But we differ on why that is:

You see innate reasons for the damaging aspects of pregnancy to be taken seriously. And as such, allegories of pregnancy-as-organ-harvesting hold, even if they do not apply to all women.

I see experiences of pregnancy and the value of human life as socially constructed and am therefore concerned with how these things are talked about – because how we talk about them will determine the dominant ways women experience their pregnancies.

Priya: “Leave it up to women to decide.”

Truth is not separate from context. So when we use cool clinical categories to break human development down into person-less pieces, this methodology produces what it seems to describe. I do not think people have ability to “freely choose” whether to see their pregnancies as they want to.

Unless you truly believe people are unconstrained agents – the real question isn’t can people make choices (to abort) but why they make the choices they do. To that extent, representations of pregnancy as parasitic contribute to the why, they contribute to new norms of viewing female sexuality as dangerous and rife with vulnerability.

Linking back to the very beginning – this is why I think it is incorrect to construe Sigrest’s comment as evil – because doing so is a type of coercion against women: which may make the pregnancy of a woman who has experienced rape a mandatory horror. This mandatory horror then becomes a reason to silence and reject the those women who experience their abortions as a secondary trauma.

(Although I do see that Timothy is concerned with other issues of policy and paternity)

As a (fledgling) social constructionist I understand that many of the issues of contemporary feminism are to do with unpackaging the legacies of second wave feminism.
2nd wave feminism instituted many essentialist notions about gender, choice, and exploitation.

For example I recently read about sexual violence prevention and some of the political issues that need to be unpackaged are things like a) all men have an innate capacity to rape b) all heterosex is essentially exploitative to women etc. But neither one of those statements is true – they are products of ways of representing gendered difference.

In the same way I am concerned about this discourse of invasive and damaging pregnancy. To me it reinforces essentialist notions that all women are innately vulnerable to sex and all women are innately susceptible to the damage of pregnancy.

But I don’t think this depiction is true – it is simply the product of ways of representing pregnancy. It excludes the possibilty that women can have experiences of pregnancy that are not damanging and not interpreted as invasive and parasitic.

I’m not saying you can’t experience pregnancy as damaging, it is just that speaking about pregnancy as only damaging (as ultimately the same as a malevolent entity trying to intentionally harvest internal organs) silences some women.

Essentialist notions of gender work against feminism, they work against gay rights and they work against transgender understanding also.

Whether a fetus intends to steal from a mother’s body is irrelevant, she has a right to use force to prevent that just as she’d have a right to use force to prevent a child from taking her kidney without permission

I am one of four sons. As the eldest, if I took one of my mother’s kidneys – she would have one left. My next brother, if he took the other – she’d be dead. But she’s not, and had all four of us. Therefore pregnancy cannot be the same as having your kidney taken out.

“the equivalent of a child attempting to remove”

Intention and direct action are different moral categories than the indirect and unintentional behaviour of a foetus. For example manslaughter is a different crime to first degree murder.

I think the analogy that better represents the darker impressions people shed concerning the average pregnancy, without being hostile, is this:

It’s winter and you drive out to a remote part of a farm to enjoy the scenery and your car breaks down.
In the quiet of the night you see that a lost traveller has fallen into an icy lake.

She has no strength and no intention to take anything from you, she can only accept your mercy. You have two choices: give her the output of your bodily organs or choose to watch her die.

Not only have you treated each other respectfully, all of you refused to allow a troll to incite you into an angry response.

Sometimes folks get upset when we pull a comment. But I hope this can help illustrate how a debate can be interesting and thought-provoking without resorting to what so often turns up on the web. And perhaps the steps to keep it mostly in accordance with the Comments Policy (we do err, we’re human) really do pay off

I assume that until very recently the higher rates of infant mortality likely put different pressures on people to match resources, effort and so forth to children (in ways where this Roman practice might have made sense). It doesn’t make it more moral.

I think the Bible licences the rejection of baby murdering, in as much as Herod and Pharoah’s edicts aren’t to be interpreted positively. And the wrongness of these killings is not simply due to the congnitions that adults have. Other than that, I cannot say.

Priya – the kidney and bone/marrow example I also addressed in my post. Other than the direct vs. indirect harm critique:

My consternation about the kidney/bone marrow assertion is that it seems to provoke very negative feelings. It paints foetuses as something that wants to harvest (non-replaceable) organs from people’s bodies. Does humanity really benefit from ascribing such hostile and invasive demands on something that is innocent and vulnerable?

Humans can have twenty children, yet we don’t have 21 kidneys. The analogy doesn’t seem to map 1 to 1 with the way humans are really made. In this gap people might come to conclusions simply because your example generates a sense of threat.

http://moms.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/08/8684372-20-kids-and-counting-michelle-duggar-announces-shes-pregnant-again

Let us say that a small town has a meeting and quickly comes to the consensus that all newborns have no right to the sustenance, production and labour of anyone else’s body at all. Can the mother then withold care for her newborn given that it has no alternatives?
If the bus that passes this town is not due for six more days – does anyone bear any responsbility or can everyone say “It’s my body, it’s my choice, I shall not aid this child.”?

Actually, your small town sounds like Rome. There, if a paterfamilia decided that a newborn was not ideal for the family, he could direct that it be left on a certain hill to its own fate. Should another wish to adopt the child, they could. Or it could be taken and raised as a slave. Or it could die.

How we all may have views about the morality of such an act. But we cannot say that such views are Biblical. Neither Paul in his epistle to the church in Rome, nor any other apostle, condemned this well known practice, much less made it the centerpiece of a Culture War.