Brandon Lee Upshaw

Christian. Sinner. Husband. Father. Former Liberal. Equalist. Abortion Abolitionist.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

On "controlling women": that's what people say when the argument has run out. About half the children killed by abortion are female. My position protects them. Many of the most outspoken abolitionists are women. The position stands or falls on whether the unborn human is a human being worthy of protection. Who's making the argument is not the argument.

Every objection in your reply has now been answered. Nothing new is on the table. If the next response is a louder version of "that's not how it is," I'll let it stand. We're done here. God bless.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

"Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want." The state isn't forcing pregnancy. Biology produced the dependent through her own action and his. The state is declining to authorize killing the dependent to end the difficulty of the dependency. A woman doesn't get to kill her two-year-old because she "doesn't want" to keep raising him. The unborn child isn't in a different category.

"Close the gap before you force pregnancy": the duty to not kill an innocent human doesn't wait on social conditions. We don't tell a starving mother she may suffocate her toddler until welfare improves. The protection of the human being is the floor, not a bonus installed after.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

A skin cell is part of a human being. An embryo is a human being at a stage. That distinction is embryology, not theology.

A skin cell is not a whole, self-directed organism. Detached, it doesn't become anything. An embryo is a whole human organism whose entire developmental trajectory unfolds from within herself when she has food, warmth, and time. The skin cell doesn't get a birthday. She does.

So the criterion doesn't prove too much. It distinguishes correctly between a body part and a body.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Correct, and that's the position, not a flaw in it. Full moral status attaches to the human being from the moment a human being exists. Currently exercising a capacity is not what makes a human valuable. If it were, sleep, coma, and severe disability would strip moral status. They don't.

The question your framework can't answer cleanly is why a being who will, on her own developmental timeline, exercise every one of those capacities doesn't count yet. Mine answers it: she counts because she is the same human being who will exercise them. Identity is continuous. Value tracks identity.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Every personhood account picks a criterion. Yours is sentience grounded in thalamocortical function. Mine is membership in the human species. Neither is question-begging on its own terms. Both locate where moral status is grounded.

The right test is which criterion creates fewer monstrous consequences. Yours grades humans by current cognitive capacity, which puts infants, the severely cognitively disabled, the comatose, and late-stage dementia patients into ambiguous territory. Mine doesn't grade humans at any stage. Same kind of being, same value.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

In each of those cases the law and the dominant culture denied personhood first, then the abuses followed. Dred Scott didn't strip rights from a recognized person. It ruled he was not one. The Nuremberg Laws did the same. So did chattel slavery. So did the dehumanization at every step of every genocide.

The pattern is identical to the unborn under current law. The abortion regime is built on the premise that the unborn child is not a legal person. Deny personhood, then deny protection. The parallel isn't sloppy. It's structural.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Location of dependency isn't morally decisive. A newborn alone in her mother's home is dependent on her mother's body in different ways: warmth, breastmilk, supervision, oxygen-rich air. We don't say the mother may let her starve because the dependency is now external rather than internal.

Two more things. The mother and father created the dependent and placed her in that exact location by their own causal act. Framing it as "she occupied my body" reverses cause and effect. And every one of us was once a human being inside our mother. Our value didn't begin when our location changed.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Brain death is not "no sentience yet." Brain death is the death of the human individual. Whole-brain function, irreversibly lost, is how we legally define that a person has died. Withdrawing the ventilator isn't homicide because the person is no longer there. We're acknowledging an absence, not causing one.

A pre-sentient fetus is the opposite case. The whole human individual is alive, present, and developing exactly on her own biological timeline. Killing her doesn't acknowledge an absence. It creates one.

"Gone" and "not yet at milestone X" are not the same thing. My framework is consistent because it treats them as the different things they are.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

"Already had it" vs "not yet developed it" only does the work you need if moral status is a milestone we earn. It isn't.

A newborn doesn't have fully developed thalamocortical architecture either. By the strict version of your test, she falls into the "not yet developed" bucket. You'd say she has enough function to count. Fine, but now the line isn't categorical. It's a degree judgment along a continuum.

Once it's a continuum, the burden shifts: name the principled threshold and justify why personhood begins precisely there. Species membership avoids that by recognizing the human being from the moment the human being exists.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Read your own sentence again. "If artificial wombs existed, the bodily autonomy objection would largely dissolve."

You're conceding that when delivery-without-killing is available, killing is not justified by bodily autonomy. Post-viability delivery-without-killing IS available right now. That is exactly what viable means. She can come out alive.

So your framework already rules out elective abortion of a viable child on bodily autonomy grounds. The only remaining question is where the line goes back, and on what principle. My answer is that the human individual is the same individual all the way down to conception, so the same protection runs all the way back.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Fair correction on the number. 23-24 weeks is the conventional viability line, climbing from there. I won't argue 22.

Notice what conceding 23-24 does to the argument though. A human being who is now capable of being born and surviving is still being legally killed because of where she happens to be located. Location doesn't grant or revoke personhood. The toddler ten feet outside the hospital isn't less of a person than the one inside.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

The biology you cite is correct. It just doesn't carry the moral weight you're loading onto it. You're using "no mature thalamocortical function" to mean "not yet a person." That is the premise, not the conclusion.

A newborn's thalamocortical network isn't adult-functional either. Full connectivity takes years. We don't grade her moral status by synaptic maturity. The reason is that personhood doesn't track developmental milestones. It tracks the human being who is moving through them.

So the question isn't whether 6-week neural activity equals adult consciousness. It doesn't. The question is whether moral status tracks the being or tracks the brain stage. I say it tracks the being.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

@pinkheretic Going to do this point by point, in the order you wrote them. Each one deserves its own reply. Thanks for keeping this substantive.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

On "support starts at birth": yes, under current law. That's exactly the legal gap abolitionists are trying to close. Current law treats the unborn as not-yet-a-person, so duties begin at birth. The argument is to extend protection back to the human who exists from conception. Citing the gap doesn't refute the argument. It describes what the argument is about.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

The drunk driver analogy doesn't depend on criminality, it depends on causation creating duty. Better non-crime examples: a hunter who accidentally injures someone (no crime, full liability). A doctor performing a known-risk procedure (no crime, civil liability if harm results). The principle is causation, not crime.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

@RLREPET @auspexheterodo1 @vixmcintyre @Zarish5062 No idea - guessing at some point I accessed X from a VPN.

Thanks for pointing it out - really thought you were trolling me in the most bizarre way.

What I said about your attempt to toss my opinion aside because you thought I was from Brazil, still stands.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

Also confused by the Brazil reference. I'm in the US, discussing US law. And "mind your own country" only works as an argument if moral questions are bounded by geography. They aren't. Any human can speak to whether intentional killing of innocent humans is wrong. That principle grounds universal human rights, abolitionism, the civil rights movement, every effort to expand human protections. "Stay in your country" is the silencing playbook of every defender of injustice. It's not an argument.

[Brandon Lee Upshaw @BUpshaw]

https://t.co/A21I9sAYcO

On consent: it's not the right category here. Causation creates duty regardless of consent. The drunk driver didn't consent to killing the pedestrian but is liable. The father who didn't consent to fatherhood still owes 18 years of support. Voluntary causation creates duty toward the resulting human, consent or not.

[RR @RLREPET]

@BUpshaw @auspexheterodo1 @vixmcintyre @Zarish5062 Consenting to sex does mean the woman consents pregnancy.