Prager University on Abortion.

[QuantaFille]

Incidentally, why do you think the majority of women who get abortions don't use or misuse contraception?

I don't know why they don't. I just know what the statistics say. If I had to guess, I'd say they either don't care ("I can always get an abortion if I get pregnant") or they don't know how to use it properly.

[QuantaFille]

American Statistics:
10% women will have an abortion before they turn 20.
6% of all abortions are conducted for women aged 17 or under.
51% of women choosing abortion used contraception during the month they became pregnant.

That statistic includes women who used some form of contraception (IIRC even withdrawal and rhythm methods) at least once during that month, even if they had sex more than once. That qualifies as "inconsistently", which is what I said.

[tabibito]

That statistic includes women who used some form of contraception (IIRC even withdrawal and rhythm methods) at least once during that month, even if they had sex more than once. That qualifies as "inconsistently", which is what I said.

The possibility had occurred to me. Nonetheless - 49% (effectively half) of the women presenting for abortion had not used ANY form of contraception. And given the number that had already had a prior abortion ... there's a decided contempt for responsibility demonstrably in play.

[Joel]

I'm accepting your ideas for the sake of argument because I do not think the rights violator is as important the rights being violated.

I'm only saying that the importance of the violator is that if there is no violator, there is no rights violation. A lot of mistakes people make when talking about rights, in general, comes from not keeping that in mind.

I didn't say a fetus cannot violate rights. I said that in the scenario, the fetus did not violate rights because no action by the fetus caused or contributed to the situation. In the case of consensual sex, the mother's and father's actions alone caused the situation, so they are the only responsible agents.

First, that's not necessarily true. If the mother and father practiced due diligence and pregnancy results regardless, it's not reasonable to assign blame to people who did their best to avoid situation.

Second, even if that's true, while the mother and father took part in the scenario's origin, its ongoing harm is caused by the fetus. People are allowed to waive their rights, and, unless contracted otherwise, they are allowed to regain those rights.

My point there was just that (in the case of consensual sex) nobody else but the mother and father could be responsible agents. If you suppose a hypothetical in which even they are not responsible, then the conclusion would be that there is no responsible agent.

If there is ongoing harm due to the pregnancy, it still isn't the fetus' fault, because no action of the fetus caused the pregnancy.

Let me push back a bit in the other direction. Suppose someone stows away on an airplane, violating the owner's rights, and the stowaway is discovered mid-flight. The owner's response to the injustice must not only be disproportional (as you previously agreed). It is thus not morally permissible to kill the stowaway on the plane, or to throw the stowaway out of the plane alive mid-flight. Rather, I would suggest the owner morally must endure the injustice until landing, and afterwards the owner could seek reparations from the culprit. (Thus even if a fetus were at fault, it would not morally justify killing or ejecting the fetus to its death.) But to be more analogous, we would have to suppose a case where somehow the stowaway ended up on the plane through no action of his/her own. A fortiori, in such a case, the owner may not throw the stowaway out of the plane mid-flight. And would not even be able to seek reparations from the stowaway after the fact, because it wasn't the stowaway's fault at all. And what's more, we would need to suppose a situation in which the only relevant actions resulting in the stowaway being on the plane in the first place are the owner's actions alone! Thus even more a fortiori the owner may not throw the person out, and, if anything, the owner owes the person.

You do not have an obligation to become a slave for that person, which appears to be what you're suggesting. There's a difference between reparations and what you're talking about.

If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, then no parent has any such obligation to their children, of any age. You would say that a parent has no moral obligation to support their 5 year old, because that would make the parent a slave to their 5 year old, and nobody ever has any such obligation.

[Teallaura]

The argument was that pregnancy is not harmful. Those were ways in which pregnancy is harmful. The harm of pregnancy justifies aborting because it is the only way to stop the harm from happening. It has nothing to do with regulation.



I wouldn't have thought the idea that pregnancy is at best not a walk in the park and at worst life threatening would be a point of contention.

2) If those are so harmful as to justify murder then action should be taken against the other possible causes. Point stands.

2) You are speaking from vicarious knowledge and she from direct. Shut up before you make a bigger fool of yourself.

[One Bad Pig]

Calling a pregnancy "accidental" when you engage in sex knowing full well what the potential consequences of doing so are is like willfully stepping in front of a speeding vehicle knowing full well what the potential consequences of doing so are and then calling the resulting injuries "accidental."

Starlight keeps bringing up people who were raised by ultraconservative Christians and as a result given no sexual education whatsoever who were allegedly ignorant of the fact that sex causes pregnancy. I can't imagine that's a large demographic, though, even if there are people that naive.

[Teallaura]

Under what rock are these alleged people living?

[QuantaFille]

I was raised in a conservative home and associated with conservative people all through my childhood, and that describes exactly no one I knew. The people who think that is typical are the naive ones, honestly. They must be living under a rock and don't associate with actual Christians, instead getting their ideas about them from TV shows that mock them. The idea that Christians won't teach their kids healthy viewpoints regarding sex due to some sort of fear of it or whatever, is completely unfounded.

[CMD]

Starlight keeps bringing up people who were raised by ultraconservative Christians and as a result given no sexual education whatsoever who were allegedly ignorant of the fact that sex causes pregnancy. I can't imagine that's a large demographic, though, even if there are people that naive.

I live in Idaho and practically everybody around here is a hardcore Christian and a far-right Conservative Republican. There's like 20+ churches within just a couple of miles of where I live, and none of them are of the left-leaning "we're o.k. with gay marriage and abortion" variety... and yet, I know of exactly 0 people who are this ignorant.