Thread by @JoshuaCypess

1/ I saw recently the ostensibly "pro-life" position described as "pro forced-birth" & I much prefer that moniker. That's where I am ethically: I'm anti-forced-birth

Morality is about *details* & compassionate lived experience shows me that abortion must be legal.

2/ Ethical rules on a page don't mean anything until they're gamed out in real life. The most fraught questions are when the state (or community) uses force against an individual - to deprive of life, liberty, resources etc., either as punishment or intended consequence of rules

3/ I'm an ethicist with a focus on medical questions. Euphemisms are common, but deadly, in that arena.

e.g. "Rationing medical care" means evaluating an individual's worth & passively declaring a death sentence

(It's happening now as a result of the GOP's COVID diktat)

4/ So the euphemism of "anti-abortion" means forcing a woman against her will to be pregnant for months & endure the deadly risk of childbirth

This is, at best, reducing women to second-class citizens by dehumanizing them into an object.

It's ghastly in practice

5/ Making any rule w/o seeing how it would play out is legal malpractice. Unintended consequences can be predicted with due diligence

Fortunately, I have the skill of #DynamicThinking: playing a scenario out in my head to see how actions & decisions lead to certain consequences

6/ Again, ethics is all about the details. I can say "every patient must be given food, water & shelter" and if they refuse food, I can require forced feeding.

But there's that word: force.

Forcing a human; going against their will; is ethically fraught & often ghastly.

7/ Also ethics requires us to understand how systems force individuals to make choices - & be held liable for them - as if they had free will, when in reality the structure takes that freedom away

If my goal is "free-will ethical choices" that often means changing the structure

8/ Someone who believes that aborting a fetus is akin to murder would necessarily need to create a system of stop-gaps & safeguards to prevent the necessity of abortion occurring

This is what I learn from being an Orthodox rabbi: how to make safeguards to avoid a Torah violation

9/ This is why I can compare it to the rationing of medical care: if I cared about human life, I'd make sure everyone knew how to prevent COVID, pay people to stay home, & ultimately change the health care system from for-profit "pro-life" (eg. create more hospitals, more 'beds')

10/ 'Rationing care' should be reserved only for utter catastrophic times (surprise wars) but we came to this stage knowingly. It's depraved indifference to human life.

It's established government knowledge to know how bad pandemics are & how to handle them. The GOP didn't care.

11/ The scope & scale of the war against life & liberty by the GOP - in COVID, but by extension you can see it in all their policies - shows they aren't "pro-life" at all

That's obvious in how they treat women & abortion: if they really cared, they would have a different system

12/ Structure follows function; actions follow ideology.

Making sure abortions will be common by banning 'planned parenthood', laughing off rape accusations & stigmatizing the victims etc. are all a consequence of believing there's no problem in forcing women into childbirth

13/ Yet our society - especially in a time of vast income inequality - is run by those who know they can circumvent any restriction (@sarahkendzior describes this problem well in the below thread)

So these 'leaders' don't care about ghastly consequences

https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior/status/1331259204326264838

14/ Forcing a woman to endure, against her will, pregnancy and childbirth is such a crime against her liberty, her autonomy, and likely her life that it's actually unconscionable to not prevent that scenario needing to ever come up. That's where I am, ethically.

15/ So I appreciate the description of the two sides: pro-forced-birth & anti-forced birth. It describes the reality; the system you are accepting or rejecting

[While ethical stands are risky, I'm restricting comments on this b/c I don't have to make it too easy for the crazies]

16/ I can imagine I will need to take this thread down some time, given the full force of the probable crazies.

Crazies = those who just want to stoke hatred & civil war (Vlad & his bots) & the RedHat Klan.

Maybe this will just be an experiment, in that regard. Sigh.

17/ @threadreaderapp please unroll.

@threader_app please compile.