So, let's say that Roe v. Wade is overturned. . .

[xiphias]

Fundamentally, it seems to me that, while the right to privacy IS a vitally important issue, there's a more fundamental right that Roe v. Wade protects -- the right to control one's own body.

There is quite literally no right more fundamental than the right to do what you want to do with your own body, to the extent that it doesn't infringe on other people. And that sentence, right there, sums up the whole abortion debate in one sentence. If you think a fetus is a person, then restricting access to abortion is potentially justifiable, because you're weighing the rights of two people against each other.

However, f you think a blastocyst is in no reasonable sense a human being, as I, for instance, feel, then a restriction of access to abortion is simply an example of an abrogation of the most fundamental right a person can have -- the right to their own body.

Restricting access to abortion to a woman who wants one is therefore a way of forcing her to work on behalf of a third party -- the fetus (who may or may not have legal standing.)

Could you make an argument based on the 13th Amendment therefore?

For what it's worth: I think that that any law in reference to abortion is inherently a stopgap measure. The only reasonable solution is technological: artificial wombs.

Fundamentally, what should happen is that any woman who doesn't want to have her body used as an incubator for a parasite, for whatever reason, should be allowed to have that fetus removed and placed into an artificial womb in which it could grow to term.

If a fetus does have any sort of legal standing, such a step would protect its hypothetical right to existence, without removing the mother's non-hypothetical right to control of her own person.

Comments

[bimmer1200.livejournal.com]

Restricting access to abortion to a woman who wants one is therefore a way of forcing her to work on behalf of a third party -- the fetus (who may or may not have legal standing.)

So you're against staxes then? Because taxes, for the half of us who actually pay them, is the forcing of me to work on behalf of a third party, whether I want to or not. And it's a great deal harder to argue that I'm responsible for seeing to it that some drunken redneck who was too busy skipping school to get a degree so he can provide for himself is fed, clothed and housed, then it is to argue that a woman is responsible for the consequences of her decision to have sex.

Further, in a society that has the legal precedent that a man can be responsible for child support for a child that he didn't father, it rings a little hollow. Add in things like prostitution, drug use, suicide, gambling and even things like helmet laws, and while I don't know your personal stand on all of these, many who make the argument you are making turn right around and argue that the government should be able to interfere in your personal life in all kinds of ways.

As for Roe v. Wade itself, the SCOTUS screwed the pooch. Roe v. Wade should be left to the States. There should be neither a federal prohibition or prescription of abortion. Would some states have abortion on demand right up til a minute before birth? Some would, yes. Would some restrict it completely? Yes. But if you don't like the way your state law is, you can change it or you can move. With the Roe v. Wade, the court stepped in and truncated a political process that was working up until that point. Abortion laws had been liberalizing across the country at the time of the decision, and the trend was accelerating. Without an imposition of the Roe from on high, this very well could be a largely settled issue with much less acrimony on all sides.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question, about taxes. As it is, I do accept the right of governments to impose taxes, even in cases where the individual in question benefits less from the services of the government than the amount that they pay out in taxes.

I wonder why that is -- I may need to think about this for a while to unpack exactly what my thinking and feeling is.

Is there a qualitative difference between actual work, especially dangerous work such as carrying a baby, and money, which, at some level of abstraction, can be considered a tangible representation of work? I feel that there is such a distinction, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. For one thing, I feel that governments can have the right to regulate commercial transactions to a much higher degree than other forms of interpersonal contact. So I need to see where that comes from, and under what theory THAT holds up.

One distinction is that money can be made through investment rather than through direct work -- one could make an argument that capital gains taxes, for instance, were moral, while income taxes were not -- income taxes are based on a method of gaining money which is more directly tied to work. I'm not prepared to make that distinction -- if only because I DO feel that income taxes are moral.

I'm going to have to think about this further. If I come up with anything brilliant, I'll let you know.

As far as Roe v. Wade -- I disagree that it's necessarily best left as a state-by-state situation. Primarily because the arguments against legal abortion AND against the restriction of legal abortion are both so clearly based on fundamental questions of morality. It seems to me that, since the Civil War, at least, we've had an argument that an issue can be so clearly morally based that the society as a whole has a say in defining itself as one which allows or disallows an action.

I argue that restriction of abortion is so clearly immoral that our country must not condone the restriction of abortion. Others argue that abortion is so clearly immoral that our country must not condone it.

In either case, a state-by-state solution is unfeasable.

I could see a limited way in which someone could be considered responsible for a child that he didn't father: if you consider a marriage contract to be a contract of mutual support between two people, and one of those people incurs the liability of a child, I could see an argument that BOTH parties in the marriage contract have incurred the liability. I'm not absolutlely convinced by this argument -- for one thing, unless otherwise specified, a marriage contract is ALSO assumed to include the stipulation that neither party WILL procreate outside the partnership, and I think it'd be totally reasonable to argue that, if YOU break THAT part of the contract, I'M allowed to break THIS part of it.

I believe that drug use, suicide, and prostitution should be legal, and I'm against helmet laws -- I'm also against most drug use, most cases of suicide, the way that street prostituion works, and riding motorcycles or bicycles without helmets, but I feel that the law isn't the right tool to deal with the situations.

One of the difficulties that the United States has as a culture is that we have too few tools for regulating behavior. All we've got are laws, the tort system, and a limited degree of government regulation. And that's simply not enough to run a healthy society. Because there are plenty of things that MUST be regulated by a society, but which must NOT be regulated by any of those tools. And our culture lacks pretty much any other tools.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I could see a limited way in which someone could be considered responsible for a child that he didn't father: if you consider a marriage contract to be a contract of mutual support between two people, and one of those people incurs the liability of a child, I could see an argument that BOTH parties in the marriage contract have incurred the liability.

Apropos of (possibly) nothing, the Department of Education agrees with you. When filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a student must list the financial circumstances of his custodial parent and that parent's legal spouse, even if the spouse is a stepparent.

[bimmer1200.livejournal.com]

With taxes, the thing is, I get far less benefit then what I pay in. I work 5 months out of the year for the benefit of others, and get little to no benefit in return from that labor. In other words, I agree that the gov't should not be able to tell you what to do with your own body, but 'we' (and by we I mean the U.S.) don't hold that as a fundamental right. And I've yet to see a good, logical, coherent distinction between income taxation and abortion on the grounds you cited.

If Roe v. Wade had been decided in a 5-4 decision (never good. It indicates a deep division) that abortion was prohibited by the Constitution, then I'd still be calling for it to be overturned. We're getting into territory of what the Constitution /is/ however, so I'm going to try to tread lightly.

The Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to regulate abortion and therefore it should be a matter for the state. I don't think the restriction of abortion, esp. if it were the hodge-podge we'd have if each state decided for itself is immoral per se. It's like murder. I think we'd both agree that murder is wrong. There is, however, no federal law against murder. But every state has some law against it.

It's exactly that no room for compromise, that both sides of the debate honestly believe that their side is the only moral one, that this should be left to the states. As I said before, we aren't imposing on the woman a financial burden that we don't impose on others if it were to be outlawed.

So we're left, essentially, with imposition of risk. A pregnancy, however, is not an imposition that anyone is forcing on a woman, save in very, very rare circumstances. According to Alan Guttmacher Institute research, of the abortions performed in the US, .3 to .9% are from pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. So the numbers of women where the pregnancy was completely out of the woman's control is less than 1%. Further, I believe something like 70% of the U.S. believes that abortions under those circumstances (incest, rape, to save the life of the mother) should remain legal. It's unlikely any state would pass a complete ban. So I just don't buy the 'it's unethical to prohibit it argument' on the grounds you cite. Further, abortion where the mother's life was in danger has been legal since well before Roe, even in states that otherwise heavily regulated it.

As for the thing with the child support, the case I'm thinking of were where a divorce occured and it came out during the divorce that the wife was cheating from pretty much the beginning, w/o the husband being aware. He finds out during the divorce that the child wasn't his, that he'd been deceived. The judge essentially ruled that the child's need to be supported was more important than any right the man might have. There are, of course thousands of cases where men are forced to financially support children they didn't want. I don't think one can be consistent and argue that the mother has the right to decide she doesn't want to be responsible right up until the birth, but that the father is commited the instant the procreative act is completed.