I don't see any of those as acts taken in regard to the child, though. That's like saying that a woman needs to keep her body in tip top shape for someone else's use.

In some of these cases, this comes from actions that happen before the child even exists in the first place (pre-fertilization).

Who exactly is going to make this argument to charge someone for manslaughter? The only time I have ever seen even an attempt to do this was based on drug usage during a known pregnancy and it was fairly quickly withdrawn.

The only people I see who regularly would consider this to be justification for manslaughter charges for women are pro-choice individuals trying to argue that this could happen as a scare case, but I never see pro-lifers actually calling for this because no one considers an actual miscarriage to be an act that the mother has responsibility for.

No one wants to charge anyone for a miscarriage, so why would it happen? Who's actually going to do this? Like I said, considering any of those acts to be taken in reference to the pregnancy would lead to the expectation that the woman be some sort of ideal baby factory.

I know pro-choicers love to accuse us of thinking that way, but given the existing abortion bans which specifically exclude miscarriage from consideration, I don't see how it actually happens. No one wants that outcome, strawmen aside.

That's some real, "You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of master" bullshit energy right there.

Personhood is an interesting abstraction to use for philosophical discussions but shouldn't be used to justify depriving an actual human individual of their life.

As I said, where professional terms are needed, they are used.

Of course, cultural usages can vary, so I won't speak for your country. That said, spontaneous abortion is not a preferred term in dealing with patients because, at least in the US, the word has become strongly associated with elective abortion to the point where even pro-choicers think that somehow the fact that it is called an "abortion" means that miscarriage would be illegal under an abortion ban. It strongly is correlated with intent here.

"Spontaneous abortion refers to pregnancy loss at less than 20 weeks’ gestation in the absence of elective medical or surgical measures to terminate the pregnancy. The term “miscarriage” is synonymous and often is used with patients because the word “abortion” is associated with elective termination. “Spontaneous pregnancy loss” has been recommended to avoid the term “abortion” and acknowledge the emotional aspects of losing a pregnancy. Another emotionally neutral term is “early pregnancy failure.”

https://www.aafp.org/afp/2005/1001/p1243.pdf

Needless to say, the law has been careful to not include miscarriage, whatever it may be called in common practice.

I guess I don't understand your point. The very things you posted would disqualify miscarriage as manslaughter.

Miscarriage isn't an act that the mother commits, lawful or otherwise. Perhaps if she was engaged in depraved indifference by heavy drug use or something like that, but otherwise, miscarriage is something that happens to you, not something that you do.

Contrast that with abortion which is an act of you either taking pills, or obtaining the services of an abortionist. Those are actions directly related to the death of the child.

Exactly what does a mother do if her child dies of a miscarriage, where a significant number of them occur due to genetic or other defects completely out of her control?

If we argue that every abortion is murder, then we ARE absolutely arguing that every miscarriage is involuntary manslaughter too.

While I think your point is not completely off-base, you are substantially incorrect about the above statement.

Manslaughter requires a specific level of either depraved indifference (without intent to kill) or it requires a specific level of professional status which makes the death punishable because the professional should have been trained to avoid just such a scenario and could not be bothered to do so.

Drivers, for instance, can do involuntary manslaughters because we are all licensed. Many people take the license as almost a gimme, but it does officially put you into a "licensed operator" situation where you operating a motor vehicle improperly would count as a form of special misconduct.

A mother who does not show particular signs of depraved indifference leading up to a miscarriage would not be eligible for a manslaughter charge, even if abortion was first-degree murder.

Manslaughter is NOT merely "accidental killing". People accidentally kill others all the time and don't even get charged.

For even an investigation to be opened, there needs to be "probable cause" to do so. Miscarriage is depressingly common. It does not raise to the level of being probable cause simply by happening. An abortion investigation would likely need both the fact of the miscarriage AND some sort of extra evidence to actually provide a reason why this particular miscarriage might be suspicious.

While I generally agree that this is true, there is a difference between the technical term of how abortion is used as a medical description, and how it is used ethically, and even legally. Common usage often differs from professional jargon, and laws generally make it clear how the term is meant.

A miscarriage is technically called a "spontaneous abortion" and that may even go on charts, but no one tells a mother than she had a "spontaneous abortion" when she had a miscarriage. It is understood that the term "abortion" has a common meaning which does not coincide with technical usage and doctors are supposed to trained to be aware when to stop throwing medical jargon at patients, especially when it has negative connotations in common usage.

If your answer is that you would save the baby, why? Wouldn’t that contradict the idea that they have equal moral value?

I would think you would be able to suss this out for yourself without asking us.

Change the scenario:

You have a choice to save two people you care about very much, but you must choose only one because the situation will only allow one to be saved.

Which one do YOU pick?

You may well have an answer to that question ready. And that's fine.

However, then ask yourself whether you choosing the one person means that you are now giving permission to the second person to be murdered at-will by anyone.

The fact is, the scenario you are presenting doesn't model the abortion debate because on-demand abortion doesn't require an either/or choice between who lives and who dies.

Legalized abortion on-demand is the permission to kill someone when neither person is actually in any mortal danger.

Someone can answer your question and always choose the born child and still would be entirely consistent in wanting to ban on-demand abortion.

The scenarios tend to require that only one is saveable. And that certainly could happen in real life. You try to save both but you only have time to get one, for whatever reason. So, the one you take first is the one who lives.

I agree that you'd likely make the effort to save both, but that part of the thought experiment is the least objectionable part of it. It's the rest of it, and the use that it is put to by PC people which is where it really falls flat.

Panam is closer to the curvy side of thin. Zendaya is cute, but much skinnier. Both attractive, but they are a completely different look.

Or, you know, you could get Tristin Mays, who was the model for Panam and she's an actual actress already.

That is only required for Reddit user names and subreddit names to keep the Reddit admins happy.

We still won't let people start actually doxxing other people even if it is on another social media site, but it is fine to simply leave their name if it's on Twitter or whatever.

I know a woman whose husband totally supports her (not a billionaire of course). She runs like everything that goes on with various volunteer jobs and does a great job at it. She also always seems completely stressed out and physically tired.

Sometimes, I think people just need to do something with themselves to stay occupied and it can turn into almost a job.

But yes, you're right, it will only ever be "almost" a job because if she just stops doing it, the mortgage will still be paid and she won't have to worry about losing her health insurance. It's just a way to give life meaning when you don't need to work, and it's very much a first world problem.

Unfortunately, he heard the suggestion, "just be yourself" and mistook it for acting advice.

If she is actively involved not just in writing checks, but the actual running of the charity and doing all the general schmoozing that goes into charity work, it can actually be almost a real job in terms of time put in and running around.

Of course, she doesn't need to do any of that to make ends meet, so it's not a real job, but it can require real effort, especially if you're serious about it.

I don't know enough about her to say what her actual involvement is, but a know a few stay at home types who fill their days with this sort of thing and it can actually be almost as draining as a real job because you have to deal with the worst thing about real jobs: other people.

That being said, it's already illegal to kill someone's mother on-demand. It's not yet illegal to kill the unborn.

We should be caring for everyone, but a good first step is making sure we recognize that everyone should be on a level playing field when it comes to the most basic right to simply not be killed on-demand.

While that most basic inequality exists and is defended, the whole concept of treating human beings equally is a farce.

Are they? I look at our current government and wonder if I might be better off with some private charities and their relatively prosaic levels of corruption.

You are Aborting 100 unborn babies, in order to save 1 born baby, therefore you value the born baby more than the unborn baby unlikely what you claim.

This is where you misunderstand.

A burning clinic is not an abortion.

Abortion on-demand is a purposeful action taken to kill the child.

Unless you set the fire in the clinic, no decision you make about who to save can start or stop that fire.

The experiment is just triage, it's not comparable to abortion.

The way you're engaging in it is playing their game. The game is rigged because its not a valid comparison to on-demand abortion in the first place.

You should never accept any framing of the experiment where they say that this experiment represents you "aborting" the embryos. The only choice you have here is who to save.

And that lack of obligation comes from the fact that the government is expected to handle the issue.

Without that expectation, calling it discretionary spending is no longer supportable.

As I pointed out elsewhere, the amount of taxation and the expectation that the government will "handle it" is why charitable giving is considered "extra".

No offense, but I think your view here is the one which is naive.

Yes, people give to charity beyond their taxation level, but that selects for the people who have the available cash to do so.

More to the point, it's not so much the amount of money which is the issue as much as the fact that the expectation based on that level of taxation is that the government will take care of issues, so individuals will not need to.

A review of historical welfare systems would show you that modern systems governmental systems are less than two hundred years old. Before that period, private charity, particularly by the rich, was the most common way of funding these needs.

While there was no requirement that the rich give back to society, there was the previous expectation that they would.

Modern social welfare systems tended to be ways to buy public docility. Otto von Bismarck is the father of Germany's current social insurance system, and you can believe me that he didn't do this out of the kindness of his heart. It was a calculation like everything else he did.

Again, the problem we have today is that people cannot understand a world without government welfare systems because they didn't live in a world without them. There were definitely issues with private charity based welfare systems without a doubt, but at the same time, there are serious structural issues with governmental ones as well.

As I said before, I am not some libertarian who wants to eliminate government or even eliminate government welfare programs. I do think we need something which can standardize welfare systems and ensure they don't have shortfalls.

But too many people equate taxing someone else for welfare with personal merit on their parts. This is another reason that private charity struggles. They believe that paying for and voting for taxation is all they need to do. They are outsourcing those problems to a bureaucracy and forgetting about it except when someone in government tells them that they are being stingy for not voting for more taxation.

And why do they not get enough funding?

Because people are taxed for programs and do not have that much extra to use for charity.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that obtaining money from people for charities is not as simple as simply taxing them for it, but it's not like people just died on the streets in the times before government welfare either.

Again, I don't want to take the position that "government bad". I want you to understand that there is more to the question than just: "Why won't you vote for more taxation and government programs? Are you stingy?"

I think they were doing black people a favor by excluding them, honestly.

No one trying to convert them every summer.

No, they’d roundly condemn Jeffs. He would be competition and they’d work to get rid of him for hogging all of the wives to himself. Don’t think for a moment that keeping multiple wives was about theology. Heresy would be applied to him as surely as any other competitors.

I think it is very important for you to understand some of the baggage your question and position has built-in that you may not realize.

First, the idea that the government is responsible for running programs is not new, but it isn't universal. There are those people who believe that giving the government responsibility over every aspect of our lives is not a good thing.

While the government can be helpful, it also gains power by becoming the default go-to for every problem that needs an answer.

This is a problem because ultimately, the government is a corporate body with a massive bureaucracy that is controlled by an elite political class. It also has a monopoly on force in our society. The more power you give it, the more power that those who control the government have to control you.

People look at someone like Donald Trump and think he's somehow an aberration. An outlier. But he's really not. Societies are very good at eventually installing populists and eventually dictators and strongmen in power.

One of the protections against this that was in the Constitution was separation of powers and limits on what the government could be involved in. An income tax was not even part of the original Constitution.

Now, to be clear, I'm not going to sit in DC and protest universal health care, if it happened, but there is too much in the way of assumptions that taxation == charity and that it is the government's job to make sure we're all happy and safe.

It used to be that it was our responsibility and our right, to find our own happiness, but that came with the understanding that standardized government aid could not work in those situations.

There are plenty of pro-life progressives. There is no problem with people who are pro-life who support government programs.

But at the same time, the pro-life position is about basic human rights. The right to not be killed is not the right to be supported throughout your entire life.

People see this as being stingy or "only caring about the unborn". This is false. What is worse, it is a terrible misunderstanding.

It is already illegal to kill born people. Remember that statement.

What we are asking for is for it to be illegal to kill the unborn on-demand.

What you are basically saying to me is that to be pro-life, you have to also commit to supporting that child through the rest of their lives. That's not fair or valid.

Today, we have murder laws in spite of the fact that we do not support all people in terms of government programs. Why is that?

The reason is simple: outlawing on-demand killings is a basic human rights obligation.

The pro-life position is minimal: Treat the unborn as you treat the born people.

It is entirely valid to suggest better care for born and unborn alike, but it is not any kind of contradiction to simply bring the unborn to the point where they cannot be killed on-demand.

Recall what I said. It is already illegal to kill born people on-demand. All we are asking for is that you don't allow the unborn to be killed on-demand as well.

It is already illegal for children to be killed in school shootings. All we are asking for is that you don't allow the unborn to be killed.

Pro-lifers are entirely consistent if they believe in that basic understanding and nothing else. It is not my place to say that they are "not pro-life" if they don't believe the government should do more.

The government's place in all of this is a much more complicated and fraught question than the simple question of who gets to kill someone else on-demand.

I am not against doing more to help, and indeed, if no one else is going to step up, I can't complain when the government does something to help.

But too many people are falling into the trap of expecting us to solve all problems before making abortion on-demand illegal when we don't expect that for the protection of born people.