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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Right, I agree. And so, would you say that a fetus, which did not choose to be conceived or sustained in any way in the mother, should be held responsible for any harm (however you define that) that comes to the mother as a result of the pregnancy? If so, then you should also hold the child responsible because it struck and harmed its mother, even though it didn't do so by choice.
Yes. That's how self defense works. You have a right to defend your own health. Period.
In that case, the child thrown at its mother is guilty of assault because it harmed her by colliding with her. The child would be subject to self-defense rules and could rightly have been shot out of the air like a clay pigeon.
No it isn't. The person throwing the child is guilty of assault. This is nowhere near the same situation.
So if a five-year-old can't be held responsible and killed for hitting its mother by being thrown at her, because it was the dad who threw it, then how can a fetus be held responsible and killed for existing and causing harm to the mother, even though it never chose to exist at all and was conceived by another person?
Because a fetus isn't a person. Until birth it is considered a part of the mother, specifically to prevent stupid and unsustainable rulings like this one. If your mother was killed by cancer, are you going to take her tumor to court and put it in prison? No, you wouldn't, that would be ridiculous. Because a tumor can't choose its actions. Neither can a fetus.
After development and birth, when the child can think and act for itself, sure it's a person. Inside the womb? It is an organ, it acts and thinks like an organ (by which I mean, it doesn't) and can hold no legal responsibility for anything because it is not a thinking being.
Do I find this to be sad? Sure, absolutely. I'd prefer every fetus in the world to be loved and wanted and born without complication into a life of ease. But you and I both know very well that that is not the reality of the world.
The entire argument here is that if we consider a fetus a person, then we should apply self-defense laws to pregnancies. I'm pointing out why "self defense" against a person who has done literally nothing is ridiculous. I was writing my previous posts under the assumption that a fetus is a person, the same as in the original post.
But I also believe that there's no point in drawing arbitrary lines in the sand where a human organism/being/whatever you'd like to call it becomes a person. The minute you do that, it opens the door to whoever is writing the rules this week to decide things like "humans who are in a coma aren't people anymore" or "humans without a certain level of intellectual ability aren't people." That isn't a level of authority that I would entrust to any mortal human being. Would you?
Organs are components of an organism that support its life functions. A fetus is not a component of an organism, but is an organism unto itself. If it were an organ, then it would be something a woman is born with and develops naturally as she grows. Women are born with egg cells, true, but they don't become fetuses until they are fertilized and undergo a degree of development.
That is certainly one part of the issue here.
Dont get me wrong here, I do absolutely understand your viewpoint here I think. Especially as regards the slope that lawmakers can use to slip down. This is a tricky and nuanced subject, which is why I'm largely in favor of leaving it the fuck alone. That's kind of the context of the entire post that we're debating in the comments of. If a fetus becomes legally declared to be a distinct person then suddenly half our legal code can be used in absurd and self-inconsistent ways. Currently that is not the case but some people very much want it to be that way.
Personally, I say a person becomes a person when they prove themselves an independent thinking being and they retain that status until their death. Babies, generally speaking, become independent thinking beings upon birth. Before that they are still biologically attached to the mother, thus not independent and therefore subject to the will of her person, and after that they move and think on their own and have become their own being. A person who is in an unresponsive coma is still considered a person because they attained personhood and have not yet died, but even today there are legal loopholes for family to decline further care for the comatose person. That probably won't change. If your family has hope for you you'll stay alive and if they don't then they can order your death, I don't really see how you get around that in a world where comas still happen.
Right now we have a shaky, but stable enough legal framework around this sort of thing that's been put together over a couple hundred years of people thinking about this. But if we go poking at things that are core to the legal code, such as "what is a person", things start falling off of it.