That does make it more understandable. But even from that perspective it would count as an exploration of the pro-choice position only if you thought that position was based on property rights and you thought that property rights gave you rights over other people’s bodies if your property happened to be lodged inside them. It’s hard to fathom that anyone thought either of those propositions was correct. (And note that GFL is the youth face of the “Pro-Life Action League” – one of the more aggressive clinic-harassment organizations, and one that’s been in operation for some years – so they’re backed and funded by people who, though not exactly models of rational discourse, have more than enough experience to know what the pro-choice position is really about.)

And more importantly, even if the operative assumption behind the piece was that women’s autonomy rights are trumped by someone else’s property rights, that hardly makes GFL’s position any more palatable.

In her analysis of the pro-choice take on this stuff, she makes a single, fundamental error early on — she (apparently) takes the pro-choice argument about a woman’s rights regarding her fetus to be a property rights argument.

If you understand her to be engaged in a thought experiment about the pro-choice position, and you understand the “pro-choice position” at issue to be one that holds that a woman has the right to abort because the fetus is her genetic property, then Annie’s piece pretty much makes sense, and a lot of the contradictions and muddle you see in it evaporates.

I think.

There’s an old tradition in philosophical argumentation of using unrealistic examples to bring out the logical aspects of a situation. You carefully craft the examples to focus the conflict on the central issue you are interested in, but that often makes the examples unrealistic. Alternately, you can create unrealistically extreme examples to force the reader to react in a certain way, then draw an analogy between those examples and the real world to suggest they should see the real-life issue the same way. These can both be reasonable ways to examine an issue, and arguments over abortion often use these techniques, so I wasn’t willing to dismiss this article out of hand just because the examples were unlikely. (And they are: most of them hinge on situations that have already been fully worked out in real life, and aren’t very controversial.) However, the fact that the implications of these examples make no sense is a drawback, even if the use of made-up examples in general is not.

Boy, you sure had a lot to say about my post that apparently made no sense to you at all. Interesting that you could make so much out of it!

Well, it was confused in very many ways. But I hope this was helpful.