After thinking about abortion for a good couple hours, I was finally able to form an almost perfect opinion.

Hint: Think about a trespasser in your home

There will always be haters and this is not an echo chamber for any side. However some opinions are going to be confronted more than others. I have made made a short guide for people of different political leanings.

• For right-leaning people who are religious and aren’t open to changing their mind, start reading from Target Reader.
• For right-leaning people who aren’t open to changing their mind, you can start reading from Obligations.
• For right-leaning people with an open mind, start reading from Obligations to an Embryo/Fetus.
• For moderates, start reading from Classical Liberal.
• For leftists, skip to Gripes.

Target Reader

Classical liberals, libertarian-right, property rights advocates, gun rights advocates.

It’s incredibly hard to write in a way to reach out to the religious and close minded, but I’ll do my best. By religious and close minded, I mean the people who use religious texts as evidence or proof or command to do certain actions or think certain ways rather than thinking deeper into why the text would say certain things or if its even valid anymore. This is not a critique of religion, so I will move on. My arguments are based on property & privacy rights as my hint strongly implies, rather than arguing the temper tantrum inducing “human life starts at conception.”

Obligations

There is a homeless person outside of McDonald’s. What do you do?

If you buy them food but that only helps them for one meal. Humans in a secure position eat 2-3 meals a day every day. What do you do?

Do you have a moral obligation to help them more than paying for one meal? Why?

If there is moral obligation to help homeless people past one meal, should that obligation be forced by the government?

If that obligation is to be forced by the government, then what other moral obligations should be forced by the government? Should the government force the donation of organs upon death?

Should the government force the obligation to perform free labour since you are a plumber when your neighbours sink bursts?

I propose three questions.

1. When does a human have a moral obligation (to act in some manner)?
2. When should a government direct an obligation?
3. Should directed obligations always be rooted in morality?

Obligations to an Embryo/Fetus?

Well for abortion, the woman and doctor don’t have a moral obligation. My proof is by contradiction. Buying a homeless person a meal is much easier than carrying a growing thing inside your body for even one month. Imagine if men were not allowed to ejaculate unless they were having sexual intercourse with their married spouse. If you do in fact believe in that nonsense, you should read up on what Human Rights are because you will never understand the other side until you can understand why religious beliefs, if codified, would be against human rights (which are universal and not legislative).

As for when the government should dictate an obligation is to ensure the well being of the population without infringing the rights of the minority. In self-defence, the minority are the criminals. When talking about animal cruelty, pets are the minority. Therefore, being human is not a consideration to having rights. Does a fetus have rights if it was not a human? Interesting question. Yes, but those rights are not supreme and are the same (or similar) to an unwanted person in another’s home. If the removal of such a person leads to their death, so be it. A person should not have to wait 9 months for the removal of another. Foreseeing a rebuttal, my opinion on squatting is irrelevant since squatters don’t have the same rights when they squat in a primary residence.

If someone was in your primary residence, they would be trespassing. A fetus is trespassing the moment the woman decides it was unwanted just like a heckler at a comedy show. Consent, privilege, and permission are all revokable. The intruder of your home would be detained and if that resulted in their death because they are sensitive to any touch, that would be on them and not the police officers that removed them. This world would simply not function if the people in it were incapable of handling any obstacles. Likewise in the case of abortion, abortion is not the act of killing a fetus, but it is the act of moving them outside of property. It is that move that results in the death of the fetus, but the rights of the property (body) simply triumph the rights of anything declaring that space to be theirs. The womb is a woman’s property and is inside of the woman itself. If abortion is illegal, the removal of a womb containing the fetus would be a loophole.

Classical Liberal

If you are a person who values gun and property rights, then the following scenario is much easier to compare to the abortion one. I consider myself a classical liberal, so I created this scenario to put an end to my fence sitting.

Say you invited a person to your home and now you want them to leave. They refuse, saying that you invited them here. The government says that no one, not you, not another human, nor the government, can forcibly remove the person. Do you accept the government’s ruling or do you bring out the handgun your government has also banned in the country? Suppose you are a law abiding citizen and don’t have a gun. Do you try to forcibly remove the trespasser which might result in your death or do you wait out 9 months?

Wouldn’t it be much better if you could just call someone to do it for you without the fear of legislative punishment?

Gripes

• Other than that, I consider embryos to be property and when the tech develops:
  • I’d prefer fetuses to be grown in an advanced incubator if it is possible to abort them without killing them immediately
  • I don’t think embryos should be brought to term in a lab unless both parents agree to it
  • Not sure if it needs to be said, but an embryo does not have organs vs. a fetus that might have organs
• The only reason you shouldn’t be able to abort a fetus is if you just learned its sex unless its life/death/financial situation
  • Root reasoning is that sex based abortions could cause an imbalance of sex ratios in a country, which would have drastic effects on the lives of both sexes (e.g. India)
  • This bias issue should be corrected in the education system as well as in immigration
  • Abortion itself should never be banned, however sex reveals should be banned only if abortions due to sex reveal starts affecting the sex ratio in the country
  • If the sex-ratio is not changing much, the slight discrimination wouldn’t be having severe consequences (e.g. race preferences in dating does not motivate people to behave differently, or it at least isn’t a moral/legal issue)
• Child support should not be mandatory. There is no reason to force another person to financially support their sexual partner because the child is biologically theirs
  • One of the reasons of abortions is financial, so there shouldn’t be a financial incentive to carry the fetus to term. It weakly implies abortion is wrong when 99.999% of abortions are not immoral
  • The child support incentive might exist to combat declining birth rates in Canada, but there are many reasons Canadians aren’t having kids to replace themselves