"Not a feminist, but": A guide to what feminism is and isn't

I don't know if I'd call abortion a feminist issue, or an equality issue between men and women, or anything like that. I think abortion should be legal, but I don't think it's got anything to do with equality between men and women.

Men can't get pregnant, but women can. So men can't get abortions obviously, women can. So I don't think it's an equality issue.... idk though, it's an important thing to discuss for women, whether you agree with it or not, but I'm not sure if it's important in terms of equality.

Someone could probably convince me it is, though, since I'm genuinely not sure myself. Just kind of confused where people see it as an equality issue. Sorry if that was explained in this thread already, I read through it, and didn't completely get it. Sorry I'm thick. DX

edited 3rd Jun '11 5:30:36 AM by SheilaStarlight

@Sheila: Don't call yourself thick, I'm sure you're perfectly intelligent.

But you asked for an explanation, so:

It's true that men can't get pregnant, but they can do things like donate or refuse to donate organs. This is because their body is their property, and they have the ultimate right to determine what happens to it.

A pregnancy is essentially a woman "donating" her uterus to the fetus for nine months. Though it would be great if she permitted it, just as it would be great if a man donated his organs to people, forcing her to allow the use of her uterus is a violation of her rights over her body, and if it's not coupled with forcing men to give up their rights over their bodies it's an unequal denial of her rights over her body.

I'm not pro-life, but there's a conceivable hole in your logic. I think the problem with this argument is that, outside of a pregnancy caused by rape, the woman took actions that she knew full well might result in pregnancy...namely, having unprotected sex. The fetus didn't ask for a "uterus donation," the mother gambled her uterus when she decided to have unprotected sex. To boot, you can argue against abortion from a rights standpoint...only because of the mother's decision, the fetus loses the rights to it's body...

I can't think of any other medical analogy that wouldn't be all kinds of illegal...

edited 3rd Jun '11 3:35:20 PM by sketch162000

@sketch: Consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. The woman isn't responsible for the pregnancy in any meaningful way unless she was actually trying to get pregnant. (And if she was trying for it it's unlikely she would want an abortion without a very good reason.)

Driving a car doesn't imply responsibility for a car accident, even though it's a necessary condition for it. Playing football doesn't imply responsibility for concussions, even though it increases the risk tremendously.

Besides all that, why does responsibility matter? If you hit a guy with your car and his kidneys are damaged beyond repair, nobody would even propose legally forcing you to donate a kidney to him.

No, but if he dies you would be convicted of vehicular homicide, which is illegal.

Actually, your analogy has got me thinking of the moral and legal considerations of such a situation...nice one.

edited 3rd Jun '11 4:00:57 PM by sketch162000

@Sketch: Yes, so? There's no legal way to destroy both a person's kidneys, but that's just a property of the example. If there was such a way it wouldn't matter to the analogy at all.

EDIT: Just saw your edit, and thank you.

edited 3rd Jun '11 3:58:55 PM by BlackHumor

If you really want to compare pregnancy to organ donation, you've got to tweak the analogy a bit, because, unlike your average organ thief, a fetus has no say in whether it uses part of your body or not.

It's more like you go into the hospital for, let's say, a tonsilectomy, but due to a slipup (maybe your fault, maybe the doctors' fault, or maybe no one's fault) one of your kidneys is removed instead. By the time you've been brought up from anasthesia enough to find out what's happened, the kidney has already been transplanted into someone who was dying from kidney failure. Since their old, damaged kidneys were removed during the transplant, if you take your kidney back now they will die within moments.

At that point, I'd say it would be immoral to try to lay claim to your kidney. Once it's been transplanted into someone else's body, it ceases to be yours and becomes theirs. If you could show that the kidney recipient intentionally set up the theft of your kidney, you'd have grounds for a lawsuit (but only for financial compensation; the kidney itself would probably still be off-limits). However, if the transplant was truly an accident, then I'd say it's a case of "sorry for loss, but sometimes that's just how the cookie crumbles".

A fetus has no say in using your organs because a fetus has no say in anything.

A proper analogy would have to be expanded a bit, but it still reaches the same conclusion:

Suppose you are in a hospital for a week for a minor surgery, and your roommate is in a coma due to kidney failure and desperately needs dialysis. But for some reason the hospital doesn't have a dialysis machine, and so it connects this guy to your kidneys, and says that only in nine months will they have a donor kidney ready so you will have to be connected to the guy for all that time. According to them, it will likely be uncomfortable to have this other guy sharing your kidney but you won't be in serious danger from it.

Let us ignore when the guy wakes up from his coma, because it doesn't really matter to the analogy. Though it is still morally the right thing to do to allow this guy to use your kidneys, it would be abhorrent to legally obligate you to stay. If you wanted, you must be able to say "no, I don't want this guy on my kidneys" and leave, even if it kills the guy, because a law forcing people to not do that would be worse than allowing people to do that.

EDIT: Though I just realized something that might be important:

All the pro-choice analogies I'm giving assume that the fetus will die unless the mother keeps it alive. In contrast, all the pro-life analogies I've been countered with assume the fetus will live unless the mother kills it.

I think much of the difference in opinion about this can be reduced to this difference in perspective. Allowing someone to die is something that at least most Americans believe people must be allowed to do, and also that people must not be allowed to kill someone. Whether an abortion is seen as killing the fetus or merely allowing it to die might be a big part of what causes people to see it differently.

edited 4th Jun '11 7:35:27 AM by BlackHumor

Er, well... a non-aborted fetus definitely isn't guaranteed to live (IIRC my stats properly, miscarriage is much more common than most people realize), but it obviously isn't guaranteed to die, either.

So I'm not sure how abortion can ever be accurately viewed as merely "letting the fetus die", when it's more "taking uncertainty out of the equation and ensuring the fetus definitely will die".

Because the mother's body has to constantly maintain the fetus to keep it alive.

It's very similar to how a hospital keeps a patient in a coma alive, actually. There's a lot of bodily functions that we take for granted that we can do ourselves which the mother instead has to do for the fetus. A coma patient has also lost some or all of those functions, and in order to keep them alive the hospital must hook them up to one or more machines which do those things for them.

So, basically, the difference is whether abortion is analogous to removing a coma patient from life support or to stabbing them.

edited 4th Jun '11 9:55:25 AM by BlackHumor

And, as with most of these analogies, it ignores responsibility. It's one thing for doctors to just let this guy use your kidneys because you are there. It changes the game a bit if the only reason the guy needs your kidneys is because of something you did.

Not that anybody could seriously suggest that, for example, a murderer would donate his body to one of his victims. But at the least, the murderer would be charged with a crime, because he is responsible for the victim being in a life threatening position in the first place.

edited 4th Jun '11 10:04:29 AM by sketch162000

Well, that's not really fair either, I'm afraid. There are plenty of women who get pregnant who actually were on the pill, IUD, using a condom correctly, etc. and thus not being irresponsible. Heck, it's even possible to still get pregnant after a tubal ligation (just much more rare than other birth control methods).

edited 4th Jun '11 10:07:26 AM by Jeysie

Of course. And also rape.

But then there are the people who fail at the pull out method., are irresponsible with contraceptives, got wasted etc...

Not saying that abortion should be illegal for everybody because of those cases. To be sure, I'm actually all for it across the board. I'm just kind of exploring the moral considerations of the other side.

edited 4th Jun '11 10:11:07 AM by sketch162000

I really don't think the organ donor/human dialysis machine analogy works that well. In that scenario, the donor and recepient are previously unattached until a surgeon comes in and does some meddling. However, in the mother/fetus scenario, the fetus has been attached to the mother from the moment it came into existence, and it takes a surgeon's interference for them to become seperate.

If you work from the premise that a human embryo/fetus counts as a person, then it's perfectly consistent to oppose both organ theft and abortion. Isn't it pretty standard medical ethics that surgery should only be performed if everyone involved gives their consent? Well, a fetus is incapable of giving consent, and a parent's ability to make medical decisions for their child doesn't include procedures that would kill them without a doubt.

Again, I'd say that conjoined twins are a much more apt analogy. The only counter that's been offered to that is that, since the mother is around before the fetus, she gets to decide what happens to their shared body parts, but I really don't see what seniority has to do with anything.

edited 4th Jun '11 10:19:53 AM by RavenWilder

And, as with most of these analogies, it ignores responsibility. It's one thing for doctors to just let this guy use your kidneys because you are there. It changes the game a bit if the only reason the guy needs your kidneys is because of something you did.

And like I said before, it wouldn't matter if he was in the hospital because of something you did.

In that scenario, the donor and recepient are previously unattached until a surgeon comes in and does some meddling. However, in the mother/fetus scenario, the fetus has been attached to the mother from the moment it came into existence, and it takes a surgeon's interference for them to become seperate.

Yes, but not since the mother came into existance, which is the relevant thing.

If an alien, of any level of sentience, popped into existence attached to your kidney, you would totally be within your rights to remove it even if it would kill it.

Isn't it pretty standard medical ethics that surgery should only be performed if everyone involved gives their consent? Well, a fetus is incapable of giving consent, and a parent's ability to make medical decisions for their child doesn't include procedures that would kill them without a doubt.

That only applies for things that can actually give consent. The scalpel does not need to give consent, for instance.

Of course,drawn out to the logical conclusion, my above argument would result in "If you don't want to have a baby, don't have sex," which highlights the basic inequality—it takes two to make a baby, but only one will get pregnant. If a couple slips up and gets pregnant it's the woman who has to carry the baby, even if it IS totally her fault. The man, who could be equally responsible, has no such bodily consequence. Maybe he has to pay child support for 18 years, and the amount is negotiable.

So really can we (should we) try to counter an inequality that comes prepackaged with nature?

Why?

Now, see, I'm not so sure that's the case. If it truly just popped up spontaneously rather than coming in from outside, I think I might just have to suck it up and deal with it (assuming the alien posed no risk of killing me, and assuming we decided to assign it personhood status).

The pro-life position is founded on the idea that an embryo/fetus is a person and deserves all the rights you'd give to a newborn infant. Afterall, a one-year-old is also incapable of consenting to a surgical procedure, but trying to remove their vital organs to graft onto another person's body would still be illegal.

If it truly just popped up spontaneously rather than coming in from outside, I think I might just have to suck it up and deal with it (assuming the alien posed no risk of killing me, and assuming we decided to assign it personhood status).

If it wasn't a sapient alien, I would not only think it would be okay to remove it, I would remove it.

If it was a sapient alien, I wouldn't remove it, but it would still not be okay to legally obligate me not to.

The pro-life position is founded on the idea that an embryo/fetus is a person and deserves all the rights you'd give to a newborn infant. Afterall, a one-year-old is also incapable of consenting to a surgical procedure, but trying to remove their vital organs to graft onto another person's body would still be illegal.

A one year old would be capable of consenting if you had some way to communicate the procedure to it. If you were to actually cut into a conscious one year old, it would communicate its lack of consent very clearly.

(Not that this makes it never okay to cut into a one year old. If an infant needed some kind of emergency surgery to save its life, neither of us would say "no, we can't do it, it needs to explicitly consent to it!" In fact, I would guess that most people would perform the surgery over the infant's objections.)

There we're gonna have to agree to disagree.

Even if you had a way to properly communicate with a one-year-old, at that point wouldn't their brain development still be low enough that they wouldn't qualify for informed consent?

Although that's getting off-topic. This thread's supposed to be about defining feminism; the bodily sovereignity issue fits into that, but the rights one affords to human embryoes/fetuses is a whole 'nother issue.

"So, if you are lying unconscious, is it OK to kill you?"

Losing consciousness doesn't really work that way. My nerves would still feel pain, my brain would still registers signals from my nerves. The fetus, on the other hand, does not have the necessary brain wiring to experience pain yet.

Well, IIRC it depends on which stage of the pregnancy you're talking about.

Yes, but 99% of abortions happen before even the earliest point the fetus might possibly feel pain (that is, 20 weeks).