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(1) Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes. I agree some of the mainstream rhetoric doesn't emphasize thi

(1) Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes. I agree some of the mainstream rhetoric doesn't emphasize this in the interest of pithiness and such, but this strikes me as an odd complaint. (2) You seem to imply that some scientific definition of when life begins would offer a clear cut solution... but whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? And anyway, e.g. most voters (of all stripes!) in the US support some right to choose in the first trimester and do not support it in the third trimester, so "first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there

beaner 5y ago
> Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things. > whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? This only seems true because it is already the case that the answer affects our lives as human adults having to take action based on the answer in our particular cases. If we lived in some other universe where abortions were impossible (e.g. they always kill the mother for some reason), it seems like we wouldn't have that difficult enough of a time identifying when life begins in the fetus. What's funny is that because the answer affects us and we won't drill down into narrower ranges to identify specific criteria, this also makes our understanding of all other life more ambiguous. Because if we did identify when frogs, or elephants, or seedlings turn from cells into life, it would have obvious implications for humans. > first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there It seems like this is exactly what Texas has done. It went from there.
- juletide 5y ago
  It is not women vs men. However, anti-choice policies do have outcomes that disproportionately burden women, which is another way of saying such policies are misogynistic, which is... sexism. You can argue sexism only counts as such if there's intent behind it, or you can argue the sexism here is less important than other considerations, but I don't think it's derailing or distracting from an ethical issue to point out this sexism. It's something worth considering when deciding on the ethical issue. Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works. The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.
  - beaner 5y ago
    Sexism is not defined as things that disproportionally affect people based on sex. Are tampons sexist? Is the vagina itself, sexist? Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not? I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used. I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards. At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed. I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child. Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent. But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance. The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.

beaner 5y ago

> Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things. > whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? This only seems true because it is already the case that the answer affects our lives as human adults having to take action based on the answer in our particular cases. If we lived in some other universe where abortions were impossible (e.g. they always kill the mother for some reason), it seems like we wouldn't have that difficult enough of a time identifying when life begins in the fetus. What's funny is that because the answer affects us and we won't drill down into narrower ranges to identify specific criteria, this also makes our understanding of all other life more ambiguous. Because if we did identify when frogs, or elephants, or seedlings turn from cells into life, it would have obvious implications for humans. > first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there It seems like this is exactly what Texas has done. It went from there.

juletide 5y ago
It is not women vs men. However, anti-choice policies do have outcomes that disproportionately burden women, which is another way of saying such policies are misogynistic, which is... sexism. You can argue sexism only counts as such if there's intent behind it, or you can argue the sexism here is less important than other considerations, but I don't think it's derailing or distracting from an ethical issue to point out this sexism. It's something worth considering when deciding on the ethical issue. Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works. The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.
- beaner 5y ago
  Sexism is not defined as things that disproportionally affect people based on sex. Are tampons sexist? Is the vagina itself, sexist? Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not? I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used. I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards. At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed. I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child. Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent. But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance. The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.