"Pregnancy Is Like Blood/Forced Organ Donation" Pro-Abortion Argument
This is an old but still popular pro-abortion argument. At first glance, it does seem reasonable, doesn’t it? But once you look closer, the analogy breaks down catastrophically.
Just to summarize, the reasons you should not be forced to give blood or donate organs (ironically, bodily autonomy comes into it, but no one seems to recognize the baby’s bodily autonomy) are primarily these:
You are not legally or morally responsible/ do not have any duty of care to this hypothetical person (i.e., you are not their parent).
You did not (presumably) cause their current condition in any way.
There are other potential avenues to save the hypothetical person’s life than your blood or organ(s) (i.e., someone else could donate; the person can survive without them for long enough for another solution to be discovered).
(implicated in C) You are not actively or passively causing this person to die by refusing them your blood or organ(s).
Worth noting, but not always consistent so not included above, is E.: Donating blood or organ(s) to this hypothetical person is inherently/ONLY harmful and would cause you permanent damage (donating blood is obviously something that people can and do easily recover from).
None of the above is true for a pregnant woman, and this is where the analogy breaks down. In the (rare) case of abortion due to rape (rapists/sex traffickers, by the way, are huge proponents of abortion and proven to be in cahoots with Planned Parenthood locations for obvious reasons), B is the only one that is then true for a woman pregnant through rape, but that still does not negate A, C, D, or E. I’ll explain it further in my hopefully more accurate analogies below.
A more accurate analogy, then, is this:
A toddler mistakenly wanders into your home. Regardless of whether you left the door open or not (i.e., had consensual sex), you are obviously not only not allowed to kill that toddler for wandering into your house, but you in fact have a duty of care to that toddler until such time as you/emergency services can find their parents or someone else better equipped to care for them. Even if that toddler tracks mud on your carpet or otherwise costs you money/causes you emotional or even physical inconvenience or pain, you are still obviously not allowed to murder that toddler. I believe this analogy to be somewhat imperfect, since it overplays the responsibility of the child – the unborn have, obviously, even less agency than this hypothetical lost toddler! But the point stands. The baby who is being killed through abortion did not ask to be in the womb and did not cause themselves to be there; that was purely the act of the mother and father. The unborn baby has no say in their condition/location/level of development, whereas the parents have had every say and thus have every responsibility.
In the case of rape – while I believe the above analogy holds true for it as well (see: door open/door closed), allow me to make it even clearer (forgive the seemingly flippant terms, but I believe the comparisons are still accurate): An evil, depraved man has picked up a random toddler from the street and outright thrown her through your door or perhaps a window, causing harm to both you and her. You have every right to press charges and seek justice against the man! However, you do not have any right to slit the throat of the toddler. (In fact, current law in most civilized societies even prevents you from slitting the throat of the criminal himself absent an immediate self-defense situation.) Neither you nor the toddler (baby) had any say in what happened.
My analogies above, in the interest of being generous, also ignore the assumption of E (that is, that donating blood or organ(s) to this hypothetical person is inherently/ONLY harmful and would cause you permanent damage). But this also does not necessarily hold true for a pregnant woman. Physical injuries, sicknesses, parasites, etc. are inherently unnatural and inimical to the body’s natural state (homeostasis); they can ONLY cause harm. Pregnancy, however, is neither unnatural to the female body nor inimical to it (the female body has organs/hormones/an entire body structure specifically designed for the process of pregnancy). Nor does pregnancy/giving birth inevitably cause permanent damage to the woman (although in rarer cases, I acknowledge that it can – much like driving in a car or being an athlete carries the risk of permanently damaging your body). In fact, carrying a baby to term and giving birth can actually be beneficial for a woman’s health – i.e., statistically decreases long-term risk of certain types of cancers, stem cells sent to strengthen a woman’s heart, etc. (Breast Cancer Risk: Age at First Childbirth | Susan G. Komen®; https://www.liveaction.org/news/study-proves-fetus-as-parasite-arguments-false/ ).
To summarize:
Comparing carrying a baby to term to forced blood/organ donation, parasitism, or even home invasion looks applicable at first blush but irreparably breaks down at second glance, for multiple key reasons (see A, B, C, D, and E). Nor is it, obviously, logically inconsistent to be against induced abortion and against forced blood/organ donation/parasitism/home invasion. They’re both immoral.
If you would like some other opinions or perhaps a different viewpoint with even more reasons why the situations are not comparable:
Refutation of the right to refuse argument.
Deconstruction of the bodily autonomy argument.
Dismantling of the parasite argument.
Construction of fetal personhood.
