... why you insist on diminishing women and trivializing women's choices by characterizing the decision to terminate a pregnancy as one made by
"a woman, who did not want to go through a pregnancy". How you could characterize having a z/e/f removed from one's body and farmed out for gestation, and then for rearing after "birth", as
"the same as abortion" is quite beyond me, I'm afraid.
Of course, the fact that you persist in demonizing women by using language like
"Except the fetus doesn't get basically ground up" is also beyond me. (Remember those sarcasm tags, now.)
Taking penicillin is the "same fucking thing!" as having having a tonsillectomy, only the tonsils don't get basically ground up. And
only you still have your tonsils, which you might have preferred, for your own reasons and in your own interests, not to have. Just like a women who is denied an abortion still has a child, regardless of whom it's been given to once it is born (or "born", in your scenario)
against her will.
"It's a very very hard question to ask, and you really missed the point entirely. There would be no 'taking away' of rights."I'm afraid, my friend, that it is you who has missed the point entirely. No one who understood (and valued) rights could say that such a science-fiction procedure involved "no taking way of rights".
"The most likely scenario (if this were to happen and the laws were to stay the same), is that abortion would become some kind of adbortion, which stands for 'adoption-abortion,' the female-fetus pregnancy is aborted, and replaced with some mechanical-fetus process, so that the child can grow up and go to an adoption center. But, again, this brings up questions about cost, and so on."Yes, I suppose it would bring up "questions about cost", in your mind, from what I've seen. In my mind, it would bring up questions about things like slavery. Having one's control over one's reproductive processes and activities taken away from one is, after all, one of the common features of that institution. Not to mention that being "born" through this kind of procedure and then farmed out to an "adoption centre" reflects just the same kind of mentality -- person-as-means to someone else's end, rather than person as end in him/herself -- as slavery reflects. Whole generations of children who are saleable products for market -- or, worse, unwanted by anyone --
things; that's all I see in your scenario.
Allow me to quote one of my favourite sources (see below for details) (all underlining mine):
50. As is pointed out by Professor Cyril E. M. Joad, then Head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, in Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics (1938), the role of the state in a democracy is to establish the background conditions under which individual citizens may pursue the ethical values which in their view underlie the good life. He states at p. 801:
For the welfare of the state is nothing apart from the good of the citizens who compose it. It is no doubt true that a State whose citizens are compelled to go right is more efficient than one whose citizens are free to go wrong. But what then? To sacrifice freedom in the interests of efficiency, is to sacrifice what confers upon human beings their humanity. It is no doubt easy to govern a flock of sheep; but there is no credit in the governing, and, if the sheep were born as men, no virtue in the sheep.
Professor Joad further emphasizes at p. 803 that individuals in a democratic society can never be treated "merely as means to ends beyond themselves" because:
To the right of the individual to be treated as an end, which entails his right to the full development and expression of his personality, all other rights and claims must, the democrat holds, be subordinated. I do not know how this principle is to be defended any more than I can frame a defence for the principles of democracy and liberty.
Professor Joad stresses that the essence of a democracy is its recognition of the fact that the state is made for man and not man for the state (p. 805). He firmly rejects the notion that science provides a basis for subordinating the individual to the state. He says at pp. 805-6:
Human beings, it is said, are important only in so far as they fit into a biological scheme or assist in the furtherance of the evolutionary process. Thus each generation of women must accept as its sole function the production of children who will constitute the next generation who, in their turn, will devote their lives and sacrifice their inclinations to the task of producing a further generation, and so on ad infinitum. This is the doctrine of eternal sacrifice -- "jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today". For, it may be asked, to what end should generations be produced, unless the individuals who compose them are valued in and for themselves, are, in fact, ends in themselves? There is no escape from the doctrine of the perpetual recurrence of generations who have value only in so far as they produce more generations, the perpetual subordination of citizens who have value only in so far as they promote the interests of the State to which they are subordinated, except in the individualist doctrine, which is also the Christian doctrine, that the individual is an end in himself.
"This technology would do more good than harm, I'd think, but we'd have to redefine what is protected life and what isn't. That, or somehow fix poverty."That's a bit of a dog's breakfast ... so let's stick with the first part. "Redefine what is protected life and what isn't". Whenever you've worked out
how that is going to work, the question I have asked so many before you -- how anything that is not
born, human and alive (i.e. "a human being") is going to have its life protected in the same way as human beings' lives are protected -- you just let me know.
The right to life (which comes as a package with all the other
human rights we recognize) requires that there be a prohibition on killing anything that has that right for the convenience or even survival of the killer (with the exception that we tend to make to permit the killing of something trying to kill us). At bottom, we may not eat each other: no matter how hungry we human beings may be, and how likely to die we may be if we do not eat the other human being on the raft, we may not kill him/her. On the other hand, we may kill anything other than a human being -- even, if we would otherwise starve to death, an animal in a protected species; we could not (constitutionally) be prosecuted for doing that.
There is simply no such thing as having a little bit of a right to life. If something has a right to life, it has the same right to life as anything else that has that right, and we owe it exactly the same protection of its life as we owe everything else with that right.
Pregnancy presents risks to women's lives -- risks that can be entirely unforeseen and unforeseeable. Compelling anyone to assume risks to her life that she does not wish to assume is a violation of the right to life. That's why you can't be compelled, by law, to jump into the icy St. Lawrence to rescue me, even if I will die if you don't. In a very few instances -- military conscription and discipline being the main one -- we do violate that right by compelling people to assume risks to their lives. We believe that this is justified by the need to protect our societies. I have yet to see any remotely similar justification for compelling pregnant women to assume the risks involved in continued pregnancy and childbirth.
If z/e/fs were to be defined as having a right to life, we would quite simply be faced with an insoluble problem. A woman who did not wish to assume the risks of pregnancy and who was compelled to do so, in order to protect the "right to life" of the z/e/f, would be a victim of a serious rights violation. A z/e/f which had a right to life but was aborted,
for any reason, would be a victim of a serious rights violation. If you can describe how such a violation could be committed in compliance with the requirements of due process, again, do tell me: how any judge or tribunal could ever decide whether to allow a violation of a pregnant woman's rights, by denying permission for an abortion, or to allow a violation of a z/e/f's rights, by granting permission for an abortion, when neither has done anything that could, under the rules of due process, justify such a violation.
In any event, this entire discussion is so nonsensical as to be almost beyond belief. Pregnancy is not some technological process. Pregnancy is a function of women's bodies. Regardless of whether artificial uteruses are ever invented and used to gestate z/e/fs that have been created in vitro,
pregnancy will still be a function of a woman's body, and z/e/fs created in the old-fashioned way will still be part of their bodies. And the interruption of a process occurring in someone's body, or the manner in which that process will be interrupted, and the removal of any part of of someone's body against her will, will always be a rights violation.
I recommend that you do a little reading about rights. You could start here: Madam Justice Bertha Wilson's reasons in the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in
R. v. Morgentaler, the 1988 decision striking down the Canadian law criminalizing abortion with exceptions.
239. The question then becomes whether the decision of a woman to terminate her pregnancy falls within this class of protected decisions. I have no doubt that it does. This decision is one that will have profound psychological, economic and social consequences for the pregnant woman. The circumstances giving rise to it can be complex and varied and there may be, and usually are, powerful considerations militating in opposite directions. It is a decision that deeply reflects the way the woman thinks about herself and her relationship to others and to society at large. It is not just a medical decision; it is a profound social and ethical one as well. Her response to it will be the response of the whole person.
240. It is probably impossible for a man to respond, even imaginatively, to such a dilemma not just because it is outside the realm of his personal experience (although this is, of course, the case) but because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche which are at the heart of the dilemma. As Noreen Burrows, lecturer in European Law at the University of Glasgow, has pointed out in her essay on "International Law and Human Rights: the Case of Women's Rights", in Human Rights: From Rhetoric to Reality (1986), the history of the struggle for human rights from the eighteenth century on has been the history of men struggling to assert their dignity and common humanity against an overbearing state apparatus. The more recent struggle for women's rights has been a struggle to eliminate discrimination, to achieve a place for women in a man's world, to develop a set of legislative reforms in order to place women in the same position as men (pp. 81-82). It has not been a struggle to define the rights of women in relation to their special place in the societal structure and in relation to the biological distinction between the two sexes. Thus, women's needs and aspirations are only now being translated into protected rights. The right to reproduce or not to reproduce which is in issue in this case is one such right and is properly perceived as an integral part of modern woman's struggle to assert her dignity and worth as a human being.
version with paragraph numbers;
version with page numbersI know that the words may go right over your head, or bounce off the prejudices and preconceptions inside it. I also know, however, that others will hear the ring of truth in them that I hear.
(formatting fixed)
.