Shorter Matt “star-toad with a thousand siblings” Yglesias-Sothoth*: “The first rule of fetus club is: You don’t talk about the women who’s bodies the fetuses have attached to against their will, and the second rule of fetus club is: You do not talk about the women who’s bodies the fetuses have atached to against their will…”
Put the Niven novel down Matt, we are not puppeteers, human females actually play a part in the gestation of their young.
However, say what you want about the uterus-less thousand siblinged star-toad, Yglesia-Sothoth highlights through tooliness a common mistake liberals of a male gender all to frequently make when playing devil’s advocate for the anti-choicers’ position: the basic supposition that fetii are people is not actually what the anti-choicers argue, it’s what they often believe, but then they are crazy fundimentalists, what generally happens however, once they start meeting resistance to the idea that fetuses are unarguably equivalent to full human beings (which, scientifically speaking, they’re not, equivalent to teri schiavio maybe, if teri had suffered from 99% of her internal organs failing entirely, swam about in a sac full of her own excretions and occasionally trod on people’s bladders) is to say that they could possibly be full humans but we’ll never know for sure, ergo we should err on the side of caution, just in case. The reason why this is very much a problem for male liberals is because it leaves the arguer focusing purely on the fetus, thus negating the extremely important role the woman who is pregnant plays in both the moral and legal deliberations regarding the debate – a mistake that seems to be routinely made when you’re not the one who’s bodily autonomy is being threatened, and you’re a humongous tool.
Now in my personal experience (which means no metrics or citations I’m afraid) the position that one must err on the side of caution regarding the “humanity” of fetii, is generally the more common one among the rank and file anti-choicers, and should therefore be the one that devil’s advocates start with. Even if it isn’t actually the majority view of anti-choicers, the plural of anecdote not being data after all, because it is actually the position that anti-choicers resort to once the very real and very valid evidence against the “human from conception” bullshit is laid out on the table, it’s the only fall back point they have once you attack the initial belief, and that’s therefore what needs to be addressed once the initial science based arguement has done its bit.
Of course, the trouble with playing devil’s advocate for THAT position, is that potential harm to a potential person who the state only potentially has a potential stake in protecting, doesn’t actually, whether legally, philisophically or theologically, trump actual harm done to an actual person who has actual rights that the state has an actual duty to protect, which include her right to personal autonomy, to defend herself against harm and freedom to worship however she pleases (which includes believing that fetuses are not people until birth).
This is why it fucks me off so much when Wankers like Yglesia-Sothoth parrot anti-choice framing which writes the woman entirely out of the process of pregnancy, the arguement is always a woman’s rights versus those of a fetus, the question then becomes a matter of who deserves to protect themselves more, an undeveloped fetus, or a fully developed, post-pubescent, sentient woman.
And if you fail to take into account the woman’s half of the equation in your devil’s advocation, you’re just repeating anti-choice talking points, and making yourself seem really fat headed in the process.
* A nickname in honor of his ability to display thought processes and logic more apt for one of Lovecraft’s “senseless idiot gods”.
Too perfect to say anything else.