In college my friends and I had this epiphany about pregnancy. Under the (typically) conservative mindset, all life is deserving to reach birth and to prevent that is itself akin to murder. So with that in mind, shouldn’t we be putting fetus’ on trial when they absorb the other fetus in utero? I mean, the absorbing fetus is literally murdering the absorbed one. And we just let these murderers walk around free for their whole life?
It sure is fun taking bad logic and applying normal logic on top of it. The results are often as silly as the concept.
Take it to the extreme; most eggs fertilized in sex don’t result in pregnancy, they aren’t able to bind to the uteral lining and die. Anyone who has unprotected sex is very likely to cause the death of one or more “people.” Having children is now murder.
Or, since things like self-awareness, memories, consciousness etc. don’t matter in terms of personhood, if you talk someone out of becoming pregnant in the first place you’re murdering that potential child.
The problem with trying to go to the extreme to reveal how absurd and irrational anti-choice beliefs are is that most of the time the religious nutjobs would just agree with you. They’d love if women were required by law to try and get pregnant every cycle.
Or just let the mother-to-be charge her insurance at hospital rates for all the blood transfusions and other health care she’s giving the fetus.
(As a bit of completely unwarranted pedantry — and I’m not a lawyer — most crimes in the US and other common law countries have a mental component (mens rea). This means that e.g. to be guilty of manslaughter you must have chosen to do something willfully harmful or at least unacceptably dangerous, such as attacking someone or driving drunk. So fetuses and babies cannot be guilty of those crimes. Of course, the “charge your insurance” thing probably doesn’t work either.)
In college my friends and I had this epiphany about pregnancy. Under the (typically) conservative mindset, all life is deserving to reach birth and to prevent that is itself akin to murder. So with that in mind, shouldn’t we be putting fetus’ on trial when they absorb the other fetus in utero? I mean, the absorbing fetus is literally murdering the absorbed one. And we just let these murderers walk around free for their whole life?
It sure is fun taking bad logic and applying normal logic on top of it. The results are often as silly as the concept.
Take it to the extreme; most eggs fertilized in sex don’t result in pregnancy, they aren’t able to bind to the uteral lining and die. Anyone who has unprotected sex is very likely to cause the death of one or more “people.” Having children is now murder.
Or, since things like self-awareness, memories, consciousness etc. don’t matter in terms of personhood, if you talk someone out of becoming pregnant in the first place you’re murdering that potential child.
The problem with trying to go to the extreme to reveal how absurd and irrational anti-choice beliefs are is that most of the time the religious nutjobs would just agree with you. They’d love if women were required by law to try and get pregnant every cycle.
Manslaughter charges for the baby if childbirth kills the mother
Or just let the mother-to-be charge her insurance at hospital rates for all the blood transfusions and other health care she’s giving the fetus.
(As a bit of completely unwarranted pedantry — and I’m not a lawyer — most crimes in the US and other common law countries have a mental component (mens rea). This means that e.g. to be guilty of manslaughter you must have chosen to do something willfully harmful or at least unacceptably dangerous, such as attacking someone or driving drunk. So fetuses and babies cannot be guilty of those crimes. Of course, the “charge your insurance” thing probably doesn’t work either.)