Abortion

It’s arguably a sexually active woman’s responsibility to monitor whether she’s pregnant.

If it weren’t her responsibility, then a burden would fall on the baby, which can’t be right because the baby only exists because of the mother’s choices.

Home pregnancy tests are affordable and reliable. According to https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-early-can-you-tell-if-you-are-pregnant, “[h]ome pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy just two weeks after ovulation”. So there’s plenty of time.

If the baby is a person, the mother has a responsibility to it. She can’t just be allowed to kill it. That makes no sense.

(Danny)

Physical (in)dependence isn’t a valid yardstick because it does not confer rights. The only thing that confers rights to an organism is personhood.

Building on #123, cutting the umbilical does not make the baby an “independent person”. The baby still depends on the parents physically, financially, emotionally, etc.

This mistake strikes me as an instance of the wider mistake of granting or withholding rights based on physical differences.

Once the fetus is a person, it can’t be property.

Because personhood is not the result of something physical but of having and running the right software.

Specifically, it’s the universal-explainer software David Deutsch outlines in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

This software presumably can’t run in the baby before its nervous system is formed to some sufficient degree. At the earliest, it’s when the nervous system reaches computational universality. (Does anyone know when that is?)

The linked Wikipedia article says:

Evictionists view a woman's womb as her property and an unwanted fetus as a "trespasser or parasite", even while lacking the will to act. They argue that a pregnant woman has the right to evict a fetus from her body since she has no obligation to care for a trespasser.

If this is an accurate description of the evictionist view, it strikes me as deeply flawed.

A pregnant woman does have an obligation to care for her fetus (at least once it’s a person). She took an action which resulted in the fetus’s existence.

Building on #121, a baby is not a “trespasser”. A pregnant woman ‘invited’ the baby into her womb. Unless she was raped, in which case the rapist ‘put’ the baby there. But the baby is blameless either way and thus can’t be likened to a trespasser.

Evictionism doesn’t explain why personhood should be ignored.

(Danny)

It matters because the abortion debate is largely about what rights (if any) an unborn baby has. Personhood determines those rights. Killing a person is morally (and legally) different from killing a non-person, so you need to know when personhood starts.

It’s true that you know personhood will start at some point as long as you don’t interfere, but this is for people who do want to interfere without committing a moral (or legal) crime.

It would be gross and upsetting, though, so let’s settle for abortion up until the child can be delivered and adoption for any unwanted babies.

That’s an inversion of morals and emotions. The emotional response should come after you form a moral judgment, as a result of that judgment. Conversely, moral judgment shouldn’t be the result of an emotion.

How do you define personhood?

A child does not seem anything like a functionally complete person until somewhere between 9 to 15 months old.

Basing personhood on ‘functional completeness’ is fudging smarts and intelligence.

Building on #164, rights do not depend on the presence of any specific skill or knowledge.

I don’t see why forgetting things that happened before age 3 is meaningful here.

It’s possible creativity, and with it, personhood and rights, only comes online after birth. For example, the universal-explainer program may be partly memetic, as David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity. In which case creativity only comes online upon exposure to other people.

But that’s highly speculative. The program might as well be wholly genetic and start running before birth.

A baby with a nervous system may be a person and thus have rights.

Except in cases of rape, the mother is responsible for the baby’s existence.

That the baby can’t survive outside the womb sounds like an additional reason to carry to term, not a reason not to do it.

I think it’s not okay to kill someone whose nervous system stops working later in life if it may work again.
They’ve already been a person and may well continue to be a person. That can’t be said of an organism that has never had a nervous system.

Personhood presumably does come in later on, but we don’t know exactly when. Since the development of the nervous system is the earliest possible point, that’s the time we should choose if we want to be careful.