Maybe they should, it is after all the ending of a yet to be born human baby. Granted the mother to be has rights, but shouldn't the yet to be born baby have rights too? I don't hear much from most people on the Left about that.
When something involves multiple individual’s fundamental rights, how can it be “black and white”? Why don’t I hear much from the right about the mother’s rights?
What you see as “black and white” I see as a series of difficult questions involving our most fundamental rights: life and self. There is no black and white to it, there is no easy right or wrong to it.
Two sets of rights: a woman’s right to her own body and one potential life’s right to develop to birth, or right to life.
It is easy to say “right to life” trumps all, but that means you are choosing to remove one person’s rights against her will, even up to the point of “eminent danger to her life” as in some of these trigger laws.
My questions….
1. Who’s rights are paramount?
2. At what point does one have rights and at what point does one’s “rights” overrule anothers?
Why does a fertilized egg have a greater right to a woman’s body than that woman?
Pregnancy and childbirth are not without risks including mortality. In fact we have been seeing an alarming increase in maternal complications and mortality. I constantly here pregnancy referred as an “inconvenience” for a woman. Pregnancy is not “an inconvenience”, far from it. Having it reduced to that makes it easier to remove rights however (and to be fair, reducing a fetus to a blob of tissue is similar), with the implication that in nine months everything will be back to normal and the woman will happily gave the baby up or keep it.
There is nothing more life affirming or life disrupting than a pregnancy. It should be wanted and the risks and hardships undertaken voluntarily with a woman’s rights to her own body intact.
Rights are typically conferred with birth: citizenship, taxes, property rights, etc. Prior to that they conflict with the mother’s. I find it ironic that many who are libertarian on here are all for rights and freedoms until it comes to a pregnant woman.
I think I’ve said this already but I will say it again.
All rights have limits and responsibilities that come with them. We, as women have a responsibility to do several things: do our best to ensure we don’t get pregnant in consentual sex, do our best to fight for access to accurate, evidence based sexual education and to contraception. Routinely, poor women do not have such access and disproportionately suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy. To that end
I absolutely support free contraception. Countries that offer that have lower levels of unwanted pregnancy and abortion.
But not fulfilling those responsibilities doesn’t automatically abolish rights.
If we, as a country, made abortion completely legal, with no barriers, then I see it as a woman’s responsibility, once she knows she is pregnant to make decision, and if it is elective abortion, to have it prior to 20 weeks. That is prior to viability. IMO…viability marks the beginning of individual rights because the individual does not need to exist within another’s body to live. I think that is a reasonable accommodation of competing rights. To that end I
wouldn’t object to a cut off for legal elective abortion at 20 weeks or even 16 weeks. But there should be
no obstacles then, no extreme laws forcing a woman to make multiple trips to a clinic, forcing invasive procedures or waiting periods, or closing most clinics in a state so she has to travel several hundred miles. It should be completely legal and un infringed upon prior to 20 (or maybe 16) weeks. After that restrict it, but there should always be exceptions for the woman’s life, health or severe fetal defects.
These are separate issues IMHO. It maybe hypocritical to support the death penalty and deny abortion, but one does not invalidate the other. Do you not think it's hypocritical for the Left to oppose the death penalty but have no problem with abortion?
I don’t see it as separate IF the arguement is innocent life. Innocent life is innocent life, right?
And yes, the left can be just as hypocritical if they claim to value human life but support abortion.
I don’t support human life simply because it is human life. If someone stood on the edge of a cliff, holding a baby in one hand, and an embryo int other, threatening to toss them over, I know which one I would save.
If choice was between a man on death row, wrongly convicted, facing being unjustly killed with full knowledge of what will happen to him and an embryo, I know what I would choose.
If I had to choose between an embryo and a dog, it still would not be the embryo, which is at point only a potential.
Don't know enough about IVF embryos, didn't know there are political differences about it. Is anybody upset about what happens to surplus embryos once a viable one has successfully been implanted? Again, I do not believe lack of support for those surplus embryos invalidates an opposition to abortion.
For me, I find it ironic that there is so little attention put on those embryos outside of a woman’s body.
