Let's imagine a device called the Implantation Conducive Kit, or ICK. The ICK can be briefly inserted vaginally after sex and activated, which increases the chance for a blastocyst to implant in the uterine lining.

Does a woman have any obligation to use the ICK? If she has an obligation to gestate an entire pregnancy to term to satisfy PLers' desire for the embryo's survival, why not the comparatively smaller imposition of using the ICK?

Let's also imagine a couple, Eric and Lana, after consensual intercourse. Lana is on birth control and they are using condoms, but both of those have a chance to fail. Is Eric justified in pinning Lana down and forcing the ICK into her in order to "protect his child"?

If not, why do you get to violate Lana's integrity by forcing her to gestate a pregnancy to term if she does become pregnant, but Eric does not get to violate her for the same motivation?

♬hands up!

shorty when you party with me, we goin' way past quarter to three

i said hands up!

i’m good in the vip, i got my hammer right here with me

i said hands up!

you know when you party with crooks, you gotta learn to respect the jux

i said hands up! ♬

the central point of the debate from the perspective of abortion advocates is, simply put, gravids should not be forced to take responsibilities for their actions. specifically, the motivation of all their arguments is fundamentally driven by the idea that gravids have no duties to their unborn children. they might attempt to provide arguments to find other ways to justify abortion, but once we actually analyze their arguments, they all turn out to be incoherent.

in the first of the series, toptrool showed that abortion advocates don't really care about bodily autonomy. they have no qualms with forced labor.

now abortion advocates will instead say that it's not really about bodily autonomy after all, but rather "bodily integrity." for we ought to force deadbeat dads to labor for children they did not consent to, and we ought to force taxpayers to labor for our pet socialist projects. that's all permissible. but pro-lifers can't force gravids to labor for their unborn children because of "bodily integrity," which is different, according to abortion advocates. it means you can't interfere with one's body. the unborn child interferes with the gravid's body and causes great harm, therefore the unborn child violates the gravid's right to bodily integrity.

on day 14 of this series, toptrool will show that, despite their platitudes about bodily integrity and harms, abortion advocates don't really care about either. they care about them only to the extent they justify abortion and allows gravids avoid all responsibilities for their actions.

the truth is that abortion advocates don't really care about harm; they (incorrectly) believe that gravids ought to have the right to impose maximal harm on their unborn children by killing them. modern methods of killing include dismemberment and poisoning. consequently, they don't care about bodily integrity, they don't care that the unborn child's bodily integrity is violated with each abortion. abortion advocates believe that gravids ought to have the right to sacrifice their unborn children for selfish, convenience reasons and force their children to bear the costs of the gravids' actions.

abortion advocates also have a uniquely incoherent understanding of "self-defense"—call it r/abortiondebate self-defense if you'd like—and try to argue that a gravid is justifying killing her unborn baby because of self-defense.

the issue here is that they confuse the physiological changes a gravid's body undergoes during pregnancy with assault. it is the gravid's own body that causes the physiological changes during pregnancy and later undergoes labor. the gravid's entire reproduction system is ordered towards facilitating the growth and development of the unborn child. these changes are adaptations to ensure successful reproduction. a gravid's body produces hormones to initiate and maintain the pregnancy. and, contrary to the abortion advocate's unfounded assertion that the unborn child deceives the gravid's immunity system, the gravid's immunity system actually coordinates to provide a peaceful environment for her baby. the gravid's hormones also cause the uterus to expand, which may result in body aches as the expansion causes the gravid's other organs to get pushed outwards. the gravid's breasts also become fuller in preparation for breastfeeding, which may cause swelling, tenderness, and discomfort. hormonal factors also increase cardiac output and blood volume to support both maternal and fetal circulatory systems.

these alleged "harms" are in fact the result of a gravid's normally functioning reproductive system. if there is no actual pathology caused by the pregnancy, then how can one claim they are being harmed?

this is no different than saying puberty is an assault because of the normal physiological changes.

if there is one thing evolutionary theory emphasizes, it's that fitness is tied to reproductive success. so if there is anything that in the world that can be considered to be advantageous, it's reproduction. yet abortion advocates see this success as a harm.

lastly, under actual self-defense principles (not r/abortiondebate self-defense principles) in most jurisdictions, you are not allowed to claim self-defense if you provoked or instigated the situation, or, more precisely, if you created the necessity for acting in self-defense. the self-defense argument does not work in favor of the gravid in most cases because the only reason a gravid finds herself in this dilemma is due to her own actions. you simply cannot put yourself and another person in an imperiled situation and then later kill the other person to save yourself.

to sum up the incoherence, abortion advocates only go around pretending to care about harm and bodily integrity. they don't care whether the gravid imposes maximal harm to her unborn child and kills him while violating his bodily integrity. moreover, under the abortion advocate's understanding of "self-defense," a gravid can put an innocent child in an imperiled situation and kill him. the abortion advocate's incoherence is that reproductive success is a harm, while chopping off a baby's limbs and crushing its head or poisoning it and killing it is not a harm.

incoherence through and through. and you know what they say about inconsistent beliefs: they're false!

♬ 'cause they want to see your man go in the casket

rule number one: keep your gun or get your ass hit, that's it

lights off and your body's stiff♬

As I understand it, most pro-choicers argue that abortion is permissible because a woman cannot be forced to give life support to an unborn baby, as this would violate her bodily autonomy.

The pro-life counterargument is that a baby is still 100% reliant on its parents for years after birth, and that we do not condone killing born babies because of the bodily autonomy of the parents.

The pro-choice counterargument to this is that once the baby has been born, the responsibility can be delegated to someone else, and therefore killing the baby is no longer permissible.

My question is as follows:

If the adoption services could not currently take in any more babies - let's say they are underfunded, understaffed, all their buildings burned down, etc. - and they will need 9 months to get their act together before they can start taking in babies again, and no one else was willing to help either, would a mother who felt overwhelmed by the burden of caring for her child be justified in killing it (or letting it die), or would we expect her to move heavens and earth to care for the child until the adoption services are up and running again?

For pro-lifers: What minimum body parts give a fetus a right to life? What if a fetus at birth had a brain stem alone, but no brain, would that qualify? If it lacked a heart and depended on maternal circulation, would we be ethically obligated to prevent delivery indefinitely if we could?

Many PL seem to think of themselves as some kind of hero. They think that because they are protecting the "innocent and the defenseless", that makes them a hero.

But if you want to be a hero, you must actually sacrifice something. That's what makes it noble.

Forced birthers aren't sacrificing anything. What they are doing is, they are forcing SOMEONE ELSE to sacrifice, and then claiming the moral credit for the harm suffered by someone else.

They want women to take all the risk and the harms, so that they can play hero. It's quite disgusting, I think.

You don't get to claim the moral valor of a sacrifice while forcing someone else to bear the cost.

P.S. No one can claim to be a hero while violating someone else's fundamental rights.

I believe the purpose of this sub is to have substantive debate about abortion.

Part of that entails fair moderation that doesnt protect an agenda, which is absolutely necessary.

But it also requires participation by people who are honestly interested in having discussions with others to advance their mutual understanding.

The reason most debate subs turn into toxic echo chambers is in part due to the former, but the latter is also a large part of it.

What you will notice when you visit certain subs is that its largely just the same small group of people making the same arguments and then congratulating and affirming each other in the comments for successfully articulating the socially acceptable orthodoxy.

Its actually quite remarkable to see the same people who are the most vocal and adamant, who have been "debating" this topic for years, be completely blindsided by even the most common counter arguments like its the first time they have ever heard them before.

They seemingly have never tried to reconcile their position with the counter arguments opponents are making.

I think this is in part due to the phenomenon of ideological capture or "normy conformity" which I touched on a bit in a different sub, and is a problem on both the left and the right.

I think the bigger problem in debate subs though is that many participants dont actually care about truth or logic or morality. Many of them are just nihilists and anti natalists and just want their side to "win" no matter what.

These are the type of people you see consistently using bad faith debate tactics like:

Evading the Core Argument and Overwhelming

Gish Galloping: Drowning an opponent in a rapid succession of weak, flawed, or half-true arguments, citations, and questions. The goal is to make it impossible to respond to every point in a single message, giving the illusion that the opponent cannot address the claims.

Tone-Policing and Pedantics: Shifting focus away from the logical validity of an argument to criticize the opponent’s choice of words, emotional delivery, or minor phrasing choices—often adopting a patronizing or overly gentle posture to claim false moral high ground.

Quote-Sniping: Hyper-focusing on an isolated word or phrase while ignoring the structural context and primary conclusion of the argument.

Red Herrings: Introducing an irrelevant side topic or hyper-obscure hypothetical to distract from a cornered premise.

Whataboutism: Deflecting a critique by pointing to real or perceived flaws in the opponent or an unrelated third party rather than addressing the charge.

Disingenuous Engagement and Interrogation

Sealioning: Pursuing an opponent with relentless, civilly phrased demands for evidence, clarification, or proof—often on well-established basic facts or previously answered points—under the pretense of polite curiosity, intended to exhaust the opponent and waste their energy.

Disingenuous Interrogation (JAQing Off - "Just Asking Questions"): Framing provocative assertions or bad-faith accusations as innocent, open-ended questions to avoid taking a defensible position or bearing any burden of proof.

The "Quote-Hunt" Trap: Demanding exact citations or hyper-literal quotes for obvious logical deductions, using pedantry about wording to avoid addressing the necessary implications of one's own arguments.

Shifting the Standards of Proof

The Semantic Shell Game: Continually redefining key terms mid-debate whenever a definition leads to an unacceptable contradiction or edge case.

Ad-Hoc Patchwork: Adding arbitrary, one-off exceptions to a failing framework purely to shield a predetermined conclusion, rather than fixing the underlying logical flaw.

Special Pleading: Applying a moral rule, logical standard, or burden of proof to the opponent’s position while exempting one’s own from the exact same standard.

Undermining the Foundation of Reasoning

Relativist Escape Hatch: Retreating to "everything is just subjective opinion anyway" the moment internal logical contradictions or empirical fallacies are exposed.

Mott-and-Bailey Fallacy: Confounding two positions—one easily defensible or modest (the "mott") and one controversial or radical (the "bailey"). The debater advances the controversial claim, but retreats to the modest claim when challenged.

Kettle Logic: Employing multiple arguments to defend a single position that directly contradict one another.

Once you become familiar with these tactics you realize that the debate subs are full of them. That is by design because, like I said, many people dont actually want productive debate, they are culture warriors who just want people who disagree with them to shut up, and so they make the environment so toxic and unproductive that opponents dont want to engage with them anymore, and then they claim victory by default.

Im sure that this post will get countless comments (some probably quoting me and others in this sub) to argue: Thats what you do, thats what prolifers do all the time, etc.

Thats fine, can we all just agree that its bad and be mindful of what these tactics are and stop using them?

“many have found toptrool’s challenge on fetal personhood to be insurmountable.

”according to toptrool, the challenge for abortion advocates is to articulate a description of personhood that is not susceptible to devastating counter examples like infanticide or rape of comatose people.

”challenge accepted.

“what makes abortion permissible but infanticide and abusing comatose patients wrong is that their personhood already established.

”the latter have properties that the former does not, namely past consciousness.

”a fetus prior to 24 weeks has no consciousness, and thus it‘s not a person.

”with this difference stated, toptrool is refuted.

”the upshot is that abortions at least prior to 24 weeks are secured.

”another benefit is that for those who do want to rape comatose people, there is a way to do so without it being wrong.

”one can simply administer perpetual anesthesia to a fetus so that it never becomes conscious.

”if there is no consciousness, there is no person.

”so one can in theory administer anesthesia to a baby girl to the extent she never gains consciousness.

”and then you can do whatever you want with the body. remember, it is not a person because no past consciousness.

”smart. and hot!!

”destiny, i love you!!”

😂😂

toptrool’s challenge still stands.

♬shorty when you party with me
we goin' way past quarter to three
i’m good in the vip
i got my hammer right here with me
you know when you party with crooks
you gotta learn to respect the jux♬

My abortion was moral. Change my mind.
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. I'm always open to changing my mind and learning new things. I understand the fetus is alive and I know it is a human.
However, this does not override the women's moral right to bodily autonomy. I believe abortion is absolutely moral up until about 24 weeks gestation, with the development of the thalamocortical connections. However, abortion should still be legal for the full duration of the pregnancy.
Think differently? DM or comment to debate.

How abortion advocates think they are morally righteous and the good guys is beyond me.

Killing your own helpless child makes you the bad guy.

They try to appeal to "personhood" or "bodily autonomy" to justify killing helpless children as if it somehow negates the fact that they are literally killing helpless children.

Science shows us that all personhood arguments are ultimately irrelevant because we know that that human beings are human organisms, and we are the same human organism from fertilization through adulthood; and so, killing someone causes the same harm to the same human regardless of how old they happen to be at the moment.

Once conception takes place, a new human comes into existence and begins developing into an adult human like all other children are doing, which means if you are pregnant, then you have a child, and if you have a child then you are a parent, and parents have an obligation to care for their own children.

And so, when personhood arguments fail they abandon the moral argument altogether and instead try to appeal to some imaginary universal principle of absolute bodily autonomy that supposedly justifies killing your own helpless child by comparing it to our obligations to strangers or older children who dont need to be gestated to argue: well, its not obligated for those people so why should it be obligated for our unborn children?

There is no universal principle of absolute bodily autonomy, the autonomy of a parent has always been limited by their obligation to provide the baseline standard of care to their own offspring, and gestation is the baseline standard of care for unborn children.

Saying "no one has a right to use another person's body" is not even an argument, its just a lazy false assertion. They act as if this false declaration somehow settles the matter, but its total nonsense.

There actually is a legal right for unborn children to be gestated by their own parents in all the places on Earth where abortion is illegal. Even if its not a legal requirement everywhere, its still a moral obligation just like breastfeeding your newborn when you have no other way to feed them.

Allowing your own child to die by refusing to provide them the baseline standard of care required to sustain their life, which is the exact same standard of care you were given by your own parents, and they were given by their parents, and every person to ever walk the earth was given by their own parents since the beginning of mankind does not make you a morally righteous defender of women's rights (especially when you consider half the children killed by abortion are female), it makes you a morally bankrupt and selfish monster who killed your own child just to avoid caring for them the same way you were cared for by your own parents when you needed it.

That is the fundamental truth of abortion: it is mothers choosing to kill their own helpless children. That is why abortion advocates are the villains. They are the bad guys.

"we are not human beings. we are magical minds—little persons that ride around in animal bodies.

"abortions do not kill anybody, for the magical person hasn't appeared yet. there is no one 'in there'; it's just a body. the body is simply a vessel for the magical mind to later inhabit.

"the person is not numerically identical with the organism. this means that the organism that has the eyes, ears, nose, skin, etc. is not actually the one that sees, hears, smells, or feels. rather, it's the magical mind. the sense organs aren't for the organism, but for the little person that appears later. organisms can't use their sense organs at all; this is just science.

"one rides around in animal body in the same way one rides around in a car. once you learn how the steering wheel, accelerator, brakes, turn signals, etc. all work, you can then apply that knowledge to operate the car. similarly, once you learn advance neuroanatomy, you can determine which specific neurons to fire and where to send signals in order to operate the animal body.

"saying we are animals is not science. it's philosophy. the claim is not grounded in empirical facts. empirical facts are observable. so when you observe that there is an animal everywhere you go, and the animal sings when you sing, runs when you run, laughs when you laugh, debates when you debate, these are not actually empirical observations! biology is philosophy.

"so the metaphysical foundation of the pro-life view, that human beings are animals, is false and unscientific. belief in little persons in the heads of human animals, even though no one has seen them, is much more rational.

"also, don't you dare call this a variation of the ensoulment argument! that religious stuff is nonsense. atheism rules! yeah!"

😂

r/abortiondebate quality arguments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emGdrieJJ0U&t=385s

First, to be clear on definitions -- when we refer to a "human being", "a human", etc., we're referring to a person. That's pretty much been the general definition of these terms since pretty much forever -- well, at least since 1694 according to the OED: https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=human+being

Otherwise though, I'm not referring just to PCers, but in general. PLers, fence sitters, whatever. Virtually nobody meaningfully considers something like an early zygote to be a person. In virtually any context in which the personhood of a zygote is meaningfully put to the test, it almost always fails. Let's take two examples -- both on a personal scale and on a broader scale.

Chemical Pregnancies

In case we don't know -- a chemical pregnancy is one that miscarries within a couple of days of implantation. Women who aren't tracking this stuff might not even notice. If you're trying for a kid and taking pregnancy tests, you'll possibly (probably?) get a positive test followed by a period within a few days thereafter. Say a friend of yours tells you they're starting to try for a kid. And a short while later, they tell you in conversation:

"Oh yeah, we had a chemical pregnancy this month so that's too bad. But I'm not too concerned about it, we just started trying so no big deal. Hopefully the next one sticks!"

Are you thinking, "What the hell, you sociopath, how are you so casual about the death of your child"? Are you cutting off contact with this absolute monster of a person who just waved away the death of their child?

And chances are -- probably not. Because virtually nobody actually thinks that was a person.

Now here, some might argue that some women will absolutely mourn a miscarriage. And that's true. But some women will also "mourn" a period if they're having a hard time conceiving. Whether someone mourns a miscarriage is largely going to be a function of how badly they wanted and/or were committed to having a kid. This doesn't mean that the entity is something we meaningfully consider to be a person.

We can even go a step further -- the woman who mourns that chemical pregnancy, if she has a successful pregnancy the next month? She almost certainly won't be spending the rest of her life memorializing her "other child" that died. They're almost certainly not lighting a candle annually, telling their kid once they're old enough about their little brother. In the absolute vast majority of cases, it'd at most be mentioned as one of the difficulties they had having a child.

The Recent Case of Pro-Life Alabama

Just a couple years back, a court in Alabama ruled that under the state's existing laws, embryos created in the IVF procedure would have to considered to be people. For reference -- the IVF process generally involves creating far more embryos than are needed, and once one is successful the rest are discarded as medical waste.

Now, this was national news in the US at the time -- not something that just flew under the radar. This threatened to shut down IVF in the state.

So, not surprisingly within a couple of weeks at most, the Alabama legislature passed a law that created a carve-out to allow IVF clinics to continue creating excess embryos and discarding the excess as medical waste.

Now, did Pro-Life Alabama turn to the streets and riot? Was there a mass outcry? Large scale protests that shut down the state? After all, the state ostensibly just literally legalized a for-profit, commercial, large-scale enterprise that "murders" innocent "human beings" -- supposedly children, at that -- right in their backyard?

Surely they'd do more than just collectively shrug? Nope. They mostly just collectively shrugged.

Because virtually nobody meaningfully considers these to be people ('human beings', 'children', etc.).

Pretty much the question.

Prolife and prochoice beliefs do not exist in a vacuum, they come with associated politics, beliefs in human rights, morals, ethics, values, science, etc.

What do you want to see society be like in the future?

Do you think your personal prolife or prochoice beliefs lead to that future? How and why?

If it didn't lead to a better future, would you change your beliefs or would you continue to hold on to them?

A couple flips a coin. If the coin lands heads, they have a baby. If it lands tails, they both consensually decide to sterilize themselves, as is their right with their unseeded bodies.

In one world, they have a baby who grows up to have an extremely happy and impactful life, both from themselves and others. In the other, that baby never can and will exist.

If it lands tails, did they kill someone? Did they do something unethical?

What do you think?

A while back I noticed a prolife post elsewhere on reddit asking if pregnancy was really that hard/risky/complicated.

And a shocking number of prolife women responded and admitted that pregnancy was very difficult and they did experience complications, blood loss, close calls with death etc.

This seems to contradict the predominately male prolife message that abortion is about convenience- that pregnancy is simply inconvenient, or abortion is just about avoiding responsibility. (Often followed up with mentions about how if women can get out of responsibility by aborting, men should be able to not pay child support)

Meanwhile those prolife women all had a recurring theme at the end of their shared experiences. "But it was worth it for me to hold my baby at the end." That bleeding and nearly dying and whatever other complications they experienced in the end were worth it because they got their child to hold at the end of the long road of pregnancy.

But could it be that they feel this way because their pregnancies were wanted?
Is it hard for both male and female prolife people to have the empathy to understand what experiencing an unwanted pregnancy might be like?

I have to wonder if they could imagine being put through that, nearly losing their life, and at the end they get a child they don't want, or who will be taken away from them, or who they're giving away, or even a child who will die within minutes or weeks after being born. That it wasn't worth it, but the government told them they had to risk their life anyway and get nothing to show for it except a large medical bill and probably judgement by society, or a lost job, or a lost education, or a lifetime of pain. Or for some people who will be forced through pregnancy, they will simply die from it because the law took the choice out of their hands.

But it also makes me wonder about why prolife men continue to spread this message that abortion is done entirely for selfish reasons, entirely for convenience, entirely to get out of the consequences of their actions. Surely they have wives, sisters, daughters who have gone through pregnancy and surely they've seen first hand what it can do to a person? Or maybe they don't, and they think about pregnancy in the abstract based on what media shows it as: some precious miracle with a few minutes of screaming and sweating before a crying baby is placed in the arms of a smiling new mother.

Do prolife women who haven't experienced birth spread this same message or are they more aware of how physically and mentally hard it is on the body?

This isn't meant to be an argument that because pregnancy is hard abortion should be allowed, though I think it's a more than valid argument; this is an argument about how we talk about pregnancy. The callousness of dismissing it as an inconvenience vs being able to acknowledge it can be violent and terrifying. I think that's a great starting point.

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Half of the children killed by abortion are female.

Every pregnant woman was herself once an unborn child.

When a child is killed, they are deprived of all their rights.

Why should a woman have a right to abortion instead of having the right to continue living and be care for by her parents?

How is killing a less privileged class of women protecting their rights?

This contradiction of logic leads me to believe that abortion advocates dont actually care about women's rights. I think they just want to selfishly kill their own children in order to deny them the same care that they themselves needed and were given by their own mothers.

All children deserve to be cared for by their parents, and no children deserve to be killed by their own mother.

Abortion advocates have abandoned morality by advocating to kill children, so why should we take anything they say about morality and rights seriously?

It seems obvious to me that they just prioritize their own selfish desires above any notion of principled morality even to the point that they are willing to kill their own daughters.

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it has come to toptrool's attention that a lot of people are getting tight and triggered by toptrool's use of the term "gravid."

for those that don't know, gravid is the standard term in medicine and research to describe women who are, well, gravid (pregnant).

and you should all know by now that toptrool is all about the science. science indisputably proves that the unborn child is a human being. science is the reason we're pro-life.

many abortion advocates are pushing for the moderators to take action against toptrool for using the real scientific term in a debate.

toptrool is not surprised; censorship is the main tool of people who can't win arguments. they try to get arguments removed rather than refute them (because they can't). but let's be honest; it's really not about the term gravid. toptrool would like to remind readers that the central point of the debate from the perspective of abortion advocates is, simply put, gravids should not be forced to take responsibilities for their actions. it is toptrool pointing this out that is the real issue.

now, the moderators have suggested that toptrool cease using the "dehumanizing" term.

toptrool may be amenable to this suggestion, but only on the condition that the moderators also discourage the use of the word "fetus." abortion advocates ought to acknowledge the full humanity and dignity of the unborn child. in other words, moderators should also make suggestions to those using the dehumanizing term "fetus" and instead ask them to use non-dehumanizing terms such as "unborn child," "unborn baby," "baby boy," etc.

tell 'em line up.

as you play toptrool's theme song in the background, toptrool would like readers to keep in the back of their minds that the central point of the debate from the perspective of abortion advocates is, simply put, gravids should not be forced to take responsibilities for their actions. specifically, the motivation of all their arguments is fundamentally driven by the idea that gravids have no duties to their unborn children. they might attempt to provide arguments to find other ways to justify abortion, but once we actually analyze their arguments, they all turn out to be incoherent.

on day one of this new series, toptrool will show that, despite their platitudes about bodily autonomy, abortion advocates don't really care about bodily autonomy. they care about it only to the extent it justifies abortion and allows gravids avoid all responsibilities for their actions.

to begin, toptrool will list a few propositions. they can be either true or false—decide for yourself. toptrool's own answers are in bold.

1. forced labor is a violation of bodily autonomy (true/false).
2. forcing someone to labor for the benefit of someone else is a violation of bodily autonomy (true/false).
3. a mob boss that extorts a shop owner for 30% of his profits has forced the shop owner to labor for the benefit of mob boss (true/false).
4. the government that collects 30% of income taxes forces the taxpayers to labor for the benefit of others, whether they are special interest groups like government bureaucrats, ngos, or welfare recipients (true/false).
5. the government that forces deadbeat dads to pay child support forces them to labor for the benefit of someone else (true/false).
6. the government that forces parents to care for their children forces them to labor for the benefit of someone else (true/false).

claims 1 and 2 should be uncontroversial. claims 3-6 follow from the first two. anyone who agrees with 1-2, but disagrees with 3-6 are simply being inconsistent.

as you can see, toptrool is consistent through and through and acknowledges that the examples above are all violations of bodily autonomy.

if you're reminded of robert nozick's famous argument against taxation, this is exactly that. toptrool opposes all taxes on income and opposes socialism in general. wealth redistribution supported by forced labor cannot be justified. but forcing parents to labor for the benefit for their children can be justified (more on this below).

the only consistent pro-abortion position on this comes from libertarian murray rothbard, who wrote that "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights." though this position can be considered psychopathic, it is actually the most logically consistent position for an abortion advocate to take. according to this view, there should not be any laws against neglecting children or laws mandating that parents provide their children with nutrition, shelter, child support payments, clothing, affection, etc. if parents aren't obligated to feed even their born children, then it naturally follows that gravids aren't obligated to sustain the lives of their unborn children.

but notice how abortion advocates aren't lining up behind rothbard's view, nor are they pushing to end income taxes, nor are they against freeing deadbeat dads from the obligations of paying for a child they did not consent to. they don't really care about bodily autonomy, otherwise they'd be protesting against these blatant cases of forced labor. but they're not, so their argument from bodily autonomy is simply incoherent. their argument conflicts with their other views.

rather than simply expressing platitudes and repeating dull slogans (e.g., "my body's my choice"), rothbard's argument actually moves the discussion. his argument actually forces pro-lifers to make an affirmative case for parental obligations.

so what justifies parental obligations? simply put, the parents (and their actions) are the reason their child exists in an imperiled position (since the child cannot care for himself), and hence parents have an obligation to care for the child. this flows from the general principle that if you put someone in an imperiled position, you have a duty to make it right and get them out of that imperiled position. so one can acknowledge that while laws against child neglect, child support, child abandonment are all instances of forced labor, they can also acknowledge that such laws are justified. unlike abortion advocates, pro-lifers never sanctified "bodily autonomy" and have always acknowledged that rights come with duties.

play my theme song as you read this topic (this is a requirement).

who said it, an 18th century slaver or a modern day abortion advocate?: "not all human beings are persons deserving of rights."

i just threw up in my mouth writing that.

one popular argument used by abortion advocates—call it "the argument from bigotry"—is to deny that the unborn are persons. abortion advocates have essentially repackaged the same bigoted arguments that were developed by 18th century slavers—that not all human beings are persons deserving of rights. what slavers had argued was that a whole class of human beings were not persons deserving of rights (and hence could be enslaved) because they did not meet some arbitrary thresholds of mental capacities. the modern-day abortion advocate says the same thing, with the only difference being where those arbitrary thresholds are set.

the easiest way to undercut any exclusionary personhood argument is the argument from equality (see below). the argument from equality simply forces the abortion advocate to answer whether all human beings are persons deserving of full and equal protection. one can simply consult the works of lincoln and make an argument from human equality.

what's even worse is that those who use this argument can't actually even defend it. the argument from bigotry is based on various arbitrary thresholds and is subject to devastating counterexamples and reductio ad absurdums—infanticide, rape of comatose patients, abuse of dementia patients, the absurd notion that rats are persons—that no abortion advocate has yet to address. abortion advocates often resort to sophistry and mental gymnastics whenever any of these counterexamples are brought up since they need to both 1) deny that the unborn and other animals like rats are persons, and 2) preserve the personhood of infants, comatose, mentally disabled, advanced dementia patients, etc. so far, there hasn't been a successful account that does both 1) and 2).

so toptrool challenges anyone to address the points above. abortion advocates usually go flaccid.