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Of the two of us, but not the only one. Knowledge is irrelevant to one's rights. If you don't realize that you have a right to free speech, does that mean that someone allowed to deprive you of it? No. It may be relative to whether or not he can take action based upon those rights, but it does not abridge those right.
Impregnation by force should be an automatic abrogation of any parental rights of the person doing the forcing. That includes under the conditions of the AU's existence. . . .
You might be able to make that argument for blood transfer as well. But in a pregnancy is she really? Or is merely the conduit for the transfer of energy/life/whatever that comes from her eating and breathing and all that? But let's not delve too far along that lines. However, I'd be up to discussing it on another thread.
You are looking at it by the current level of knowledge and technology. As I have noted before, I cannot even begin to guess at what kind of advances we will make in the future. We may find out that the pill method actually has long term side effect that we've not detected yet (no I am not arguing against the pill method). For that matter we may develop a method that will prevent any female from getting pregnant unless she makes a conscious effort to do so, thus rendering abortion moot. Logan's Law #3: Don't ever say never. You can think that we will never come up with a procedure that will make transplanting less or equally invasive than abortion, and I agree that current medical knowledge and technology would indicate that, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. Like I said earlier in the thread, we at one point in our medical history said it was impossible to perform heart surgery without fully opening up the chest. Look where we are now. Imagine where we might be and what wonders we might have by say the 23rd century.
You are looking at it by the current level of knowledge and technology. As I have noted before, I cannot even begin to guess at what kind of advances we will make in the future. We may find out that the pill method actually has long term side effect that we've not detected yet (no I am not arguing against the pill method). For that matter we may develop a method that will prevent any female from getting pregnant unless she makes a conscious effort to do so, thus rendering abortion moot. Logan's Law #3: Don't ever say never. You can think that we will never come up with a procedure that will make transplanting less or equally invasive than abortion, and I agree that current medical knowledge and technology would indicate that, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. Like I said earlier in the thread, we at one point in our medical history said it was impossible to perform heart surgery without fully opening up the chest. Look where we are now. Imagine where we might be and what wonders we might have by say the 23rd century.
I'm not just talking about "father's rights" in this case. I'm saying that, in a case of rape pregnancy and, by extension, other kinds of pregnancies, e.g., genetically defective embryo with no known medical remedy, the combination of her ovum with other genetic admixtures is not the state's business, but it is hers. If she does not want that modified ovum to be allowed to grow into a human being, she should have the right to stop that growth - not just because she was raped, but because she did not give permission for the exact modification of the ovum that resulted.
The argument related to blood transfer was already made a long time ago and was used in one philosophical argument for abortion - no one, not even your own born child, has a right to a transfusion or your blood or a transplant of one of your organs, even if it is necessary to save his or her life.
A pregnant woman is not a "conduit" for anything. She eats and breathes to sustain her own life. All the nutrients and oxygen she takes in, her antibodies, blood, endometrial tissue, and immune attack T-cells all belong to her - just as her kidneys do. No one has the right to them except her and those to whom she consents to give them voluntarily in whatever amount she consents to give. Indeed, her own life belongs to her, and anything inside her body boundaries which supports, sustains, and protects her life belongs to her and to no one else.
It is unbelievably insulting of individual personhood to suggest that anyone is a "conduit" for transfer of life, as if her own life were merely on loan from the government.
I am aware that knowledge and technology will change. But abortion early in pregnancy can be induced by a couple of pills, without any surgery, though an invasive ultrasound is needed to be sure the pregnancy is not ectopic. No surgical method of removing an embryo for transfer could possibly be equal in non-invasiveness to the non-surgical method of abortion. You would have to come up with a non-surgical method with as few side effects as those pills.
And I honestly don't think any removal for transplant could be that non-invasive and natural even in realistic science fiction.
I might be a little lost on this as you seem to be joining two or more separate ideas into one, or rather maybe multiple results that can each come from the same multitude of source. The line that is really confusing me is the "exact modification of the ovum that resulted" part. I think you need to restate this section before I can properly respond to it. I honestly can't say that I agree or disagree with it because I'm not sure what you are saying.
I think you combined two totally different points there. First off I was noting that the possible argument could be made that a blood transfusion was the transference of part of one's life, and I guess by extension, one's organs. However, I would not agree with that. One may be able to provide to another life sustaining substances, such as blood and organs, but that does not mean that part of one's actual life goes along with it.
As to a "right" to something,....well that is a topic probably best for another thread and section altogether, but just to touch on the surface of it, as I see it, a right to something does not automatically result in a requirement for another to provide it. A right to something, tangible or not, simply means that the government cannot legally restrict it from you. Mind you that's a rather simplistic summary, but as I said we can go more into depth in an appropriate thread. So yes, IMHO, everyone has the right to the transfusion of another person's blood or organs, but they have no right to take said items by force.
WOW! That is going so way off base from what I was trying to imply/say. All I was saying was the we as humans take in on a regular basis more than our bodies require. We breath in more oxygen with each breath (under normal conditions) than our bodies take out to use. Thus the basis of why the breathing part of CPR works. The same happens for food and the like. My point was that instead of transferring part of her life to the ZEF, she's merely being a conduit for those excess items (which because they are excess are not part of her life) to find their way to the ZEF. I was looking at it from a pure biological/mechanical POV with no intention to going to any kind of political leanings.
However, since you mentioned it in your post, you are wrong in that she gets to decide in whatever amount to consent to give with regards to the ZEF. She either consents to allow it to continue to make use of her body (by what ever mechanisms) by keeping it, or to reject it from her body (abortion). If she decides to keep it she cannot regulate how much of what it gets. Unless you are aware of some extraordinary bio-feedback techniques that most women are not?
Transporters. I mean if we are projecting so far ahead as viable working AU, we can theorize working transporters also. Slight tounge-in-cheek aside, the point is there is much in the way of methods we have today that earlier generations could not even conceive of,even while still conceiving of the results. As such there is much we will come up with in the future, method wise that we cannot conceive of now, such as a method of removing a ZEF, intact with as little or even less stress/trauma/invasivness as the pill today. Determining a desired result and then working towards a viable method, including creating new technology or discovering new knowledge to make that method work, is the principle of most research and invention. Right now we envision the cure to the "common cold" with no real knowledge of how to make it work. That doesn't mean that we can't envision how we handle the results of success. We can envision working AU's. We of course, mechanic aside, have to look at and discuss not only the ethics of their use, but what other areas they will affect. Since we cannot yet know in what will be required for them to work, so we have to look at different ways it could possibly work. Including the possibility of there being a method for transference that fits the criteria I've been putting out. As such we can then look at the ethics and rights of both the contributors of the genetic material to the ZEF.
And I am honest enough to say that given what we currently know, I can't think of how it would be done either. I'm just not willing to say that it can't be done.
I'm saying this. A woman's ovum carries her genetic code. Her ovum's cell membrane remains as the cell membrane of the zygote that forms after spermatic fertilization, and nutrient in the ovum is the basis of initial growth of the zygote as a morula and blastocyst. So she can claim that the zygote is not an equal merging of her ovum and some guy's sperm, but is basically her ovum, with the same cell membrane, except that spermatic fertilization has genetically modified it. The question then becomes whether or not she has the right to claim that she did not approve of this particular genetic modification and has a right to prevent its being grown into a human being.
In rape pregnancy, she has such a good case for making that claim that it can hardly be challenged. Nonetheless, even in cases where she consented to sex but not specifically to spermatic fertilization of an ovum, she still may have a good case. She could argue, for example, where genetic defects are detected later in the embryo/fetus and would result in a born child with genetic defects for which there was no known medical remedy, that there was nothing wrong with the original ovum, so the recombination that effected the genetic modification produced the defects, and she did not consent to a defective genetic modification. Hence, she would claim that the state had no right to demand that the embryo be grown, because, she, as the owner of the original ovum, did not consent to that particular genetic modification. She would have the right to object because the membrane of the zygote was the same as that of the original ovum, so the zygote was basically the same cell but had undergone genetic modification by addition of genetic material, centrosome, etc.
This is pretty much where I thought you were headed, but better to be sure. First off let me point out that to make the argument that the defect in the ZEF is due to the introduction of the sperm, that "there was nothing wrong with the original ovum" should would have to prove that there is actually nothing wrong with the ovum. There is an equal chance, when looking at a random coupling, that the defect could be in the ovum with none in the sperm and still result in "a born child with genetic defects for which there was no known medical remedy". In the end the existence of said child, is sufficient for her to choose to be rid of the ZEF from her body, but the argument you give to lead up to that conclusion is an improper one, or at the least an inconsistent one.
"The question then becomes whether or not she has the right to claim that she did not approve of this particular genetic modification and has a right to prevent its being grown into a human being." Very grey area, but on the surface one can argue that if she consented to get pregnant by the guy, and since there can be no determination of what DNA she receives from him, she indeed did approve of that particular genetic modification. At the very least, in consensual sex, she indeed agrees that the resultant ZEF is a probability. Still not a sufficient argument, however, to force her to keep the ZEF. In fact, short of entering into a contractual agreement, there is no argument at all that is sufficient to force her to keep the ZEF in her body. But in the end that is NOT my argument. At no point have I made any argument regarding forcing the woman to keep the ZEF.
At this point while there is no doubt that the woman has the right to rid her body of the ZEF, does she indeed have the right to destroy it? I have granted that under current medical tech, this becomes a moot point as it is not possible, but what we are now discussing are the ethics/rights under the assumption of a viable AU system as I have previously described. Once the woman determines that she does not want the ZEF, it is still part his property. There is no getting around that, short of the female rape by male argument resulting in the legal precedent that a criminal cannot legally profit from the results of their crime.
If we were to make a creation, and 75% of the materials were yours and 25% mine. And for the sake of the parallel, let's say that we have to place our materials within a machine you own that will combine them into a whole, from which the original individual components cannot be retrieved. Now how close a parallel this is can depend on how one views the next step. I'll try to keep it as close as possible. During the process of the creation coming into being, you decide that it is not developing as you desired. It is defective. You want to destroy it. I however, still like what I see developing even if it is not what was originally envisioned. Now if I do not own a means of continuing the process then it's your machine and thus you can stop the process at any time and cause the creation to be destroyed. However, if I do indeed possess the means by which I can continue the process, is it not within my right to demand that the creation be moved to my machine to finish the creation process? Or to move the opposite way, is it not my right, upon seeing that the creation is not developing as I agreed to, to demand a halt to it's development?
As I see it you are making the argument of "I will take your genetic materials and do with it as I see fit, but don't you dare try to tell me what I can do with it or with mine." You want to have your cake and eat it too. And worse, you'll most likely still claim that in cases of a female raping a male and getting pregnant or otherwise stealing his sperm. The claim is that he has no right to demand that the resultant ZEF be destroyed, that his stolen DNA is not used in any creation, or even to demand that defective result of the combination be destroyed.
Both parents should have equal right to the chance to bring to term a ZEF of theirs, where feasible, or both have equal say if said ZEF is terminated. The idea of the AU shows the hypocrisy of most women that make the "my body" arguments. Even with the proposition that the man can still raise the offspring when she doesn't want it, the argument is almost always, "too bad". She can bring it to term if he doesn't want it, but heaven forbid that he should have any equal say in this. She can terminate it, and dispute a solution present, heaven forbid he should have any equal say in it. If nothing else the AU idea is a thought experiment that shows the hypocrisy of the idea of "equal rights" in some women. It proves that they wish to be "more equal"
My reply is this. Nowhere did I blame the sperm's intrinsic qualities. I said, the ovum by itself was fine, as is, as an unfertilized ovum. The recombination produced something the woman likes or does not like and if she doesn't like it she can consider what happened to be a sort of pollution of her ovum as property.
The woman can actually be as passive as an ovum.
In my opinion, as long as a woman has a right to abort an embryo/fetus, a man should have an equivalent right of refusal to accept any legal liability for child support after birth or any time before if the woman chooses to continue her pregnancy. But he also shouldn't have the right to claim that a born child is equally his unless he has made a binding legal agreement with the woman and has paid an equal share of the costs of pregnancy-related stuff like loss of work time, prenatal care, increased food and clothing expenses for the pregnant woman, and childbirth and postpartum care of the woman's health entailed as a cost of producing the end product.
So far as I can see, as long as a man is careless enough to give away his sperm or throw them away into a woman's body as a receptacle, without making any individual legal agreement with her about their fate, he chucked them and they are no longer his. Once they are in the woman, they are in her possession and she can do what she wants.
Not what you said or at least didn't word clearly enough, but I accept that it is most likely what you meant. Lord knows I've misstated what I intend to say plenty of times
So can the man. Not an argument.
In this at least you are miles ahead of many others and a rarity among women. And while I can respect this opinion to a point, I find that I cannot fully agree with it. I will say that I would accept it as a legal compromise. But the argument overall falls flat due to the current legal status wherein the male is responsible for any offspring born. As such, were it medically/technologically feasible, he should also have equal say in whether or not the offspring is terminated. Would you agree that the male should have such rights were the legal status not changed to what you believe it should be, again assuming the offspring could finish gestating outside the woman?
I had meant to put this in the last post. Not sure why I forgot it but here it is now.
Where do you stand in regards to male rape by female resulting in pregnancy or theft of sperm by other means? Under these conditions, the man has not given or chucked anything away. It has been taken from him, perhaps violently. Where do his rights now stand in regards to the ZEF? He has not given permission for his DNA to be combined with anything else. Does he now have a right to demand that such a result be destroyed? Since he didn't give it away, thus not giving up his right to the sperm to the woman (and again assuming it medically/technologically feasible), does he have a right to demand possession of the ZEF if she attempts to get rid of it?
So can the man. Not an argument.
In this at least you are miles ahead of many others and a rarity among women. And while I can respect this opinion to a point, I find that I cannot fully agree with it. I will say that I would accept it as a legal compromise. But the argument overall falls flat due to the current legal status wherein the male is responsible for any offspring born. As such, were it medically/technologically feasible, he should also have equal say in whether or not the offspring is terminated. Would you agree that the male should have such rights were the legal status not changed to what you believe it should be, again assuming the offspring could finish gestating outside the woman?
I had meant to put this in the last post. Not sure why I forgot it but here it is now.
Where do you stand in regards to male rape by female resulting in pregnancy or theft of sperm by other means? Under these conditions, the man has not given or chucked anything away. It has been taken from him, perhaps violently. Where do his rights now stand in regards to the ZEF? He has not given permission for his DNA to be combined with anything else. Does he now have a right to demand that such a result be destroyed? Since he didn't give it away, thus not giving up his right to the sperm to the woman (and again assuming it medically/technologically feasible), does he have a right to demand possession of the ZEF if she attempts to get rid of it?
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