definitions that give different results for the marginal cases.
I've had a chance to quickly look over the first two articles linked in the Wikipedia article on organisms. The first discussed four conceptions of organism (addressing the colonies concern you had), all of which are (I think) satisfied by fetuses. (One conception would say that twins are single organisms.) It's hard to say for sure because some of the conceptions are only very loosely defined.
The second paper is easier to excerpt, so:
"The first view defines an individual organism as a living entity in which the fitness interests of its components are aligned such that little or no actual conflict is expressed". On this a fetus is an organism, right?
"The second view defines an individual organism as a living entity in which the components are interdependent on one another for reproduction, such that fitness is exported from the lower to the higher level, and the whole organism reproduces itself to create a similar entity with heritable fitness". This also seems to classify fetuses as organisms.
"The third view defines an individual organism as an integrated functional agent, whose components work together in coordinated action analogous to the pieces of a machine, thus demonstrating adaptation at the level of the whole organism". This also seems to classify fetuses as organisms.
The authors defend their own view, which doesn't get a nice definition like the ones above as far as I can see, but which would also (I think) count fetuses as organisms. In both articles the basic structure seems to be that we start with the idea of a 1-1 correspondence between genome and organism, noting that this doesn't work in some cases, and then considering what to make of that. But since fetuses always have a distinct genome from their mothers, this sort of strategy seems unlikely to deliver a conception of organisms on which fetuses aren't distinct organisms.
Sorry this is sort of sloppy, but I figure you'll want to dig in for yourself anyway if you think it's important.
I won't pretend that I'm an authority on this matter, but my semi-informed understanding is that there's a definition that appears in textbooks and is used for almost all practical purposes, and that counts fetuses (within 2 weeks of conception at the latest) as organisms. And I would expect that you're right that there are edge cases that call for refinements of this definition, and that there are various competing refinements. But I expect that most or all of those refinements, if not politically motivated, will count fetuses as organisms, since they satisfy the "standard" definition so clearly. But I could be wrong about this--I'm less willing to bet about this than about the claim that fetuses are alive. It looks like the wikipedia article on organisms has some helpful links, maybe I'll poke through them later when procrastinating.
This is amusing. There is no "scientific" consensus that life starts at conception. That's Catholic dogma (perhaps shared by some other Christian denominations), nothing more. No. 2 is not in fact in doubt (or under debate), it is rather no. 1 that is the problem.
If you believe in no. 3 it's not at all clear why abortion is not murder ("intentional killing of an innocent human being" *is* the definition of murder in most legal systems) or shouldn't be prosecuted, and I don't see where it's "explained above"?
Luckily, I didn't say there was a scientific consensus that life starts at conception, I said that science gives us reason to believe that a new human organism comes into existence very early on in the pregnancy, either at conception or shortly thereafter. I believe this contains a perhaps dated overview of the relevant facts: https://philpapers.org/archive/SMISD.pdf
"No. 2 is not in fact in doubt (or under debate), it is rather no. 1 that is the problem."
I'm sorry, but you're just wrong, at least if you mean to be talking about the actual debate between informed people, not what people on the streets are talking about.
You didn't? Silly me I thought "not seriously debatable" means just that, but clearly you meant something else entirely? As to "the actual debate" I find your latest comment, as the original comment, very ironic. You claim to enlighten pro-choice people ignorant about the pro-life stance about it, but in the process reveal your own ignorance of the pro-choice worldview.
C'mon, this is supposed to be a place for intelligent debate. As is extraordinarily easily verifiable, what I said was that it isn't serious debatable that life begins at conception, OR SHORTLY THEREAFTER.
And what claims have I made about the pro-choice worldview? Do you mean the above? Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other: I know some uninformed pro-choice folks on the streets would debate (1). My point was that it wasn't scientifically debatable. The most influential and important and well-regarded pro-choice arguments all concede that fetuses are alive, since that's not, as I said, seriously debatable.
The entire debate, or at least a major part of it, is precisely on what counts as a person, when life begins for the purpose of personhood. You can extract a cell from your body and sometimes keep it alive and replicating but that does not make it a person. When life begins in the sense of when that which started as fetalized egg became a person is not a scientific question and is at the heart of the abortion debate. If you’re unaware of that, and think pro choice people (or “serious” pro choice people) agree with pro life people on this point and that there is anything close to a consensus (scientific or otherwise) that an embryo/fetus “from conception or shortly thereafter” is a person, then you are radically misinformed, and not just about the views of the majority of Americans but of the majority of people throughout history.
Again, c'mon, please look carefully at what I've written before publicly dismissing it. I never said that it was uncontentious that personhood begins at conception, or even shortly thereafter. I said it was (scientifically) uncontentious that a new human organism comes into existence at conception, or shortly thereafter. The word 'person' didn't appear in my argument at all. We could introduce it if you like: 'person' (in these debates at least) basically means 'individual with a right to life'. By that definition, (2) is equivalent to the claim that all human organisms are persons. That claim is not a scientific one, as you note. And that claim, like I've been arguing all along, is at the crux of the debate about abortion. My point is that it's prima facie quite plausible, and that the alternatives to it all have implausible consequences. And so it shouldn't be so mysterious why pro-life people have the views they do.
Thanks for engaging with the argument! But I don't think denying someone your kidney is killing them, or more generally, that failing to save someone is equivalent to killing them. You and I could save at least a couple of starving kids right now by donating to Oxfam, but almost nobody thinks that the fact that we aren't doing that means that we're killers, or equivalent to killers. So I don't think a right to bodily integrity is needed to explain why donating a kidney in your scenario isn't morally required. What I do think your point shows is that, even if fetuses have a right to life, perhaps "evicting the fetus from the mother's womb" could be justified as a form of "failing to save" the fetus. The analogy with abortion breaks down (in almost all cases) because (in almost all cases) the fetus is killed, not just delivered and left to die on its own. But perhaps your reasoning could justify delivering a fetus prematurely knowing that it will certainly, or almost certainly, die.
"Yes, every once in a while a state legislator will pop off about how pregnant women should be forced to carry non-viable fetuses to term. But in general, that’s considered amateur hour stuff, and savvy politicians don’t do it. They just also don’t come out and say, “okay, here are some situations in which I think abortion should be legal.”"
Is this true? The Indiana bill had a number of exceptions where abortion would be legal: rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and when the life of the pregnant person is at danger [1]. That's basically laying out situations where abortion should be legal. And it's actually more expansive than I would have expected. In particular, I would not have expected an exception for fatal fetal anomalies, which is something that doesn't come up much in the popular press but has come up in the SB comments.
Relatedly, I'm guessing that conservatives will be more willing to bend to political reality than you'd expect. E.g. here are some quotes from the National Review in the aftermath of the Kansas vote:
"...be willing to compromise. Compromise is painful when it means leaving some children to their deaths; no later progress can undo that. But it is how progress in a democracy works. And pro-lifers now have the advantage on that score. The pro-life ideology is that all human life is sacred at every stage and should be protected in law, but a law that protects some lives is better than a law that protects no lives. A 15-week abortion ban concedes nothing to principle, as opposed to political reality." [2]
The "leading lights of the anti-abortion movement" may be opposed to any compromise, but the politicians pushing the laws certainly are:
"[pro-lifers] also need to defend a positive pro-life agenda that can garner sufficient public support. If they want to achieve lasting protections for the unborn, pro-lifers should know that more than 75 percent of Americans nationwide have consistently said they support an exception for abortions in the case of rape (which account for 1 percent or less of all abortions). Congressman Henry Hyde, one of the greatest pro-life statesmen, allowed this exception in 1993 in order to save his amendment prohibiting federal Medicaid funding of elective abortions that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. That exception has been part of the federal budget ever since. The lesson then, as now, is that it would have been a grave error to insist that no lives should be protected unless all lives are protected." [3]
Contrast that last sentence to some discourse you hear from the left (e.g. "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere").
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-ban-rape-incest-exceptions/10255511002/
[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-pro-life-movement-isnt-in-kansas-anymore/
[3] https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/the-lessons-of-kansas/
I think it's crucially important to remember that the Pro-Life movement is not monolithic. Sometimes pro-choice advocates forget this (and I think Matt runs dangerously close to the edge here). I personally identify as Pro-Life. I think a fetus is a human being, in some form or another, and that the unborn child must be given far more weight than pro-choice activists suggest. An unborn child is not a growth, it's not a tumor, it's not just a random collection of cells: it's a human. The conceit of the pro-choice movement is that a woman gets the sole decision on when something goes from being "just a bunch of cells" into her baby. I think that's wrong, I think deciding when we recognize life to begin is an important societal discussion, and not something we can flippantly dismiss with slogans like "my body my choice" and debates on freedom.
That being said, I ALSO think it's obvious you cannot give an unborn child the same rights as a baby, or the mother. That is also nonsensical. The problem with the Roe political landscape is it permanently locked us into a situation where the pro-choice side won an unequivocal victory on a complex issue. It was genuinely strange that the US Supreme Court acknowledged abortion to the point of fetal viability as a constitutional right, while most European countries had at least stated bans on abortion after 12-15 weeks.
At this point I expect Republicans to start fracturing (not as a party but into camps) on where they stand on abortion. Some will call for more European style bans, while others will remain steadfast in their absolutism. I also expect Trump to lead the more moderate camp.
“…I ALSO think it's obvious you cannot give an unborn child the same rights as a baby, or the mother. That is also nonsensical”
It is not obvious. Can you explain?
A lawyer can’t talk to an unborn child, we cannot discern what the unborn child might want, the unborn child has no history to draw from. The unborn child is entirely dependent on the mother to live and unlike a baby: the mother can’t abandon it or give it up for adoption.
To me it’s clear the life of the mother must come before the life of the unborn. That is simple logic, especially since most fetal anomalies will result in the death of the unborn child anyway.
The unborn child can plausibly only have two rights:
Right #1: a right to be born
Right #2: a right to not be exposed to toxins which will make its life unbearable (alcohol being the obvious example)
A baby has more rights and concerns. The mother has more as well.
The big question in the abortion debate is when the unborn’s rights (listed above) supersede a mother’s right to control her body? The second question is who gets to decide? The pro-choice argument on the latter has largely been the mother and the mother alone; while demurring on the former (but generally supporting the notion that it should be as long as possible).
I would say look at 2 extremes.
1) A just fertilized egg - completely non-viable outside the womb, some (too-high) likelihood of miscarriage - depends entirely on the mother for all survival. No brain function (no brain cells!) - no heartbeat - none of that. Pregnancy also carries _some_ small risk to the mother.
2) A preemie baby _about_ to be born 6 weeks early. Pregnancy situation is otherwise healthy (assume no extra risk to mother)
(I'm going to say lifeform here as a neutral term because I wasn't sure what to use - please don't read anything into it)
The lifeform in situation 1 isn't even guaranteed to survive to be born if the mother tries to do everything right and imposes significant costs on her.
The lifeform in situation 2 could survive without the mother's intervention if you give it just a little time to be born, and it's much farther along otherwise.
Since I don't believe in a soul, it's obvious to me that the lifeform in situation 1 has fewer rights than the one in 2.
Even believing in a soul, the one in situation 2 is just much more likely to be born even if everyone tries everything right.
I don't claim that this will convince you - some things depend so strongly on our axioms and first principles that they cannot be bridged - I only say that this is why it is "obvious" to me. (Although I can't speak for Benjamin to be sure.)
(I'd also note that most people don't _want_ to abort in situation 2, those are very rare anyway unless the mother's life is at risk)
I wouldn’t call a “lifeform in situation 1” an “unborn child” as you did.
One reason a subset of ultra-maga types want the band is that it a.) gives states reasons to prosecute godless “slutty women” and as a nice bonus, own the libs.
For those types, it was never a good faith argument.
Correct. Not sure how they square their desire to prosecute women whose cultural mores they don't like with the fact that if they found out they'd impregnated someone they wished they hadn't, they'd push the gal in question to get an abortion in a heartbeat...
". Nobody needs to make pro-pollution pledges"
Ok this really irks me - this is the quality level of Captain Planet villain motivations.
The _goal_ isn't more pollution. The _goal_ is cheaper (whatever it is that causes pollution).
Heck, if they found a way to reduce the current pollution controls to 99% of their current level by reducing 50% of the cost of the tradeoffs, you'd probably support that too, because that money could be used on lots of other things we want to spend money on.
If we can't understand why the other side of an issue believes they have it correct (and instead always think "they're in the pocket of big <WHATEVER>" then it's hard to come to an agreement.
I know you love to troll on Twitter, but this just bothers me when its on your substack.
Today’s essay is probably the most condescending, facile, and shallowly partisan thing I have read here.
I think he means spell it all out. As in don’t say “deregulation” specify what specifically you want to deregulate. In order to lower pork prices I support increasing the ability of pig farmers to dump pig waste in streams and rivers. Yes it will cause environmental damage but lower prom prices are worth it.
The way I read it, he said this in context of what "the groups" on their side would ask for. Nobody "asks" for more pollution. The NRA doesn't "ask" for more victims of gun violence.
The left doesn't "ask" for regulations to put people out of work, it doesn't "ask" to raise gas prices 3x so that nobody can afford to buy gasoline.
I agree that pressing people on what actual regulations they want to change is a good idea - let's discuss the actual tradeoffs, and in some cases benefit from status quo bias or ickiness (your policies would support <1%> more pig waste in streams!), but that's not how his text read to me.
MattY has some tropes that he repeatedly uses about Republicans regarding low taxes and pollution. Amusingly, they are almost exactly what a Sunrise activist might use against a neoliberal such as himself - still supporting capitalism and wanting to use gas to pollute the air or supporting the creation of nuclear waste instead of all "clean" energy.