Women have a responsibility to more than themselves

As I said it really is a minor point to me.

 

So you finally decided to stop whining about typo's and attempt an argument.

That the UVVA has defined the zygote as Person is no dream. It is reality.

I agree that this does not mean the rights of the woman do not outweigh the Fetus so not sure why you are preaching to the choir.

The fact of the matter is that the argument is much tougher once one cedes the personhood position.

Why do you want to make things difficult for women.

 

Are you tacitly admitting that banning abortion has nothing whatsoever to do with the constitutional rights of women and everything to do with the theist beliefs of whomever a Republican potus would appoint to the SCOTUS?

Because that would be just another instance of "legislating from the bench" by the extremist right trying to impose their religious morality and beliefs in violation of the Constitution.

- - - Updated - - -

In order to criminalize abortion the extremist right must be willing to punish women to the full extent of the law for 1st degree murder.

 

It should matter to you because it does effect the legality of abortion. Once the personhood position is ceded the argument becomes much more difficult.

If the zygote is not a person, arguing that it has the same rights as person becomes much more difficult. Once personhood is ceded arguments for choice are much less likely to succeed against a Justice who is predisposed - Pro Life (Like the 3 out of 8 justices - would have been 4 out of 9 had Scalia not died-in the recent Texas ruling) Ceding personhood also gives very good arguments to the other side.

Your first attempt is "Consent".

A) Personhood not ceded. I argue that consent to the possibility of pregnancy is not consent to a child as no child exists in the early stages of pregnancy.

B) Personhood ceded. Consent to sex is consent to the possibility of pregnancy/conception. Since at conception a child exists. The woman has at consented to the possibility that a child might exist in her womb as a consequence of sex.

Some of the Philosophical arguments have gone this direction as follows.

As a renter - Just because I consent to a tenant living in one of my apartments does not mean I do not have the right to kick them out.

Rebuttal - If it is freezing cold outside and kicking the tenant out could risk the life of the tenant the renter does not have this right.

A company does not have a general right to kill someone for financial gain.

The point here is that things can get very convoluted very quickly. There are 3 main arguments once, as Feinberg puts it "moral personhood" as been ceded.

1) the previously mentioned property rights,
2) the right to self-defense, and
3) the right to bodily autonomy

You can read the detailed version, where arguments for and against are trotted out here: http://www.ditext.com/feinberg/abortion.html

I have posted the "Summary" below.

My Point - There are good arguments that can be made from the anti abort side once "moral personhood" is ceded. According to this well known Philosophy of Law expert the arguments for choice (as per summary above) become weak and only apply in certain instances once moral personhood is ceded.

Just because this guy comes the conclusion above does not mean that this conclusion is the be all end all. Consent, Self Defense, Bodily autonomy are still good arguments and other experts will argue differently.

What it does mean is that ceding moral personhood gives the anti aborts powerful arguments that anti abort Judges can use as justification for criminalization of abortion.

 

And thank you for ceding that point. As to whether it is minor or not, on this we disagree as was trotted out in my last response to your other post.

 

Interesting question. The answer is Yes and No.

1) The wing-nut religious right SC members make their decisions based on religious belief and then try and justify these via the constitution. These members are not stupid people. They realize that there is no consensus among subject matter experts (Biology/Taxonomy, Philosophy, Bioethics) that shows the "Zygote" to be a living human/Person. In fact the consensus is to the opposite.

They can not just come out and say " Its a person on the basis of my religious belief". "God says so" is not a valid legal argument.

What they did is gave the Zygote personhood with out giving any valid justification. There is no "This is why the zygote is a living human".

Once the zygote is magically turned into a person, then they can make constitutional arguments (which are still bogus as the "right to life" was intended for living citizens - parties to the social contract- and not living humans per say; Blacks for example were living humans but had no right to life)

Regardless - imposing their religious belief (zygote is a human) allows them to make constitutional arguments.

Correct. This is often the rule rather than the exception these days. Often this is done on the basis of religious belief - hidden by fallacy and bad arguments or "Fallacious Utilitarianism".

Other times there is no religious component. The constitution is violated regularly on the basis of "utilitarianism" and often on the basis of fallacious utilitarianism.

Example: "If it saves one life"/harm reduction as justification for law.

It is through utilitarianism and "tyranny of the majority" that the Gov't/SCOTUS has managed to wrest power back from the people.

Abortion can be criminalized in ways that do not have 1st Degree murder as the punishment but in general .. Yes.

The UVVA in fact does just that if the violent offender happens to be a woman. While the UVVA restricts this punishment to violent offenders other than the mother, it is still the first step down the slippery slope.

 

The text does refer to the unborn child as a victim, and a member of the species homo sapiens, but it does not refer to the unborn child as a person. Even a corporation can be a victim.

The uslegal.com reference tells us "An unborn child is a child in the mother’s womb. The term is often seen used in debates over the personhood of the fetus before birth."
That does not say the unborn child is a person. It tells us that "unborn child" is a term often seen in debates over the personhood of the fetus before birth.

Your statement that all members of the species "Homo sapiens" are humans/people/persons is incorrect. Terri Schiavo (for example) could not have been allowed to die if she was still a person. That would have been murder. Her cerebral cortex was no longer functional so her body was allowed to die (because a living human body of the species "Homo sapiens" is not the same as a person).

 

A person with no functioning cerebral cortex is not considered to be a "living human" they are clinically dead by definition. Personhood applies only to living humans/ living Homo sapiens, not dead ones.

A single human cell is not a Homo sapien.

The UVVA, by stating that a zygote was a member of the species Homo sapiens, was granting that entity personhood.

That is the whole point of including such terminology.

Put it this way. There are no humans/persons who are not Homo sapiens. If something is a "living human" it is a Person.

If a zygote is a member of the species Homo sapiens it is a human. Further, it is a living human - a person.

 

And if it is it has the same restrictions that other "persons" have, it cannot use another person's to sustain it's life. AND since pregnant women do not lose the right to self defense they can kill it......just like any other person who is harming us without OUR consent.

 

The main arguments one has to rely on once you have ceded "personhood" are trotted out in a fair bit of detail in Post 330. "Self Defense" is one of the arguments covered.

While you might claim and believe that abortion is justifiable homicide on the basis of "self defense", convincing others (or more importantly the courts) that your claim is valid is a whole different kettle of fish. There are good arguments that counter your claim. This is not to say that "self defense" is not a good argument as well and that there are not counter points to the good arguments on the other side.

The point I made (and indirectly by the author) is that winning the argument becomes much more difficult and complicated once you cede personhood.

No one can made a good/valid argument which shows that the zygote is a "Person/Living human". The best place they can get to is "experts disagree" and in reality there are only a few folks who have expert qualifications that even try to make such a claim "Zygote is a human". It is an extremely difficult road to value the rights of "Experts disagree = We don't know" against the value of the rights of a woman never-mind show that that value equals exceeds or even compares to the rights of a woman.

This is not the case once one cedes personhood - agrees that the zygote is a living human with rights equal to that of a woman.

The argument gets much easier for the anti aborts and much tougher for pro choice.

 

Denying a person something, even if they need it to live, is not necessarily homicide. If it were, we would have to arrest everyone who refused to tick the box on their drivers license for organ donations.



​

 

I disagree...(shrug)

 

Depends on the situation. Denying a child the necessities of life is homicide.

 

​

 

Not sending your kid to school is homicide?

Killing someone who is causing you harm without your consent is self defense....

 

You stated "A single human cell is not a Homo sapien." but that is untrue. What authority do you cite for that? When the egg is fertilized it is a single cell and (until it splits) it has all of the DNA that the daughter cells will contain after the first cell division. How is a pair of cells = Homo sapiens, but the single cell they came from is not? Yes, a cell with human DNA is part of a human body, but that human body (without a functional brain) does not have personhood.

You also stated "There are no humans/persons who are not Homo sapiens. If something is a "living human" it is a Person." Do you deny that Terri Schiavo (and others like her) ever existed? Terri Schaivo (the person) was gone. The autopsy revealed that here brain had deteriorated to half of its original size, but her body was still living. In that situation you have a living human body with no functional brain and it is no longer a person. Reality conflicts with your assertions.

It is equally possible for a living human body (forming in the womb) to be a living Homo sapiens, without being a person.

 

Nope

Sometimes

 

"""Killing someone who is causing you harm without your consent is self defense. """


When it's causing the grevious harm to a person that the fetus does to the woman it's in, it is justifiable....and I hope you're not one of those biologically/scientifically challenged who insist women suffer no harm from having a fetus grow inside them.... are

 

Having a complete human DNA does not make that organism a "Homo sapiens". Having a single cell from a human may tell us that that cell came from a Homo sapiens, but that cell is not a Homo sapiens.

Membership in that club requires a whole long more than the having of human dna according to the domain science of classification. Biology/Taxonomy.
To be a Homo sapiens requires that the organism has certain characteristics/ membership in a bunch of different comes.

All of these club memberships are required: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order Family, Genus, Species. (I did from memory so I may have got order wrong or left out a few). A single eukaryotic human cell has membership in only one club. Domain Eukaryota.

By definition .. not my definition but a coroner .. lacking significant brain function someone is clinically dead. Pull the plug and bury them.

At the zygote stage, not a single cell in the structure of the human that may (should all go well) be built later exists. This cell is not a member of the club Homo Sapiens (lacking things like a spine, brain, eyes, 5 fingers and so on) and nor it is a "Person" as not a single cell in the structure of this supposed person exists. There is no human, there is no Homo sapien ... there is no person.

All "Living" Homo Sapiens are living humans ... living humans are People .... by definition.

The point of the UVVA, if you look at its history, was to turn the mighty zygote into a Person.

 

It can be. "Harm" is a relative term. This is covered in the link post 300.

The fetus can indeed cause harm to a woman. From my link in post 300 under "Self Defense and Proportionality".

.

Feinbergs commentary:

"Applying English's answer to the abortion case, and assuming that both the fetus and the woman have legitimate claims, we derive the conclusion that killing the "fetal person" would not be justified when it is done merely to prevent relatively trivial harms to the mother's interests. Not all cases of abortion, therefore, can morally be justified, even if there is a maternal right to abortion derived from the more basic right to self-defense"

So we have run into a little problem in law call "proportionality". You do not get to kill someone because they slapped your backside.

I am not going to comment on whether or not killing a Person/Fetus is proportional to the harm from carrying a pregnancy to term because it matters not what I think. The question is how will an SC Justice rule ?

How they will rule, if history is any indicator, is based on whether they are "pro life" or not. Stack the SC with Liberal Justices and they will probably side with the woman. Stack it with Conservative Pro Life fundamentalist religious zealots and they will likely side with the fetus.

Once the argument gets into such subjective territory a Judge can rule however they want as good arguments can be made on both sides "IF" the fetus is deemed a moral person.

My argument avoids almost all this subjective nonsense. If the entity in the womb, especially during the early stages of pregnancy (ET) , is not a "Person", then it has no rights that stack up to the rights of the woman. The scales of justice are so disproportionately weighted in favor of the woman that no rational legal argument that will make the rights of the ET-Fetus equal to or greater than the rights of the woman. Not even close. Not even definable.

You can stammer around and disagree all you like. The question is what are you disagreeing with ? Ceding the "Its a human/person" argument to the other side leads to a large amount of subjectivity and this can be (and has been) used by a Pro Life Justice to rule against the woman.

If the fetus is not a person, the Judges argument against the woman has no legal legs to stand on. It would be like that one State Justice who threatened to rule against Gay Marriage because "God's Law" is higher than the constitution.

In fact it would be even more ridiculous in the case of abortion because there is no "Gods Law" proscribing against abortion like there is against Homosexuality.

 

We actually agree on quite a bit.

We agree that an individual human cell (the zygote) can have human DNA, be alive, but not be an actual person. It is only a potential person at that moment.

We agree that a human body (Homo sapiens) which is lacking significant brain function is not alive ("By definition .. not my definition but a coroner .. lacking significant brain function someone is clinically dead. Pull the plug and bury them."). I am not sure that is the correct definition for clinically dead, but I don't have a medical dictionary handy and I keep pulling up common usage references on Google (which are not as reliable).

This part would be disconcerting for an amputee:
At the zygote stage, not a single cell in the structure of the human that may (should all go well) be built later exists. This cell is not a member of the club Homo Sapiens (lacking things like a spine, brain, eyes, 5 fingers and so on) and nor it is a "Person" as not a single cell in the structure of this supposed person exists. There is no human, there is no Homo sapien ... there is no person.
I know you did not mean to imply that a human body with an incomplete inventory of body parts is not a person.

I would suggest that you put too much emphasis on all those body parts. The body is being grown as a container for the person who will inhabit it. If the brain never starts working, it was never a person. If the brain stops working, it is no longer a person. The body is irrelevant (except as a life support system for the mind). In the future, we may develop the technology to rescue a person from a dying body by placing their brain in a robotic body with an enclosed life support system. Is that what it would take to prove to you that the functioning brain is what turns a human body into a person?

PS: I forgot to mention, we also agree that the likely purpose of the UVVA legislation was for pro-lifers to push some kind of fetus = person equivalency into law. However, getting it into law does not make it valid (just ask the folks who lived through Prohibition).

 

"""""when it is done merely to prevent relatively trivial harms to the mother's interests.""""

The most unscientific, ignorant sexist , misogynistic and just plain stupid remark by a person totally ignorant of biology or anything else resembling science and facts. A slobbering drooling sexist Anti-Choicer's wet dream...with no basis in reality...

Anyone so totally willfully ignorant that they think pregnancy is no worse than a slap on the backside really has NOTHING of any importance or credibility to say...




You: """My argument avoids almost all this subjective nonsense. If the entity in the womb, especially during the early stages of pregnancy (ET) , is not a "Person", then it has no rights that stack up to the rights of the woman. The scales of justice are so disproportionately weighted in favor of the woman that no rational legal argument that will make the rights of the ET-Fetus equal to or greater than the rights of the woman. Not even close. Not even definable."""


Where have I disagreed?


My stance on self defense is,



get ready,



IF


the fetus was ever deemed a person......why can't you read what I post ?????

 

3 slobbering drooling anti choicer's are currently sitting in the SC. The fact of the matter is the the UVVA does in fact deem the fetus a person.

You don't care ... Got it.