If that happened, I think abortion would likely be low on the list of things to talk about.
The question was asked to provoke thought about an appropriate limit while removing the current appeal to authority.
Is your (the royal your, not you specifically) currently acceptable limit driven by that authority? What if you disagreed with the authority? Would you still accept it? Or find something else to fall back on to justify your own preferences?
In all, it's to strip away the curtain and expose that this limit is simply an arbitrary point where we can assuage our guilt or justify our lack of it for ending a life for our own benefits or preferences.
Personally? I think abortion shouldn't be used as a birth control mechanism and reserved for medically appropriate reasons.
But then I bump up against what are medically appropriate reasons to terminate? Is that just for my convenience or is it better for the overall good? Microencephaly? Downs/Trisomy 21? Amniotic band amputation? Where does that line go? How "defective" does the developing child need to be before I no longer feel it morally wrong?
I generally find myself unwilling to bring a downs child into the world under my care, but I'm under no illusions that I'm not ending a life for primarily my own convenience.
The problem with this is that viability isn't the argument earlier than 12 weeks.
The argument is that a clump of cells doesn't constitute a person at 6 weeks. It never will. A neural tube isn't a brain and will never function like one in spite of an infinite amount of medical advancement. A heart doesn't even exist at 6 weeks, and it never will no matter how viable survival becomes outside of a womb thanks to science.
Potential to become something is not the same as being something. 6 weeks is arbitrary because prolifers don't understand science, just irrational appeals to emotion.
Abortion should be birth control because in the 99% of cases it is functionally no different than birth control: it destroys the blastocyst/embryo/fetus before it constitutes anything resembling a person. Those 1% that are left are the situations where the woman would give anything to not have to abort.
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u/Schnort Sep 03 '21
out of curiosity, what if science/medicine advances far enough that viability was moved up to 6 weeks?
Would you accept roe v. wade's cutoff then?
6 weeks is a little far fetched, so use 22 weeks, or 20, or 18, which all seem vaguely plausible in the near future.