Comment on An Abortion Dialogue

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:39:38 GMT

My argument is that the people being punished in this way have in some sense forfeited part of their right not to have their autonomy violated, by demonstrating inability to stick to a social contract that has been agreed on as reasonable. Views can differ on whether that's reasonable or not, but it's firmly distinguishable from someone forfeiting their autonomy because they got pregnant.

I don't see why you would elevate the social contract in any extreme way like that; you mean abortion is OK, and execution not OK, solely because the latter is imposed (hopefully) on those who have violated the social contract in some way? This seems rather relativistic. So what if we have a social contract, like in Catholic countries, which says abortion is not OK?

Also doesn't deal with the draft or taxation examples, or additional examples like duty to rescue.

So under this view of autonomy, abortion belongs in the same category.

Or goes quite the other way: what loss of a woman's autonomy for 9 months could possibly compare to losing an entire life of autonomy, which is what the fetus's loss will be? Bioethics calls this the violinist thought experiment.

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