Abortion destroys freedom
June 30th, 2006 by BrandonSome people say that making abortion illegal would limit freedom, and that the mother should be given a choice in the matter. While we are all able to make our own choices in mortality, people who choose to have abortions should understand that in making that one choice themselves, they are destroying any choices that the unborn child would ever make. Essentially, they are taking away the freedom and choices of an entire lifetime by choosing to selfishly make one choice for themselves. Just some food for thought…
July 24th, 2006 at 8:35 am
You can’t possibly think that settles the debate. Surely it must strike you that this is a little too easy. But let’s consider exactly why your response is too easy. You point out that pro-choicers would be in trouble if they believed the following two things…
1) it is always wrong to prevent any persons from having the opportunity to freely exercise their choice with regard to anything they want.
2) a fetus is a person.
.. These two beliefs are incompatible with the pro-choice view that it is permissible to kill a fetus (thus preventing its ability to make choices). However, there are two different ways that a pro-choicer can avoid this problem. The most obvious one is to reject the second claim, which many pro-choicers do in fact reject. In that case they are still being consistent. Another tactic is to give a more nuanced principle than the one expressed in that first claim above. Something like…
1′) it is wrong to prevent a person from having the opportunity to freely exercise their choice with respect to the use of their body.
This claim is compatible with the idea that, while every person has a right to life, they do not necessarily have the right to the things required to live. In particular, someone who endorses the (1′) claim can agree that a fetus is a person with a right to life, but consistently deny that the fetus has a right to the use of the mother’s body because the mother must have the opportunity to choose how her body is used, and by whom.
So, as you can see, your dialectical gambit does not so easily secure the conclusion that abortion is wrong. Also, on an unrelated note to what I’ve already said, I just wanted to point out how offensive it can be to label all abortions ’selfish’. Do you honestly think that a young girl who is raped by her stepfather and gets pregnant is being selfish when she gets an abortion? That seems like a vulgar characterization of her situation or the situation of anyone who gets an abortion as a victim of some brutal sex crime.
July 25th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Oh, my comments alone definitely weren’t meant to settle the debate. It’s just another facet of it that I wanted bring up. Also, I never stated that a fetus is a person, only that killing it would prevent it from being able to make choices, thereby limiting it’s potential freedom and life.
In case of rape or insest, I can see where in certain cases an abortion might be appropriate.
Thanks for your comments.
July 25th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Is a Fetus a Person?…
A comment made in one of Brandon’s posts posed the question, “is a fetus a person?” (I’ll make the assumption that a “person” is a human being with both spirit and body.) I believe so. Why? I think my belief spawns f…
July 26th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Brandon, I agree that you never stated that a fetus is a person, but did say “…killing it would prevent it from being able to make choices, thereby limiting it’s potential freedom and life.” If a fetus is not a person, then it cannot make any choices, so you aren’t preventing it from doing any such thing. Only persons, with reasons and the ability to will themselves to act, can make choices, hence killing a non-person does not prevent anything from making choices because the thing you are killing does not have that ability. It seems to me that because you claim killing a fetus prevents it from making choices you are implicitly commited to the fact that it must be the kind of thing that can make choices in the first place: a person.
I think what you should probably say instead is that in killing a fetus one is killing something that could eventually become a person. In that case, you are preventing this potential future person from making any choiced because you are ensuring they will never exist. There are two important things to notice about this way of stating the case….
1) The analogy with pro-choice advocacy breaks down. Actual persons can make choices about their lives and it is wrong to prevent them from making some of those choices. Potential persons cannot make choices (not now) because they don’t even exist yet. So there is no simple analogy between “preventing the mother from choosing abortion” and “preventing the potential person from choosing (whatever)” since we are talking about very different kinds of issues in each case.
2) Once you see this, it becomes incumbent upon the pro-lifer to make the case that preventing a potential person from existing is unethical. However, this is going to be a tough case to make. Just consider the following thought experiment as one kind of counterexample: suppose it were possible through the use of some alien technology to turn every cell in your body into a perfect clone of you. Would it follow that anyone who declined to have this procedure was doing something unethical? It would if preventing the existence of potential persons (millions of them in this case) is wrong. But that conclusion seems crazy, so there must be something incorrect about the principle that preventing the existence of potential persons is always wrong.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:25 am
Here is the Church’s official stance on abortion:
http://www.lds.org/newsroom/issues/answer/0,19491,6056-1-201-10-201,00.html
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