Let me guess: you made no effort whatsoever to understand the conversation before commenting, did you? You decided it would be more amusing to jump straight to the most malicious inference possible, even though there’s no evidence for it.

Obviously, I’m not “cool” with slavery and rape. Bodily sovereignty, as far as it goes, is legitimate. But as a fair-minded reader would have easily understood, I was asking why a mother’s bodily sovereignty pre-empted the rights her unborn son or daughter.

While tempting for those of you looking for excuses to abort, it still doesn’t account for whether the harm done to the baby by abortion is proportional to the harm the mother’s trying to alleviate. Or whether parents have any sort of special obligation to their children. Or whether the baby is entitled to have anyone step in and speak for his or her interests.

And you’re not simply “withholding” a resource from your child (side note: how sickening does that sentence sound?). You’re cutting off nourishment he or she is already getting. You’re directly and starving him or her to death.

Not only that, but a mother who aborts isn’t simply “removing” her son or daughter. She’s having lethal chemicals (or different weapons later in development) with the express purpose of directly killing him or her. The death isn’t a side-effect or an accident.

Take a refresher course on cause-effect relationships and call me in the morning.

So a vacuum that’s designed to bring him/her out dead (something tells me it’s not sucking at a terribly safe speed for the baby, and what it’s depositing the baby into isn’t some sort of life-support environment) and drugs that make his/her environment inhospitable aren’t directly responsible for the baby’s death. Um, okay.

If that’s what you’ve decided need to tell yourself…. 

 So what you’re saying is if I bind someone’s hands and feet and drop them in a lake, I wouldn’t actually be killing you? So it would be the water’s fault, right? Got it.
I just don’t think any courts would buy it.
Sucking the baby out and leaving it to die is the very same thing. And besides, the suction machines usually fully dismember the child anyway, so I think to say it is “just removed” is a bit mild.

The life and death of innocent people reduced to a contract negotiation.

Modern liberalism in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

Um, no. I’ve never said a woman chooses to have a baby when she chooses to have sex. I’ve merely stated the obvious: that choosing to have sex is choosing to risk the possibility.

Funny how pro-choicers’ moral indignation never seems to come with, y’know, morality.

Yes, but my reply is dealing with Guest’s mischaraterization of my *past* words on elective cases.

Do you deny that knowingly risking somebody’s creation entails at least *some* minimum level of responsibility or respect for that person?

Well, not only is it interesting to hear a Supreme Court Justice question whether we’re evolving or devolving, in terms of societal decency, it’s clearly indicative of the new conservative ethos on the SCOTUS that some call Tough Luck Libertarianism. Scalia openly questions whether we’re obligated to care for a dying man on the door of a hospital, if he can’t pay for it. Alito wonders if we’re really progressing towards more civilty, or if the time has come to acknowledge that if you live in a state committed to retribution to the nth degree, the law can’t disallow it. Kennedy poses a disturbing metaphor about how you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger:

“The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him, absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that’s generally the rule.”

I know some of this libertarian thought must be appealing to you, Calvin, but what chance does a unwanted fetus have in the new Tough Luck Libertarianism?