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The more I think about politics, I always end up coming back to this quote from a very good video (from a very good youtuber!).
I think in most cases, politics are about values. To piggy back off the abortion example. The go to argument surrounding this typically is bodily autonomy, and although one could argue that this isn't really consistent on a factual, legal level. If I were in the room debating a pro-choice person on the issue, here is how it would go.
PC Person
The fetus is not entitled to its mothers body, consider the court case McFall v Shimp: McFall suffered from a life-threatening bone marrow disease and his cousin, Shimp, was a compatible bone marrow donor. Shimp refused to donate bone marrow. McFall requested Shimp be compelled to donate. The Court considered Shimp’s refusal “morally indefensible,” but still ruled in Shimp’s favor, explaining,
“For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind.”
Judith Jarvis Thomson tackles the issues of bodily integrity and moral obligations in her essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson asks us to imagine a famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. One day a bunch of music lovers kidnap you and hook your kidneys up to the violinist’s circulatory system. In nine months the violinist will have recovered, but if you disconnect yourself prematurely the violinist will die. Thomson asks, “Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”
When you drive (have sex), you know there’s a possibility you could crash into someone (conceive). Even when you drive very cautiously (use contraception), there is still a chance of a car accident. Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."
Me:
"Thats cool. Lets say you, for whatever reason, are a psychopath who enjoys taking children, draining them of their blood, hospitalizing them and or possibly killing. If I was king for a day, and assuming your blood was a match, I would sentence you to life in prison, and then order that your blood be drained and given to the remaining children to save them. Fight Me"
I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.
You are free to think I'm a crazy person, fine. But that's not my main point. The same problem exists for issues like nationalism & immigration. You can scream all day about how immigrants are a net gain to the economy, or how they commit less crime. But a ethno-nationalist will simply go "No, I value the culture and heritage of the green people, and I'd rather them go extinct than to have our way of life polluted by the purples.".
Another explicit example of what im talking about is race. A black person does not vote democrat because they are factually good for the economy (whether or not they are is besides the point). If you asked average black voter to produce a study about specific policies that cite this, they would come up short. Support for democrats comes from the idea of racial solidarity, and the fact that black people value the black race, and would like to advance black interest.
I have no clue how one would even go about resolving this. Morals & values are not empirical - you cant prove bodily autonomy and cultural heritage are good in the same way you can prove what foods are and aren't healthy. These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
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.
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.
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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