Because the fetus is not an autonomous entity and has no capacity for self-defense.

Everything that keeps the fetus alive and growing—food, oxygen, climate control, waste disposal—comes from the woman. At the stage at which the overwhelming majority of abortions are procured, if the fetus is removed from the woman’s body, it has absolutely no chance of survival. Autonomy has no meaning for a fetus.

The woman is a biologically independent person. She is transporting herself around, responsible for her own respiration, nutrition, bathing and personal care, and depending on her age and degree of socioeconomic success, earning a living and/or going to school, and with interpersonal relationships that already make claims on her time. She has preferences, aspirations, survival instinct and the ability to make decisions.

The pregnancy could put her ability to earn a living or complete her education in jeopardy. Sometimes, and pregnancy goes seriously wrong and does major damage to the woman’s health and quality of life. There are some women who die from pregnancy complications.

In order for the fetus to survive, it must stay inside the woman’s body, live off her physiological processes and impose those risks to her health.

We don’t compel anyone else to devote their bodies to keeping someone else alive. Some people need blood transfusions, bone marrow or kidney transplants to survive. They need other people to donate blood, bone marrow, kidneys or other body parts to keep them alive. Those people are members of society, with responsibilities to fulfill and relationships to maintain, but they cannot demand that other people donate so much as a pint of blood. If they die for lack of donations, it is a tragedy, but it is not a crime.

Ergo, if a pregnant woman is compelled to support a fetus for a full pregnancy against her will, she is assigned responsibility that we do not assign to other autonomous individuals, and the fetus is entitled in ways that no one else is.

The conclusion is that EVEN IF a fetus is defined as a person, the woman still has the right to have it removed from her body pre-viability. This is not homicide so much as removal of life support.

ncidentally, please do say if you mind a complete stranger turning up on your blog and arguing with you – I’m aware that it could very easily come across as a hostile act, and if you’d rather I refrained then I’m happy to do so, obviously.

Don’t worry; I post these rather confrontational opinions on a public blog with the understanding that some people may express their disagreement.

That said, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year and my Internet connection at home is currently on the fritz, so I can’t devote time to the comment section like a blogger should. If I turn off comments, it’s not personal; I just have other claims on my time. If I don’t respond, it’s because I have other stuff going on.

The only answer, I think, is that the woman is a person and the foetus isn’t.

There’s an old and probably-apocryphal story about a Muslim warlord who burned a library (I think it was the Great Library of Alexandria) because all the books in it either agreed with the Qu’ran (and were therefor superfluous) or disagreed with the Qu’ran (and were therefor heretical).

That’s rather my position when it comes to explaining why early and mid term abortion should not be restricted, (and why late-term abortions are not morally equivalent to murder): if your argument includes the step “a foetus is not a person, because it is not self aware” then pretty much everything else is superfluous; if it doesn’t contain that step then it’s either insufficient or incorrect.

I think you may be using a rather tighter definition of “sentient” and “capable of valuing its own life” than I was – the standard I was referring to as “self-awareness” was “capable of subjective experience”, rather than any kind of higher-level thought. I’m certainly not arguing that anything capable of experiencing pain or pleasure is not a person or should be legally aborted.

My talking mostly about foetuses rather than women is partly logical (as I’ve said, I think that if you’ve said “a foetus is not a person” then you’ve already proved your case) and partly pragmatic – I think that the big point of disagreement between supporters and opponents of abortion rights is not their views on women (it would be lovely to believe that opposition to abortion was all about men trying to control women’s sexuality, but actually I believe that men in the USA are, on average, more pro-choice than women, and I suspect that the arguments set out by the person you were commenting on are fairly close to the views of most people who vote against abortion rights) but their views on foetuses, and that the best way to convince them to change their minds is to get them to think about what a person is, why killing people is wrong, and whether that applies in the case of presentient foetuses.

In particular, I think it’s important to *avoid* any argument which might give the impression that one would still support legal abortion if foetuses *were* sentient/conscious/capable of subjective experience. I’ve clearly failed to do that, and I’ll try to make it clearer what I mean by “sentient” from the get-go next time I have a similar discussion, but in general I think it’s a much bigger risk if one talks about women’s rights than about foetuses lack of them.

Incidentally, please do say if you mind a complete stranger turning up on your blog and arguing with you – I’m aware that it could very easily come across as a hostile act, and if you’d rather I refrained then I’m happy to do so, obviously.

Not for a moment does that mean it’s okay to kill a baby post-birth but pre-self-awareness.

The primary argument for abortion rights that I and other pro-choice advocates use when the issue comes up is one of bodily autonomy: if a woman becomes pregnant when she doesn’t want a child, she should not be compelled to complete the pregnancy, because no other person has the right to use her body against her will. This is not really a question of whether it’s okay to kill someone so much as what kind of responsibilities we have in keeping other people alive. There is also an element of self-defense logic in the bodily autonomy argument: pregnancy is a physically risky and sometimes life-threatening process for the woman, and it is considered justifiable homicide to kill someone who is threatening your life.

This would put your hypothetical “castaways on desert islands with no living family” in the place of the pregnant woman, rather than the fetus. The castaways are not biologically dependent on the hypothetical killer, they are autonomous individuals looking after themselves, and as a woman is entitled to use her own body for her own purposes, those castaways have the right to live out their lives. Based on self-defense, however, they are allowed to kill a person who suddenly boards the island and tries to murder them.

So, then, you may wonder: why did I bother talking about our relationships to each other, and how death affects the living? This is not a question of crime, but of tragedy. The commenter I quoted above, and many other opponents of reproductive choice, frame the deaths of embryos in elective abortions as equivalent to killing people who are already out and about and breathing their own air. They imply that by allowing all these embryos to be aborted, we’re doing just as much damage to society as if a similar number of walking-around people were victims of homicide at the same time. I disagree with that. Society views death as a tragedy because it severs relationships. An early elective abortion severs no relationship except the one between the fetus…and the woman who decides to get the abortion. This is a separate issue from the question of whether it’s okay to kill someone, and even a separate issue from whether the fetus is a person. Even if it’s a person, it is not a member of society. If abortion is going to be defined as a crime, it needs to be on grounds that don’t make a false equivalence between the effect of aborting a first-trimester fetus and strangling a breathing infant.

Finally, I notice that your thoughts on abortion rights make no mention of the concerns of the woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. That’s an omission I find deeply troubling. If you still think my logic of how abortion is not a tragedy is “deeply suspect,” to be honest I’m okay with that, because I don’t like to see an abortion debate that erases the pregnant woman from the picture.

The reason why (IMNSHO) it’s OK to abort foetuses up to about the 24th trimester in all circumstances, but later than that only in emergencies (although still not nearly as bad as killing someone later in life), is *sentience*. I don’t agree with you that life is precious because it’s precious to other people, and I certainly don’t agree with the religious right that it’s precious because it comes with a soul; I think people’s lives are precious because they’re precious to the people living them.

To value your life, you have to have to be aware you are living it; which means you have to have a mind, and my understanding is that the best guess of the neuroscientists is that the earliest that could start to develop is at around about 6 months (it may be later, but is unlikely to be earlier).

It’s not about “dehumanising”, I think, it’s about “depersonising” – the defining characteristic of a person is a mind, and the capacity for sentience and subjective experience, not a soul or a set of human genes or anything else. I’m quite happy to admit that foetuses are genetically human, but they *aren’t* people, and until they’re capable of valuing their own lives – that is to say, until they develop minds – nor should we.

My view is that any pro-choice argument that doesn’t focus on the chain of reasoning “killing people is wrong because they have minds; foetuses do not have minds, therefor killing foetuses is wrong” is either superfluous (if it would not apply if foetuses had minds) or incorrect and potentially immoral (if it would apply even if they did). And I’m very much afraid that “your life is valuable because it’s valued by other people” comes into the latter category.

Incidentally, with regards to your first apostrophe, I have read that on average in the USA men are more likely to support abortion rights than women are, so not doing so is not necessarily reason to doubt that the author is female.

Absolutely. This is what it comes down to: each woman is most intimate with her own body. This is especially true regarding our reproductive system. We have to deal with it constantly once we begin menstruating. We can’t ignore it – we have to plan for and obtain supplies, we have to clean up accidents, and handle any pain or illness it causes. It’s never far from our minds – can I wear that skirt, go camping without supplies, will I need to change my tampon during a six-hour flight… there is a constant litany of thoughts and decisions we must make from the time we are 12 years old or so.

It’s completely laughable that any politician should attempt to meddle in the intricate and intimate relationship a woman has with her body. A woman is the only person qualified to make any decisions about her readiness for pregnancy.

Society really needs to stop making it a big deal. We need to view it as a natural part of being a woman. I am certain that any society that truly honors women, and makes abortion safe, legal, and private, will find they have a very low abortion rate. Which is a good thing.