''Why Mothers Don’t Have The Right To Refuse Babies The Use Of Their Wombs'' & a rebuttal as to why they actually do

My rebuttal is to this Federalist article: ''Why Mothers Don’t Have The Right To Refuse Babies The Use Of Their Wombs''

This prolife article argues that prenatal humans have to belong somewhere. If not the womb, then where?

''For most pro-choice advocates, the right to abortion hinges on affirming that a pregnant woman has the right to refuse her child residence in her body. But then the question may be asked, if a prenatal human being does not belong in her mother’s womb, where does she belong? The answer? Nowhere.''

You can ask that if you wish. My answer would be that it is irrelevant to the very first statement.

''It is implausible to claim a child does not belong in the place she began to exist and the only place she can survive: in the nurture and care her mother’s body naturally provides. This has been the case for virtually all of humanity since our history began. The mother’s womb is the rightful place of a child in the earliest gestational stages to live and flourish.''

This article is essentially a thinly veiled argument that the womb is the only place an unborn can be, and thus has a right to be there, while using the pretext that it is arguing against the woman's right to bodily autonomy.

Let me simplify their argument: The unborn can only live if within the womb = it has a right to be there

I will just go ahead and agree with him now: the womb is the only place a prenatal human can be.

I wont lie, this is the strongest argument I have seen from the prolife side. It is the only argument that is of any consideration to me. This is similar to the argument that the secular prolife position takes as well.

Its also complete bullshit.

This is a common issue with prolife rhetoric. It attempts to take one idea and superimposes another idea onto it that actually has nothing to do with the original idea. It is mashed together to seem like they correlate. Case in point: abortion is the killing of another human, therefore it is murder. This completely ignores the fact that killing in self preservation & defense is not considered murder. Whether they ignorantly or deceptively believe this (I believe there is a mix of both), they leap to this extreme because of the emotional impact. They had an almost logically sound case, but omitted an important factor in their equation and thus came to the wrong conclusion. And sadly this deceptive tactic works in pulling people to their cause, but that is a discussion for another time.

The reason I say it is a thinly veiled argument is because it is giving you the right answer to the wrong question. Just because you come to the conclusion that a prenatal human belongs in its mothers womb, does not have any baring on whether that woman has the right to bodily autonomy and thus the right to remove it if that is how she chooses to exercise her bodily autonomy.

It is a fallacious conflation. Can the unborn only live if they are in a womb? Up until about 24 weeks, yes, this is most certainly true.

This does not, however suddenly mean it has a right to be there.

So what is the missing stepping stone that was not addressed in this article?

What this article neglects to address is the issue of consent.

Without consent, without the will of the person who owns their womb, no one has the right to be there. Even if that means it will die.

A person owns their body 100% of the time, and generally along with that ownership, gets to dictate what happens to it 100% of the time. This is true for all humans. The only time it is not true is when that person is unable to make decisions for themselves. Such as is the case if someone is unconscious, in a coma, brain dead, mentally incompetent, or an underage child. One's governance over one's body does not magically drop in percentage points simply because their uterus goes from a non pregnant state to a pregnant state. Her uterus is always hers at all times. Just because someone else needs it to survive does not mean it belongs to them or gives them any say over it, or as is the case of the prolife rhetoric, it does not give a 3rd party say over someone else's body on behalf of another. (And I say this loosely as I do not believe an unborn has any agency whatsoever, nor do I think it is its own separate body during pregnancy. But this is a discussion for another time.)

It is interesting how nature gets pointed out a lot by prolifers. I would like to point out an interesting tidbit that people seem to not address. Children, particularly infants and small children, cannot survive without the help of an adult. Nature literally says that they need parents to care for them, in order for them to live. If an adult doesn't provide care for them, they will die. And how does an adult provide care for a child if not for having made a decision to do such? Consenting to provide care for another is literally required by nature in order to have this thing called life.

Yet they are trying to take away everything natural about a female human. The constant attempts to control her agency to desire and engage in sex for the purposes of bonding and stress relief. Her ability to use her mind to determine if the environment is the right environment to bring a child into is undermined and downright ignored and overridden. Her ability to engage in a medical procedure devised by the natural human mind is attempted to be removed from her. Her ownership and agency over her body is removed from her. She is told that she must sacrifice what she wants for herself and her life and forced to give of herself altruistically, something that by its very definition cannot be forced.

Everything that makes her human, that gives her agency, is stripped.

On Human Rights

''To put it simply, if you do not believe human rights are entitled to all human beings, you do not really affirm “human rights.”''

Yes Mr. Jackson, I agree with you on this. And that is why being prolife is not synonymous with pro human rights. It is quite the opposite in fact.

To people new to this argument, unborn do have the same human rights as everyone else. And no human has the right to someone else's body against their will. We do not afford this to anyone else but somehow it should be afforded to the unborn according to the prolife rhetoric.

Again, consent matters. When we remove this idea of consent from the situation, horrible human rights violations occur. This is evident throughout history. Slavery, rape, corporal punishment, torture, involuntary experimentation, kidnapping and involuntary imprisonment, domestic violence and abuse, the list goes on.

Human rights are predicated on consent. When you remove consent and a persons agency, human rights are violated. And going back to an earlier point I made, children can't consent to anything. Therefore, if you want to argue ''what about the fetuses right to consent'' I would point out that it doesn't have any, therefore she is not removing anything or denying them a right. And if you wanted to argue that angle, you could also argue that the same thing is occurring by allowing it continued gestation and subsequent birth. If unborn can't consent, they can't consent to anything. Period. And thus, we should not be gestating and birthing them without their consent. And since we cannot do this, their consent is irrelevant. Something the prolife rhetoric tries to make irrelevant of women, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I would like for the prolife community to explain to me how a woman is undeserving of being the sole arbiter of her own body. This article attempted to to explain that, but got lost in the fetal centric view like so many other of their arguments. The very fact that they cannot or will not acknowledge that the arguing of fetal rights means that women will have their rights directly impacted is yet another example of their attempt to take away everything that makes a female or person with a uterus, human.

The very fact that prolife rhetoric refuses to acknowledge the woman and her human rights in the topic of her own pregnancy, is very telling of how little consideration we apparently deserve on the topic. We on the other hand, do acknowledge the fetus, both in our decisions to have abortions and in the discussion. And that is that they have the same rights as the rest of us, but along with that, no human has the right to use someone else's body against their will even at their own demise. The ball is in the prolife court to explain why women deserve to be stripped of their rights. And it has been sitting there for a long time. Apparently, they own that too.