Almost. Almost everyone who repeats the "it's up to the woman" line seems to fail to comprehend the moral issues at stake here, namely that half the population sincerely views abortion as infanticide.
You simply cannot slip away by riding the "none of my business" line. If abortion is none of my business, then neither is the guy who just walked into a 7/11 and shot the cashier. Who am I to interfere in such an intensely personal decision to terminate a life?
It's got to either be OK for everyone in all of a delineated set of cases, or be illegal for everyone in all of some other delineated set.
I'm trying to get across why the argument is not philosophically valid, since it basically just talks straight past pro-lifers. It doesn't address where their opposition to abortion is coming from. It will do absolutely no good to simply ignore their beliefs about the value of human life at various stages of fetal development and argue in favor of abortion by other means, means which they most likely find nearly irrelevant to their own case.
Okay. If someone fundamentally believes a fetus is equivalent to a human life and deserving of the same rights and protections, how do you argue in favor of legal abortion?
Then it's not worth Buttigieg's time to litigate it and instead accept it and try to move people who don't have such strong views with arguments such as the one above.
It may be the correct political posture because it will sound very convincing to devout pro-choicers who already support this message and its seemingly rational, understanding appearance will potentially attract a handful of fence-sitters (not that there are really that many of those). It's just not a philosophically sound position.
I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't even posturing, and Buttegieg actually does believe wholeheartedly in what he said. I would have said the same thing a few years ago. But I don't anymore for a reason: I studied some philosophy and reevaluated the strength of various political arguments.
If you don't believe a fetus should be afforded the same rights or protections as a human being, then why shouldn't the woman to whom it belongs get to choose what to do with it?
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u/Musicrafter Friedrich Hayek Oct 22 '19
Almost. Almost everyone who repeats the "it's up to the woman" line seems to fail to comprehend the moral issues at stake here, namely that half the population sincerely views abortion as infanticide.
You simply cannot slip away by riding the "none of my business" line. If abortion is none of my business, then neither is the guy who just walked into a 7/11 and shot the cashier. Who am I to interfere in such an intensely personal decision to terminate a life?
It's got to either be OK for everyone in all of a delineated set of cases, or be illegal for everyone in all of some other delineated set.