1. If abortion is usually utility-maximizing, then it seems like infanticide would be as well. The only relevant difference in utility between ending the existence of the unborn and the born seems to be the disutility of pregnancy, but usually pregnancy is not so bad as to make the difference in outweighing the net utility of a fetus' life. So, if it is usually utility-maximizing to abort the fetus, it will be because of utility unrelated to pregnancy that would usually also justify infanticide.
2. Your counter-argument here seems to fail against the famous violinist case which is one of the main motivations for the bodily autonomy justification for abortion. If we imagine a violinist who needs to be plugging into to you in order to prevent their arm from falling off, it still seems permissible to unplug the violinist and leave them to their fate. This suggests that you are making the same mistake that bodily autonomy proponents think all pro-lifers make: you are implicitly assumimg that the violinist and the fetus have some right to use the woman's body, when our intuitions suggest that they don't.
Since fetuses are future people, all of these views would imply that fetuses are persons in a highly relevant sense.
Responses to potential counterpoints:
- "Not every fetus is a counterfactual future person, since having an abortion doesn't necessarily change the amount of children a person is going to have". For starters, this justifies infanticide, so long as you make sure to have another child for every infant you kill. Secondly, this still doesn't justify abortion, because the child can be given up for adoption, and the mother can still have however many children she would have had.
- "I still think making abortion illegal would be bad for other reasons, such as farmed animal welfare, x-risk reduction, etc." Sure, that's valid, but you'd still have to concede that fetuses _are_ persons in the relevant sense. You'd have to argue that killing fetuses (or infants or young children, since there's little moral difference if you reject person-affecting views) is a positive good, because it helps farmed animals / reduce x-risk.
- "The 'relevant sense' in this case is the sense of 'person' which should be adhered to in legal/social situations, which should be _distinct_ from the sense of moral patient". This objection works, but if that is your objection, I'd be quite interested in reading a post from you which describes this demarcation and why you adhere to it.
Fetuses are people in the same way future generations are. But most people oppose forced procreation (myself included). Though I was saying that I think the utility calculus also favors abortion. Whether the fetus is a person mostly has to do with my nontrivial credence in nonutilitarian views.
You could oppose abortion and also oppose forced procreation, the same way most people against global poverty support charity but oppose forced reappropriation of people’s capital.
(Your separate argument on knock-on effects is valid, although as we’ve discussed, I think there are significant considerations in favor of increasing the human population.)
I’m also surprised that your credences in views where fetuses _aren’t_ persons happen to be the operative ones for shaping your actions. If fetuses are persons, it’s wrong to kill them. If they’re not, it’s okay. But the wrongness of killing fetuses—if they are persons—is quite high. Even a 10% credence that fetuses are persons, under maximizing expected choiceworthiness, would be enough to oppose abortion.
I agree that #3 is impermissible. But I’d like to hear your reasons for arguing that the fetus is not a person. Does passage through the vaginal canal impart personhood? If not, then how do you know when personhood is imparted? It seems strange that on one side of a hospital we can be killing fetuses at 24 weeks, and on the other side at NICU, we can be desperately trying to help them live. The only difference is the will of the parent. Do I, as a mother, have the power to impart personhood?
There's tremendous evidence that, at the very least, birth marks a radical shift in the psychological life of the newborn. Whether or not that shift is what imparts personhood depends on your theory of what personhood is, but if you think personhood relies in some way on a certain level of psychological complexity, then birth would probably be extremely relevant.
Excellent point, and convincing. I now see that proponents of the bodily autonomy argument are just smuggling the not-a-person conclusion in through the backdoor. Thus: preventing something that is not a person from becoming a person harms no persons; harming something that does become a person eventually harms a (now one-armed) person. Changing the frame to maiming rather than killing shows that the bodily autonomy argument only works if we're already secretly agreeing with the not-a-person argument.
A more direct argument can be given for why abortions should be legal even if they leave the fetus permanently crippled. I can't tell whether you think the forced blood/organ donation cases are analogous to forced pregnancy (such that if the former should be illegal then so should the latter). But if you think they are relevantly analogous when the victim is at risk of death, then you should also think they are analogous when the victim is at the risk of being crippled. It seems that individuals should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from being permanently crippled. Thus, for the very same reason, individuals should not be forced to deliver a pregnancy to save a fetus from being permanently crippled.
The basic argument is this:
1. People should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying.
2. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying, then they should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled.
3. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled, then they should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
4. Therefore, people should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
There are a few possible responses:
* Deny (1). I'm assuming no one denies this, so I'll skip it.
* Deny (2). This would assume that we have stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent deaths. Even if this is true, this view would undermine the argument you provided in your OP. In your OP, you claimed "And so if you can kill a person who is dependent on your body to end their dependence, then surely you can slice off their arm". But if there is stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent to prevent deaths, then your claim would be false. A pro-choicer could maintain that abortions should be legal if they cause the death of the fetus, but not if they cause the crippling of the fetus (just as the one who denies (2) maintains that withholding blood/organ donation should be legal if they cause the death of the victim, but not if the cause the crippling of the victim).
* Deny (3). This would assume that forced blood/organ donations are not analogous to forced pregnancy. Now, I happen to think they are relevantly analogous, but this would just rehash the same dialectic in every abortion debate that I'm sure you're familiar with. The important thing to note here is that the dialectic does not meaningfully change if we talk about cripplings rather than deaths. Whether or not forced pregnancies are analogous to forced blood/organ donations is independent of whether the victim will die or become crippled.
Question: given utilitarianism, why does it matter whether the fetus is a person? Surely the utility implications of abortion don't change once the fetus acquires personhood. For illustration, suppose you think that the unborn become persons one-hundred days into pregnancy. It seems very weird to think that the utility of abortion is x on day 99, but y (where y is some value vastly lower than x) on day 100. It seems like the only way to make personhood relevant to abortion is to bring in some non-utilitarian considerations (e.g. rights).
(I should note that the above is a purely rhetorical question, since the unborn are persons from conception and utilitarianism is false.)
Utilitarians ought to like rights. They make things go well.
I think one of the best cases against the pro-choice view is that, whatever its merits in isolation, it runs the risk of watering down norms regarding the sanctity of life that could make society worse off in innumerable other areas.
Cutting of arms only seems "obviously" wrong to me in a sense that this would create a class of highly visible abortion victims, which would then lead to much lower approval towards abortion. It reminds me of the idea that we would have done something against CO2 emissions a long time ago if it gave the sky a brown tint, simply because then it wouldn't be invisible anymore.
Why is it “obviously wrong” to cut off a fetus arm to end a pregnancy? If the argument is that bringing someone who is crippled into the world costs more in medical and social costs then they are worth, then the argument you are making falls flat. After all, killing someone would *not* be categorically worse than crippling them. It’s a bit like saying that death must always be worse than torture, and then calling someone absurd for not wanting to subject someone to infinite torture. Your prior assumption is flawed.
If we are approaching this from a rights perspective, then I don’t see why it’s “obviously” wrong that lopping off an arm is bad. It’s a less restrictive means of asserting the right to choose, and the fetus can’t exactly make a choice of its own here. The nonarbitrary justification would be “rights”.
To a fully born children you could just refuse them in any services from yourself. It won’t necessarily kill them, but you’ll have no obligation and no rights from being a parent
Suppose a woman lives way out in the middle of nowhere, far away from any village or town. She has a baby, but a few months in decides she no longer wants to feed her. On the violinist argument, it seems she can stop feeding her child and let the baby starve. But I doubt many proponents of the argument would accept this conclusion.
Sure, intuitively it’s wrong, but I’m just being coherent on behalf of someone with those views
They just have to accept it
Less incoherent view imho is some sort of “measure one’s cognition through amount of one neurons and when said amount is sufficiently small to negate all doubts it’s okay to kill the baby”
Thanks for the reply. I think that your reply is sensible if you are already very confident that abortion is like the violinist case, for instance, and that people are very sexist, such that their intuitions about what should be imposed upon women are systematically distorted. But I'm not very confident about either of those things, and I think this is a decently direct case.
If we think this is the byproduct of bias against women, seems to make sense to imagine a scenario where men gain the ability to get pregnant.
>> seems to make sense to imagine a scenario where men gain the ability to get pregnant.
The problem with this, though, is that womanhood and pregnancy are so closely linked that imagining "men getting pregnant" is essentially the same thing as imagining "men being women". Saying "My view is not problematic because I think men should have to give up their autonomy if they get pregnant" is equivalent to saying "My view is not problematic because I think men would have to give up their autonomy if they were women too". Such a comparison doesn't actually eliminate any of the flawed background intuitions one might have about women being expected to give up their autonomy.
Going back to my comparison with gays, your statement is a bit like saying, "I don't think my argument that gay men should be banned from locker rooms is rooted in homophobic intuitions, because I believe that if straight men also wished to have sex with other men, they also should also be banned from locker rooms." Obviously, such a statement wouldn't really show that biased or homophobic intuitions weren't at the root of such an argument!
Therefore, in order to eliminate the risk of such biases contaminating our intuitions, it's necessary to consider situations which are not simply slightly modified cases of pregnancy.
One brief note--you appeal to the potentially confounding effects of sexism on our intuitions. But isn't there a more confounding effect of our prejudice against flesh eating zombies?
No, I think a fetus-person would have to be a mindless person that attaches to and feeds off another body. I actually think this is a straightforward comparison that highlights the horror of being forced into pregnancy and childbirth.
Boy, I wonder why women might say that, in a culture where they will be viciously attacked if they say they regret having children... Regardless, you still have 4% of women who clearly do regret children, and you have to admit that their experience must have been awful, right?
The initial claim here seems clearly false. Not all women can get pregnant, and it's not too implausible that some non-women can (e.g. people with Swyer syndrome, who plausibly are not female). Even if you appeal to a kind of proper-function view (according to which S's inability to get pregnant counts as a defect iff S is a woman), that wouldn't mean that men who gained the ability to get pregnant had suddenly "become women." At most, they would be men with some sort of unusual medical condition.
Also, it seems like most of the intuitive force of the zombie example comes from the violent language and imagery. I don't think most people (including most feminists) would describe pregnancy as "a painful, months-long process of [unborn children] burrowing into their victims’ bodies." Nor would they describe birth as the child "[ripping] open the victim’s genitals in an excruciating, life-threatening, and often permanently damaging process." The whole thought experiment is meant to invoke images of gnashing teeth and shredded viscera. This looks less like "eliminating the risk of [bias]," and more like using allegations of sexism to justify putting one's thumb on the scale.
As for the claim that pro-life thought experiments only appeal to people who have some pre-theoretic intuition that "women should be forced to sacrifice their bodies to sustain others," that seems wrong as well. Suppose we re-run Perry Hendricks' cabin case, except this time it's a man who needs to use his body to support the child. Maybe I'm just weird, but I have *exactly* the same intuitions about this scenario as I do about the original cabin case.
The reason why pro-aborts need to appeal to outlandish thought experiments is because anytime somebody gives an example which is even vaguely analogous to real-life pregnancy, the immorality of abortion becomes clear. So we end up talking about parasitic zombies and "people seeds" floating in with the midday breeze, while all the time thousands of unborn children are being killed.
The fact some women can't get pregnant doesn't mean that womanhood isn't based around being socially recognized as the type of human that gestates young and generates ova. So women with Swyer syndrome are still women as well. You can read my response to Alex Byrne on my substack for more arguments as to that.
Of course most women don't describe their *wanted* pregnancies this way, but the post is necessarily about *unwanted* pregnancies (which are extremely traumatic and cause vast amounts of stress and suffering). "Painful, months-long process of fetuses burrowing into their victims' bodies, with their genitals being ripped apart at the end" is actually a quite recognizable description about what it's like to be forced to go through an unwanted pregnancy. Childbirth is extremely painful and generally results in genital tearing (which can often be severe and lead to incontinence) and childbirth is unfortunately still often deadly. Implantation is also routinely described as a burrowing process. What I am providing is a description of pregnancy/chidlbirth from the point of view of a woman who desperately doesn't want to be pregnant, so the readers can understand what a serious burden this is to force upon someone.
The physical process of gestation is identical whether the pregnancy is wanted or unwanted. Either "a painful, months-long process of [unborn children] burrowing into their victims’ bodies" is a fair description of both types of pregnancy, or it's a fair description of neither. I also very much doubt that most women with unwanted pregnancies would describe their pregnancy this way. In my experience, the only people who talk like this are pro-abortion activists.
The dis-analogy of the cases is evident from your own example. Do you seriously think that the implantation of a zygote is even vaguely analogous to a zombie clawing its way into a person's intestines? If that were the case, you'd think people would *feel* implantation, as I imagine they'd probably feel somebody ripping their intestines open. This is farcical. Examples like this are only ever used because sensible ones give a result that pro-abortion people don't like.
Yes, I think people routinely describe wanted pregnancies in ways that downplay the suffering involved because they are excited to become mothers. That's not strange at all.
>> You would feel implantation
At this point, I have to laugh, because I've been pregnant and did feel implantation (it felt like strong cramping and nausea). This is extremely common. You are betraying your ignorance of the process of pregnancy here. Before my abortion I dealt with vomiting all the time, as most women do, and I didn't even have complications - which are common and cause far worse side effects.
It seems obvious to me that cutting off the fetus' arm is *worse* than killing it. If you cut off the fetus' arm, then the fetus will be born and develop a large number of desires in the course of its life that will be thwarted at various points by the resultant disability. But if you kill the fetus, no desires will develop in the first place to be thwarted at any point. Of course, the fetus will "lose out" on a valuable future, but I don't think there's any convincing reason to think that "losing out" is worse than the "losing out" that occurs whenever a woman simply avoids getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course, some people will probably say this misses the point because we're supposed to assume the fetus is a person for sake of the argument. But it's unclear to me if that means we're supposed to assume the fetus has desires and interests or if we're supposed to assume there's some inherent moral value the fetus has apart from those things. If it's the former, then I would say that assumption just doesn't reflect reality, because (at least for 95%+ of all abortions) the fetus in question uncontroversially lacks those features. But if it's the latter, then I would say that's just an incoherent view of personhood that no pro-abortion person should be expected to consider.
This is why I think it's ultimately impossible to separate discussions about abortion into "bodily autonomy" questions and "personhood" questions - unless your conception of personhood is totally unmoored from any sort of actual quality in the world, then it's just not possible to assume a being is a person without shifting some concrete facts about the situation. It's like asking "Would the death penalty for jaywalking be acceptable if jaywalking was the greatest imaginable evil?" In order for jaywalking to be the greatest imaginable evil, then it would have to have some non-moral features (causing horrendous suffering, involving extreme cruelty, etc) that it doesn't actually have. But if you're just asking me to imagine extreme moral evil magically associating with jaywalking for some unspecified metaphysical reason, then it's hard to understand what possible insight that could provide into the actual reality of the situation.
"If abortions left fetuses alive but permanently, harmfully crippled, they would seem to be impermissible......But surely if it’s permissible to kill the fetus in order to end a pregnancy, then it’s permissible to chop off it’s arm to end the pregnancy."
Don't you think that we can build an ethical model by synthesising different principles, even if there is somewhat friction between them? So, a pro-choicer might say, the bodily autonomy principle should be implemented until it begins producing externalities. If one defines externalities as pain experienced by conscious entities, then pro-choice can conceivably get around this.
The bodily autonomy argument is a reason why abortion should be legal even if it kills osmeone with rights rather than a reason fetuses don't have rights
Jess Flanigan makes your argument here
https://brill.com/view/journals/jmp/aop/article-10.1163-17455243-BJA10059/article-10.1163-17455243-BJA10059.xml?language=en
Great minds . . .
Two Objections to your Views:
1. If abortion is usually utility-maximizing, then it seems like infanticide would be as well. The only relevant difference in utility between ending the existence of the unborn and the born seems to be the disutility of pregnancy, but usually pregnancy is not so bad as to make the difference in outweighing the net utility of a fetus' life. So, if it is usually utility-maximizing to abort the fetus, it will be because of utility unrelated to pregnancy that would usually also justify infanticide.
2. Your counter-argument here seems to fail against the famous violinist case which is one of the main motivations for the bodily autonomy justification for abortion. If we imagine a violinist who needs to be plugging into to you in order to prevent their arm from falling off, it still seems permissible to unplug the violinist and leave them to their fate. This suggests that you are making the same mistake that bodily autonomy proponents think all pro-lifers make: you are implicitly assumimg that the violinist and the fetus have some right to use the woman's body, when our intuitions suggest that they don't.
I'm surprised that you "think a fetus is probably not a person in the relevant sense". Don't you:
- Reject person-affecting views: https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-new-utterly-decisive-argument-against
- Reject the procreation asymmetry: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-dangerous-population
- Explicitly believe that future people's happiness is worth the same as an equal amount of present people's suffering: https://benthams.substack.com/p/deducing-a-radical-utilitarian-conclusion
Since fetuses are future people, all of these views would imply that fetuses are persons in a highly relevant sense.
Responses to potential counterpoints:
- "Not every fetus is a counterfactual future person, since having an abortion doesn't necessarily change the amount of children a person is going to have". For starters, this justifies infanticide, so long as you make sure to have another child for every infant you kill. Secondly, this still doesn't justify abortion, because the child can be given up for adoption, and the mother can still have however many children she would have had.
- "I still think making abortion illegal would be bad for other reasons, such as farmed animal welfare, x-risk reduction, etc." Sure, that's valid, but you'd still have to concede that fetuses _are_ persons in the relevant sense. You'd have to argue that killing fetuses (or infants or young children, since there's little moral difference if you reject person-affecting views) is a positive good, because it helps farmed animals / reduce x-risk.
- "The 'relevant sense' in this case is the sense of 'person' which should be adhered to in legal/social situations, which should be _distinct_ from the sense of moral patient". This objection works, but if that is your objection, I'd be quite interested in reading a post from you which describes this demarcation and why you adhere to it.
Fetuses are people in the same way future generations are. But most people oppose forced procreation (myself included). Though I was saying that I think the utility calculus also favors abortion. Whether the fetus is a person mostly has to do with my nontrivial credence in nonutilitarian views.
You could oppose abortion and also oppose forced procreation, the same way most people against global poverty support charity but oppose forced reappropriation of people’s capital.
(Your separate argument on knock-on effects is valid, although as we’ve discussed, I think there are significant considerations in favor of increasing the human population.)
I’m also surprised that your credences in views where fetuses _aren’t_ persons happen to be the operative ones for shaping your actions. If fetuses are persons, it’s wrong to kill them. If they’re not, it’s okay. But the wrongness of killing fetuses—if they are persons—is quite high. Even a 10% credence that fetuses are persons, under maximizing expected choiceworthiness, would be enough to oppose abortion.
I think that bodily autonomy arguments complicate the legal question under uncertainty.
I agree that #3 is impermissible. But I’d like to hear your reasons for arguing that the fetus is not a person. Does passage through the vaginal canal impart personhood? If not, then how do you know when personhood is imparted? It seems strange that on one side of a hospital we can be killing fetuses at 24 weeks, and on the other side at NICU, we can be desperately trying to help them live. The only difference is the will of the parent. Do I, as a mother, have the power to impart personhood?
There's tremendous evidence that, at the very least, birth marks a radical shift in the psychological life of the newborn. Whether or not that shift is what imparts personhood depends on your theory of what personhood is, but if you think personhood relies in some way on a certain level of psychological complexity, then birth would probably be extremely relevant.
Excellent point, and convincing. I now see that proponents of the bodily autonomy argument are just smuggling the not-a-person conclusion in through the backdoor. Thus: preventing something that is not a person from becoming a person harms no persons; harming something that does become a person eventually harms a (now one-armed) person. Changing the frame to maiming rather than killing shows that the bodily autonomy argument only works if we're already secretly agreeing with the not-a-person argument.
A more direct argument can be given for why abortions should be legal even if they leave the fetus permanently crippled. I can't tell whether you think the forced blood/organ donation cases are analogous to forced pregnancy (such that if the former should be illegal then so should the latter). But if you think they are relevantly analogous when the victim is at risk of death, then you should also think they are analogous when the victim is at the risk of being crippled. It seems that individuals should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from being permanently crippled. Thus, for the very same reason, individuals should not be forced to deliver a pregnancy to save a fetus from being permanently crippled.
The basic argument is this:
1. People should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying.
2. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying, then they should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled.
3. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled, then they should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
4. Therefore, people should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
There are a few possible responses:
* Deny (1). I'm assuming no one denies this, so I'll skip it.
* Deny (2). This would assume that we have stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent deaths. Even if this is true, this view would undermine the argument you provided in your OP. In your OP, you claimed "And so if you can kill a person who is dependent on your body to end their dependence, then surely you can slice off their arm". But if there is stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent to prevent deaths, then your claim would be false. A pro-choicer could maintain that abortions should be legal if they cause the death of the fetus, but not if they cause the crippling of the fetus (just as the one who denies (2) maintains that withholding blood/organ donation should be legal if they cause the death of the victim, but not if the cause the crippling of the victim).
* Deny (3). This would assume that forced blood/organ donations are not analogous to forced pregnancy. Now, I happen to think they are relevantly analogous, but this would just rehash the same dialectic in every abortion debate that I'm sure you're familiar with. The important thing to note here is that the dialectic does not meaningfully change if we talk about cripplings rather than deaths. Whether or not forced pregnancies are analogous to forced blood/organ donations is independent of whether the victim will die or become crippled.
Question: given utilitarianism, why does it matter whether the fetus is a person? Surely the utility implications of abortion don't change once the fetus acquires personhood. For illustration, suppose you think that the unborn become persons one-hundred days into pregnancy. It seems very weird to think that the utility of abortion is x on day 99, but y (where y is some value vastly lower than x) on day 100. It seems like the only way to make personhood relevant to abortion is to bring in some non-utilitarian considerations (e.g. rights).
(I should note that the above is a purely rhetorical question, since the unborn are persons from conception and utilitarianism is false.)
Utilitarians ought to like rights. They make things go well.
I think one of the best cases against the pro-choice view is that, whatever its merits in isolation, it runs the risk of watering down norms regarding the sanctity of life that could make society worse off in innumerable other areas.
Cutting of arms only seems "obviously" wrong to me in a sense that this would create a class of highly visible abortion victims, which would then lead to much lower approval towards abortion. It reminds me of the idea that we would have done something against CO2 emissions a long time ago if it gave the sky a brown tint, simply because then it wouldn't be invisible anymore.
Why is it “obviously wrong” to cut off a fetus arm to end a pregnancy? If the argument is that bringing someone who is crippled into the world costs more in medical and social costs then they are worth, then the argument you are making falls flat. After all, killing someone would *not* be categorically worse than crippling them. It’s a bit like saying that death must always be worse than torture, and then calling someone absurd for not wanting to subject someone to infinite torture. Your prior assumption is flawed.
If we are approaching this from a rights perspective, then I don’t see why it’s “obviously” wrong that lopping off an arm is bad. It’s a less restrictive means of asserting the right to choose, and the fetus can’t exactly make a choice of its own here. The nonarbitrary justification would be “rights”.
My favorite reply to the violinist argument is to ask why Rothbard is wrong in applying it to fully born children (see The Ethics of Liberty p. 100).
But it’s incoherent
To a fully born children you could just refuse them in any services from yourself. It won’t necessarily kill them, but you’ll have no obligation and no rights from being a parent
Suppose a woman lives way out in the middle of nowhere, far away from any village or town. She has a baby, but a few months in decides she no longer wants to feed her. On the violinist argument, it seems she can stop feeding her child and let the baby starve. But I doubt many proponents of the argument would accept this conclusion.
Sure, intuitively it’s wrong, but I’m just being coherent on behalf of someone with those views
They just have to accept it
Less incoherent view imho is some sort of “measure one’s cognition through amount of one neurons and when said amount is sufficiently small to negate all doubts it’s okay to kill the baby”
Interesting take!
FYI I've written a response here.
https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/bodily-autonomy-arguments-are-clearly
Thanks for the reply. I think that your reply is sensible if you are already very confident that abortion is like the violinist case, for instance, and that people are very sexist, such that their intuitions about what should be imposed upon women are systematically distorted. But I'm not very confident about either of those things, and I think this is a decently direct case.
If we think this is the byproduct of bias against women, seems to make sense to imagine a scenario where men gain the ability to get pregnant.
>> seems to make sense to imagine a scenario where men gain the ability to get pregnant.
The problem with this, though, is that womanhood and pregnancy are so closely linked that imagining "men getting pregnant" is essentially the same thing as imagining "men being women". Saying "My view is not problematic because I think men should have to give up their autonomy if they get pregnant" is equivalent to saying "My view is not problematic because I think men would have to give up their autonomy if they were women too". Such a comparison doesn't actually eliminate any of the flawed background intuitions one might have about women being expected to give up their autonomy.
Going back to my comparison with gays, your statement is a bit like saying, "I don't think my argument that gay men should be banned from locker rooms is rooted in homophobic intuitions, because I believe that if straight men also wished to have sex with other men, they also should also be banned from locker rooms." Obviously, such a statement wouldn't really show that biased or homophobic intuitions weren't at the root of such an argument!
Therefore, in order to eliminate the risk of such biases contaminating our intuitions, it's necessary to consider situations which are not simply slightly modified cases of pregnancy.
One brief note--you appeal to the potentially confounding effects of sexism on our intuitions. But isn't there a more confounding effect of our prejudice against flesh eating zombies?
No, I think a fetus-person would have to be a mindless person that attaches to and feeds off another body. I actually think this is a straightforward comparison that highlights the horror of being forced into pregnancy and childbirth.
96% of women who are denied abortions later say they no longer wish they could have had one: https://secularprolife.org/2021/03/five-years-later-96-of-women-denied/
Do you think people would say the same thing about having their intestines ripped open by a flesh-eating zombie?
Boy, I wonder why women might say that, in a culture where they will be viciously attacked if they say they regret having children... Regardless, you still have 4% of women who clearly do regret children, and you have to admit that their experience must have been awful, right?
The initial claim here seems clearly false. Not all women can get pregnant, and it's not too implausible that some non-women can (e.g. people with Swyer syndrome, who plausibly are not female). Even if you appeal to a kind of proper-function view (according to which S's inability to get pregnant counts as a defect iff S is a woman), that wouldn't mean that men who gained the ability to get pregnant had suddenly "become women." At most, they would be men with some sort of unusual medical condition.
Also, it seems like most of the intuitive force of the zombie example comes from the violent language and imagery. I don't think most people (including most feminists) would describe pregnancy as "a painful, months-long process of [unborn children] burrowing into their victims’ bodies." Nor would they describe birth as the child "[ripping] open the victim’s genitals in an excruciating, life-threatening, and often permanently damaging process." The whole thought experiment is meant to invoke images of gnashing teeth and shredded viscera. This looks less like "eliminating the risk of [bias]," and more like using allegations of sexism to justify putting one's thumb on the scale.
As for the claim that pro-life thought experiments only appeal to people who have some pre-theoretic intuition that "women should be forced to sacrifice their bodies to sustain others," that seems wrong as well. Suppose we re-run Perry Hendricks' cabin case, except this time it's a man who needs to use his body to support the child. Maybe I'm just weird, but I have *exactly* the same intuitions about this scenario as I do about the original cabin case.
The reason why pro-aborts need to appeal to outlandish thought experiments is because anytime somebody gives an example which is even vaguely analogous to real-life pregnancy, the immorality of abortion becomes clear. So we end up talking about parasitic zombies and "people seeds" floating in with the midday breeze, while all the time thousands of unborn children are being killed.
The fact some women can't get pregnant doesn't mean that womanhood isn't based around being socially recognized as the type of human that gestates young and generates ova. So women with Swyer syndrome are still women as well. You can read my response to Alex Byrne on my substack for more arguments as to that.
Of course most women don't describe their *wanted* pregnancies this way, but the post is necessarily about *unwanted* pregnancies (which are extremely traumatic and cause vast amounts of stress and suffering). "Painful, months-long process of fetuses burrowing into their victims' bodies, with their genitals being ripped apart at the end" is actually a quite recognizable description about what it's like to be forced to go through an unwanted pregnancy. Childbirth is extremely painful and generally results in genital tearing (which can often be severe and lead to incontinence) and childbirth is unfortunately still often deadly. Implantation is also routinely described as a burrowing process. What I am providing is a description of pregnancy/chidlbirth from the point of view of a woman who desperately doesn't want to be pregnant, so the readers can understand what a serious burden this is to force upon someone.
The physical process of gestation is identical whether the pregnancy is wanted or unwanted. Either "a painful, months-long process of [unborn children] burrowing into their victims’ bodies" is a fair description of both types of pregnancy, or it's a fair description of neither. I also very much doubt that most women with unwanted pregnancies would describe their pregnancy this way. In my experience, the only people who talk like this are pro-abortion activists.
The dis-analogy of the cases is evident from your own example. Do you seriously think that the implantation of a zygote is even vaguely analogous to a zombie clawing its way into a person's intestines? If that were the case, you'd think people would *feel* implantation, as I imagine they'd probably feel somebody ripping their intestines open. This is farcical. Examples like this are only ever used because sensible ones give a result that pro-abortion people don't like.
Yes, I think people routinely describe wanted pregnancies in ways that downplay the suffering involved because they are excited to become mothers. That's not strange at all.
>> You would feel implantation
At this point, I have to laugh, because I've been pregnant and did feel implantation (it felt like strong cramping and nausea). This is extremely common. You are betraying your ignorance of the process of pregnancy here. Before my abortion I dealt with vomiting all the time, as most women do, and I didn't even have complications - which are common and cause far worse side effects.
It seems obvious to me that cutting off the fetus' arm is *worse* than killing it. If you cut off the fetus' arm, then the fetus will be born and develop a large number of desires in the course of its life that will be thwarted at various points by the resultant disability. But if you kill the fetus, no desires will develop in the first place to be thwarted at any point. Of course, the fetus will "lose out" on a valuable future, but I don't think there's any convincing reason to think that "losing out" is worse than the "losing out" that occurs whenever a woman simply avoids getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course, some people will probably say this misses the point because we're supposed to assume the fetus is a person for sake of the argument. But it's unclear to me if that means we're supposed to assume the fetus has desires and interests or if we're supposed to assume there's some inherent moral value the fetus has apart from those things. If it's the former, then I would say that assumption just doesn't reflect reality, because (at least for 95%+ of all abortions) the fetus in question uncontroversially lacks those features. But if it's the latter, then I would say that's just an incoherent view of personhood that no pro-abortion person should be expected to consider.
This is why I think it's ultimately impossible to separate discussions about abortion into "bodily autonomy" questions and "personhood" questions - unless your conception of personhood is totally unmoored from any sort of actual quality in the world, then it's just not possible to assume a being is a person without shifting some concrete facts about the situation. It's like asking "Would the death penalty for jaywalking be acceptable if jaywalking was the greatest imaginable evil?" In order for jaywalking to be the greatest imaginable evil, then it would have to have some non-moral features (causing horrendous suffering, involving extreme cruelty, etc) that it doesn't actually have. But if you're just asking me to imagine extreme moral evil magically associating with jaywalking for some unspecified metaphysical reason, then it's hard to understand what possible insight that could provide into the actual reality of the situation.
"If abortions left fetuses alive but permanently, harmfully crippled, they would seem to be impermissible......But surely if it’s permissible to kill the fetus in order to end a pregnancy, then it’s permissible to chop off it’s arm to end the pregnancy."
Don't you think that we can build an ethical model by synthesising different principles, even if there is somewhat friction between them? So, a pro-choicer might say, the bodily autonomy principle should be implemented until it begins producing externalities. If one defines externalities as pain experienced by conscious entities, then pro-choice can conceivably get around this.
The bodily autonomy argument is a reason why abortion should be legal even if it kills osmeone with rights rather than a reason fetuses don't have rights