feotakahari | Entries tagged with abortion

Read a story where a guy accidentally gets an anime character stuck in his head. He considers trying to delete her, but is told that would be murder and therefore wrong. Her right to live is more important than his right to his body.

Hey author? What are your thoughts on abortion?

There are posts that go “you can get a lot of leftists to support eugenics without them even realizing how right-wing they’re being.”

Those posts can get a lot of leftists to oppose reproductive freedom without even realizing how right-wing they’re being.

The most I’ve ever pissed people off on the Internet was when I argued against the idea of bodily autonomy as a defense of abortion. I’m fine with abortion, I just don’t believe in bodily autonomy. After all, anti-vaxxers say they have the bodily autonomy to refuse vaccines, and I think they’re full of shit.

Multiple people blocked me over this. One person couldn’t understand how my mind works that I would come to this conclusion.

People who pirate movies because they don’t believe in IP are now so mad at AI art that they’re lobbying the government to make more laws to defend their IP. Frankly, I think more of you should think like I do.

Today in “I agree with your end goal, but please don’t do it this way”: please don’t argue in favor of abortion rights based on how you find pregnancy disgusting and horrifying on an emotional level. I get enough of that from people who find abortion disgusting and horrifying on an emotional level.

My apologies in advance to Tuesday and Morlock for this post on abortion and law:

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Pissed off some more people by making this argument, so I’ll make it again for good measure: if you don’t read or buy someone’s book, you are doing exactly the same amount of harm as if you pirated someone’s book. Since you don’t buy every book, you are always doing that amount of harm to everyone whose book you didn’t buy. Furthermore, the same issue applies to people who didn’t write a book, but still need money to survive, which is why this isn’t an issue that can be fixed through capitalist consumption alone. Someone who doesn’t have your money doesn’t benefit from your money. Somehow, people keep interpreting this as me saying that authors should starve, when my point is that people are already starving whether they’re authors or not.

Actually, as long as I’m frustrated, I’ll repost the other argument that got a ton of people to block me. People argued for abortion based on bodily autonomy. I thought about anti-vaxxers and their bodily autonomy arguments, and I decided anti-vaxxers are full of shit. This isn’t even an argument against abortion! I’m just saying I can’t reasonably claim bodily autonomy as the defense I’m using for abortion.

It’s frustrating how many of the people I reblog from also reblog from people who have me blocked and will presumably keep me blocked until the end of Tumblr. But at the same time, if I didn’t use anonymous Internet accounts to argue things I think are true, I would never argue them anywhere. I think about all the arguments people made to change my mind, and they just don’t seem very convincing to me.

Bodily autonomy is the wrong tack to take when arguing in favor of abortion. Do not give ammunition to anti-vaxxers.

I posted this before, years ago, but I don’t have an opinion on abortion. That’s one of the reasons I support legal abortion. I’m not equipped to evaluate whether it’s bad or not, so I’d just as soon let the people who might have abortions determine for themselves whether it’s bad or not.

I once played this godawful cyberpunk game where one of the subplots is bigotry against furries. The best part of the game is the dialogue tree with an anti-furry activist. He's quite specific about how he has nothing against people who become furries for medical reasons, and only opposes people who become furries as a lifestyle choice. Then you get him talking about what he’s actually doing, and it’s stuff like allowing landlords to refuse to rent to furries. He doesn’t address, and doesn’t seem to particularly care about, how some random landlord would know the difference between a medical furry and a lifestyle furry. He just takes it for granted that anyone who would end up homeless deserves it.

If I understand Legal Eagle’s video correctly, the law is supposed to allow for abortion if the mother’s life is in danger. But it allows suits from people who would have no idea whether the mother’s life is in danger or not. You’re probably not going to have enough money to fight it, and even if you win and prove your life is in danger, you’re not going to get your attorney’s fees back. And of course, there’s the question of how long you have to wait to resolve the damn court case while hoping you don’t bleed out and die. It seemed like the people who created the law didn’t bother to think about that, and just assumed anyone who would be affected by the law is a “dirty slut” or whatever the fuck.

“A service dog isn’t a dog anymore: sure, it has dog tendencies, but they’re a mobility aid, or someone’s eyes, or they are there to detect if somoene’s glucose levels fluctuate.”

Would I piss off EVERYONE if I said that this reminds me of that anti-abortion politician, the one who said your body isn’t your own when it’s a vessel for your child?

I realize this is the edgiest thing I’ve posted here, but my reaction to anti-abortion advocates is “then what?” Let’s say you have a healthy baby, mothered by someone who can’t or won’t raise a baby. What are you actually going to do in order to give that baby a good life? You can’t even take decent care of the children who’re already in the foster system! And yes, I personally wouldn’t want to terminate a viable fetus, but it’s not about me. My feelings don’t matter as much as the experiences of a child who was neglected or abused. If I can’t promise them care, then I don’t have the right to insist on their suffering to make myself feel better.

Someone once told me they wanted the right to suicide “for the same reason [their] homelessness was treated with antidepressants.” A world where they could be guaranteed the conditions to be happy would be better, but the right to suicide if sufficiently unhappy was more achievable in their lifetime. I thought that was the most depressing thing I’d ever heard, but I saw the logic in it.

I’m going to share a secret that protects you from so many Bad Takes: you don’t have to choose just one person in a moral quandary to be “you.”

I originally got this from Judith Thomson’s “famous violinist” argument, which is meant to prove that abortion is okay. She proposes that “you” wake up one day with a famous violinist plugged into your vital organs, and unless you leave him plugged in for nine months, he will die. From there, she argues that you wouldn’t want to have a famous violinist plugged into your vital organs for nine months, so therefore abortion is okay.

What she never considers is that “you” could wake up one day to discover that you’re a famous violinist who’s plugged into someone’s vital organs and will die unless you stay plugged in for nine months. In the magic of Thought Experiments, where anything can happen, it’s all equally valid! And if you don’t want to be unplugged early and die, then you can argue from there that abortion is wrong.

The real issue here is that “what benefits me personally” is not the sole valid definition of morality. But it’s also useful to remember that “me personally” doesn’t have to be a single fixed entity, and it doesn’t have to be whoever the person making the argument decides it ought to be. It turns out the Veil of Ignorance is actually a useful idea, folks! You can argue from the violinist’s perspective, and the perspective of the person plugged into the violinist, and the lawmaker deciding whether it should be legally required to save the violinist, and the surgeon who would have to “unplug” the violinist, and everyone else who’s relevant!

(See also: a good 50% of the arguments defending the movie Passengers, and maybe 20% defending the video game The Last of Us. “If you were in the protagonist’s position, you would do exactly what he did!” But what if I was in some other position?)

I saw a Catholic blog describe what they thought “winning” would look like. One of their ideas of a win would be abortion clinics closing down for lack of customers. This is … I tried to think of a more polite phrasing than “detached from reality,” but there doesn’t seem to be a polite way to say that. But it’s detached from reality in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s intentionally malicious. I think it explains both why other people tend to interpret the religious right as genocidal, and why the religious right is always so baffled at the idea that anyone could think they want genocide.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m something of a collector of accounts of pregnancy complications. Sometimes the fetus is already dead and rotting, and the woman risks hemorrhage if she doesn’t abort. Sometimes, the newborn baby won’t be able to breathe outside the womb. I once read about a case where he would live, but would be unable to move his arms and legs and would also have incurable chronic pain.

Let’s be clear; the women who would give birth in these circumstances are not voluntary customers of abortion clinics, in the same sense that I’m not a voluntary customer when I go to the doctor to stop my immune system from ripping me apart from the inside. That’s why they tend to assume that Catholics and other right-wing Christian groups want to punish women for having pregnancy complications. I have seen feminist sites openly state that Christians think women who have fatal pregnancy complications deserved to die.

Except this Christian does not think women who have pregnancy complications should all die. They* think there’s a possible world, with no changes in medical technology, where women don’t want to get abortions at all. The only way I can think of to explain this is that they’re genuinely ignorant that these women exist.**

Now I’m going out on a limb here, because I’ve never seen OP talk about gender issues and have no idea what they think on the subject. But I’ve seen other people who have similar opinions to OP who are very invested in the idea that science supports two binary genders. If a scientist of any stripe argues that gender is not binary, they do their best to argue that the scientist’s credentials are invalid or irrelevant and the argument does not represent mainstream science.

I recently saw a blog post where someone speculated about a possible future where he*** is fired from his job and disallowed from getting Medicare because a DNA test shows he’s intersex. I wanted to grab him and shake him. “These people can’t DNA test you! They can’t live in a world where you are physically and provably intersex! They need to believe that everyone is innately male or female and chooses to defy that!”

I’m not saying these beliefs are harmless. If you think that all people can be straight, you assume responsibility for all the people who killed themselves because they couldn’t be straight. But I think OP lives in a simpler world than I do, and I think if you wanted to argue with OP, you would have to find a way to make their world more complicated.

*No pronouns are listed on their blog.

**I once saw someone say that they oppose abortion of dead fetuses because God might work a miracle. For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to assume this person is not typical.

***I don’t remember the blog name, so I can’t check pronouns, but I do remember OP is male-passing.

I avoid casting judgment on abortion, because it’s not a concept Utilitarianism was built to handle.

Suppose aborting a fetus decreases utility, because that fetus would have grown up to have a happy life. By the same token, aren’t you decreasing utility by not getting pregnant in the first place? This would seem to obligate people to keep having children up until the point where having children decreases total happiness, and that would create a lot of unhappiness for people who aren’t equipped to raise children or simply don’t want to.

Now suppose aborting a fetus increases utility, whether because the child won’t have a happy life, or for any other reason that gets away from the previous problem. Is killing the infant at birth, as some cultures do, any less moral than simply aborting? What if you’ve raised a child for five years, but realize you’ve made a mistake that will decrease total happiness–rather than continuing to raise the child, is it better to immediately kill it?

I once saw immanentizingeschatons and fnord888 trying to resolve this problem. They talked about “population ethics” and “counterpart theory” and lots of other phrases I’d never heard before, but it didn’t look like they were making much headway. Personally, I just stay out of the way. If you judge that an abortion is the right thing to do in your case, then I figure you know more about your life and your values than I do.