Eating animals because they’re less intelligent.

The argument for humans rights is the same argument for animal rights, other animals possess the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of organisms that have rights, which is sentience – the capacity to feel things.

It is not my white skin color that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain white skin color, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not the white skin color that makes avoidance of a knife in my throat into an important priority.

It is not my penis that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain a penis, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not penis that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

And finally, it is not my human DNA that makes it an important priority to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat either, as I could be braindead, still contain human DNA, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not human DNA that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

There is absolutely no reason why it would be in any way worse to pull the plug on a braindead person, any more than to pull the plug on a computer, the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to do so is because it affects another sentient organism, like a family member or friend of their’s that has some kind of emotional attachment to the braindead body, but if that family would indeed be more upset by someone destroying their computer than the braindead human, then it would be worse to destroy the computer in fact.

Speciesists are under ingroup favoritism/bias, just like racists and sexists, i.e I am important because I can feel things, that is understood, but this other creature is not important despite being able to feel things just like me, because it doesn’t share group membership with me, you’re not in team white, team penis or team human, so we can torture you.

An other difference that exists between humans and animals, that does not as severely exist between whites and blacks, or men and women, is the different level of intelligence, it is true that pigs, cows, chicken are much less intellectually capable than humans, whereas there’s no such extreme difference between blacks and whites, or men and women.

However, then we run into the mental retardation problem.

There are of course severely mentally disabled humans that aren’t much more intelligent than pigs, cows, chicken, definitely not chimpanzees, so would any of these speciesists sign me a contract that states that if they were to get into a car accident tomorrow and end up on the same level of intelligence as a pig, cow or chicken, I am allowed to treat them as a pig, cow or chicken?

Let’s say you are no longer able to add 50 plus 50, and cannot read books, so now I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia, stick my arm up your asshole and throw you into a meatgrinder once you are of no more use for me to rape and exploit? Is that perfectly fine? I couldn’t get any more milk out of that retarded bitch’s tits, so I beat her to death with a sledgehammer. Why not?

”BUT THEY’RE STILL HUMANS!!!!!”

Saying that such disabled humans are still human though, even if they’re not as intelligent, so they’re still granted rights unlike the other animals is nothing but a cheap cop-out, because if the speciesist specifically states intelligence to be the reason why humans have rights unlike animals, and we already established that human DNA in and of itself is worthless (braindead vegetables contain human DNA but can’t feel shit), then obviously if there’s a human that does not possess such a level of intelligence, they don’t deserve rights, plain and simple, it’s logical consistency.

It would be analogous a sexist saying men are granted rights because they’re stronger than women, but then, when we find these sexists a man that is just as weak as the average woman, they say ”but he still has a peepee!” to justify why this man has rights, but women don’t, because the very reason they stated as to why penis havers deserve rights is because they’re stronger than women, this man is not, so he doesn’t deserve rights according to said sexist.

They basically want to attempt to say that even if this retarded person is no more intelligent than a pig that they justify eating based on said pig’s lack of intelligence, they should still be treated the same as other humans, because they share one characteristic with them, which is being human.

This is completely irrational and arbitrary, by that sort of rule (treat the minority the same as the majority based on sharing one characteristic with them), I could say most people are not rapists, Ted Bundy is a serial rapist but also a person, so therefore, we shouldn’t arrest Ted Bundy, because he shares the characteristic, which is personhood with non-rapists.

Speciesists don’t really have any coherent excuse for this, here they frequently just try to make it sound more complex than it is, by appealing to extrinsic factors that may in practice, not in principle be different about causing harm to an unintelligent creature, or use other concepts to describe intelligence and say that animals lack these capacities, like rationality, reason, the ability to reciprocate morals and social contracts, etc.

So they might say if you assault the retarded person, the family of the retarded person would be upset, if you assault the cow, no one would be upset, except the cow of course.

Great, then just rape a retarded orphan child that no one knows on an abandoned island, or in a society of psychopaths that all join in and rape the retarded orphan child too. You’d sign the contract then that says if you end up retarded, we can treat you like that? No.

The pig on the other hand was just bred for meat, the retard wasn’t! Great, then let’s just explicitly breed pig IQ humans for the purpose of turning them into mince meat then, that surely makes it a lot better, as long as you breed someone for the sole purpose of exploiting them it’s alright, slavery is only a problem if you weren’t bred for it and your IQ is over 70.

Of course, they’d mock even the idea of a cow being assaulted or raped, because the cow is supposedly not intelligent enough to understand the concept of assault and rape (i.e in our differently verbalized language, they still feel what is happening), the cow cannot spell the words assault or rape. So therefore, supposedly you can’t assault or rape them because they’re too dumb.

Although, they would of course be completely fine with calling the assaulting and raping of a human female on the IQ level of a cow assault and rape, it’s hypocritical on every level, perhaps they’d even say ”OH MY GOD THIS IS RAPE” if they walked in on some guy inserting his arm into their tied up pet dog’s anus, that is no more significantly intelligent than a cow either.

Or speciesists may dress it up in other abilities that are related to intelligence to make their bigot argument sound more complex, some examples would include:

”Ability to understand morals and reciprocate the social contract.”

Same problem applies, some humans cannot adequately reciprocate ethics, here a favorite dishonest weasel tactic is of course to appeal to violent mentally handicapped humans that have been locked away for the sake of public safety to demonstrate how these individuals lost their right to freedom as well, but we’re not talking about their violence, just their retardation, and there are harmless retarded individuals that don’t need to be locked away, just like pigs, cows, chicken are harmless.

”Ability to understand and speak in our language.”

Hilarious one too, that retarded mute cunt couldn’t talk back, so I just kept raping her.

”Ability to write poems, philosophize and make scientific discoveries.”

Even average humans often can’t do that, so turn them into mince meat?

”Ability to do math.”

So a calculator or a computer has more rights than an average human child?

”Ability to think and plan ahead for the future.”

Same problem, not to mention that many animals can do this, but that’s a less important point.

And so on and so forth, ultimately it all boils down to the same concept – intelligence, and very obviously, intelligence is not why you want to avoid pain, if you legitimately believe that, you are delusional, psychotic, fundamentally disconnected from objective reality.

A butthurt attempt at downplaying the suffering of animals is then often times also that because these other animals are less intelligent, therefore can’t comprehend how to act rationally towards one another, we’re somehow allowed to be just as retarded, even when we know better.

”Ha! Silly vegans, you all try to save the animals, but the fact is, these animals would eat you too if they got the chance!!! Look at nature, dog eat dog world, the lion is eating the zebra too so why shouldn’t we do the same???”

You are appealing to what retarded creatures that don’t know any better are doing, to justify you doing the same, even though you know better.

Imagine the following scenario, I work in a facility for mentally retarded humans, sometimes these disabled individuals are sexually assaulting and beating each other, because they lack the ability to think about and contemplate the ethical implications of their actions.

What would be the ethically responsible thing to do here?

1 – Prevent them from sexually assaulting and beating each other.

Or:

2 – Joining in and brutally raping a mentally disabled girl too because they did too.

Look, these retards don’t know any better, they would sexually assault you as well, so you might as well just join in and sexually assault them too. No problem.

Not to mention, other animals are largely completely harmless to you as well, pigs, cows, chicken generally don’t assault humans in some kind of dangerous manner, so that makes it even worse.

It’s not as though we’re talking about a lion attacking you, which we could analogize to a big, strong retarded person sexually assaulting you, we’re talking about a chicken that can’t seriously harm you, so this is pretty much like some sociopathic rapist saying you are under no obligation to not violently assrape a 3 year old with your fist because a 3 year old kicked you in the nuts once.

The 3 year old has no obligation not to punch me, so I don’t have an obligation not to punch the 3 year old either, checkmate you anti-child abuse idiots. You don’t punch 3 year olds? Well guess what, they would punch you because they don’t know any better, so I should do the same!

You get the point, ultimately supporting animal abuse because animals have a lower IQ is not a rational stance, it’s an irrational stance, and none of the dishonest tactics that speciesists use to justify this stand up to scrutiny in any way.

Ingroup favoritism and the capacity to suffer.

What all forms of discrimination like racism or sexism, but also speciesism and nepotism have in common is that they are just different forms of irrational ingroup favoritism that deny that the reason as to why it’s bad to be discriminated against is the capacity to experience suffering itself, not membership of the particular group, it’s discrimination based on an irrelevant factor.

Adherents to more socially acceptable forms of ingroup favoritism, like speciesists like to claim that comparisons to the holocaust, racism and sexism are unfair when one is talking about what is done to non-human animals, because that’s unfair to humans that have been dehumanized by the racists and nazis, not understanding that this is just another irrational ingroup bias on their part, assuming that if something is not human, it is fine to harm it anyway without needing further explanation.

Speciesism is bad for the exact same reason that racism and sexism are bad.

A simple enough question to ask, what is the characteristic that makes it important for you to be put into the category of things that have rights (e.g. a right not to get randomly assraped with a chainsaw)?

Is it your skin color?
Is it your genitalia?
Is it your particular family origin?
Is it your country?
Is it your species?

The answer is no to all of these, the reason why you want to avoid getting anally raped with a chainsaw randomly is because you are sentient, that is the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of things that have rights, sentience, the capacity to feel things, not skin color, not gender, not species.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.^[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

P1: Sentience is what makes it possible and bad to be harmed.
P2: Most non-human animals are sentient.
C: It is bad when said non-human animals experience harm.

If one is sentient, one can produce sensations, and sensations are of different qualities. They can be better/less bad, e.g. I’m in a blanket and this feels good because it protects me against the cold, or worse/less good, e.g. I poured gasoline all over myself and set myself on fire, this is a little too warm.

On the other hand, if you were a completely braindead human vegetable on the same level as literal vegetables like carrots or broccoli emotionally, you wouldn’t care if I set you on fire even though you would still contain human DNA and be alive, that’s because you wouldn’t be sentient, so it doesn’t feel bad anymore, it doesn’t feel like anything, so this proves that it’s not the possession of human DNA that makes the avoidance of harm an important priority.

A speciesist ignores this and downplays the suffering, just like a racist slave owner ignores the capacity to suffer of the black slaves. Like the other ingroup favoritists, they pretend that the characteristic that makes it a really important priority to avoid being harmed is membership of their ingroup, when obviously the characteristic that in reality makes it an important priority to avoid being harmed is simply the capacity to experience harm itself.

”You can’t call it rape!”

That is something that speciesists sometimes insist when it comes to cows getting restrained and forcefully impregnated, because it’s a human concept supposedly.

How so, why exactly do they think that is a sensible definition? Rape at its core describes having your preference not to engage in a sexual activity or especially to be penetrated violated, particularly the unwanted penetration of your sexual organs, otherwise it can also be referred to as a molestation.

Human DNA is not the enabling function of a preference, sentience is the enabling function of a preference, that is what creates preferences that can either be alleviated or frustrated.

Can I rape a braindead person that has absolutely no preference not to get raped? Is it not rape if I were to restrain a dog in a rack and stick my arm up its asshole? I’m sure if any of these speciesist bigots walked in on someone violently fistfucking their cat, they would be perfectly comfortable saying ”that guy raped my cat”.

You could dishonestly refer to what dairy farmers do as ”just artificial insemination”, but if they have to be restrained because they don’t want to be artificially inseminated, that entirely fails to capture the aspect of forcing yourself on someone else, it’s not as though the cow is consensually making a doctor’s appointment to be artificially inseminated.

These ingroup favoritists that proclaim to be against against racism and sexism but get offended when one discusses the non-human animal holocaust have learned nothing from past mistakes of humanity, they foolishly think racism and sexism were only bad because it harmed other humans, how horrible, as if that is somehow a relevant factor.

Smashing a braindead human with a sledgehammer is by itself not any worse than doing it to a car or a computer, it could only produce some amount of badness in the sense that it affects sentient organisms that care about said braindead human, if the family of said braindead human cared more about their plasma TV than the braindead human, it would be worse to smash that plasma TV with a sledgehammer.

That’s the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to destroy a braindead human, if some other sentient organism, like their family were to be negatively affected by it in some way, human DNA in and of itself is absolutely worthless, just like skin color or genitalia.

In reality the reason why black slavery was bad was also only because blacks were sentient, not because they contained human DNA, if really all the blacks had been braindead it wouldn’t have mattered that whites enslaved them, and that’s why it’s also bad to enslave pigs, because they are generally not braindead.

In fact, it wouldn’t have even been slavery anymore of course, because again, in that instant, if there is no sentience, there exists no preference/desire not to be enslaved either, you cannot enslave a rock, this entire concept of raping or enslaving something that has no will is absurd.

It’s absurd how those humanist bigots that criticize racism and sexism are offended by the racist and sexist analogies because they feel that it downplays the suffering blacks and women go through, when in reality it’s the exact other way around if anything, comparing what they go through in the first world downplays the suffering of non-human animals.

The last time I checked black men aren’t getting castrated without anesthesia, immigrant children aren’t being thrown in a meatgrinder, women aren’t being kept in a cage and repeatedly forcefully impregnated, then have their offspring ripped away and slaughtered.

This doesn’t mean they can’t face any problems, but certain non-human animals have not and are not even considered as subjects under the law for the greatest part of history, blacks and/or women are generally not considered property under the law anymore, it’s fair to say their sensibilities are almost always considered less important, by default.

They make it out to be like someone getting called a fat cunt or receiving an unwanted sexual compliment whilst walking down the street is simply inherently worse than getting raped multiple times, then having your offspring ripped away and slaughtered, then having your throat slit open once you can’t produce any more milk, because one happens to a lifeform that contains human DNA and the other one doesn’t, as if that actually means anything to how much suffering is being produced any more than which skin color or set of genitalia you have.

Completely distorted priorities stemming from a psychology that is ironically no better than that of the racists and sexists they like to criticize, it’s the manifestation of their ingroup bias, they are acting no better than the nazis and fascists they take issue with.

Of course, some animals may have a lower capacity to suffer than humans, so if you were forced to throw either an animal of lower sentience or one of higher sentience in a meatgrinder, it would be more rational to throw the animal of lower sentience into it, but this is not an irrational discrimination based on species membership alone.

It’s not more important to protect a human than a cockroach because the human is part of the human species, it’s only more important in the sense that the human has a higher capacity to experience suffering upon being thrown into the meatgrinder, so you throw the cockroach instead of the human infant.

In fact, were the human entirely braindead, or were we talking about a human embryo that is likewise not sentient, some variation of human that is less sentient than cockroach, then at that point it would become the more sensible option to throw said human vegetable in a meatgrinder than the cockroach, it would generate less suffering, better squash a thousand human embryos than one cockroach, it would cause less negative sensation to be produced.

You don’t want to avoid suffering because you have human DNA, just like you don’t want to avoid suffering because you have white skin color, you want to avoid it because suffering is simply an inherently negative experience, that’s why you put on the seatbelt and get anesthesia during a surgery, that’s why both speciesism and racism are a failure, you fully know you wouldn’t want to be that thing you discriminate against when it’s experiencing harm.

Same principle applies to nepotism as well, another more socially acceptable form of bigotry, which is all it ultimately is as well – bigotry, this tendency already starts with your family, because I know that some bigots are so deep into their bigotry that they would answer the typical vegan question of:

”Why pet the dog but eat pigs?”

with simply more narrow-minded bigoted rhetoric like:

”But, I also treat my child better than every other child, nothing hypocritical about that at all.”

Is the fact that someone’s child is someone’s child really what makes it important for the child to avoid harm though? No.

It is not the fact that your child is your child that makes it bad for the child to suffer, it is bad simply because suffering itself is bad just like water is watery, even if it happens in a different vessel that is not your child, water in a different bucket is still just as wet and watery.

You don’t want whether or not you have a right not to be tortured based on whether or not others are positively biased towards you, so it’s still hypocritical to say that the dog’s value is dependent on you being positively biased towards it.

Or did you only care about avoiding harm as a child because you were of some use to some nepotistic bigot, is that what determined your value? No, of course not, even if your parents died when you were 5 years old, you would’ve still tried to avoid it if someone tried to set you on fire, you wouldn’t have volunteered to be burned alive, saying:

”Well, I’m given no extrinsic value by my parents, so therefore, I’m but a worthless object, go ahead and set me on fire all you want!”

As if the whether or not an experience is bad is dependent on how someone else (in this case parents) feel about it, so if the parents think that the child feeling bad is good, then the negative sensation the child experiences is somehow simultaneously positive (a direct contradiction).

The experience generated by an orphan child about which no one cares being burned alive is bad regardless of whether or not some nepotistic bigot thinks it is bad, if someone tried to set you on fire when you were 5 years old, you would have still tried to run away, even if you didn’t have any parents that cared about you.

You should ideally care about your child only because it is a sentient organism capable of suffering, not because it crawled out of your vagina in particular – caring about it only because it crawled out of your vagina is bigotry just like speciesism, which is bigotry, just like racism.

And if you were faced with the meatgrinder scenario again, and your child or 50 other children would have to be thrown into it, then it would be more rational to throw your child into the meatgrinder, because harm to your child is bad because it is harm itself that is bad, not because it is your child, but if 50 were thrown in a meatgrinder instead, it would generate more harm, so if you throw your child in there, it’s less harm, less bad, it would be less bad in that scenario if one of the two things had to happen either way, no matter how offensive to common human intuition that is.

Ultimately any kind of narrow focus on the rights of a subset of sentient organisms is delusional – black, white, men, women, human, animal, etc rights, what makes it an important priority to have rights to be protected from suffering is never being part of those particular ingroups, it’s the capacity to experience suffering itself, once you make it about the group in particular, it becomes non-sensical.

All that matters is that you’re part of the sentient group so to speak, if you’re not, we can’t possibly even harm ”you” by treating ”you” a certain way, you wouldn’t want to face the discrimination farm animals face unless the trait sentience/consciousness/suffering-capacity would be absent in you, it’s not about being human or not human or how attached others are to you.

On abortion.

What does it mean to create life?

When you create life, you make someone addicted to pleasure/relief, and if they don’t obtain it, they will be exposed to suffering, life entails constantly facing series of suffering, like hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue, etc.

You have deprivations imposed on you, and if you fail to alleviate deprivation, you will suffer more intensely as a result of that. At its core, you are presented with the task to alleviate deprivation, if you fail to do so, it intensifies. If you alleviate it, A. another deprivation will pop up (like appetite after hunger, now you need to eat just to avoid suffering boredom) or B. the initial deprivation (hunger) is going to return in time, and you’ll have to eat again.

You have to chase pleasure your entire life or you are subjected to harm, and the relief from harm is not guaranteed before you procreate.

Eat or hunger.
Drink or thirst.
Defecate or constipate.
Ejaculate or become tense.
Sleep or fatigue.
Breathe or suffocate.

So on and so forth.

I think it is therefore the responsible thing to do to kill a fetus. You prevent all future suffering by doing so instead of irresponsibly creating an addiction to pleasure that you cannot guarantee will be properly satisfied, and while there won’t be any pleasure, again, it won’t be a problem either, because there won’t be an addict craving for more pleasure in the first place.

Here I’d like to bring up the concept of Benatar’s asymmetry:

Benatar’s asymmetry:

Is the absence of pleasure really an issue if there is no one to experience it and suffer from it? Imagine this, I have both hypothetical pleasure and pain serum, if I inject said liquids into inanimate objects, they will turn conscious and either experience intense pleasure or intense pain, depending on which liquid I choose obviously.

Is injecting the pain liquid into my chair problematic? I would say yes.

Is not injecting the pleasure liquid into my chair problematic? I would say no.

Sentience is the only important characteristic.

Badness is necessarily something that is happening in feeling organisms, the capacity to have sensations that can either be of negative or positive value, this function is enabled by a brain and nerves that have to be developed to a certain degree. A rock cannot produce badness, neither can a fertilized egg or human fetus until a certain point.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

Sentience is arguably the trait that makes it most important to avoid having certain things happen to you, such as getting run over by a car, having a knife stuck in your throat or being burned, it opens the door to very negative sensations, it’s the only thing that could make it an important priority for you to avoid it.

A tree doesn’t care if it’s being burned down, it could only generate negative sensations in the sentient organisms that may in some way care about the tree, not in the tree itself. If an asteroid hits and destroys the entire planet, that can only be bad if there are sentient organisms on said planet, otherwise it is a completely insignificant event.

The reason why it’s bad when I’m harmed is not because I contain human DNA, it is bad because I have a functioning central nervous system generating a pain response, enabling me to even be harmed, it is the only reason why I am even capable of experiencing harm in the first place.

I think the common question of: ”Is it a human life?” is simply completely misguided to begin with, being human is not why I try to avoid being squashed.

It doesn’t matter whether or not something contains human DNA or is alive, a braindead human contains human DNA, a head of broccoli is alive too, that doesn’t make it bad to destroy a thing, many pro-lifers are simply speciesists.

If they knew they had to experience the life of a factory farmed pig getting its nuts hacked off with no anesthesia tomorrow, they wouldn’t agree to that based on their entirely misguided notion that the thing that makes not having a knife stuck in your throat important is the trait human DNA. Human life by itself is absolutely worthless, life only has extrinsic value to sentience.

It’s similar to a white slave owner accepting the torture of black slaves because they don’t contain white skin color, but having qualms about pulling the plug on his braindead white grandmother because she contains white skin color, neither white skin color nor human DNA are the characteristic that make it important to avoid torture.

Pre-sentience abortion for the ”victim” is essentially just like it’s for tomatoes when you turn them into tomato soup, it cannot matter to them.

The only two common objections I consistently hear to this type of argumentation are that:

The fetus could become sentient in the future.

This is true of every potent sperm sample, if you don’t impede the process by flushing it down the toilet, I’m in full agreement that life starts in the testicles. Sperm lives, sperm dies, new sperm comes to life, sperm can survive in a moist environment up to 5 days.

If that argument is rejected because sperm could not ”on its own” grow into a sentient child (i.e by leeching off of a female’s body for 9 months, so not really on its own), only the morning after pill, not ejaculation would have to be a crime, as it prevents the sperm from fertilizing the egg on its own once it has been successfully ejaculated into a vagina, then realizing its potential to grow into a sentient child later on, on its own.

The effect is the same – no suffering.

It still cannot matter to the ”subject”, so there’s no rational reason for concern because of the aforementioned point I made, I don’t think the absence of pleasure is a problem if it doesn’t result in suffering. The fact that the fetus could become sentient doesn’t matter to the fetus right now when it’s not sentient, so it can’t possibly hurt it to be aborted, if you’re purely asexual, you can’t be deprived of sex.

I like the hypothetical of sentient grassblades. Let’s say if I let grassblades grow for 9 months, they would become sentient. Would it be a problem to mow them down before they have grown for 9 months? I’d say no, because they’re not sentient yet, so they won’t even care about never becoming sentient in the future.

If I took life away from a sentient organism, it could result in some badness as their sentience enables them feel distress in response to their life being taken away, sure, the arguably living organism that is not sentient yet cannot miss anything on the other hand.

So even if there were a hypothetical tomato that could become sentient tomorrow, if I turned it into tomato soup today, it could not possibly matter.

Coma patients are temporarily unconscious, but we don’t put them down either.

It doesn’t necessarily harm the coma patient to just not wake up again either, what could worry people though is to know that they could be legally euthanized if they were to fall into a coma one day, before they fall into that coma, because they have some kind of delusional death anxiety that they’re going to miss being alive once they’re dead.

So it doesn’t lead to badness to kill a sufficiently unconscious organism, but it could produce some suffering to legalize doing it, worrying others that they may not wake up again if they were to fall into a coma, that’s the slight distinction.

The fertilized egg/embryo/fetus was never conscious before, when it was a sperm, it never worried that if it were to fertilize an egg one day, it may be aborted by some evil, uncaring monster although it wished to become a fully conscious child one day, so in the case of an abortion as opposed to coma patients, we don’t have this whole problem.

And again, some organisms that live outside of wombs also have utility to helping others, I could argue it’s bad to pull the plug on someone who has to take care of a child, or a scientist who is about to find the cure for AIDS. We don’t live in a vacuum, the fetus kind of does.

What if the fetus is already sentient though?

If the fetus is unfortunately already able to suffer, without any great debate now about when exactly that happens, just presupposing the fetus is, then the same goes as for every other organism, if it’s killed entirely painlessly, without any suffering involved, it still wouldn’t be bad. It cannot be intrinsically harmful, it could only be extrinsically harmful, as in:

Family members and acquaintances might miss the painlessly killed person.
If we legalized this act of painless killing, you may scare others they’re next in line.
You prevented the person from reducing more suffering in other organisms.

Death is not an intrinsic harm, it can only be an extrinsic harm. This goes for late term abortion, infanticide, really any death. It’s only a problem in practice, there’s no problem with a theoretically completely painless death in principle, it prevents all future pain/suffering/harm/negative qualia.

Believing in the badness of death itself almost requires the subconscious or conscious delusion of some sort of afterlife. Even if you know that once you’re dead, it’s over, you can still be delusionally scared of things that aren’t a threat to you, arachnophobia, fear of even little spiders that you know to be harmless would be an example, and similarly irrational is fear of being dead.

Obviously, if you are dead, you no longer experience needs, wants, desires just like you didn’t before you were born, so the only thing that could be bad is your departure, you’re not going to wake up afterwards as a ghost and feel the need to come back but being unable to.

The general utility of the right to bodily autonomy.

Another thing to point out in general is also that even if the fetus is already sentient, that doesn’t automatically mean that the harm of the abortion outweighs the harm of forced birth.

Of course, anyone’s right to bodily autonomy isn’t absolute.

It matters like anything, only because of the existence of pain. You don’t want to get raped, generally there’s no worse harm to prevent by raping you, as in, we have to rape you or otherwise we all go to hell and burn for all eternity for example, so we write on a piece of paper that person x now has a legal entitlement not to get raped for no great reason randomly.

Fair deal, if you want to violate it, it’d be good to show evidence that you’re actually going to prevent a worse harm by doing so, and this is where pro-lifers fail.

Two organisms are connected to each other here, so if the pregnancy is unwanted by the hostess (which ideally, would be all pregnancies to begin with), we are automatically forced into a situation of having to harm one by abortion or the other one by forced birth. So if the only two options are:

harm the more sentient
harm the less sentient

then it’s still the lesser of two sufferings to abort than to force birthing – the fetus should be sufficiently sedated though if there’s a chance that it can suffer to some degree at that point, there’s still no adequate justification to cause unnecessary (to prevent greater) harm.

Just as when you leave the door open and an uninvited intruder comes in and refuses to leave your house, you have a right to shoot them, not torture them to death over the course of three days, that’d be doing unnecessary harm to prevent the threat.

Here pro-lifers will frequently say but the fetus is innocent, the intruder chooses to harm you, therefore it’s different. This is irrelevant, a rapist with severe mental retardation, multiple personalities or schizophrenic delusions who thinks he must rape to cure world hunger and cancer is also innocent and has a good motive in mind, that doesn’t diminish the harm caused, so it’s probably still better to defend yourself.

Sometimes two organisms are connected to each other and you have to harm one either way, e.g. a cat has an ixodid tick or a tapeworm. All suffering is bad, perhaps you’ll cause some suffering to the slightly sentient tick or tapeworm, but certainly much less than if you let the parasite inside the cat’s asshole, causing worse suffering to the cat.

Pro-lifers would have more of a point if they demonstrated the suffering of the fetus to be worse, more intense than the suffering of the hostess, if pro-lifers could legitimately prove that the fetus has a soul and its soul is after the abortion forever suffering in a purgatory for aborted fetuses, getting raped by demons with pitchforks, then of course it’d be better to take that mother’s right to bodily autonomy away.

In that case, the forced-birth rhetoric would indeed start to make a lot more sense, granting bodily autonomy in that scenario would lead to a much worse outcome, but that is what makes the forced-birth view so absurd in our reality, because abortion does not lead to the more suffering producing outcome, to the contrary, it greatly prevents and reduces suffering.

UPDATE:

What if the fetus is already sentient?

That’s indeed a more complicated question, I have no qualms with anything non-sentient being killed, and technically I don’t think the painless killing of a sentient organism is a problem either.

If the non-existence before existence isn’t harmful, neither is the non-existence after you died harmful, it’s the same non-existence, and the organism won’t miss pleasure. If I’m not sad about my non-existent sibling that was never born not experiencing happiness, and I’m not upset about a potato not being able to experience happiness, why would it bother me that a corpse cannot experience happiness? They all have in common that they don’t miss it.

So what I’m saying is that all that can actually be harmful is the process of you dying and its external consequences (sad family members, friends, etc).

However, in practice I still don’t take the view that you should just walk around trying to euthanize as many people as possible, there would be practical issues with that, it would have lots of negative side effects, so it seems to me I would think this is simply a case by case kind of thing if it can be done rather painlessly, admittedly I’m not an expert on that subject – so I can’t really comment that much at what point a fetus is sentient and it might be ethically problematic to squash it, I won’t declare it’s always right.