The flippant “Y chromosome” stuff is a minor and mild way of putting the shoe on the other foot, since it’s good to feel how other people live. Somebody who’s as strong against sexism as you are no doubt comments as strenuously against all the flippant comments aimed at women, and even more so against all the humiliating, downright despicable, and cruel ones. That’s great. We need more men with a sense of fairness to speak up.

Might want to actually have some data to back up your statements before being a petty sexist.

At this point, the number of people who would, in all seriousness, say gays or blacks aren’t people is so vanishingly small, their concept of what the consensus should be doesn’t matter. They’re not part of it. The law doesn’t reflect their views.

But if people get their heads far enough up their asses, there’s literally no limit to what they can decide about this. If a society has no concepts of fairness and justice, and decides that, say, all blonds are slaves, then behavior is organized accordingly. People can and have done that in the past. Those aren’t very happy societies, and they tend to fall apart on first contact with better ones, but the fact remains that social consensus can be anything. It doesn’t have to make sense.

So the answer to the anti-choicers is to point out that they’d better have an inclusive view of who’s human, including women, and blacks, and gays, because if they don’t, there is nothing to stop, say, me, from deciding that their highest purpose would be as spare organ parts.

And a view of humanity that includes women as persons with the same rights as everyone else means that being pro-choice is the only option on a social level. (One can always be anti-abortion for oneself.) Even people who believe the fetus has all the rights of a citizen cannot start giving that fetus more rights. If they insist that women can be forced to provide life support for a fetus, then they’re promoting the idea that some people are more important and others can be used as ambulatory organ storage. As I say, I doubt very much that they really want to go there.

So, short form: no, there’s nothing outside of consensus that decides who’s human. Yes, we better decide women have the same rights as anyone else, because otherwise any class of humans can be declared non-persons if the consensus decides to go that way.

(Hmm. Pretty longwinded. I hope I answered your question, somewhere in there. )

So how do you make that distinction? Because I’d love to be able to understand your reasoning so I can quote/paraphrase you when debating about abortion rights.