Fetus-hood vs. Personhood

[ebonlock]

I have to say I found Lance Mannion's latest post on the abortion debate both interesting and decidedly frustrating. I was trying to put my own ideas together to respond, but then Rana in the comments said it far better than I ever could:

I hate to say it, but for me the personhood of the fetus is beside the point. Presumably one of the rights of human beings is the right to control their own bodies. This is why we do not legally require people with O-negative blood to donate blood, why we do not legally require parents to donate kidneys to their children, why we do not legally require children to donate marrow to their parents, why we do not legally require anyone to give up any of their body in order to support someone else's.

It is true that a fetus, especially one that is more pre-term than one that is nearly ready to be born, lacks the ability to live without the biological contribution of the woman in whose womb it exists. So why should its need for a woman's uterus trump the woman's right to control her own body, given that a need of this kind carries no legal compulsion for any other category of person?

Now, there may be moral or ethical obligations that devolve upon the mother -- or the blood donor, or the organ donor, et al. -- in a situation like this, but those are the purview of churches and individuals, not government. I especially do not approve of the legal imposition of the moral code of a belief system I find to be vicious, rigid, and anti-woman, as if my own moral code was not good enough.

I personally would be reluctant to have an abortion if I became pregnant, because I _do_ believe in that fetuses are more than just clusters of cells, but that decision to give over my body and health to the support of another human being should be MINE. Not my partner's, not the fetus's, and certainly not that of judgemental, self-righteous people who know nothing about me or my life and couldn't care less about what happens to me during the pregnancy or either me or the child after birth.

So whether the fetus is a pre-baby or a clump of parasitic cells is not decisve to me. Either one believes that women have the same right as men, children, and fetuses to control their own bodies, in which case one must reject restrictions on abortion of any kind, or one is choosing to see women as legally inferior to the rest of humanity.

We may wish that adult female human beings behave in selfless ways, but I find it morally repugnant to single them out for legal coercion when they choose to exercise the same rights to bodily integrity that the rest of humanity can exercise unimpeded.

Yeah, that about sums it up for me.

Comments

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's....a really good argument. I think I may use that, next time it comes up.