In other reasons, yes autonomy isn’t the greatest good. But during that time of legal abortion, due to the lack of personhood of the fetus, it is. I’m saying if you want to make certain abortions illegal then, you are being pro-life: the life of the fetus is suddenly important.

Not ‘due to lack of personhood’ but ‘irregardless of the personhood’. The individual has autonomy over their body, even if denying the use of their body to another results in another person’s death. To use an oft quoted hypothetical, you are not under any obligation to donate your kidney to another person, even if your refusal means the other person will die. That’s not changed by ‘proving’ the person in need has full personhood.

You’re correct that the autonomy argument hasn’t carried the day fully in the US (as it would if we took, say, an Ayn Rand view of it). You can’t decide to legally abort, say 8 months and 25 days into a pregnancy, for example. But the trimester scheme of Roe is not all that bad here IMO. You can argue that after a certain period of time ‘constructive consent’ has to some degree been granted thereby justifying making it hard to ‘change your mind’…a bit like how if you allow someone to squat on your property for a long period of time, kicking them off requires you jumping thru some legal hoops.

As for victims and potentials, you have to argue from the visible changes. I think we can all say cultures with a high gender imbalance aren’t healthy:

I don’t think we know anything of the sort and more importantly I don’t think we know anything about ‘managing gender ratios’ in ways that don’t do more harm than good. For most of human history, though, we know that humans have lived under states that are weak (meaning gov’ts that had limited ability or interest in regulating personal life) and ‘gender selection’ was within the ability of most parents to one degree or another. During that long history not a single example comes to mind of a society that got in trouble because ‘gender selection’ caused such imbalances that problems arose. This implies:

1. Humans are less prone to gender selection than we might think (less likely IMO)

2. There are self correcting mechanisms that cause gender imbalances to adjust the ‘cost/benefit’ analysis. For example, in some cultures the girl’s family must pay a dowery to secure a husband. In others the male must pay to secure a bride. In a culture that where you get ‘too few girls’, doweries must logically fall and even turn into payments that the grooms family must make.

Yet then it isn’t otherwise. It becomes a “some animals are more equal than others” condition. Bad to select for gender, okay (at 90%+ rates in the UK) to select for down syndrome.

I’m not clear who is actually saying ‘gender selection’ abortions are to be outlawed. The reforms praised in the Salon article had to do with putting limits on the use of ultrasound machines, which don’t make abortions illegal but would frustrate an attempt to use abortion as a gender selection tool as well as educational campaigns. An actual law prohibiting ‘gender selection’ abortions would seem nearly impossible to enforce unless you had a very overbearing state.

The autonomy argument, IMO, doesn’t really impact efforts to frustrate high tech gender selection (i.e. ‘sperm sorting’) because the actual autonomy argument is that individuals have sovereignity over their own bodies, but not over other people’s bodies or actions. A law that outlawed a doctor selling a ‘sperm sorting’ device for a non-abortive gender selection technique wouldn’t interfere in autonomy the way I read it. The way you read it, though, (as a right to ‘decide’ your ‘reproductive future’) it might.

You’re extending the argument too much. Autonomy is defined fairly specifically in this, as the ability to abort a fetus within a certain timeframe from conception, by the mother for any reason. That’s autonomy in regards to this.

In other reasons, yes autonomy isn’t the greatest good. But during that time of legal abortion, due to the lack of personhood of the fetus, it is. I’m saying if you want to make certain abortions illegal then, you are being pro-life: the life of the fetus is suddenly important.

Yet then it isn’t otherwise. It becomes a “some animals are more equal than others” condition. Bad to select for gender, okay (at 90%+ rates in the UK) to select for down syndrome.

As for victims and potentials, you have to argue from the visible changes. I think we can all say cultures with a high gender imbalance aren’t healthy: I’m reminded of the perils of black women trying to find a suitable black man to marry. The problems you list are with any birth, really.

You can only argue from potential when an effect is clear. In this case, serious imbalances.

For example, lets say your car’s brakes fail while driving, and you are closing on an intersection. Ahead of you is a schoolbus, and you know if you don’t do something, your SUV will collide with it. So you sharply turn the wheel, and flip the SUV into a parked, but empty car.

In both cases, you did something that could cause harm. You chose the path that caused the least. In no sense is the act itself of totalling an empty car a moral good, it’s just less harmful than the alternative. It’s not fair, but it’s not a case where say you buy one kid a car and the other you don’t.

As for murder, we have to go with what stops it immediately and what is feasible. When a problem is wide-scale, it breaks the criminal system down. When marijuana use became popular, it strained the system to its limits. Or Rwanda.

Dblade,

You might be right if I argued that because there are a tiny number of “hard cases” in which most people would find it difficult to deny a woman an abortion, then all abortions should be permitted. That is not the argument that I am making.

Would every western democracy that enacts pro-life laws choose to implement this model?

I think it is very unlikely that any state (or more than a few states) in the United States would enact a law banning abortion to save the life of the mother. However, I think that is inconsistent with saying abortion is murder or claiming a “right to life” exists from the moment of conception.

I stick by my original statement, which was, in my opinion, noncontroversial. It is not difficult to understand why a pro-choice feminist would be suspicious of those pro-lifers who want her to join forces with them in making “reasonable” restrictions on abortions when she knows that those same pro-lifers would deny her an abortion even to save her life. If you like, I can restate it as follows: It is not difficult to understand why a pro-choice feminist would be suspicious of those pro-lifers who want her to join forces with them in making “reasonable” restrictions on abortions when she knows that those same pro-lifers want to prohibit 99% of abortions that currently take place.

Do you see the National Rifle Association volunteering to get together with gun-control organizations for the purpose of coming up with “reasonable” restrictions on gun ownership?

1. If sex selection was not available, would all 900 families have gotten pregnant knowing there’s a 50-50 chance they might end up with an unwanted girl? To use my first analogy, if I had ‘xray goggles’ that could let me see what was under scratch off lottery tickets, I’d end up buying lots of scratch off lottery tickets. But if I lost those googles, I wouldn’t keep buying tickets, I wouldn’t buy any. How many of those 900M girls would have ended up not even existing in Joe’s world?

2. Speaking of non-existence, you’d have 900M boy victims if sex selection didn’t happen. If 900M times, families aborted girl fetuses until they got to a boy fetus, then if sex selection was available you’d have 900M boys who exist today but would case to exist in that ‘alternative universe’. If pro-lifers think its fair to ask people who exist today “what if your mother had an abortion” then its also fair to ask “would your mother have had you if she didn’t have an abortion a few years before you?”

From a Hindu and Buddhist perspective, (at least by some sects), this ‘potential problem’ may not be an issue because matters of existence can be thought of as a ride at an amusement park. A woman having an abortion or opting not to get pregnant may simply mean you have to ‘wait in line’ a bit longer to score a human rebirth. From a Christian perspective, there’s no ‘waiting line’. People come into existence at conception and existence is good. Better to exist in a womb for 2 months than never to have existed at all. So pro-lifers here would seem to be wishing away the existence of 900M Asian boys!

Don’t take this as an argument for either abortion or sex selection….just some of the paradoxes that seem to arise when people start spinning off ‘potentials’ as ethical arguments.

If I have the autonomy to determine my own reproductive future, I can choose to abort a fetus for whatever reason I like. It could be a boy, a girl, predisposed to down’s sydrome or homosexuality. The moment you say it’s wrong to select for a factor you are destroying the autonomy idea.

By this reasoning ‘autonomy’ would extend not only to abortion but long afterwards. If I want to choose to have a famous singer for a child, I can ‘post-birth abort’ when the kid is 9 years old and vocal coaches confirm that she just doesn’t have the vocal chords to be a professional singer!

But you accomplish this distortion by looking at only one idea of ‘autonomy’….the autonomy that’s usually at issue is the autonomy one has over their own body. In other words your body is yours and you have a right to say ‘no’ with it. That would mean you may say no to having sex with someone, no to having their baby, and no to a baby that’s already inside of you.

The right then isn’t to ‘kill’, the killing is incidental or a side effect. Like saying people who opt not to be organ donars are ‘killing’ people who need transplants because each year so many die waiting for a transplant while so many perfectly acceptable organs are buried because those who died either didn’t sign an organ donar card or opted to reject donating. If it became possible to transplant a fetus to another womb or an artifical one nothing in Roe.v.Wade would forbid a state to outlaw abortion provided it respected the autonomy of the individual’s body.

This being the case, the right you’re talking about is one that doesn’t exist and isn’t advocated by most pro-choicers that I’m aware of. A state can under the principle of individual autonomy of their own bodies still outlaw a host of options for people to ‘determine their reproductive future’. For example, nothing in Roe.v.Wade would stop a state from banning genetic engineering on fetuses to produce ‘designer babies’.

There’s really no logical problem or contradiction in the positions you’re attacking. Consider:

1. You have a right to buy a scratch off lottery ticket.

2. You do not have a right to know if the ticket is a winner or loser before you buy it. Hence you may not be wearing special x-ray/infrared goggles that let you see beneath the ‘scratch material’ as you’re making your selection.

This would seem no different than asserting one has a right to choose to be a parent or not but once you make that choice you have to live with whatever the baby happens to turn out being.

Your propositions A and B aren’t technically true. Hvistendahl notes that abortion was not introduced in Asia as part of women’s rights but as a part of state management of women. A state that can force women to have abortions because its ‘managing population’ can just was logically deny some woman abortions because its decided to ‘manage gender ratios’. In both cases the view of abortion is very different than that in the west where the view is that the state is keeping out of abortion in favor of autonomy.

Technically I think Hvistendahl does not advocate outlawing abortion for sex selection which technically would run afoul of personal autonomy. But that wouldn’t apply to supporting regulations that frustrate sex selection as a motivation (i.e. making it harder to access ultrasound machines, pre-genetic testing etc.).

I think the gender ratio issue is a bit overblown and actually self correcting myself. First I suspect that ‘sex selection’ has been practiced by many human cultures. It’s called infanticide and it can be done in both hard and soft ways (hard meaning literally killing infants who are girls more often than killing boy infants, soft meaning that girl infants aren’t given the care and attention that boy infants are resulting in more ‘natural’ girl deaths than boys).

Second, this leads to the question of how come we have many examples of culture sthat had few qualms about infanticide AND a preference for male children yet did not end up in some absurd situation where a generation ends up killing like 99% of their girl children resulting in demographic extinction? Certainly I’m not going to put much stock in a thesis that depends on humans being such ‘naturally good’ creatures that they would always keep their bad impluses in at least a little check. I think what must happen is a sociological process that checks variations in the gender ratio.

Here I think Hvistendahl is incorrect. On balance women probably benefit from the ‘war on girls’. Yes some women unfortunately end up in human traficking to men seeking wives or mates in societies with a ‘shortgage’ of females but I suspect many other women see their status rise. With more men than women a woman can afford to be much more selective in a husband. Even in societies where families decide for women, a shortage of women means higher standards can be afforded women. I agree its not quite a pretty way to do it, but ironically I suspect ‘sex selection’ will do more for women’s rights in Asia than a lot of self-righteous heckling by western elites. Note that in societies that have artificial ‘girl shortgages’ such as fundamentalist Mormons who practice polygamy, baby boys often end up with a worse lot in life than baby girls. A family that has 3 baby girls has 3 potential wives for the society’s elites. A family that has 3 baby boys must confront the prospect of them seeking not 3 but multiple times 3 girls for wives in less than two decades! Not surprisingly, such sects often spin off lots of ‘runaway’ teen and young teen boys who are actually driven out of the community.

I do think that Hvistendahl is right to raise the issue of non-abortion sex selection as more dangerous. The generation of ’99% boys’ has probably never happened in human history because even with social norms permitting infanticide and a strong preference for boys, a born baby represents a lot of ‘sunk costs’ in terms of time and wear and tear on the mother. Even with abortion there’s a degree of investment with a family seeking a baby by the time an ultrasound gives them an answer. With ‘sperm sorting’ and other possible things in the future the cost could drop to zero making the demographic doomsday scenario more likely.

I disagree. If someone invades my home tonight and threatens my wife or my children, and the only way I can stop the intruder is to kill him, then I am doing a moral good by killing the intruder. I’m not being immoral by defending myself or my family, nor am I being evil in any way.

“The quote there was in reference to measures to stop a gendercide, and its not as productive to jail the users. ”

I disagree here also. If the state enacted a law to give a long-term jail sentence to any woman who gets an abortion, you are saying that wouldn’t lower the abortion rate? Furthermore, why shouldn’t murder get a jail sentence, if abortion is in fact really murder?