Mexico’s supreme court has decriminalized abortion across the country, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The supreme court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
Oh, my bad, apologies. Scan reading sometimes leads to mistakes like that, and that one was too funny for my brain to let go.
But now it makes even less sense to me with the body thing. I would never accept someone else forcing me to do (or not do) something with my own body - and i see no reason whatsoever for anyone to accept that.
There is an issue of vaccination where some enforcement is justifiable, as there is a true risk for other people in you not doing it. How does someone’s decision of not having a child threatens you?
Any and all restrictions or instructions should be based on a rational argument, otherwise it is just a limitation of your freedom.
And given that the argument in favor of imposing the limitations in question lies in the area of someone else’s beliefs - that becomes even more ridiculous.
On the taxes side - there i can see a strong argument for it in principle, as it allows the society as a whole to do better. You want to use infrastructure built by society - you pay. Now, there is a whole other problem of how exactly the monies collected on the basis of a rational idea are spent. Holding the people in charge accountable is truly a big issue, not for this thread though.
“How does someone not having a child threaten you”
A serial killer that only targets blondes doesn’t pose any threat to me at all. I might even personally benefit from their actions. Why do I still want them to be stopped?
“I see no reason whatsoever to accept that”
But you already do. You even give vaccination as an example where it would be permitted.
You are perfectly fine with one bodily autonomy violation to save lives (vaccination), but are against another (weaker form) violation that also saves lives.
The logical resolution to this is to say that prohibiting abortion doesn’t save lives (i.e the fetus has no moral value or atleast insufficient moral value to outweigh personal feelings). But this renders the bodily autonomy argument worthless, because it is now the moral status of the fetus that matters not any idea of bodily autonomy. This pretty much establishes why I think the right to bodily autonomy is not actually accepted by anyone.
“Any and all restrictions and instructions should be based on rational arguments”
There is tons of academic papers on the immorality of abortion, of course there are tons that argue in the opposite of direction. I would consider most on both sides to have somewhat rational arguments it just depends on what premises you want to accept as true. I find the premises behind permitting abortion to be bit more far-fetched, things like mind-body dualism or continuity of mind as somehow granting greater moral value to be unsupported or impractical.
Blondes are people, fetuses are not - that is my view. Moral arguments can form opinions, not legislation.It is ok for you to hate me if you choose to do so, it however does not grant you a right to stop me doing my immoral in your view thing. That is, unless my immoral thing infringes your rights, then we can talk and see what can be done.
As mentioned, I am always keen to accept a rational argument (as in vaccination, where there is science behind), so can i please politely ask you to point me in the direction of academic studies on the immorality of abortion? Never saw one, so forgive my ignorance.
“Blondes are people fetuses are not”
First you completely missed the point of that question. You initially speculated why people should care if it is not directly harming them, this is a clear and obvious example of people caring about something that doesn’t directly harm them. Showing that your initial objection was unfounded.
Second you immediately abandoned the bodily autonomy argument, just like I pointed out you would.
“Unless my Immoral things is infringing on your rights”
Circle back to the serial killer. They aren’t infringing on my rights, how dare I object! What right do I have to enforce my morality on them?
Obviously it is permissible to enforce morality regardless of whether or not the subject likes it. The question is simply how to determine if the morality is correct, i.e consistent and well-founded.
“Moral arguments can form opinions not legislation”.
Nope, that’s literally all that legislation is. A moral system is something that determines whether or not something is good or bad. If a law declares that some action should be taken or certain actions are to be prohibited it is enforcing a moral system. (That moral system may be wildly inconsistent and contradictory but it is still a moral system).
There seems to be this popular notion ( outside of moral philosophy) that morality is somehow empirically derived. Unfortunately no matter how much you watch someone die, you will never gain any information on whether that circumstance is bad or good. Empirical facts may aid in classifying actions, but they do not create the requirements for the categories themselves. For instance you have a moral system that says that actions with property X are bad, you may use empirical facts to determine that action Y has property X and you can therefore determine that action Y must be bad. Without the initial premise that actions with property X are bad, you could observe Y and any other action and have no ability to determine if they are good or bad.
“In the direction of academic studies”
Not so much studies as arguments, since moral philosophy is not really an empirical field, but rather a rational one. You can find them in many ethics journals. A notable paper is “Why Abortion is Immoral” by Don Marquis, and if you read any papers in favor of abortion or infanticide there is generally a paper rebutting it.
