Sure. You can think about tar and feathering Congress, if it suits you...but you can't actually do it.
Thus, validating my point: that how a woman becomes pregnant without intending to, or why she does not want to carry the pregnancy through, is not relevant to the issue of her legal right to choose abortion.
I'd say the issue is about the fundamental right to be and when that right has to be protected.
Well, no, not really. Since no one is arguing that we do not have a fundamental right to exist. What is being argued is who, and how we are to determine, legally, when a human being has come to exist, and thus has that right to continued existence. Some of us feel that a person exists from the moment of conception, on. Others feel we come to exist at birth. And still others feel that it happens some time in between, but there are differing ideas as to when. While none of us can prove our theories to be irrefutably true.
So the issue is not whether or not a person has the right to exist, but when that right becomes claimable.
Because our compact has already spoken to the right. But just as we once failed blacks in not upholding the standard of equality before the law for everyone (and women too, to a lesser extent) we're failing the unborn in our present consideration.
Well, this is your opinion, yes. Because you believe personhood begins at conception. But not everyone does, and neither you nor they can prove what they believe to be true. So there we have it: the dilemma about legalized abortion.
There's no such animal as unimpaired liberty or absolute control of person.
That is true. But absolutism was neither necessary to, nor was it proclaimed, when I made my point. Personhood does require self will and the liberty to express it, to be manifested. It does not require absolute self will, nor absolute liberty. But it requires enough of these to allow the human biological entity to recognize that it has it's own will, and can exercise it according to it's own nature. Short of that, it's not much different from plant life. And fetuses in the womb, during the early stages of development, do not have an awareness of self will, nor the physical autonomy to express it even if it did. And in fact is no more a 'person' than the average house plant. I understand that it will eventually develop into a person, but it is not logically a 'person' from conception, onward.
Anyway, again, it's about the right to be and what we do about it, where that right must be reasonably defended. Even when that defense works a hardship on others.
Exactly. The problem is that we all have different ideas about when and what it means to come to "be", and therefor when and how that right must be recognized and defended. Yet no one has the right to force everyone else to abide by their idea of when and how this should happen even though some of us think that we should have the right to do so, and are willing to deny the rights of others to force them to comply.
You keep trying to focus on the human being's right to exist, and in so doing, you keep ignoring the real issue: that we don't all agree on what that means, or when exactly it happens. And although you can't prove your own opinion on this, you are still willing to force everyone else to comply with it.
Until you can justify your automatic presumption of this right to usurp the autonomy of others, to their satisfaction, they will not give you that authority. Thus, abortion is still legal, and will (and should) remain so until someone can resolve this dilemma. Either by presenting irrefutable proof for their claims about when a fetus becomes a person (thus convincing a significant majority of us to comply) and/or by developing an artificial womb in which unwanted pregnancies can be brought to birth without the forced use of the mother's body.
Rather, I have noted that we as a compact advance the truth that right isn't conferred by the state...
All the more reason, then, that the state should not be deciding this issue for the women who are faced with the decision.
Not exactly, but it doesn't address my point and I've already noted that I feel the legal reasoning with Roe was insufficient and a narrowed mistake made defacto law by virtue of the time and pressures of the day. If literal independence was the cornerstone of right the sleeping would have less of it and the comatose none at all.
The courts used the only reasonable criteria available to them. And it's a long-standing legal criteria, too, as 'personhood' has long been directly related to an individual's autonomy. Throughout most of U.S. hostly, women were only considered to be 2/3rds of a person, and as such were denied a significant degree of autonomy: the right to own property, and to vote, for example.
