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Are they sure about that? To me, it looks like the difference between manslaughter (if they die) and not (if they live). You can say that the law doesn't "require" you to save the victim, but the prison sentence on the other side of that choice doesn't make it very convincing.
The assumption that babies simply appear from the ether has weirded me out since I noticed the framing. You weren't kidnapped by a music lover and forced to give life support to another human (unless you were, in which case I support the right to abortion in cases of rape). "Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.
Maybe for unprotected sex.
I don’t think we apply such a black and white understanding of causality to every risky activity. Is there some point at which you’d say “yeah, neither he nor she could have reasonably expected a pregnancy?”
The reverse came up last time we discussed miscarriage. A surprising amount of fertilizations don’t result in a viable pregnancy.
As tempting as the strict liability standard is, I'd rather avoid the need to answer that question than set a threshold.
Imagine you're golfing, and your ball goes flying through someone's window. Are you responsible for that in the case where:
By that standard, any pregnancy short of the Virgin Mary's would be covered.
The more interesting question IMO is: Given that it happened due to your actions, what is the range of your acceptable responses? I think it does include abortion even in cases of recklessness, but you wouldn't be able to think about that in the sudden-surprise-baby framing.
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I’m split on the use of contraception, which obviously makes me a sinner as a Catholic, but I’m against abortion. It always struck me as disingenuous how the blue tribe seems to get collective amnesia and forget how to be literate when it comes to the matter or abortion. Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet. The notion that a right to have sex isn’t a right to get pregnant is a fallacious argument when biology itself happens to disagree with you because, oh I don’t know people actually ‘get’ pregnant by doing it.
But they don't claim to have found people on another planet; a bacterium is alive, but it is not a person. Thus, I would phrase the question not as "When does life begin?" so much as "When does the developing life-form become a person?".
I think you’re going to find it very difficult to circumscribe the ontology of personhood in such a way that wouldn’t arbitrarily involve marking out large swathes of people for the same kind of treatment you would a fetus.
I find birth to be a natural and fitting Schelling point for when one's life becomes the business of society.
Why? The vaginal canal is literally just 3 - 4 inches in length. There is little to no developmental difference between a 28 week old premie and a 28 week old fetus, besides a 3 - 4 inch move.
Schelling points don't track base reality, they track arguments. "28 weeks" is a lot easier to argue about (why not 28 weeks + 1 day? What if it's faster-developing than average? What if they have poor recordkeeping?) than "birth".
There's also little to no developmental difference between a 17.99 year old and an 18.01 year old person, but there's a vast difference in legal status. You can argue about development all day long, but birth either happened or it didn't.
I mean, yeah. But even thats not cut and dry is it? There are plenty of places where age of consent is 16, compared to 18 or 19 else-ware. The Netherlands will even let you commit infanticide, if the child is sick enough. & Most countries with legal abortion have some kind of gestational limit, minus the good old US of A (to my knowledge). I don't think the birth canal is as magical a line in the sand as one would think.
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Just a vibe then?
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I once saw someone on Tumblr (who, in their defense, was probably a teenager at the time), try to square this circle by arguing "I consented to having sex, I didn't consent to getting pregnant".
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.
I've always found this reasoning to be weakest of all possible arguments, for the simple fact that is doesn't follow on the male end of things. Can someone get out child support payments purely because they didn't "consent" to fathering the child? No! We give them the old adage of "Man Up" and "You play you pay", and rightfully so.
Just because the West is gynocentric and hypocritical about something doesn't mean the argument is wrong. Realistically Men should be able to opt out of child support if they didn't consent to pregnancy, assuming a world where abortion is legal. It logically and morally follows.
Sure, but nobody actually believes this, and a big chunk of that difference is less ra-ra manhating girlbossery and more the idea that the women getting abortions will raise criminals and make society pay for it.
Normies hate this one clever trick: Don't pay. An expansion of equal rights around this topic is perfectly compatible with a reduction in social welfare to disincentivize anti-social behavior.
Nobody "mainstream" actually believes - I fixed it for you.
With easy available contraceptives, access to abortion, and equality around parental consent rights, if Alice wants to have Bob's baby to lock him down, and Bob withdraws is parental consent within an appropriately timely manner. Alice can chose to have an abortion or chose to carry the baby to term without the societal assistance of social hand outs, her choice.
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These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.
Why not? People get lung cancer without ever smoking as well. There very well could be some non-smokers whose lung cells were, just due to dumb luck and coincidence, 1 inhale away from becoming cancerous, and 1 puff triggered it. Probably not many, though.
Which, I think, gets at the issue that this argument is about quantity, not quality. Is sex -> pregnancy more like driving or smoking, where you could reasonably do it tens of thousands of times and still not get the consequence, or is it more like playing Russian Roulette with 6 bullets, where your odds of surviving is the odds of the bullet or gun being defective plus of your aim being off enough either to miss or cause non-fatal damage (actually 1-(1-(odds))*(1-odds)), I think, but that's a good-enough approximation), and by how much? I think most people place the line somewhere in between for determining the morality of elective abortion, and it's the different places where people put that line that cause conflict. Especially since many of those people don't even seem to recognize that they're placing such a line, much less where that line is for themselves.
I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.
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There are a lot of foreseeable consequences to a lot of actions. We as a society don't stop people from trying to mitigate them or prevent them. In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.
Do you want to make a stand that any and all foreseeable consequences of actions now require you suffer them with no renumeration or mitigation allowed regardless of the situation?
No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant.
Pregnancy is a risk of sex but it is not a 1:1 relationship.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of this pregnancy"
So what if you didn't consent to lung cancer, you have lung cancer. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of lung cancer"
For reference, I voted in favour of legalising abortion in Ireland. This is one of those "there's nothing I hate more than bad arguments for views I hold dear" situations.
Regardless of whether one believes a fetus is "alive" – unlike a tumour in one's lungs, it has the potential to develop into a sentient human being. Removing a malignant tumour presents no moral quandaries even if the presence of the tumour is the direct result of actions you freely undertook. You can't escape the moral quandary associated with abortion just by saying you never consented to getting pregnant.
Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.
No one would be persuaded by this reasoning: the entire reason drink-driving is illegal is because it makes motor accidents vastly more likely. Choosing to drive drunk entails choosing the likely consequences of driving drunk. Choosing to have unprotected sex entails choosing the likely consequences of unprotected sex. As a society we might still determine that abortion should be legal, but the idea that we can just dissolve the ethical dilemma by announcing "I never consented to getting pregnant, so you have to let me do whatever I want" strikes me as exactly insane as letting Alice off the hook because she never consented to hitting Bob with her car.
I think this analogy smuggles in a bunch of separate elements that actually break is usefulness as an abortion comparison.
A better analogy would be something were you voluntarily did something that carried a known risk of creating a needy dependent condition and in that analogy whether you had a duty sustain it's life. I think that is why organ donation is common analogy. We usually do not infer from “you knowingly took a risk” to “you must surrender bodily autonomy for months to sustain another life.” Even if I cause someone to need my kidney, the law generally does not force me to donate my kidney.
And to be clear consent to sex is not identical to consent to gestation.
Regardless I think my general argument here is: Taking a known risk does not automatically create an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk.
I think, once again, you're interpreting me as making an anti-abortion argument when I'm really not. I'm not saying that every woman who gets pregnant should be forced to carry to term. I'm simply saying that it's dumb and facile to argue "I may have consented to sex, but I never consented to pregnancy" as some kind of automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. If Y is a likely and foreseeable consequence of X, and you know that Y is a foreseeable consequence of X (i.e. you are informed when you make your decision), then voluntarily consenting to X entails voluntary consent to Y. Abortion is the only case I'm aware of in which people claim otherwise. I would genuinely love to see a second example of a situation in which consenting to X is not taken to consenting to Y where Y is a likely, foreseeable consequence of X. Actually, even "foreseeable consequence" is underselling the point I'm making: pregnancy is the purpose of heterosexual sex! It's like claiming you consented to aiming and pulling the trigger, but never consented to firing the gun.
If pro-abortion activists argued "when I had sex, I implicitly consented to getting pregnant, but I didn't fully appreciate the gravity of that decision until after I actually got pregnant, and now I've changed my mind", I would find that line of reasoning perfectly coherent. When they argue "I consented to unprotected sex but never consented to pregnancy, therefore abortion should be legal", this just strikes me as a complete non sequitur.
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We do, at the margins, because we make smokers pay higher health insurance premiums, which reduces their access to care that would fix lung cancer. Similar is the case for car accidents as well, since a track record of reckless driving increases auto insurance premiums, which reduces one's access to mitigate the consequences of auto accidents one gets into.
Given that pregnancy and abortion are more all-or-none things rather than near-continuous like insurance premiums and payouts, I think the analogy breaks down here, though.
I'd be curious to know if there are serial abortion users. If the average user of an abortion is 1-2 times in the life it makes it really hard to track historical usage for insurance to be an applicable analogy.
The problem with bringing in insurance is that insurance is a pool of other people's money. If you were a smoker and you could self-finance your chemo we would absolutely treat it. We just draw the line at paying for care of people engaging in risky behaviors with known risks continuously, from the group/collective funds. By that logic, medicare/universal medicine will not pay for your abortion if you engage in known risky practices, like sex without contraception, but you may finance it on your own. I think that is a fairly acceptable stance, and consistent. But it's not really engaging with the general moral fault line here.
If there were laws on the books that forced smokers to suffer lung cancer and we refused to treat them, that would be more akin to the anti-abortion argument. I'm sure I could come up with dozen more foreseeable situations with risks that people would really dislike care being denied for.
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It’s a way of trying to dismantle the notion that actions have consequences and to the extent one ever becomes separable from the other, there’s a moral obligation to make it so. I also never consented to being compelled to live in the same country as said Tumblr moron. Does that give me a right to knock them out, euthanize them when they’re unconscious and give away their organs?
In the case of the latter, there’s a concept in civil law called “duty of care,” that is taught to doctors in medical school. Doctors have a duty of care to their patients such that, if patients knew that at any point in a medical facility they could be knocked out and euthanized, they would never go there and therefore the utility function of hospitals would be destroyed. In the former it creates ethical conflicts between a doctor’s commitment to protecting life when it’s between the fetus and a patient; especially when it doesn’t explicitly involve the health of the mother.
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Congratulations, by driving in a car you have now signed up for a lifetime as a quadriplegic due to an accident. It was a risk you knew was possible. Please don't do anything but accept the consequences of your choice.
Sex != baby-making. Sex carries the risk of baby making.
Yeah, so? I also do that as a passenger of a car with a responsible driver. Or by walking down a staircase. I voluntarily take on risks every day, and live with the consequences.
Why not? That sounds reckless and/or defeatist.
I'll mitigate the risks as much as practical. If that fails, I'll minimize the consequences then deal with them as best as I can. As an example, physiotherapy is a good way to deal with the consequences of some of my actions. Is an abortion a good way to deal with the consequences of my actions? Who knows, but at least we're asking the right question now.
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Yes, when taking part in risky activities I accept the risk. I’m not sure what the alternative would be?
In the framework you gave, abortion for an accidental pregnancy would be permissible, but one for an intentional pregnancy would not.
I fail to see how this is different than the current accepted practice? People intentionally getting pregnant don't then go get abortions. Abortions happen when pregnancy occurs accidentally (due to risks) or when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.
Or in cases of fetal abnormality. These span a spectrum from absolutely non-viable cases (like anencephaly) to clearly viable babies who are likely to be severely disabled (like Down's) but Christian pro-lifers want abortion to be illegal in almost all of them and normies with an ick about abortion think they are some of the good examples of legitimate abortions.
I'd assume Christians are also against euthanasia of infants in these cases, so...
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I suppose one can contrive a scenario where a woman could have an elective abortion refused because her prior actions indicate the pregnancy was intentional. For instance, if she took active steps to restore her fertility not long before the pregnancy; not just forgetting to take a pill or not wearing a condom, but something like reversing a tubal ligation or removing an IUD without a medical justification.
I have to wonder how rare those scenarios are though.
I think that would be an actually interesting philosophical question, especially if we examine our response to other situations where people engage in actions intentionally that effect other people but then change their mind. In some situations like contract law, we enforce the prior agreement, but in others like a promise to aid or a charitable donation we don't enforce compliance.
It's a question of how much bodily autonomy you have depending on the cost of your bodily autonomy on other people.
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I’m guessing some number of abortions are because the mother changes her mind, and it seems very counterintuitive to say that the intent of the parents influences the morality of the abortion.
To be clear, I’m broadly pro-choice, but I don’t think sex and pregnancy can be neatly decoupled, any more than driving and car crashes can.
I mean I don't think they can be neatly decoupled, one is a risk that is of the other. But we as a society accept other risk pairings as both legally correct and morally ok. This idea that babies are the direct and singular causal response to sex is just not based in reality. Pretending it is, is an attempt at motivated reasoning. Which I was calling out.
EDIT:
I suppose this is probably true, I do wonder what the breakdown in cases between the three would be. Regardless I am pretty pro-choice from a fairly radical bodily autonomy perspective.
Funny, from the same principle I believe the reverse: „Every child wants to be born“; the body of another human being is harmed (well, murdered) -> This is anathema.
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Are you saying that driving != getting into accidents?
I'm saying that driving carries the risk of getting into accidents. But yes that driving != getting into accidents. Sex is to Pregnancy as Driving is to Accidents.
Yeah, not everyone having sex “intends” to get pregnant. But the passenger in the vehicle doesn’t intend on winding up in a clinic with a medical certificate attached to his/her name either.
I think the passenger analogy doesn't really apply well here because the passenger in a car still displayed agency in determining the risk/reward of getting into the car. A baby doesn't display any agency on being conceived.
But if you want me to stake a position, then even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no. It's my body and you can't morally compel me to use it.
Of course a baby doesn’t display agency, because it ‘can’t’. Therein lies the problem.
The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body. You’re the one who chose to commit the act. What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.
The baby is dependent on me for survival. If I wish to use my body for something other than its survival and would like to remove it, I am within my rights to remove it. If someone else would like to put it in their body or test tube for its survival they may. It's not my concern. If the baby would like to form a contract with me to exchange value for its continued use of my body, then it should make an offer.
I chose to take a risk. Much like when I decided to smoke a cigarette. Just because the lung cancer became a sentient clump of cells doesn't entitled it to my body or preventing me from attempting to get rid of it.
I forgot the "fighting for existence" is such a moral rectitude that it permits the overriding of any other beings rights. Let me quickly go tell my boss he needs to pay me a bajillion dollars because I am "fighting for my existence"
You brought up the point about organ donation. You’re not engaging in “organ donation” in the normal process of pregnancy. “Your body” is no longer “your body,” at the point it involves the life and death of someone else. That’s the entire point.
Precisely. You chose the risk. And now you live with the consequences of said risk.
You realize fighting was in quotation marks, right?
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This is just patently false.
Driving exists to get you from place to place.
Sex exists to reproduce life.
Sex is literally FOR babies, and the feeling good is a side effect. Driving, on the other hand, is literally FOR moving around, not crashing.
I must have missed the part of health class where they discussed how human females are fertile 24/7 365 days a year. Instead of the short window around the ovulation cycle. Or that how when females are not fertile it is not possible to have sex with them. You should submit your new revolutionary information to the latest medical journal, this could be a major breakthrough on human bodily functions!!
Sarcasm aside, you are smuggling in a moral argument to a functional argument that does not follow it. Just because you believe that sex = babies doesn't mean its actually true from a purely biological functionality fact(which you are also wrong about). I think I could construct several purely biological functional arguments for various other things that you would strongly disagree with.
You are essentially using arguments as soldiers for principles you don't actually care about. Make your real argument that God/bible says abortion is wrong and be done with it.
Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...
Sex is for reproduction. Different animals graft different parts to the single most important drive in the living world.
Sex came first, and sex is for reproduction. But sex isn't the only way to reproduce. We could be pollinators, or reproduce like fish by spraying semen everywhere, or another strategy altogether. We could be crystalline entities forming and reforming in patterns as we reshape the strata in an ever-expanding zone. But not for us, not for this particular class of mammalian vertebrates. We have sex, and we have babies.
I mean, Thou Shall Not Kill is right there, but I'm OK killing people who deserve to be killed, I just don't think they should be innocent children. That's the real argument: yes, it's killing, and no, you don't have cause to kill someone because you simply choose to.
And before humans (+ tree shrews) decided to torture themselves, chili peppers produced capsaicin to repel mammals, ergo eating modern kimchi is morally impermissible because it’s a profanation of its natural function?
The opposite, eating makes sense as it is desensitizing/training up against the plant defenses.
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Nonsense the bible says the earth is 6,000 years old and humans were formed directly by God in the garden of Eden. The only ancestor of human women is Adam's rib. Stop cherry picking the bible...
Then why don't humans have a 24/7 365 fertility window. Other animals have it. Obviously sex is ONLY for reproduction. Except apparently not. Listing different forms of reproduction isn't really an argument. You've made a claim that sex is only for reproduction, give some evidence of this, listing a risk/probabilistic outcome of sex doesn't suddenly prove that.
And besides a sky-hook, what moral evidence do you have that this view is the moral correct one. It's not like Christians have never killed children either. Why are children considered so innocent that they demand special consideration? Would Alien Children warrant the same consideration?
I don’t think there are any animal species, certainly no mammals, who have this trait.
But your argument surprisingly does check out, as human men (and all male apes) are in fact 24/7 365 fertile! Following your reasoning this explains that male sexuality is indeed all about reproduction/impregnation. But female sex is not (or only around a sixth as much). Which explains much about sexual customs and men/women.
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The exploration of the purpose of things is called teleology. We assert that things have inherent natural purposes. A knife exists so that it might cut things. You could use a knife for other things, say, as a paperweight, but you are losing the sense of what is means to be a knife if you cannot distinguish these ends.
Aristotle's classic example is the acorn, whose intrinsic telos is to grow into an oak tree. That's what the acorn is "supposed to do". Now, you might use an acorn for other things such as decoration in resin or feed for pigs. But these are closer to technology, in the sense that we have manipulated the acorn. We've changed it. What Aristotle would call the "final cause" of the acorn is to become a tree.
The final cause of sex, its telos, is reproduction. Sex has other ends besides and you obviously don't have to have a child every time you have sex. But you essentially can't talk about sex at all without talking about reproduction because that's its telos. That's what it's for.
Because children are innocent by definition. They aren't fully-formed adults, they are presumed not to have had sex, they haven't fully interacted with the world. They aren't morally culpable in the way an adult is. They can't be legally guilty in the way an adult can be. That's basically the definition of innocence. It's like asking why oranges are considered orange, well it's inherent in the category.
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Driving exists to burn gasoline in the engine. Making wheels roll is just a useful side effect.
This is according to the base function that a mechanism can be stripped down to.
According to "the purpose of a system is what it does", the vast majority of sex acts are for pleasure while minimizing the possibility of conceiving, while the vast majority of driving is for getting from place to place while minimizing the possibility of crashing.
According to God or other source of objective telos, well, you can quote them once you present them.
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Is playing Russian roulette != blowing a hole in your skull?
Yes... Would you say that "Blowing a hole in your skull" is the singular causal outcome of playing Russian roulette? Or just a risk?
I'd say a statement like "I didn't mean to shoot myself in the head, I was just playing Russian roulette" sounds pretty dumb.
Probably because a 1/6 chance of killing yourself is a risk that most people think is too much. Especially when there is only a marginal reward.
I don't think that risk/reward ratio really applies in Sex or Driving.
That would really depend on the kind of sex.
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Someone taking reasonable measures to not produce a baby has not signed up for baby-making. The fact that it is a possible result doesn't mean they signed up for it; we don't use that standard anywhere else. "There's some chance that any human will go berserk and turn into a serial killer, so by living among humans, you've signed up for the possibility that a serial killer will kill you".
What if someone is taking unreasonable measures though?
Contraception is very safe and not difficult, but still there were 1.1 million abortions in the US last year (a third of births). That high a number is only possible to me if people are self-sabotaging their measures (“just the tip”).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_risk
From their example, if you go skiing and break a bone, the resort will argue that that's what you signed up for when you got on the hill. It's pretty normal.
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Isn't this basically true, though? It's certainly not ideal, but people are generally against constructing the sort of society in which this statement isn't true. See regular political fights over gun control, or even driving laws. Lots of people (tens of thousands in the US) die annually at the hands of plain 'ol human failure modes.
Even if you could semi-reliably identify those that will "go berserk", you'd have to wade through a bunch of legal questions to actually do something about it under current law.
We don't say "you assumed this risk by deciding to live in a place full of humans". It's entirely the fault of the serial killer, and the fact that someone "signed up for the possibility" of living next to a serial killer is not taken into consideration at all.
Generally, we don't say that you "signed up for" something which you've taken reasonable (but not 100% certain) measures to avoid, particularly if avoiding it completely makes it hard to live a normal life.
The analogy would be knowing which sexual acts (even with contraception) will result in a pregnancy, which you can't identify ahead of time either.
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