Yes, the right to stop consenting never ends (duh?)
In the law, consent is not always an ongoing thing. One can waive one’s rights by not acting on them in a timely fashion. At some point, by not complaining, you consent to whatever it is you could once have objected to. The rules are different for every relationship, but the law would have no trouble saying, as it does, that if you don’t want a baby growing in a healthy pregnancy, you need to expel it before some arbitrary point, e.g., viability. I see no reason why ethical rules would be any different.
It is possible in law and life to give irrevocable consent. It is your god-given right as a libertarian to do so. That being the case, and, as you say, action and inaction being the same thing, your failure to object by date X can be seen under the local ethical system as equivalent to irrevocable consent. Of course, that equivalence would apply only in special cases.
Not sure what you’re even asking here, but seems equivalent to 1
It means can you stop consenting when you learn the baby’s sex because you don’t like the baby’s sex? So, yeah, it’s equivalent to 1.
I dealt with this in the main article, but essentially yes, child services exists
Child services? What obliges you to call them? That would be imposing a duty on you to which you have not consented. As you say, “you have to tell someone that you’ve revoked your consent for this situation.” How so? If you can morally refuse to rear the kid, why can’t you morally refuse to tell anyone so? If you can refuse to consent to the inconvenience of rearing your kids, why can’t you not consent to the inconvenience of arranging to have them cared for? And while you’re at it, how about arranging for the care of other parents’ kids that need caring for? Do you have a special duty to make sure your kid is cared for? That is precisely what I meant about the argument proving too much.
If you want to claim that duty to rescue is different from duty not to kill, you need to make an argument as to why.
The difference is simple: You can refrain from harming anyone, but you cannot save everyone. At the moment that you would have me save a drowning man, I could be earning money to feed a starving child. How am I to choose whom to rescue? Why must I choose?
An obligation to rescue would be open-ended. If we had an obligation to rescue, and no special duty to rescue particular people, we would never stop rescuing. In contrast, not doing harm — except in the Darwinian sense that surviving in a competitive world implies harming someone — can be achieved without then having to go on and not harm someone else.
From an evolutionary perspective — morality is just game theory applied to preserving our genes — it is impractical for each of us to save everyone and redundant for all of us to try. So, we each have a set of designated rescuees — our loved ones — whom it is immoral not to rescue. From there, we reason back to declaring abortion immoral from whatever point the little bugger becomes one of our designated rescuees.
The “special duty” argument is not that one life is more valuable than another; it’s that the community in which our morality operates meets the duty to rescue everyone by allocating to each member the “special duty” to rescue his or her own children. For the neighborhood to look good, all the lawns have to be mowed, so we each have a special duty to mow our own lawn. But we have no duty to mow anyone else’s.
We don’t defer to the principle of natural selection when saving people in hospitals in general, so no reason it should be different here. By the way, lifeguards can indeed quit their jobs. So can police.
Hospitals, lifeguards, and police are paid to save people. They have a special duty to do so and a moral duty not to break their promise. I did insert the phrase “while on duty” in my lifeguard example. No one has an obligation to be a cop, but a cop on duty has a moral obligation to act like a cop.