r/hatethissmug • u/Sudden-Hoe-2578 • 10h ago

Non-fictional I HATE these "gotcha arguments"

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"Ohhh, look how I tricked this dumb dumb baby in my trap so now I am right and they are wrong. I'm so smaaart even though it does not adress the actual argument and adds nothing to the debate. They teach arabic numerals in school btw."

And these type of comments always get tons of likes

119 Upvotes

51% Upvoted

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875

u/Even-Tear-6965 10h ago

I think it addresses how uneducated people are about fetuses or just about conception and pregnancy as a whole yet still believe they know enough to be hold strong rigid opinions.

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u/Not_So_Normal_ 10h ago edited 10h ago

Most pro choice people cant tell the difference either, Saying this as pro choice, its just a bad faith argument 

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u/Aless76109 10h ago

Yeah but I think the point is that while pro-choice people are saying “do whatever you want reasonably”, pro-life people are trying to remove women’s choice inherently insisting that they know more, so poking a hole in their logic by showing that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about is still better and less in “bad faith”

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u/Elliezium 5h ago

There are plenty of holes in "pro-life" people's arguments, but "you don't know exactly what a human fetus looks like" really doesn't get at any of them. None of their arguments actually rely on that, they don't claim to be experts on fetuses

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u/Goosepond01 4h ago

I don't agree simply because if they are arguing they know more it probably isn't them arguing that they know exactly what a dolphin fetus or human fetus looks like, especially if both can look very alike.

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u/i__dont___know 10h ago

But it doesn’t prove they’re uneducated and don’t know what they’re talking about as it has nothing to due with the topic at hand. It’s also a bit dishonest to say pro choicers just want “do whatever you want reasonably” like come on you can have your stance on abortion but don’t act like it isn’t still an important discussion to have. The burden isn’t only on pro lifers to prove their pov.

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u/grizzy45 9h ago

The group denying the others autonomy has to prove its POV. The group which doesn't deny others autonomy has not.

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u/i__dont___know 8h ago

And what about the group ending a human life? Is half of pro choices stance not denying the value of another life? Don’t you think it’s really important to prove that the life your ending isn’t truly human?

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u/grizzy45 7h ago

We already did prove that tho. The pro life people just don't care about sience.

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u/i__dont___know 7h ago

Who proved what? Science actually agrees with pro lifers as only the only clear cut distinction made so far is that a new human with an entirely unique set of human DNA separate from the mother and father is created with the zygote. There is no clean line where a human becomes conscious and it certainly isn’t birth. How can science prove that bodily autonomy can override a life at different stages of development? That’s a moral problem.

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u/grizzy45 7h ago

Science can probe and did prove that a fetus does not have an experience. It has for a long time no ability to produce its own experience

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u/i__dont___know 7h ago

Thats a blatantly false statement to make for the entire pregnancy. Sure it’s true for some time in the development process but the line where that stops isn’t concrete and can’t be ignored when ending a life. And that’s under the presumption that not being able to experience makes a life null and void as it’s still a living. Does a comatose person lose their right to live?

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u/grizzy45 7h ago

Did the comatose person had an actual experience before being in a coma? If not, fuck him.

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u/Ruggab0ut 7h ago

Neither do babies up to the age of 2 or 3.

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u/Sensitive_Shape5746 3h ago

Wrong. This is a lie.

Babies have conscious and sensory experiences. Babies learn to recognize different sounds, faces, and voices, and will even form preferences.

The reason we don’t retain those memories in adulthood is because of infantile amnesia. Babies don’t recall or store memories in the same way after a certain point in cognitive development and neurological development.

Literally, you can find this out within 2 minutes of a search in case you feel like you’re wrong. Babies do have experiences.

There’s a whole psychological framework for this from Jean Piaget.

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u/grizzy45 7h ago

Thought experiment. A psycho connects your heart to my heart with tubes. Should you be allowed to destroy the tubes to go on with your bodily autonomy even if it would kill me?

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u/i__dont___know 7h ago

The classic violinist argument. This situation is only comparable to rape specifically since it removes all choice that a normal pregnancy would have with the consensual option of vaginal sex. You don’t just magically get pregnant at random. You can’t consensually do an action that could connect you to me then cut the tube and kill me.

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u/grizzy45 7h ago

A condom ripping or a lot of other circunstances can make you pregnant without any fault of your own.

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u/i__dont___know 7h ago

You full well know going into sex that condoms aren’t full proof and decide that it’s a risk worth taking for pleasure. My saying is don’t put the baby making part in the other baby making part if you don’t want a baby. There are plenty of ways to be sexually intimate with your partner otherwise. Vaginal sex for pleasure is not a need and does not give you the right to kill your fetus because you were horny.

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u/grizzy45 7h ago

Following the same logic:

You are at fault for getting raped or stabbed because that's something that can happen if you go outside.

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u/i__dont___know 7h ago

I can’t live without going outside and getting stabbed isn’t the naturally direct line of events that going outside entails. Again vaginal sex for pleasure isn’t a need and is easily forgoable, unlike not going outside.

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u/moedexter1988 9h ago

True dat. Both make a lot of horrible arguments. I even have seen uneducated pro-choicers.

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 9h ago

(Very proud choice btw)

Come on, pro life people's goal isnt to limit the rights of women. Most of them would easily acknowledge that women benefit from having the option. Their belief is that the fetus is inherently valuable and that killing it is wrong.

If women were allowed to kill anyone who harassed them, that would also benefit women, but we agree that killing people is wrong so we limit that freedom. The disagreement is fundamentally not centered on women's rights, it's about the value of a fetus.

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u/Foreversssssssss 9h ago

You’re not pro choice lmao. The fetus, when unwanted, is essentially a parasite sucking life out of you. It isn’t alive, it’s a clump of cells, and it is killing you from the inside out. If you’re allowed to take medicine to get rid of viruses and shit you should be able to get rid of fetuses.

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 7h ago

I think you're dumb as rocks because I literally agree with you that it's a valueless clump of cells. You assume that juat because I am working within the bounds of a premise to steelman another position that I also accept that premise and position. I am pro choice for many reasons. I assumed putting that in my comment would reduce the need for your type of response.

I believe banning abortion kills women. I believe early stage fetuses have no inherent value. I believe leaving it up to the government to decide which abortions are allowed endangers and kills women. I believe doctors and women can decide when abortion is the right choice for them. There, are you happy now?

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u/Vahlez 9h ago

You’re literally the problem. You can’t even acknowledge the point of the pro-life crowd is that they genuinely believe that baby fetuses are still human. This isn’t a question that science can answer cleanly by the way. This argument has no clean answer and the fact that people get so passionate about their side is silly.

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u/koalascanbebearstoo 8h ago

I mean, if you truly believed that fetuses were human life endowed with human rights to life and dignity, then I’m not sure it would be “silly” to feel passionate about stopping a genocide on the scale of about six Holocausts a year.

And if you truly believe that restrictions on abortion are the first step to returning women to a state of sexual/marital servitude that rolls back 100 years of gender equality progress then—again—it doesn’t exactly seem “silly” to have a strong reaction to that.

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u/Vahlez 8h ago

Yea I may have worded that poorly. The silly part is the lack of acknowledgement of what the other side cares about.

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u/AlextheAnt06 8h ago

It literally cannot be a parasite because it’s the same species as its mother. And wtf does “sucking life out of you” mean? That’s not a valid medical term.

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u/Ruggab0ut 7h ago edited 4h ago

All babies consumes resources that otherwise could have gone to you and produce nothing in return. Why are they not parasites when fetuses are?

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u/froginabucket69 6h ago

This is such an inhumane way of thinking that it’s almost difficult to approach.

If the ONLY way you can rationalize getting an abortion is by dehumanizing the HUMAN fetus within you, then you don’t deserve to have that option.

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u/Foreversssssssss 5h ago edited 5h ago

Okay, so, if I stick with that logic, you would rather doom a child who I’d resent and dislike than let me have the option to abort? Are you aware that that HUMAN fetus becomes a human? Fuck, I feel like people like you never consider what will happen to the child who wasn’t wanted. Dooming the woman/girl to a life of misery and the child too.

Listen, it really isn’t alive and conscious. When the fetus isn’t wanted, or when the fetus is wanted, it is still a clump of cells that has the potential to become life. That isn’t dehumanising, that’s just science. Whether it’s viewed as a miracle or a parasite depends on the state of the person it’s inhabiting.

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u/froginabucket69 5h ago

It is objectively alive, and if you really want to die on the hill of consciousness, then I’m afraid you may alienate those who have been through a coma.
It has human cells and a unique genetic profile from the moment of conception.

YOUR misanthropic hatred for another living being should not be the sole decider in whether it lives or dies, especially if it was created through a mutual, consenting effort.

There are plenty of children who go into adoption happy. I imagine that with a better cultural outlook on adoption as a whole, it can only get better.

You want to avoid responsibility in whatever way you can, and are projecting that fear onto a human fetus that had no say in the circumstances of its birth.

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u/Foreversssssssss 4h ago

Honestly, I’m not misanthropic at all. It’s really the opposite. I love and cherish women, and want them to live happy lives where they retain their autonomy, and I want children to live happy lives where they’re loved and cared for. The adoption system, or foster system, isn’t an easy system. It isn’t easy to get adopted, it isn’t easy to find a foster home, it isn’t easy to be split from your birth parents. Having no fucking clue of what the reality of what life is actually like for kids sent for adoption is naive as fuck.

And comas don’t work that way what the fuck are you talking about?? A clump of cells aren’t the same as people in comas, that’s a crazy comparison. It’s like saying we’re basically dead when we’re sleeping or some shit like that.

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u/TheFlyingSheeps 8h ago

Except the logical end point of the discussion regarding the rights and values of the fetus is to ban abortion which limits the rights of women to control their reproductive health. The disagreement is actually fundamentally on women’s rights as well because you cannot have a decision on one without the other being impacted

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u/One-Mixture2184 9h ago

(Very proud choice btw)

parrots pro life strawmans to justify abortion bans

Yeah ok

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u/Yadin__ 9h ago

They literally just explained the other side's viewpoints because the person they were replying to was making a strawman. As another pro-choice person I would be very concerned if someone were that ignorant of the other side's 'talking points' that they would not recognize the strawman that the comment OP corrected

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u/One-Mixture2184 9h ago

When I stop hearing "that's what you deserve for having sex", I'll believe it. Until then, using harassment as the analogy is going to remain dumb

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u/Yadin__ 9h ago

of course it's dumb, it's a pro life argument. But it's a hell of a lot better than "they are just evil and want to take right from women" which was the strawman that was corrected

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u/TheFlyingSheeps 8h ago

Not really. They tried to dismiss the claims that pro-life isn’t an attack on the rights of women when the logical endpoint of pro-life arguments is to ban abortion, which limits the rights of women. Despite their claims it is center to the discussion and a core disagreement as you cannot affect change one without impacting the other

Their second paragraph is also completely irrelevant and misses the mark.

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u/Yadin__ 8h ago

They were not dismissing the claim that banning abortion is an attack on the rights of women, they were correcting the premise of pro-lifers' motivation being taking rights away from women, which was what the original comment was framing it as

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u/TheFlyingSheeps 7h ago

Except I disagree with that claim they aren’t motivated about taking away the rights of women. That’s exactly their objective. Their justification may be that it’s to protect the innocent but they are specifically targeting the rights of women to achieve their goal

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u/Yadin__ 7h ago

Do you understand the difference between means and ends?

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 7h ago

Yknow what there are probably some right wing politicians who do see abortion bans as a means of controlling women, which is obviously evil.

My comment represents what the most reasonable type of pro lifer might say. They see women losing their autonomy as an unfortunate side effect of protecting the lives of innocent fetuses.

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u/TheFlyingSheeps 7h ago

Ok but that “reasonable” pro-lifer is still willing to side with an obviously evil person to achieve their goal, which is the issue. The problem lies in the fact their end goal can be considered just as immoral as the side they fight against.

They may see themselves as justified, but that doesn’t negate the fact their end goal is to strip the rights of women, and of course they are not immune to hypocrisy as seen by the essay The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 7h ago

Yeah you're making sense. I still just disagree with the wording of "their end goal is to strip the rights of women" because I think their end goal is to protect fetuses through the means of stripping women of their rights. But yeah at the end of the day I agree with you that banning abortion endangers women.

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u/froginabucket69 6h ago

First you’ll have to prove that abortion is a legitimate human right, because until then you won’t have any grounds in law.

If only there was a precedent for the legal killing of other humans to preserve your own life…

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 8h ago

How is anything i said a pro life strawman? Steelman if anything

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u/therealsereny 9h ago

Hehe if I call the argument I disagree with a strawman, I win -you

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u/One-Mixture2184 9h ago

"You wouldn't kill someone harassing you so abortion should be illegal" isn't a strawman? Okay, fine, it's just a really stupid argument. Is that better?

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 7h ago

Are you fr? it was an analogy to try to help people understand what I was saying. Maybe next time I'll spell it out more clearly. The point was to illustrate that we all concede that that the right to not be murdered completely trumps the right to prevent suffering. Therefore you cannot kill a person to prevent suffering. If you see a fetus as a person, then the logical extension of this logic is to say that you cannot kill a fetus to prevent your own suffering.

Therefore, to convince a pro lifer that abortion is a valid method to prevent women suffering through unwanted pregnancy, you have to convince them that a fetus is not a person.

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u/TaroJayda 9h ago

Is this r/asablackman but for pro-choice? Pro lifers don’t want the baby to stay alive (as evidenced by the fact that they don’t want their taxes to pay for its food and education) they just want the woman to be forced to birth it.

I feel like a pro-choice person wouldn’t dismiss pro choice arguments out of hand and blindly espouse pro life propaganda like you do.

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 8h ago

Pro choice arguments about women's rights are valid. That's why I agree with them. They are simply on a smaller scope than 1 entire human life if you believe that the fetus counts as 1 entire human life. I do not believe the fetus counts as 1 entire human life, so I believe we should protect women's health and autonomy with higher priority. Those argument will, however, not convince someone who believes the fetus has a soul and should be valued as a person.

And yeah most pro lifers are also generally not very intelligent and don't agree with policies that would help a person actually life a good life.

I just think its disingenuous to act like the only pro life argument is that women deserve to suffer through the pain of childbirth if they didn't practice safe sex.

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u/Yadin__ 9h ago

as evidenced by the fact that they don’t want their taxes to pay for its food and education

the concept of pro life exists outside of the US btw

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u/TaroJayda 9h ago

Yeah but luckily you freaks don’t have a ton of sway in your countries.

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u/Yadin__ 9h ago

I'm pro choice lmao

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u/ConcentrateFree4918 8h ago

And they're the same kind of people in my country, which isn't US. The support for those children that women are forced to give birth to ends when they are born. It's a pretty universal pro-life brain rot.

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u/sesquipedalianmime 9h ago

Boy howdy that's a disingenuous argument right there. Is it common for women to attach feeding tubes and carry the person harassing them in your part of the world?

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u/Annual_Insect6972 9h ago

In every part of the world, parents have an obligation to care for their children. Doing nothing to care for a child is criminal child neglect nearly universally. Even if my toddler bites me daily, I can't leave them at home or refuse to feed them.

The only question remaining is when does that obligation begin? 

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u/sesquipedalianmime 9h ago

When the foetus becomes a baby. Until then it's a parasite.

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u/Yadin__ 9h ago edited 9h ago

see how the disagreement just became centered on something other than women's rights, but on the value of the fetus itself?

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u/Annual_Insect6972 9h ago

We have to always ask ourselves if we're respecting everyone's rights, if we are to say we believe in human rights at all 

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u/Ruggab0ut 7h ago

When does a foetus become a baby?

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u/sesquipedalianmime 7h ago

When it permanently exits the vagina in almost every situation.

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u/Ruggab0ut 7h ago edited 7h ago

Alright, so if you gave the lethal injection to a foetus whilst it was still in the womb in such a way that the mother was not harmed in any way, even if the mother was in labour and was expecting in 30 minutes, that would not be murder? - even if that mother wanted to keep the baby?

Indulge me, this is a thought experiment.

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u/Annual_Insect6972 9h ago

Nonsense!  They're definitely not a parasites.  They're offspring.   This isn't some foreign alien body.  This is natural reproduction.  Gestation is the only way any of us have come to be at all.

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 7h ago

What? My argument was not to compare the level of suffering between unwanted harassment and unwanted pregnancy. My comparison relied on the premise that they are both bad and should be prevented by reasonable means. Killing all harassers is an obvious unreasonable means. Killing all unwanted fetuses, in my opinion, is a good solution because I do not care about fetuses. But if someone saw fetuses as humans, you might be able to see why they would say that is an unreasonable means of prevention of suffering.

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u/Fold-Open 6h ago

Well, I am in shock that you got downvoted only for explaining other side belives instead of talking how bad they are.

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u/Kitchen-Function5150 6h ago

As far as some of them are concerned I literally am the other side even though I will always argue for the side that protects women and autonomy