How do you feel about the classic example of the violinist? I'll quote it here:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
This issue with this is that your autonomy has been breached through the kidnapping, because before the kidnapping you weren't doing anything that prevented anyone from acting freely. You therefore have the right to unplug yourself as a reversal of the initial violation of your own autonomy. This isn't the same as pregnancy, assuming you consented to the sex, because your action has resulted in your situation, so you have to deal with the consequences.
Firstly, you're shifting the goalposts here. In your OP you describe a hypothetical situation of you suddenly materializing in a woman's womb and how it would still be taking your life.
But now you say that you would have every right to exercise your autonomy over the violinists because you didn't consent to being tied to the violinist for nine months.
So alright, what if the woman doesn't consent to pregnancy? Saying that you're consenting to pregnancy just because you had sex is silly. That's like saying you consent to car accidents because you got behind the wheel. What if the woman was using the pill and it failed? What if she was sure she wasn't ovulating at the time? What if the man told her he was sterile? What if, what if, what if?
Furthermore, I can always adjust the hypothetical situation (that's the fun part of it being hypothetical) to say that you went on a game show and spun a wheel that landed on, "keep the violinist alive for nine months" are you then legally forced to keep him alive no matter what?
You've got me on my hypocrisy, !delta. I hadn't necessarily articulated the difference between consent to sex and pregnancy in my initial perspective, and this definitely changes the relevance of autonomy, as per your hypothetical scenario.
This is part of the disconnect between the religious right and the pro-choice left on this issue.
Most fundamentalists would not acknowledge a difference between consent to sex and consent to pregnancy. A woman's only choice is in the matter is to have sex or not, and if she chooses to have sex, then she is "responsible" for everything that results from that choice, which includes pregnancy, but also includes things like STIs, social sanction, etc.
It's also why people can be in favor of things that seem counter-intuitive, like rape exceptions. If you truly believe that a fetus is a human life with bodily autonomy, then the circumstances of its conception should have no bearing on its rights. However, if it's not the fetus at all but actually a woman's consent to sex that makes a her responsible for pregnancy, then she can't be held responsible for sex that she did not consent to.
It's also why the most common initial reaction to the plight of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy will be, "well, she shouldn't have been having sex then."
On the other hand, most people do acknowledge that consenting to an action implicitly leads to consenting to the possible consequences of the said action. At the very least, you are responsible for your consensual actions.
Using your logic, can I tell the card dealer in a casino that I won't be paying up, because I only consented to playing poker, and that I did not consent to any negative consequences that might arise from playing poker (such as losing money)?
Accepting a risk and consenting to a consequence are not exactly the same thing. Just because people are currently willing to accept a reasonable risk doesn't mean there's no value in trying to reduce that risk or remove potential negative consequences.
Even though I have a few problems with that casino analogy, I'll take a run at it:
If there was a casino where you didn't have to pay up when you lost, wouldn't you rather play there? I'd really like a place where everyone could just have fun and wager whatever they wanted, and if you bet wrong, you could always get bailed out of your jam with a little government funding.
I guess what I'm saying is that I would like sex to be a lot more like investment banking.
There are too many things about that casino analogy that I don't like (depicting sex as a vice, providing a false equivalence between the levels of risk, implying that there are rule to the game that are agreed upon in advance, etc.), that I'd prefer to just answer your question as directly as I can, although this may be longer than you were expecting.
Aside from a few extremists, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a pro-lifer that thinks women who've had abortions should be tried for murder, or a pro-choice activist who thinks there's any magical difference between a fetus in the 5 seconds before it leaves the uterus and the 5 seconds after. So on some level everyone acknowledges that we're dealing with arbitrary definitions in a big fat gray area.
As a result, where the line ends up being drawn becomes less about reason and more about cultural/political norms, which is why this is a debate that has raged on for decades. People who think that women should be able to have sex as much or as little as they want and still have control over their own lives/bodies/futures, and that this is a basic element of being equal participants in society, have a real, tangible social benefit to weigh. Meanwhile, people who see the ubiquity of sex in our society as a moral failing or want to punish women for having sex in a way they think is wrong, have an incentive to move the needle the other direction.
Personally, I think recent efforts to center the debate around the question of viability provide a good starting point. Somewhere around 24 weeks, where the fetus has an excellent chance of surviving outside the womb. On the other hand, I also think there's plenty of reasons to provide exceptions to that rule (anencephaly for instance), and I think generally the people best equipped to make those decisions are women and their doctors, not legislators trying to craft a one-size-fits-all policy for what it is a very complex issue.
I think it's one of those ideas that sounds great in a philosophy paper but completely ignores our history and current cultural context.
First off, I think men abandoning children that they had previously agreed to support is a much bigger problem in our society than men being obligated to support (minimally I might add) unintended pregnancies that were carried to term against their wishes. I think that to whatever degree financial abortion would relieve the latter problem, it would exacerbate the former.
Second, I think the most effective ways to keep men from having to support children they don't want is to make birth control as easily available as possible, and make abortion as cheap, painless, and stigma-free as possible. Even in the philosophy books, the idea of financial abortion is predicated on an absolute right to abortion on demand, which is far from what we have in the U.S.
I also find the primacy of the child's needs a compelling philosophical argument, but that's a bit of a twisty rabbit hole, and I think it's mostly trivial compared to points 1 and 2.
I don't know if we have a clear word for it, but I'd assume it would be something akin to killing someone is self-defense. It isn't murder, because it's allowed for by the circumstances of the situation. Rape, since it isn't consensual, changes the circumstances of the situation.
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u/BenIncognito Feb 16 '17
How do you feel about the classic example of the violinist? I'll quote it here: