The real moral question of the age is not whether a foetus is a person. The more pressing question is whether a woman is a person- a fully human person, a person who deserves absolute bodily autonomy.
Apparently, this one is trickier to answer. Who the hell knew?
I’m watching the news roll in on the Roe V Wade hearings and trying to write, yet again, about why women’s freedom matters, about the fight against reproductive coercion in and beyond the USA. And I realised that what I actually want, first of all, is to talk to other people about how they’re feeling, about how I’m feeling, and what on Earth happens next.
How are you doing? What are you most worried about, and what gives you pause, and what do you want to know from me?
I’ll be on this thread from 8-9pm GMT, answering questions and checking in.
See you then. x
I am pro-abortion at any point in the pregnancy. And having had two children now, I'm not totally convinced they're fully human even when they are born (for a more scientific point of view please see studies that discuss how human gestation is a balance between a fully functional baby and its large head size fitting through a woman's hips). A limitation I have not yet been able to figure out though, is that I also believe designer babies to be wrong - as a female and a member of a certain minority group I have considerable concerns about what eugenic rubbish people would do with that power. So how do you square a woman's right to choose, with the possibility of her choosing based on the characteristics of the baby?
For everything else and the whole viable life form and it's a person with rights stuff, I'd be a lot more impressed with those arguments if America always provided food, shelter and healthcare to children for free. Because their life is so sacrosanct, of course.
Or maybe the issue is actually a question regarding the scope of consent: those opposing abortion believe a woman who consents to sex automatically consents to a pregnancy (cf also that many think abortion is permissible in case of rape). Before marital rape was outlawed the idea was that a woman who marries gives her consent to sex with her husband for a lifetime, and think of those who think consent to a date includes consent to sex (cf your text about consent being not an action but a state of being).