Rex Kerr
5 min readAug 29, 2022

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Not really. I am poking fun at you, to be sure, but at the same time I am pointing out that you are making multiple claims that are only well-founded if you are a expert mind-reader.

That part isn't ad hominem; it's basic logic.

If you say, "Ololade wants women to die", for instance, but Ololade himself doesn't say that--rather he says something else, like "how is a baby just before birth so different from one just after birth?" (not his words, admittedly) and he doesn't say when abortion should be restricted, and he doesn't say whether there should be exceptions for the life of the mother--then your statement can only be considered reliable if you are somehow reading his mind.

And in this answer, you have doubled down on the mindreading. Except, alas, I am apparently wearing a tinfoil hat, because you're completely off target.

You say, "I've addressed the point: abortion is not murder." Except you haven't. Indeed, you seem implicitly to acknowledge that a very late-term abortion might be murder! You say: "At 37 weeks, it would be a planned birth with cesarean." But why? Why on earth do that?! If the mother doesn't want the baby, and it isn't murder--just have an abortion! It's not murder, you say, repeatedly. If it couldn't ever be, then have the abortion at 37 weeks.

You keep bringing up embryos. This is irrelevant to the point, unless you agree that killing an embryo is murder. That wasn't the contrast that was highlighted. You keep bringing up women not having access to abortion in the first and second trimester. Also probably not relevant (unless we agree that second trimester fetuses are indistinguishable from just-pre-term fetuses...and I'm not agreeing to that, as it's nonsense biologically...but I grant that Ololade might given some of his other statements).

You try to make an analogy to blood donation, but that argument alone is not enough (as I've already said). We already do force people to take care of their dependents unless they go through a nontrivial process to relinquish dependency, which in every other case results in an alternative caregiver not death for the dependent. If the dependent dies from willful neglect or abandonment, it is absolutely considered murder (or at least manslaughter, if the responsible party could reasonably have believed that their dependent would survive). So the parallels aren't enough: they can be used to argue either perspective. Therefore, you have to argue this situation on its own merits. (Which, I note, the justices writing the Roe vs. Wade decision did.)

Using your less-than-spectacular powers of mindreading, you suggest that I don't care about women's lives. But in fact that's exactly backwards. I think the fastest and best way to start saving women's lives is to have really solid arguments and to directly address every concern, so that no support is lost due to poor argumentation. Except your arguments are awful in this area. I can't even tell what your position is. This is a horrible way to assuage concerns of the large number of people who are pretty comfortable with the Roe vs. Wade policy of drawing a distinction between viability and not, and pretty uncomfortable with allowing viable fetuses to be killed rather than born.

Roe vs. Wade did not make a strong overarching case for bodily autonomy above all else. RBG's alternative foundation based in the Equal Protection clause also wouldn't have placed bodily autonomy above all else, since the logic of society's interest in future members of society would not have differed between the privacy-based version and an equal-protection-based version. The "bodily autonomy is everything" argument is popular and, unrestricted, seems to allow arbitrarily late abortions.

You again bring up the Savita case...but as I said before, it's irrelevant to the logic of whether post-viability abortion is murder. Furthermore, there are plenty of other cases where swift medical action with minimal encumbrance is necessary to save people's lives. We know how to do this. The doctors in Savita's case knew how to save her, and the only reason she wasn't saved was because the Irish law did not empower medical professionals to put the life of the mother first. So the solution to that is really easy: life of the mother comes first. There was a recent case in Malta which is very similar: their law does not put the life of the mother first. (In these cases it was even easier: there was no way the baby was going to be viable. It wasn't even putting the baby over the mother--it was putting restrictive rules over life. And though you said "the exception existed", it effectively didn't: the presence of a fetal heartbeat overrode the danger to Savita.)

So to me it seems like you're putting attachment to a simple pro-abortion idea, that the woman's bodily autonomy is always more important than everything else, above every other concern, including well-established responsibilities to dependents, pragmatic tactics to save women's lives by quickly gathering support for Roe v Wade-type (rather than expanded) abortion rights, and the ability to even face simple arguments or be aware of the reality of what (occasionally) happens.

Abortions of a viable fetus are very rare (but Roe vs. Wade explicitly said that it was okay to restrict such abortions, and nearly every state did, so there are legal barriers in most places), but they do happen, and you still can't answer a straightforward question about whether that should be okay just because the mother wants it to happen. Following the logic of your argument, it seems that the answer should be "yes, it's okay".

But you have never managed to say so. Embryos! Think of women dying at 17 weeks of pregnancy! Late abortions never happen! What if she has cancer! Ololade wants women to die! You don't care about women! Abortion isn't murder!

Every excuse imaginable, and never actually directly facing this precise question.

And that's a problem. Because your rhetorical position is highly vulnerable to demonization, and this position is actively being demonized. So get a good answer already. Accept the logical conclusion and argue for it, or change your reasoning, or something.

Argue not against the most extreme anti-abortion view, but to persuade the person with an intermediate view, the ones who say there should be "some restrictions" on abortion but who said "Roe vs. Wade shouldn't be overturned", about what the reasonable policy should be. There are tons of people like that.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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