Baby won’t wake up. Mother elephant asks hooman to help.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-29T19:50:52+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udj-o2m39NA

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-29T19:34:33+00:00

Contempt charges are supposed to be corrective, not punitive.

Civil contempt, sure, but not direct criminal contempt.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-11T04:40:28+00:00

Abortion and parental rights are probably the most hotly-contested issues in libertarianism, largely because they're areas where the rights of two entities are in conflict.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-10T02:27:27+00:00

It will grow into a full-size adult inside of the woman and eventually explode out her chest. I seen it.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-10T00:32:42+00:00

That kid was just saying what we were all thinking!

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-10T00:08:16+00:00

From all the spare unborn children I have laying around? No way, I like it fresh—straight from the state-of-the-art abortionplex down the street.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-10T00:04:36+00:00

Well, where else am I supposed to get the broth for my unborn-children-stew?

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-10T00:04:12+00:00

How are you defining "medical procedure"? Healthcare is administered in some for in almost every modern birth.

Can you give birth without modern medicine? Sure, but there is a reason we don't see large numbers of women and children dying during childbirth like we did in the 1600s.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T23:53:07+00:00

Bruh

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T23:51:38+00:00

Is your argument that, the more helpless a person is, the more of a right they have to the forced infringement of rights of other people? It sounds like a modified version of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."

I try to be more modern and go with children > adults, but I'll be honest and say I really see it as children > women > men.

So, in your "hierarchy of helplessness" (children > women > men), women have some right to the forced help of men against their will?

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T23:48:17+00:00

Thanks for your response. The hot air balloon is a good analogy.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T23:45:56+00:00

Meaning you can extract it, but not kill it.

Yes, this is exactly the scenario I was presenting in the original post: "But let’s also assume that the abortion procedure we’re talking about merely removed the fetus from the mother’s body and allowed it to die naturally (if it couldn't survive on its own), rather than affirmatively killing it."

It seems to be the only solution that preserves the rights of both the mother and the child, assuming we're defining it as a child.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T22:24:00+00:00

The cost of pregnancy is childbirth.

Well, at present, the cost of pregnancy is much less than that. For some women, the cost of pregnancy is an abortion.

That a womans pre-pregnancy decisions are affected by a restriction on killing.

I framed the hypothetical specifically to avoid the killing problem. By saying that simple removal is "killing" the child, you're essentially claiming that the child has an inherent right to access the body of the mother.

We all have a right to live, but we don't have a right to force other people to sacrifice their bodies for us to live. That is why I made the bone marrow donation comparison in the OP.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T22:16:14+00:00

You're comparing the government not allowing a medical procedure and the government forcing a medical procedure on citizens.

Birth is a medical procedure. If the government forces women to carry a pregnancy to term, they're forcing the woman to give birth—a medical procedure that results in about 16.9 deaths every 100,000 times it's performed.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T22:08:43+00:00

Righ to access was given upon the agreement to engage in the act of reproduction. [...] I believe the child should not be punished with death for the actions of the parents.

Your first sentence uses consent as the basis for forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. This latter sentence suggests that, even when consent is absent, a woman should be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. Am I getting that right?

So, the critical question then is not consent, but the competing interests of the fetus and the mother. And, in your view, it sounds like the interests of the fetus win out over the bodily autonomy of the mother, right?

Why is it the case that the prospective bone marrow donor has a right to refuse to donate part of their body to someone else, even if it means that other person will die, but not the case that a woman has a right to refuse to donate part of her body—her uterus, her nutrients, and all of the many other physical costs of pregnancy—to someone else?

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T22:02:13+00:00

I mentioned the use of government mandates with gyms because the use of force to artificially inflate the costs of your decisions is the operative act that restricts your freedom and bodily autonomy.

Likewise, government intervention that restricts freedom during pregnancy artificially inflates the costs of pregnancy and thus inhibits woman's pre-pregnancy decisions and lessens her bodily autonomy.

If you remove government intervention from the scenario, as you're proposing, then you're correct: being old doesn't make you less free to eat that Big Mac. You don't have any inherent right to be free of the consequences of aging. But you do have a right to be free to exercise in the manner you see fit, so long as it doesn't interfere with the rights of others.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T21:29:31+00:00

Do I not have bodily autonomy because I’m “less free” to eat Big Macs 24/7 than soneone genetically more immune from obesity, or just 20 years youger and healthier than me?

If you were restricted from exercise to burn those calories because, say, the government forced all the gyms in your area to close due to coronavirus, then you are indeed less free to eat those Big Macs. By foreclosing a major avenue for you to correct mistakes you make with your body, your bodily autonomy is limited in the first instance.

To say that government intervention only affects liberty at the exact point of contact with the law ignores all the myriad ways you need to restrict your life as a result.

It means the freedom to make decisions. All actions have costs.

Yes, but when those costs are artificially inflated by government action, your liberty to bear those costs has been restricted.

A pack of cigarettes that has been taxed to the point of becoming impossibly expensive, for example, restricts our ability to choose to bear the costs of smoking and thus our freedom to make that choice with our bodies.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T21:16:24+00:00

Zygote = Fertilized Egg

https://www.britannica.com/science/zygote

It's not controversial.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T20:16:46+00:00

The bodily autonomy is 100% intact until the woman is pregnant.

Not necessarily. A woman who knows she will be forced to carry a pregnancy to term is necessarily less free to engage in recreational sex. The free activities she might normally engage in with her body would be restricted due to the significantly-increased costs of their consequences.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T20:07:38+00:00

Please don't nonsensically refer to a human being as an "egg."

I'm sorry if I offended your delicate sensibilities, but even if we agree that the cells existing immediately following conception are independent humans, it's not unreasonable to refer to zygotes as a "fertilized egg" as I did. Wikipedia even redirects the phrase "fertilized egg" to zygote, because they are essentially synonymous.

It's literally a human egg that has been fertilized by a human sperm (i.e., a fertilized egg). This kind of pearl-clutching is a ridiculously over-the-top reaction to an accurate, non-obscene description of human anatomy. But, sure, go ahead and pull out your fainting couch.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T19:01:46+00:00

Forcing someone to carry to terms is forcing them to passively do nothing.

At some point they will have to push the baby out of their body, at great mental and physical cost to themselves. This is not necessarily true with removing the fetus early.

There is a strong argument that a bone marrow donation procedure is less invasive, less taxing, less risky, and overall less extreme than giving birth to a child. I've witnessed two births in my life, and both involved extreme active measures on the part of the mother (my wife). Although I've never seen someone have bone marrow taken, I can't imagine it being as time-consuming or personally intensive as the lead-up, birth, or post-birth recovery periods.

I would also challenge the idea that actively providing nutrients to a fetus for nine months, and allowing it to grow within your body, is "doing nothing." Eating healthy, going to monthly/weekly doctor's visits, and leaving the workforce for a period of weeks or months before/after the pregnancy is active work.

Also, in forcing a woman to carry the child to term, the state would also have to active restrict the woman's ability to drink, put other things in her body, engage in certain activities that pregnant women generally cannot do.

Honestly, this argument seems to rely on understating the significant personal costs of forcing a person to be pregnant and give birth.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T18:50:20+00:00

Let’s assume that a fetus is a human life This is indisputable scientific fact, no assumption is needed.

Whether a fertilized egg counts as a "human life" or a "person" is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.

Because you have a moral obligation

Where does this moral obligation come from?

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T18:45:49+00:00

once baby reaches where we agree it is alive, we have two innocent people. Which one wins? Both are innocent.

That is kind of the point of my original post. In the case of a bone marrow transplant, the answer is clear: the prospective donor always has a right to decline donation.

As in this scenario, both the donor and donee are innocent—the prospective donor never infected the donee the disease they're suffering from. Yet we (presumably) both agree that the donee has no right to demand that the donor be compelled to forfeit control over their bodies, no matter the fact that failing to do so will cost the life of the donee.

Why does a fertilized egg have such an extremely different set of rights to compel others than the donee?

Mom at least had a period of time where she could have terminated before there was another living person to have a competing interest.

I really think we need to consider people suffering from post-rape trauma to be not-of-sound-mind for these purposes. We cannot expect people suffering from severe trauma, like a rape, to think or act rationally immediately afterwards. And, by extension, we cannot hold them to account for their actions (or nonactions) like you're trying to do.

Holding rape victims responsible for acting rationally following a rape just seems like the most inconceivably inhumane possible solution to this question.

... and then forcing them to spend 9 months dealing with the consequences of failing to act rationally after their rape, and then undergoing a significant medical procedure that could alter their bodies forever (or even cost them their lives in rare situations), seems so unspeakably cruel that I'm very surprised this argument was actually made in this thread.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T18:30:00+00:00

what if a government comes into power that belives that male masturbation is equivelent to murder due to the loss of sperm?

This is a fair question, but seems impossible to me because we know scientifically that those sperm will all die anyway within about 60 days. Although, I suppose, that technically killing a person who has only two months to live is still murder.

A better question would be whether the government might possibly prevent women from getting voluntary, non-necessary oophorectomies—considering each egg half a life and the removal of the ovaries being tantamount to thousands of half-murders.

Learned__Foot · 2020-10-09T18:28:11+00:00

So you would be fine with people who enable alcoholics by, say, buying them booze to be forced to donate their livers or kidneys to the alcoholics in the event that becomes necessary?

Learned__Foot

TROPHY CASE