A: The right is universal, I agree. But it's only recently, as in within the last 150 years, that we were made aware of it. This indicates to me that, since we've been wrong before, there may be other universal rights that we are currently unaware of and infringing upon. Namely the rights of unborn humans.
M; A good argument. However, I personally believe that the evidence that forced birth is a violation of a woman's rights not to have to be pregnant is clear now today. A person is born female by chance. When one is fertile is chance. Being raped, for example, is chance. The level of ones education, moral discipline, sexual promiscuity, sexual attractiveness, etc, are all chance. The children who are here should be wanted and the product of stable healthy families.
A: We are all subject to natural processes, such as aging. We will all eventually die.
M: Yes but we seek means to live much much longer and may one day download into machines.
A: Women, because of their anatomy, have a particular role in nature. Only they can give birth.
M: Then only they can decide whether to come to term.
A: Regarding the rape argument, my stance remains the same for the same reason, by asking the following sequence of questions: Who is responsible for this girl's pregnancy? Because she was forced to have sex, the rapist is responsible. Who should bear the consequences of this? Certainly the rapist. How then can we establish that the child, however created, bears any responsibility for this crime? It's harsh, I grant. But it seems the most just resolution, because justice seeks to punish the guilty, not the innocent.
M: You conveniently left out the woman who will have to bear the child of rape. Very cruel, I think and all because of principles you have up in your head, absolutes you want to force on others.
A: I very much want people to be held accountable for their actions, responsible or irresponsible. I don't call for punishment, only that they be held to the same standard as anyone else. If I were a male driven by anger, I'd be insulting you, yet it is you who have been insulting me.
M: I call it poking your conscience.
A: When anything unfavorable happens to anyone, they immediately look to assign blame to the responsible party.
M: Speak for yourself, thanks.
A: That, I think, is the basic search for justice.
M: More like the search for somebody to dump blame on.
A: Because pregnancy to women in this example is unfavorable, there IS cause to blame. Dealing with an unwanted child by killing it is not dealing with it. It's irresponsibility. Dealing with it would be accepting the consequence of your actions.
M: Better still is not to deal with the consequences by aborting if you don't want a child. You can't shake the feeling she is killing a cell growth rather than a person, a parasite, essentially, in her body. You can't escape your religious belief or the need to impose it on others. You have ever reason to believe what you believe is right but not the right to arrogantly impose that on others. You are religiously moral and emotional, not detached and rationally objective. I would act like you if I were pregnant and a woman, but I won't tell others what to do. I see that I feel what I feel and that it's only a feeling. It's a nice theory and practice in a loving family but impractical in secular reality. The judges figured this out in roe vs wade.
A: There's a simple line of reasoning here. Woman knows she can get pregnant. Woman does not want to get pregnant. Woman knowingly does the very act which will get her pregnant anyway. Woman gets pregnant. She made a conscious decision to take a risk, and now she is responsible for her decision. That's seems pretty clear to me. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with religious morality.
M: Sure it does. I look at the same line of reasoning and conclude: ........and now she is responsible for her decision and decides to abort. And lucky her, it's legal.
A: You can't cry foul because of a self-inflicted wound. You can't stand in the middle of an interstate and say, "If someone hits me, I'm the last person to blame."
M: Hit somebody in the middle of an intersection and see what happens. There is no foul. It's all in your head.
A: I don't understand.
If you hit somebody in an intersection you will quite likely be cited and you don't have a right to hit somebody that shouldn't be there. Your notions of personal responsibility are all in your head. You carry lots of guilt and have been made to feel guilty. You are authoritarian and punitive in nature. You are old testament.
A: My rights do end where another's begin, as you say. Regrettably, people don't extend that ethos to unborn children.
M: That is exactly what I said. They don't extend those rights until they meet the legal definition of person.
A: This implicitly contradicts something you said at the beginning. In response to my assertion that the right not to be a slave was granted in the constitution, you said that this right was universal and inalienable, outside of the constitutions jurisdiction. Yet here you say that it is the government that defines a person. Shouldn't the definition of a person be just as universal and inalienable as the right not to be a slave, since being a slave means you're assumed not to be human? If we extended rights only to those who met the legal definition of a person, then slaves were only human when we passed the 14th amendment, and that's obviously not the case. The truth is they were always human, and we just took forever to admit it to ourselves.
M: It is when the child is wanted. Murder a pregnant woman and you'll likely be charged with double homicide. It is when the woman's right to the sovereignty of her own body as opposed to being parasitized that the collection of human cells loses it's status. A whole person trumps the right of a collection of cells not unlike a tumor. You are emotion and can't properly think. It's a secular problem that needs a secular solution. Again, you can't escape the religious notion that a dependent fetus has the same rights as an independent human. The application of your absolutism creates a logical and practical outcome that is tantamount to slavery for the woman who in her own mind may have completely different feeling about her fetus than you do. She has to live with the consequences so she decides.
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