AS200: Abortion Debate Followup

Thank you guys for the avalanche of comments, emails and messages on my debate with Tyler Vela. This is likely the most response I’ve gotten to anything, and I think it’s because there is plenty to disagree and argue about. That’s my favorite kind of topic! Today’s episode is a bit of a post-mortem on the debate, along with further thoughts and observations. Please feel free to let me know what you think about all I’ve said!

13 thoughts on “AS200: Abortion Debate Followup”

  1. Since you asked about rights here’s my take on them.
    If I’m living alone on a desert island I don’t need god, or a society to tell me I have certain rights. I grant myself the rights that I feel are justifiable based on my standards of morality. When I am no longer alone, the rights I’ve granted myself come into conflict with the rights others have granted themselves, and it may become necessary to reach compromises that will result in some limitations on my rights. So essentially rights can only forcibly be taken away, or voluntarily given up for the betterment of society, but they are not granted, though society can agree to protect them.

  2. Hi Thomas, You sort of hit on where the problem is on this who ‘know’ thing. Tyler, at some point, is going to have to either say the same thing as you, namely that he’s getting there from a set of basic assumptions, OR he’s going to have to revert to divine command theory.

  3. Unfortunately, you accepted a premise within the first minute that was not warranted. The premise that you zeroed in on was: is the zygote (etc) a person? That is secondary.

    The primary question is: WHEN IS IT OK FOR ONE PERSON (or the state) TO FORCE ANOTHER PERSON TO USE THEIR BODY AGAINST THEIR WILL?

    The bit about allowing killing of a 1 day old baby is moot, because the baby is separate from the mother’s body and can live without using her anymore.

    Abortion is NOT primarily about the fertilized egg, zygote, fetus, etc. IT IS ABOUT THE PREGNANT PERSON’S RIGHT TO CONTROL THEIR OWN BODY.

    THAT’S why it is rightly called pro choice. It is pro the pregnant person’s choice. No one elses.

  4. BTW, I don’t have to consider or give a fuck about the “person” that was using my body against my will. I should be able to just choose to walk away. If society wants to debate what happens next, that is a competely separate subject, and has nothing to do with my right to own my own body.
    I listened to all 3 of these podcasts, and I must say that, despite your profession of being prochoice, you and Tyler Vela both sound remarkably callous with the absolute life shattering devastation that abortion denial has visited on huge numbers of women. Limited choices, limited futures, fear, shame, financial ruination because of mostly men limiting womens rights to control their own bodies. Today, in 2015, a woman is in jail for attempted murder, for perfoming a coat hanger abortion on herself. (Motherjones.com) This encroachment on bodily right is escalating at the same time that abortion access constricts. Doctors, patients, and clinic volunteers endure harrassment and risk their lives to get or facilitate legal abortions.
    Tom, you speak as if this is just an interesting philosophical discussion for you, and proposed outlawing of abortion is mostly about the fetus. For me and other women, it is a threat of forced pregnancy/state prosecution/life ruination. This is serious shit, not a fucking word problem for you boys to play with. Its our fucking lives. Treat us with respect. Address womens bodily rights first and last, in every conversation on the subject.

    Finally, yes, our rights can be taken from us. Every day, in fact. Rights are a concept, like democracy or freedom. We have to fight for them. Please fight instead of allowing serious consideration that forced pregnancy is ok, that it is not equal to slavery.

    1. I respect where you’re coming from and I’m 100% pro-choice. I believe abortion should be not be denied to anyone. I also believe (and you are completely free to disagree with me) that the feelings you expressed here will never ever convince someone like Tyler. I approach it this way because I think people like Tyler genuinely see it as a problem of personhood and not wanting to kill someone. I think they are genuinely confused on the issue and the results, as you’ve pointed out, are absolutely tragic for women everywhere. I apologize if it offended you, but I honestly think if there’s any chance of getting through to people like Tyler, it’s by arguing based on their understanding and trying to attack the problem that way. I’m going to address this comment in my next show, btw.

    2. I respect where you’re coming from and I’m 100% pro-choice. I believe abortion should be not be denied to anyone. I also believe (and you are completely free to disagree with me) that the feelings you expressed here will never ever convince someone like Tyler. I approach it this way because I think people like Tyler genuinely see it as a problem of personhood and not wanting to kill someone. I think they are genuinely confused on the issue and the results, as you’ve pointed out, are absolutely tragic for women everywhere. I apologize if it offended you, but I honestly think if there’s any chance of getting through to people like Tyler, it’s by arguing based on their understanding and trying to attack the problem that way. I’m going to address this comment in my next show, btw. I also would be happy to have you come on the show and yell at me if you’d like.

  5. Removing the fetus from the mother would be an incredibly invasive procedure and the state should not have the right to force a woman to go through that against her will.
    .
    The financial obligations that people must agree to in order to live in a country are not the same thing as something using someone else’s body against their will. People are free to opt out of a system and leave the country. They have a choice even if they don’t like the options.

    The example given that a mother is forced to care for the child after it is born is wrong. The mother can give up the baby on day one and have nothing to do with it the rest of its life if she wants to. Unfortunately many women will not choose this option even if they are not in a position to care for a child because of social pressures and guilt.

    1. When did I say the state would force a mother to go through that procedure? In my hypothetical, I said that if we treated the fetus as an actual person, rather than simply vacuuming the fetus out, we may some day be able to remove it in a way that doesn’t cause its death. Would this necessarily be more invasive than an abortion? It certainly doesn’t have to be for the sake of my hypothetical.
      You’re right that the mother can give it up, but that’s precisely in line with my point – she has to give it up into someone else’s care. She’s not allowed to simply stop feeding it and have it die. Again, all this is to say I think the personhood part is important. I ultimately agree with all your conclusions, but only because I don’t think the fetus is a person.

  6. To address the issue of rights first, yes, we do not have rights in the sense that they are an extant thing that we can measure; rights are a social construct that we have developed in the pursuit of equitable society, a natural outgrowth of the basis for morality, namely to maximize wellbeing and minimize suffering. And of course rights can be taken away; prisoners have a number of their rights modified or completely revoked.

    I also agree that the Bodily Rights argument is sufficient; presuming everyone’s familiarity with it for the sake of brevity, you seem to be confused on the order of precedence in it, or at least are mis-prioritizing the moral issues in the argument. It isn’t that someone is being granted the right to kill another person (going with your presumption of personhood for the moment), or the right to force another person to kill someone as you put it; setting aside that if no doctors were willing to perform abortions then the right to have one would be meaningless, the intent of the action is for the woman to exercise autonomy over her body and the death of ‘person’ is an unfortunate secondary effect (again, presuming personhood for the moment.) Working from the moral basics of minimizing suffering and maximizing wellbeing, a necessary basic precept is preeminence of bodily autonomy.

    I would also say that while the Bodily Rights argument is sufficient to take a Pro Choice position, I also do not think that embryos warrant personhood and that Tyler’s argument relies a lot on wordplay and equivocation.

    I also think that the confusion in you discussion over consciousness, animal or otherwise, arose from definitional differences. I think that Tyler was meaning ‘sapience’ when he was saying consciousness; I think you were meaning something closer to what consciousness means when you used it. For me, sapience is a subset of consciousness which is one of the critical factors for personhood; most other animal species are conscious (and therefore have some moral value, especially over unconscious matter) but are not sapient and therefore not persons.

    1. Hey David, just reading your comment and thinking about bodily rights. What about this scenario? A pair of conjoined twins are raised to adulthood and twin one has enough organs to survive on their own but twin two is reliant on organs from the other body. Twin one decides they no longer consent to twin two using their organs and wants twin two to be removed. Do they have a legal right to have the removal performed?
      I believe bodily autonomy is important but I’m not sure it can be separated from the personhood considerations

      1. I would say that that scenario is an extremely poor comparison. Setting aside its highly contrived nature, you would need to say that twin one existed prior to twin two which simply came into existence at one point and you would need to say that twin one possesses all of the functioning organs and that twin two is entirely dependent on every organ function of twin one, including nutrition, oxygen, and waste disposal.

        Still, to answer your scenario directly, yes twin one has the right to control the use of their organs; the fact that twin two dies is a secondary outcome of twin one exerting control over their body. The fact that it makes us feel sad is irrelevant to the issue; I’m not sure that your argument here is much more than an appeal to emotion.

  7. Very cool episode. Thanks for all your hard work. Speaking of person-hood, there’s a series streaming on Netflix called Black Mirror. Tons of great moral dilemmas. Trigger warning–it’s prolly not for everyone. But the episode called White Christmas (With Jon Hamm from Mad Men) is pertinent to the person-hood argument.

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