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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?
We are going to disagree irrevocably about this. "My Body" is always my body, morally it is wrong to remove bodily autonomy from a being regardless of the reason. I don't think you can convince me that any form of slavery regardless of the cause will ever be ok. I'm not a consequentialist, and am not a utilitarian. The freedom to bodily autonomy is a quintessential natural right and it requires Tyranny to override that.
I'd go as far to say you benefit from this as we currently aren't harvesting your organs against your will because it will save the lives of multiple other people. Afterall "your body" is no longer "your body".
I also did not bring up organ donation, please highlight where I did.
Show me the law or the penal colony where we condemn smokers to die of lung cancer without any chance of treatment.
Do you support abolishing prison? Or law enforcement entirely, since almost all criminal law enforcement requires taking people's bodies and holding them against their will (and threatening them with bodily harm if they don't comply)? I can't think of any moral framework that includes absolute bodily autonomy without resulting in absurd results in all other walks of life. And we're not talking about weird edge cases here, we're talking about normal things a society needs in order to function.
I mean this gets into how a social group enforces rules, there are a lot of gray areas. For example, if I kidnap you and hold you hostage is that ok because society believes that imprisoning people is ok? What if I commit you to an insane asylum against your will while you are perfectly sane?
I'd argue that holding someone against their will for no reason other than you can is wrong, and there are a bunch of different lens you could use to explain why.
However, if I violate some social compact around what constitutes lawful behavior in my tribe what are my options? Non-Exhaustively:
Scale these up from tribes to modern society and I'd argue the intuitions follow. Realistically a criminal could fight their incarceration, its up to them if they think losing/being treated as an enemy of a society is worth that cost. They could escape to the wilds and form their own tribe, or wait until such unjust rules are overthrown. They can accept the punishment in hopes of re-integration afterwards. They have lots of options, but fundamentally they have the right to bodily autonomy, just as members of a society/tribe have the right to associate with individuals they want to. There's tension there, but I don't see the conflict.
Sure, but law enforcement/prison (usually) isn't a "just because we can" thing. Similar to how many people oppose murdering babies (which, by the way, violates their bodily autonomy) "just because we can". I.e. when "it's inconvenient for my lifestyle and/or the baby will have Down's Syndrome or similar" which accounts for roughly 95% of abortions. I'm personally a pro-life absolutist who opposes it even in danger to the life of the mother type situations (though I've grown into that position over time, I sadly used to be more "moderate" in my support of child murder), but for the modal abortion it's essentially done out of convenience, not necessity.
I made a response to this same argument: here. The baby is violating my bodily autonomy, me removing them from MY body does not violate their bodily autonomy. Their inability to survive outside of MY body is not my problem. Pro-lifer's want to assign more moral weight to a baby than to a human, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for it.
To be clear you are asking me to unpack a very complex and complicated topic that only marginally relates to the abortion topic in that they affect similar values. For similar levels of effort I'd like you to address how you can be pro-life yet not immediately donate your body and all your organs to help everyone who needs organ transplants. After all if bodily autonomy is not sacrosanct, and some humans have more moral worth than others, shouldn't we forcibly remove organs to help those of more moral virtue?
Or we can stay on the topic at hand...
At least you are honest and consistent. I can respect that. I am near enough to a pro-choice absolutist, so I doubt we'll ever agree. Furthermore since I think humans are of equal moral worth (barring edge cases) and I am not religious, I don't see how I will ever consider a "child" (even granting a clump of cells is a child) of more moral worth than an existing human being. And thus be willing to abrogate the rights of one to support the rights of the other.
You generally can't remove a baby without violating their bodily autonomy. Most abortions involve essentially blending the baby up and scraping them out.
That's just straight up weird, children have been almost universally considered to be of greater moral worth than adults for all of human history. Even animals are often willing to endanger or sacrifice themselves for the sake of children. Even from an atheistic and evolutionary point of view, ensuring the safety and well-being of children (over that of adults) is essential to the perpetuation of the species. Children are innocent (this was discussed more thoroughly by someone else in this thread), and innocent people have greater moral worth than those who are guilty of wrongdoing (and all adults have done some amount of wrongdoing, some more than others). The same way a serial killer adult has less moral worth than a non-serial killer adult. I don't see any way to see this differently without completely throwing out the idea that morality exists.
Because I'm not a utilitarian? Only utilitarian ethics (and similar deranged branches of ethics) would reach the conclusions you're suggesting. Just because all human life has inherent value but some are more valuable than others doesn't mean any and all measures to save the life of another are mandated. But there is nothing incompatible with this view and the view that we should not take active measures (like abortion) to end an innocent life.
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