kirisutogomen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kirisutogomen) wrote2011-09-28 03:03 am
kirisutogomen) wrote2011-09-28 03:03 am
Entry tags:
Chinese advertisements
The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)
And another for the same service from a competing provider:
These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.
Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"
And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.
And another for the same service from a competing provider:
These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.
Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"
And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.
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Thinking about it more
Morally, I'd prefer to live in a world where abortion wasn't treated like a trip to the hair salon, but who I am to judge that that's really what's happening in China with these advertisements? I find them surprising, but I don't think they should be illegal.
All that said, I could imagine supporting a law against very late-term abortions. The real reason I don't is that it's not necessary --- basically nobody is aborting their perfectly healthy 8 1/2 month fetus --- and it's a slippery slope. But on the other hand, I don't blanket agree with your "what a person does with their body" approach either. What's the wedge that lets you accept quarantining people with infectious diseases but not accept preventing very late-term abortions? They are both instances of someone other than X having a say with what X does to their body with the purported goal of protecting Y.
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Wow, great question! Well, let me work it through. My starting point is normally some variant of "what is good for society?". (Related tangent: I think a somewhat-confusing-the-issue #3 in my reply above is: the woman in the West Coast who had sextuplets via public healthcare. It's bad for society for a woman to have 6 kids when she has arguably limited means to support them, but I think it's better for society to accept that cost if everyone else gets better* healthcare. The devil is in the details of the asterisked "better", of course.) So quarantining someone isn't done for their benefit, it's done for the benefit of the people around them.
Nrgh, I'm going to be lazy and go into Analogy Land. (I consider analogies to be sloppy thinking; apologies for resorting to such, but I can't take too much time this morning.) I think it's okay for me to play my music at whatever volume I want; I think it's also okay to have noise nuisance statutes. I think it's okay to ingest a bottle of Instant Plague, so long as I quarantine myself beforehand. Cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Aha, okay: so yes, the cost to me (and the rest of society) of someone having a baby who I (and miraculously, the rest of society agrees with me) think shouldn't have a baby is that now we have to bear the cost of raising that child. I'd rather have that cost, then open the possibility that I (or anyone else) gets to say whether or not she can elect to not have the child.
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In the last paragraph, it seems as if you're arguing against mythical eugenicist opponents who want to force abortions on young women to avoiding burdening society with the costs of their children? Most of the debate in the US today is over allowing abortions, not over whether to force abortions.
To rephrase a sentence from your first paragraph: "Preventing a woman from having a late-term abortion isn't done for her benefit, it's done for the benefit of the unborn baby." So no wedge there.
So I guess I don't understand your point. I think you could construct a coherent argument, but it will involve being more careful and probably accepting additional premises beyond "X always gets to decide what to do with X's body."
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What's the wedge that lets you accept quarantining people with infectious diseases but not accept preventing very late-term abortions? They are both instances of someone other than X having a say with what X does to their body with the purported goal of protecting Y.
I'm confused on a few things, so let me resort to bullet points.
1. Stupid question #1: what do you mean by "wedge"? :)
2. I think quarantines are necessary, are fine, are legal, are a good thing. (Okay, devil in the detail with regards to implementation, but I'll gloss over that.)
3. I think late-term abortion should be legal. I may disagree with the reasons a woman chooses to have one; I might shun her because of that decision. But I think it should be legal. (Actually, I'm pretty certain I have absolutely no idea why a woman would choose to have a late-term abortion, so mostly I think I should first discreetly learn why this option was taken and try to understand that.)
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I think earlier this morning, I thought you were asking a different question, which is why you got a response that doesn't really make sense to either of us now. :)
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2. A quarantine is a situation where someone other than person X gets a say over what happens to their body.
3. A rule against late-term abortions would also be a situation where someone other than person X gets a say over what happens to their body.
What makes 2 (quarantines) morally acceptable while keeping 3 (rules against late-term abortions) morally unacceptable?
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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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The brain development is pretty constant and things like the circulatory system having been working for a while, it's more than at birth, the respiratory and digestive systems "go live."
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I'm not seeing the final point you're building up to, though. (Put another way, I see a bunch of interesting facts, but not how they tie together.)
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I mean, just because they haven't separated yet, doesn't mean they aren't separable.
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How does this tie into whether what a person does with their own body is or isn't legal?
I think you're discussing when legal oversight of a child begins and ends (or perhaps, what kinds of legal autonomy a child should have until the age of majority, whenever that is), which is important, but a different matter.
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So I'm back to repeating
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This is just a variant of the quarantine or smoking examples: you can do whatever you want with your body, so long as it doesn't affect anyone else.
What's your basis for this sharp bright line? The people are separable well before they typically separate.
One is completely dependent on the other before birth, and not afterwards. We-ll, actually, that's not strictly true: see astra_nomer's point about saving the life of the mother.
I also still don't see the connection to the legal issue. I see a moral issue here, certainly, but not a legal connection.
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First breathe of air is an arbitrary point to award a baby/fetus status as "anyone else" ("so long as it doesn't affect anyone else"), especially in a day and age when such a thing (birth) can be scheduled and preemies regularly live to adulthood.
Plus they're pretty dependent after they take that first breathe too.
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From the original post:
Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"
The legal issue is: what degree of self-determination does a person have over their own body?
You're bringing up interesting biological questions, but I don't see how they relate to the legal issue. They are quite interesting from a philosophical standpoint, or a biological standpoint, or a moral standpoint.
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I wasn't actually debating the legal issue, though I do think that things are complicated enough that boiling it down do a bright line and a one sentence slogan misses a lot of important stuff.
As to what degree of self-determination *does* a person have over their own body, my guess is that legally the answer is currently quite a lot, but less than 100%. (Though I think Cael was pondering replacing "does" with "should.")
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By the way, there are also substantial biological changes that happen in a short period at birth, particularly with vaginal births. Those changes may or may not define what is or isn't human, but it's far from a smooth, continuous change.
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The vast majority of late-term abortions happen when either
1) a horrible defect is discovered in the fetus
2) the health and/or life of the mother becomes at risk
This is why I am opposed to any bans on late-term abortion.
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Quarantining of people at immigration is legally supportable, of course, just as customs inspections are.