I think I am actually stupider having read that tortured piece of crap trying to remove women from the category of “human rights.”

I will say it is better to have women’s rights than not to have women’s rights, but the only way to put women’s rights first is if we are willing to say — which I am not — that women are better and more important than humanity as a whole

Now that’s a particularly stupid thing to say, and in context a very vile thing to say.  But in all fairness, it’s rather plain that she’s speaking of women as a subset of “humanity as a whole,” and not as nonhuman.

I’m with rea on this one - while I think it’s a crap point and I disagree with it, I don’t think the intention was to say that women are subhuman so much as to say that, in this case, “the needs of the many (humanity, including zygotes) outweigh the needs of the few (women) or the one (woman).”

Even charitably interpreted, it’s a nasty piece of “Othering”. It reminds me a lot of arguments that eliminating discrimination against African Americans was going too far against the rights of the white populace to live in negro-free neighbourhoods, or that the rights of gay people to marry is violating the civil rights of Christians.

The “rights’ of humanity in the statement is just so much privileged bullshit that women must subject to; not rights understood as applicable to all people. Charitably, the argument is that women are second-class citizens, and not property objects. I don’t consider that “progress” anymore.

Silly Amanda!  Reproductive rights are so passé, so Third Wave.  Anyway, SOME OF THOSE FOETUSES ARE FEMALE.

Sounds like that old, tired anti-gay “special rights” bullshit to me - only this time, it is aimed at women.

This sort of thing appears not infrequently in the UI Argonaut. Someday my school is going to make the headlines for something other then giving Sarah Palin a degree, having revealing cheerleader uniforms or letting people like this kid run off at the mouth.

I’ve frequently asked pro-lifers (and never once been told “yes”) if they themselves would be okay with a world in which their organs could be harvested against their will, in order to save other people’s lives.

I think rea is right that the original author is arguing that women, as a sub-set of “humanity as a whole” ought not to have our rights regarded as more important than the rights of fetuses (also a subset of “humanity as a whole”) to survive by making use of women’s bodies against their will.

But unless the people who argue that it is a basic human right to make use of another human being’s organs to survive are consistent enough to agree that this means anyone dying of renal failure may claim the spare kidney of any healthy/compatible owner of two kidneys, and anyone who needs blood may claim a pint from someone with the same type, then they are making an argument that only women’s bodies can be made use of as a “basic human right” - and that is an argument that women are not quite included in “humanity as a whole”.

Jesurgislac:

But those women had TEH SEX! and cute babeez!

It’s as if everyone who went to a classical-music concert automatically consented to donate their kidney to the next famous violinist in need of one. (For some reason, all the essays I used to read debunking the supposed right of a fetus to use a woman’s body 25 years ago had a famous violinist in the innocent-victim-needing-your-bodily-life-support role.)

I think they’d be okay with it, Jesurgislac, if they could somehow only force that kidney-donation policy on sexually-active women.

And yes, if women are a subset of humanity, fetuses would ALSO be a subset.  The only way their treatment reflects on “humanity as a whole” is if the author believes cell clusters are more authentic, meaningful human beings than women are.

Eh, Paul beat me to it.

Anyway, if that violinist deserved a kidney, God wouldn’t have given him/her kidney failure.  But baybeez are innocent!

Sounds like that old, tired anti-gay “special rights” bullshit to me - only this time, it is aimed at women.

I think so too.  Authoritarians (which most anti-choicers are) have a dualistic view of the world where someone is always on top and someone always on the bottom.  Therefore, women having rights means women being the dominant group.

I found it bizarre the way ‘humanity as a whole’ reads almost like some concrete entity which has rights than can supersede the rights of the individuals which are its constituent parts. It harks back to old conceptions of us belonging to the tribe and not existing as individuals.
It is only human individuals who are accorded rights not some abstract amorphous ‘humanity’. This is why the cut-off point for abortion is reckoned on when a foetus is capable of surviving independently. Even then there is a substantial amount of time when a child born could not survive without intensive medical intervention and could still have lifelong health problems.
To say life starts at conception is arbitrary because the sperm and egg are both alive before they fuse. Where does it stop? Do we then make masturbation illegal and make it mandatory for women to try to fertilize every egg possible?
He talks as if a woman’s human rights are conditional upon the fertilization of one of her ova. Once that occurs her rights are abrogated in favour of what is developing within her. Our bodies don’t actually belong to us.
I have always found it ironic that the majority who are anti-choice and hold that the foetus has the right to life base their world view on the Old Testament. Yet it explicitly says that parents have the right to stone their grown children to death for insulting their parents and you can sell their daughters into slavery. In other words children are owned by their parents and can be disposed of if necessary. The cut-off point for termination extends right into adulthood.

Jesurgislac - Wow, you’ve asked you that and they’ve given you an answer? I’ve been asking that question of the anti-choicers for weeks on the site for my local paper, and they haven’t even given me a “no.” The closest thing to a response was something like “Well, I don’t know, no one’s asked me for an organ before.” Pathetic.

Childe O’Grace - it’s really Rousseauvian, isn’t it? That stupid “general will.”
Good point about the Old Testament. I think I shall quote it at people when they try to use the Bible to oppose abortion…besides the separation of church and state, of course.

Going further with what Childe O’Grace said—women are HALF of humanity as a whole. How on earth can hurting HALF of humanity as a whole benefit humanity as a whole? Hurting half of humanity means that humanity as a whole is screwed, even if you don’t take into account the fact that men’s interests are inextricably linked to those of the women in their lives.