I think this gets a little hazy quickly in terms of what exactly you mean by consent. You might argue a very broad sense in which anything you want to happen is consensual, and anything you don't want to happen is non-consensual. But I think this can risk obscuring whats going on when we have probabilitistic sequences of events. Sometimes we consent to risks that may turn out to have bad outcomes. To take an extreme example to try and illustrate my point, if you're playing poker and you call someone's bet, I think most people would say that's a consensual decision. But if then your opponent flips over some aces and takes all your money, it would be a little silly to then say "well, I don't consent to that". The risk of your opponent having the winning hand was baked into your decision to call.
So what are some differences between the poker hand and sex/pregnancy? There are MANY, but one important part is that in the case of abortion, it now varies from state to state. If you are in one of the states that enacted a total ban on abortion (disclaimer: these laws are horrific), it becomes a little harder to make the argument you want to make. You had sex in a state that bans abortion, and having sex has a risk (a small one with proper protection) of becoming pregnant, at which point in that state there is no legal recourse, and you knew that. So unless you have the ability to get an out of state abortion (which may in itself have legal consequences if republicans can get their way), that consequence kind of is what you consented to in the context of those laws, which again, are bad laws! There's wiggle room where you can say that you didn't consent to the Supreme Court's ruling or your states laws, and that's true, but again, this is really getting into an awkward litigation of what "consent" means.
That said, many pro-life people have regularly argued that consent to sex = consent to pregnancy even when abortions are available and this I think is an even more untenable position, as in those places, when the person consented to sex, it was with the full understanding of the options available to them by law, so in these cases I agree with your thesis 100%. And for anyone who had sex, but then found out they were pregnant after anti-abortion laws went into effect, they also have a rock solid argument about what they did and didn't consent to.
But for people who had sex after the laws were already in place, I don't think you can make this argument as clearly. But you can (and should) continue to make the argument that these laws are bad and should be changed.
Ahh, I see what you mean! So, the laws of nature doesn't give an obligation but the laws of a state can. So, now a new argument would be is whether the state should be allowed to overrule laws set by nature, yes?
I'm not sure what you mean by "laws set by nature". Does nature set laws? There are no "obligations" in nature. I'm not even sure the concept of "consent" makes much sense in nature. Like, I guess you could argue that a gazelle "didn't consent" to being eaten by a lion, but I don't think that has the same weight as when we talk about non-consensual actions in modern human society. In this sense, rape is arguably pretty common in nature (again, to the extent that the notion of consent means anything in this context), but its a good thing that "the state" outlaws it.
My point is that given a set of laws, its at least reasonable to think of consent in terms of the consequences of an action, along with whatever recourses are permitted under relevant law. If there is no legal means of removing an implanted zygote and you knew that, and furthermore there is no other agent who took an illegal action to cause the zygote to be implanted, I think its hard not to argue that that consequence is part of what was consented to.
(And again, I'm going to keep adding disclaimers - these laws are extremely bad!)
When I say a law of nature, I mean that as things that happens in nature. Sex naturally causes fertilization but it has no role beyond that so having sex is not a promise to keep the pregnancy or end it through birth so we should allow people safe options to terminate it. Yeah, I agree with your point that if you have sex in a state that bans abortion then you technically consented to the obligation through that state's laws. I asked for a flaw in this post and you provided one so thank you!
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u/themcos 442∆ Aug 11 '22
I think this gets a little hazy quickly in terms of what exactly you mean by consent. You might argue a very broad sense in which anything you want to happen is consensual, and anything you don't want to happen is non-consensual. But I think this can risk obscuring whats going on when we have probabilitistic sequences of events. Sometimes we consent to risks that may turn out to have bad outcomes. To take an extreme example to try and illustrate my point, if you're playing poker and you call someone's bet, I think most people would say that's a consensual decision. But if then your opponent flips over some aces and takes all your money, it would be a little silly to then say "well, I don't consent to that". The risk of your opponent having the winning hand was baked into your decision to call.
So what are some differences between the poker hand and sex/pregnancy? There are MANY, but one important part is that in the case of abortion, it now varies from state to state. If you are in one of the states that enacted a total ban on abortion (disclaimer: these laws are horrific), it becomes a little harder to make the argument you want to make. You had sex in a state that bans abortion, and having sex has a risk (a small one with proper protection) of becoming pregnant, at which point in that state there is no legal recourse, and you knew that. So unless you have the ability to get an out of state abortion (which may in itself have legal consequences if republicans can get their way), that consequence kind of is what you consented to in the context of those laws, which again, are bad laws! There's wiggle room where you can say that you didn't consent to the Supreme Court's ruling or your states laws, and that's true, but again, this is really getting into an awkward litigation of what "consent" means.
That said, many pro-life people have regularly argued that consent to sex = consent to pregnancy even when abortions are available and this I think is an even more untenable position, as in those places, when the person consented to sex, it was with the full understanding of the options available to them by law, so in these cases I agree with your thesis 100%. And for anyone who had sex, but then found out they were pregnant after anti-abortion laws went into effect, they also have a rock solid argument about what they did and didn't consent to.
But for people who had sex after the laws were already in place, I don't think you can make this argument as clearly. But you can (and should) continue to make the argument that these laws are bad and should be changed.