Rex Kerr
3 min readJul 24, 2022

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Oh come on, this is ridiculous.

You have been oversimplifying to the point of absurdity over and over and over. I keep painfully trying to bring you back to more of the unavoidable complexity, and you keep falling back on incorrect and overly simplistic statements like "You oppose my rights." All while failing to answer very pertinent questions with very clearly laid-out logic.

And now you're just trying to change the topic.

Personhood matters more that rape status because we generally have very strong prohibitions against killing people--to the point where we don't even have automatic death penalties for rapists (who actually willfully committed the act) let alone their offspring (who themselves were blameless).

You haven't even managed to offer any statement about when you think personhood starts. All you offer is that you don't want to think about it.

After that's established (at least within some fuzzy parameters) then we have the baseline necessary to decide whether rape is a special case, and at that point we could tackle the Indiana case (edit: Ohio/Indiana, I guess).

But you're going all upside-down and sideways. You won't talk about basic justifications behind the basic right, and suddenly you want to tackle a case with two additional complexities? When you can't manage to discuss the base case with any sophistication? After I've given you two articles to help think about the issues from your perspective?

The Indiana case is, I think, probably not very complicated unless you bring in a eugenics argument that I don't think most people these days, probably including you, have much stomach for. But it does necessarily depend on the answers to two other questions, one of which we haven't even raised yet.

You have to learn to walk before you can run. I'm not aiming for cartwheels right now, thank you very much.

So, is your final answer #3: your rights are the only rights that matter when you and someone else has arguably conflicting rights, as long as that person is your (hypothetical) unborn baby? That is, you don't dispute in the least that the baby could be truly 100% a person (by whatever reasonably objective measure(s) we could use to judge and with healthy awareness of uncertainty--none of this "conception because the simplicity makes me happy" nonsense), but you do think that their personhood is 100% irrelevant because your rights matter and theirs don't at all.

If yes, then we're done.

If you mean it, which I seriously doubt, then we are done because I will not be a party to your completely callous disregard for other people. I cannot change your empathy or concern for other people in any reasonable amount of time, but the idea that you see someone who isn't in conflict with another person (e.g. me), and you like that idea so much that you think you are justified in completely ignoring the needs of the person you're in conflict with is really quite shocking.

It's no different conceptually that someone who has a dependent toddler thinking, "Well, gosh. That single person there has autonomy rights I don't have, like the rights to arrange their time ("pursue happiness") however they want without a dependent. Why shouldn't I have that?" and abandoning their toddler. And that being totally cool instead of totally horrific.

If you don't mean it, which I think is far more likely, then we are done because you can't bring yourself, for whatever reason, to address the actual more complex issues underlying the situation. But that complexity is the entire reason why the issue is disagreed upon by different people. So we can make no progress: it's a critical, core issue that you can't explain or debate and upon which everything else depends.

If you don't actually literally mean #3, then maybe there's a point continuing. But I'm kind of skeptical, given not just the baffling (to me) oversimplifications you have in your justifications, but also your perception that I'm the one wanting things to be simple.

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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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