in light of the texas abortion ban here’s a reminder to stop debating what counts as a human, baby, or life with pro-lifers because that is not a debate you can win. you can not win a philosophical debate about what counts as a person, and you will not change their minds.
what can be proven is that in no situation under united states law is an individual legally obligated to lend their body or organs for the sake of another life.
4.5 million people each year are in need of blood transfusion, the entire process of donating blood takes a little over an hour, it’s free, and a single pint of blood can save up to 3 peoples lives, but there is no legal obligation or requirement to donate blood in place.
it is illegal to take organs from deceased peoples’ bodies without permission. CORPSES. bodily integrity is prioritized by law, even after death.
it doesn’t fucking matter whether a fetus is a person, whether a fetus is alive, whether a fetus has a soul. it literally doesn’t matter. pro-lifers set up the argument through that lens (hence their name) to evoke empathy and pity and take the focus away from the actual process of pregnancy, which changes a person’s body FOREVER. that is not an exaggeration. whether the pregnancy is complicated and high-risk or totally smooth sailing, the birthing person will physically never be the same. if they’re lucky, they’ll come out of it with weight gain, differently shaped breasts, and changes to the cervix/vagina. if they aren’t, there’s a fucking laundry list of potential complications that could arise, that may eventually fix themselves, need surgical or therapeutic intervention, or never go away, like varicose veins, separation of the abdominal muscles, incontinence, prolapse, diabetes, postpartum depression, and chronic pain, just off the top of my head. and this makes no mention of the very real possibility of income disruption, as well as the financial cost of giving birth, and the chance of fucking death, which is even higher for underserved communities like black women.
there is no basis for a governing body forcing an individual to lend their body or organs for the sake of another life. that is the argument. period the end.
Imagine a tradcath tumblr user confessing to their priest that they’re addicted to posting on the degenerate homosexual blogging platform
Forgive me Father Elijah, I’ve done everything in my power… but I can’t stop posting cartoon frogs and black and white photos of blonde women in sundresses on the website most famous for its spartan-like army of mentally unwell teenage shut-ins
I will lie, cheat, and scam if it means getting out of a conversation I don’t wanna be in. My sense of ethical behavior vanishes entirely when I want ppl to stop talking to me. One time I pretended not to know what Egypt was so they’d stop talking to me about their vacation plans
when jean baudrillard wrote simulacra and simulation he was talking about how more people are familiar with peter lorre impressions in cartoons than they are peter lorre.
The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality”, this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called “the sacramental order
The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence”. Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the “order of sorcery”, a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.(source)
