Political Crossfire Forums

The personhood angle is horribly convoluted.

For instance, if a man punches a pregnant woman in the stomach, thus ending that fetuses life, I think it's reasonable to charge that man with murder or manslaughter. In fact, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin will charge a person who kills a fetus with one of those charges.

And yet all of those states will allow a woman to end a fetuses life, at will.

Where does that leave the concept of personhood? If you think that a fetus isn't human life, than you must logically conclude that killing a fetus isn't murder or manslaughter, it is destruction of property and assault, or perhaps a distinct crime altogether (but the punishment for such a crime would logically be as bad or worse than murder/manslaughter, so this is kind of a distinction without a difference). If you think that a fetus is human life, than you must logically conclude that those who engage in abortion are committing murder or manslaughter.

The only way around that is to argue that because the fetus resides in a woman's body, it removes her culpability for killing it. This is the "parasite" argument. Let's explore that.

The idea is that up until a certain amount of time has passed, a fetus isn't viable. It cannot "live" on it's own. Therefore, it's not a human life. That viability limit (50% chance of survival) is typically set at around 21 weeks. But that doesn't really make any sense - there are no fetuses that can be born at 22 weeks and live on their own. Without the application of truly miraculous technology and the constant care of somebody else, that fetus will die. Period, end of story. It doesn't stop being a parasite once it leaves the body after full-term, either - in fact, it becomes all the more parasitic, demanding an ever-increasing amount of external resources and energy to survive. And really you can take this argument forward pretty much until the child is capable of crawling around long enough to find what is necessary to eat, on it's own, without relying upon someone else giving it resources.

All of it points to the idea that "personhood" isn't the right standard. "When is a person a person?" isn't the right question. And when you step back from the abortion debate and look at it from a distance, you can see that even if a fetus is a person, that doesn't mean that killing it is necessarily wrong. We do it all the time when we turn off life support, or when we sentence someone to death, or when we go to war for our ideals. Really the issue is so multi-faceted that you can only come to a proper conclusion by investigating each individual abortion and it's motivations.

Which brings me around to the only real conclusion I can offer you: the policy justifications for legal abortion are obvious, clear-cut and indisputable. Leaving it up to the mother is not a perfect or even particularly moral position to take, but it is impossible to take another one without committing to actions that are arguably just as morally wrong. Do we want a pregnant woman to go to jail because she ended the life of her 7 week old fetus? Do we want to make such a private decision subject to public review? Do we want to increase the likelihood of botched abortions, which used to kill 5000 pregnant women every year in the United States, instead of 6?

Those are the right questions to ask from a policy perspective.

There needs to be less babies and people and more abortions.

Abortion isn't wrong, a fetus is not a person if we recognize people as rational beings instead a combination of unique DNA. Fetuses are about as intelligent as a duck, or a crab or something. Its like pulling a plug on a brain dead person.

Casey Anthony didn't commit murder, just an extremely late term abortion.