Posty: 164
Dołączył(a): 2 mar 2010, o 00:45
Re: Aborcja a prawa zwierząt
almost everyone agrees that nobody has the right to kill another person without a justification such as self-defense.
Abortion is self-defense. It is protecting your body from the agony and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth.
The problem is that we don't agree about when a pregnant woman and a developing foetus become separate entities.
There is no problem at all. The developing fetus becomes a person, a separate entity, when it becomes autonomous; meaning it no longer requires another sentient organism to support its life.
We can't reach consensus on abortion because pregnancy is a mystery.
Pregnancy is not a mystery. We know what happens and how it happens.
At the beginning of the process you have a single person who has the right to control her own body and at the end of the process you have two people, each of whom has the right to be free from bodily injury imposed by others.
The end of the process in this case is childbirth.
During the process the mother-child organism is precisely the kind of paradox that western culture cannot tolerate: both one person and two people at the same time.
No, it is one person being a life support for a non-autonomous organism.
It seems to me unlikely that we will ever reach consensus on that question.
We do not need to reach consensus. Abortion is a matter of private morality. It affects no one except the pregnant woman. The government has no right to impose private morality on anyone.
The United States Supreme Court, in its Roe versus Wade decision, came as close as we will probably ever get to common ground by locating the critical moment at the point at which the foetus could (at least in theory) live outside of the womb.
It does not matter that the fetus COULD live outside the woman’s body. The fact is that it IS inside the woman’s body and it is impossible to get it out alive without hurting the woman.
But even that commonsense viewpoint is very controversial because, at heart, the question is spiritual rather than technical.
Spiritual? That is absurd! Not everyone believes in spirits. There is such a thing as freedom of religion or freedom FROM religion.
During pregnancy, no scientist or judge can say with certainty where or when the mother ends and the child begins.
I already answered this above.
Even women who have been mothers do not agree with each other about how to interpret the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in order to answer the questions surrounding the medical procedure known as abortion.
I, for one, have no desire to discuss this private matter with these women.
So, it's not surprising that we don't have consensus on that issue within the animal liberation movement, among women in the movement, or even among self-identified feminists in the movement.
Someone, who believes that non-human animals should have rights but that women should not have rights, is irrational and immoral.
No one who denies women’s rights has a right to call herself/himself a feminist. This would be a contradiction in terms.
I wish that both "pro-life" and "pro-choice" activists would spend less time fighting about abortion and more time doing the things that we know would reduce unwanted pregnancies, like making birth control available to everyone, making sure young people know about the ten thousand ways to have enjoyable sex without having intercourse,
Birth control should be available to all women, but there are more pressing issues, like this one for example:
ending the sexual exploitation of girls and boys.
If we actually did all of those things, my guess is that the demand for abortions would drop so low that it would cease to be such a big controversy and we'd have an easier time maintaining a fair compromise like Roe v. Wade.
While billions of sentient and autonomous beings are being exploited and murdered, I will not worry about non-sentient organisms in other people’s bodies.
Let's face it: Nobody likes having an abortion.
It is sure better than pregnancy and childbirth (in my personal opinion).
It's not as bad as a forced full-term pregnancy but it's pretty bad. It's an often painful operation that frequently leaves women feeling depressed and dispirited.
I know two women who have had abortions. They were neither depressed nor dispirited (whatever that means). They were glad to get rid of the problem.
And now, it is often as easy as taking a pill.
Real reproductive freedom means freedom from unwanted pregnancy. Access to abortion is a poor substitute for true reproductive liberation.
I agree with that!
I do believe that reproductive freedom is central to animal liberation. What is domestication, exactly? Enslavement combined with control of reproduction. How does animal agriculture sustain itself? By completely controlling the reproductive lives of the animals under its dominion.
I could not agree more! This supports my previous arguments about the extinction of domesticated animals.
What is the one thing that even self-designated animal liberationists feel completely comfortable taking away from animals? The right to decide when and with whom they will reproduce.
They feel comfortable with much more than that! They feel comfortable with taking away animals’ sexuality along with their ability to reproduce. This is something I strongly disagree with. I think domesticated animals must be sterilized, we have no choice in that matter, but they do not have to be castrated.
Control of reproduction is central to both the subjugation of women and the subjugation of animals.
There is similarity here but there is also one big difference: women are independent individuals, they do not rely on anyone to take care of them; domesticated non-human animals depend on us to take care of them. We cannot possibly take care of all the domesticated animals if we let them reproduce at will. It would create massive suffering (as we already see with cats and dogs).
Total animal liberation must include real reproductive freedom, which means no more rape, no more forcible impregnation, no more electro-ejaculation, no more forced sterilisation... in short, no more forcing or preventing reproduction without genuine consent.
It is not possible to achieve this. The only solution is extinction of domesticated animals.
In my head I am hearing the justifications of the advocates of spay-neuter programs for dogs and cats. I don't disagree. All of the dogs and cats who live with me have been spayed or neutered without their consent. But we ought to have the decency to be abashed about it, to see it as an emergency use of power that we shouldn't have in the first place, and to devote at least as many resources to shutting down the breeders, with the explicit aim of one day restoring control over their own reproduction to the animals themselves.
I absolutely see no reason why this person had to castrate all the animals in his/her household. The females could have had just their uteruses removed. The males could have been left intact. This would have been sufficient to stop reproduction. The animals would have been healthier and happier.
How might we do that? I have a few ideas, but what really needs to happen is for reproductive freedom to be embraced as a goal by all animal activists, so that we all can pool our creative energies to come up with strategies.
Again, there is only one solution: extinction of domesticated animals.