glberns t1_janc88r wrote
Reply to comment by Lance_lake in In pre-Roe hearings, Pa. women described their anguished, resolved search for an abortion by FrederickChase
Let's explore the 1% risk of death situation.
A woman goes to her doctor and learns that her pregnancy may kill her with a 1% risk. She's uncomfortable taking that risk and wants to get an abortion. In this hyothetical, both the woman and the doctor believe her life is in enough jeopardy to be covered under the life of the mother exemption.
But you want that abortion to be illegal. So it's clear that you do not believe that the doctor and woman decide when her life is in enough peril to be allowed a legal abortion.
So back to my original question: Who decides when the woman's life is in enough jeopardy? Do you want the government to define the necessary risk tolerance? Should it be written into your law?
Lance_lake t1_jang8u2 wrote
So let me ask you this. Do you agree that the baby is a living human being?
Lance_lake t1_jang1bk wrote
> In this hyothetical, both the woman and the doctor believe her life is in enough jeopardy to be covered under the life of the mother exemption.
This is where your hypothetical breaks down. A doctor isn't going to agree that a 1% risk is worth killing a human life. If he is, then he is a terrible doctor and should have his license revoked. He would also never suggest anything to patients because all drugs have a 1% chance of killing someone in a freak accident type of way.
> So it's clear that you do not believe that the doctor and woman decide when her life is in enough peril to be allowed a legal abortion.
I said as long as the risk is reasonable. I don't believe people would agree with you that a 1% chance of death in childbirth is a reasonable concern.
You do realize that if you are arguing that it should just be up to the woman and doctor if they kill someone, then you are suggesting people like Michael Joseph Swango did nothing wrong because those people had a 1% chance of killing him.
glberns t1_janjmcq wrote
> I said as long as the risk is reasonable.
The entire discussion is about who defines what is reasonable? You keep dancing around that question. Please just answer it.
Lance_lake t1_janp8y1 wrote
> The entire discussion is about who defines what is reasonable? You keep dancing around that question. Please just answer it.
I have not. I'm using a term used in called the legal concept of the “reasonable person".
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/self-defense-overview.html
> Sometimes, self-defense is legally justified even if the perceived aggressor did not actually mean the perceived victim any harm. What matters in these situations is whether a “reasonable person" in the same situation would have perceived an immediate threat of physical harm.
> Under the legal concept of the “reasonable person," legal systems determine whether a person's feelings and experience of imminent danger justify the use of force as a response to a threat.
> As an example, imagine two strangers walking past each other in a city park. A bee is buzzing around the head of one of the two people. The other person sees this. Trying to be friendly, the other person reaches quickly to try to swat the bee away from the bee's soon-to-be-victim. The person with the bee by their head, only seeing a stranger's hand move quickly toward their face, might understandably slap the other person's hand away violently.
> In other circumstances, the slap would amount to a textbook assault, but a court could easily find that the sudden movement of a stranger's hand toward a person's face would cause a reasonable person to conclude that they were in danger of immediate physical harm. This would likely render the use of force a justifiable exercise of the right to self-defense. It would not matter that the perceived attacker meant no harm and was, in fact, actually trying to help!
So who defines what is "reasonable" is already a matter of law. I am using the legal definition of reasonable. A "reasonable person" would not think a 1% chance of death is acceptable to murder someone.
glberns t1_janre5p wrote
Okay, so you're saying that you want judges to define what the line is based on the "reasonable person" standard. Thank you for (finally) defining that.
Now, do you see how inserting a judge into the decision making process is not leaving it up to the woman and her doctor? When I asked you who decides when her life is in enough risk, you said
>The doctor and woman most likely.
But now you're saying that it should be the judiciary's interpretation of what a resonable preson would do. Ultimately, you believe that whether a woman should have access to legal abortion should be up to whether a judge believes her pregnancy is risky enough.
Personally, I think a 1% chance of death is more than acceptable to allow a legal abortion -- even if you believe that it's murder.
But that belief is rooted in the idea that people have a fundamental right to bodily autonomy. Which means that if someone depends on your body to survive that you have a right to cut them off from your body at anypoint, even if it kills them. It's dissapointing (and a little disturbing) that you believe that someone else should have a legal right to your body.
And a 1-in-100 chance is very high when you're talking about death. Would you get on an airplane if 1 in 100 crash? Would you play a sport where there's a 1-in-100 chance that you'd die?
Lance_lake t1_janu9tz wrote
I am thankful for you keeping calm explaining your viewpoint. But now, you are telling me what I believe and making assumptions on that belief. The very nature of the strawman falicy.
I never said it was only up to a judge. I have said before how I defined it. I don't believe that someone else should have a legal right to a body. The 1% chance was me rounding up.
> Rates in 2020 were 13.8 deaths per 100,000 live births for women under age 25, 22.8 for those aged 25–39, and 107.9 for those aged 40 and over
13.8 + 22.8 + 107.9 = 144.5 per 100,000 births.
.001445%
Do you want to still say that risk is reasonable to kill another human being?
glberns t1_janyu3r wrote
> I never said it was only up to a judge.
Who else defines the legal standard of "reasonable person"? In practice, that standard is defined by a judge.
>I don't believe that someone else should have a legal right to a body.
But you believe that a woman should be legally forbidden from removing a fetus if she doesn't want it to use her body... You're contradicting yourself. Either you believe that she should be able to control whether the fetus uses her body, or you believe that the fetus has a legal right to her body. You can't believe both.
>Do you want to still say that risk is reasonable to kill another human being?
I believe that each person should get to define how much risk they want to take with their body. That a woman should not be legally required to take even that small risk.
I certainly don't believe that the government should define an acceptable level of risk for an individual.
Lance_lake t1_jaofsba wrote
> Who else defines the legal standard of "reasonable person"? In practice, that standard is defined by a judge.
Judges don't make laws. Government (elected by the people) make them.
> But you believe that a woman should be legally forbidden from removing a fetus if she doesn't want it to use her body... You're contradicting yourself. Either you believe that she should be able to control whether the fetus uses her body, or you believe that the fetus has a legal right to her body. You can't believe both.
You are trying to use the violinist discussion here.
> You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
Yes?
> I believe that each person should get to define how much risk they want to take with their body. That a woman should not be legally required to take even that small risk.
So you are also against the military, schooling, and police then? Those are careers that they don't get a say as to how much risk they put themselves under.
When you get pregnant, you have agreed to take this risk.
> I certainly don't believe that the government should define an acceptable level of risk for an individual.
I'm sorry you don't want to fit into a society with laws. Thank you for your input, but this statement betrays your calm vernacular. If you don't agree with laws that limit risk to people, then I don't see any purpose of continuing with this conversation.
glberns t1_jap6k2k wrote
You're literally saying that you want the "reasonable person" standard to define when a woman meets the criteria for the life of the mother exemption your ideal law would allow for. If that's how you want the law to read, then it will be up to the judiciary to decide where the line is. Every time a woman gets an abortion to save her life, she'll be gambling that a judge agrees with her that she's being reasonable.
How do you expect that to play out without a judge deciding whether she's being reasonable?
>So you are also against the military, schooling, and police then? Those are careers that they don't get a say as to how much risk they put themselves under.
I'm against the draft, yes. And forcing people to be police officers. People can choose to take that risk.
>When you get pregnant, you have agreed to take this risk.
Unless she didn't want to get pregnant...
And you point out that a normal risk from pregnancy is way less than 1%. So when a woman gets a condition that increases that risk to 1%, that's more risk than she wanted to take.
At the end of the day you're position is to impose your risk tolerance on others.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments