Because while a pregnant mother doesn’t have the option to give the fetus to someone else to feed, the mother of an infant does.

I have a sense of humor about most things. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of short, text-based communication that you get a dramatically incomplete picture of people and their intentions. You misrepresent my position to suggest that I am claiming I would have “no problem” with a woman putting her baby into a blender. In fact, I said no such thing. And in this very thread I offered the difference between Justice, a subset of morality, and Morality generally. Even if putting a baby into a blender doesn’t violate the baby’s rights (because it has none), that doesn’t mean that I don’t think there are lots of morally significant reasons NOT to do that. But none, or almost none of those reasons, apply to a 2 week old fetus, which is a brainless, organ-less lump of cells lacking any morally significant attributes at all.

So you’ve taken the position that infants have no rights, including a “right to life”.

Initially I said you’d begged the question; now I’m beginning to think your argument is actually a “reductio ad absurdum” in favor of the other side.

Like Radley, I’m beginning to think it’s pointless, but I’ll give this one more shot:

Is there any circumstance in which a person is obligated to care for another? Based on the arguments you’ve provided above, is there ANY moral reason for a parent to feed and care for an infant if they don’t feel like it?

I’m starting to get light-headed.

A long time ago I was a member of a libertarian mailing list. There were a few early L4L members on that list. Someone would bring up abortion and it would take over the mailing list. So I had a list of all the people who had ever brought it up, and when the topic came up I’d add that person and send them a note that the topic was discouraged here because it takes over, but all these people want to talk about abortion in a libertarian context, please form a new list.

As for the instant case, take a look at her own release, at http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559

——–
To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms . copies of copies of which there is no original.

This piece . in its textual and sculptural forms . is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.
———

This is the bullshit that is typical of conceptual or performance artists, playing with the truth, and the notion of truth, and so forth. I’ve taken a college-level modern art class. A classmate to play at objet trouve with dining hall food, and he tweaked the “artists” in our house by putting his stuff up in our exhibition space for a few days. He and I both did our term papers on his work. Since I did apply the right analysis, and it was long enough, and the course was the biggest gut on campus, I received a B with the comment “Bogus but cute” from the teaching fellow.

Is it OK if setting aside the abortion question I find art that’s made out of stuff that comes out of the human body to be icky? (To avoid charges of misogyny, it’s not just menstruum, but anything, and especially stuff that I have to clean up after my barely civilized kids leave it around or on the laundry. Possible exception for deciduous teeth and locks of hair, as distinct from the hair that around the drain.) I have no desire to see Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervic Announcement either.

“Just because it doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t mean it’s not true!”

Your gut is right. Reason and logic have little to do with it. As I alluded to earlier:

“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large….”

“A fetus is not a “parasite” latched on to the insides of an unwilling female.”

It certainly _is_ if the female is doesn’t want to have it latched onto them.

Consenting to an action with a particular person doesn’t mean that you consent to all possible consequences of an action that a third party can perform upon you. Just because I consent to walk with my friend in the park, doesn’t mean that I’ve therefore consented to a third person robbing me at knife point. At the time of sex, there’s not even a third party to consent to. You can’t consent to a sperm, or an egg cell.

But really, pregnancy is an organic process. You can no more “consent to pregnancy” than you can consent to being struck by lightning. It happens or it doesn’t, but it doesn’t make sense to refer to either in terms of consent. And just because it happens doesn’t mean you’re obligated to let an organism feed off of you for nine months.

Now, I don’t know enough about the topic to get into a structured debate, but all I know is that my gut says “wrong” when someone kills a human being in early stages of development. Especially when it was their choices that led to the pre-person person being there in the first place.

I know many others feel differently, especially here, but to hear the way some of you have written about unborn children has truly made me sick.

Yay internet abortion debate!

Um… yeah, that’s right. The obvious difference between the two cases is that your friend is, presumably, a human being with thoughts, feelings, desires, and expectations that you’ve fostered through your relationship with him or her.

Whereas a 2 week old fetus is a largely undifferentiated clump of cells with zero moral significance.

It’s not the premise where you get tied up, but the application.

You said earlier that it would be immoral to talk badly about your friends behind their back. But it isn’t immoral to get pregnant for the sole purpose of abortion as art installation? Check your premises.

Er, I haven’t conflated anything. I’ve addressed BOTH issues. I don’t think morality is “personal” in the sense that you seem to be using it - by which I think you mean, true by virtue of the fact that a person happens to hold it. I don’t fault people for their emotional reactions necessarily, but I do fault people for their expressions of moral outrage which are unjustified. There’s absolutely nothing immoral about ejecting a fetus from your body, especially one that’s around 8 weeks old, _even if you got yourself pregnant just for that purpose_.

“I HAVE staked out a strong position both on the Justice of abortion, and on the Morality of demonizing a person for choosing to engage in it.”

Ah, but you have just conflated the justice aspect of abortion with the larger issue of the morality of it. Yes you have a right to vacuum out the fetus if you no longer wish it to gestate. But you could also wait until it’s time to take it out of the oven and let a couple adopt it. Or: through no (or little) fault of your own, you find yourself pregnant and unable (or unwilling) to carry it, so you have an abortion..vs, as an art project you claim to get yourself pregnant numerous times for the sole purpose of aborting the proto-humans inside you.
Personal morality is, well, personal. And I suppose it would be impossible to use reason to get someone to find something wrong when it’s a matter of it being judged so based on your personal beliefs and feelings. But if you claim to see the bigger picture on morality (it’s more than just rights talk), I don’t see how you can feel to understand why some people would consider her actions repugnant (and engage in some emotional hyperbole) yet not rights-violating. Do you really think demonizing her by typing words on a website is a greater moral “sin” than intentionally having multiple abortions for the sake of an A on your art project? Really?

It’s not a matter of popularity. It’s a matter that you’re wrong, and you are too blind to see it. The error in your radical philosophy isn’t an error of reason. As G.K. Chesterton said, a madman has lost everything BUT his reason. Your error is a manifest mistake of affections that have destroyed the value of humanity itself. You remind me of Professor Frost from C.S. Lewis’s work “That Hideous Strength.”

Being popular and being right are two different things. If it’s unpopular to be right, then it behooves you to be unpopular. There’s no virtue in selling out what’s right for popularity.

#32:

If you had ever bothered to offer a coherent argument for your position that dealt with the issue under discussion (what are the prerequisites for a being to have rights), I’d be more inclined to take your dismissal seriously. As you haven’t, there’s no particular reason to think that your dismissal is justified.

Congrats. You’ve just lost all right to be taken seriously.

What a monstrous philosophy - treating newborn children as sub-human.

The “right to life” is a misnomer. Nobody has a “right to life” if by that you mean a positive obligation, enforceable by coercion, to physically attach themselves to another human being to parasitically draw upon them as sustenance. Even if you need my kidney to live, and even if I had one to ’spare,’ you don’t have a “right to life” that enables you to legitimately tie me down and take it from me.

As for when a fetus, or baby, because a “Human” in the sense of having rights — well, they obtain that when they have the cognitive capacities which are a prerequisite for the possession of rights - which is the capacity to operate as moral actors. If we are correct in denying the moral status of humans to Great Apes, such that they don’t have any rights, then we must necessarily deny the moral status of human to homo sapiens until they’ve achieved some level of capacity to operate as moral actors which is greater than the most developed Great Apes - which would be a few years old.