After I asked an atheist abortionist his theory of mind and view on ethics (still no answer on those things) I was challenged on Twitter to respond to a series of threads on abortion. I’ll go through some of them:

 

https://twitter.com/shirospirit/status/1572269894170722305?s=46&t=8s2EgsJssB4V2o2L6s6JzQ

This part of the threads is an awkwardly written statements regarding women, consent, and sexual activity. It tries to suggests that some analogy exists between pro life position and rape. That being they both deny women consent to some activity with their body. 

Of course, the relevant difference is because of moral obligations. Women have obligations to children that they don’t have to sexual partners. A child isn’t making some conscious choice to exists or to inflict the pains accompanied in pregnancy to their mother. Furthermore, a child isn’t violating a woman in the same way a rapist violates a woman. Women are designed to bear children, they aren’t designed to be raped. So, the analogy has relevant dissimilarities.

 

https://twitter.com/shirospirit/status/1575530549384462336?s=46&t=8s2EgsJssB4V2o2L6s6JzQ

In this thread, he argues that initial consent doesn’t equate to perpetual consent. This is true, but we often see that one may remain liable because the initial choice. Like a vehicle that cuts over lane of traffic causing an accident is liable for the accidents they cause. The driver initially consents to the movement but they didn’t consent to the accidents but remain responsible for them. 

There’s also an issue of retroactive consent. Supposing a woman may later come to regret their choices of partners, they may come to think that because their current disposition that they were violated. I don’t subscribe to that but I wonder if he does.

 

https://twitter.com/shirospirit/status/1574444584431755265?s=46&t=8s2EgsJssB4V2o2L6s6JzQ

Here we have an argument that without gestation, an underdeveloped human would die. Therefore, they’re not a baby. Of course, the position I’m presenting doesn’t state that infants in the womb are sufficient for physical independence. It’s that they are sufficient for personhood.
Also, I’m not sure if this is a part of the argument, you can’t just assume this is a case where you can infer from the parts of something to the whole. The fact that the parts of a fetus (sperm, egg, development, etc) aren’t persons doesn’t imply when combined they aren’t. If this line of argument was taken serious, then adult humans aren’t persons either because their parts alone aren’t sufficient in and of themselves for having a person. Maybe he wasn’t intending to argue this but it seems implied by the bakers analogy. Mind you a cake isn’t a creature in nature that has stages of development. 

But suppose human development all happened in a machine outside a woman’s body. Think of a lab that can create all these humans as if we were in Blade Runner. Would the company or the government (whoever owns the machines) have the right to kill the child inside? If bodily autonomy is the only condition, then would the abortionist agree that it’s wrong? 

The position is bizarre, it states that the facts regarding the baby in the womb do not determine whether it is a person. The condition that makes a baby a person is whether a mother desires to come to term with her child. This is bizarre in many different ways. There’s cases where women don’t know that they’re pregnant. That means some women have possessed non baby until the point of birth or even after because a mother may pass out not even aware of what has happened. Under this view, non babies can be born. 

There’s the issue of identical situations. Imagine two hypothetical worlds where a mother does and doesn’t go through with a pregnancy. In each case, they have the same situation with the same individuals. But according to Void Screamer, in the circumstance she goes to term with them non baby, it magically becomes a baby because the mothers intent. Which means that no facts about the baby in the womb makes it a baby. It’s merely those facts are necessary, but not sufficient for a baby. It just lacks the magic of the mothers preference which somehow makes a baby a baby. It means that a baby and non baby can be identical in everyone of their qualities but if a mother doesn’t accept it then it’s not a baby.

Lastly, this gets rid of any civic responsibilities. Why should you be forced to use your body for the greater good of society? The only position that justifies this is a hard positions like Anarcho Capitalism. But it’s hard to imagine abortionists that maintain healthcare is a human right will agree to such. Furthermore, it justifies the abilities of parents to neglect their children as ethical. There’s two different dependencies a person may have (at least for this argument), biological and functional dependence.  Biological dependence is the idea that someone is dependent on your organs or internal systems. Functional dependence is when a person requires another to take care of them (elderly, sick, damaged, infant, etc). A baby goes from being biologically dependent to needing a parent to take care of it. If the former dependence implies you can kill then, then why not the latter?

There’s more poorly reasoned threads that an intelligent thinker would’ve boiled down to just 5. But competence is in short supply when dealing with abortionists. It’s basically 18 threads of someone trying to argue bodily autonomy (a rather uninteresting attempt) implies women have the right to kill their children. I’ve addressed this before:

 

Abortionists argue that women have “bodily autonomy” and therefore should be able to kill the babies inside them. There is some ambiguity to this notion of “Bodily Autonomy”. What precisely does it mean? Bodily Autonomy usually refers to the right to self-governance over one’s own body without external influence or coercion. The issue is that one must assume that the infant is a part of the mother in order for certain ways of forming the argument to work. As Dr. James Anderson said:

While all people have certain rights over their own bodies, the false assumption is that a baby is merely a body part of its mother, like one of her limbs or organs. That’s biologically confused. The baby is an individual human with a genetic identity distinct from his or her mother and all her body parts. The unborn child is attached to the mother and dependent on her for life, but the fetus isn’t a part of his or her mother. A mother’s rights do not include the freedom to kill her own child.

https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2019/08/rebutting-objections-to-the-pro-life-position/

The other way it is phrased is that it doesn’t matter whether the baby inside their mother is a human with moral value because the mother isn’t obligated to keep it alive regardless. That is tied to the violinist argument above and it is talked about by others here:

The second, more sophisticated version, which Horn calls the “Right to Refuse” argument, was first introduced by moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson in 1971.[4] It contends that a woman has a right to refuse to let the unborn child use her body to survive. Just as a person is not obligated to donate an organ to save the life of someone else, the pregnant woman is not obligated to provide her uterus (and the sustenance and protection it affords) to her child.

This argument has enormous problems. Abortion, in the vast majority of cases,[5] is not merely the withholding or withdrawing of “life support” from the unborn child—it is the intentional and active killing of that child, often by dismemberment. This killing violates the child’s right to life (the right not to be intentionally killed) and right to bodily integrity. Indeed, “if people have a right to bodily integrity and so do not have a duty to donate a kidney,” writes philosopher Christopher Kaczor, “then people in utero have a right not to have their bodily integrity fatally violated through abortion.”[6]

Moreover, even if abortion were not intentional killing (i.e., if it were simply a refusal to aid the child by removing her from the womb), abortion would still be wrong because a pregnant woman does have an obligation to allow her baby to live and grow in the womb. Here’s why.

First, the father and mother, except in cases of rape, willingly engaged in an activity that caused (and is biologically ordered to) the creation of a new, dependent human being. So they bear responsibility for the resulting child.

Second, parents have special obligations to their dependent offspring that they do not have to others. Fathers, for example, must pay child support even if they did not intend or desire to become fathers. Parents may not abandon their children or refuse to provide for their needs (though they may relinquish those obligations through adoption).

Indeed, more generally, “we are by nature members of communities,” explains ethicist Patrick Lee. “[O]ur flourishing involves being in communion with others. And communion with others of itself—even if we find ourselves united with others because of a physical or social relationship which precedes our consent—entails duties or responsibilities.”[7]

Parental obligation may not require extraordinary acts (like donating a kidney), but it does require basic, ordinary care, such as the nourishment and shelter provided during pregnancy.[8] If unborn children are valuable members of the human family, like born children, then the same parental duties that apply after birth are present beforehand as well.

Third, the purpose of the uterus is to gestate the unborn child—it is where that child belongs. All human beings, during their prenatal stages of development, rely on it for care and protection. “The uterus exists for the unborn child rather than for the mother,” notes Stephanie Gray.[9] It is reasonable to think that a child has a right to live in her natural environment.[10]

Finally, even apart from the other reasons, a moral obligation seems to arise when we alone are in a position to provide ordinary care (food and shelter) to someone who needs it to survive.[11] “Suppose you live in a cabin far out in the wilderness, cut off from civilization by extreme distance and weather for much of the year, say, nine months,” writes Mathew Lu, a philosophy professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. “One day you return to the cabin to discover that an infant has been left at the door without explanation. … Do you have an obligation to care for the infant, who will surely die if you do not take it in?”

https://www.mccl.org/post/2016/12/19/my-body-my-choice-why-bodily-autonomy-doesnt-justify-abortion

Some maintain that dependence is a sufficient explanation for abortions. The pre-born infant is dependent upon their mothers and therefore, she has the right to relinquish such activity (blood flow, nutrition, etc). The issue with this is that post-birth infants are dependent on their mothers. Even further, many humans are dependent on life-saving technologies. We often don’t advocate that mothers can starve their children or that we have the right to kill those with pacemakers.

Suppose your toddler was hooked up to you in order to save his life, is it wrong to force a parent to save their child’s life? If so, then why is it right to force them to feed or deliver them to safety? People often arbitrarily would allow for force somewhere.

Many will say it is the type of dependence one has on another person. Why is one dependence morally relevant and another not?

 

https://spirited-tech.com/2019/05/25/the-pro-life-catalogue/