"Marie felt obliged to accommodate the Remora*, but she still resented the intrusion"
Here is an interesting spin on the right to life.
The right to anything begins and ends at the skin level. Where I stop and air starts is the extent to which I have a right to anything. Let's call this skinspace. We all have it, men women... fetus included.
Now to put it in context: the fetus' rights including to that of life extend only to the limit of its own skin. That means that it has a right to be shielded from harm. This covers the case of wanting to prosecute for double homicide when a fetus is killed in utero along with the mother.
Now we approach it from the other end. A woman has a right to control her whole body. No one can sell her for gain or keep her in slavery or harm her person, her skinspace, in any manner. No one may aquire her organs for their own gain. You cannot make her give up a kidney just because someone else needs it. You also may not implant anything in or under her skin withour her permission and if you do, she can rightfully remove it regardless of the consequent harm to the item. As in, you cannot make her grow a kidney for someone like they do with mice. So her choice extends to her person and her organs. All of these rights also apply to men and fetuses.
Now we seem to have a conflict. If I cannot harm a fetus and I also cannot enslave a woman to gestate it, who wins the argument of control of the skinspace a fetus needs to survive.
In fact there is no argument. A woman has a right to determine whatever happens within the confines of her own skin at ANY time. If a fetus is inside her skin, no matter how far developed, she can expel it by whatever means is at her disposal. If the fetus survives this, great. If not, still ok. Fetus that get born are privelidged to have accommodating hosts, not creatures with rights to subsume another individual's right to their own skinspace.
This also covers male reproductive rights. If you release your sperm from your body, they are on their own. You have no right to insist on their further life inside someone else's skin. So it becomes your responsibility to manage them as you see fit, but gives you no right to control them once they are inside someone else's skinspace. So you cannot enslave a person in order to procreate.
Once they are not inside your skinspace, no matter what is happening to them, they do not extend rights of your own skinspace to the skinspace of others.
Once they are an existing entity, the responsibility toward them becomes equally distributed to any contributors to the entity's life. If this is a problem for men, we are back to responsibility for your own sperm and where they are located. Things that can make babies should always be under your explicit control at all times.
While they are inside someone's skin, you have no right to control them. So you should not put them there unless you are sure that is ok with you. Once they are outside someone else's skin, they become your problem again.
This approach solves the abortion/paternity/ right to life problems from all angles. Applied to any situation, the skinspace rights solution resolves the issue according to the first tenet of freedom, that to control your own person and only that person.
After that, we are on to social contracts. But inside your own skin, you are the boss, whoever you are.
I openly welcome debate and criticism of these thoughts. I will try to defend it and will listen to any objections with an open mind. I have been thinking about this for a very long time and have only been able to come up with this as the underlying answer to the pernicious social problems any other take on it generates. The pharmacy problem is what got me willing to try to write it down. I have tried to address the needs of women, men and the unborn, as they all matter to me.
*1 : any of a family (Echeneidae) of marine bony fishes that have the anterior dorsal fin modified into a suctorial disk on the head by means of which they adhere especially to other fishes 2 : hindrance, drag
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annette2009
Steve Blevins
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When I asked my mother, whose life was compromised by the presence of 5 children, why she didn't abort us if she knew we would be so burdensome and would make her unhappy and mentally fragile (paraphrased). She said, and I quote, "Well, Bay, I may be goin' to hell for what I've done in my life, but at least I won't be tormented by the arms and legs of little children I killed."
It left a real impression with me. I would and will defend any woman's right to control her own body. It's all you really can own in the end.
So, it's just as reasonable (under the skinspace doctrine) to hold that if a woman has total authority WRT paternity, as it happens within her skinspace, she also assumes total responsibility for any decisions that she may make regarding that skinspace and has consented to that and she should not let him put the sperm there unless she is sure that is ok with her.
I of course rely on the old established legal doctrine of "Sauce for the Goose..." ;-)
Accepting the sperm and then gestating it is a potentiality for the sperm that leave the man's body. Until the sperm are dead, they remain the responsibility of the man, even if that control is suspended for nine months while the sperm inhabit someone else's skinspace. I would say that if she stole your sperm and made a child with it, you might have a case. But you are back to social contracts and courts to decide fiscal responsibility in those cases.
Since the responsibility for the sperm still obtains, the potential of them joining with an egg and making a child is still the ultimate ethical responsibility of the man in ratio of precisely half the responsibility for the subsequent offspring.
Since she can't make the baby alone, she can't assume 100% responsibility for the offspring. The fact that you lose control of your sperm for the nine ensuing months while it is in the skinspace of another person is a chance you are taking when you ejaculate, whether that means its potential life OR death at the hands of the individual in possession of it.
Life is full of chances and risks.
Or:
old enough to fuck, best not trust your luck.
the corollary to:
old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.
Note how a nice simple, ingenious system gets complex when we get down to cases. We've now seem to have gotten to what seems to be a skinspace sublet.
Glad I'm not an attorney, too many shades of grey.
I think the one with their name on the actual lease can kick the occupant to the curb at short notice. The occupant may trash the place in anger, and the owner will have to pay to clean it up, but they still have to vacate.
I love an obtuse an analogy!
I wish I had had this jargon to begin with. It really offers a great economy of words to a difficult set of ideas.
"Fetus that get born are privelidged to have accommodating hosts, not creatures with rights to subsume another individual's right to their own skinspace."
Did you mean to say "fetus that get conceived?" To use the word "born" implies it is no longer in the woman's skinspace.
Once the fetus is no longer in the skinspace, and has become an infant child, does it not have a legitimate claim on the mother's skinspace? Afterall, the mother has consented to its birth, but in order to live the infant must utilize resources that reside within the mother's skinspace, i.e. breast milk.
Does this doctrine allow for consideration of the level of development of the fetus? Is there no moral distinction between aborting a seven week old fetus and a 35 week old fetus?
Breast milk is adequately although not optimally substituted with no harm to the fetus. Also, if you insist on real breast milk, wet nurses are an option. Once the baby is outside, it is at the mercy of the world. Good thing they are cute.
"Does this doctrine allow for consideration of the level of development of the fetus? Is there no moral distinction between aborting a seven week old fetus and a 35 week old fetus?"
No moral distinction. You either can survive inside your own skin or you are at the complete mercy of the one you are living inside.
You could be thirty and you have no RIGHT to live inside of me, or to any part of my skinspace, not even a slice of my liver for transplant. No Rights to any part of me, ever.
Lucky thing for most babies that most women get all sentimental about this. But that is sentiment, not rights.
Whether you believe in abortion or not, this has always been the case. I can always throw myself down the stairs and induce miscarriage. Men who think they can MAKE you carry it to term are fooling themselves and always have been. A determined woman will enforce this doctrine on her own terms, laws be damned.
And they always have. i am just codifying it.
cb: "It's not that pro-choice folks deny the moral standing of the fetus. They just do not think that standing necessarily leads to a prohibition on abortions or automatically trumps the moral standing and interests of others (i.e. like the mother)" This is true - for me. However, I believe the pro-choice movement has done itself a great disservice dancing around this very issue vs. dealing with it in straightforward terms.
And that is essentially what I am arguing. It's your flesh. You got there first. And you always retain the rights to it. It is even true of organ donation. Without specific documentation, even when you are dead, they cannot violate your body by removing organs for the use of other living people.
Yet if a woman says no, that she is not available to incubate...well that makes her an awful person, doesn't it? I say no.
"Since the responsibility for the sperm still obtains, the potential of them joining with an egg and making a child is still the ultimate ethical responsibility of the man in ratio of precisely half the responsibility for the subsequent offspring."
Can you elaborate on the skinspace paradigm where questions may arise over cryogenic stockpiles of sperm? I've donated my spunk. I've got great little swimmers apparently. I don't know where they will end up. Should I wind up being 50 percent responsible for thousands of little J.D.s. (A cringe-worthy thought, I know). Or does that fall under the aegis of social contract, or indeed, legal contract? We need a lawyer here. Calling Le Castor right now.
"Since she can't make the baby alone, she can't assume 100% responsibility for the offspring. The fact that you lose control of your sperm for the nine ensuing months while it is in the skinspace of another person is a chance you are taking when you ejaculate, whether that means its potential life OR death at the hands of the individual in possession of it."
I flunked biology 101, I admit it. But I didn't know it was still technically sperm for nine months. I thought when the single lucky jackpot winner wiggled his way into the egg and his tail dropped off, he was no longer a sperm. In fact, the egg at that point is no longer an egg. Both become a different thing. Can we hear from a doctor on this? Where's Doctor Jones this morning? Paging Doctor Jones.
"Life is full of chances and risks." True words, Elizabeth.
Sometimes reality is harsh. In the summer of 1970 I was finished with all the training the army was going to provide and they gave me a 10-day pass to go home and get my affairs in order before reporting to the Oakland Overseas Replacement Center.
The times were different then. The sex was casual, recreational, and abundant. A female platonic friend of mine felt sorry for me going to Vietnam. She was sure I wasn't coming back. I'll call her Susan. She invited me to her St. Louis apartment for a going away dinner. To my surprise, it was a very private dinner. It was just Susan and her best friend I'll call Trish. (I know, this sounds like Penthouse Forum but remember, it was the '70s). Whether it was pity or patriotism or just hedonism, I'll never know. But after dinner they took turns with me. The friendship was no longer platonic obviously.
Grateful as hell and dazed from the experience, a few days later I flew off to S.E. Asia to an unknown fate. Of course, I returned a year later with all my limbs intact. A year after I got back I went looking for Susan. She was in Chicago. I drove up to see her. We had another meaningless but enjoyable romp. But as we were enjoying the afterglow, she casually mentioned that her friend Trish had become pregnant by me during that one night stand in St. Louis and had an abortion.
"She didn't want to contact you about it while you were in Vietnam," Susan told me. I was ambivalent about this news. I was neither sad for the child I might have fathered, nor was I glad that I didn't have to take any responsibility for my part in what happened. The truth is, I didn't care one way or the other. I never contacted Trish and she never contacted me. There was simply no connection. It was just a fuck. That's how it was.
I didn't think about that incident again until I was well into my 50s. I don't know what triggered it, but I did the math. If that child had been brought into the world s/he would be somewhere around 30 years old.
I agree with you Elizabeth. Life is full of chances and risks, and I know you lean toward people having to pay for their actions. I did eventually pay a price for my irresponsible behavior. Although I buried it deep for all those years, I do now wonder "what if." I also know what Trish did with the fetus inside her was hers to decide. I knew that even back then. I don't know what ever happened to Susan or Trish. I lost track of Susan shortly after seeing her in Chicago. So it's all like a dream now. But a recurring dream. A bitter-sweet dream.
I think the indentured spunk issue is one for the lawyers.
But the sperm changing in the womb. As I see it, the sperm is evolving into something else as it gestates, but its identity and the responsibility for it obtains in its new incarnation as a fetus.
The residence of this fetus determines its fate during that time. And then it is back in play as the resulting precious babe.
As a war veteran, you would know better than some what it means to own nothing but your "skinspace" and having someone try and take it from you.
I think most of us would kill to keep it intact.
I never ever once thought of it like that.
You are a bad man with naughty thoughts
about innocent mermaids and fish.
Ichthyeroticism, indeed!