If you invite someone onto your submarine, and take them down to the bottom of the ocean, but then they suffer some accident and need to be taken back to the surface for medical attention, it isn't slavery for the law to force you to pilot the submarine to the nearest port.
Whether any of that is relevant to the complicated issue of abortion is another matter, but I think Margaret Atwood is glossing over some important questions.
Abortions can be easily avoided if people didn't have unprotected sex with people they don't wish to raise a family with. They had complete control over their body and who they shared it with but just don't want to deal with any of the consequences of it, I find it all very sad.
Nope, had protected sex with my wife and got pregnant (pill plus condom). We weren't ready for a kid and had an abortion. It's not black and white. Please, don't make it out to be.
You pretty much touched on the central issue. "Sex without consequences" is pretty much what's at stake here. And you start telling people they can't just go around having sex with whoever, you really kick the hornets nest.
In other words it’s all about upholding religious prejudices, which, while harmful to society, benefit certain people. It’s no different from sharia law. (Except even sharia law doesn’t condone this particular stupidity.)
It is stupidity. You will find incredible intelligent people behind every fringe theory; it’s just they aren’t particularly smart about this particular area. There is a lot of examples, from Jordan Peterson to Aquinas.
Pedestrian accidents can be easily avoided if people didn’t try to cross the street. Would you advocate banning medical aid to pedestrians? Because that’s your reasoning above.
But deciding about an unborn child's body isn't. I really don't think your position is as incontrovertible as you're suggesting, which is why this issue doesn't have any easy answers.
Abortion isn’t deciding about fetus body, same way refusing to donate an organ for life-saving transplant isn’t deciding about transplant receiver body.
There's a big difference between allowing someone with an illness to naturally die by not donating your organ to them, and deliberately carrying out an abortion with the intent to kill a developing child.
The law (and the field of ethics) has always distinguished between acts of commission and acts of omission, and also taken into account the intent of the actor. If a stranger's house is broken into and their TV stolen, and you could have prevented that by sleeping over at their house, that doesn't mean you are an accomplice by sleeping in your own house.
Anyway, I'm glad you're thinking about this, because it's a complicated issue and it needs multiple perspectives to sharpen our thinking.
In other words, if somebody is violating your bodily freedom, you don’t deserve the right to defend in a way that would harm them?
Abortion isn’t a complicated issue. It’s a typical science/ethics vs alt right stupidity issue. The only thing complicated about it is the prevailing political correctness towards religion.
> you don’t deserve the right to defend in a way that would harm them?
If that's your strawman interpretation of what I said, then let me turn it around and infer your position: People's rights should be based on their ability to do harm to those trying to violate their bodily freedom.
I don't think that actually is your position, but it is at least consistent with your view that vulnerable children should have no rights at all.
It's not a strawman, this is literally what you said above: that bodily freedom (in this case abortion) does not imply the right to actively defend against something/someone violating this freedom (in this case the foetus).
Children of course do have rights, because they don't invade anyone's freedom, in particular they don't parasite on another person's body against that persons will. As opposed to unwanted pregnancies.
> something/someone violating this freedom (in this case the foetus).
Thank you for explaining your position, but I think it's an odd framing to say that a foetus is "violating the freedom" of the woman bearing it. If a woman decides to handcuff herself, and then accidentally loses the key, I suppose you could say that the handcuffs are "limiting her freedom", and she needs to "actively interfere with" the handcuffs by damaging them, but saying "violating" and "defend" makes it sound like the foetus has agency and is deliberately/knowingly acting against her wishes.
I'm sure it isn't your intention to make the foetus seem like a person (which is why you call it a foetus and not a child, even though we could be talking about a fully formed human being, one day before their birth). In any case, I'm afraid your argument sounds completely circular, because you are defining "that bodily freedom" to specifically mean a supposed right to abortion. Of course if that right exists then the foetus/child may not violate it, but if there is no such right then no one may "actively defend against" the existence of that foetus/child.
Are you trying to say the law should prohibit helping people who handcuffed themselves and then lost the key?
Calling foetus a “child” suggests it’s a person, while in reality it almost never is, because it lacks the property defining a person: brain activity. It’s just a fundamentalist newspeak, invented to distort reality; kind of like “unborn child” or “civilization of life”. Why would anyone use terminology introduced by worlds leading child rapist association is beyond me.
The very idea of bodily freedom implies the right to abortion.
> Are you trying to say the law should prohibit helping people who handcuffed themselves and then lost the key?
No, because metal handcuffs are not (and will never be) people, so that's quite uncontroversial. A more instructive example would be a 7 year old child super-glueing their hands to the hands of their mother (as some kind of prank). I think we'd all agree that the law shouldn't permit anyone to "help" the mother by amputating the child's hands.
> it lacks the property defining a person: brain activity.
I'm not sure what counts as "brain activity" to you, but "Ultrasounds can reveal the embryo moving as early as 6 weeks after conception (or 8 pregnancy weeks), detecting the electrical impulses that govern movement and indicating that the brain is beginning to function."[0]
> fundamentalist newspeak, invented to distort reality; kind of like “unborn child”
The adjective "unborn" only became necessary because these were the specific subset of children whose right to life were being ignored. It's like how we didn't use the term "World War I" until there was a second one. If abortion were legal after the child is born but before they could feed themselves, we would need a name like "dependent child" to refer to them as a legal class of citizen.
The very idea of bodily freedom implies the right to not be aborted.
I would think fair compromise is to ban destructive abortions. That means it would have to be natural of c-section to remove the fetus. Then it is up to fetus to survive outside.
Whether any of that is relevant to the complicated issue of abortion is another matter, but I think Margaret Atwood is glossing over some important questions.