Abortion

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Anon Anon’s avatar

Abortion is a technology problem, not a political issue. The choice between the loss of life and the loss of authority over one’s own body is a poor one. This dilemma is caused by a lack of medical knowledge.

At a high level, there are only two technologies needed to resolve this dilemma.
1. Safe extraction of a living pregnancy.
2. In Vitro Gestation.

In fact, if some of the political funding had been redirected toward research, it would probably be solved by now.

Dennis Hackethal’s avatar

It seems odd to me when people argue pregnancy is a loss of authority over one’s body.

A woman had sex. Assuming it was voluntary, what did she think was going to happen?

Imagine someone saying: ‘I ate too much. Now I’m fat. I’ve lost authority over my own body.’ But they didn’t. They got exactly what they should have expected.

I think what those people are really saying is: they don’t like that their actions have consequences. They want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Criticized1*
Anon Anon’s avatar

This is not a valid or interesting criticism of my argument that the apparent dilemma can be resolved through the growth of knowledge. 

Not interesting:
You’ve merely argued one side of the dilemma, apparently insisting that there is no dilemma to be resolved. If the dilemma can be resolved, then any argument for one side or the other is pedantic and superseded by that solution. 

Not valid:
Sex is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause pregnancy. “Eating too much” is also neither necessary nor sufficient to cause adiposity. Even if you assume that those voluntary actions played a causal role in the transformation, the argument you presented depends on the premise that “if someone voluntarily performs any action that contributes to the antecedents of a transformation and has knowledge about the antecedent relationship between those actions and that transformation, then that transformation is under their authority.” This is a deeply problematic theory, because it results in every accident or crime against someone happening “under their authority.” With respect to sex and pregnancy, specifically, this theory leads to the conclusion that miscarriages are also under one’s authority. Regardless of whether your real concern here is about the loss of life due to terminated pregnancies (vs. punishing women for having sex), far more potential lives are lost due to miscarriage than abortion, so this should be of much greater concern. 

Fortunately, miscarriages could also be avoided by using the technologies I proposed above. In the future, this could even become the preferred method of gestation for the protection of the child’s life, and the optimization of their early development.

Criticism of #5052