Mexico’s supreme court has decriminalized abortion across the country, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The supreme court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
Judging by the length of your replies i make a conclusion that either the topic in question is rather important to you, or you just enjoy arguing. In any case - thank you, it is always a pleasure to have a meaningful debate. Cannot say that the topic in question was ever in my focus (I am getting agitated mostly about personal rights and freedoms in general, rather than this particular sub-case), but your time committed deserves a slightly more detailed response. Also, thanks for a particular paper you mentioned - I enjoyed reading it, and it only highlights the differencies in our views. So let me use the same way of responding to specific lines in your posts. “You completely miss the point of that question” - nope, you provide a specific example of a killer, I respond that killing anybody is bad. The big question is how to define this “anybody”. Based on that single paper you mentioned - the only one I ever read on the subject - this is indeed a central question of the whole debate, as both sides recognise the unacceptability of killing. I draw the line at birth, you do it sometime before. Oversimplification, I know, but I have no intention to contribute to the whole debate with my humble attempts on writing a tome. All I am saying - and it seems you agree, but that is up to you really - is that there is no definitive way to establish the bulletproof concept around abortion rights, so there is no ground to impose a restriction on a woman to do as she sees right. “You abandoned the bodily autonomy argument” - how so? I did not mention it in the short reply, that is true. But I stand convinced that bodily autonomy is the inherent right of every single person living. Moreover, the vaccination case does not contradict it, if taken together with the principle of limiting one’s rights by rights of others. I do not see who’s rights are affected in the abortion case (with a potential exception of a father who could really want this particular baby). “Thats literally what legislation is” Moral code evolved into the legislation, that is not something to argue against. Moral norms, however, as argued by evobiologists, were initially based on natural factors that helped the population to survive and expand. Killing one of your kin is bad, sleeping with your sister or your father is bad, stealing food is bad etc. Then there were less obvious additions and then there come religions that totally screwed it all. The whole idea of a proper legislation is to remove everything arbitrary (as it violates someone’s rights with no purpose) and keep the rules that are accepted by the majority and work. Abortion ban is obviously not accepted by everyone (majoriity is to be seen for any of the sides, from what I heard about US politics, the ban is in minority), and the purpose of it is unclear outside of a particular understanding of the morality. That is what I basically am trying to say: there is no universal moral system, hence there should not be a law based on someone’s belief that something is moral or not. A good basis of a law is the natural right to live, but in my view it does not emerge before someone is born. The deprivation argument from prof Marquis is, as I read it, by his own definition too broad to be practical (animals, contraception, plants,…?).
You abandoned the bodily autonomy argument because you switched to the moral status of the fetus. If the bodily autonomy argument was really sufficient to permit abortion then the moral status of the fetus could not possibly matter, because bodily autonomy will always override it.
You seem to like the idea of bodily autonomy, but apparently don’t consider it to be sufficiently morally relevant to actually be considered in anything but morally neutral circumstances. (This is pretty standard among most people, no matter how much they want to say they value bodily autonomy)
“There is no universal moral system, hence there should not be a law based on someone’s belief that something is moral or not”
By this standard no morality could be enforced because you are acting contrary to someone else’s morality. Not everyone agrees that killing is bad.
“a natural right to live… does not emerge before someone is born”.
They are alive before they are born, so what special property do they gain at birth that gives them a right to life? If it is independence, well children can’t survive on their own until at least 4 years of age (closer to 10-12 in reality).
“Marquis definition is too broad… plants and animals”
That’s why it’s called a future-like-our’s. Plants and animals are certainly deprived of futures, but they are not future humans. It’s to human conscious experience that is valued, and depriving an existing entity of future human experience explains the wrongness of killing adult humans and by extension all humans with an expectation of human consciousness.