Comment by cb18 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cb18 | Hacker News Reader

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No one can force you to be an organ donor. Even if donating your organs would save someone's life, you have autonomy over your body and you are allowed to decline to be an organ donor. How is abortion any different?

An organ is a component of a body. A baby is an entire human life form. You can't take an organ out of a body and have it grow up to be a poet or an astronaut.

If a baby in the womb is simply "a woman's body," what about the 50% of genetic material from the father?

I think the Republican Party's pro-life position to be discriminatory against women.

How is it discriminatory against women? Women are the only sex that gestate. Opponents of abortion simply feel that much abortion is highly questionable ethically and feel that a society's treatment of the weakest and most defenseless among them speaks much about the character of their society. If men gestated they'd feel the same way.

In modern society women do have complete autonomous control over their bodies in determining whether or not to become pregnant.

I think you missed the point of my analogy on abortion. Let's say there's someone you know who's going to die in 24 hours if she doesn't get a kidney transplant. She's too far down on the list to get one in that timeframe. Out of all the people she knows that have been tested, you're the only one who's a match.

If you donate your kidney, she lives. If you don't donate your kidney, she dies. Either way, the government cannot compel you to donate your kidney to save her life. You can say "This is my body, my choice" and the woman dies.

Same with abortion. The woman makes a choice about her body, the baby dies. This isn't the government's business.

> Opponents of abortion simply feel that much abortion is highly questionable ethically and feel that a society's treatment of the weakest and most defenseless among them speaks much about the character of their society.

Then by that logic, they should be arguing for organ donation to be mandatory.

> In modern society women do have complete autonomous control over their bodies in determining whether or not to become pregnant.

Tell that to a woman who gets pregnant from being raped.

Just want to throw this out there for folks who don't realize the origins of this argument: Google "Judith Jarvis Thomson violinist critique"

Thanks for providing that.

Thomson grants for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to life

Thomson says, abortion does not violate the fetus's legitimate rights, but merely deprives the fetus of something—the use of the pregnant woman's body and life-support functions—to which it has no right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion

This has a real sleaziness to it. Her argumentation is to separate into two, something that cannot logically be separated.

It's like saying you have a "right to breathe all you want from our oxygen rich biosphere," ... while in outer space.

I'll say this again, because it has just struck me so strongly, and it is so strange. What is it about our society that we have people so passionately arguing for killing off our progeny?

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