Is this a pro life anarchist? An anarchist advocating placing restrictions on personal freedoms???
Trying to logic into this position hurts my brain.
Like I get a theoretical argument (beyond the common pro-life positions) stating that allowing abortion is harms the future atonomy of an unborn baby, but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child, so there’s not exactly as strong of a leg to stand on.
I presume by bringing fascism into the equation they’re probably trying to point out that fascism uses abortion for eugenics, and therefore banning it would prevent fascists from doing eugenics. Well, abortion being illegal might stop eugenics via abortion, but that does nothing to stop eugenics via sterilization, and it also assumes fascists wouldn’t just perform abortions anyways.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child,
This is the crux of my own pro-choice position. It’s irrelevant to me if the baby is a person or if it’s just a clump of flesh because, either way, it does not have a right to use another person as an incubator. It’s the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don’t want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
It’s the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don’t want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
I’m not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities, and if you stretch definitions a bit - to everyone, because we all depend on society to survive.
Can you spell out how that would go a bit more explicitly? The violinist argument is supposed to show that nobody gets to use a particular individual as a life support system without their consent, not that we don’t owe some degree of care to one another. I’m not saying there’s not a way to make a (bad) analogous argument about people with disabilities, but I’m not familiar with it and can’t quite see how it would go. If you’ve got time to spell it out, I’d appreciate it!
It certainly can’t be “equally” applied! No one has to have their body mutilated and bodily autonomy violated and health harmed and life threatened and put through excruciating discomfort to support people with disabilities.
I’d be fascinated to see it applied equally.
I’m not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities
You are correct. The whole issue isn’t about life, but about control. It’s about a whole group of people who force/coerce you into a caregiving role. The very coercion reveals their own desire to not do the work themselves. I find it especially galling that these same people will not do the same caregiving, do not offer help, and get when you object to all of this work!
You cannot coerce people into caregiving, whether babies, disabled, sick, elderly, or anybody else. It must be a choice.
There’s actually only one kind of scenario where someone WOULD have that right over you. Luckily it’s absurd:
If you could grab a random, fully living person off the street and jam em up in your womb, and somehow make them dependent on you to survive until you can be surgically detached, you would owe them that service 100%. And if someone else forced this on the both of you, you wouldn’t owe them that. The vast majority of people would agree with this.
This is why fundamentalist Christians have to believe that God pulls down souls into fertilized zygotes. It turns conception into a form of soul-based child abduction. If you completely skip past any thought about what the fetus is, and just assume with full conviction that it’s equal to a person in every important way, then you literally arrive at the most common fundie anti abortion position… Full ban unless it’s the mother’s “fault”.
This is extremely convenient - the linchpin of their entire argument is literally magical thinking. Think of the first scenario, someone has done this to a person, they’re stuck attached, and the abductor is complaining that their right to kill the abductee and go chillax are being trampled. That’s what it sounds like to anti abortion religious fundies.
This is why they must be opposed with raw force. They can’t be reasoned out because they didn’t reason themselves in.
Christian Nationalists full-on worship an evil deity, that intentionally and knowingly sends the souls of babies to Earth to get aborted and then be sent to Hell for not accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It’s not worth arguing with, y’know, evil worshiping death cultists.
I found the Violinist Argument reasonable when I was a vaguely Christian teenager figuring my own beliefs out, though.
but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
The whole argument of trying to place where “life” begins, or where the fetus becomes a “person” will always lead nowhere because there is no definitive cut off point or specific week/term where this occurs, forcing people to come up with arbitrary qualifications (such as an identifiable heartbeat). This will go on forever until people realize that as it is developing the (potential) child is always in between conceptual forms. The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
One time when I was in college pro life protestors came on campus and being the foolish bleeding heart liberal I was I went to debate one of them. I inuited this idea during the conversation and they hit me with a “well, that’s invalid.” No explanation, no reasoning, just refutation via nuh-uh. It was so incredibly upsetting that I just walked away. Fuck that person. I’d be pro choice with no other reason besides that conversation.
