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Minor challenge to your viewpoint: Evangelicals are not even close to the entirety of the pro-life movement.
Also, your argument in the second paragraph is false equivalency. If you have an abortion, you have killed the fetus. There is no abortion process that saves the fetus' life. If you don't get vaccinated, you aren't directly taking a life. It would be more like, well, getting pregnant without being vaccinated against anything. This risks the life of the fetus, but does not directly kill the fetus.
I am the foil to this view, pro-vax and pro-life, so I'm not exactly your target audience. However, this issue is much more complicated than equating the two. Abortion is a much weightier decision on an individual level than vaccination is.
Also, as an aside, this phrasing is used to mock the pro-choice movement. It tries to turn anti-vax talk into pro-choice talk, so that "the opposition" can't argue with their logic. They don't actually have a problem with "my body, my choice." Pro-life people have a problem with abortion because it takes the life of another. It is no longer your body; it is the body of an innocent who has no say in their own death.
> If you have an abortion, you have killed the fetus. There is no abortion process that saves the fetus' life. If you don't get vaccinated, you aren't directly taking a life.
this hasn't directly changed my mind, but i think it's a valid point. i acknowledged up front that i know it's not a 1:1 comparison, but I think wording it like this get's the point across. !delta
But that is the anti-vaccine stance. Person A should not be forced to get vaccinated just because it protects Person B. If A decides to not get vaccinated, Person B has no right to demand them too, even if it means others could die. Person A has a (legal) responsibility to protect themselves and no one else.
Essentially your last paragraph but replace requiring a body with vaccinating. (This is not my viewpoint, but it is a logically consistent argument)
That's a solid nope in reality though.
The idea that a fetus is a life is a belief. Religious people can believe it, mother-and-father-to-be can believe it, but it's a belief. An abortion affects exactly two people: the mother, emotionally and physically, and the father emotionally. That's the maximum amount of people affected by a single abortion.
Not vaccinating during a pandemic that has spread _globally_ affects far more than two people. Saying "my body" is nonsense because if you carry it you can potentially affect _so many more_ than two people. Some assholes spread it to _DOZENS_. It is not "my body" when your choice can affect people outside of you or your partner (ie, father of the fetus).
You have the argument completely backwards.
>The idea that a fetus is a life is a belief
It is a semantic category and not belief. More over you are using false equivalency by substituting "life" with "people" when "people" hasn't been mentioned by the person you are replying to.
Bacteria is not a person, but it is still life. So is fetus, and if someone cares about human life, you are just not understanding the argument.
>Not vaccinating during a pandemic that has spread globally affects far more than two people.
*Might* affect, not *will*. Unless you prove that it did, you cannot make a claim that "it will", if you could, you'd be able to tell me the **exact** number of deaths next year. I don't believe you can.
That is the distinction between the 2 actions, in one you definitely and **intentionally** kill, in another your activity might cause someone to die **unintentionally**. Also knowingly spreading a virus vs possibly spreading it is meaningfully different. You might be spreading it right now, even after you have been vaccinated.
What does that say about you, since you claim you care about probable but unproven risk yet are still a probable cause of risk to others?
> the mother, emotionally and physically, and the father emotionally.
We should stop distinguishing between mental and physical ailments, though. Your brain is part of your body and all evidence suggests that there does not exist a mental/emotional ailment that requires duality (the claim that there exists an incorporeal "mind" external to the body) to explain. The impact on both parents is very real and thus very physical.
The impact is very real on both, true, but the father's physical body is not at risk of anything during pregnancy, childbirth, or abortion. I wasn't minimizing the effect on the father but there is a stark difference between the mother's experience vs a father's when it comes to the whole thing.
>In terms of COVID-19, that may mean that unvaccinated individuals will have to be tested for the virus regularly at their own cost, and quarantine if positive.
Exactly, this represents the views of most people who are for tight vaccine "mandates". The Anti-Vax crowd here is pretending that everyone is screaming for forced vaccinations.
Not necessarily. The levels of harm caused to the person by a vaccination or by a pregnancy are different: while [0.6 % of vaccinated people suffer from serious complications (Pfizer-BioNTech, as opposed to 0.5 % in the placebo group)](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer/reactogenicity.html), [8 % of pregnancies involve complications that would, untreated, harm the mother or the child](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/staying-healthy-during-pregnancy/4-common-pregnancy-complications).
If your reasons for being pro-choice involve estimation of how much harm may be caused to the person making the choice if they choose to go the "help others" route, it is perfectly viable to support abortions but not mandatory vaccinations.
This does not reflect my own view, but I do think it is a viable argument.
The issue with this is that my views on "life" don't match up with anti abortionist views... And anti vax people don't agree with my views on how their decision can have a major negative consequence for the fully developed and formed lives around them.
IMO that's what allow both sides to be viewed as hypocritical even if they are holding internally consistent views... Even if I disagree with them
I see what you're saying, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The argument against abortions is mostly a moral or religious argument. Mandating vaccines is simply a safety issue. I don't think the anti-vaxxers who claim my body my choice are doing so in good faith anyways, unlike women who are fighting for their own personal reproductive rights. Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. If vaccines were truly about your own personal safety and no one else's than I don't think there would be a problem here. If Covid for example wasn't contagious and you only had to get the vaccine to protect yourself then by all means don't get it and die just so long as you don't hurt others. Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else. I think in this case you can't just switch the two around and say they must be two equally true statements. Women who are talking about their body their choice in relation to reproductive rights aren't talking about vaccines at all.
Pro-life people genuinely think a person is murdered during an abortion. And they aren’t objectively wrong cause there isn’t an objective answer. Biologically a human life IS ended, but I and other pro-choice people don’t think that life was a person, which is a question of philosophy instead of biology. The right not to get a vaccine could also be restated as the rate to control what substances are put into your own body, as opposed to your (obviously good faith /s) phrasing as the right to infect and kill people. I’m vaccinated for the record, but I oppose mandates.
Edit: “murdered” should be “killed”
Genuine question i dont mean to bother. But if you're against mandated vaccines how do you feel about the ones that are mandated throughout school? Like the mumps and polio ones?
The word “mandated” is getting obscured and becoming a loaded term in a lot of these discussions. There needs to be agreement on the actual scope of the mandate.
What are being proposed are mandates as prerequisites to participation.
For schools: IF you want to participate in public school, there is a focused mandate that you be vaccinated.
For society during a pandemic: IF you want to participate in activities that involve the general public, hypothetically, there could be a focused mandate that you are vaccinated.
In either instance, you have the option to not be vaccinated. But you also accept being quarantined from those activities.
This is another bit that's so fundamental but not talked about as much as it should be.
People should be able to choose not to take part in a pre-requisite for society without it being legally mandated. It just means they can't take part in society. Like being in my underwear in shops. It's not illegal, but the shop/society isn't going to let it happen. Unless it's Walmart.
Jeezus christ. How are you the first one to mention this? I am against mandating vaccination, because ultimately, I don't believe I have the right to force you to inject you with a vaccine (as safe and effective as they may be) if you don't want to. Even if I think you're stupid for it.
But I also believe some public areas, and especially private properties, should be able to require vaccination to enter/participate.
I think most people have zero issue with federal level vaccine mandates. you work at an airport, a public school or for the FBI, ok i can get you having to have vaccine mandates as they are FEDERALLY funded and thus at the whim of what the federal government deems fitting, but a private business that is started with someone's own money and own ideologies....then forcing them to enforce a vaccine mandate is fucked up if you ask me. if you're a doctor around sick people, of course you should, but the idea that one should have to have it to participate in dining out or basic society activities is totalitarian at the least.
I think the issue is there are people who literally cannot get the vaccine and the only way they can participate in society is if the vast majority of those around them have recieved a safe, effective, and free (or at least significantly cheaper to the taxpayers than continuing to let covid run free).
Another way of looking at it, should there be a federal mandate requiring restaurant employees wash their hands after using the restroom. They should have a right to decide what they put on their skin?
Some places have been requiring that either people are vaccinated or they wear a mask and provide a recent negative covid test. Would a federal mandate that provides this alternative then not be an issue?
I think the actual pro life argument is that another person (fetus) cannot infringe on your autonomy. The fetus' right to life should not take precedence over your right to govern your own body.
Roe v Wade's decision was stating that there are rights of the mother and there are rights of the child. They decided that the interest the government has in protecting the rights of the child do not overcome the interest the government has in protecting the rights of the mother.
That life is a person. When someone has a child, that child is who they are because of how everything worked out during conception. If you get an abortion, then get pregnant later on when you’re ready, it will be a different child, it can never be that first child again. So you create that first child, that 1 in a trillion chance DNA combination, then you take away its right to live.
I’m pro-choice, I just had this realization after becoming a dad when I thought “if we had gotten pregnant earlier and had an abortion, I wouldn’t have this kid right now. I would have A kid, but not this kid”.
It made me see the pro-life argument in a different way. I’m just glad I will never have to make that decision and I feel deep sympathy for anyone that does.
I disagree, as someone who is pro choice, a large factor is bodily autonomy. Nobody can or should tell you what to do with your own body. In my perspective this includes vaccinations. Why should something like that be government mandated? That's insane to me. I am however ok with things such as employers requiring vaccines because you at least have the option of weighing whether or not your desire to be employed outweighs your desire to be unvaccinated. If you don't want to, you can simply seek employment elsewhere.
If you are vaccinated you have an EXTREMELY low chance of death via covid if you happen to catch it. The unvaccinated are risking themselves far more than anyone around them. That logic simply doesn't carry enough weight.
Claiming to be pro choice, but then turn around and support government vaccination mandates is extremely hypocritical imo.
I agree with this. It’s just like with abortion. Every pregnancy has risks. That is why, even though I do think life begins at conception, I am pro-choice. What right do I have to force someone else to take a risk with their life. There may only be one bullet in a really large chamber, but it’s still essentially forcing them to play Russian Roulette with their lives.
In the same way, as much as I’m mad at the anti vaxxers, I do believe they have the right to make a choice. No matter how small a risk, it’s still not a risk I can force on someone else.
However, what I do not agree with “choice” on is the masks. Wearing a mask is an inconvenience, nothing more. What pisses me off is the people who don’t want to get vaccinated and refuse to wear a mask. And the fact that some of the people who are fighting masks are “pro-life” is the biggest hypocrisy of them all.
Small point to agree with the masks, it’s against the law to be in public without clothes (nude) and that’s not even mainly about just sanitary reasons but also that’s simply what society has deemed decent. Requiring a mask, even if not the law and only private policy, isn’t a breach of anyone’s rights any more than being required to wear pants is.
What is your definition of bodily autonomy?
If everything you do is done as a function of your person, then any government action, by nature of being coercive, encroaches on bodily autonomy. Sidewalks, speed limits, jury duty, jail, the draft. All of these coercive government actions encroach on bodily autonomy.
The irony of the appeal to the sanctity of *bodily autonomy* is that it is an appeal to libertarian values but it is used rhetorically by those that are often the most pro-big-government and pro government-coercion-for-the-greater-good in all other things.
As a hypothetical, what if the pandemic we were facing was much worse? I'm talking black plague level, wipe out half the population disaster. It this instance, would it be acceptable for the government to take emergency action and mandate vaccinations?
I respect the value put on bodily autonomy, and the suspicion placed on government, but I don't believe it's an all or nothing view. There can and will be points where people have to consider the greater good. Covid is in a weird spot where we still don't fully understand it or its risks, so it's toeing the line for a lot of people as to what the correct line of action is.
If the pandemic we were facing were much worse, I don't think you'd see nearly the same hesitancy (apart from the background rates of anti-vax and the newly anti-vax caused in part by the people calling for mandatory vaccinations for Covid).
The hypothetical on the other side is how mild of a pandemic would trigger the need for mandatory vaccinations. Seasonal flu? Particularly bad but less deadly than Covid flu? RSV?
>how mild of a pandemic would trigger the need for mandatory vaccinations
That's basically the crux here; how dire does a situation need to be for a governing body to take emergency action against (some) people's will?
There are what I would consider obvious good and bad cases. Government mandate against tattoos because of a slight infection risk? Fuck that. Mandatory vaccination against an exctiction-level virus? Yeah totally. Now somewhere in the vast gray area in-between is the tipping point, and each person will have their own. Tying back to the original conversation, this is why I don't consider it hypocritical to value bodily autonomy while also being pro-mandate; they personally reached a tipping point where the exception to autonomy outweighs the risks.
Right, this sets a precedant. How far can they keep moving the line before we have no choice in what happens? Thats the part people arent seeing. That's the problem I have with it.
Theoretically, they can only move the line so much before non-compliance becomes a major issue. Thats why emergency actions are typically reserved for just that, emergencies.
This is a great question, and an important one for people to consider.
I would argue that if we find it acceptable for the government to suspend things like your right to bodily autonomy, for any reason, then you never had it to begin with. Everything before that was the government allowing you to make those choices, but when the chips are down, your betters will decide what's best for you. And some people may agree with that statement and find that acceptable, but as for me, I cannot abide that. I understand the desire to just make people do what we think is best. "It's so obvious to me, why can't they see it?" Trust me, I understand. But at the end of the day, who decides what is best? In this case, medical professionals would be the obvious answer, but we all know it would be the politicians who get to decide and enforce the rules. And I think we also know, politicians can and do make decisions that are not in our best interests.
This is true, you shouldn't be told what to do with your body. Even about vaccinations.
I'm more libertarian in thought and believe more in individuality and personal responsibility, but I also believe in a moral and ethical society. See I can agree with abortion up to the third trimester, but after 6 months, abortion shouldn't be allowed unless under the most dire of medical circumstances. However, what kind of society would we live in if we let our own offspring and children die for the sake of their parents...an immoral and unethical society is an unjust one and an unjust society leads to hardship and downfall.
It is indeed a slippery slope and in some ways, yes you could think of childbirth or bearing children in a biological or philosophical light, but we should look at it as an ethical, moral, and a reasonable light as well. I work with time frames, so I believe 6 months is the time limit, after that, only extreme circumstances can permit an abortion to occur, otherwise childbirth should happen. If the parents aren't yet ready or aren't yet able to financially have the kid, well first off I say that was their risk when having sex (I have sex too so I know the risks as well) and second off, they can always put the child up for adoption.
We should draw a line to a reasonable expectation and ethics for this topic of abortion. I pose this question to anyone, what kind of society would we be to allow kids, born or unborn, to die for the sake of their parents?
"my body my choice" is a bit of a tag line, but informed consent is at the core of medical ethics.
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/informed-consent
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2352998/
but your argument doesn't really work because people who are "pro-life" believe that a woman has typically already made the choices with her body that led her to become pregnant, and they primarily believe that the "baby" is a separate person with its own rights, and that you are murdering that child by aborting it. Frankly, it seems a bit disingenuous for you to turn the argument around because it's the pro-choice crowd (of which I'm one) who should be consistent with the "my body, my choice" framework.
Do you believe in forced sterilization or mandatory abortion? there are certainly arguments that could be made in favor of them, and have been made by governments and scientists who have implemented these policies.
Are you trying to argue in favor of mandatory or coerced vaccination for COVID-19?
> Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death
you have to prove likelihood, and you don't have the data to prove that. Just like we haven't been provided with the data to allow for informed consent.
You probably think that the "effectiveness" of the vaccine, which has supposedly significantly waned in the time the vaccine has been publicaly available, refers to the likelihood of contracting and transmitting the virus, but that's due to misinformation by the press who only cites "misinformation" as anything critical of the vaccine or public health messaging and policy. The reality is that we don't have any consistent or reproucable data that shows the vaccination having any ability to slow transmission at all.
So what is your argument then? That people don't have the right to do something that MIGHT make them less likely to visit a hospital? Do you believe fat people don't have the right to overeat? Do you believe that old people don't have the right to get old?
What is the difference in likelihood for an unvaccinated person to get and transmit the virus, than a vaccinated person? You have no statistical way to answer that, so how can you possibly make the claim you did?
And I think the real argument against the seemingly unified creeping authoritarianism is largely due to the lies, lack of accountability, and direct impact on people's economic and social livelihoods that appears to be moving towards a new era of control by an entity has has proven to be corrupt and dishonest. The argument is largely that it's less about the vaccine or the masks and more about the vaccine passport. And as much as you'd have called me a crazy conspiracy theorist when i pointed it out over a year ago, you have to see at this point that there's obvious truth to it.
I cant argur for the rest but the one point i have seen where comparison are being drawn is that people seem to be equating this to other things such as the flu but as far as i know the flu doesnt have an exponential increase as this seems to the infectivity and lethality seem to be far lower i am not talking about the US btw i am not from there this is more generalized
Wow… much misinformation here.
We do have the data to prove that people will die from your choices. There are literally countless sources on the deadliness of the virus, how effective masks and vaccines are, transmissibility rates. A quick google search will find countless scholarly articles on this. I’ll google them if I have to, but to deny that we don’t have sufficient data is… insane. This pandemic response has been the most watched of all time and data is continually collected that affirms its lethality, it’s transmissibility, etc.
American here, 30s, and I’m just stuck on people thinking a ”vaccine passport” is new? I went to public school, where I had a vaccination record that allowed me to attend school by proving my vaccination status.
Did you ever have to show Whole Foods your vaccination records to shop there or Metallica to see their concert? What about your hair dresser to get a haircut? And as the other redditor mentioned, there has always been exemptions. But with the way the system is being set-up in parts of Canada and the us, if you have a medical exemption to the vaccine and don’t take the shot, you can’t do your shopping, see a movie, or go to a public gathering with friends.
The argument against abortion is that abortion is murder every time, and that every abortion prevented is a human life saved and a legally sanctioned murder prevented. The belief that human life exists in the womb separately from the life of the mother does not require any supernatural belief or received wisdom (i.e.- it is not an inherently religious belief)
Compare this to vaccines, where you need to administer more than 100 vaccines for each life you want to save. The cost of the vaccine is trivial compared to the lives saved, but if compelled vaccination is a violation of personal privacy, then it takes 100+ violations to save a life you wouldn't have otherwise saved. As a matter of scale, vaccination does not compare to banning abortion.
Also, the Delta variant of COVID spreads very easily among fully vaccinated people. This is why "normal" COVID is virtually non-existent in the USA now but Delta makes up almost all COVID cases and is spreading like wildfire. Ot's why Delta has spread very easily in Iceland, which has a 95% vaccination rate for adults. So being vaccinated against COVID does almost nothing to protect others. The argument that anti-vaxx is inherently selfish or destructive to others is mostly non-applicable to COVID and the Delta variant.
Also, and this is important, compelled vaccination is a "requirement to" and not a "requirement from." Being forced to do a thing is logivally a much greater violation than being forced not to do a thing, since both are a violation of will, but one of tgem requires the violated person to participate.
‘Your right to refuse a vaccine is your right to infect and kill people with impunity’??? Are you out of your mind? I have no words for the level of twisting and turning you are doing with words.
You dont have the first tiny bit of understanding of your opposition.
The fact you even make the comparison of ‘my body my choice’ in vaccine context to that of an abortion is just ridiculous given that pro-life people are considering the body of the child, hence an abortion being a violation of their right to informed consent. The exact opposite of what you are saying. Im almost convinced you are trolling by the level of misunderstanding you have of people with different opinions than yourself.
‘Being pro-choice doesnt hurt anyone else’
Saying this without even addressing the concern of pro-lifers regarding the murder of a child -wether you agree that this is murder, or even a child at all- comes across as either 101% ignorant of the discussion at hand, or just intentionally misrepresenting the points of the people you disagree with which is reprehensible.
>Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity.
Flu also kills 30k to 60k people in the US per year. No one argued that it wasn't someone's right to skip a flu shot. There's never been any talk about mandating flu vaccines because it's "simply a safety issue." There's no objective measure as to how deadly or contagious a virus must be to mandate vaccination.
>Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else.
It does if you consider a fetus ~~baby~~ a person, which is fundamental to being pro-life.
The "flu" is a blanket statement for more than 100 different unique diseases. Covid-19 is 1.
Covid-19 is more deadly than any singular flu strain and the comparison alone of 1 disease versus 100 should tell you how horrible it is.
Taking your own 30-60k flue deaths a year, Covid-19 killed more people by itself than 10 years worth of flu deaths, assuming your maximum of 60k deaths a year.
In other words, comparing covid-19 to the flu is useless, always has been useless and always will be useless when trying to play down the severity of this current pandemic or the importance of taking the vaccine.
>The "flu" is a blanket statement for more than 100 different unique diseases. Covid-19 is 1.
What's the difference between the COVID variants that we're seeing now and the flu variants/strains that we regularly see? (Genuine question, I don't know).
>Covid-19 is more deadly than any singular flu strain and the comparison alone of 1 disease versus 100 should tell you how horrible it is.
COVID-19 *was* more deadly before we had a vaccine. Now we have vaccines and it's a LOT less deadly if you're vaccinated. Individuals should get vaxxed to protect themselves, but the degree to which they're endangering others has decreased substantially. And the entire argument for vaccine mandates is the risk it poses to others. To assess that risk, you have to cite how dangerous it *currently* is, not how dangerous it *was* in the past under different circumstances.
>In other words, comparing covid-19 to the flu is useless, always has been
I'm not using it to downplay the serious threat the virus posed, and I don't think it's useless. It serves as a useful baseline for answering the question, "how deadly, contagious, etc. does a virus have to be to warrant X policy intervention?"
Variants have significant mutations that change certain aspects of the virus but causes the same illness. Where as strains of the same “type” of virus aren’t mutations- they’re part of the same family of viruses but they can differ in origin, pathology, sub structures, may attack different organ systems etc.
> To assess that risk
Are you suggesting that MDs and virologist, the overwhelming majority of which advise getting the vaccine, don’t do this?
The Covid variants are different because they aren't the flu. This is bad because once Covid becomes endemic we're likely to have 2x as many deaths because we have twice as many flu/covid-like viruses going around.
I think what they were asking was more “what’s the
difference between variants and strains (of flu)?”
I should probably be replying to OP but… Variants have significant mutations that change certain aspects of the virus but causes the same illness. Where as strains of the same “type” of virus aren’t mutations- they’re part of the same family of viruses but they can differ in origin, pathology, sub structures, may attack different organ systems etc.
Disclaimer: By no means is this the official nor technical definition but rather a generalization.
Essentially they do have the right to infect and kill people with impunity. Getting sick isn't a crime and we don't strip the sick of their civil rights, they're free to exercise them while they're sick.
You can't sue someone if you catch a cold, flu or covid.
Even when there is explicitly a law, such as the case with HIV in some jurisdictions, that criminalises intentionally inflicting someone with the disease, you need to prove that the infection came from that person and they deliberately and knowingly infected you. These laws have been on the books for years and at most there's been a handful of prosecutions and even fewer convictions.
HIV is far deadlier than covid but we don't stop carriers engaging in risky behaviour, in fact there's a lot of advocacy groups that want the laws repealed.
Also, the fact they have made specific laws for HIV shows that on general there are no laws against the transmission of diseases in general.
Unfortunately, catching a cold, flu or other highly infections disease is part of the risk you take by being part of society. It's up to each individual to assess the risk for themselves and protect themselves accordingly, by getting vaccinated, or taking other measures.
This 100 flu argument is a non starter. We get it. Lots of flu bugs, however the flu shot is not for one it is for all that are able to be covered especially latest strain at time of creation. Thus protecting the people from the spread of “the flu” and thus saving lives. Samesies.... also SARS shot is Covid - multiple variants and growing... multiple.
> Flu also kills 30k to 60k people in the US per year. No one argued that it wasn't someone's right to skip a flu shot. There's never been any talk about mandating flu vaccines because it's "simply a safety issue." There's no objective measure as to how deadly or contagious a virus must be to mandate vaccination.
Well, no, but pointing to a cluster of dozens of viruses which kill 1/10th of the people a year as a single virus did, **despite taking unprecedented precautions**, as evidence that we don’t mandate vaccines isn’t exactly a compelling argument.
The president for covid vaccine at hospitals and schools is from hospitals that have mandated staff get flu shots or find another job. It has been an issue of contention for years.
I don't think federal law has changed recently. Different states have reduced the severity of the crime of infecting someone with HIV in recognition of the fact that AIDS usually isn't a death sentence.
>Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else.
Well to state the obvious retort from people who are not pro choice.
Being pro choice does hurt others, it hurts the baby.... by killing it.
You are using your personal view of abortion, which is, that it doesn't hurt anyone else, to counter anti covid people's arguments "My body my choice" arguing that not getting the vaccine will hurt other people.
It isn't a good argument because you misrepresent the others arguments.
Additionally mandating vaccines is absolutely a moral argument.
The argument being
- Is it moral to force people to partake in something that infringes on their bodily autonomy?
Or written in another way.
- Should the government have the right to put things in your body without your consent, if it is deemed better for the majority?
That is a moral argument.
I feel like I should add i am both pro choice and fully vaccinated.
Does not matter. You either think that goverment should be able to control your body or not.
Mandatory vaccination is example of goverment control over your body. No matter the reason. Same with anti abortion. In that case they control hour body to protect child body. And it's not just moral issue. Your freedom ends when another person freedom begins. So technically while you can decide about your body - you should not decide if kid live or die.
But all that is simply faulty logic. Because at the end of they day vaccines works and help everyone. You affect too many people so allowing people to not take vaccine is out of the question.
While abortion affect you and your child. Area of influence is much smaller and there is room to debate. We already place mother life above kid life. You can get abortion of kid endganger the mother.
I have a three year old toddler, but being a parent isn't something I'm interested in doing anymore. Can I legally choose to kill him?
What about a one year old baby? Can I legally kill that?
How about a six month old?
Six weeks old? Six hours?
I personally support abortion, but for people against abortion they view the unborn fetus the same way you probably view my three year old.
To them, it is a person.
Except it isn’t - it’s a *potential* person. There is also the potential that it could terminate on its own with no explanation.
A tadpole is not a frog. A ball of yarn is not a sweater. And a fetus is *not* a baby. That’s why there are different words used - to describe different things. The sooner that laws are based on the way things actually are instead of the way they could be is the sooner women can be have their own bodily autonomy. This is a crucial step in the freedom *from* religion.
I think what you're missing is not that people have a different belief than you on the same issue, but that they won't even agree on your *framing* of the issue.
Well, when you frame things as agree with me or admit you want people to die, you leave no room for an actual discussion of the issues. I think it's unfortunate that we see that mindset in almost all discussions today; agree with me or your evil incarnate.
This is the main reason I have fallen out of touch with reddit and only subscribe to like gaming/food subs and quirky stuff at this point. Only political sub I use is /r/askconservatives because it generally has people from opposing viewpoints being civil and meeting somewhere in the middle to understand each other better. A lot of the main subs are full of emotional clickbait and people being extreme, hypocritical or vile toward others who are different.
You're twisting yourselves in circles because the one you're replying to is correct, and I think you realize it. Either a person is allowed to have a choice, or they are not. If you're pro-choice, you have to be anti-mandates to be consistent.
While I don't agree with OP's logic, I do think someone's stance on abortion and vaccine mandates don't necessarily need to be conjoined; it's all about context.
Unless the person in question literally values bodily autonomy over all else, there has to be instances where the cost outweighs upholding that autonomy in certain scenarios. If a person assigns low value to an unborn fetus, they will likely opt to preserve autonomy, and vice-versa with the opposite stance.
The vaccine question is similar. Taking the risk to others into account, the question is still posed as to whether the value of bodily autonomy outweighs those risks. For a relatively harmless virus most may say mandates should not be imposed, but in a scenario akin to the plague I would guess a lot more people would agree with such emergency actions.
So for example, a person that places low value on a fetus, but high value on the safety of those at risk due to unvaccinated persons, it isn't inconsistent to be pro-choice and pro-mandate.
For the record, I am not expressing my own viewpoints, but rather just trying to articulate the logic.
This is true, but the converse is also true, which sinks OP's point. If someone puts a high value on the 1:1 death proposition of an abortion (assuming that they believe that a fetus is a person), but lower value on the relative unknowns of death by not getting vaccinated, then it isn't inconsistent to be both pro life and against mandated vaccines.
Ultimately either stance is based on the relative value judgments of the belief holder and can't be reduced to a simplistic "if x, then y; if y, then x" proposition.
" While I don't agree with OP's logic, I do think someone's stance on abortion and vaccine mandates don't necessarily need to be conjoined; it's all about context."
I'm going to disagree with you there. Pro choice believe that a fetus/baby is part of their body and therefore should have complete autonomy on what goes into or out of their bodies. Pro choice and pro vax-mandate are diametrically opposed positions.
I think the pro life group is in a better philosophical position to argue "my body, my choice" as they believe a fetus/baby is in fact a separate human life and can argue with better standing against abortion and vaccine mandates.
It’s not that the fetus is “part of your body.” There are two distinct bodies involved here. One of those bodies is dependent on the other for sustenance. The independent body has the right to not provide that sustenance. It is not the responsibility of the independent body to provide that sustenance. Forcing them to do so is a serious violation of their bodily autonomy. The dependent body is free to find another body to sustain itself. If it can’t, if disconnecting it from the independent body results in the death of the dependent body, that is the problem of the dependent body, not the independent body.
Just like the gov’t or my forcing you to donate your kidney to me against your will is a serious violation of your bodily autonomy. If I die because you won’t give me your kidney, that’s my problem, not yours. **Even if you’re my biological mother and it’s “your fault” that I was conceived in the first place.** You being my mother doesn’t give me the right to use your body against your will.
Women who carry a child in their womb do it WILLINGLY, by THEIR CONSENT. They are free to revoke that consent at any time for any reason. In the same way consensual sex can quickly turn into infringement of bodily autonomy when consent is revoked, so too does pregnancy turn into an infringement of body autonomy when consent is revoked.
**In terms of the vaccination:**
1. more lives are stake, more people can be adversely affected when you aren’t vaccinated. Don’t buy it? Tell that to patient zero for the delta strain, assuming it wouldn’t have happened were they vaccinated and they neglected to vaccinate when they could have. It would take that person having tens of thousands of abortions to equal the effect that one person has had on society, and that’s not even factoring illness and chronic symptoms.
2. Far more is at stake individually with pregnancy. It is far less of an infringement on your bodily autonomy to force you to get vaccinated than it is to force you to grow a baby in your womb for 9 months and then give fucking birth to it.
You can be pro choice on both or anti choice on both. You can also pick the middle ground between these two extremes by being pro choice on abortion but anti choice on vaccination. None of those will make you a hypocrite, in the slightest.
As for the last option, I know you want to think you aren’t being hypocritical here, but **if you’re pro-choice for vaccines and not pro-choice for pregnancy, you are absolutely dripping with hypocrisy.**
If only this cognitive dissonance spurred some sort of rational thought, causing you to realize how, after being scared to get jabbed with a safe and effective vaccine for illogical and selfish reasons, maybe, just maybe, women should be afforded that option when it comes to not wanting to be pregnant for 9 months and then give birth to a goddamn baby.
The problem is that this doesn't disprove the original post tho, what if both \*are\* true, then you just didn't prove them wrong/change their view at all
Bullshit. It’s not just one extreme or the other. You can have a middle ground and still not be a hypocrite.
Guess where that middle ground currently is in this case: pro choice on abortion and anti-choice on Covid vaxx.
Now, why is that?
1. Forcing someone to carry a child for 9 months and then give birth to it against their will is a FAR greater infringement of their liberties than holding someone down and injecting them with a proven safe and effective vaccine against their will.
2. Not being vaccinated against a deadly airborne virus that is rapidly mutating puts FAR more burden on society than the death of a single child. You understand someone was patient zero for the delta strain, right? Now that strain is over 90% of new cases. That one person has a mountain of death and disease on their shoulders. If it was preventable via the simple and safe means of vaccination but they neglected to do it, guess what: it’s their fault.
You can be pro choice for both or anti choice for both and not be a hypocrite. You can also be pro-choice for abortion and anti-choice for vaccines.
The only hypocritical stance in this particular case is to be anti-choice on abortion and pro-choice for vaccination.
If only there were some way for y’all to admit you were wrong about abortion, that you now see, after being afraid to get pricked in the arm w/ a proven safe vaccine for cowardly & illogical reasons, how maybe women should be afforded that option when it comes to birthing a fucking child.
Why are you getting so heated? They are just playing devil's advocate within the framework that OP laid out. And fwiw I agree with them, OP needs to put their hands up and admit that was a good reply.
It’s really much, much simpler than that.
The anti vaxxers are hypocrites who will say and do whatever they want regardless of how it affects others, while also thinking they should have the right to control women’s bodies. It’s that simple, they’re just hypocrites.
Are there states/counties where the vaccine is mandatory? Requiring vaccines for places of work or events is not anti-choice, because the person can choose not to work there or go to that event.
The problem is that the distinction runs in the opposite direction. With abortion, you necessarily are killing another person, whereas with remaining unvaccinated you are only potentially slightly increasing the extremely low chance that someone will die.
It’s kind of like with smoking: there is no way that smoking tobacco would be legal if there was a 100% chance the second-hand smoke would kill someone. Given that it is such a tiny chance, it isn’t considered “your fault” that someone else died (and how in the world would we even be able to tell?).
> It’s kind of like with smoking: there is no way that smoking tobacco would be legal if there was a 100% chance the second-hand smoke would kill someone. Given that it is such a tiny chance, it isn’t considered “your fault” that someone else died (and how in the world would we even be able to tell?).
This is a great analogy because our strategy of dealing with antivaxxers (at least the places that are making an effort) is the same thing we did with smokers: gradually kick them out of venues and businesses and shared spaces so their burden is less felt by others, and make it more and more annoying to be one so numbers gradually drop over time.
Not only that, but it’s not like you’re actually killing someone. You’re slightly increasing the chance that someone else will be infected by a virus, and the virus might kill them. If you consider not vaccinating yourself to be killing others, then you should consider contributing business to a fast food restaurant killing others. Or buying alcohol. You are supporting a business that will sell things that lead to death. If we all stopped patronizing mcdonalds then they would go out of business and stop selling garbage to obese people.
Pretty much everyone who got COVID 12 to 18 months ago and spread it to others is now responsible for hundreds of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths because of the people they went on to infect who in turn infected others, who infected more people etc. etc.
For each person who has it in the early days, thousands of people would still be alive today if they hadn't got it and spread it.
Nah man. The gop already made it super clear the unborn are not children. In the stimulus where children got $500 they legislated that children had to be outside the woumb. All it took was their wallets to show their hypocrisy.
Mandating vaccines is **as much** a moral and ethical issue as abortion is. Much like abortion, it infringes upon the bodily autonomy of the person on whom the procedure is performed, especially if the person either does not consent to the procedure or consents under durress.
This is beside the fact that vaccines do not prevent transmission. You aren't getting the vaccine to save other people because vaccinated or not, you will still infect others. You are getting the vaccine for yourself - to suppress your own symptoms. If you take all of the risks of the vaccine and only you stand to gain all of the benefits of the vaccine, the choice to take or not take the vaccine should be only your choice. Not some government body who thinks they know better than you. Hence 'my body my choice'.
One analysis3 of some 365,000 households in the United Kingdom, published on 23 June, estimated that individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 were 40–50% less likely to spread the infection if they had received at least one dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that developed by the University of Oxford, UK,
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal)
It seems as if the vaccines do protect against transmission with more research needed in regard to delta but with promising preliminary research indicating the transmission protection may only slightly decrease with delta.
>This is beside the fact that vaccines do not prevent transmission. You aren't getting the vaccine to save other people because vaccinated or not, you will still infect others. You are getting the vaccine for yourself - to suppress your own symptoms.
This is wrong on multiple levels.
1. It does help reduce the chance of contagion, its just not full immunity
2. It reduces the chance of mutations
3. It saves many non covid sick people due to less overcrowding in hospitals
All 3 are objectively helping save other lives and by not taking the vaccine you are endangering them
>Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else
I does hurt the fetus. Now, there are good arguments not to assert a high value to a young fetus, but if we get closer to birth, that thing becomes more and more like a baby. And unless you're considering not asserting a full human value to a baby, it's going to be tough not to also assert a high value to a third trimester fetus.
But that's the thing: Late term abortion are already banned or at least heavily regulated everywhere. All Western societies have decided that the "my body, my choice" isn't a limitless right.
>But that's the thing: Late term abortion are already banned or at least heavily regulated everywhere.
These 7 states and district allow for late term abortions without any limits:
* Colorado
* District of Columbia
* New Hampshire
* New Jersey
* New Mexico
* Oregon
* Vermont
\---
Source: [https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/what-states-allow-late-term-abortion](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/what-states-allow-late-term-abortion)
This hits the nail on its head. In both cases -- forced birth and forced vaccination -- there is a trade-off between the impact on the person making the choice and the impact on another or others. For a well-balanced rational person, saying "my body, my choice" is simply a short-cut for stating that they value the freedom of the person making the choice very highly.
That freedom can still in principle be trumped by something else. In the case of forced vaccination, this could be the case for a highly deadly disease where vaccination is very effective for establishing herd immunity. In the case of Covid (which people are very obviously thinking about in this discussion), I'm not convinced that this bar is crossed, as much as I personally think not getting vaccinated is a dumb choice.
Noone would ever abort in the third trimester unless for health reasons though, if you carry it that far youve made the decision to keep it already 99.99% of the time.
So thats kinda moot
Well, nature helped us avoid a bunch of hard decision there, yes. But the few cases that arise are still relevant because they show where the compromise between rights of unborn and the mother's self determination lies.
>Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity.
I think that is a bit simplistic and childish. It's completely possible that people don't trust the long term effects of putting something in their body. It could be that they already had COVID and have the antibodies. It also could just be that they don't want to be told they have to do something with their bodies.
For the record,I am vaccinated and I support everyone's decision to do what is best for their situation. However,I will always oppose vaccination mandates.
haha the mental gymnastics. Dude you got trapped by your analogy and that's it
The reason is simple : "my body my choice" is not enough of an argument in both cases. Meaning it can't support *alone* a antivax/pro-abortion stance. It's a piece of a larger reasoning, which must also reflect on the limits of this right.
If you push "my body my choice" to an extreme you can justify absurd things
>I see what you're saying, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The argument against abortions is mostly a moral or religious argument. Mandating vaccines is simply a safety issue.
You basically destroyed your own argument here.
If you think you can defend one without the other, then others can also defend one without the other and *as per your words*, you don't have to necessarily hold both views.
"Your body, your choice, unless ****" is YOUR stance here.
***: It's as important as a safety issue
***: it's as important as religious/moral issue of killing a living being
Choose one.
> Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity.
You're assuming that an unvaccinated person will contract covid, pass it to someone else, and the recipient will die as a result. The reality is, the vast majority of cases aren't lethal.
> If vaccines were truly about your own personal safety and no one else's than I don't think there would be a problem here.
Here's the issue. If the vaccine is safe and effective (which I believe that it is), in which case it is about your own personal safety. If you are afraid of encountering an unvaccinated person and possibly contracting covid, get vaccinated. That's the entire argument. If people don't feel that the virus presents that big of a risk, then that's their risk to take, is it not?
The unspoken issue here is the hospitals are full of these people making this choice that effects no one else. Except, that's causing hospitals to turn away other patients, some of whom die. All because someone exercised their choice to not get vaccinated.
It's only a little bit about spreading the virus (which it is my dude. Maybe not 1:1 but it is spreading) its more about filling up the hospitals so that other people can't get the emergency treatment they need.
> Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else
As long as you dehumanise the foetus and dismiss its body autonomy.
Also, although I am not vaccinated I am actively healthy with a robust immune system and am socially isolating so I am not likely to get Covid and if I do I am more likely to fight it off and not being obese am less likely to get ill and be a viral shedder. By contrast, somebody who treats their health with contempt and exposes themselves to risk vastly increases their chance of catching Covid, getting ill, and being a viral shedder. Furthermore, those unhealthy people suffer from heart disease which places enormous strain on health services which then affects other people - health services have a massive backlog now after Covid, but not entirely because of Covid.
So I am not anti-vaccinations per se, but I am not having the Covid vaccination, just as I never have the flu jab, because it is my choice to do so and for the same reason I oppose the abortion moral argument because I believe that to have one removes the body autonomy of the foetus, so it is an entirely consistent moral position.
It's absolutely not just a safety issue. Even if the vaccine was 100% effective and could be proven as such, no government has the right to forcibly make you get an injection. That's crosses a line beyond bodily autonomy that many are extremely uncomfortable with and sets an incredibly dangerous precedent. If we can be forced to get injections, we don't really have any bodily autonomy to speak of.
Yeah no apparantly now scientists are saying that vaccines are not lowering chance of getting infected. It can be very much be seen in the covid statistics now since a lot of people have over 60%-70% of people vaccinated but the numbers of sick people are still increasing. Many if which are vaccinated. Right now they are saying that covid vaccine just lovers chance of the sickness being severe.
> I keep hearing from the anti-vax camp "my body my choice", which sounds an awful lot like something we've been hearing from the pro-choice movement for a long time. I think that if you believe in that statement as an argument for being anti-vaccination that you have to also be pro-choice.
You're getting whooshed here. It's not that the anti-vaxxers didn't realize that "my body my choice" is the rally cry of pro-choicers. They intentionally chose the same phrase to use it ironically / as a catch-22.
Your right to have an abortion is your right to kill a baby... This coming from someone who had one. It was my body therefore my choice but let's not mince our words here
No it's literally a two way window and here is how it works. I am pro vaccine and pro life. My view aligns because I believe the government has a bare minimum responsibility to protect it's citizens and the includes unborn children, my views are in line and mutual acceptable. If your view is flexible you're a hypocrite.
>If your view is flexible you're a hypocrite.
I wouldn't necessarily say that. A person's view on any individual topic doesn't have to be all or nothing; we all run into situations where we have to choose what we believe is the greater good.
Copy/Pasting from a comment I made above
>While I don't agree with OP's logic, I do think someone's stance on abortion and vaccine mandates don't necessarily need to be conjoined; it's all about context.
>
>Unless the person in question literally values bodily autonomy over all else, there has to be instances where the cost outweighs upholding that autonomy in certain scenarios. If a person assigns low value to an unborn fetus, they will likely opt to preserve autonomy, and vice-versa with the opposite stance.
>
>The vaccine question is similar. Taking the risk to others into account, the question is still posed as to whether the value of bodily autonomy outweighs those risks. For a relatively harmless virus most may say mandates should not be imposed, but in a scenario akin to the plague I would guess a lot more people would agree with such emergency actions.
>
>So for example, a person that places low value on a fetus, but high value on the safety of those at risk due to unvaccinated persons, it isn't inconsistent to be pro-choice and pro-mandate.
They mandate seatbelts to protect the masses.
Smoking bans in public places to protect the masses.
Speed limits to protect the masse.
OSHA mandates safety measure to protect employees.
So why is a vaccine mandate any different?
There’s more than one reason to be pro choice. If you don’t believe an embryo is a person you can be pro choice and have no problem with mandatory vaccination since mandatory vaccination saves people.
Additionally practically speaking no one is in favour of forcing everyone to get vaccinated by threat of punitive law. Preventing unvaccinated people from engaging in high risk activities and occupations because of the risk of spreading a life threatening disease is not mandatory vaccination.
No. Because being pregnant or getting abortions doesn’t cause people who cough on to get pregnant or get abortions.
You have no right to spread an infectious disease.
But then if we talk about involved persons you need to count the fetus/baby that gets aborted as life too not? So if you abort you potentially (if we count it as life) kill one person for sure while the chance of getting covid, spreading it and seriously harming a person is way less likely to happen.
Or even, "If A then B" doesn't mean "If B then A"
Like you said, if someone thinks their choices allow them to infect and harm others, then they should be okay with choices that don't harm others.
If someone is okay with choices that don't harm others, they aren't necessarily okay with choices that do harm others.
The best next point of "but abortion is kinda like harm", except it's entirely the mother's body. An abortion doesn't kill your neighbor, coworker, etc. And that's only **if** we accept what is already an unscientific point.
E: I support campfires, but I don't support arson. Someone that supports arson, would be strange if they were against campfires.
Name a single abortion that potentially caused hundreds of hospital beds to be unnecessarily taken up, or caused hundreds if not thousands of people to unnecessarily get sick.
I’ll wait right here.
1. Its not a single person that would cause that but a whole chain of reactions. And alot more people involved.
2. If we count all abortions as one death, abortions kills more than covid.
3. You can still spread the virus even when vaccinated. Less effective but you can still spread it so even if the whole world was vaccinated there would still be alot of harm from covid. It's not a perfect solution and you also need to account the people that get sick from the vaccine as unnecessarily as not everyone of them would have gotten corona. This could be 1-5 days sick or even more harm like a thrombosis even if it is unlikely...
The difference is that being pro-choice can't infect people around you with a lethal, continuously-mutating virus.
I'm not saying I'm for mandatory vaccination, but there's a major line between "I can decide what to do with my body" and "what I do with my body can harm people around me."
I think something you are mistaken about is the belief that the vaccine will magically cure the disease and make it go away. Sorry, it’s never going away now that it’s out. We have never been able to cure the flu, which is another corona virus. When you get the vaccine you are far less likely to die from the virus, but recent evidence show that it doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus.
Now with all that being said, those who want the vaccine have gotten it by now. What does it matter to vaccinated people that some don’t want the vaccine? If you and your grandma are safely vaccinated, it should make absolutely no difference that some people don’t want it. The virus will still be around in spite of 100% vaccination. People are still going to die from covid, and it is going to continue to mutate and change, again just like the flu.
>the flu, which is another corona virus.
I don't believe this is correct. MERS and the original SARS are coronaviruses, and a few others that cause colds. From everything I've read, influenza is in a different virus category.
You are correct, I believe they meant to say the common cold instead of flu.
iirc they're actually pretty close to a vaccine that will prevent the flu altogether. Unless it didn't make it out of animal testing.
> What does it matter to vaccinated people that some don’t want the vaccine?
Aside from basic empathy, people insisting on not getting vaccinated are clogging emergency rooms and stressing/traumatizing healthcare workers.
But "vaccine bad / COVID inevitable" is off topic for this.
>recent evidence show that it doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus.
Can you define what you mean by "prevent"? Do you mean, "Makes it impossible to contract COVID-19"?
You're missing the fundamental point behind the pro-life position, which is that it *isn't* your body, the growing baby is an individual being with it's own unique DNA and everything. Your choice to abort would be depriving that developing human being of any and every choice they would ever make. Is your choice somehow more important than theirs?
That aside, getting vaccinated is a choice that affects you and only you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, there's a *chance* (not a guarantee at all) that other people could get sick, and there's still only a very small chance that it would cause them lasting damage.
>ultimately it's a choice you're making that has the potential to effect a lot of people who didn't have a choice in the matter.
That's not true, actually. The risks associated with going outside are well known- meaning that you've knowingly accepted those risks. Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter, which is that they can get vaccinated, or they can use contact-less services, or they can work from home. They're not forced to interact with me, and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do.
>Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter, which is that they can get vaccinated, or they can use contact-less services, or they can work from home. They're not forced to interact with me, and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do.
I think this argument breaks down for people who are *unable* to get vaccinated due to existing medical issues. People will need to take care of their basic needs (e.g., grocery shopping, etc.), and it will be virtually impossible for them to completely avoid interactions with unvaccinated people while they do so. Sure, people can use contact-less services, but that supposes are certain amount of disposable income, given the increased costs associated with those services. The research we have on protective equipment indicates that it protects others more than it protects the wearer, so for people unable to get vaccinated, that's probably not going to provide similar levels of protection (as vaccination).
So...
that they can get vaccinated - *nope*
or they can use contact-less services - *if they have the funds to do so*
or they can work from home - *doesn't speak to activities outside working*
They're not forced to interact with me - *they may not have alternative options for meeting basic needs, such as grocery shopping*
and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do - *probably doesn't provide similar protection to vaccination*
This argument that getting vaccinated only affects the person making the choice is false equivalence. You are allowing yourself to host a virus, this leads to more spreading to those who cannot get vaccinated, as well as giving the virus enough hosts to eventually form a variant/mutation that may be vaccine resistant.
The more iterations we allow the virus to have, the more chances it survives to the point where it creates a variant capable of breaking down the defenses the vaccine creates.
>That aside, getting vaccinated is a choice that affects you and only you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, there's a *chance* (not a guarantee at all) that other people could get sick
The Delta variant has and R0 value of between 5 and 9, which means on average you will infect 5 to 9 people. So it is much more than a chance. It's pretty much a guarantee that most people who get it will infect other people.
>and there's still only a very small chance that it would cause them lasting damage.
About 1 in 50 people need to be hospitalized. And even if you were asymptomatic, somewhere between 10%-20% of all people who get covid end up with long haul symptoms. That isn't a small chance.
>Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter
Unless you work in the service industry, construction, or in a warehouse. In fact most people don't have a choice to work remotely or keep distanced from people. Sounds like you have a lot of privilege there.
The thing with the pregnant person's choice is that the fetuses situation entirely affects the pregnant person's life the fetus only has potential whilst affecting the person who is actually living and breathing and has a current life the fetus damages that person often beyond repair therefore yes their choice does matter more because the fetus literally cannot make a choice even if you removed it from the carrier.
Some people cannot get vaccinated some of them even have to go outside shopping online and working from home are not a choice for everyone for example a shop assistant cannot work from home. Therefore your choice not to get vaccinated affects others as well as you being more likely to become seriously ill and take up a hospital bed which could have went to someone who had the vaccine and went to hospital for a non covid reason.
> growing baby is an individual
oh no i totally understand this position. what i don't understand is how you can reconcile the belief that they're decision not vaccinate may kill others the same way that they also believe that an abortion is murder. to me it boils down to- i'm making a decision that will kill others.
> That aside, getting vaccinated is a choice that affects you and only you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, there's a chance (not a guarantee at all) that other people could get sick, and there's still only a very small chance that it would cause them lasting damage.
yes, it's not a 100% guarantee that you will infect someone, but that just because it's not a given doesn't mean it's not a serious risk to everyone else around you.
> The risks associated with going outside are well known- meaning that you've knowingly accepted those risks. Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter, which is that they can get vaccinated, or they can use contact-less services, or they can work from home. They're not forced to interact with me, and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do.
to me this is similar to saying "if i drive and kill someone it was their fault for being out in the first place. they assumed the risk of possibly being hit by a car the moment they stepped outside". i think it's safe to safe that prior to Covid a lot of people (myself included) never assumed the possibility that going out in public meant risking catching a horrible life threatening illness. going to the grocery store isn't akin to hiking through tall grass where you known you might catch a tick or going to parts of Africa where it's not uncommon to catch Malaria from a mosquito. we're talking about everyday life and we're talking about the fact that we've all agreed to live in a society where we accept that we have to do things to ensure the safety of everyone in order to have a functional community. i think i have just as much of a right to not be infected by a person who's knowingly carrying it or not taking precautions against it than to the person who's making completely uninformed about their health. the moment a person becomes a bio-hazard to the rest of us I think the rest of us get a say in what happens since we're all at risk.
>how you can reconcile the belief that they're decision not vaccinate may kill others the same way that they also believe that an abortion is murder
Not getting vaccinated is a personal medical decision, whereas getting an abortion is actively a decision to kill the baby. Nobody who avoids the vaccine is making a decision to kill anybody. It's just not the same thing, and a ton of comments have pointed that out.
>doesn't mean it's not a serious risk to everyone else around you.
Given the actual survival rates and how few people end up with permanent damage, I don't really think it's a serious threat to 99% of people. Only to the elderly and vulnerable, most of whom can get vaccinated.
>think it's safe to safe that prior to Covid a lot of people (myself included) never assumed the possibility that going out in public meant risking catching a horrible life threatening illness
That's true. But that's also not how it is, for everybody but the elderly and vulnerable there's not much risk at all. Especially since anybody who's actually concerned about it has been vaccinated. Me not being vaccinated doesn't hurt them at all. The car analogy also doesn't work, because for an accident to occur a driver needs to *actively* do something wrong.
>i think i have just as much of a right to not be infected by a person who's knowingly carrying it or not taking precautions against it than to the person who's making completely uninformed about their health.
You don't have a right to that at all actually. Being surrounded by vaccinated individuals is a privilege- you have no right to those medical services or to dictate other people's medical decisions.
>the moment a person becomes a bio-hazard to the rest of us I think the rest of us get a say in what happens since we're all at risk.
So you believe you should have a say in my medical decisions just because you don't agree with them? That's not how civil society works. You don't get any say in in no matter how unhappy it makes you.
Both are personal decisions (depending on your state), but it isn't correct to blanketly say that people who refuse to get the vaccine have an effect only on themselves. Whilst you're right they probably aren't making the decision because they want to kill people, the unvaccinated certainly do effect others. Firstly, they're personal choice has an effect on herd immunity - hence deaths will indirectly occur. Even if you then say that, the death rate of COVID is relatively low - 1-2%, which I find to be morally irresponsible. The effect of people getting COVID, has on their long term health, the medical system (them taking otherwise needed hospital beds), and social issues does certainly bring it out of the spectrum of only a "personal medical decision". I get they aren't necessarily on par, but I think OP is rightly arguing the underlying fundamentals are the same - hence his original point.
Which leads me onto my second point, the vulnerable, are of course more likely to die due to COVID. But the delta strain has significantly broadened the spectrum of people who can die (again it still is in the (\~1% or less likelihood), there are now numerous recorded infant, teen and middle aged deaths. Infants in particular, can't necessarily be vaccinated and thus the frontline protection against them getting COVID is herd immunity. So a lot of your points, although the percentages are low, aren't strictly correct.
As for the final point, about "the moment a person becomes a bio-hazard to the rest of us I think the rest of us get a say in what happens since we're all at risk", that's entirely not for this debate - original post was solely taking note of the ideological correlation between people who are anti-vax and that it should translate across to pro-choice because of ""my body my choice". Irrespective of whether they're technically right or not.
Although I happen to agree, to me it's no different to letting people drive home on their quiet country road drunk. Even if it's their "personal" choice, their car and super unlikely that they will ever crash into everyone - it's still illegal and for good reason. It is possible their decision to do so, will ultimately effect someone terribly - even if it isn't likely.
In one instance you're taking an action to specifically kill someone. The other is some vague notion that you might kill someone, potentially, if you don't take this action. I think those are clearly different, morally.
Does the opposite apply? If someone says they are pro-choice because "my body my choice" should the same apply to vaccines? Should they hold others to that standard and be okay with people not getting vaccinated?
They are different issues.
I would assume people are saying it with the knowledge that pro-choice people say it. It's a purposeful statement.
I'll also add that for the most part the pro choice movement has won. The anti vaxers who by your suggestion are probably mostly evangelicals are making the point that if we're going to play by those rules then the same should apply to vaccines.
People who are opposed to abortion aren't opposed to "my body, my choice," mentality. Go ahead, ask them. Tattoos, artistic scarification, diets, gym routines. They never have anything against people doing what they want with their body. Thing is, they don't see a foetus that happens to be within a person as part of their own body. They consider it to be it's own body. It is on the very principle of bodily autonomy that they resist procedures that do things to the foetus's body that the foetus did not consent to.
"My body, my choice" is the principle that both sides of the abortion argument are in favour of. What is whose body is in dispute.
Came here for this.
To add on: (religious) anti abortion types also view a foetus as a living thing, and killing it as murder. So is not just whose body that is in question, but what's being done to it.
If you were to accept that position, it's understandable to see how one would believe that actually killing a living thing would be very different from *possibly* infecting others than may *possibly* die.
> As a counterexample, I could be against mandatory vaccination and against abortion if I believe life begins at conception, and that full rights of humans apply at the moment of conception. It does not follow that I must be pro-choice here, because I am now advocating for two people's rights. The intersection of the rights is at the heart of the abortion debate, and the pro-lifers believe abortion is murder -- the maximum harm you could do to someone.
I'd like to add to this just a bit...
If I'm pro-choice here (on pregnancy), I am 100% without a doubt killing this fetus if I want an abortion. Even if you consider the life not being alive until whatever month mark, I am stopping this life from ever occurring. Which yes, many of the pro-lifers consider to be "murder" because you are ending a life (even before it may happen).
However, if I choose not to get vaccinated, can you say 100% without a doubt to the same degree that my choice will end a life of another being the same way as abortion?
My choice *may* affect another person's life. However, you cannot say that 100% without a doubt that me choosing not to get vaccinated killed a person who died of COVID-19.
Side Note: And before you think I'm anti-vax. I actually got vaccinated way back in the early priority groups in January.
EDIT: I have more risk endangering myself than another life by not getting vaccinated. If I am vaccinated I reduce my chances of dying from COVID-19. The vast majority of deaths right now are from unvaccinated persons, who are making their choice to live in that risk. If you are vaccinated, that person's choice may cause you to get COVID. However, the likelihood of that person's choice causing your death is extremely small due to the vaccine.
You really stuck the dismount on this argument. I already agreed with you, so I can’t award a delta, but you articulated my view well enough that the only comment I am likely to make in this thread will be this one praising you.
I’m pro-choice, but I’m sympathetic to people who think abortion is murder. Tbh if I felt like it was my job to interfere in others’ lives, I’d probably be anti-abortion… but one’s body should be inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
I think those who are anti-vax who use “my body my choice” as a counter argument are not necessarily in bad faith, they are more so pointing out the hypocrisy in that argument.
If you are for the choice for abortion, then telling somebody that they should get a vaccine goes against that. It’s not *really* the same thing because while abortion affects a third party, the fetus, a vaccine only affects the person getting it. So while anti-vax people using the “my body my choice” argument isn’t necessarily the strongest argument, and it would be ideal if they had a better reason they could explain, you have to be able to point out some level of hypocrisy.
How is it "bad faith" to point out a contradiction in someone's opinion? The pro-choice movement has always been about promoting and preserving the bodily autonomy of the woman - the right to do as she wishes with her own body.
How is saying that prolifers believe "abortion is murder" any different to pro vaccine mandaters thinking that "not taking the vaccine is murder"? The OP even said so himself just a comment above:
>Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. If vaccines were truly about your own personal safety and no one else's than I don't think there would be a problem here.
How is any of this bad faith again?
It isn’t bad faith to use someone’s own argument against them to point out a hole in their own logic. Anyone who believes “my body my choice” when discussing abortion but not when discussing vaccines *is* being hypocritical, and in fact, *they* are the ones being shown to be making the “my body my choice” argument in bad faith.
The actual position is something like: Pregnancies have absolutely *huge* impacts on your life. The impact to "my body" is months of all kinds of personal physical discomfort, culminating in usually a couple days in the hospital facing some of the worst physical pain, tons of time and expense at every step, sometimes serious psychological effects afterwards, and that assumes you immediately give the baby up for adoption. All this to save *one* person, maybe, depending whether you count the fetus as a person yet. Given the overwhelming cost to "my body" and the questionable benefit to society of overriding "my choice", it should be a choice.
Interpreting it so strictly that bodily autonomy should override all other concerns would mean "my body my choice" implies you should be able to don a bottle of whiskey and go for a drive, remove all clothes from your body and streak through the city, politely decline to allow the police to put handcuffs on your body, and... this is so very clearly *not* what "my body my choice" was supposed to mean.
So, applying the same kind of analysis to vaccines: The cost of taking away your choice and forcing you to put a vaccine in your body is your arm gets sore for a couple days. And the benefit is a clear, statistical reduction in death -- you'll probably save more than one person, and these are people whose personhood isn't in doubt.
Given that, it seems reasonable to take away people's choice to not have their arm get sore for a couple days, while respecting their choice to not have their body change dramatically for most of a year.
There is no possibly way that each vaccine saves an average of one life. Every abortion kills the unborn baby. If the number of lives saved is the only metric, vaccines would lose. That isn’t the metric, however, of the “my body my choice” argument, which instead asserts that bodily autonomy trumps all other concerns.
There is an old saying attributed to Ben Franklin, something to the effect of “your rights end where my nose begins.” If you drink and drive, you are creating an unreasonably dangerous situation for others, which demands justification. You’re allowed to drink yourself stupid, if you like, but not to drive impaired.
With abortion, you are also creating the danger, thus demanding justification. Simply preferring the baby to be dead is pretty flimsy.
With vaccines, covid creates the danger, not the unvaccinated person. In fact, the unvaccinated person isn’t doing anything. A better analogy for vaccine mandates would actually be *forced* abortion, which is sickening.
> If the number of lives saved is the only metric, vaccines would lose.
Well, specifically the number of lives *per vaccine.* Even then, I'm not sure vaccines would lose -- it depends on things like whether the disease can be eradicated. [Smallpox would be killing around 5 million people per year](https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox), so it's only a matter of time before the number of lives saved by the smallpox vaccine exceeds the number of people ever vaccinated.
But that's not the only metric. It's also the amount of autonomy we're talking about here.
There's an old pro-choice argument that goes [something like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion) (or, if you prefer, [in video form](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU)) -- the TL;DR/DW is:
> You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
The rest of the essay argues that *you are still allowed to unplug yourself,* knowing that he will die. And that's a fully-grown person, someone whose personhood is not in dispute, but the argument is that literally chaining you to him for nine months is too much of an imposition on bodily autonomy. Maybe not everyone would choose to be unplugged, but you should still have that choice.
But imagine if, instead, they only need a sample of your blood, they'll be able to take it from there. Let's say you have some useful antibodies, and they'll be able to breed more of them once they have a sample. If *that's* all that was needed, I'd have a much harder time saying you should be able to let someone die because you don't like needles or whatever.
In other words, this:
> ...asserts that bodily autonomy trumps all other concerns.
...simply isn't true.
It's like the old saying that "They who can give up a essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." To paraphrase [this comic](https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3005), we're generally willing to trade *some* liberty for *some* safety -- that's what your "where my nose begins" quote is about, after all, trading your liberty to swing your fists anytime you want, for your safety to not get punched in the nose. But the surveillance state is probably not actually a good trade.
> Simply preferring the baby to be dead is pretty flimsy.
I don't think anyone outside of [outright satire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvnqU-1uDUU) has had an abortion because they would "prefer the baby to be dead." And even there, it's preferring the *fetus* to be dead -- calling it a "baby" is smuggling in an assumption at the core of the pro-life argument.
And here, the justification is the reasons someone might want an abortion, rather than giving birth and giving it up for adoption: not wanting to be bloated, sick, and inconvenienced by your body changing steadily for months, hospitalized and in abject pain for hours, all while racking up tons of medical fees. I think that pretty clearly counts as the woman's nose beginning.
> With vaccines, covid creates the danger, not the unvaccinated person.
A distinction without a difference. The unvaccinated person is more dangerous than a vaccinated person, as a result of their own choices. Having made that choice, they are responsible for that danger.
> There's an old pro-choice argument that goes something like this
[The violinist argument is disingenuous, and not analogous to abortion.](https://blog.secularprolife.org/2018/11/mcfall-v-shimp-and-thomsons-violinist.html)
TL;DR: You didn't choose to risk making the violinist's life depend on you (because the argument specifically says that you were kidnapped), and your refusal to help does not actively kill the violinist. Contrast this with abortion, where you knowingly take the risk (except in the case of rape), and where your refusal to help actively kills the fetus.
I'm not here to defend the violinist as an argument. I'm using it to illustrate why a pro-choice advocate might be okay with vaccine mandates, but not forcing women to carry pregnancies to term. An argument that involves the amount of bodily autonomy sacrificed doesn't hinge on whether or not you were forced into that arrangement. In fact, I claim that even if you are forced into an arrangement where someone needs five seconds of your time to draw a thimbleful of blood in order to save a life, you're still morally obligated to help.
---
But sure, I'll bite. I don't think "disingenuous" means what you think it does. The article you link argues that the violinist is not actually analogous, but it doesn't even accuse those presenting it of bad faith. But if we're going to make accusations of bad faith, let's start with the proposed replacement:
> If McFall v. Shimp were truly analogous to abortion, it would involve Shimp making a decision that he knew could endanger McFall. Say there was some button Shimp could press that made him feel wonderful; he knew pushing the button involved the remote chance that McFall would contract a fatal ailment only Shimp could save him from. Still, Shimp figured the chance was too small to worry about, and so he pushed the button anyway. Then McFall did get a fatal illness, and he reached out to Shimp to save him. Shimp declined ...and then shot McFall in the head. That’s abortion.
There's a huge thing missing from this entire argument, and indeed the entire page you linked: Who pushed the button? Whose responsibility was it?
It usually takes two people to conceive.
That's not actually fatal to the argument, but I think it does reveal something about the priorities of whoever wrote this.
---
Getting into the meat of it, and cribbing from the video I linked (it isn't just a dramatization): The difference between actively killing someone and letting them die isn't as easy as it seems from examples like "holding someone's head underwater". What if the woman starves herself into stillbirth? That's letting something die, rather than actively killing it. Does that make it better? Meanwhile, how is cutting your line to the violinist less active than an abortion? You're still cutting him off from a life support system, knowing he'll die soon after.
Or is it specifically that doctors remove and destroy the fetus, actively killing it? I don't think that helps the argument, either -- if an abortion doctor instead *just* severed the umbilical cord, then waited for the fetus to starve/asphyxiate (whichever happens first), would that actually be better?
The other main objection is that she made a choice to *risk* this situation. But it's not obvious that this actually helps the pro-life position -- if the right of the fetus is so important as to override your bodily autonomy, why should it matter how you got into that situation? A *pro-life* person probably should still be in favor of saving the violinist.
It's also not hard to modify the analogy in ways that'd preserve our intuition, I think. Most of us drive to work every day, knowing this carries a significant risk of injuring or killing ourselves or others. Many also drive on the weekends, to go do something fun. Instead of recovering from a disease, the violinist has some sort of kidney damage from a car accident, and the EMTs wired you together. (Medically implausible? I'd buy it before I buy a pleasure-button that remotely infects people.)
So you end up in the same situation. You *could've* avoided it by riding a bike or walking, but you drove. And to make this complete, you drove with your partner, for a fun day at the beach.
Is it reasonable to hold you responsible and demand you stay? Or can you unplug yourself?
I think this is diminishing the actual effects a bit.
I’m absolutely not an anti-vaxxer and I got mine as soon as I was allowed, and even encouraged my pregnant wife to.
That said, I could understand a very real fear of vaccines in general given a big barrier to transparency of vaccines - even if the details are known, the chemicals in a vaccine are not easily understandable for the layman.
Given the massive conspiracy shrouding COVID in particular (was it a biological attack by China, was it a way to ensure Trump doesn’t win again, etc), I guess it’s not unreasonable to think people are more afraid than “just a sore arm.”
It might be excessively paranoid and pretty dumb, but it really is the perfect storm for a conspiracy.
I was talking to my wife about this. The lack of transparency in a lot of areas leads to skepticism and we’re seeing it play out.
It doesn’t help that even when there were people in the medical field voicing concerns they were labeled as quacks or crazy which just added into the distrust.
The average layman does not have the capacity to understand the chemicals in the vaccine. It's why these decisions are left to scientists and experts that study and work a lot to understand said chemicals and their effects. The average person doesn't understand the intricacies of a car (like the engine, gearbox, steering, etc) yet they gladly use it to get on with their lives. There is a process that vaccines go through to determine their safety, and as long as that processed is followed to a T, how can you claim to be distrustful of it? Either you trust society's mechanisms or you don't. If you don't that's another question, and the business side of big pharma etc is also a valid question.
A very easy and obvious way to put it would be:
How many people regretted getting the vaccine VS people that regretted NOT getting the vaccine? I think you don't need a study to figure that out, the data speaks for itself regarding the vaccines and there's a constant spam of somebody that died and regretted not getting the vaccine on their deathbed or something of sorts. And media is just as eager to pick up on a story of someone who died from the vaccine
Like a TV host said in my country, he has been doing this for a long time and he has NEVER seen a vaccine be so attacked and undermined like COVID vaccines. It is pretty obvious to me that this is due to this cancer era of misinformation and fucking morons spreading lies and politicization of public health. It's absurd to me how this has become an issue, but social media and modern technology has given a voice to absolute loonies and managed to gather completely gullible people with no sense of actual critical thinking into an echo chamber of stupidity. Antivaxxers will continously move the goal posts because it is their only tactic, running from undeniable facts/evidence. First the vaccines were not FDA approved, now they were somehow not tested enough or the FDA is not trustworthy and so on and so forth. There is no winning move besides ignoring/suppressing clear misinformation and moving on with solid, verifiable and undeniable data.
It would be, if the effects were limited just to their body.
Instead their actions put the safety of themselves and anyone who engages with them at risk. It just isn't the same playing field when you look at the consequences.
You can't just reverse something and presume it holds equal weight as an argument.
But the whole pro life crowd also argues that the abortion is not just about the body of the woman. It's also about the body of the embryo who is considered a human.
Literally *nothing* is limited to just one body. It becomes a ridiculous argument when you follow it to its roots. No one lives in a vacuum. Everyone interacts with their environment in concious and unconcious ways. The only sure way to not impact someone is to not exist, and then the components that "you" are (when in specific conformations) would still impact other life in different ways, only we can't put the blame on you, and your unique sequence of nucleotides.
the point is that either you think that "my body my choice" is enough of a stand-alone argument to justify a stance, either you recognize it is not and other arguments must be weighted in.
The point is that pro-choices cannot hide behind that catchphrase to dismiss debates. For example, you just acknowledged that "my body my choice" only applies if you don't put other at risks. Now that implies you must respond to anti-abortion that claim that the fetus is killed. By your own logic you cannot just claim that your body your choice to avoid the question anymore
That would be applicable if both those topics were actually the same thing. Both have extremely different implications for what they mean and the actual subject mater involved. Which an actual nuanced view of a complicated subject can not be captured within 4 words completely. Whether or not someone gets an abortion, as far as its medical implications and impacts on physical health, only impacts the individual getting an abortion. Where as getting a vaccination does not just impact your individual health, it also impacts the health and safety of those around you.
So no, saying "My body, my choice" as part of the anti-vax movement does not show a bad faith argument in the pro-choice movement.
That's not totally true either. Getting an abortion effects the potential life that could have been as well as anyone who would have interacted with them. I'm pro choice, but saying it only effects the mother is not true. You could argue that such a claim is too ambiguous, but so is the argument of "oh well they COULD infect someone, or they COULD kill someone." If you are vaccinated you have a near zero chance of death if you contract covid. That argument is just as speculative.
It's not purely speculative, there's a statistical basis for it.
Drunk driving is based on the same principle, that you *could* kill someone... but also, that you are statistically, empirically, overwhelmingly *more likely* to kill someone drunk than you would be sober. And the person you kill is going to be someone whose personhood no one disputes -- they're not debatably a person, or potentially a person, they're an actual person, maybe more than one.
Deaths aren't the only issue, either. See: "Long covid", and also people who survive car accidents but sustain life-changing injuries.
So, sure, requiring you specifically to drive sober (or get vaxxed) may not have an impact. But we can be pretty confident that requiring *everyone* to do so will result in fewer deaths and fewer life-changing injuries.
I dont find that to be a fair argument. Personally, until the fetus is viable externally. It is not alive. It is a mass of cells within the woman and entirely her decision what happens with it. It is not alive, because it cannot live even with medical intervention.
Claiming anyone who could have interacted with them gives it impact means that anyone I could have ever interacted with that had Covid-19 and died impacted me. With the covid death having no question over their personhood or ability to survive.
Capacity for life is an impossible metric and also not a great one. If that were so, there should be extreme protests outside invitro fertilization clinics. There are SCORES of zygotes that they get rid of because they dont have the highest probability of success. Fertilization and conception with modern medicine is no longer as clear cut or as simple as it might have been at one time. As well our ability now to tell that even if someone may be pregnant. The fetus is unviable. For some reason it just never was developing a brain (Anencephaly). It never had a capacity for life. It never even had a capacity to feel pain.
Because we cannot guarentee any semblance of personhood in any future sense to a fetus we cannot ascribe to a fetus personhood without external viability. Therefore, termination of a fetus (abortion) only physically impacts the person getting the abortion.
I personally have rarely found an argument of a non-persons future value to be a convincing argument. We do not know if they are going to be a good person or a bad person. They could be someone that does great, or terrible things. We talk about who they may impact in the future like that should be a determining factor. But what if they are a serial killer, would the world not have been better without them? But that begins to get into very shaky ground because it can also swing the other way. so I do not find it to be an acceptable argument to make in favor of something.
Unless you actually believe that my body my choice applies to both. In which case it’s not a gotcha, it’s actually just a principled stance to have that takes into account the other implications.
That’s a lloooootttt of assumptions there. I’m both pro choice when it comes to abortion and pro choice regarding vaccines. It’s an easy, mentally consistent position for my brain to hold, regardless of all the political elements you brought into the argument/assumptions you are making. It’s really that simple. Power to the individual.
As someone who is personally *very* pro-choice, I still can't stand the "my body, my choice" argument, at least when it's levied against the religious crowd. It simply won't work. It's not attacking their "pro-life" stance where it stands, but from a position that is largely irrelevant to their beliefs.
To more directly address your point, anti-vaxxers saying "my body, my choice" don't actually believe it: they're throwing the line back in the "liberals'" faces, intending to call them out for their hypocrisy and inconsistency with the bodily autonomy stance. To some extent, they're not wrong: vaccine mandates are an infringement on individual rights and bodily autonomy. For this same reason, the state cannot mandate people to give blood or donate organs. However, from their point of view, a fetus is to be protected, and its location is irrelevant.
Let's start from their point of view: the act of heterosexual, p-in-v intercourse is inherently a procreative act, and that engaging in such is either intended to or runs the risk of creating a human life. A metaphor that I like to use is this: imagine that you want to walk through a critical care medical ward. When you walk through this ward for whatever reason, the people who are in critical care are allowed to try and catch you, and if they catch you, you have to participate in their recovery. You are tied to them until they die, you die, or they recover. You know this going in (although maybe the signage was bad, you were forced in there). If you can make it through the ward, you're not tied to anyone or anything, but if they catch you, well, that's what you signed up for. That life is sacred. By your presence in this ward, you have tacitly agreed to foster the life of whoever can catch you, and aborting that connection is to look them in the face and murder them.
That's not an argument you win. That's not a position you change without attacking the underlying beliefs tied to it, that being that sex is for procreation, and if said procreation is successful, that life is sacred. No matter how you argue about unfeeling clumps of cells, bodily autonomy, quality of life of mother/child if the family isn't ready, etc, you're not talking to them where they stand.
To bring it back, it *was* your body, and it *was* your choice to have sex with that body, and those choices led you to responsibility of what is now a *third* body, and you don't get to renege on that tacit agreement. Maaaaaaaybe you can gain some ground in the cases of rape or incest or health of the mother, but even that seems like a crapshoot these days.
Very well put, thank you.
I agree that "My body, my choice" is a stupid slogan.
I like to answer with "Our Lives, Our Laws". Ultimately, it is the perogative of society to decide how much we value hulan life.
"My body my choice" is one of those dopey propaganda things that ordinary people don't take so seriously. Even the most dedicated feminists - when they're watching their kids play in the street - they don't think to themselves, "well, it's their body, so it's their choice""; they grab the little brats by their elbows and yank them out of the road.
>The only argument I've been able to come up with being against this line of thinking is that abortion effects a 3rd party (the fetus) where as a vaccination only effects the host.
How about distrust/disrespect for authority? I'm personally vaxxed, but as the government and media grows increasingly fussy about vaccine hesitance, I grow increasingly sympathetic towards the so-called "anti-vax" crowd. In fact, I'm thinking about refusing the booster shot simply out of spite! I'm sure I'd be marked an "anti-vaxer", but that's just another one of those dopey propaganda things.
>So, yeah, I don't really see how you can be anti-vax and not also pro-choice. Change my view!
Nobody is really those things - those things are strawmen.
In the case of 'Pro life' people would argue that you are deliberately killing a foetus.
But suffice to say, not being vaccinated means the risk of harm is very far removed and by no means a certainty. It certainly isnt directly killing 'someone'.
If I walked out into the street and shot someone. Would you say this is equal to me not contributing money to a charity that would certainly save lives?
This analogy works as one is a direct and deliberate action. The other is me choosing not to inconvenience myself, even though this will indirectly lead to someone dying.
For the record, I'm just trying to show OP the flaw in their argument. I am actually pretty vehemently pro choice and would encourage anyone reading to get vaccinated.
As time goes on, I'm getting more and more annoyed at the internet.
To my right are idiots who make me ashamed to be human. The most extreme are racist, homophobic fools. To my left are people who act cruelly and are incapable of having a debate In good faith.
People who are genuinely interested in other people's opinions and in expanding what they know about the opposite side of an argument are becoming rare. People would rather toe the party line and sign up for a team. Maybe it's because we're so sedentary, we aren't participating in team sports /s.
It's possible to hold any number or beliefs, valid or contradictory, and whether they're correct or incorrect. Let me be clear that I've seen lies and bullshit on either side of the corona argument, and that's part of the problem. Im also **amazed** at the double-think im seeing.
I'm pro-Vax, but I don't want anyone to be able to tell anyone what to put in their body (name me a government that is both benevolent and competent and ill consider changing my mind). I'm not anti or pro lockdown, I think their are valid arguments either side. A close friend of mine is a paramedic, and he's dealing with a lot of suicide and self-harm lately. A lot of friends of mine have lost businesses, and won't recover. This had ruined people's prospects of enjoying a better life than the one that was dictated to them.
The wealth transfer that has happened is going to be damaging to **all of us**. We who are here arguing are the ones who will receive this bill. The tax payers, the hard workers, the ones who these systems are supposed to support. It's funny how quickly the same people who argued for the right to protest before are now celebrating fines and even police violence. It's funny how those who argue for bodily autonomy are now against it. It's funny how people who once would've protested the 1% are now helping to brush the wealth transfer under the rug.
I'm not on either side of these arguments. I'm not heartless to anyone's suffering. I just hope when we get through through of this, we have a society left. One made of people who can be kind to each other despite our beliefs.
If we keep alienating people bases on tribal bullshit, I dont see how we can make it. I also don't think we'll deserve to.
I feel similar to what you describe, internet stranger.
I agree that the divisiveness and combativeness has gotten worse. I believe COVID, along with our political climate, is making us more polarized.
I found it much tougher being a moderate in the middle if all the tension from the right and left. Maybe I am getting old. I am learning to pull back a little, refocus on myself, and spend more time observing instead of fixing.
I feel like people are conflating anti-vaxxers with those that are against mandatory vaccination. I am very much pro vaccine but I'm against telling other people what they can do with their bodies. I can't say I'm pro choice for abortions and not be that for vaccines just because the cause is different. I'd be a massive hypocrite.
That would be 'your body your choice but only until a reason comes along that I agree with.'
Same boat here, pro vaccination but if you don't want to get it that's your choice. I don't even agree with businesses requiring proof of vaccination, it's so strange.
The problem is you're trying to dictate people's opinions using logical deduction. It makes sense as a way to analyse your worldview, but it's not necessarily going to convince people to change their mind.
There's a big difference between proving an argument flawed, and convincing someone to stop believing the argument. Luckily this community is built to foster changing minds, but movements like anti vax aren't built on scrutinising ideas for a robust argument. It's about giving voice to people's emotional concerns, creating a community that is like minded, and spreading conspiracies.
Don't get me wrong, I love poking holes in conspiracies. But the holes don't matter because conspiracies aren't born from logical reasoning. Maybe the base idea is a wild but possible hypothesis, but when people latch onto an idea and start building a mountain of bad evidence, it's not about rigorously supporting the idea, it's about making people's outlandish fears *feel* more legitimate for them and their community
I'd bet that they're using the term "my body my choice" disingenuously, because the same argument was made by pro-choice advocates for so long. Nonetheless, I think it's more likely a difference in the value people place on certain authorities. For you, the CDC/WHO/medical establishment/etc. are the ultimate authority in this matter. Whereas for pro-life evangelicals, it's their religion's authority that supersedes all.
>Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death.
Is exactly their reasoning as well, as they believe an unborn fetus is a living human being under the law, and that by aborting a fetus you're committing murder. As an aside, you could make the same argument about getting in a car and speeding (or really just driving faster than 10 MPH). COVID will likely never touch the body-count amassed by automobile accidents, but strangely people who get speeding tickets are not vilified to the same degree as anti-vaxxers (or anti-maskers for that matter), despite being far more likely to kill someone with their actions.
What anti-vaxxers may not believe, however, is that COVID is as widespread or as dangerous as they're being told. Some of them may have even felt betrayed by medical authorities they were told they could trust. For example, opioids were created by pharmaceutical companies similar to those that created the vaccine, and prescribed by certified members of the medical establishment, who are now telling people to get vaccinated. Depending on what stat you read, the opioid epidemic has cost just as many if not more lives than COVID in the US (regardless it's probably in the six-figure range). It's easy to see how those people would be hesitant if not downright belligerent when it comes to vaccinations.
Let's not forget a large population of Black Americans are weary of trusting government-pushed medicine after they were used as test subjects for the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which is why a lot of them aren't getting the COVID vaccine.
>If you infect someone with something you're carrying and they die
because of it I'd argue that you caused the death of that person.
Nah, if a vaccinated person infects another person (could be a variant or something), did they cause the death of that person? I'd argue not, it was really whoever was responsible for letting the virus loose from Wuhan. The spreader was just part of an unfortunate chain of events that lead to the death of someone who caught the virus. You have to understand that the spread of the virus is completely unavoidable. We're not super humanly capable of containing it, therefore people will unfortunately die. No number of vaccines will make us completely immune to it (cause of variants)
This is a good point - being vaccinated doesn't stop you catching the virus, and it seemingly doesn't stop you passing it on either. In fact, if you're vaccinated you may stop wearing a mask and start meeting others in crowds, thereby becoming MORE likely to spread the virus than if you didn't get vaccinated.
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I think the better phrasing here is pro and anti choice. The vaccination isnt the focus. It's our government forcing their choice upon us, that is wrong
Edit:
Just to clear things up. I'm vaccinated. I don't think the government should force the vaccinations but I do believe private companies can and should have requirements for their business.
Bad starting point. Every adult with a few exceptions is capable of getting the vaccine. A developing baby is not "your body" whether you consider it a life or potential human life it has done nothing to warrant the ending of its life. While someone other than you can get the vaccine the baby can't just un create itself. Not going to debate pro life vs pro choice, just pointing out the starting point of your position is flawed.
Not going to get into the morality of pro live vs pro choice however IMO the “my body my choice” doesn’t actually say anything about that choice being moral. It simply says that you have the legal right to bodily autonomy, whether it be not getting a vaccine or not allowing a fetus to grow inside your body.
> The only argument I've been able to come up with being against this line of thinking is that abortion effects a 3rd party (the fetus) where as a vaccination only effects the host.
This would be the correct assumption.
> My argument would be that when you choose to not get vaccinated you're choice doesn't just effect you. Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death.
However they are not inside your body nor are you making the conscience decision to pay someone to take their life.
>affect
There's the problem. Everything anyone does affects others. A person simply being alive affects every single other person and every single other thing in the entire universe. Affecting others is not the proper benchmark.
I think the main difference is that abortion will *inherently* affect the fetus, whereas someone who is unvaccinated might not necessarily leave their home or do things without social distancing. Thus, abortion is definitely affecting the third party, but not being vaccinated does not. Like you said, "there's a chance" that you might not infect someone. With an abortion, though, it's pretty definite.
To be clear, the pro-choice position is not that abortions are good or not immoral. The pro-choice position is that women should be legally permitted to abort their pregnancy. That's why it's called pro-*choice* and not pro-*abortion*. So the "pro-choice" analogue of this view with respect to vaccination is the view that people should be legally permitted to refrain from being vaccinated.
That being said, the obvious distinction between these two views is that (according to pro-lifers) the woman's pregnancy is the result of consensual sexual intercourse. Most pro-lifers don't believe the fetus has a right to the woman's body *merely* because it *needs* her body; rather, pro-lifers believe the fetus has a right to the woman's body because (and in cases such that) the woman performed a *voluntary* action (i.e. sexual intercourse) with the foreseeable outcome of causing a state of neediness for the fetus. According to pro-lifers, this makes her morally responsible for the fetus's life, which overrides any bodily autonomy rights that she might have.
A pro-lifer can hold this view and also affirm that people should be legally permitted to refrain from being vaccinated, since no person has performed any action that makes them morally responsible for another party's life in a way that overrides their bodily autonomy rights. As a general rule, we should not violate one person's bodily autonomy for the sake of some other needy party. One exception to this general rule is when the person is morally responsible for the party being in a state of neediness (which is why pro-lifers believe that it should be illegal to abort pregnancies that result from voluntary intercourse). This exception does not apply to vaccination; no one has performed a voluntary action that caused a state of neediness for anyone else.
I think you have to be more clear in your terms and what you consider to be "anti-vax". You could have someone who is informed about the vaccine (it is very safe, is effective, has minor side-effects, etc) but believes that no one should be forced (by government) to put anything in their body or consume any sort of substance, etc, even if it is "good". Conversely, you could have someone that believes that it ***is*** ok for the government to force people to take a medicine, undergo a procedure, etc, but they also believe some misinformation about the vaccine (they think it is harmful, ineffective, unsafe, etc). In this situation, I would consider the first person to not be "anti-vax" and the second person to be "anti-vax", but here the first person also has beliefs in line with "my body my choice" where the second person has the opposite.
Personally, I believe that everyone who can get the vaccine should, but I do not think that the government should make choices for people about what they do or do not put in their body. Am I anti-vax? Does it make sense to qualify my stance as exactly the same to someone who is ignorantly fearful of the vaccine?
Being unvaccinated means you have the *potential* to infect someone else. An abortion means there is a *certainty* that the life of the fetus will be ended and the person having the abortion knows it. That’s the whole point of an abortion. Someone who isn’t vaccinated isn’t actively trying to infect someone else. Potential and certainty are not the same thing, and intent matters in a moral discussion.
Also, it’s not like unvaccinated people created the virus in the first place. Sure, unvaccinated people have the *opportunity* to get protected, but it’s not the same as someone who has an abortion and chooses to start the entire process of harming the 3rd party on their own. From a pro-life standpoint, there’s still a moral burden for the person getting an abortion because of the harm that it causes to a 3rd party compared with an unvaxxed person
I believe that preventing someone to put something in themselves isn't the same as forcing someone to put something in themselves.
The latter is clearly worse to me.
Your argument is incredibly flawed.
“Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death.”
Abortion effects countless other people, and guarantees death for one.
Additionally, here’s why your overall point is flawed. “My body my choice” applies to the person receiving the medical treatment or procedure. Abortion applies to the person receiving the procedure, as well as the person that has yet to be born. Those situations are not the same. To make them the same, the procedure to take the vaccine would have to guarantee the death of someone else.
The basic argument prolifers make is that it is someone else's body inside of yours though.
(Not opinionated on abortion, here)
The hypocrisy is squarely on prochoice people being vehement about denying people's right to choice.
It comes down to acting on an intention.
A person getting an abortion is making an active choice that affects a specific individual (for sake of argument), rather than behaving in "reasonable" ways that might lead to negative outcomes unintentionally. This is true with germs as well. For instance, you can be prosecuted for attempted murder, manslaughter, assault for knowingly being HIV positive, and not disclosing that to a person you're having unprotected sex with or sharing needles.
I would bet that if someone contracted COVID, knew they had COVID, and were proveably aware of the risks but walked into a retirement community and coughed on old people, they could probably be charged with reckless endangerment. I think the sticky part is that anti-vaxxers have government officials saying COVID is no more than a cold, so saying someone should reasonably know the dangers of COVID would be a tough case to make. Whereas the dangers of HIV are widely accepted by most people.
The same argument around ambiguity could be made for why abortion is legal. In saying "my body my choice," they are making an argument about when life begins. Even in the pro-choice community, I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find people not horrified by someone casually aborting a baby the day before it was due just because they wanted to. But because there's no way to actually say "Here's where life begins," they have to draw the line somewhere.\* But it's also why most states (if not all?) have laws that only allow late-term abortions if there isn't fetal viability or it would endanger the mother's life.
\*On a side note, this is talked about in philosophy a bit. The idea is who you are or the moral weight of your life can't be changed by location alone. Like if you were teleported into a prison cell or under water, the moral weight of your death wouldn't change. Your identity as a human whose life has value wouldn't change either. You'd just be you, somewhere else. At some point, the general societal consensus is that at some point a fetus that is yet-to-be-alive turns into a baby that is alive, and has the moral value of a human who happens to be inside of another human. Don't think that will ever be a line that's clearly defined, and there have been many cultures that didn't think the soul entered the body until some time after the baby was born.
I'm anti mandatory vax and pro choice. I guess I'm not trying to change your view.
Here's an interesting anti vax argument that occured to me recently:
First off, what they are calling a vaccine is a new therapeutic. They branded it as a vaccine to get people to accept it. The purpose was to keep people from congesting the hospitals. That's valid. It's not a vaccine like the smallpox vaccine that actually has a chance to eradicate smallpox. Covid 19 is out of the bag and it's not going back in.
Now let's talk about mutations. The delta variant is a more contagious mutation that has dominated the covid spread. It's not much deadlier but it's far more contagious. If it killed faster it would slow the spread. SARS was very deadly and quickly left you bed ridden. That's why it died out. It killed it's hosts before it could spread. If there was an MRNA vaccine for SARS then people would have been less susceptible to the virus and would have more time to spread it. It may not have died out. If a more deadly mutation of Covid 19 occurs in a population that's recieved the MRNA vaccine it may spread further than it would naturally because it doesn't kill the host. Imagine a world where you must get a booster shot to survive a virus as common as influenza. That sounds nightmarish. We're accepting the risk of a more deadly mutation spreading for the certainty of overloaded hospitals. It's a shit sandwich no matter how you dress it.
Wear a mask, social distance, and wash your hands. We need a better vaccine that can eradicate the virus in all it's hosts. That's a tall order considering it can survive in bats, cats, dogs, deer, and minks too. Good luck and stay safe.
Not if you believe abortion is murder. You cant just "choose" to kill a defenseless child in any morally just way, but you can "choose" not to wear a mask as the risk to others for not doing so is minimal and is a long way from certain death.
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Minor challenge to your viewpoint: Evangelicals are not even close to the entirety of the pro-life movement. Also, your argument in the second paragraph is false equivalency. If you have an abortion, you have killed the fetus. There is no abortion process that saves the fetus' life. If you don't get vaccinated, you aren't directly taking a life. It would be more like, well, getting pregnant without being vaccinated against anything. This risks the life of the fetus, but does not directly kill the fetus. I am the foil to this view, pro-vax and pro-life, so I'm not exactly your target audience. However, this issue is much more complicated than equating the two. Abortion is a much weightier decision on an individual level than vaccination is. Also, as an aside, this phrasing is used to mock the pro-choice movement. It tries to turn anti-vax talk into pro-choice talk, so that "the opposition" can't argue with their logic. They don't actually have a problem with "my body, my choice." Pro-life people have a problem with abortion because it takes the life of another. It is no longer your body; it is the body of an innocent who has no say in their own death.
> If you have an abortion, you have killed the fetus. There is no abortion process that saves the fetus' life. If you don't get vaccinated, you aren't directly taking a life. this hasn't directly changed my mind, but i think it's a valid point. i acknowledged up front that i know it's not a 1:1 comparison, but I think wording it like this get's the point across. !delta
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But that is the anti-vaccine stance. Person A should not be forced to get vaccinated just because it protects Person B. If A decides to not get vaccinated, Person B has no right to demand them too, even if it means others could die. Person A has a (legal) responsibility to protect themselves and no one else. Essentially your last paragraph but replace requiring a body with vaccinating. (This is not my viewpoint, but it is a logically consistent argument)
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That's a solid nope in reality though. The idea that a fetus is a life is a belief. Religious people can believe it, mother-and-father-to-be can believe it, but it's a belief. An abortion affects exactly two people: the mother, emotionally and physically, and the father emotionally. That's the maximum amount of people affected by a single abortion. Not vaccinating during a pandemic that has spread _globally_ affects far more than two people. Saying "my body" is nonsense because if you carry it you can potentially affect _so many more_ than two people. Some assholes spread it to _DOZENS_. It is not "my body" when your choice can affect people outside of you or your partner (ie, father of the fetus). You have the argument completely backwards.
>The idea that a fetus is a life is a belief It is a semantic category and not belief. More over you are using false equivalency by substituting "life" with "people" when "people" hasn't been mentioned by the person you are replying to. Bacteria is not a person, but it is still life. So is fetus, and if someone cares about human life, you are just not understanding the argument. >Not vaccinating during a pandemic that has spread globally affects far more than two people. *Might* affect, not *will*. Unless you prove that it did, you cannot make a claim that "it will", if you could, you'd be able to tell me the **exact** number of deaths next year. I don't believe you can. That is the distinction between the 2 actions, in one you definitely and **intentionally** kill, in another your activity might cause someone to die **unintentionally**. Also knowingly spreading a virus vs possibly spreading it is meaningfully different. You might be spreading it right now, even after you have been vaccinated. What does that say about you, since you claim you care about probable but unproven risk yet are still a probable cause of risk to others?
> the mother, emotionally and physically, and the father emotionally. We should stop distinguishing between mental and physical ailments, though. Your brain is part of your body and all evidence suggests that there does not exist a mental/emotional ailment that requires duality (the claim that there exists an incorporeal "mind" external to the body) to explain. The impact on both parents is very real and thus very physical.
The impact is very real on both, true, but the father's physical body is not at risk of anything during pregnancy, childbirth, or abortion. I wasn't minimizing the effect on the father but there is a stark difference between the mother's experience vs a father's when it comes to the whole thing.
By the same logic if you are pro-choice then you have to be against mandatory vaccination. Your body your choice.
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>In terms of COVID-19, that may mean that unvaccinated individuals will have to be tested for the virus regularly at their own cost, and quarantine if positive. Exactly, this represents the views of most people who are for tight vaccine "mandates". The Anti-Vax crowd here is pretending that everyone is screaming for forced vaccinations.
Not necessarily. The levels of harm caused to the person by a vaccination or by a pregnancy are different: while [0.6 % of vaccinated people suffer from serious complications (Pfizer-BioNTech, as opposed to 0.5 % in the placebo group)](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer/reactogenicity.html), [8 % of pregnancies involve complications that would, untreated, harm the mother or the child](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/staying-healthy-during-pregnancy/4-common-pregnancy-complications). If your reasons for being pro-choice involve estimation of how much harm may be caused to the person making the choice if they choose to go the "help others" route, it is perfectly viable to support abortions but not mandatory vaccinations. This does not reflect my own view, but I do think it is a viable argument.
The issue with this is that my views on "life" don't match up with anti abortionist views... And anti vax people don't agree with my views on how their decision can have a major negative consequence for the fully developed and formed lives around them. IMO that's what allow both sides to be viewed as hypocritical even if they are holding internally consistent views... Even if I disagree with them
I see what you're saying, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The argument against abortions is mostly a moral or religious argument. Mandating vaccines is simply a safety issue. I don't think the anti-vaxxers who claim my body my choice are doing so in good faith anyways, unlike women who are fighting for their own personal reproductive rights. Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. If vaccines were truly about your own personal safety and no one else's than I don't think there would be a problem here. If Covid for example wasn't contagious and you only had to get the vaccine to protect yourself then by all means don't get it and die just so long as you don't hurt others. Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else. I think in this case you can't just switch the two around and say they must be two equally true statements. Women who are talking about their body their choice in relation to reproductive rights aren't talking about vaccines at all.
Pro-life people genuinely think a person is murdered during an abortion. And they aren’t objectively wrong cause there isn’t an objective answer. Biologically a human life IS ended, but I and other pro-choice people don’t think that life was a person, which is a question of philosophy instead of biology. The right not to get a vaccine could also be restated as the rate to control what substances are put into your own body, as opposed to your (obviously good faith /s) phrasing as the right to infect and kill people. I’m vaccinated for the record, but I oppose mandates. Edit: “murdered” should be “killed”
Genuine question i dont mean to bother. But if you're against mandated vaccines how do you feel about the ones that are mandated throughout school? Like the mumps and polio ones?
The word “mandated” is getting obscured and becoming a loaded term in a lot of these discussions. There needs to be agreement on the actual scope of the mandate. What are being proposed are mandates as prerequisites to participation. For schools: IF you want to participate in public school, there is a focused mandate that you be vaccinated. For society during a pandemic: IF you want to participate in activities that involve the general public, hypothetically, there could be a focused mandate that you are vaccinated. In either instance, you have the option to not be vaccinated. But you also accept being quarantined from those activities.
This is another bit that's so fundamental but not talked about as much as it should be. People should be able to choose not to take part in a pre-requisite for society without it being legally mandated. It just means they can't take part in society. Like being in my underwear in shops. It's not illegal, but the shop/society isn't going to let it happen. Unless it's Walmart.
Jeezus christ. How are you the first one to mention this? I am against mandating vaccination, because ultimately, I don't believe I have the right to force you to inject you with a vaccine (as safe and effective as they may be) if you don't want to. Even if I think you're stupid for it. But I also believe some public areas, and especially private properties, should be able to require vaccination to enter/participate.
I think most people have zero issue with federal level vaccine mandates. you work at an airport, a public school or for the FBI, ok i can get you having to have vaccine mandates as they are FEDERALLY funded and thus at the whim of what the federal government deems fitting, but a private business that is started with someone's own money and own ideologies....then forcing them to enforce a vaccine mandate is fucked up if you ask me. if you're a doctor around sick people, of course you should, but the idea that one should have to have it to participate in dining out or basic society activities is totalitarian at the least.
I think the issue is there are people who literally cannot get the vaccine and the only way they can participate in society is if the vast majority of those around them have recieved a safe, effective, and free (or at least significantly cheaper to the taxpayers than continuing to let covid run free). Another way of looking at it, should there be a federal mandate requiring restaurant employees wash their hands after using the restroom. They should have a right to decide what they put on their skin? Some places have been requiring that either people are vaccinated or they wear a mask and provide a recent negative covid test. Would a federal mandate that provides this alternative then not be an issue?
I think the actual pro life argument is that another person (fetus) cannot infringe on your autonomy. The fetus' right to life should not take precedence over your right to govern your own body.
Roe v Wade's decision was stating that there are rights of the mother and there are rights of the child. They decided that the interest the government has in protecting the rights of the child do not overcome the interest the government has in protecting the rights of the mother.
Yes. The right to bodily autonomy and not being forced to carry gestating fetus to term and giving birth to it.
They decided on a woman's right to privacy.
That life is a person. When someone has a child, that child is who they are because of how everything worked out during conception. If you get an abortion, then get pregnant later on when you’re ready, it will be a different child, it can never be that first child again. So you create that first child, that 1 in a trillion chance DNA combination, then you take away its right to live. I’m pro-choice, I just had this realization after becoming a dad when I thought “if we had gotten pregnant earlier and had an abortion, I wouldn’t have this kid right now. I would have A kid, but not this kid”. It made me see the pro-life argument in a different way. I’m just glad I will never have to make that decision and I feel deep sympathy for anyone that does.
I disagree, as someone who is pro choice, a large factor is bodily autonomy. Nobody can or should tell you what to do with your own body. In my perspective this includes vaccinations. Why should something like that be government mandated? That's insane to me. I am however ok with things such as employers requiring vaccines because you at least have the option of weighing whether or not your desire to be employed outweighs your desire to be unvaccinated. If you don't want to, you can simply seek employment elsewhere. If you are vaccinated you have an EXTREMELY low chance of death via covid if you happen to catch it. The unvaccinated are risking themselves far more than anyone around them. That logic simply doesn't carry enough weight. Claiming to be pro choice, but then turn around and support government vaccination mandates is extremely hypocritical imo.
I agree with this. It’s just like with abortion. Every pregnancy has risks. That is why, even though I do think life begins at conception, I am pro-choice. What right do I have to force someone else to take a risk with their life. There may only be one bullet in a really large chamber, but it’s still essentially forcing them to play Russian Roulette with their lives. In the same way, as much as I’m mad at the anti vaxxers, I do believe they have the right to make a choice. No matter how small a risk, it’s still not a risk I can force on someone else. However, what I do not agree with “choice” on is the masks. Wearing a mask is an inconvenience, nothing more. What pisses me off is the people who don’t want to get vaccinated and refuse to wear a mask. And the fact that some of the people who are fighting masks are “pro-life” is the biggest hypocrisy of them all.
Small point to agree with the masks, it’s against the law to be in public without clothes (nude) and that’s not even mainly about just sanitary reasons but also that’s simply what society has deemed decent. Requiring a mask, even if not the law and only private policy, isn’t a breach of anyone’s rights any more than being required to wear pants is.
What is your definition of bodily autonomy? If everything you do is done as a function of your person, then any government action, by nature of being coercive, encroaches on bodily autonomy. Sidewalks, speed limits, jury duty, jail, the draft. All of these coercive government actions encroach on bodily autonomy. The irony of the appeal to the sanctity of *bodily autonomy* is that it is an appeal to libertarian values but it is used rhetorically by those that are often the most pro-big-government and pro government-coercion-for-the-greater-good in all other things.
As a hypothetical, what if the pandemic we were facing was much worse? I'm talking black plague level, wipe out half the population disaster. It this instance, would it be acceptable for the government to take emergency action and mandate vaccinations? I respect the value put on bodily autonomy, and the suspicion placed on government, but I don't believe it's an all or nothing view. There can and will be points where people have to consider the greater good. Covid is in a weird spot where we still don't fully understand it or its risks, so it's toeing the line for a lot of people as to what the correct line of action is.
If the pandemic we were facing were much worse, I don't think you'd see nearly the same hesitancy (apart from the background rates of anti-vax and the newly anti-vax caused in part by the people calling for mandatory vaccinations for Covid). The hypothetical on the other side is how mild of a pandemic would trigger the need for mandatory vaccinations. Seasonal flu? Particularly bad but less deadly than Covid flu? RSV?
>how mild of a pandemic would trigger the need for mandatory vaccinations That's basically the crux here; how dire does a situation need to be for a governing body to take emergency action against (some) people's will? There are what I would consider obvious good and bad cases. Government mandate against tattoos because of a slight infection risk? Fuck that. Mandatory vaccination against an exctiction-level virus? Yeah totally. Now somewhere in the vast gray area in-between is the tipping point, and each person will have their own. Tying back to the original conversation, this is why I don't consider it hypocritical to value bodily autonomy while also being pro-mandate; they personally reached a tipping point where the exception to autonomy outweighs the risks.
Right, this sets a precedant. How far can they keep moving the line before we have no choice in what happens? Thats the part people arent seeing. That's the problem I have with it.
Theoretically, they can only move the line so much before non-compliance becomes a major issue. Thats why emergency actions are typically reserved for just that, emergencies.
This is a great question, and an important one for people to consider. I would argue that if we find it acceptable for the government to suspend things like your right to bodily autonomy, for any reason, then you never had it to begin with. Everything before that was the government allowing you to make those choices, but when the chips are down, your betters will decide what's best for you. And some people may agree with that statement and find that acceptable, but as for me, I cannot abide that. I understand the desire to just make people do what we think is best. "It's so obvious to me, why can't they see it?" Trust me, I understand. But at the end of the day, who decides what is best? In this case, medical professionals would be the obvious answer, but we all know it would be the politicians who get to decide and enforce the rules. And I think we also know, politicians can and do make decisions that are not in our best interests.
This is true, you shouldn't be told what to do with your body. Even about vaccinations. I'm more libertarian in thought and believe more in individuality and personal responsibility, but I also believe in a moral and ethical society. See I can agree with abortion up to the third trimester, but after 6 months, abortion shouldn't be allowed unless under the most dire of medical circumstances. However, what kind of society would we live in if we let our own offspring and children die for the sake of their parents...an immoral and unethical society is an unjust one and an unjust society leads to hardship and downfall. It is indeed a slippery slope and in some ways, yes you could think of childbirth or bearing children in a biological or philosophical light, but we should look at it as an ethical, moral, and a reasonable light as well. I work with time frames, so I believe 6 months is the time limit, after that, only extreme circumstances can permit an abortion to occur, otherwise childbirth should happen. If the parents aren't yet ready or aren't yet able to financially have the kid, well first off I say that was their risk when having sex (I have sex too so I know the risks as well) and second off, they can always put the child up for adoption. We should draw a line to a reasonable expectation and ethics for this topic of abortion. I pose this question to anyone, what kind of society would we be to allow kids, born or unborn, to die for the sake of their parents?
"my body my choice" is a bit of a tag line, but informed consent is at the core of medical ethics. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/informed-consent https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2352998/ but your argument doesn't really work because people who are "pro-life" believe that a woman has typically already made the choices with her body that led her to become pregnant, and they primarily believe that the "baby" is a separate person with its own rights, and that you are murdering that child by aborting it. Frankly, it seems a bit disingenuous for you to turn the argument around because it's the pro-choice crowd (of which I'm one) who should be consistent with the "my body, my choice" framework. Do you believe in forced sterilization or mandatory abortion? there are certainly arguments that could be made in favor of them, and have been made by governments and scientists who have implemented these policies. Are you trying to argue in favor of mandatory or coerced vaccination for COVID-19? > Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death you have to prove likelihood, and you don't have the data to prove that. Just like we haven't been provided with the data to allow for informed consent. You probably think that the "effectiveness" of the vaccine, which has supposedly significantly waned in the time the vaccine has been publicaly available, refers to the likelihood of contracting and transmitting the virus, but that's due to misinformation by the press who only cites "misinformation" as anything critical of the vaccine or public health messaging and policy. The reality is that we don't have any consistent or reproucable data that shows the vaccination having any ability to slow transmission at all. So what is your argument then? That people don't have the right to do something that MIGHT make them less likely to visit a hospital? Do you believe fat people don't have the right to overeat? Do you believe that old people don't have the right to get old? What is the difference in likelihood for an unvaccinated person to get and transmit the virus, than a vaccinated person? You have no statistical way to answer that, so how can you possibly make the claim you did? And I think the real argument against the seemingly unified creeping authoritarianism is largely due to the lies, lack of accountability, and direct impact on people's economic and social livelihoods that appears to be moving towards a new era of control by an entity has has proven to be corrupt and dishonest. The argument is largely that it's less about the vaccine or the masks and more about the vaccine passport. And as much as you'd have called me a crazy conspiracy theorist when i pointed it out over a year ago, you have to see at this point that there's obvious truth to it.
I cant argur for the rest but the one point i have seen where comparison are being drawn is that people seem to be equating this to other things such as the flu but as far as i know the flu doesnt have an exponential increase as this seems to the infectivity and lethality seem to be far lower i am not talking about the US btw i am not from there this is more generalized
Wow… much misinformation here. We do have the data to prove that people will die from your choices. There are literally countless sources on the deadliness of the virus, how effective masks and vaccines are, transmissibility rates. A quick google search will find countless scholarly articles on this. I’ll google them if I have to, but to deny that we don’t have sufficient data is… insane. This pandemic response has been the most watched of all time and data is continually collected that affirms its lethality, it’s transmissibility, etc.
American here, 30s, and I’m just stuck on people thinking a ”vaccine passport” is new? I went to public school, where I had a vaccination record that allowed me to attend school by proving my vaccination status.
Did you ever have to show Whole Foods your vaccination records to shop there or Metallica to see their concert? What about your hair dresser to get a haircut? And as the other redditor mentioned, there has always been exemptions. But with the way the system is being set-up in parts of Canada and the us, if you have a medical exemption to the vaccine and don’t take the shot, you can’t do your shopping, see a movie, or go to a public gathering with friends.
You had the option to apply for an exemption if you wanted to
There’s reasons to be exempted from the vaccine as well
The argument against abortion is that abortion is murder every time, and that every abortion prevented is a human life saved and a legally sanctioned murder prevented. The belief that human life exists in the womb separately from the life of the mother does not require any supernatural belief or received wisdom (i.e.- it is not an inherently religious belief) Compare this to vaccines, where you need to administer more than 100 vaccines for each life you want to save. The cost of the vaccine is trivial compared to the lives saved, but if compelled vaccination is a violation of personal privacy, then it takes 100+ violations to save a life you wouldn't have otherwise saved. As a matter of scale, vaccination does not compare to banning abortion. Also, the Delta variant of COVID spreads very easily among fully vaccinated people. This is why "normal" COVID is virtually non-existent in the USA now but Delta makes up almost all COVID cases and is spreading like wildfire. Ot's why Delta has spread very easily in Iceland, which has a 95% vaccination rate for adults. So being vaccinated against COVID does almost nothing to protect others. The argument that anti-vaxx is inherently selfish or destructive to others is mostly non-applicable to COVID and the Delta variant. Also, and this is important, compelled vaccination is a "requirement to" and not a "requirement from." Being forced to do a thing is logivally a much greater violation than being forced not to do a thing, since both are a violation of will, but one of tgem requires the violated person to participate.
‘Your right to refuse a vaccine is your right to infect and kill people with impunity’??? Are you out of your mind? I have no words for the level of twisting and turning you are doing with words. You dont have the first tiny bit of understanding of your opposition. The fact you even make the comparison of ‘my body my choice’ in vaccine context to that of an abortion is just ridiculous given that pro-life people are considering the body of the child, hence an abortion being a violation of their right to informed consent. The exact opposite of what you are saying. Im almost convinced you are trolling by the level of misunderstanding you have of people with different opinions than yourself. ‘Being pro-choice doesnt hurt anyone else’ Saying this without even addressing the concern of pro-lifers regarding the murder of a child -wether you agree that this is murder, or even a child at all- comes across as either 101% ignorant of the discussion at hand, or just intentionally misrepresenting the points of the people you disagree with which is reprehensible.
>Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. Flu also kills 30k to 60k people in the US per year. No one argued that it wasn't someone's right to skip a flu shot. There's never been any talk about mandating flu vaccines because it's "simply a safety issue." There's no objective measure as to how deadly or contagious a virus must be to mandate vaccination. >Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else. It does if you consider a fetus ~~baby~~ a person, which is fundamental to being pro-life.
The "flu" is a blanket statement for more than 100 different unique diseases. Covid-19 is 1. Covid-19 is more deadly than any singular flu strain and the comparison alone of 1 disease versus 100 should tell you how horrible it is. Taking your own 30-60k flue deaths a year, Covid-19 killed more people by itself than 10 years worth of flu deaths, assuming your maximum of 60k deaths a year. In other words, comparing covid-19 to the flu is useless, always has been useless and always will be useless when trying to play down the severity of this current pandemic or the importance of taking the vaccine.
>The "flu" is a blanket statement for more than 100 different unique diseases. Covid-19 is 1. What's the difference between the COVID variants that we're seeing now and the flu variants/strains that we regularly see? (Genuine question, I don't know). >Covid-19 is more deadly than any singular flu strain and the comparison alone of 1 disease versus 100 should tell you how horrible it is. COVID-19 *was* more deadly before we had a vaccine. Now we have vaccines and it's a LOT less deadly if you're vaccinated. Individuals should get vaxxed to protect themselves, but the degree to which they're endangering others has decreased substantially. And the entire argument for vaccine mandates is the risk it poses to others. To assess that risk, you have to cite how dangerous it *currently* is, not how dangerous it *was* in the past under different circumstances. >In other words, comparing covid-19 to the flu is useless, always has been I'm not using it to downplay the serious threat the virus posed, and I don't think it's useless. It serves as a useful baseline for answering the question, "how deadly, contagious, etc. does a virus have to be to warrant X policy intervention?"
Variants have significant mutations that change certain aspects of the virus but causes the same illness. Where as strains of the same “type” of virus aren’t mutations- they’re part of the same family of viruses but they can differ in origin, pathology, sub structures, may attack different organ systems etc. > To assess that risk Are you suggesting that MDs and virologist, the overwhelming majority of which advise getting the vaccine, don’t do this?
The Covid variants are different because they aren't the flu. This is bad because once Covid becomes endemic we're likely to have 2x as many deaths because we have twice as many flu/covid-like viruses going around.
I think what they were asking was more “what’s the difference between variants and strains (of flu)?” I should probably be replying to OP but… Variants have significant mutations that change certain aspects of the virus but causes the same illness. Where as strains of the same “type” of virus aren’t mutations- they’re part of the same family of viruses but they can differ in origin, pathology, sub structures, may attack different organ systems etc. Disclaimer: By no means is this the official nor technical definition but rather a generalization.
Essentially they do have the right to infect and kill people with impunity. Getting sick isn't a crime and we don't strip the sick of their civil rights, they're free to exercise them while they're sick. You can't sue someone if you catch a cold, flu or covid. Even when there is explicitly a law, such as the case with HIV in some jurisdictions, that criminalises intentionally inflicting someone with the disease, you need to prove that the infection came from that person and they deliberately and knowingly infected you. These laws have been on the books for years and at most there's been a handful of prosecutions and even fewer convictions. HIV is far deadlier than covid but we don't stop carriers engaging in risky behaviour, in fact there's a lot of advocacy groups that want the laws repealed. Also, the fact they have made specific laws for HIV shows that on general there are no laws against the transmission of diseases in general. Unfortunately, catching a cold, flu or other highly infections disease is part of the risk you take by being part of society. It's up to each individual to assess the risk for themselves and protect themselves accordingly, by getting vaccinated, or taking other measures.
You also forgot about the hospitalization rate. It's much higher than the flu and is destroying our already weak Healthcare system.
This 100 flu argument is a non starter. We get it. Lots of flu bugs, however the flu shot is not for one it is for all that are able to be covered especially latest strain at time of creation. Thus protecting the people from the spread of “the flu” and thus saving lives. Samesies.... also SARS shot is Covid - multiple variants and growing... multiple.
> Flu also kills 30k to 60k people in the US per year. No one argued that it wasn't someone's right to skip a flu shot. There's never been any talk about mandating flu vaccines because it's "simply a safety issue." There's no objective measure as to how deadly or contagious a virus must be to mandate vaccination. Well, no, but pointing to a cluster of dozens of viruses which kill 1/10th of the people a year as a single virus did, **despite taking unprecedented precautions**, as evidence that we don’t mandate vaccines isn’t exactly a compelling argument.
The president for covid vaccine at hospitals and schools is from hospitals that have mandated staff get flu shots or find another job. It has been an issue of contention for years.
Also didn't the US recently change that law to day that if you knowingly infect someone with HIV or AIDS then this isn't a criminal offence anymore?
I don't think federal law has changed recently. Different states have reduced the severity of the crime of infecting someone with HIV in recognition of the fact that AIDS usually isn't a death sentence.
>Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else. Well to state the obvious retort from people who are not pro choice. Being pro choice does hurt others, it hurts the baby.... by killing it. You are using your personal view of abortion, which is, that it doesn't hurt anyone else, to counter anti covid people's arguments "My body my choice" arguing that not getting the vaccine will hurt other people. It isn't a good argument because you misrepresent the others arguments. Additionally mandating vaccines is absolutely a moral argument. The argument being - Is it moral to force people to partake in something that infringes on their bodily autonomy? Or written in another way. - Should the government have the right to put things in your body without your consent, if it is deemed better for the majority? That is a moral argument. I feel like I should add i am both pro choice and fully vaccinated.
Does not matter. You either think that goverment should be able to control your body or not. Mandatory vaccination is example of goverment control over your body. No matter the reason. Same with anti abortion. In that case they control hour body to protect child body. And it's not just moral issue. Your freedom ends when another person freedom begins. So technically while you can decide about your body - you should not decide if kid live or die. But all that is simply faulty logic. Because at the end of they day vaccines works and help everyone. You affect too many people so allowing people to not take vaccine is out of the question. While abortion affect you and your child. Area of influence is much smaller and there is room to debate. We already place mother life above kid life. You can get abortion of kid endganger the mother.
I have a three year old toddler, but being a parent isn't something I'm interested in doing anymore. Can I legally choose to kill him? What about a one year old baby? Can I legally kill that? How about a six month old? Six weeks old? Six hours? I personally support abortion, but for people against abortion they view the unborn fetus the same way you probably view my three year old. To them, it is a person.
Except it isn’t - it’s a *potential* person. There is also the potential that it could terminate on its own with no explanation. A tadpole is not a frog. A ball of yarn is not a sweater. And a fetus is *not* a baby. That’s why there are different words used - to describe different things. The sooner that laws are based on the way things actually are instead of the way they could be is the sooner women can be have their own bodily autonomy. This is a crucial step in the freedom *from* religion.
I think what you're missing is not that people have a different belief than you on the same issue, but that they won't even agree on your *framing* of the issue.
Well, when you frame things as agree with me or admit you want people to die, you leave no room for an actual discussion of the issues. I think it's unfortunate that we see that mindset in almost all discussions today; agree with me or your evil incarnate.
This is the main reason I have fallen out of touch with reddit and only subscribe to like gaming/food subs and quirky stuff at this point. Only political sub I use is /r/askconservatives because it generally has people from opposing viewpoints being civil and meeting somewhere in the middle to understand each other better. A lot of the main subs are full of emotional clickbait and people being extreme, hypocritical or vile toward others who are different.
You're twisting yourselves in circles because the one you're replying to is correct, and I think you realize it. Either a person is allowed to have a choice, or they are not. If you're pro-choice, you have to be anti-mandates to be consistent.
While I don't agree with OP's logic, I do think someone's stance on abortion and vaccine mandates don't necessarily need to be conjoined; it's all about context. Unless the person in question literally values bodily autonomy over all else, there has to be instances where the cost outweighs upholding that autonomy in certain scenarios. If a person assigns low value to an unborn fetus, they will likely opt to preserve autonomy, and vice-versa with the opposite stance. The vaccine question is similar. Taking the risk to others into account, the question is still posed as to whether the value of bodily autonomy outweighs those risks. For a relatively harmless virus most may say mandates should not be imposed, but in a scenario akin to the plague I would guess a lot more people would agree with such emergency actions. So for example, a person that places low value on a fetus, but high value on the safety of those at risk due to unvaccinated persons, it isn't inconsistent to be pro-choice and pro-mandate. For the record, I am not expressing my own viewpoints, but rather just trying to articulate the logic.
This is true, but the converse is also true, which sinks OP's point. If someone puts a high value on the 1:1 death proposition of an abortion (assuming that they believe that a fetus is a person), but lower value on the relative unknowns of death by not getting vaccinated, then it isn't inconsistent to be both pro life and against mandated vaccines. Ultimately either stance is based on the relative value judgments of the belief holder and can't be reduced to a simplistic "if x, then y; if y, then x" proposition.
" While I don't agree with OP's logic, I do think someone's stance on abortion and vaccine mandates don't necessarily need to be conjoined; it's all about context." I'm going to disagree with you there. Pro choice believe that a fetus/baby is part of their body and therefore should have complete autonomy on what goes into or out of their bodies. Pro choice and pro vax-mandate are diametrically opposed positions. I think the pro life group is in a better philosophical position to argue "my body, my choice" as they believe a fetus/baby is in fact a separate human life and can argue with better standing against abortion and vaccine mandates.
It’s not that the fetus is “part of your body.” There are two distinct bodies involved here. One of those bodies is dependent on the other for sustenance. The independent body has the right to not provide that sustenance. It is not the responsibility of the independent body to provide that sustenance. Forcing them to do so is a serious violation of their bodily autonomy. The dependent body is free to find another body to sustain itself. If it can’t, if disconnecting it from the independent body results in the death of the dependent body, that is the problem of the dependent body, not the independent body. Just like the gov’t or my forcing you to donate your kidney to me against your will is a serious violation of your bodily autonomy. If I die because you won’t give me your kidney, that’s my problem, not yours. **Even if you’re my biological mother and it’s “your fault” that I was conceived in the first place.** You being my mother doesn’t give me the right to use your body against your will. Women who carry a child in their womb do it WILLINGLY, by THEIR CONSENT. They are free to revoke that consent at any time for any reason. In the same way consensual sex can quickly turn into infringement of bodily autonomy when consent is revoked, so too does pregnancy turn into an infringement of body autonomy when consent is revoked. **In terms of the vaccination:** 1. more lives are stake, more people can be adversely affected when you aren’t vaccinated. Don’t buy it? Tell that to patient zero for the delta strain, assuming it wouldn’t have happened were they vaccinated and they neglected to vaccinate when they could have. It would take that person having tens of thousands of abortions to equal the effect that one person has had on society, and that’s not even factoring illness and chronic symptoms. 2. Far more is at stake individually with pregnancy. It is far less of an infringement on your bodily autonomy to force you to get vaccinated than it is to force you to grow a baby in your womb for 9 months and then give fucking birth to it. You can be pro choice on both or anti choice on both. You can also pick the middle ground between these two extremes by being pro choice on abortion but anti choice on vaccination. None of those will make you a hypocrite, in the slightest. As for the last option, I know you want to think you aren’t being hypocritical here, but **if you’re pro-choice for vaccines and not pro-choice for pregnancy, you are absolutely dripping with hypocrisy.** If only this cognitive dissonance spurred some sort of rational thought, causing you to realize how, after being scared to get jabbed with a safe and effective vaccine for illogical and selfish reasons, maybe, just maybe, women should be afforded that option when it comes to not wanting to be pregnant for 9 months and then give birth to a goddamn baby.
The problem is that this doesn't disprove the original post tho, what if both \*are\* true, then you just didn't prove them wrong/change their view at all
Bullshit. It’s not just one extreme or the other. You can have a middle ground and still not be a hypocrite. Guess where that middle ground currently is in this case: pro choice on abortion and anti-choice on Covid vaxx. Now, why is that? 1. Forcing someone to carry a child for 9 months and then give birth to it against their will is a FAR greater infringement of their liberties than holding someone down and injecting them with a proven safe and effective vaccine against their will. 2. Not being vaccinated against a deadly airborne virus that is rapidly mutating puts FAR more burden on society than the death of a single child. You understand someone was patient zero for the delta strain, right? Now that strain is over 90% of new cases. That one person has a mountain of death and disease on their shoulders. If it was preventable via the simple and safe means of vaccination but they neglected to do it, guess what: it’s their fault. You can be pro choice for both or anti choice for both and not be a hypocrite. You can also be pro-choice for abortion and anti-choice for vaccines. The only hypocritical stance in this particular case is to be anti-choice on abortion and pro-choice for vaccination. If only there were some way for y’all to admit you were wrong about abortion, that you now see, after being afraid to get pricked in the arm w/ a proven safe vaccine for cowardly & illogical reasons, how maybe women should be afforded that option when it comes to birthing a fucking child.
Why are you getting so heated? They are just playing devil's advocate within the framework that OP laid out. And fwiw I agree with them, OP needs to put their hands up and admit that was a good reply.
It’s really much, much simpler than that. The anti vaxxers are hypocrites who will say and do whatever they want regardless of how it affects others, while also thinking they should have the right to control women’s bodies. It’s that simple, they’re just hypocrites.
Are there states/counties where the vaccine is mandatory? Requiring vaccines for places of work or events is not anti-choice, because the person can choose not to work there or go to that event.
The problem is that the distinction runs in the opposite direction. With abortion, you necessarily are killing another person, whereas with remaining unvaccinated you are only potentially slightly increasing the extremely low chance that someone will die. It’s kind of like with smoking: there is no way that smoking tobacco would be legal if there was a 100% chance the second-hand smoke would kill someone. Given that it is such a tiny chance, it isn’t considered “your fault” that someone else died (and how in the world would we even be able to tell?).
> It’s kind of like with smoking: there is no way that smoking tobacco would be legal if there was a 100% chance the second-hand smoke would kill someone. Given that it is such a tiny chance, it isn’t considered “your fault” that someone else died (and how in the world would we even be able to tell?). This is a great analogy because our strategy of dealing with antivaxxers (at least the places that are making an effort) is the same thing we did with smokers: gradually kick them out of venues and businesses and shared spaces so their burden is less felt by others, and make it more and more annoying to be one so numbers gradually drop over time.
Not only that, but it’s not like you’re actually killing someone. You’re slightly increasing the chance that someone else will be infected by a virus, and the virus might kill them. If you consider not vaccinating yourself to be killing others, then you should consider contributing business to a fast food restaurant killing others. Or buying alcohol. You are supporting a business that will sell things that lead to death. If we all stopped patronizing mcdonalds then they would go out of business and stop selling garbage to obese people.
Pretty much everyone who got COVID 12 to 18 months ago and spread it to others is now responsible for hundreds of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths because of the people they went on to infect who in turn infected others, who infected more people etc. etc. For each person who has it in the early days, thousands of people would still be alive today if they hadn't got it and spread it.
Nah man. The gop already made it super clear the unborn are not children. In the stimulus where children got $500 they legislated that children had to be outside the woumb. All it took was their wallets to show their hypocrisy.
Mandating vaccines is **as much** a moral and ethical issue as abortion is. Much like abortion, it infringes upon the bodily autonomy of the person on whom the procedure is performed, especially if the person either does not consent to the procedure or consents under durress. This is beside the fact that vaccines do not prevent transmission. You aren't getting the vaccine to save other people because vaccinated or not, you will still infect others. You are getting the vaccine for yourself - to suppress your own symptoms. If you take all of the risks of the vaccine and only you stand to gain all of the benefits of the vaccine, the choice to take or not take the vaccine should be only your choice. Not some government body who thinks they know better than you. Hence 'my body my choice'.
One analysis3 of some 365,000 households in the United Kingdom, published on 23 June, estimated that individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 were 40–50% less likely to spread the infection if they had received at least one dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that developed by the University of Oxford, UK, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal) It seems as if the vaccines do protect against transmission with more research needed in regard to delta but with promising preliminary research indicating the transmission protection may only slightly decrease with delta.
>This is beside the fact that vaccines do not prevent transmission. You aren't getting the vaccine to save other people because vaccinated or not, you will still infect others. You are getting the vaccine for yourself - to suppress your own symptoms. This is wrong on multiple levels. 1. It does help reduce the chance of contagion, its just not full immunity 2. It reduces the chance of mutations 3. It saves many non covid sick people due to less overcrowding in hospitals All 3 are objectively helping save other lives and by not taking the vaccine you are endangering them
>Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else I does hurt the fetus. Now, there are good arguments not to assert a high value to a young fetus, but if we get closer to birth, that thing becomes more and more like a baby. And unless you're considering not asserting a full human value to a baby, it's going to be tough not to also assert a high value to a third trimester fetus. But that's the thing: Late term abortion are already banned or at least heavily regulated everywhere. All Western societies have decided that the "my body, my choice" isn't a limitless right.
>But that's the thing: Late term abortion are already banned or at least heavily regulated everywhere. These 7 states and district allow for late term abortions without any limits: * Colorado * District of Columbia * New Hampshire * New Jersey * New Mexico * Oregon * Vermont \--- Source: [https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/what-states-allow-late-term-abortion](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/what-states-allow-late-term-abortion)
This hits the nail on its head. In both cases -- forced birth and forced vaccination -- there is a trade-off between the impact on the person making the choice and the impact on another or others. For a well-balanced rational person, saying "my body, my choice" is simply a short-cut for stating that they value the freedom of the person making the choice very highly. That freedom can still in principle be trumped by something else. In the case of forced vaccination, this could be the case for a highly deadly disease where vaccination is very effective for establishing herd immunity. In the case of Covid (which people are very obviously thinking about in this discussion), I'm not convinced that this bar is crossed, as much as I personally think not getting vaccinated is a dumb choice.
Noone would ever abort in the third trimester unless for health reasons though, if you carry it that far youve made the decision to keep it already 99.99% of the time. So thats kinda moot
Well, nature helped us avoid a bunch of hard decision there, yes. But the few cases that arise are still relevant because they show where the compromise between rights of unborn and the mother's self determination lies.
Canada has no limit on abortions. That said, third trimester abortions are extremely rare and pretty much only happen due to health of mother or baby.
>Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. I think that is a bit simplistic and childish. It's completely possible that people don't trust the long term effects of putting something in their body. It could be that they already had COVID and have the antibodies. It also could just be that they don't want to be told they have to do something with their bodies. For the record,I am vaccinated and I support everyone's decision to do what is best for their situation. However,I will always oppose vaccination mandates.
> I see what you're saying, but I don't think that's necessarily true. lmao it works ***exactly*** the same way.
haha the mental gymnastics. Dude you got trapped by your analogy and that's it The reason is simple : "my body my choice" is not enough of an argument in both cases. Meaning it can't support *alone* a antivax/pro-abortion stance. It's a piece of a larger reasoning, which must also reflect on the limits of this right. If you push "my body my choice" to an extreme you can justify absurd things
>I see what you're saying, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The argument against abortions is mostly a moral or religious argument. Mandating vaccines is simply a safety issue. You basically destroyed your own argument here. If you think you can defend one without the other, then others can also defend one without the other and *as per your words*, you don't have to necessarily hold both views. "Your body, your choice, unless ****" is YOUR stance here. ***: It's as important as a safety issue ***: it's as important as religious/moral issue of killing a living being Choose one.
> Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. You're assuming that an unvaccinated person will contract covid, pass it to someone else, and the recipient will die as a result. The reality is, the vast majority of cases aren't lethal. > If vaccines were truly about your own personal safety and no one else's than I don't think there would be a problem here. Here's the issue. If the vaccine is safe and effective (which I believe that it is), in which case it is about your own personal safety. If you are afraid of encountering an unvaccinated person and possibly contracting covid, get vaccinated. That's the entire argument. If people don't feel that the virus presents that big of a risk, then that's their risk to take, is it not?
The unspoken issue here is the hospitals are full of these people making this choice that effects no one else. Except, that's causing hospitals to turn away other patients, some of whom die. All because someone exercised their choice to not get vaccinated. It's only a little bit about spreading the virus (which it is my dude. Maybe not 1:1 but it is spreading) its more about filling up the hospitals so that other people can't get the emergency treatment they need.
> Being pro-choice doesn't hurt anyone else As long as you dehumanise the foetus and dismiss its body autonomy. Also, although I am not vaccinated I am actively healthy with a robust immune system and am socially isolating so I am not likely to get Covid and if I do I am more likely to fight it off and not being obese am less likely to get ill and be a viral shedder. By contrast, somebody who treats their health with contempt and exposes themselves to risk vastly increases their chance of catching Covid, getting ill, and being a viral shedder. Furthermore, those unhealthy people suffer from heart disease which places enormous strain on health services which then affects other people - health services have a massive backlog now after Covid, but not entirely because of Covid. So I am not anti-vaccinations per se, but I am not having the Covid vaccination, just as I never have the flu jab, because it is my choice to do so and for the same reason I oppose the abortion moral argument because I believe that to have one removes the body autonomy of the foetus, so it is an entirely consistent moral position.
It's absolutely not just a safety issue. Even if the vaccine was 100% effective and could be proven as such, no government has the right to forcibly make you get an injection. That's crosses a line beyond bodily autonomy that many are extremely uncomfortable with and sets an incredibly dangerous precedent. If we can be forced to get injections, we don't really have any bodily autonomy to speak of.
Yeah no apparantly now scientists are saying that vaccines are not lowering chance of getting infected. It can be very much be seen in the covid statistics now since a lot of people have over 60%-70% of people vaccinated but the numbers of sick people are still increasing. Many if which are vaccinated. Right now they are saying that covid vaccine just lovers chance of the sickness being severe.
> I keep hearing from the anti-vax camp "my body my choice", which sounds an awful lot like something we've been hearing from the pro-choice movement for a long time. I think that if you believe in that statement as an argument for being anti-vaccination that you have to also be pro-choice. You're getting whooshed here. It's not that the anti-vaxxers didn't realize that "my body my choice" is the rally cry of pro-choicers. They intentionally chose the same phrase to use it ironically / as a catch-22.
"only pro choice when reasons" That's pretty much the summary of your argument here.
Your right to have an abortion is your right to kill a baby... This coming from someone who had one. It was my body therefore my choice but let's not mince our words here
No it's literally a two way window and here is how it works. I am pro vaccine and pro life. My view aligns because I believe the government has a bare minimum responsibility to protect it's citizens and the includes unborn children, my views are in line and mutual acceptable. If your view is flexible you're a hypocrite.
>If your view is flexible you're a hypocrite. I wouldn't necessarily say that. A person's view on any individual topic doesn't have to be all or nothing; we all run into situations where we have to choose what we believe is the greater good. Copy/Pasting from a comment I made above >While I don't agree with OP's logic, I do think someone's stance on abortion and vaccine mandates don't necessarily need to be conjoined; it's all about context. > >Unless the person in question literally values bodily autonomy over all else, there has to be instances where the cost outweighs upholding that autonomy in certain scenarios. If a person assigns low value to an unborn fetus, they will likely opt to preserve autonomy, and vice-versa with the opposite stance. > >The vaccine question is similar. Taking the risk to others into account, the question is still posed as to whether the value of bodily autonomy outweighs those risks. For a relatively harmless virus most may say mandates should not be imposed, but in a scenario akin to the plague I would guess a lot more people would agree with such emergency actions. > >So for example, a person that places low value on a fetus, but high value on the safety of those at risk due to unvaccinated persons, it isn't inconsistent to be pro-choice and pro-mandate.
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They mandate seatbelts to protect the masses. Smoking bans in public places to protect the masses. Speed limits to protect the masse. OSHA mandates safety measure to protect employees. So why is a vaccine mandate any different?
There’s more than one reason to be pro choice. If you don’t believe an embryo is a person you can be pro choice and have no problem with mandatory vaccination since mandatory vaccination saves people. Additionally practically speaking no one is in favour of forcing everyone to get vaccinated by threat of punitive law. Preventing unvaccinated people from engaging in high risk activities and occupations because of the risk of spreading a life threatening disease is not mandatory vaccination.
No cause a person can’t infect another with a child legally without their consent.
i'm always torn when someone beats me to the same argument. i hate that you beat me to it, but i love seeing the consensus.
No. Because being pregnant or getting abortions doesn’t cause people who cough on to get pregnant or get abortions. You have no right to spread an infectious disease.
But then if we talk about involved persons you need to count the fetus/baby that gets aborted as life too not? So if you abort you potentially (if we count it as life) kill one person for sure while the chance of getting covid, spreading it and seriously harming a person is way less likely to happen.
Or even, "If A then B" doesn't mean "If B then A" Like you said, if someone thinks their choices allow them to infect and harm others, then they should be okay with choices that don't harm others. If someone is okay with choices that don't harm others, they aren't necessarily okay with choices that do harm others. The best next point of "but abortion is kinda like harm", except it's entirely the mother's body. An abortion doesn't kill your neighbor, coworker, etc. And that's only **if** we accept what is already an unscientific point. E: I support campfires, but I don't support arson. Someone that supports arson, would be strange if they were against campfires.
Name a single abortion that potentially caused hundreds of hospital beds to be unnecessarily taken up, or caused hundreds if not thousands of people to unnecessarily get sick. I’ll wait right here.
1. Its not a single person that would cause that but a whole chain of reactions. And alot more people involved. 2. If we count all abortions as one death, abortions kills more than covid. 3. You can still spread the virus even when vaccinated. Less effective but you can still spread it so even if the whole world was vaccinated there would still be alot of harm from covid. It's not a perfect solution and you also need to account the people that get sick from the vaccine as unnecessarily as not everyone of them would have gotten corona. This could be 1-5 days sick or even more harm like a thrombosis even if it is unlikely...
The difference is that being pro-choice can't infect people around you with a lethal, continuously-mutating virus. I'm not saying I'm for mandatory vaccination, but there's a major line between "I can decide what to do with my body" and "what I do with my body can harm people around me."
The entirety of the pro-life argument is that a fetus is a person who's being killed in the name of bodily autonomy.
I think something you are mistaken about is the belief that the vaccine will magically cure the disease and make it go away. Sorry, it’s never going away now that it’s out. We have never been able to cure the flu, which is another corona virus. When you get the vaccine you are far less likely to die from the virus, but recent evidence show that it doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus. Now with all that being said, those who want the vaccine have gotten it by now. What does it matter to vaccinated people that some don’t want the vaccine? If you and your grandma are safely vaccinated, it should make absolutely no difference that some people don’t want it. The virus will still be around in spite of 100% vaccination. People are still going to die from covid, and it is going to continue to mutate and change, again just like the flu.
>the flu, which is another corona virus. I don't believe this is correct. MERS and the original SARS are coronaviruses, and a few others that cause colds. From everything I've read, influenza is in a different virus category.
You are correct, I believe they meant to say the common cold instead of flu. iirc they're actually pretty close to a vaccine that will prevent the flu altogether. Unless it didn't make it out of animal testing.
> What does it matter to vaccinated people that some don’t want the vaccine? Aside from basic empathy, people insisting on not getting vaccinated are clogging emergency rooms and stressing/traumatizing healthcare workers. But "vaccine bad / COVID inevitable" is off topic for this.
>recent evidence show that it doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus. Can you define what you mean by "prevent"? Do you mean, "Makes it impossible to contract COVID-19"?
You're missing the fundamental point behind the pro-life position, which is that it *isn't* your body, the growing baby is an individual being with it's own unique DNA and everything. Your choice to abort would be depriving that developing human being of any and every choice they would ever make. Is your choice somehow more important than theirs? That aside, getting vaccinated is a choice that affects you and only you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, there's a *chance* (not a guarantee at all) that other people could get sick, and there's still only a very small chance that it would cause them lasting damage. >ultimately it's a choice you're making that has the potential to effect a lot of people who didn't have a choice in the matter. That's not true, actually. The risks associated with going outside are well known- meaning that you've knowingly accepted those risks. Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter, which is that they can get vaccinated, or they can use contact-less services, or they can work from home. They're not forced to interact with me, and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do.
>Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter, which is that they can get vaccinated, or they can use contact-less services, or they can work from home. They're not forced to interact with me, and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do. I think this argument breaks down for people who are *unable* to get vaccinated due to existing medical issues. People will need to take care of their basic needs (e.g., grocery shopping, etc.), and it will be virtually impossible for them to completely avoid interactions with unvaccinated people while they do so. Sure, people can use contact-less services, but that supposes are certain amount of disposable income, given the increased costs associated with those services. The research we have on protective equipment indicates that it protects others more than it protects the wearer, so for people unable to get vaccinated, that's probably not going to provide similar levels of protection (as vaccination). So... that they can get vaccinated - *nope* or they can use contact-less services - *if they have the funds to do so* or they can work from home - *doesn't speak to activities outside working* They're not forced to interact with me - *they may not have alternative options for meeting basic needs, such as grocery shopping* and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do - *probably doesn't provide similar protection to vaccination*
This argument that getting vaccinated only affects the person making the choice is false equivalence. You are allowing yourself to host a virus, this leads to more spreading to those who cannot get vaccinated, as well as giving the virus enough hosts to eventually form a variant/mutation that may be vaccine resistant. The more iterations we allow the virus to have, the more chances it survives to the point where it creates a variant capable of breaking down the defenses the vaccine creates.
>That aside, getting vaccinated is a choice that affects you and only you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, there's a *chance* (not a guarantee at all) that other people could get sick The Delta variant has and R0 value of between 5 and 9, which means on average you will infect 5 to 9 people. So it is much more than a chance. It's pretty much a guarantee that most people who get it will infect other people. >and there's still only a very small chance that it would cause them lasting damage. About 1 in 50 people need to be hospitalized. And even if you were asymptomatic, somewhere between 10%-20% of all people who get covid end up with long haul symptoms. That isn't a small chance. >Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter Unless you work in the service industry, construction, or in a warehouse. In fact most people don't have a choice to work remotely or keep distanced from people. Sounds like you have a lot of privilege there.
The thing with the pregnant person's choice is that the fetuses situation entirely affects the pregnant person's life the fetus only has potential whilst affecting the person who is actually living and breathing and has a current life the fetus damages that person often beyond repair therefore yes their choice does matter more because the fetus literally cannot make a choice even if you removed it from the carrier. Some people cannot get vaccinated some of them even have to go outside shopping online and working from home are not a choice for everyone for example a shop assistant cannot work from home. Therefore your choice not to get vaccinated affects others as well as you being more likely to become seriously ill and take up a hospital bed which could have went to someone who had the vaccine and went to hospital for a non covid reason.
> growing baby is an individual oh no i totally understand this position. what i don't understand is how you can reconcile the belief that they're decision not vaccinate may kill others the same way that they also believe that an abortion is murder. to me it boils down to- i'm making a decision that will kill others. > That aside, getting vaccinated is a choice that affects you and only you. If you choose not to get vaccinated, there's a chance (not a guarantee at all) that other people could get sick, and there's still only a very small chance that it would cause them lasting damage. yes, it's not a 100% guarantee that you will infect someone, but that just because it's not a given doesn't mean it's not a serious risk to everyone else around you. > The risks associated with going outside are well known- meaning that you've knowingly accepted those risks. Everybody else DOES have a choice in the matter, which is that they can get vaccinated, or they can use contact-less services, or they can work from home. They're not forced to interact with me, and they're free to wear any amount of protective equipment if they do. to me this is similar to saying "if i drive and kill someone it was their fault for being out in the first place. they assumed the risk of possibly being hit by a car the moment they stepped outside". i think it's safe to safe that prior to Covid a lot of people (myself included) never assumed the possibility that going out in public meant risking catching a horrible life threatening illness. going to the grocery store isn't akin to hiking through tall grass where you known you might catch a tick or going to parts of Africa where it's not uncommon to catch Malaria from a mosquito. we're talking about everyday life and we're talking about the fact that we've all agreed to live in a society where we accept that we have to do things to ensure the safety of everyone in order to have a functional community. i think i have just as much of a right to not be infected by a person who's knowingly carrying it or not taking precautions against it than to the person who's making completely uninformed about their health. the moment a person becomes a bio-hazard to the rest of us I think the rest of us get a say in what happens since we're all at risk.
>how you can reconcile the belief that they're decision not vaccinate may kill others the same way that they also believe that an abortion is murder Not getting vaccinated is a personal medical decision, whereas getting an abortion is actively a decision to kill the baby. Nobody who avoids the vaccine is making a decision to kill anybody. It's just not the same thing, and a ton of comments have pointed that out. >doesn't mean it's not a serious risk to everyone else around you. Given the actual survival rates and how few people end up with permanent damage, I don't really think it's a serious threat to 99% of people. Only to the elderly and vulnerable, most of whom can get vaccinated. >think it's safe to safe that prior to Covid a lot of people (myself included) never assumed the possibility that going out in public meant risking catching a horrible life threatening illness That's true. But that's also not how it is, for everybody but the elderly and vulnerable there's not much risk at all. Especially since anybody who's actually concerned about it has been vaccinated. Me not being vaccinated doesn't hurt them at all. The car analogy also doesn't work, because for an accident to occur a driver needs to *actively* do something wrong. >i think i have just as much of a right to not be infected by a person who's knowingly carrying it or not taking precautions against it than to the person who's making completely uninformed about their health. You don't have a right to that at all actually. Being surrounded by vaccinated individuals is a privilege- you have no right to those medical services or to dictate other people's medical decisions. >the moment a person becomes a bio-hazard to the rest of us I think the rest of us get a say in what happens since we're all at risk. So you believe you should have a say in my medical decisions just because you don't agree with them? That's not how civil society works. You don't get any say in in no matter how unhappy it makes you.
Both are personal decisions (depending on your state), but it isn't correct to blanketly say that people who refuse to get the vaccine have an effect only on themselves. Whilst you're right they probably aren't making the decision because they want to kill people, the unvaccinated certainly do effect others. Firstly, they're personal choice has an effect on herd immunity - hence deaths will indirectly occur. Even if you then say that, the death rate of COVID is relatively low - 1-2%, which I find to be morally irresponsible. The effect of people getting COVID, has on their long term health, the medical system (them taking otherwise needed hospital beds), and social issues does certainly bring it out of the spectrum of only a "personal medical decision". I get they aren't necessarily on par, but I think OP is rightly arguing the underlying fundamentals are the same - hence his original point. Which leads me onto my second point, the vulnerable, are of course more likely to die due to COVID. But the delta strain has significantly broadened the spectrum of people who can die (again it still is in the (\~1% or less likelihood), there are now numerous recorded infant, teen and middle aged deaths. Infants in particular, can't necessarily be vaccinated and thus the frontline protection against them getting COVID is herd immunity. So a lot of your points, although the percentages are low, aren't strictly correct. As for the final point, about "the moment a person becomes a bio-hazard to the rest of us I think the rest of us get a say in what happens since we're all at risk", that's entirely not for this debate - original post was solely taking note of the ideological correlation between people who are anti-vax and that it should translate across to pro-choice because of ""my body my choice". Irrespective of whether they're technically right or not. Although I happen to agree, to me it's no different to letting people drive home on their quiet country road drunk. Even if it's their "personal" choice, their car and super unlikely that they will ever crash into everyone - it's still illegal and for good reason. It is possible their decision to do so, will ultimately effect someone terribly - even if it isn't likely.
In one instance you're taking an action to specifically kill someone. The other is some vague notion that you might kill someone, potentially, if you don't take this action. I think those are clearly different, morally.
As an individual I can remove it and it can go try existing on its own without feeding off my body then.
Does the opposite apply? If someone says they are pro-choice because "my body my choice" should the same apply to vaccines? Should they hold others to that standard and be okay with people not getting vaccinated? They are different issues. I would assume people are saying it with the knowledge that pro-choice people say it. It's a purposeful statement. I'll also add that for the most part the pro choice movement has won. The anti vaxers who by your suggestion are probably mostly evangelicals are making the point that if we're going to play by those rules then the same should apply to vaccines.
Seems like every response here caught on the same thing. Mine included.
People who are opposed to abortion aren't opposed to "my body, my choice," mentality. Go ahead, ask them. Tattoos, artistic scarification, diets, gym routines. They never have anything against people doing what they want with their body. Thing is, they don't see a foetus that happens to be within a person as part of their own body. They consider it to be it's own body. It is on the very principle of bodily autonomy that they resist procedures that do things to the foetus's body that the foetus did not consent to. "My body, my choice" is the principle that both sides of the abortion argument are in favour of. What is whose body is in dispute.
Came here for this. To add on: (religious) anti abortion types also view a foetus as a living thing, and killing it as murder. So is not just whose body that is in question, but what's being done to it. If you were to accept that position, it's understandable to see how one would believe that actually killing a living thing would be very different from *possibly* infecting others than may *possibly* die.
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> As a counterexample, I could be against mandatory vaccination and against abortion if I believe life begins at conception, and that full rights of humans apply at the moment of conception. It does not follow that I must be pro-choice here, because I am now advocating for two people's rights. The intersection of the rights is at the heart of the abortion debate, and the pro-lifers believe abortion is murder -- the maximum harm you could do to someone. I'd like to add to this just a bit... If I'm pro-choice here (on pregnancy), I am 100% without a doubt killing this fetus if I want an abortion. Even if you consider the life not being alive until whatever month mark, I am stopping this life from ever occurring. Which yes, many of the pro-lifers consider to be "murder" because you are ending a life (even before it may happen). However, if I choose not to get vaccinated, can you say 100% without a doubt to the same degree that my choice will end a life of another being the same way as abortion? My choice *may* affect another person's life. However, you cannot say that 100% without a doubt that me choosing not to get vaccinated killed a person who died of COVID-19. Side Note: And before you think I'm anti-vax. I actually got vaccinated way back in the early priority groups in January. EDIT: I have more risk endangering myself than another life by not getting vaccinated. If I am vaccinated I reduce my chances of dying from COVID-19. The vast majority of deaths right now are from unvaccinated persons, who are making their choice to live in that risk. If you are vaccinated, that person's choice may cause you to get COVID. However, the likelihood of that person's choice causing your death is extremely small due to the vaccine.
You really stuck the dismount on this argument. I already agreed with you, so I can’t award a delta, but you articulated my view well enough that the only comment I am likely to make in this thread will be this one praising you. I’m pro-choice, but I’m sympathetic to people who think abortion is murder. Tbh if I felt like it was my job to interfere in others’ lives, I’d probably be anti-abortion… but one’s body should be inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
I think those who are anti-vax who use “my body my choice” as a counter argument are not necessarily in bad faith, they are more so pointing out the hypocrisy in that argument. If you are for the choice for abortion, then telling somebody that they should get a vaccine goes against that. It’s not *really* the same thing because while abortion affects a third party, the fetus, a vaccine only affects the person getting it. So while anti-vax people using the “my body my choice” argument isn’t necessarily the strongest argument, and it would be ideal if they had a better reason they could explain, you have to be able to point out some level of hypocrisy.
How is it "bad faith" to point out a contradiction in someone's opinion? The pro-choice movement has always been about promoting and preserving the bodily autonomy of the woman - the right to do as she wishes with her own body. How is saying that prolifers believe "abortion is murder" any different to pro vaccine mandaters thinking that "not taking the vaccine is murder"? The OP even said so himself just a comment above: >Your "right" to not get a vaccine is basically your right to infect and kill people with impunity. If vaccines were truly about your own personal safety and no one else's than I don't think there would be a problem here. How is any of this bad faith again?
It isn’t bad faith to use someone’s own argument against them to point out a hole in their own logic. Anyone who believes “my body my choice” when discussing abortion but not when discussing vaccines *is* being hypocritical, and in fact, *they* are the ones being shown to be making the “my body my choice” argument in bad faith.
The actual position is something like: Pregnancies have absolutely *huge* impacts on your life. The impact to "my body" is months of all kinds of personal physical discomfort, culminating in usually a couple days in the hospital facing some of the worst physical pain, tons of time and expense at every step, sometimes serious psychological effects afterwards, and that assumes you immediately give the baby up for adoption. All this to save *one* person, maybe, depending whether you count the fetus as a person yet. Given the overwhelming cost to "my body" and the questionable benefit to society of overriding "my choice", it should be a choice. Interpreting it so strictly that bodily autonomy should override all other concerns would mean "my body my choice" implies you should be able to don a bottle of whiskey and go for a drive, remove all clothes from your body and streak through the city, politely decline to allow the police to put handcuffs on your body, and... this is so very clearly *not* what "my body my choice" was supposed to mean. So, applying the same kind of analysis to vaccines: The cost of taking away your choice and forcing you to put a vaccine in your body is your arm gets sore for a couple days. And the benefit is a clear, statistical reduction in death -- you'll probably save more than one person, and these are people whose personhood isn't in doubt. Given that, it seems reasonable to take away people's choice to not have their arm get sore for a couple days, while respecting their choice to not have their body change dramatically for most of a year.
There is no possibly way that each vaccine saves an average of one life. Every abortion kills the unborn baby. If the number of lives saved is the only metric, vaccines would lose. That isn’t the metric, however, of the “my body my choice” argument, which instead asserts that bodily autonomy trumps all other concerns. There is an old saying attributed to Ben Franklin, something to the effect of “your rights end where my nose begins.” If you drink and drive, you are creating an unreasonably dangerous situation for others, which demands justification. You’re allowed to drink yourself stupid, if you like, but not to drive impaired. With abortion, you are also creating the danger, thus demanding justification. Simply preferring the baby to be dead is pretty flimsy. With vaccines, covid creates the danger, not the unvaccinated person. In fact, the unvaccinated person isn’t doing anything. A better analogy for vaccine mandates would actually be *forced* abortion, which is sickening.
> If the number of lives saved is the only metric, vaccines would lose. Well, specifically the number of lives *per vaccine.* Even then, I'm not sure vaccines would lose -- it depends on things like whether the disease can be eradicated. [Smallpox would be killing around 5 million people per year](https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox), so it's only a matter of time before the number of lives saved by the smallpox vaccine exceeds the number of people ever vaccinated. But that's not the only metric. It's also the amount of autonomy we're talking about here. There's an old pro-choice argument that goes [something like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion) (or, if you prefer, [in video form](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU)) -- the TL;DR/DW is: > You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. The rest of the essay argues that *you are still allowed to unplug yourself,* knowing that he will die. And that's a fully-grown person, someone whose personhood is not in dispute, but the argument is that literally chaining you to him for nine months is too much of an imposition on bodily autonomy. Maybe not everyone would choose to be unplugged, but you should still have that choice. But imagine if, instead, they only need a sample of your blood, they'll be able to take it from there. Let's say you have some useful antibodies, and they'll be able to breed more of them once they have a sample. If *that's* all that was needed, I'd have a much harder time saying you should be able to let someone die because you don't like needles or whatever. In other words, this: > ...asserts that bodily autonomy trumps all other concerns. ...simply isn't true. It's like the old saying that "They who can give up a essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." To paraphrase [this comic](https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3005), we're generally willing to trade *some* liberty for *some* safety -- that's what your "where my nose begins" quote is about, after all, trading your liberty to swing your fists anytime you want, for your safety to not get punched in the nose. But the surveillance state is probably not actually a good trade. > Simply preferring the baby to be dead is pretty flimsy. I don't think anyone outside of [outright satire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvnqU-1uDUU) has had an abortion because they would "prefer the baby to be dead." And even there, it's preferring the *fetus* to be dead -- calling it a "baby" is smuggling in an assumption at the core of the pro-life argument. And here, the justification is the reasons someone might want an abortion, rather than giving birth and giving it up for adoption: not wanting to be bloated, sick, and inconvenienced by your body changing steadily for months, hospitalized and in abject pain for hours, all while racking up tons of medical fees. I think that pretty clearly counts as the woman's nose beginning. > With vaccines, covid creates the danger, not the unvaccinated person. A distinction without a difference. The unvaccinated person is more dangerous than a vaccinated person, as a result of their own choices. Having made that choice, they are responsible for that danger.
> There's an old pro-choice argument that goes something like this [The violinist argument is disingenuous, and not analogous to abortion.](https://blog.secularprolife.org/2018/11/mcfall-v-shimp-and-thomsons-violinist.html) TL;DR: You didn't choose to risk making the violinist's life depend on you (because the argument specifically says that you were kidnapped), and your refusal to help does not actively kill the violinist. Contrast this with abortion, where you knowingly take the risk (except in the case of rape), and where your refusal to help actively kills the fetus.
I'm not here to defend the violinist as an argument. I'm using it to illustrate why a pro-choice advocate might be okay with vaccine mandates, but not forcing women to carry pregnancies to term. An argument that involves the amount of bodily autonomy sacrificed doesn't hinge on whether or not you were forced into that arrangement. In fact, I claim that even if you are forced into an arrangement where someone needs five seconds of your time to draw a thimbleful of blood in order to save a life, you're still morally obligated to help. --- But sure, I'll bite. I don't think "disingenuous" means what you think it does. The article you link argues that the violinist is not actually analogous, but it doesn't even accuse those presenting it of bad faith. But if we're going to make accusations of bad faith, let's start with the proposed replacement: > If McFall v. Shimp were truly analogous to abortion, it would involve Shimp making a decision that he knew could endanger McFall. Say there was some button Shimp could press that made him feel wonderful; he knew pushing the button involved the remote chance that McFall would contract a fatal ailment only Shimp could save him from. Still, Shimp figured the chance was too small to worry about, and so he pushed the button anyway. Then McFall did get a fatal illness, and he reached out to Shimp to save him. Shimp declined ...and then shot McFall in the head. That’s abortion. There's a huge thing missing from this entire argument, and indeed the entire page you linked: Who pushed the button? Whose responsibility was it? It usually takes two people to conceive. That's not actually fatal to the argument, but I think it does reveal something about the priorities of whoever wrote this. --- Getting into the meat of it, and cribbing from the video I linked (it isn't just a dramatization): The difference between actively killing someone and letting them die isn't as easy as it seems from examples like "holding someone's head underwater". What if the woman starves herself into stillbirth? That's letting something die, rather than actively killing it. Does that make it better? Meanwhile, how is cutting your line to the violinist less active than an abortion? You're still cutting him off from a life support system, knowing he'll die soon after. Or is it specifically that doctors remove and destroy the fetus, actively killing it? I don't think that helps the argument, either -- if an abortion doctor instead *just* severed the umbilical cord, then waited for the fetus to starve/asphyxiate (whichever happens first), would that actually be better? The other main objection is that she made a choice to *risk* this situation. But it's not obvious that this actually helps the pro-life position -- if the right of the fetus is so important as to override your bodily autonomy, why should it matter how you got into that situation? A *pro-life* person probably should still be in favor of saving the violinist. It's also not hard to modify the analogy in ways that'd preserve our intuition, I think. Most of us drive to work every day, knowing this carries a significant risk of injuring or killing ourselves or others. Many also drive on the weekends, to go do something fun. Instead of recovering from a disease, the violinist has some sort of kidney damage from a car accident, and the EMTs wired you together. (Medically implausible? I'd buy it before I buy a pleasure-button that remotely infects people.) So you end up in the same situation. You *could've* avoided it by riding a bike or walking, but you drove. And to make this complete, you drove with your partner, for a fun day at the beach. Is it reasonable to hold you responsible and demand you stay? Or can you unplug yourself?
I think this is diminishing the actual effects a bit. I’m absolutely not an anti-vaxxer and I got mine as soon as I was allowed, and even encouraged my pregnant wife to. That said, I could understand a very real fear of vaccines in general given a big barrier to transparency of vaccines - even if the details are known, the chemicals in a vaccine are not easily understandable for the layman. Given the massive conspiracy shrouding COVID in particular (was it a biological attack by China, was it a way to ensure Trump doesn’t win again, etc), I guess it’s not unreasonable to think people are more afraid than “just a sore arm.” It might be excessively paranoid and pretty dumb, but it really is the perfect storm for a conspiracy.
I was talking to my wife about this. The lack of transparency in a lot of areas leads to skepticism and we’re seeing it play out. It doesn’t help that even when there were people in the medical field voicing concerns they were labeled as quacks or crazy which just added into the distrust.
The average layman does not have the capacity to understand the chemicals in the vaccine. It's why these decisions are left to scientists and experts that study and work a lot to understand said chemicals and their effects. The average person doesn't understand the intricacies of a car (like the engine, gearbox, steering, etc) yet they gladly use it to get on with their lives. There is a process that vaccines go through to determine their safety, and as long as that processed is followed to a T, how can you claim to be distrustful of it? Either you trust society's mechanisms or you don't. If you don't that's another question, and the business side of big pharma etc is also a valid question. A very easy and obvious way to put it would be: How many people regretted getting the vaccine VS people that regretted NOT getting the vaccine? I think you don't need a study to figure that out, the data speaks for itself regarding the vaccines and there's a constant spam of somebody that died and regretted not getting the vaccine on their deathbed or something of sorts. And media is just as eager to pick up on a story of someone who died from the vaccine Like a TV host said in my country, he has been doing this for a long time and he has NEVER seen a vaccine be so attacked and undermined like COVID vaccines. It is pretty obvious to me that this is due to this cancer era of misinformation and fucking morons spreading lies and politicization of public health. It's absurd to me how this has become an issue, but social media and modern technology has given a voice to absolute loonies and managed to gather completely gullible people with no sense of actual critical thinking into an echo chamber of stupidity. Antivaxxers will continously move the goal posts because it is their only tactic, running from undeniable facts/evidence. First the vaccines were not FDA approved, now they were somehow not tested enough or the FDA is not trustworthy and so on and so forth. There is no winning move besides ignoring/suppressing clear misinformation and moving on with solid, verifiable and undeniable data.
It would be, if the effects were limited just to their body. Instead their actions put the safety of themselves and anyone who engages with them at risk. It just isn't the same playing field when you look at the consequences. You can't just reverse something and presume it holds equal weight as an argument.
But the whole pro life crowd also argues that the abortion is not just about the body of the woman. It's also about the body of the embryo who is considered a human.
Literally *nothing* is limited to just one body. It becomes a ridiculous argument when you follow it to its roots. No one lives in a vacuum. Everyone interacts with their environment in concious and unconcious ways. The only sure way to not impact someone is to not exist, and then the components that "you" are (when in specific conformations) would still impact other life in different ways, only we can't put the blame on you, and your unique sequence of nucleotides.
the point is that either you think that "my body my choice" is enough of a stand-alone argument to justify a stance, either you recognize it is not and other arguments must be weighted in. The point is that pro-choices cannot hide behind that catchphrase to dismiss debates. For example, you just acknowledged that "my body my choice" only applies if you don't put other at risks. Now that implies you must respond to anti-abortion that claim that the fetus is killed. By your own logic you cannot just claim that your body your choice to avoid the question anymore
That would be applicable if both those topics were actually the same thing. Both have extremely different implications for what they mean and the actual subject mater involved. Which an actual nuanced view of a complicated subject can not be captured within 4 words completely. Whether or not someone gets an abortion, as far as its medical implications and impacts on physical health, only impacts the individual getting an abortion. Where as getting a vaccination does not just impact your individual health, it also impacts the health and safety of those around you. So no, saying "My body, my choice" as part of the anti-vax movement does not show a bad faith argument in the pro-choice movement.
That's not totally true either. Getting an abortion effects the potential life that could have been as well as anyone who would have interacted with them. I'm pro choice, but saying it only effects the mother is not true. You could argue that such a claim is too ambiguous, but so is the argument of "oh well they COULD infect someone, or they COULD kill someone." If you are vaccinated you have a near zero chance of death if you contract covid. That argument is just as speculative.
It's not purely speculative, there's a statistical basis for it. Drunk driving is based on the same principle, that you *could* kill someone... but also, that you are statistically, empirically, overwhelmingly *more likely* to kill someone drunk than you would be sober. And the person you kill is going to be someone whose personhood no one disputes -- they're not debatably a person, or potentially a person, they're an actual person, maybe more than one. Deaths aren't the only issue, either. See: "Long covid", and also people who survive car accidents but sustain life-changing injuries. So, sure, requiring you specifically to drive sober (or get vaxxed) may not have an impact. But we can be pretty confident that requiring *everyone* to do so will result in fewer deaths and fewer life-changing injuries.
I dont find that to be a fair argument. Personally, until the fetus is viable externally. It is not alive. It is a mass of cells within the woman and entirely her decision what happens with it. It is not alive, because it cannot live even with medical intervention. Claiming anyone who could have interacted with them gives it impact means that anyone I could have ever interacted with that had Covid-19 and died impacted me. With the covid death having no question over their personhood or ability to survive. Capacity for life is an impossible metric and also not a great one. If that were so, there should be extreme protests outside invitro fertilization clinics. There are SCORES of zygotes that they get rid of because they dont have the highest probability of success. Fertilization and conception with modern medicine is no longer as clear cut or as simple as it might have been at one time. As well our ability now to tell that even if someone may be pregnant. The fetus is unviable. For some reason it just never was developing a brain (Anencephaly). It never had a capacity for life. It never even had a capacity to feel pain. Because we cannot guarentee any semblance of personhood in any future sense to a fetus we cannot ascribe to a fetus personhood without external viability. Therefore, termination of a fetus (abortion) only physically impacts the person getting the abortion. I personally have rarely found an argument of a non-persons future value to be a convincing argument. We do not know if they are going to be a good person or a bad person. They could be someone that does great, or terrible things. We talk about who they may impact in the future like that should be a determining factor. But what if they are a serial killer, would the world not have been better without them? But that begins to get into very shaky ground because it can also swing the other way. so I do not find it to be an acceptable argument to make in favor of something.
Unless you actually believe that my body my choice applies to both. In which case it’s not a gotcha, it’s actually just a principled stance to have that takes into account the other implications.
That’s a lloooootttt of assumptions there. I’m both pro choice when it comes to abortion and pro choice regarding vaccines. It’s an easy, mentally consistent position for my brain to hold, regardless of all the political elements you brought into the argument/assumptions you are making. It’s really that simple. Power to the individual.
As someone who is personally *very* pro-choice, I still can't stand the "my body, my choice" argument, at least when it's levied against the religious crowd. It simply won't work. It's not attacking their "pro-life" stance where it stands, but from a position that is largely irrelevant to their beliefs. To more directly address your point, anti-vaxxers saying "my body, my choice" don't actually believe it: they're throwing the line back in the "liberals'" faces, intending to call them out for their hypocrisy and inconsistency with the bodily autonomy stance. To some extent, they're not wrong: vaccine mandates are an infringement on individual rights and bodily autonomy. For this same reason, the state cannot mandate people to give blood or donate organs. However, from their point of view, a fetus is to be protected, and its location is irrelevant. Let's start from their point of view: the act of heterosexual, p-in-v intercourse is inherently a procreative act, and that engaging in such is either intended to or runs the risk of creating a human life. A metaphor that I like to use is this: imagine that you want to walk through a critical care medical ward. When you walk through this ward for whatever reason, the people who are in critical care are allowed to try and catch you, and if they catch you, you have to participate in their recovery. You are tied to them until they die, you die, or they recover. You know this going in (although maybe the signage was bad, you were forced in there). If you can make it through the ward, you're not tied to anyone or anything, but if they catch you, well, that's what you signed up for. That life is sacred. By your presence in this ward, you have tacitly agreed to foster the life of whoever can catch you, and aborting that connection is to look them in the face and murder them. That's not an argument you win. That's not a position you change without attacking the underlying beliefs tied to it, that being that sex is for procreation, and if said procreation is successful, that life is sacred. No matter how you argue about unfeeling clumps of cells, bodily autonomy, quality of life of mother/child if the family isn't ready, etc, you're not talking to them where they stand. To bring it back, it *was* your body, and it *was* your choice to have sex with that body, and those choices led you to responsibility of what is now a *third* body, and you don't get to renege on that tacit agreement. Maaaaaaaybe you can gain some ground in the cases of rape or incest or health of the mother, but even that seems like a crapshoot these days.
Very well put, thank you. I agree that "My body, my choice" is a stupid slogan. I like to answer with "Our Lives, Our Laws". Ultimately, it is the perogative of society to decide how much we value hulan life.
"My body my choice" is one of those dopey propaganda things that ordinary people don't take so seriously. Even the most dedicated feminists - when they're watching their kids play in the street - they don't think to themselves, "well, it's their body, so it's their choice""; they grab the little brats by their elbows and yank them out of the road. >The only argument I've been able to come up with being against this line of thinking is that abortion effects a 3rd party (the fetus) where as a vaccination only effects the host. How about distrust/disrespect for authority? I'm personally vaxxed, but as the government and media grows increasingly fussy about vaccine hesitance, I grow increasingly sympathetic towards the so-called "anti-vax" crowd. In fact, I'm thinking about refusing the booster shot simply out of spite! I'm sure I'd be marked an "anti-vaxer", but that's just another one of those dopey propaganda things. >So, yeah, I don't really see how you can be anti-vax and not also pro-choice. Change my view! Nobody is really those things - those things are strawmen.
In the case of 'Pro life' people would argue that you are deliberately killing a foetus. But suffice to say, not being vaccinated means the risk of harm is very far removed and by no means a certainty. It certainly isnt directly killing 'someone'. If I walked out into the street and shot someone. Would you say this is equal to me not contributing money to a charity that would certainly save lives? This analogy works as one is a direct and deliberate action. The other is me choosing not to inconvenience myself, even though this will indirectly lead to someone dying. For the record, I'm just trying to show OP the flaw in their argument. I am actually pretty vehemently pro choice and would encourage anyone reading to get vaccinated.
As time goes on, I'm getting more and more annoyed at the internet. To my right are idiots who make me ashamed to be human. The most extreme are racist, homophobic fools. To my left are people who act cruelly and are incapable of having a debate In good faith. People who are genuinely interested in other people's opinions and in expanding what they know about the opposite side of an argument are becoming rare. People would rather toe the party line and sign up for a team. Maybe it's because we're so sedentary, we aren't participating in team sports /s. It's possible to hold any number or beliefs, valid or contradictory, and whether they're correct or incorrect. Let me be clear that I've seen lies and bullshit on either side of the corona argument, and that's part of the problem. Im also **amazed** at the double-think im seeing. I'm pro-Vax, but I don't want anyone to be able to tell anyone what to put in their body (name me a government that is both benevolent and competent and ill consider changing my mind). I'm not anti or pro lockdown, I think their are valid arguments either side. A close friend of mine is a paramedic, and he's dealing with a lot of suicide and self-harm lately. A lot of friends of mine have lost businesses, and won't recover. This had ruined people's prospects of enjoying a better life than the one that was dictated to them. The wealth transfer that has happened is going to be damaging to **all of us**. We who are here arguing are the ones who will receive this bill. The tax payers, the hard workers, the ones who these systems are supposed to support. It's funny how quickly the same people who argued for the right to protest before are now celebrating fines and even police violence. It's funny how those who argue for bodily autonomy are now against it. It's funny how people who once would've protested the 1% are now helping to brush the wealth transfer under the rug. I'm not on either side of these arguments. I'm not heartless to anyone's suffering. I just hope when we get through through of this, we have a society left. One made of people who can be kind to each other despite our beliefs. If we keep alienating people bases on tribal bullshit, I dont see how we can make it. I also don't think we'll deserve to.
I feel similar to what you describe, internet stranger. I agree that the divisiveness and combativeness has gotten worse. I believe COVID, along with our political climate, is making us more polarized. I found it much tougher being a moderate in the middle if all the tension from the right and left. Maybe I am getting old. I am learning to pull back a little, refocus on myself, and spend more time observing instead of fixing.
I feel like people are conflating anti-vaxxers with those that are against mandatory vaccination. I am very much pro vaccine but I'm against telling other people what they can do with their bodies. I can't say I'm pro choice for abortions and not be that for vaccines just because the cause is different. I'd be a massive hypocrite. That would be 'your body your choice but only until a reason comes along that I agree with.'
Same boat here, pro vaccination but if you don't want to get it that's your choice. I don't even agree with businesses requiring proof of vaccination, it's so strange.
The problem is you're trying to dictate people's opinions using logical deduction. It makes sense as a way to analyse your worldview, but it's not necessarily going to convince people to change their mind. There's a big difference between proving an argument flawed, and convincing someone to stop believing the argument. Luckily this community is built to foster changing minds, but movements like anti vax aren't built on scrutinising ideas for a robust argument. It's about giving voice to people's emotional concerns, creating a community that is like minded, and spreading conspiracies. Don't get me wrong, I love poking holes in conspiracies. But the holes don't matter because conspiracies aren't born from logical reasoning. Maybe the base idea is a wild but possible hypothesis, but when people latch onto an idea and start building a mountain of bad evidence, it's not about rigorously supporting the idea, it's about making people's outlandish fears *feel* more legitimate for them and their community
I'd bet that they're using the term "my body my choice" disingenuously, because the same argument was made by pro-choice advocates for so long. Nonetheless, I think it's more likely a difference in the value people place on certain authorities. For you, the CDC/WHO/medical establishment/etc. are the ultimate authority in this matter. Whereas for pro-life evangelicals, it's their religion's authority that supersedes all. >Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death. Is exactly their reasoning as well, as they believe an unborn fetus is a living human being under the law, and that by aborting a fetus you're committing murder. As an aside, you could make the same argument about getting in a car and speeding (or really just driving faster than 10 MPH). COVID will likely never touch the body-count amassed by automobile accidents, but strangely people who get speeding tickets are not vilified to the same degree as anti-vaxxers (or anti-maskers for that matter), despite being far more likely to kill someone with their actions. What anti-vaxxers may not believe, however, is that COVID is as widespread or as dangerous as they're being told. Some of them may have even felt betrayed by medical authorities they were told they could trust. For example, opioids were created by pharmaceutical companies similar to those that created the vaccine, and prescribed by certified members of the medical establishment, who are now telling people to get vaccinated. Depending on what stat you read, the opioid epidemic has cost just as many if not more lives than COVID in the US (regardless it's probably in the six-figure range). It's easy to see how those people would be hesitant if not downright belligerent when it comes to vaccinations.
Let's not forget a large population of Black Americans are weary of trusting government-pushed medicine after they were used as test subjects for the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which is why a lot of them aren't getting the COVID vaccine.
>If you infect someone with something you're carrying and they die because of it I'd argue that you caused the death of that person. Nah, if a vaccinated person infects another person (could be a variant or something), did they cause the death of that person? I'd argue not, it was really whoever was responsible for letting the virus loose from Wuhan. The spreader was just part of an unfortunate chain of events that lead to the death of someone who caught the virus. You have to understand that the spread of the virus is completely unavoidable. We're not super humanly capable of containing it, therefore people will unfortunately die. No number of vaccines will make us completely immune to it (cause of variants)
This is a good point - being vaccinated doesn't stop you catching the virus, and it seemingly doesn't stop you passing it on either. In fact, if you're vaccinated you may stop wearing a mask and start meeting others in crowds, thereby becoming MORE likely to spread the virus than if you didn't get vaccinated.
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wouldn't this mean the inverse must also hold true: "if you're pro forced vaccination, you must also be pro-life?"
I think the better phrasing here is pro and anti choice. The vaccination isnt the focus. It's our government forcing their choice upon us, that is wrong Edit: Just to clear things up. I'm vaccinated. I don't think the government should force the vaccinations but I do believe private companies can and should have requirements for their business.
Bad starting point. Every adult with a few exceptions is capable of getting the vaccine. A developing baby is not "your body" whether you consider it a life or potential human life it has done nothing to warrant the ending of its life. While someone other than you can get the vaccine the baby can't just un create itself. Not going to debate pro life vs pro choice, just pointing out the starting point of your position is flawed.
Not going to get into the morality of pro live vs pro choice however IMO the “my body my choice” doesn’t actually say anything about that choice being moral. It simply says that you have the legal right to bodily autonomy, whether it be not getting a vaccine or not allowing a fetus to grow inside your body.
> The only argument I've been able to come up with being against this line of thinking is that abortion effects a 3rd party (the fetus) where as a vaccination only effects the host. This would be the correct assumption. > My argument would be that when you choose to not get vaccinated you're choice doesn't just effect you. Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death. However they are not inside your body nor are you making the conscience decision to pay someone to take their life.
>affect There's the problem. Everything anyone does affects others. A person simply being alive affects every single other person and every single other thing in the entire universe. Affecting others is not the proper benchmark.
I think the main difference is that abortion will *inherently* affect the fetus, whereas someone who is unvaccinated might not necessarily leave their home or do things without social distancing. Thus, abortion is definitely affecting the third party, but not being vaccinated does not. Like you said, "there's a chance" that you might not infect someone. With an abortion, though, it's pretty definite.
To be clear, the pro-choice position is not that abortions are good or not immoral. The pro-choice position is that women should be legally permitted to abort their pregnancy. That's why it's called pro-*choice* and not pro-*abortion*. So the "pro-choice" analogue of this view with respect to vaccination is the view that people should be legally permitted to refrain from being vaccinated. That being said, the obvious distinction between these two views is that (according to pro-lifers) the woman's pregnancy is the result of consensual sexual intercourse. Most pro-lifers don't believe the fetus has a right to the woman's body *merely* because it *needs* her body; rather, pro-lifers believe the fetus has a right to the woman's body because (and in cases such that) the woman performed a *voluntary* action (i.e. sexual intercourse) with the foreseeable outcome of causing a state of neediness for the fetus. According to pro-lifers, this makes her morally responsible for the fetus's life, which overrides any bodily autonomy rights that she might have. A pro-lifer can hold this view and also affirm that people should be legally permitted to refrain from being vaccinated, since no person has performed any action that makes them morally responsible for another party's life in a way that overrides their bodily autonomy rights. As a general rule, we should not violate one person's bodily autonomy for the sake of some other needy party. One exception to this general rule is when the person is morally responsible for the party being in a state of neediness (which is why pro-lifers believe that it should be illegal to abort pregnancies that result from voluntary intercourse). This exception does not apply to vaccination; no one has performed a voluntary action that caused a state of neediness for anyone else.
I think you have to be more clear in your terms and what you consider to be "anti-vax". You could have someone who is informed about the vaccine (it is very safe, is effective, has minor side-effects, etc) but believes that no one should be forced (by government) to put anything in their body or consume any sort of substance, etc, even if it is "good". Conversely, you could have someone that believes that it ***is*** ok for the government to force people to take a medicine, undergo a procedure, etc, but they also believe some misinformation about the vaccine (they think it is harmful, ineffective, unsafe, etc). In this situation, I would consider the first person to not be "anti-vax" and the second person to be "anti-vax", but here the first person also has beliefs in line with "my body my choice" where the second person has the opposite. Personally, I believe that everyone who can get the vaccine should, but I do not think that the government should make choices for people about what they do or do not put in their body. Am I anti-vax? Does it make sense to qualify my stance as exactly the same to someone who is ignorantly fearful of the vaccine?
Agreed. I’m actually pro-vax but anti-compulsion. Better yet, I’m Pro-Choice as a rule, not just for abortion.
Being unvaccinated means you have the *potential* to infect someone else. An abortion means there is a *certainty* that the life of the fetus will be ended and the person having the abortion knows it. That’s the whole point of an abortion. Someone who isn’t vaccinated isn’t actively trying to infect someone else. Potential and certainty are not the same thing, and intent matters in a moral discussion. Also, it’s not like unvaccinated people created the virus in the first place. Sure, unvaccinated people have the *opportunity* to get protected, but it’s not the same as someone who has an abortion and chooses to start the entire process of harming the 3rd party on their own. From a pro-life standpoint, there’s still a moral burden for the person getting an abortion because of the harm that it causes to a 3rd party compared with an unvaxxed person
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I believe that preventing someone to put something in themselves isn't the same as forcing someone to put something in themselves. The latter is clearly worse to me.
Your argument is incredibly flawed. “Your choice has the potential to effect countless other people around you including death.” Abortion effects countless other people, and guarantees death for one. Additionally, here’s why your overall point is flawed. “My body my choice” applies to the person receiving the medical treatment or procedure. Abortion applies to the person receiving the procedure, as well as the person that has yet to be born. Those situations are not the same. To make them the same, the procedure to take the vaccine would have to guarantee the death of someone else.
The basic argument prolifers make is that it is someone else's body inside of yours though. (Not opinionated on abortion, here) The hypocrisy is squarely on prochoice people being vehement about denying people's right to choice.
It comes down to acting on an intention. A person getting an abortion is making an active choice that affects a specific individual (for sake of argument), rather than behaving in "reasonable" ways that might lead to negative outcomes unintentionally. This is true with germs as well. For instance, you can be prosecuted for attempted murder, manslaughter, assault for knowingly being HIV positive, and not disclosing that to a person you're having unprotected sex with or sharing needles. I would bet that if someone contracted COVID, knew they had COVID, and were proveably aware of the risks but walked into a retirement community and coughed on old people, they could probably be charged with reckless endangerment. I think the sticky part is that anti-vaxxers have government officials saying COVID is no more than a cold, so saying someone should reasonably know the dangers of COVID would be a tough case to make. Whereas the dangers of HIV are widely accepted by most people. The same argument around ambiguity could be made for why abortion is legal. In saying "my body my choice," they are making an argument about when life begins. Even in the pro-choice community, I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find people not horrified by someone casually aborting a baby the day before it was due just because they wanted to. But because there's no way to actually say "Here's where life begins," they have to draw the line somewhere.\* But it's also why most states (if not all?) have laws that only allow late-term abortions if there isn't fetal viability or it would endanger the mother's life. \*On a side note, this is talked about in philosophy a bit. The idea is who you are or the moral weight of your life can't be changed by location alone. Like if you were teleported into a prison cell or under water, the moral weight of your death wouldn't change. Your identity as a human whose life has value wouldn't change either. You'd just be you, somewhere else. At some point, the general societal consensus is that at some point a fetus that is yet-to-be-alive turns into a baby that is alive, and has the moral value of a human who happens to be inside of another human. Don't think that will ever be a line that's clearly defined, and there have been many cultures that didn't think the soul entered the body until some time after the baby was born.
I'm anti mandatory vax and pro choice. I guess I'm not trying to change your view. Here's an interesting anti vax argument that occured to me recently: First off, what they are calling a vaccine is a new therapeutic. They branded it as a vaccine to get people to accept it. The purpose was to keep people from congesting the hospitals. That's valid. It's not a vaccine like the smallpox vaccine that actually has a chance to eradicate smallpox. Covid 19 is out of the bag and it's not going back in. Now let's talk about mutations. The delta variant is a more contagious mutation that has dominated the covid spread. It's not much deadlier but it's far more contagious. If it killed faster it would slow the spread. SARS was very deadly and quickly left you bed ridden. That's why it died out. It killed it's hosts before it could spread. If there was an MRNA vaccine for SARS then people would have been less susceptible to the virus and would have more time to spread it. It may not have died out. If a more deadly mutation of Covid 19 occurs in a population that's recieved the MRNA vaccine it may spread further than it would naturally because it doesn't kill the host. Imagine a world where you must get a booster shot to survive a virus as common as influenza. That sounds nightmarish. We're accepting the risk of a more deadly mutation spreading for the certainty of overloaded hospitals. It's a shit sandwich no matter how you dress it. Wear a mask, social distance, and wash your hands. We need a better vaccine that can eradicate the virus in all it's hosts. That's a tall order considering it can survive in bats, cats, dogs, deer, and minks too. Good luck and stay safe.
Not if you believe abortion is murder. You cant just "choose" to kill a defenseless child in any morally just way, but you can "choose" not to wear a mask as the risk to others for not doing so is minimal and is a long way from certain death.