If so, it explains a lot.
I saw this on Facebook, posted by a good freind who is also a public school teacher (and, of course, a Harris voter). I then found it again elsewhere on the platform; both posts wee smothered with likes and loves. It is beyond moronic.
I’m not even quite sure what point the writer (my friend didn’t write it) is trying to make. Of course “its” about babies: abortion involves eliminating the life of a baby/developing baby/”going to be a baby if you don’t kill it” living human being. I guess it depends on what the meaning of “about” is about.
Is the idea (I’m being generous applying that term to whatever this is) that the people who oppose abortions really don’t care that it is the taking of a human life—that is what creates the ethics conflict, after all—because if they really cared about that, they would also want to spend trillions of dollars making the child-rearing process mostly free and burden tax-payers and the government with footing the bill? If so, this is social justice “thinking” reduced to a “time to pull the plug” level of brain power. If we’re not ready to pay for all aspects of the lives of all children, that means we are hypocritical to not embrace killing them.
Got it. No, actually I don’t.
I could spin out some amusing analogies to the logic in that statement, but I’ve got another funeral to go to, I’m pressed for time, I understand the value of life, and I don’t want to rob you of your fun.
What is bothering me right now is that this may be an accurate indication of the kinds of people we rely on to teach our children who manage to get out of wombs alive.
Ethics Alarms 
It is about making the choice- the choice to not engage in the proven activity that produces baby, if you are unwilling to care for the baby.
It is about taking responsibility for your irresponsible choice, not foistering it on toothers.
There is no accidental pregancies just as there are no accidental overdoses, or accidental cases of lung cancer while you continue to smoke. All these and others are choices made.
Careful, I was banned from the Chronicle of Higher Education for using the term ‘personal responsiblity’. Apparently, it is an oppressive concept and anyone suggesting that it be applied to anyone is making the entire space ‘unsafe’.
It’s the level of thinking that almost every debate is reduced to now. Why put forth reasoned arguments when you can just throw together a ridiculous reductionist meme? Jonathan Swift it isn’t, but the absurdism is still there, happily undetected by those who can’t or won’t think harder.
It reminds me of a meme that went around during the pandemic when churches were fighting to stay open. It postulated that churches only wanted to be open so that they could get money from the offering plates.
My church hasn’t passed an offering plate for years. Automatic drafts and online pay are how it receives most of the offerings. Many churches do this now. And for those who resist technology, churches still accept checks through the mail.
Bias makes them stupid, indeed. So do memes.
Really? I haven’t heard of this. Automatic drafts? Many in my church don’t have bank accounts. Of course, every anniversary of the founding of our church, we pass Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets for the offering. You don’t want to forget your roots.
Yes, a lot of churches in urban and suburban communities are using auto-payments or online payments. I go online to my church’s Give page and submit it that way.
Obviously, there are still some churches out there who do things the old way, but characterizing Christians’ unwillingness to give up meeting together as motivated by a money grab shows an ignorance of the modern church.
In the Diocese of Cheyenne (Catholic) Bishop Steven has been dragging the parishes kicking and screaming into the 20th century (yes I know which century it is now). He threatened something awful and made my (now retired) priest accept having a church website, email accounts for the priest and secretary, and accepting online donations as an option. We still pass the basket, but mailing checks (what my husband and I did in 2020) and online giving is now acceptable.
I prefer online giving so that my husband and I don’t have to have the conversation, “did you write a check for the church yet?” like we used to anytime life got complicated. It is now just taken care of automatically. We don’t appreciate the church less, they just automatically get our money so we can focus on the other parts of our religious devotion.
I was infuriated by an online comment on a local comment board about COVID restrictions and religious freedom. I made the point that government shut down religious meetings (unconstitutional) while still allowing other “dangerous” activities like going to the liquor store (hypocritical).
Someone responded (with wayyyy too many likes) that you don’t need a building to be religious, and that you can still be religious in your own home.
The comment board restricted me from responding that I hoped that one day they’d find out how it feels to be told that you can still speak freely in your own home, petition the government to your spouse, and meet to protest in your living room.
“If you’re not volunteering to pay for his drug rehab, psychiatric care, and ongoing room and board in perpetuity, then how dare you object to me shooting this homeless guy in the face right now.“
I myself have used the homeless analogy before, including on Usenet newsgroups.
I think, and this is giving those who claim to believe such absurd arguments the benefit of the doubt they may not deserve, that many abortion-supporters recognize the ethical flaw in the position, and contrives such rationalizations to shield themselves from guilt. Rationalizations are lies you tell yourself to make you believe your are doing the right thing when you know deep down that you aren’t, to drown out the ethics alarms. This screed is a wonderful example.
If you really cared about murder, you would make sure that everyone got a mental health screening every month and all emotional stress they are under would be relieved by the state, and they would be bailed out of any financial situation that was bothering them by the state. If you really cared about murder, you would pay any amount of money required to placate murderers so they wouldn’t murder people.
If they wanted a girlfriend, the state would get them one. If they didn’t want to take care of their kids, the state would take the children and relieve the potential murderer of all legal responsibility, if they liked hurting people, the state would provide them with people to hurt. If they just wanted to hang out and play video games or do drugs (or both at the same time), the state would take care of this. If they were delusional, the state would provide elaborate systems to validate the delusions (like the transgender thing).
If you don’t support this, you don’t REALLY care about people being murdered.
But I think our laws against murder illustrate the problem with most pro-abortion arguments. If I ask ‘Is it OK for me to go around killing people?” Most people will say ‘no’. But, I might argue, if someone breaks into my house and tries to kill my family, I need to be able to kill them to protect my family. You would probably agree. So (the pro-abortion argument goes), you can’t pass a law restricting when and where I can kill people, because that law might make me hesitate to kill someone when I really need to. I might be prosecuted for a just killing if you passed ANY laws against killing people. because an overzealous prosecutor might prosecute despite a clearly written exception and biased juries might convict me despite the fact that I followed the letter of the law. There might be social stigma attached to me if I killed someone justly. To be on the safe side, we need to allow all killings of anyone at any time.
The pro-abortion arguments will even go further and say that we can’t have any laws against killing people because we need to remove bodies when people die. If we have laws against killing people and disposing of their corpses, we won’t be able to remove bodies of people who are killed in accidents or who die from old age or disease. People will just have to leave dead bodies in their houses until they decompose to dust.
This sounds ridiculous, but it is exactly the pro-abortion arguments. They claim you can’t restrict any abortion because some fathers impregnate their 8-year old daughters who are too young to safely have a child. You can’t restrict abortion because there are rare pregnancy complications that endanger the mother. You can’t restrict abortion with exceptions for these because the doctors would rather let a mother and child die than follow a clearly identified exception. You can’t pass abortion laws because there are miscarriages that require a D&C and the doctors will let the mother die of sepsis before following a clearly defined exception (like removing the corpse of a person who died of old age). The truth is, there are no late-term pregnancy complications that require an abortion.
How can we have clearly defined exceptions for murder and improper disposal of a corpse with our self-defense laws and corpse removal laws that people with B.A.’s or associate degrees can understand, but we can’t have such a system for abortion because physicians are incapable of understanding the concepts? Maybe if we reduced physician salaries to $50,000/year they would be able to understand it.
Of course, the pro-abortion argument gets even more ridiculous with late-term abortions. There is no reason to abort a baby late in pregnancy because of a health threat to the mother. The health issue can be treated equally well (probably faster and more easily) by delivery of the baby. If the baby dies, that would be a stillbirth or a natural death. There is no need to tear a few limbs off the baby and let it bleed to death in the womb first. However, the argument goes, physicians would rather let the mother and baby both die than follow such guidance, they have to be allowed to tear a perfectly viable baby limb-from-limb so they will feel comfortable treating the patients.
Outstanding!!
I’ve been seeing this argument (more or less) for decades. I think it’s a mix of ad hominem and straw man. It’s not strictly tied to abortion, but that is the most common form of it.
“If members of <other party> truly supported < X > they’d also support <other unrelated things that depend on axiomatic beliefs that they don’t have>, therefor they don’t believe < X > and actually believe < Y >, which is evil, despite explicitly disagreeing with < Y >”
The misleading labels of pro-life and pro-choice do not help.
Thus, they must agree that to be pro-choice must allow me to buy the weapon I feel will most likely serve to protect my well being.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stew of second wave feminism that was sloshing around on the Kirkland College (all women) campus across the street from all boys Hamilton College in the ‘seventies while I was there. This sort of thinking dates from the early ‘seventies, and its currently manifesting itself is the result of fifty plus years of feminism. The thinking goes as follows: Bearing children is simply a burden imposed upon women. Unless and until society obviates every single aspect of that burden, women are under no obligation whatsoever to bear children. It’s Marxism, pure and simple. By virtue of their biology, women are oppressed. It is society’s duty to address and rectify that oppression. This is Communist thinking: every problem is caused by capitalism’s mishandling of capital and can be solved by reallocating money from the oppressor to the oppressed. Dismiss it as lunacy at your peril.
I mean reductio ad absurdum.
It’s the traditional progressive rebuttal to just about everything: “Fine! If you disagree with my position then surely you must support socialism to get me to reconcile with you!”
I believe that the reasons many women want abortion to be legal are, when delving down deeply: fear and guilt. Please note that my argument is not meant to absolve anyone of responsibility, especially as I am dang near an anti-abortion absolutists, but instead what motives I have seen in my argumentation with pro-abortion (they hate that label because “we aren’t for abortion, we’re for women having the right to choose what is best”) advocates before the argument degenerates into some form of the above as their “knock down, undeniable” argument to shut me up. (Tearing it apart just turns into accusations of me being brainwashed and the conversation devolving into at least one side calling names, though my temper has occasionally dropped me to their level.)
I’m going to start with guilt, because it is the easiest to explain. Many women know someone who has had an abortion. My cousin had one for reasons that are at least sympathetic – the child was diagnosed with a genetic mutation that is always fatal if the diagnosis was correct (many are not) – even if I think she was completely in the wrong. She is hardly the only person in my circle that has had one or helped someone obtain one. Most people who do this recognize somewhere that this was the wrong choice. Many people are nearly eaten up with guilt about the child they know they killed. I know people who have broken down in tears in private over this, even though they are pro-abortion in public. They have pro-abortion stances that seem to cover up the guilt. They often act as though they believe that if everyone supports abortion and allows it up to birth or beyond, they will finally not feel guilty because the only reason they feel guilty is the societal pressure that abortion killed a baby.
Fear, however, is the primary reason. Men, since time immemorial have gotten away with consequence-free sex, while women bear most of the negative consequences. Men don’t get pregnant. When it comes to STDs, women are far more susceptible then men, being the penetrated rather than the penetrator. Frankly, men (as a whole) desire sex more than women. It is a generality, but one that I have found to be true. “Men trade love for sex and women trade sex for love.” This puts an unequal spin on the consequences. Men, again generally speaking, desire sex more. Women bear a higher cost for sex than men. This lack of equality is a breeding ground for fear. Women who have regular sex will get pregnant over a long enough time span, assuming they do not have fertility issues, contraceptives or no.
There are many fears that women can have around pregnancy, and today’s society has bred even more. Men have always had the ability to have consequence-free or at least consequence-reduced sex. See the Scarlet Letter or any dead-beat dad to prove my point. Women can fear that the trials of parenthood, and there are many, will leave her holding the bag when he goes away. In our society today, when many people with Y chromosomes do not seem to grow out of acting like boys and never develop into men, this is exacerbated.
Another fear is that having a baby ties you down to a marriage to a man whom you should not be with. Oxytocin is powerful, and a girl’s crush on the wrong boy who she then decides to sleep with so she can keep him suddenly becomes a horrible marriage, bound together with children when she becomes pregnant and he actually does take responsibility. Sure, you can get divorced if things are too bad, but you are back to being a single mom, maybe with child support, but the system has a number of loopholes that can wreck any chance of a decent amount of money to help with the kids. Again, if you get pregnant and have a baby, the odds seem stacked against you.
There is also the fear of what kids will do to your education and career. If you have to pay for a babysitter, it hurts your chances of being able to afford college, and feeding two mouths while paying off student loans is harder than just feeding yourself. Of course, having to be up at night with a teething child rather than studying or sleeping before a test is its own struggle. How can you make it? And all those career women? If that is what you want out of life, you will struggle when you have to take off because the kid is throwing up or has a fever, something that happens all the time when kids are little. Even when they are older, is your presence at their piano recital or sporting event more important than your presence working the hours needed to get that big promotion? A child makes achieving your goals harder.
What about all the things and experiences you want out of life? Society is pushing so many different concepts now of what happiness is, but very few of them work with children. You can’t reasonably take small children to many concerts. Sporting events are expensive and now you have to buy not one, but two tickets, or pay for a babysitter who costs a decent fraction of those tickets? The money that you spend on diapers, wipes, formula, clothes, medical care, etc could have gone towards having fun. Or maybe you are a minimalist and good times involve living with the bare minimum. Well that bare minimum is now cluttered with toys, covered in spit up, and smelling like pooped diapers. There go your dreams.
Then there are the fears surrounding pregnancy itself. Honestly, maternal mortality rates aren’t that bad, if you ignore those who didn’t receive pre-natal care, gave birth with medical care at least nearby if not in the hospital, and who haven’t already had an abortion (which increases the chances of life-threatening complications in future pregnancies). However, women do die when pregnant, even in the best of circumstances. Therefore pregnancy is an elevated risk. What about complications? What if you really need an abortion to survive?
Adoption has its own fears. Assuming I do go the adoption route, what if the child has anything other than the perfect childhood. What about if they end up in foster care? What happens if they or, assuming I keep the child, we end up in poverty? All of that misery is avoidable with abortion.
There are other fears. There is the fear of rape. If you get raped, you could get pregnant. Surely you can’t be expected to have the baby of your attacker. What about the fear of disabled children who may or may not live as long as you want/fear? Birth defects happen, incest or not, but that fear is especially true if you were raped by a relative. What happens if you fall in love with this baby and they die? Then you are left with heartbreak. What happens if you have a special needs child that means you have to care for them all your life and can never retire and will die in poverty? How about any horror story you hear about on social media that may or may not be the full truth? We NEED abortion to deal with this. If we can’t decide to end a pregnancy when something is wrong, we are not equal to men.
I state again, that these are not my beliefs, merely a summary of the beliefs I have heard whenever I speak with a pro-abortion believer. I can think of responses to most if not all of these. However, the response this post was based off of is essentially about getting rid of some of the fears. Usually I see that response coupled with a guarantee that men will no longer rape women, that medical care will be so advanced that women never have a problem with pregnancy, and that no woman will ever have to have a job she doesn’t want or is beneath her. The fears that drive women’s desire for abortion make for some illogical outcomes and arguments. That being said, I am ashamed of my sex for our illogical outbursts that demand the deaths of our own children. The demand that started this post is just one of many of those illogical outbursts, and I apologize for my sex for saying it.
Marvelously well-crafted comment, SB; COTD material!
PWS
I agree. Sarah does this a lot.
Beautifully done, Sarah. Thank you. My equivalent to your comment is my short story titled “Advanced Placement” among the stories in my self-published collection of short stories called, “Stories from Way out West.” The book is available on Amazon. Author is Bill Fearnow. (How’s that for a great Jonathan Turley self-promotion impersonation, gang?”)
The story is about a smart, quasi-naive, firstborn daughter who becomes pregnant over her junior to senior year of high school summer. The title alludes to the fact young girls have thrust upon them by nature and society an inordinate (and heavy) amount of responsibility in the sex and reproduction area. Your essay is a wonderful exposition of the issues I touch on via fictional methods in “Advanced Placement.”
Old Bill,
I actually do have your book.
Stories from Way out West is highly recommended by my lovely and long-suffering wife.
(How’s THAT for obsequious @$$kissing…?)
PWS
Sarah, thank you for actually making the effort to understand the concerns of the people you disagree with. This is exactly what everyone should be doing.
Even if the solutions people ask for may lead to problems that you want to avoid, the problems they face still need to be addressed. People do have a reasonable expectation of receiving help with those problems if they’re not allowed to avoid them entirely. That help isn’t required to be of the exact form they specify, though, and talking things out helps us explore mutually agreeable options.
In this case, the issue is that abortion advocates don’t understand how others could conclude, after thoughtful reasoning, that personhood starts at conception. Therefore, they understandably assume that opposition to abortion must be motivated by control, or by genuine belief in dogma that was designed to control. Abortion opponents may want to build trust by helping address the reasons why people don’t want to give birth after becoming pregnant. I know that at least some pro-life clinics already attempt to do that, which is a good start. People have concerns based on health, finances, and culture, and the most effective thing an abortion opponent can do is explore ways of addressing those concerns (policy-based or otherwise) that people on both sides can support.
I myself think that the belief that personhood starts at conception involves one or two logical fallacies, and that people who genuinely believe it are often unwilling to examine those fallacies because they are afraid of what might happen if people did not subscribe to the belief. Those concerns deserve to be addressed as well. I think that some opponents to abortion might be motivated by control, but that doesn’t excuse us from addressing people’s stated reasons.
Even if there were no intellectually honest abortion opponents, it would be intellectually dishonest to fail to engage the reasons that abortion opponents provided. We must reject the fallacy of ad hominem: even if someone is lying about their reasons for doing something, the concerns they dishonestly express may still describe a real problem worth addressing.
For general reference, if a person has underlying motivations they don’t want to admit, we can address those indirectly. We can guess at hidden motivations and set up the situation such that if the person does have those motivations, they now have other options for fulfilling them that don’t cause problems, without them specifically having to request those options. Discreetly giving people an out, providing something they want with plausible deniability, is a somewhat advanced empathy mindset technique, but when you know how it’s done, you see it everywhere. It’s called “helping someone save face.” It’s a great parenting technique and comes in particularly handy when persuading stubborn people, but it’s also a gesture of respect for people at all levels of maturity.
I am a believer in life starts at conception and I am curious what logical fallacies you find in the position.
Of course, to ask that, I best define my position, otherwise we could be talking past one another.
First, I define the word person with the classical Catholic definition, “individual of a rational kind.” Kind, being in reference to one’s species or nature. Since humans are a nature that can reason, they are of a rational kind, even if certain individuals in the species cannot reason, no matter the cause. This allows me to rather neatly side step many arguments about angels, demons, and even intelligent aliens like a cephalopod being persons. They are, as long as their kind can reason.
Therefore, I have several reasons to believe that life beings at conception. First, there is no argument that a human zygote, much less a fetus is alive by the technical definition. It has all the hallmarks of life as given in biology.
It is made of cells, can reproduce (over time), grow, maintain internal stability in its designated environment, and react to changes (over time). It is an individual, as the zygote has its own individual DNA distinct from its mother. It is human, as the DNA of the zygote is human. It is a person, as it is an individual of the human species, which I have already defined as a rational kind.
What is the logical fallacy in this? I would love to see the weaknesses in my reasoning so that I may improve upon my reasoning.
Thanks, Sarah! I appreciate that.
The main logical fallacy that I see is the association fallacy: if two things are in the same group, that doesn’t necessarily mean they share all of the same properties. There seems to be no reason to attribute personhood to a “kind” instead of to an individual. Why not just say “a person is a rational individual”? Why bring “kinds” into it at all? One might as well say that ostriches can fly because they’re birds, and birds are a “kind” that flies, even if not all birds can actually fly.
Does this mean that if I were to take an animal of a species that cannot reason, and give it the ability to reason, it would still not be a person? Because I would take ethical issue with that.
This fallacy might also be considered more of an unwarranted ontological assumption: the assumption that there is such a thing as a “kind” or “nature”.
With the possible exception of fundamental particles, categories are not inherent aspects of the universe. Categories are things people make up for our own convenience. They’re part of the map, not the territory. I’m not sure what you think about evolutionary theory, but we’ve observed that even Earth species aren’t necessarily rigidly defined. They usually split off from each other gradually as “ring species”, in which each breed can produce fertile offspring with adjacent breeds but not with more distantly related ones. Labels help us make useful generalizations about messy, blurry things that just… happen.
It may be that Catholicism holds that each thing or person has a nature defined by a creator, possibly for a specific purpose. However, I’m an existentialist. I have no reason to believe that things have an inherent nature or purpose. Things may have properties or behaviors, but we choose what we want their purposes to be, just as we choose our own purposes.
Therefore, I don’t believe that something that is biologically alive and biologically human automatically must be a person. Person is as person does. I define personhood based on behavior (including reasoning) and the internal structures that enable that behavior (e.g. the brain), because that’s what we care about. That’s how we identify an entity as a person.
Metabolism and DNA are correlated with personhood, and they allow people to exist, but they’re not the functions or the mechanism behind the aspects of personhood that what we care about. By way of analogy, an engine is necessary for a car to run, but an engine on its own is not a vehicle. A bicycle is a vehicle even though it has no engine. We care about the vehicle helping us travel from Point A to Point B. If an object can’t be made to do that, then for all practical purposes it’s currently not a vehicle, even if it once was or even if we could turn it into one.
Does that all make sense?
No, it really doesn’t, EC. I’d love to know how that lame rationalization got implanted in your brain and by whom, because you are normally more exacting than that. “Personhood” in the matter of abortion is a contrivance and a bootstrapping excuse to pretend what is human and alive isn’t a “life.”
It is illegal to take and cook the eggs of endangered species, like certain turtles, reptiles and birds. Why? Because those are nascent, living individuals of that species, and killing one means one member of that species will not exist. Nobody talks about “turtlehood.” Abortion apologists do that to dodge the issue. 1)The unborn are human 2) They are alive, 3) They are genetically and biologically distinct from the mother. So what if they can’t yet imagine dragons? They will, if you leave them alone and don’t kill them. What mother distinguishes between the gestating child who has distress and dies at four months and the one who (can I use “who”?) dies at 8 months? No mother, and that’s because the result is the same: no human being because of a premature death. A living human snuffed out of existence. Killed. But it’s OK because it wasn’t thinking deep thoughts?
In “The Terminator II,” why is anyone concerned about John Connor? He doesn’t exist yet, so making sure he can’t exist is nothing, right? There’s no “person”…yet. But there will be, if you don’t snuff out a life on the way to being born.
I don’t think your argument holds up to reality. Self-awareness is just a qualification for legal protection added to the equation by those who realized they were on weak ethics ground.
EC, I hope you don’t mind if I jump in, because at least some of the details here are things I’ve wanted to discuss with you and have been very, very lapse in writing anything at all.
The topic of “nature” is an important one to discuss, because ethics follows nature. Classically, we can ask what something is, and what about that thing makes it what it is. The whole notion of taxonomy relies on defining “what” something is. When we examine things, we notice two main categories of details. One category is essentials, and the other category is accidentals. It is essential to the nature of water to be composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and it is essential to the nature of water to be a solid at some temperature, a liquid at another temperature, and a gas at a third temperature. It is accidental to water to be wet, because ice and super-heated steam are not wet, and it is an accident of water to be white, because snow is white but steam is transparent. Another way to put that is water can lose wetness and still be water, but if water loses its hydrogen atoms, it is no longer water.
There is such a thing as human nature. We can discuss and reason and argue about what details of human existence are essential and which are accidental, but I think we can agree that at some point if enough details are removed, what remains is no longer human. If we take the evolution of species (which Catholics are allowed to believe in), while we notice a gradation of speciation, we nevertheless notice that distinct species have disparate traits that are essential to being that species. Certainly it seems that a very distinct and essential detail of being human is being a rational creature. What Sarah B. brought up about rational kinds notices that a rational nature, while necessary, is not sufficient to identify as human, as there could be rational alien races in the universe, and the Catholic belief in purely spiritual beings that we call angels and demons postulates rational natures that are not human. In a similar way, there are shared details among primates, but there are different details about humans that distinguish them from other primates.
You ask, why bring “kinds” into the discussion at all? I find this an odd question, because the very question of trying to determine what the unborn are means we are trying to classify them, and we need to reference “kinds” to make such a classification. In order to distinguish between kinds, we have to then identify what is essential to a kind. When we speak of rational kinds, we are identifying a group of beings that share rationality as essential to their nature. In a similar fashion, we associate into one group those beings that possess mammary glands and call them mammals. This is an essential property of being a mammal. If there is a member of a mammalian species that lacks mammary glands, we know that that individual is suffering a disorder. Keep in mind, the very idea of nature is necessary to identify disorder. It is impossible to state that there is a disorder if there is no actual order for that being. In a similar vein, if an animal whose nature does not have rationality as an essential feature somehow receives rationality, we would call that super-natural, because it is a feature above the nature of that animal. That does not make that animal a person, because the rationality is not an essential feature and could be removed without changing the essential qualities of that animal.
Now, if we look closer at what we mean by a rational kind, we also notice that what we are speaking of is the capacity for exercising rationality. We know that humans do not always exercise rationality. We sleep. We occasionally act entirely on impulse or muscle memory. We can enter states in which brain activity is at a minimum. The extent to which, or the frequency of which, we exercise our rationality cannot be the essential quality of personhood, because then one would be in constant flux between being a person and not being a person. The essential quality must therefore be the possibility of rationality by nature. A sperm or an egg does not possess that possibility, but a single-celled union of the two does, because that single cell possesses in entirety the nature which by right contains the capacity for rationality.
One other detail I’ll address is when you mention “Things may have properties or behaviors, but we choose what we want their purposes to be…” I want to clarify that there is a distinction between what something is and what it is purpose is. An existentialist worldview is fully capable of agreeing with the concept of nature, because nature is what you described as properties and behaviors. The purpose of an object is another subject. Classically, the discussion of natures is ontology, whereas the discussion of purpose of teleology. They aren’t the same thing. We can discuss the nature of a chair, knowing full well that a purposeless, undirected, accidental universe has no concept of chair-ness (because it has no concepts at all), because there are still essential qualities for being a chair, even if a chair is purely a human invention. The impartial, unfeeling universe cannot care if we want to sit down, and nor if we take wood and metal and rendered horse hooves and say the result has the purpose of holding us up while we sit. That doesn’t change that the nature of what we have created is a chair. It is a deeper discussion we can have as to whether the purpose of being sat upon is an essential detail of a chair (or in other words, we can ask whether a teleological detail can be a necessary detail).
What do you think? Frankly, I love delving into the philosophical aspects of nature and purpose, so I hope I’m not flooding you with details here. And, knowing I’m terrible at making timely responses, nevertheless I’ll offer to try to answer any questions or challenges you have here. (I still owe you a number of responses from our previous discussions, but I have to admit that working overtime while trying to manage four daughters and still pay attention to my wife does eat into my spare time…)
(Response here: https://ethicsalarms.com/2024/10/26/comment-of-the-day-is-this-the-level-of-critical-thinking-devoted-to-pro-abortion-advocacy-2/#comments)
Wow, it is almost as if nature itself is against the female sex.
it sort of like, if men had uteri, you’d be able to get abortions at gas stations
DD
What a moronic thing to say. Or think. One more comment like that, and The Stupidity Rule kicks in.
Remember when you asked “I’m not even quite sure what point the writer (my friend didn’t write it) is trying to make”?
do you remember that? And you should stop insulting people for stating opinions you don’t agree with. It makes you look weak and petty
DD
Not an insult, DD. Just a diagnosis, and as the proprietor here, I have to keep up standards. That idiotic comment is exactly te kind of low-level participation that I work to avoid here. I was thinking about this over night: you’re hopeless. I’m banning you, and I’m going to write a post explaining why.
And nobody gets to tell me how to run Ethics Alarms. Especially commenters who say things as dumb as “it sort of like, if men had uteri, you’d be able to get abortions at gas stations.”
Bye. I thought you had a chance to be useful. I was obviously wrong.
ALERT! Denver Dave has been banned.
I’m going to put up a post explaining it, although I’m sure this doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
Dang. I should have taken the time last night to formulate my reply, because I was still typing it when you announced the ban.
Maybe Denver Dave will apologize and promise to try to do better.
The Stupidity Rule is forever. You can’t fix stupid.
Your comment is up!
Denver Dave,
Are you looking for a more detailed fisking of your comment? Here are the issues I have with the comment.
First, your comment stands without any context. If your intent was to respond to Jack’s “I’m not even quite sure what point the writer is trying to make,” that was not all clear, because your statement could as easily be making a parody of the Facebook post as trying to respond to Jack. Are you asserting this position, or are you making fun of the Facebook post?
Second, whether parody or your genuine stance, the comment itself is incredibly facile. The proposition of “if men could get pregnant, they would be entirely supportive of abortions” is inane and ignores the complexity of the variety of points held by both men and women. Some men are already strong advocates for abortion. Some women are very anti-abortion.
Third, as an attempt to clarify the Facebook poster’s point, you do nothing but muddy the waters. The poster is indicating that conservatives don’t really care about the babies, a common claim among the pro-choice crowd. The accusation ignores the massive efforts conservatives put forward to offer assistance during pregnancy, after delivery, in crisis situations, in providing food, shelter, monetary assistance, programs, and more. Because conservatives do not favor the government being the primary engine of such services, the pro-choice crowd tries to spin that as not caring at all. Once that accusation is in the common dialogue on the matter, it is an easy step towards what seems to be the poster’s main point, which is the pro-life agenda is not really about saving babies, but instead is using babies to hide the real agenda, which is the enslavement of women.
There’s a big billboard in town (sponsored by a “reproductive rights” group) that reads, “If men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be discussing this.” It’s exact same train of idiotic, sexist thought as what DD posted.
Women CAN get pregnant…and about half of them oppose abortion. Opposition to abortion is not directed or dictated by men.
The other side of this argument goes like this: Oh, so feminism is this all-big, all-powerful thing and Beyonce sings how girls rule the world and girl-power and Kamala Harris…but apparently you feminists still need the men around to really get things done.
Oh, I didn’t think DD’s insulting, ethics-free and idiotic comment was original. I’ve heard it many times over the decades: it is very near to the bottom of the excuse barrel for abortion advocates.
Broken record Bill here. I think Denver Dan is a paid Dem talking point spouting troll. He just thumbs through his little instruction manual and chooses what he thinks is the lefty talking point applicable to issue at hand, and presto chango, his work for the day on EA is done!
I got to give Jim credit, he lasted longer than most of his ilk.
Edit: I got to give HIM credit.
“There’s a big billboard in town (sponsored by a ‘reproductive rights’ group) that reads, ‘If men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be discussing this.’ “
Guvvy Gavin tried that in the Land of Fruit Cakes and Nut Cases…deliciously ironic hilarity ensued:
If Men Could GET PREGNANT This Wouldn’t Even Be A Conversation
PWS
According to the latest sex science, men can get pregnant.
Denver Dave is not great at communicating, but I see no evidence he’s being less than earnest here.
The above is Jack’s statement of confusion regarding a Facebook post.
The above is DD’s attempt to address that confusion by comparing the Facebook post’s assertion to a similar assertion. Both assertions express distrust regarding the motivations of abortion opponents–I’ll address that separately.
The above is Jack attributing DD’s comparison to DD himself.
The above is DD attempting to point out he was attempting to address Jack’s confusion.
The above is DD criticizing Jack’s response to an argument that he doesn’t agree with. For Jack, that particular argument is one he is tired of dealing with. DD points out that outsiders don’t know that, and so Jack’s response appears to indicate a lack of a substantial rebuttal.
This is why I created the Values Reconciliation Workshop: it lets you quickly and easily field arguments no matter how inane they seem to you. You can consistently present dignity and level-headedness, clear up confusion, and deescalate arguments without significant effort.
How does that sound?
EC, it was obvious to me that DD’s statement was a serious pr-abortion (anti-abortion opposition) “argument,” and as such, indicates near total ethics ignorance. And he’s been around long enough that this shouldn’t be the case. It was not an explanation of the Facebook post in question, because that had no gender orientation at all!
I am late to comment but I will agree that Sarah has outlined similar themes or arguments I have heard as well. There is however a common misconception (no pun intended) about men having consequence free sex. While it is true that men will not have to bear the pain and problems of the pregnancy men are legally obligated to pay the child rearing costs more so than women. Ironically, this is a holdover from a time in which males were considered to be the breadwinners and women took care of the home. The nuclear family was sacrosanct and sex out of wedlock carried a stigma.
Our current laws dealing with family law are still oriented toward the Victorian ideas that men are the providers and women are to be the caregivers. The question is if we truly believe in equality shall we also change the laws that automatically assume the child is better raised by its mother? I, for one, see that the rise in single motherhood is strongly correlated to increased violence among young males, higher rates of depression in both sexes, as well as gender confusion. Could this be from a lack of male influence because the single mother chooses not to have long term relationships for any number of reasons? This is not to say that single motherhood causes these problems but we cannot simply say the mothers are the better parent in light of this. Perhaps our laws need to change requiring equal co-parenting obligations in term of time and financial contributions. That would provide some measure of equality.
It is a generality, but one that I have found to be true. “Men trade love for sex and women trade sex for love.” This puts an unequal spin on the consequences. Men, again generally speaking, desire sex more. Women bear a higher cost for sex than men. This lack of equality is a breeding ground for fear. Women who have regular sex will get pregnant over a long enough time span, assuming they do not have fertility issues, contraceptives or no.
I can accept the first line of the above statement if it states men trade the promise of love for sex and women trade sex for the promise of love. As such there is no unequal spin on consequences but there can be an unequal consequence. The way Sarah’s statement is written suggests that the male actually gives the emotional and physical support to the partner and sex is an outgrowth of that love and the woman only allows sexual activity upon payment of love. I don’t think that was intended. If fear is a driving factor initially then it stands to reason that women should not be deluded by shallow promises of love. Love exhibits itself over time through emotional and physical non-sexual behaviors.
Whether men want sex more than women is arguable because various factors cloud behavioral interpretation of both sexes. When men are together the quantity of sexual activities boost his ego while women discuss details. Women with claimed high “body counts” are seen as harlots while men are seen as conquering heroes. Most of men’s “body counts” are embellished while I would suspect women’s are undercounted. Again these ideas are ingrained in us from historical behaviors of both men and women. Just ask yourself why do women still desire to wear white on their wedding day?
What I write below is not to take issue with any of Sarah’s points she makes about what she has heard from pro-choice advocates. I know she has heard them. I too have first hand knowledge of a person who was guilt ravaged after such a procedure. Sarah’s reasoning that some feel that keeping abortion legal will help mitigate the guilt is sound.
Every argument for allowing abortion except in those rare occurrences in which a rape took place or to prevent the birth of a seriously deformed/birth defect fetus comes with the option available to all. If one is concerned about her future economic prospects because a pregnancy will prevent her from activities that would advance her interests then there are numerous ways to prevent pregnancy; from abstinence to contraceptives. I will agree that her partner also exhibit some responsibility by protecting both of them from pregnancy or an STD but ultimately being Pro-Choice means being in control. Thus, if one engages in sexual activity that can result in pregnancy and one is unwilling to accept the consequences of that decision you take control by initiating actions on your part that will prevent that pregnancy. At some point the woman has absolute control by saying NO anything after that is rape.
Ultimately, women want the same ability to have consequence free sex as they believe men to have. If that is the case we will have to change the attitudes and protocols of social service agencies so provide equal treatment in areas of child support, custody and visitation, and penalties for failing to meet one’s responsibilities for both mother and father.
I believe if we had more honest conversations on this topic in the same manner as Sarah put forth we might just move the needle to a point where the issue can be resolved to most everyone’s satisfaction.
I don’t think it is Victorian anymoe, it is feminism. The courts seem to have the opinion that for every woman with a child, a man needs to be assigned to give her money to help her raise the child.
The courts don’t care if the man is the biological father of the child. Fathers have few rights. Fathers may get to ‘visit’ this child as a reward for giving the state and the mother money, but that is all.