I was recently watching a YouTube video by Ben Shaphiro, where he (is tormented by his staff to) watch insanely "woke" TikTok videos. One of the videos was a woman making a pro-choice argument. I would like to object to that argument more than Ben did. The argument in the video was this:
"If life doesn't begin at conception, when does it begin?"
"It doesn't matter, Brandon, it has never mattered. At no point ever has it mattered whether it's just a clump of cells or a fully-fledged person already accepted to Harvard University. It has never ever matter when did life begin. The point is that a person cannot use another person's body without their permission. By forcing women to share their bodies with fetuses to keep them alive you are actually suggesting that fetuses should have more rights than any other person in the world, and that people with uteruses should have less rights. If you want a fetus to have the same rights as other people, I hate to break it to you, but you would be pro choice."
The argument doesn't make sense. The fetus does not have "more rights than any other person in the world" if it's kept alive. In fact, that means that it has precisely the same rights as everybody else, including the mother.
The ultimate universal human right, the one that's above everything else, is the right to life. It's essentially the only fundamental human right that, if violated, cannot be reversed, cannot be remedied, cannot be compensated, cannot be made amends for. When you are dead, you cannot receive any compensation or justice. Because you are already dead. It's irreversible. Any other fundamental human right violation can be reversed, compensated and/or remedied, except this one. For this reason the most fundamental human right, the one above every other right, is the right to life.
The mother certainly has this universal inalienable right. Willfully killing the mother is considered one of the worst and most heinous crimes that humans can commit, and the death will be pretty much universally considered a tragic and irreversible loss.
So no, guaranteeing the right to life for the fetus is not giving it "more rights than any other person in the world". It's giving it the same fundamental right as every other person enjoys (or, at the very least, should enjoy). The mother being legally allowed to kill the fetus with no consequences means that the fetus has less rights than the mother and everybody else, not more. Certainly nobody can kill the mother and have it considered acceptable and unpunishable.
A moral-ethical-philosophical discussion can be had whether it's acceptable that the fetus has less rights than the mother, but regardless of which side of the aisle you stand on, it cannot be denied that in the "pro choice" world it currently does have less rights than the mother. Not the same, certainly not more.
If we were to accept the insane proposition that "if you want a fetus to have the same rights as other people you would be pro choice", that would mean that the mother, and anybody, could be legally killed at any moment, for any reason, or no reason at all, without any legal consequences.
The fetus is not committing a crime. The fetus did not choose to live in the mother's body. In fact, most of the time it was the mother who made that choice, not the fetus. Why should the fetus be punished for its mother's decisions and choices?
A natural biological function of the human body cannot be considered to be a bigger violation of a human right than the fundamental right to life. Even if someone is a huge nuisance to you and causes you a lot of discomfort and pain, that still doesn't give you the right to kill that someone. This especially so when that someone isn't actually doing it on purpose and by choice. There are innumerable amounts of people in this world who are stuck with someone who causes them enormous amounts of hardship, pain and suffering, or just an economic burden, and while that's (in the vast majority of cases) quite regrettable and sad, and it would be nice if they didn't have to suffer, that still doesn't give them the right to kill that someone. You don't get to kill someone just because that someone is a nuisance or a burden to you. There are different levels of rights, and the right to life ranks pretty high.
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