Time Machine Hypothetical, Take Away Right to be Born as Punishment

I was reading in another thread and one Pro-Lifer said this:

This got me thinking...
Imagine someday that somebody invents a time machine.

How would you feel if the government, as punishment for committing the crime of abortion, went back in time and aborted the person before they could ever come out of their mother's womb?

Okay, you might argue "women's choice", but what if they gave the mother a gift card or something to incentivize and get her to choose abortion? Being that time travel was possible, they could time the abortion very precisely to take place in the earliest stages. It would like you would never have been born...

It is a very thought-provoking idea to think about.

Would you be perfectly okay with this? Basically, everyone who would ever abort (for elective reasons) would never get to be born.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this from Pro-Choicers.

Your fetus does not have the Right to Life so neither should you.
With a Time Machine, we can take away your Right to Life without killing a "person" (as you put it), just as you seek to do with your fetus.

 

Arnold would show up and tell the fetus "Get out!"

If a time machine is invented two thousand years from now, wouldn't we already know about it?

 

Uuuh oooh, not again.

Okay...

But, if you go back in time that woman has no longer had an abortion, right? Seems you did not think this through.

Why not just be completely honest and open and just propose the death penalty for any woman who has an abortion?

What?

Not wt all since it does not make any sense whatsoever.

No.

Why?

You are creating an endless loop here though. Sally has an abortion, so government goes back in time to force her mother to abort her, but now Sally's mother has had an abortion, so you have to go back in time and have her grandmother abort her mother etc etc.

 

7 degrees of separation ... the mother of any woman who has an abortion would be given an abortion to rid her of the woman who had
an abortion, thus all the mother's children would never have been born and their kids would never have been born, so not
only would you be punishing the woman who had the abortion, but any other of her kids (many women who are married with kids
get abortions because the might be overwhelmed by another) would also be punished - and their kids, and so on.

Bottom line - you didn't really think this out at all, did you?

 

But by pro-choice logic, she doesn't exist yet. Isn't that true?

 

Sure it does. You just don't want to think about it, because you know very well the inevitable mental conclusions it would lead you to.

Well, then why no?

I don't see how you can have it both ways. You say "no" to my premise but then question me. Why not question your no?

 

Okay, true, but there are multiple possible ways to resolve these time travel paradoxes. We could put in place a way to see what the future would have been had we not gone back and altered it. This may sound impossible but something equivalent to it is already being done with today's technology, albeit on a much smaller more limited scale and only involving a fraction of a second timespan.

This of course could raise some philosophical ethical issues, but so what? Abortion already raises philosophical ethical issues and no one seems to care.

(If anyone doesn't believe me, you can see the link here: Quantum Bomb Detection (st-andrews.ac.uk), which explains the basic principle, although it is probably two complicated for most of you to be able to understand. The short summary is there is a method to be able to see things with virtual photons of light when those photons do not actually exist, and cannot be measured by the thing being observed through conventional means. Due to the nature of the measurement, the visualization actually transcends time, although not in practical reality with existing examples since the distance is so small, combined with technical issues.)
The point is, if time travel did exist, there would be possible ways to be informed what past reality would have been if you were not going to go back and alter it, which of course would allow you to go back and alter time even though there would be no apparent need for your to do so since the problem that you are seeking to fix no longer exists.

 

Time Travel Paradox - you never know if one of the people not born because of your little experiment was the one who changed the time line so that YOU
are still alive. Roll of the dice. You could literally be killing the person who saved hundreds or thousands of other people.

And say, that a woman had aborted one child because she wasn't ready, but later
had two others - your little experiment would be punishing the other two - so
who is the monster now? Hint: you.

 

guess what, if you asked someone that was born of rape if they thought rape should be legal as that is how they were born... bet they would say no too

 

sad argument for forcing rape victims to have their rapists babies

even a baby from rape grows up to know that would be wrong

 

That's true but very unlikely.

But that is also true with abortion.

 

So, when did potentiality start becoming so important to pro-choicers?

You know, it really seems like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too.

This was my whole point of this thought experiment. According to pro-choice logic, it shouldn't be wrong at all. You only verify that when the only arguments you are able to use against this are pro-life arguments which you yourself obviously don't believe in.

 

Oh my goodness!

I see you are trying to raise the potentiality issue, but that does seem like a very separate scenario from the one I described and is not related to it.

Don't you think, FreshAir, that might be an issue better for a separate thread?

I also think your example is a little bit disingenuous because you are talking about cutting off someone from existence before the point of conception. So in reality, what you are bringing up is really no different from the usually pro-choice trite that "wearing a condom is murder!"

Although I suppose we could ask the question whether pro-choicers would think it any worse of a punishment if you were aborted in your mother's womb rather than going back in time just a little further to prevent your conception in the first place.

 

But then again, if we had a time machine and were capable of doing this, then rape would be a moot point, wouldn't it?

There would not end up being any rapes.

Do you still want to ask me the hypothetical question should we use a time machine to punish a woman getting an abortion when she might have been raped and there exists no way to know? Even though I cannot imagine any way such a hypothetical scenario could logically exist.
(Hey, I'm willing to play unrealistic thought experiments if you want)

 

Yes, but we would be going back in time to stop that at a point before all those other children have been born yet.

You don't have a problem with that, I will presume, because you don't have a problem with it when a woman chooses abortion.

That's my whole point. The only argument you seem capable of putting against this is the potentiality argument. But the potentiality argument would also tell you that abortion is wrong. So if you support abortion, it's really hard to argue that this would be wrong. Even though you have an instinctive intuitive sense that it is and you are trying to argue against it.

I do think you raise one sticking point though. The case of a woman who already has a born child before she gets an abortion. So what if this hypothetical only applied to women who did not already have any children?

Like if this was only done against a woman who had just aborted the only child she had ever had up to that point.

Then going back and aborting her would be no different from if she decided to use contraception to prevent those future births. It's not going back in time to alter the present, because it is altering the future at a point ahead of when we decided to go back in time. (Just like executing a murderer is not "wrong" to that murderer's potential future offspring)

And this is totally a speculative hypothetical, but what if time travel technology advanced to the point that it was possible to go back and prevent the woman from being born, while still somehow keeping her children she had already had in existence?

(I think that would be another long discussion to explain how this could conceivably be possible)

 

But YOU are saying it's OK to terminate people ALREADY born (remember, you would be starting from a timeline point where all
these people already existed) then be going BACK in time to terminate them. So who is the monster?

 

Yes, because she chose to terminate someone else (who already exists).

Being born is kind of an arbitrary distinction. Already existing is what matters.

Unless you want to try to make this all about whether a human being has come out of its mother yet and make that what this argument entirely hinges on.

And in that case, then you have a separate Pro-Choice argument, which we have already discussed in separate threads.

Are you referring to born children she has already had? Because I think I already addressed that in my above post.

(sorry for adding on a long segment after you might already have started to respond)

 

I'm referring to children she had AFTER the first abortion (very common). These people would already exist (and may have children themselves) at
the time where you depart the present timeline and go back to terminate the mother who had an abortion - in effect, terminating those
people AFTER they (and maybe their children) they were born. So you would not only be punishing the mother, but possible dozens of
other people at the same time.

 

it's no different from your scenario.... no baby of rape is going to support rape just because they would not of existed without it

many questions like that, if you could go back in time, would you allow Hitlers mother to get an abortion.....

 

would you support time machine abortions, maybe go back in time, give Trump's dad a condom, Hitler’s dad a condom... would you stop all rapists before they got their children's mother pregnant, so many possibilities

course if that happened, none of us would know as it would have never happened on our timeline

if time machines are ever invented, let's hope they are not abused, but I fear they would be

 

Perhaps, but we are talking about doing the same sort of thing to the woman that she has done to someone else.
That's not exactly so clear in any of your examples you mentioned.

 

Well, then I think I already addressed that pretty well in my post. (top half of post #15)

Good to know, because in that case it is a very easy argument for me.

They would not already exist yet if we are talking about the children the woman has after her abortion.
I think you will agree that the punishment would probably be carried out a short time after her abortion, before any other additional children are brought into the picture.

I totally agree it could be problematic if you are talking about a case where a woman already had children before she got the abortion. But I thought you made it clear you were not talking about that.

 

well then we would have to do the same thing to those that force rape victims to have their rapists baby - many pre-crimes could be punished by handing out free condoms

 

Sounds like you are talking about retroactive punishment then. Because if a time machine were developed and it became so easy and convenient that this sort of policy were put in place, we could be pretty sure that there would be no rapes anymore.

Anyway, FreshAir, I think your point is mostly off topic, because we are talking about people who do not whether the woman has been raped or not.
Or in some cases where the fetus is so advanced that even if we do know it was rape, it's pretty obvious that aborting it at that point would be murder.
So, seems like a separate argument we would need to have in a different thread.

 

And if next year, someone with power decides YOU need to be terminated because of something you did in the past (even though it was legal then) you
would agree that it was a just decision.