Let’s set up a scenario:
We have a two year old child who, for medical reasons,
requires another person to be hooked up to them via an IV to survive. If the
child goes longer than several minutes without being hooked up to another
person, it dies.
We didn’t say it’s a happy scenario.
Is it moral to force someone to hook themselves up to the
child? The child’s mother, for instance? Should it be legal to force a mother
to let her child use her body for survival? Why should it be the mother and not
the father?
These are the questions we want the Fetal Supremacists,
heretofore the pro-life crowd, to answer.
You see, the abortion issue amounts to people who think
fetuses have special rights versus those who think fetuses have the same rights
as everyone else. Yet it’s the Fetal Supremacists who frame themselves as the
ones who want equal rights!
Confused? Fuck yes, we are.
Fetal Supremacists say that everyone, including fetuses,
have a right to life. We agree on that. Where we disagree is when the fetus
requires the use of another person’s body to survive.
If a fetus can survive on its own and the mother no longer
wishes to be pregnant, that fetus (now called a “baby”) should be removed (at the woman's discretion) and the
baby gets to live.
If a fetus cannot survive on its own and the mother no longer
wishes to be pregnant, that fetus should be removed from the mother’s body.
If we can’t force a mother to be hooked up to her two year
old, we shouldn’t force a mother to be hooked up to her fetus.
What the Fetal Supremacists are doing is this:
If a fetus is not viable and the mother no longer wishes to
be pregnant, that mother must be forced to maintain the fetus against her will
until such time as the fetus is viable.
Fetal Supremacists support granting special rights to
fetuses, and they need to demonstrate why that is fair.