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.
Nazis are coming with an army to kill disabled people and minorities. In order to fight the Nazis, conscription is necessary. Is it moral under this framework to conscript a white CIS man to fight to protect disabled people and minorities if the Nazis would otherwise have left that white CIS man alone?
Fighting, of course, means putting him at risk of mutilation, deprives him of his bodily autonomy, and consists of a lot of excruciating discomfort even if he isn’t wounded.
Surely there must be better arguments for abortion that don’t rely solely on the Western conception of individual rights as a moral and ethical basis?
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.
