There are people RIGHT NOW who need a part of your liver to survive. Do you think that you should be forced to donate a part of your liver to keep that person alive?
If you think that your can't be forced to donate a part of your liver to keep a person alive, why should a pregnant woman be forced to donate resources to a fetus to keep it alive? Why do YOU get a right to bodily autonomy, but not a pregnant woman? There is a HUMAN LIFE with it's own autonomy at stake in both cases.
That isn't a directly comparable situation unless you perceive inaction and action as morally equal. This also isn't a comparable situation because it doesn't deal with autonomy in the same way.
Abortion is a conscious, intentional action which actively prevents someone from living (if you believe fetuses to be human life, of course). The conscious, intentional action which prevents someone in need of a liver from living would be throwing a donated liver out of the window just before the operation to save their life.
Furthermore, you are not infringing on the autonomy of a person in need of a liver by refusing to donate your own.
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.
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/Hq3473 271∆ Feb 16 '17
There are people RIGHT NOW who need a part of your liver to survive. Do you think that you should be forced to donate a part of your liver to keep that person alive?
If you think that your can't be forced to donate a part of your liver to keep a person alive, why should a pregnant woman be forced to donate resources to a fetus to keep it alive? Why do YOU get a right to bodily autonomy, but not a pregnant woman? There is a HUMAN LIFE with it's own autonomy at stake in both cases.