This article is a work-in-progress.
In 1973 the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled seven-to-two in favor of Roe's rights to abortion against a healthcare official of the state of Texas. Roe argued for abortion with ``privacy'', derived from the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. As the U.S. has a precedential judiciary system, this effectively legalizes abortion across the country.
However, as Roe's case was argued for based on privacy rather than body autonomy or similar rights, it left a question into if abortion is indeed a right that women should have. After all, if someone is accused of murder, the suspect's privacy is not a reason to not investigate the case further. Those against abortion often believe that abortion is murder, and thus the privacy argument wouldn't stand long.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned this precedent, and now the abortion rights of women in the united states are in a void. This memo focuses on discussing the notion of abortion itself, and briefly comments on the decision of the Court.
Some people believe that because fetus is human life, and abortion is nonvoluntary (as in nonvoluntary by the life terminated) termination of human life, thus abortion is murder and is unacceptable.
This reasoning is flawed—nonvoluntary termination of human life, even when the decision-maker understands the consequence of their action, may or not be murder.
Involuntary termination of life isn't always murder. Consider yourself an average person in the United States. You live on paychecks and you're living an average life in a comfortable house. You noticed a poor person, without food, proper clothes, or shelter, sleeping in the street, almost frozen to death. You took them home, giving them food, clothes and shelter. But one day, out of whatever reason you decided to stop supporting that person and remove them from the house back onto the street. You understanded that they will have a hard time finding foot, shelter and clothes. They deceased because of the cold.
The poor person was life, and your decision did cause their decession. But is this murder? Man-slaughter? Any kind of statutory offense? No, not really, it's merely termination of voluntary support that you provided for another person.
There is a subtle, but eventually significant difference between helping a person down the street and voluntary pregnency. (Involuntary pregnency is basically ``alright, here comes a person at your doorstep, you MUST help them and keep them alive'', there's not much to discuss there in my opinion.)
In the last example, the ethicalness of terminating support would be different if you and the person receiving help signed an explicit contract giving you the responsibility to help them but you terminate the support when the contract is still valid.
Indeed, the fetus did not sign a contract with the mother that obligates the mother to carry to term. But similarly, children don't sign contracts with their parents to take care of them, but we consider parents who don't take care of their children and such to be child abuse. But they are different.
A scientific definition of life which includes bacteria, fungi, parasites, plants, animals and many other forms of life doesn't seem inherently valuable to us—almost all of us don't feel bad killing bacteria with an ultraviolet lamp, don't feel bad killing plants for consumption, and don't feel bad stepping on a mosquito. Many of us don't feel bad consuming animals for food. We value human life because it allows us to pursue what we want and live a life. But a fetus cannot do that: though the fetus is biologically a human, it doesn't have the very characteristics that make the life valuable: It doesn't have meaningful brain activity and cannot pursue what it wants.
Abortion is just okay before the cerebrum (the part of the brain responsible for thinking) develops, which is usually at the end of the second trimester. Abortion after meaningful cerebrum activity is detected should be considered with care because at that time the fetus's life would be considered valuable.