pondělí 16. července 2018

How can someone be "Pro life" and "Pro choice" at the same time.

I've recently watched videos on youtube by Steven Crowder and found myself to disagree particularly with the video I’m Pro-Life | Change My Mind which then led to Ben Shapiro Destroys the Abortion Debate (Compilation) and REBUTTAL: John Oliver’s Crisis Pregnancy Center Propaganda! whose are not any better from my point of view.

I base my argument on a non-aggression principle and property rights. I own my body therefore I own my time and fruits that come out of my work. I can trade these properties and do whatever I want with them unless I infringe on other's property rights and start being aggressive. From an age of -0.75 to your death you have no right to get help from others, you can ask, it can be offered but you have no right for it.

Why killing in a self defence is moral is clear since an aggressor was the first to break the rules and therefore should bear the consequences (but you have to be careful not to cross the line from a defence to an aggression).

How do you apply it to a pregnant mother? The kid is using her body to grow. It literally invades the mother's blood stream to harvest resources for and dump the waste products from the metabolism of its body and also drugs the mother's body to not fight the kid on both the psychological and physiological level. The mother has every right to make any steps that she wants to stop this harvesting because she owns her body and every nutrient in her bloodstream etc. provided she's not going to cross the line from a defence to an aggression.

How do you draw the line between a defence and an aggression in an abortion? The kid's rights are not violated (it does not have the right to be in the womb) unless it is old enough to survive outside the womb then it has a right to receive a help but only when mother's rights are not violated (i.e. complications (and not only medical!) from a delivery are at the same or lower rate and severity as complications from an abortion).

Since an abortion is a medical procedure and not easily done by the mother herself, she needs a professional. She cannot force the doctor to perform the procedure or the pharmacist to sell her the medication since they are the ultimate judges of what to do with their own time.

Therefore it is up to a doctor or a pharmacist to choose if they want to proceed. How should they choose provided they want to provide the best health care possible, since they acknowledge that only the best health care is the way how to attract and keep the most customers/patients? They need to consider several factors:

1. What would the mother do if they refused?
  1. She finishes the pregnancy and deliver the baby.
  2. She finds a willing professional, non-professional or ends the pregnancy herself.
  3. She kills herself now or the baby after the delivery.
  4. She and/or her child might become a subject of an aggression from her partner, child's father, family or other people for various reasons.
2. How dangerous is the pregnancy and the abortion for the mother?
  1. It is almost 30 times more probable (17.3 / (4 / 6.64435)) for the mother to die from a pregnancy than from an abortion in the US. 
  2. Which and how much would certain medical, financial, psychological and sociological factors etc. contribute to a rise or a decrease over the statistics above?
3. Can they terminate the pregnancy while saving the child?
  1. A child is in a modern medicine deemed to have a 50% viability chance at the 24th week of gestation.
  2. What, how many and how much are influenced consequences or probabilities of certain conditions that may worsen the life of the child by a premature delivery?
4. How dangerous is the termination of pregnancy with the child saved for the mother?
  1. Is it a medically induced vaginal delivery?
  2. Is it a caesarean section?
5. What is the foreseeable plan for the child and the mother?
  1. Is the mother set? 
  2. Is the mother able to provide for the child?
  3. Is somebody else able to provide for the child and/or the mother? 
  4. Is this likely to change during the pregnancy and after the delivery?
All of this is going to be complicated by contracts between her and her partner, her and her family, her and an insurance company, her and the doctor etc., and the law that applies or the contracts that might be available to her and the child.

Lets look at every factor separately and deduct how the law against abortion changes it.

1.1 She finishes the pregnancy and deliver the baby. 
  • That is the "perfect" (having a kid is a far from perfect and universal solution to the human happiness) scenario and there was no defence nor aggression towards the kid. Unless she or the kid die or are disabled in the process. Unless her, her child's or her family's etc. lives fall apart due to any financial, social, psychological, medical or any other reasons. Then we have imperfect scenario and there was no defence nor aggression towards the kid.
  • We can try to asses the risks and let the woman choose which course to take or abolish abortion by a law (even while defining a few risks as exemptions i.e. mother's medical emergency) which will automatically mean that all the risks (apart from those exempt) will manifest themselves in the statistics in the negative way, while also striping the mother from her right to defend herself.
  • We can also try to decrease the risks and persuade the woman not to undertake the abortion because we will help and assist her with the risk management. What will be the better motivator for people to invest in charities to decrease the risks? Persuading the woman not to let the baby die while and through bettering her and her child's life? Or abolishing an abortion and bettering the lives? I would argue that once you remove the dying from the equation the motivation for people to help and prevent a misery goes down and the expenses to help all women and children that were prevented from undertaking an abortion goes up effectively ending with less money to help more people. 
1.2 She finds a willing professional, non-professional or ends the pregnancy herself.
  • If you decrease a chance to find a legal professional you also increase the price, decrease the quality of the medical treatment and increase the motivation to find a non-professional (i.e. professional in another state might be inaccessible) or end it on her own. 
  • If you push an abortion into illegality you effectively harm the chance of a charity to reach the women in need since they can locate themselves in a close proximity of legal medical facilities that provide abortions.
  • Mother's motivation to resolve her situation rises with the growth of her belly and professionals might begin to have personal objections to carry out the procedure. Therefore increasing the time to find a help by decreasing the choices creates more miserable and desperate mothers with even less choices.
1.3 She kills herself now or the baby after the delivery.
  • Some women may not have an access to a charity, medical treatment (including a delivery in a hospital), illegal abortion etc. However there might be reasons why they might deem a pregnancy, delivery or a child this much inconvenient. Two ways of addressing this.
  • A charity with a sign that says: "Free professional interruption, psychological, social and financial help with pregnancy and parenthood". Woman wants an abortion, comes in, they say look: "We can have a doctor to examine you and offer a pill or a surgical procedure depending on your medical assessment for free. We can also offer psychological, social and financial help up to a place to live for 5 years and a guaranteed part time job. We value the life of your child very much and therefore request that you sit for 2 hours with a trained psychologist to analyse your life situation before a free medical treatment is offered to you"
  • A charity without that clickbaity "free interruption" has to serve more women with their children since they cannot undertake an interruption and has less money because women with children that are hungry are not that big of a problem as women that kill their children and are hungry. This charity also does not attract women that want an abortion.
1.4 She and/or her child might become a subject of an aggression from her partner, child's father, family or other people for various reasons.
  • Only a help for while stopping the aggression against the woman is right. Decreasing the options while increasing the numbers in need of a help is not right and creates bigger resource problem.
2. How dangerous is the pregnancy and the abortion for the mother?
  • Mothers that cannot afford the delivery at the hospital but could afford the abortion will not profit from the law that abolishes it. This will effectively increase the number of dead mothers and/or children. The resources that a charity would have to deploy to resolve this problem will also rise significantly while decreasing the ratio between productive people and those in need.
  • Professionals, that cannot offer a choice of an abortion in the case of mothers that have not perfectly average or lower ~30x higher risk of deadly complications from a pregnancy than from an abortion, are definitely less helpful too. 
3. Can they terminate the pregnancy while saving the child?
  • You cannot force the parents to take care of their children. Children do not have the right to get resources from their parents. Parents do not have the right to stop children from receiving resources from someone else. It's better to let the parent leave the child at a hospital or a foster home than let him abuse or underprovide for the child and then to forcefully take the child and put it in the hospital or a foster home. 
  • Real question is what to do with saved children with various needs. If you save a child and you do not have the means that will let him survive, what good does it serve? Therefore a charity should decide if they will pay the bill for children saved at 23, 24 or 32 weeks for example. They cannot save everyone and therefore they can try and ask the mother to carry the child for a few more weeks but have no right to deprave her of an option to end the pregnancy.
    4. How dangerous is the termination of pregnancy while the child is saved for the mother?
    • Professionals can clearly calculate health risks associated with any procedure. They cannot calculate economical, psychological, social and other risks. They have no right to tell the woman when it is right for her to deliver not kill the baby, only she really knows. However if it was given that the health risks of an abortion are clearly higher than those of a delivery and the child has a foreseeable future even without mother's assistance doctors should in my opinion use their right to not perform an abortion and offer only delivery. I really believe that a market for these situations is so small that they cannot make a living out of it (do it once and no hospital will hire you, can't do it enough times per month to have enough money for a decent living) therefore showing that people really do not finance what they do not want.
    5. What is the foreseeable plan for the child and the mother?
    • I would argue that there is no point in stopping a mother from an abortion when there won't be any care for the child to not die post delivery. 
    • I would also argue that it is dangerous to stop a mother from an abortion when there is no care for her during pregnancy and delivery which increases the risks of her dying almost 100 times and of the child almost 3 times when compared with those that use that care and already have almost 30 times higher chance of dying from pregnancy than from an abortion.
    Let's see how incoherent is an anti-abortion law advocate reasoning. We'll discuss several scenarios and show that a rule "every unborn human has a right to live" needs a lot of arbitrary exceptions to meet the expectations of a society.
    1. The mother gets a cancer. The cancer will kill her before the child will become viable. The treatment will kill the child.
    • In my view the mother has the right to choose. She can choose the treatment with an abortion (killing it on purpose is safer than let it die and decompose inside the womb...) or to die and take the child with her.
    • In a view of an anti-abortion law advocate the kid would die anyway, no point in letting the mother die too.
    2.  The mother gets a cancer but it's some sort of a slowly growing one. The cancer will not affect her chances of finishing the pregnancy and successfully deliver the baby. Her chances of survival after the therapy are N times greater if she starts it now than when she waits for 8 months and starts it after a delivery. The treatment will kill the child.
    • In my view the mother has the right to choose. She can choose the treatment with an abortion (killing it on purpose is safer than let it die and decompose inside the womb...) or to give birth to her child (or die from medical complications of her pregnancy, car accident or any other reason) and diminish her chances of survival afterwards.
    • I really have no idea how the anti-abortion law advocate will react but there are three choices. The mother is sick, of course she has a right to choose. The mother could be saved after delivery but the kid is sure to die in an abortion, we do not care about her chances of survival because she has a chance. The mother has a right to choose if her chances of survival are P (an arbitrarily set number about which we can have endless and meaningless political debates) times smaller.
    3. A woman have had sex and the condom have broken, she took the after-pill.
    • In my view the mother has the right to choose.
    • I really have no idea how the anti-abortion law advocate will react but there are three choices. Mother can prevent implantation, it is not a human with a right to live yet because we would have a problem with embryonic science research and other stuff too (it becomes a human with rights after an arbitrarily set number of days about which we can have endless and meaningless political debates). Mother can prevent an implantation if she has a medical precondition (we can have endless and meaningless political debates about the list of them) that endangers her life R (an arbitrarily set number about which we can have endless and meaningless political debates) times more during a pregnancy than in a healthy woman. Screw the mother's choices and her medical, economical, social, psychological and other preconditions, abortion is illegal at any point, we'll charge her with a first degree murder if she buys over the counter drug that could lead to an unsuccessful implantation, a second degree murder if she buys now illegal after-pill, a manslaughter if she does it but really really thinks it is not a human that she killed, the science on embryos is prohibited as you cannot experiment on the non-consenting humans.
    4. Two women get pregnant. One wants a child but tumbles in the bathroom, hits her belly and has a miscarriage. The other does not want a child but cannot afford an abortion or an abortion is illegal, tumbles in the bathroom, hits her belly and has a miscarriage on purpose.
    • In my view it is just sad. The first one lost the wanted child, the second one should have had an opportunity to not endanger her life and have an abortion or a support from a charity (to have an abortion or to raise a child).
    • Anti-abortion law advocate has three choices. In general do not waste police resources on this because every mother would have similar stories about an accident, kids are still dying in the womb, women have to undergo greater risks to end the pregnancy. Launch an official murder investigation into every case, all women have similar stories but a lot of them genuinely had an accident and are now harassed by the police, kids are still dying in the womb, women have to undergo greater risks to end the pregnancy, they might not go to the doctor with a different matter if they think they might be pregnant and want to keep their options to a self-inflicted abortion open and secret to avoid a possible murder investigation. A murder investigation is launched only sometimes depending on arbitrary parameters that we can have endless and meaningless political debates about, all women have similar stories but some of them genuinely had an accident and and some of them are now harassed by the police, kids are still dying in the womb, women have to undergo greater risks to end the pregnancy, they might not go to the doctor with a different matter if they think they might be pregnant and want to keep their options to a self-inflicted abortion open and secret to avoid a possible murder investigation.
    5. A successful mother of two kids that are going to an university has had sex with her husband while on contraceptive pills (no contraception is perfect) but is now pregnant. Her husband cannot support a family of five from his income alone while paying the university for the two kids, mortgage on the house and a health care for his pregnant woman and an infant. 
    • In my view the mother has the right to choose. She saves her career, her home and her children's future by having an abortion, risks everything (kids at the university get a part time jobs, husband will get a second job, they sell the house and move to a smaller one), gives her newborn child for an adoption (while still risking her career, kids future, her home... since the pregnancy will have an effect on it, not to mention how difficult it would be psychologically) or dies from complications during pregnancy. No one should have a right to tell her what to do.
    • Anti-abortion law advocate "saves" the child and waits how the life lottery he put the mother into plays out for her, her family and her newborn child. 
    • I should not need to tell you in which scenario the charity (with limited resources while the human suffering in the world is almost endless) will be needed more.
    6. Any other controversial scenario with disabled children, raped women, mere inconvenience... If you really think the anti-abortion law policy through you'll see the horrible consequences for individuals and the society as a whole.
    There is a reason why I always write about a charity and never the state. Etatists (those who believe in the necessity of the state) can switch it for the state at any circumstance. However there are consequences to solving the problem this way.
    • State takes care of the unwanted but born children. State saves money by subsidising or handing out free contraception for women. Sexually transmitted diseases rise in prevalence, because there is a smaller incentive to use a condom now. 
    • State starts subsidising or handing out condoms and since they are free they are used as balloons at parties and other situations apart from sex which wastes resources in the society. State pays for advertising the safe sex.
    • State actually saves money when it pays for an abortion than for a psychological, economical, social and medical help through pregnancy, delivery and childhood. You can now stop using contraception at all because it is just inconvenient or the risk of irresponsibility is quite low and the abortion is free.
    • Only a fool can think that adding another regulation or a state program to this mess can improve it. Not even partial dismantling will be enough as you'll end up with the problems that you created with the first shot at the free market and non-aggression principle and tried to solve with more and more regulations. To finance all of this nonsense state has to violate the owner's rights of all people since virtually no one is paying taxes voluntarily, effectively making the state the biggest aggressor there is.
    Why is a limited anti-abortion law (let's say only up to the 13th week of gestation) bad too? You're incentivizing all radical pro-life advocates to just delay the woman's decision until it's illegal to do it. They will set up charities that seem as a helping party but abandon the women right after the calendar shows the right date. 

    Why are state subsidised private abortion clinics bad? They compete for the subsidy not the quality of the service. They have the state stamp for truth and can mislead women into abortion because that procedure is easily subsidised, reported and managed by a bureaucrat therefore incentivizing those clinics to push abortions not complex solutions (which is a nightmare for a bureaucrat to do right).

    To sum it up. Somehow there are two left policies. One is advocated by usually the left and the other by usually the right. Seems hilarious to me that the "right" thinks that any law apart from a non-aggression principle and owner's rights can be on the right. Therefore I am pro life (best morality and lowest suffering int the society) and pro choice (everybody can choose unless they are aggressive). To better explain my position I made this chart.