dcltdw: (Default)
dcltdw ([personal profile] dcltdw) wrote in [personal profile] kirisutogomen 2011-09-28 06:15 pm (UTC)

Got it, thanks.

First, I see what you did there:
What makes 2 (quarantines) morally acceptable while keeping 3 (rules against late-term abortions) morally unacceptable?

I'm not talking about what I think should or shouldn't be morally acceptable; I'm talking about what should/shouldn't be legally acceptable.

The quarantine is to protect other people; the abortion (to me) is only about the pregnant woman. I don't subscribe to "the unborn baby has rights the same as people", which I think many others do. And to anticipate a question, I draw a sharp bright line at "birth", which I realize gets fuzzy as late-term babies are viable outside the womb in the ICU.

I'll have to think about this a bit more, but I don't see a problem with "we had a medical operation, and now the fetus is aborted" and "we had a medical operation, and now the pre-term baby is in the ICU". Mostly because what I'm really comparing that to is "did we preserve the self-determination agency of a person?", to which the answer in both cases is Yes, and that Yes trumps the earlier questions.

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I feel like I have a quibble here as well with your quarantine analogy. A quarantine limits where I can go, but not what I can do with my body. I don't think it makes your analogy invalid, but I think it limits how far the analogy can be taken.

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