Make no mistake, the pro-life-forced-birth lobby are advocating slavery for women. Dianne, in a comment on Pharygula, captures exactly the position our anti-choice friends would like to put women in.
Query: Why are they talking about the circumstances of the conception as though that matters? A forced pregnancy is slavery, regardless of the circumstances that led to the pregnancy. In the US, at least, people are never, under any circumstance other than pregnancy, required to give use of their body to another under any circumstance, even to save the life of the other person. Why are fetuses granted more rights than living people?
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
17 comments
March 11, 2013 at 6:30 am
theguywiththeeye
Thank you! The movement would more accurately be called pro-embryo than pro-life.
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March 11, 2013 at 7:52 am
myatheistlife
It’s not slavery so much as it is punishment for having the audacity to be raped. Remember, killing the unborn is only moral when Jesus’ baby daddy does it… because, you know, god is love.
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March 11, 2013 at 8:11 am
Darwin O'Connor
There is military conscription (which women happen to be exempt). It existed in the US up until 1973 and many western countries still have mandatory military service.
There are also taxes which basically forces people to do part of their work for the government.
People in jail (many of whom are still awaiting trial) are forced to do all kinds of things.
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March 11, 2013 at 10:12 am
bjh
I have been making this argument all week now as Americans are in a tizzy over all of the new restrictive abortion laws.
Check this out:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/01/22/originalist-argument-abortion-rights-compulsory-childbearing-during-antebellum-sl/
“Professor Koppelman has previously argued, on the basis of Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude to protect individual liberty and equality, that the government may not prohibit abortion. To do so would be to require physical service from a woman for the benefit of a fetus. The originalist argument relies less on analysis of the case law than a more comprehensive understanding of what antebellum slavery entailed. Though most originalists would likely argue that neither the framers of the Amendment nor a reasonable person alive at the time of its passage would have thought of unwanted pregnancy as a form of involuntary servitude, this is not the question. Forced childbearing is not analogous to slavery, it was an element of it. This is not to equate forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will with permanently enslaving her. It is only to say it is a historical fact that this was a fundamental part of dual oppression female slaves endured by virtue of being black and female.”
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March 11, 2013 at 10:13 am
bjh
@Darwin O’Connor
Taxation is not slavery. Wow. But somehow not unexpected. I hear that argument alllllll the time from woman-hating tea party fruitcakes.
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March 11, 2013 at 10:36 am
syrbal
Taxation is the price of civilization. And military conscription is now out. And IF the draft is brought back, the latest versions of it would also conscript women. So, really, neither equate to forced pregnancy.
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March 11, 2013 at 10:50 am
Darwin O'Connor
… and forced birth prevents a death.
I can come up with glib responses, too.
So why is taxation is not slavery. Just because it is the price of civilization?
Why does a draft not equate to forced pregnancy? During a time of war it would be a great deal more dangerous.
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March 11, 2013 at 11:13 am
bjh
Actually, forced birth prevents the creation of a person – not a death.
An embryo is not the equivalent of a living, breathing person. It is just DNA. You are more than your DNA.
Anyways, as syrbal said, there is no draft anymore.
And women have been kept out of combat roles in the future – no more.
Even during WWII, conscientious objectors were allowed to avoid fighting and instead worked on farms as part of the war effort.
A draft is wrong, in the case of Vietnam. That is, in a manner of speaking, a form of slavery to force people to fight in order to enrich a very small number of people.
Any draft that is going to exist today would be defensive. Basically, if your country is being invaded, either you are going to fight to defend or give up and…BE ENSLAVED BY THE ENEMY. So that is hardly slavery – doesn’t even come close. In fact, it is *fighting* slavery.
Taxation is not slavery. In the real world you need lots of positive goods to exercise liberty, like food, water, shelter, security. If you lack any basic goods, paying taxes to acquire them would increase your liberty. If you think you can buy those goods on the private market, the private market can’t exist without stability, and if the presence of positive programs like welfare is required to prevent socialist revolution, then even these programs increase your bourgeois liberty.
So taxes, and a defensive draft PROTECT AND DEFEND YOUR LIBERTY.
If you want to be free of the slavery of taxation go live in Somalia and see how much you like that libertarian paradise! Good luck building any business that isn’t piracy or crime related!
Also, we have a little thing called ‘taxation with representation’. Taxation would only be analogous to slavery if you were taxed 100% and all of that money went into someone else’s pockets and was used not to make life better for the inhabitants of the land, but to enrich a small number of authoritarians.
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The final main point is this…
Paying taxes and fighting a defensive war protect your liberty. It benefits you. Forcing blood and organ donations – and yes, forced pregnancy – does NOT benefit you. It is in the service of someone else, 100percent.
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March 11, 2013 at 11:52 am
syrbal
A draft, even one that included women, would be spreading the risk to ALL so drafted. Forced pregnancy does not risk any man’s life at all. And if you are going to legislate for anything that prevents a death? Hey…let’s go with gun control, breathalyzers on cars, and ban imports from nations using child labor — since some children DO die in those sweatshops. My response was not “glib” but simple common sense. Yours is hyperbolic bullshit.
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March 11, 2013 at 12:27 pm
bjh
And for the record, during WWII, women were drafted.
Many became WACS – nurses and the like, and they DID venture into combat zones.
Otherwise, women were drafted into farming and other professions to feed clothe and power the war effort.
It was one giant collective effort to defeat Hitler and everyone was expected to do their part.
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March 11, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Darwin O'Connor
Good comment, bjh. So people can be forced to do things that benefit themselves, even if they don’t agree that it benefits themselves.
Of course, if you happened to be charged with a crime, then all bets are off.
You say, “An embryo is not the equivalent of a living, breathing person.”
The question is, a what point does an embryo become the equivalent of a living, breathing person? I assume you don’t mean breathing should be the criteria to acquire human rights.
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March 11, 2013 at 1:28 pm
bjh
@Darwin O’Connor
So make your case for anarchy then, please. I am waiting…
And if you don’t like paying taxes, you can always *leave*.
Move to Somalia as I suggested.
A woman cannot simply hand over a fetus if she doesn’t like the forced pregnancy.
An embryo is a potential person, but not an actual person.
Potentiality is not actuality.
A case could be made that once the fetus is viable outside the womb that it then acquires personhood.
Until then, if it is wholly dependent on the mother (on her organs blood minerals and nutrients from her body) it is not, by definition, a separate being.
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March 11, 2013 at 1:31 pm
bjh
And if you don’t like being forced to defend your country you can always defect and join the enemy.
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March 11, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Darwin O'Connor
I’m pretty sure my arguments have been constantly pro-making-people-do-things. It’s you who having been saying it’s okay to force people to do things one some cases (taxes), but not others (pregnancy).
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March 11, 2013 at 1:48 pm
bjh
Did you miss the part where you benefit from paying taxes.
A woman does not benefit from an unwanted pregnancy.
A woman cannot hand over a fetus.
However, if you don’t like paying taxes, you can LEAVE.
You have more freedom to stop paying taxes than a woman does to end a forced pregnancy.
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March 11, 2013 at 1:54 pm
bjh
And we live in a democracy.
You have the freedom to start your ‘no taxes’ political party’ , win some elections, and abolish taxes!
In some US states and municipalities people have already done a version of this, on a much smaller scale.
People would rather have the extra cash than pay for maintenance on the local road. The road has now gone years without any sort of upkeep, it is falling apart, and local businesses are suffering because people avoid the roads out there!
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March 11, 2013 at 5:17 pm
bjh
“It’s you who having been saying it’s okay to force people to do things one some cases (taxes), but not others (pregnancy).”
We can easily change that to:
1) It’s you who having been saying it’s okay to force people to do things one some cases (taxes), but not others (forced gardening for Mexicans)
2) It’s you who having been saying it’s okay to force people to do things one some cases (taxes), but not others (forced plantation work by blacks)
3) It’s you who having been saying it’s okay to force people to do things one some cases (taxes), but not others (forced work in Magdalene* laundries for wayward girls)
I mean it’s only fair, right, that if you are going to force *everyone* as a *collective* to pay taxes, when we should also force women to have babies, Mexicans to do garden work, blacks to pick cotton, and unwed mothers to do laundry.
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Slavery is when you are forced to use your body against your will. There is no real chance of escape without punishment. If you try to escape the army, they put you in jail (they used to execute deserters). If you are a slave and you try to escape the plantation, you get whipped and thrown in a cellar. A woman, for all intents and purposes, is chained to the fetus. She cannot hand it over. And when abortion is illegal, a woman is treated like a criminal for attempting to procure one.
If you don’t pay your taxes, the reason you might be thrown in jail is because the rest of society is then working to serve YOU. (Or are you saying you don’t want/need/use/might use police, firefighters, public roads, public schools, medications/vitamins/etc of any sort, any food you didn’t personally produce, fly on planes, own a vehicle, use sewage/water systems, live in a country defended by a military, use GPS (for americans – the rest of us get that for free. Thanks, yanks!), use or anticipate medicare or social security (or equivalent), … I think that’s enough for now.)
If you force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, she is being forced to serve a fetus (and other people who want her to have babies).
So, your logic quite clearly fails here.
The only valid point you had was in regards to the draft. The draft should either include women as well or eliminated.
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*http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/19/ireland-apologises-slave-labour-magdalene-laundries
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