I like the car riding into traffic analogy. If your behavior in regards to an unintended outcome is the same as someone who intended that outcome, then I think we can say you consented to the consequences. So both the people riding a bike into oncoming traffic have consented to the outcome of likely injury, even though one was trying to get injured and the other was not.

I would say the same holds true for pregnancy. If the person's actions who didn't want pregnancy are indistinguishable from the person who did want pregnancy, then we can say they were consenting even though it was not the desired result.

But how about if this person was modifying their behavior to reduce risk? What if the bicyclist was on the sidewalk and the car swerved off the road? What if the woman was on oral contraception and became pregnant anyway?

(BTW, I'm pro-life and these are not deeply held beliefs or anything. I just think the topic is interesting. The abortion argument is always couched in personhood, so it's morbidly fascinating to explore the ethics from another angle)

Consent is not the correct term. One does not consent to breathing, digesting, or pumping blood through your veins. It's how your body was designed to function. I could eat with the expectation of throwing it all up but the idea that I don't consent to digesting what makes it into my stomach seems silly, no? The bike is always in the road, it's just a matter of how far into the road as to whether it gets hit this time or not.

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Consent is not the correct term. One does not consent to breathing, digesting, or pumping blood through your veins. It's how your body was designed to function. I could eat with the expectation of throwing it all up but the idea that I don't consent to digesting what makes it into my stomach seems silly, no? The bike is always in the road, it's just a matter of how far into the road as to whether it gets hit this time or not.

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I'm not sure I would make that argument. After all, if we stop talking about consent and start talking about natural processes, then we open a whole new set of arguments. After all, cancer is a natural process, and everyone is pretty sure we have the right to destroy our own cancer cells, even if they are human cells unique in all of existence. The entire field of medicine is about altering our body or its natural processes to improve our longevity or quality of life.

No one is arguing for the personhood of cancer, so that's a pretty big difference. But imagine a person had a tumor that started growing into an extra head with at least some faculties of reason. This would be an entirely natural process and you could certainly argue for the personhood of the extra head. I would argue that you would still need to consent to keep the head as the body was yours to begin with and you probably didn't want an extra head.

AstroAg17 said:

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All this design nonsense isn't science. That's your religion. Biology doesn't assign goals or purpose to nature. It maybe a fundamental part of how you view the world, but it's not "basic biology". Procreation isn't the scientific "purpose" of sex.

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You're right. Our bodies aren't organized for reproduction. It's just pure chance that sex results in pregnancies, even when they're unwanted.

ramblin_ag02 said:

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Consent is not the correct term. One does not consent to breathing, digesting, or pumping blood through your veins. It's how your body was designed to function. I could eat with the expectation of throwing it all up but the idea that I don't consent to digesting what makes it into my stomach seems silly, no? The bike is always in the road, it's just a matter of how far into the road as to whether it gets hit this time or not.

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I'm not sure I would make that argument. After all, if we stop talking about consent and start talking about natural processes, then we open a whole new set of arguments. After all, cancer is a natural process, and everyone is pretty sure we have the right to destroy our own cancer cells, even if they are human cells unique in all of existence. The entire field of medicine is about altering our body or its natural processes to improve our longevity or quality of life.

No one is arguing for the personhood of cancer, so that's a pretty big difference. But imagine a person had a tumor that started growing into an extra head with at least some faculties of reason. This would be an entirely natural process and you could certainly argue for the personhood of the extra head. I would argue that you would still need to consent to keep the head as the body was yours to begin with and you probably didn't want an extra head.

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This is weird...

If nobody likes my awesome cancerous extra head analogy then here's a different one

I have often seen the argument that because God is the Creator and Sustainer of all things, He can do anything He wants to anyone He wants, including killing them. Is a pregnant mother not in a similar position? She was responsible for the creation of the embryo/fetus, and for a time it is 100% dependent on her. Why isn't she granted the same sovereignty?

She is, if she makes it with her own matter.

Like the old joke "Get your own dirt"

Serioulsy though, are you saying that she lacks "sovereignty" here because she didn't create her own matter, and therefore has no say over her own body?

I mean, if you want a "real" answer - because she didn't create the person ex nihilo, she doesn't know the person, she didn't know the person before she "made them". She supports the child's continued life, but it not the child's very existence. She participated in the creation, but she did not do the creating in the same way God does.

So God's sovereignty over persons is entirely due to the ex nihilio nature of creation and His omniscience? What about a person's sovereignty over another person?

I'm trying to understand the argument from a secular perspective. While you and I agree on the moral and ethical questions, our typical reasoning can easily be nullified by a simple atheistic or Deistic mindset. In the natural world, a woman conceiving and carrying a child is the closest thing we have to the idea of creation and complete dependence.

I think the flaw is not on the secular side of this argument, though. I think the problem is arguing for the Sovereignty of God based on Creation, Power, Sustanenance or any of His other features. This allows the property of sovereignty to be connected to those features in some relative way. So a woman's sovereignty over an unborn person would be similar in a relative way to God's sovereignty. I think we should say that God is Sovereign because He is Sovereign. It is not a quality that depends on other qualities, and therefore there is no reason to grant similar sovereignty to others in similar situations. It is unique to His Nature

Hm...

Here's the thing though. We don't know much about God's nature, especially not the Father as creator. I mean, about the only thing we confess about the Father in the symbol of faith is that He is almighty, maker of everything. The fact that He made everything ex nihilo is more or less His identifying quality (even within Trinitarian theology, the identifying aspect of the Father is that He is the sole cause of the Trinity - vs the Son who is begotten and the Spirit who proceeds).

In other words, the monarchy of the Father is the monarchy of causation. There is no difference between saying "God is sovereign because He is sovereign" and "God is sovereign because He Created" because Him as Sovereign and Him as Creator are both identity relationships with Him as Father. Nothing possesses this causative nature but Him.

I think we're saying the same thing, but I don't think a person's participation in a small way into this creative / causative act implies that the person possesses causation in a real way. It doesn't diminish the claims to deity to say - yeah, God is sovereign over everything because He made it.

I'm less concerned with dimishing God's majesty and more with ascribing relative authority based on relative roles. If God has 100% authority due to being 100% Creator, then would a 51% creator have 51% authority? Or is God's authority completely independent from His role as Creator?

Also, I think you can look at this in some respect as to what we are sovereign over as individuals.

We can certainly make a disposition of our property, we are utterly sovereign in practice over property. We can break or make or reconfigure or destroy or whatever. But, morally and legally there is always a distinction that people are not property.

And, to some extent, morally we start to make a distinction that animals are a particular kind of property. You don't have complete authority to torture an animal, or to harm them. We say that level of cruelty is wrong, even evil.

So when it comes to children, though children are wards and we have some autonomy in disposition over them, this is never unlimited. Even, again, over animals this is never unlimited as it is over, say, a sandwich or a piece of wood or a flower in a pot.

A person's autonomy and sovereignty over things is always circumscribed by not only the person but the nature of the thing in question, and the amount of authority isn't contingent upon whether or not the person made it but whether or not they own it. (A biological mother cannot claim the right to a child that someone else has adopted. An artist can't claim the right to determine the disposition over his created work after its sold, etc etc).

His authority over creation is, I think, intimately linked with His creative and sustaining act. Its kind of a if a tree falls in the woods thing, right? Can you have authority over nothing?

And, again, why is the Father the Father? Because the Son is begotten of Him, and the Spirit proceeds from Him. Even in the Trinity the confession about Him is descriptive of His action/role/personhood/whatever.

I think, maybe, this is kind of a sidebar discussion but it goes into the later Medieval / philosophical tradition as looking at God as this one Thing, the common essence, "actus purus", and then with persons from the common essence (even in the fililoque expositions the formula is that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one source). Whereas, in the eastern tradition, which I think is a preservation of an earlier tradition (duh obviously) the causative / source / beginning is in the personhood of the Father, not the common essence of the godhead.

A mother is a mother because she bears the child. A father is the father of the child because he fathered the child. The child is the child of the parents because he was fathered and born by them. I'm not sure if there's a way to quantify these relationships as degrees of authority rather than simply qualitative factual relationships.

What I mean is, a thing in relationship to another thing can be a concrete, factual arrangement. The object of creation has a dependent relationship to the creator through the act of creation. Then, there is a secondary or dependent question of - what is that dependent relationship? What does it mean when we say, "it was created by them"? Or, what are the implications of this relationship?

I don't think we need to worry about the relationship as much as the implication, if that makes sense?

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And, to some extent, morally we start to make a distinction that animals are a particular kind of property. You don't have complete authority to torture an animal, or to harm them. We say that level of cruelty is wrong, even evil.

So when it comes to children, though children are wards and we have some autonomy in disposition over them, this is never unlimited. Even, again, over animals this is never unlimited as it is over, say, a sandwich or a piece of wood or a flower in a pot.

A person's autonomy and sovereignty over things is always circumscribed by not only the person but the nature of the thing in question, and the amount of authority isn't contingent upon whether or not the person made it but whether or not they own it. (A biological mother cannot claim the right to a child that someone else has adopted. An artist can't claim the right to determine the disposition over his created work after its sold, etc etc).

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I agree but why? Children, animals, and art are all transferable to an extent. And the opinions regarding limited dominion animals, and less so children, are highly cultural. In the American South dog fighting is seen by many as acceptable, and in the Phillipines cock-fighting is part of the national identity. In Sparta, mothers would leave unwanted babies to the elements to die, and the Phoenicians would throw their newborns into fire. If our Judeo-Christian values are what drives the respect for children and animals, then it would be hard to generalize that to an atheist per se as a reason to limit dominion.

And the idea of God as absolute unity versus differentiated and how that affects Trinity, monotheism and polytheism is also fascinating, but I feel very inadequate to discussing it. It's probably the single most discussed and important Christian theological topic throughtout history

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A mother is a mother because she bears the child. A father is the father of the child because he fathered the child. The child is the child of the parents because he was fathered and born by them. I'm not sure if there's a way to quantify these relationships as degrees of authority rather than simply qualitative factual relationships.

What I mean is, a thing in relationship to another thing can be a concrete, factual arrangement. The object of creation has a dependent relationship to the creator through the act of creation. Then, there is a secondary or dependent question of - what is that dependent relationship? What does it mean when we say, "it was created by them"? Or, what are the implications of this relationship?

I don't think we need to worry about the relationship as much as the implication, if that makes sense?

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I follow you, and I was having a similar thought when I talked about God's authority being a result of his role as Creator and Sustainer. It seems like you are saying that the relationship of God to the world as Creator is completely unique, and that similar relationships are not a similar as they appear. Therefore, while God's absolute Creation gives Him authority, an apparently similar earthly relationship wouldn't do the same. That's functionally the same thing I was trying to say when a talking about God's authority being part of Him and not following as a result of Creation..

Yup