If you’re planning on passing through South Dakota, it might be worthwhile brushing up on the credentials some people think you should require to qualify for an abortion. Even if you’ve been raped, you’ll still need one or two small extra things to get over the bar.
From NARAL News:
State Sen. Bill Napoli (R-Rapid City) gave this shocking description of the circumstances under which he thinks abortion should still be permissible when he told The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:
“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”
That’s right: all you loose atheists are asking for it!
March 20th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Yeah, Bill, being sodomised won’t make you pregnant.
March 20th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Nothing like taking extreme quotes out of context to prove a point! (it does not.)
March 20th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Not sure what you mean Joseph. What is out of context about this?
March 20th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Perhaps it is supposed to start ‘Fearless and Godly Warrior for Truth, State Sen. Bill Napoli…’
March 20th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
I suspect that putting the quote more into context might actually make it worse for Senator Napoli.
March 20th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Thanks Adam. Sitting here doing boring tasks like refereeing papers it’s great to read a comment that makes me laugh out loud.
March 20th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Pro-lifers can be religious, as well as non-religious. Arguments for why abortion (if the abortion is not done to save the mother’s life) is immoral are founded in reason, not in religion. At conception, we have a new human life to worry about, and we shouldn’t prefer one life over another, no matter how developed the embryo is.
March 20th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Vince, you seem to have glossed over an encyclopedic discussion of when it makes sense to talk about human life beginning with one simple decree. I, for one, don’t find a few cells to be a human life. you may disagree, but I don’t see that reason guides us simply here.
March 20th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
I think this could get more out of hand than a debate about the landscape.
March 20th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
We can only hope the people of South Dakota throw out the bums in the next election.
March 21st, 2006 at 12:02 am
maybe that girl could instead find hope and love, having with that child.
March 21st, 2006 at 12:54 am
You can find the full transcript here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june06/abortion_3-03.html
I don’t think the context changes the message very much, though perhaps this was his “worst case scenario” that would most strongly justify abortion? Even so…
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.
BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
March 21st, 2006 at 6:57 am
In Jimmy Carter’s latest book he says 2/3 of all abortions happen because the woman is unsure about how the child will be taken care of.
Vince, you are right, Mark you are not..got back and bone up on your biology!
March 21st, 2006 at 7:24 am
Cisco – maybe and maybe not. But since it is her body, it seems reasonable to me that she decide.
P. Edward Murray – again, another glib comment glossing over a complicated issue. Perhaps you are unaware of the long and nuanced debate over such things.
March 21st, 2006 at 8:43 am
Perhaps Bush can win the war on terror if he invites Bin Laden to rule some of the conservative US states. It seems that both parties would be happy with such a solution.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:30 am
If you google “William Napoli State Senator Dakota”, you can get his phone number and express your opinion directly.
The majority of abortions are economic decisions. When Bill supports a living wage for all Americans get back to me on other ways to reduce the demand for abortions.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:59 am
The abortion debate should logically be about whether or not, or at what stage, the foetus/unborn child/whatever is a human. The most vocal people in this debate have clearly already made that determination (’Life’ or ‘choice’ generally both presuppose the settlement of the ‘is it/he/she/whatever human?’ question) and are just at work politically to get legislation that favours their point of view. Which makes it a rather moribund ‘debate’ to get into, with the activists of either side, because there is in fact no debate on the rightness/wrongness of abortion, but just a debate about how best to screw the people that hold the opposite view.
Pro-abortion supporters should rejoice in the current situation, because South Dakota’s decision is going to work against the anti-abortion camp (and it won’t ever come into effect anyhow, even for a little while). If it goes to the Supreme Court, they’ll reaffirm Roe anyhow and Roberts and Alito will have to vote. If either votes for overturning the SD law, then conservative activists will feel that in their support of the GOP that they are left holding a bag of manure; if they both vote against, the next Justice might well be the key and the likelihood of the GOP being able to get an another anti-Roe vote through the Senate is pretty damn low, not to mention that it will invigourate the Left across the board. The GOP are happier, it seems to me, with being able to claim that they’re anti-abortion without the prospect of having to live up to it; they can rally their base whilst being shielded, by Roe, from the disapproval of the majority of Americans that believe that abortion should, in fact, be legal. Mort Kondracke had a column on why the attempts to actually challenge Roe are bad for the GOP: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/03/gop_should_hope_supreme_court.html
I think that he’s pretty much right on that and that the best short-term aims for pro-lifers are achievable ones. Indeed, there are people who do favour Roe and abortion rights who don’t favour unlimited abortion anyhow. Not that it’s likely to get as far as the Supreme Court, and the GOP can count themselves lucky on that, although McCain has already had to pin his colours to the mast on this, and won’t be winning any points from independents and/or ‘moderate democrats’ with what he said. Grandstanding for the primaries can bite you in the arse when the General Election comes along.
Additionally, I think that the best long-term course for anti-abortion and pro-abortion types is a constitutional amendment on the subject of when a foetus becomes ‘human’ (whenever people decide that it does), which is a logical step, it seems to me, and certainly should be a federal/constitutional matter. If Roe ever falls, it might well take Griswold v Connecticut with it, and Griswold is, frankly, a more important decision than Roe, at least for those that favour some privacy from government intrusion.
Incidentally, I hate the nicey-nice ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ titles. Everyone would be ‘in favour of life’ and ‘in favour of choice’ so the adoption of these essentially meaningless but apparently descriptive names for each side can only be an attempt to avoid the actual matter in question, to dress up the presupposed conclusion to the ‘is it human’ question with some pleasing spin. The wider debate, insofar as it is a ‘debate’ at all more than an argument with immutable sides, ranges over a few different issues, but this part of it is about abortion. Even ‘pro abortion’ and ‘anti-abortion’ that I use above are only really any use to describe the extreme fringes of the debate (as most people appear to have a more measured opinion on the issue); their merit, despite their terminological inexactitude, is that they at least contain mention of the issue at the heart of this part of the wider debate.
Two other points: for the pro-abortion camp, the problem with SD isn’t this law (which provides a net positive to their side, politically) but that the whole state reportedly has only one clinic that performs abortions, that is only open for one day a week, and that is staffed by doctors from other states. Secondly, it might be interesting to watch if this has an effect in SD politics, in the popularity of the governor and in invigourating the state Democrats.
March 21st, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Adam,
Nobody is Pro-abortion.
March 21st, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I am pro-abortion, in exactly the same way I am pro-quadruple-bypass-surgery: it’s no fun, but provides a definite good in the right circumstances. Obviously it makes sense to try to limit those circumstances to be as rare as possible.
March 21st, 2006 at 12:43 pm
No matter what your views on abortion, you cannot allow it only on the basis that the rape victim is religious and that she was a virgin. Unless, of course, you want to introduce the Christian Shia.
March 21st, 2006 at 1:15 pm
The debate over choice is a foolish one. It’s really all about social class. Abortions will always be available for women who can afford to leave South Dakota–or the United States, if necessary. And poor women will continue to have abortions–but they won’t be safe, clean ones.
March 21st, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Eliot, I think that ‘pro abortion’ and ‘anti abortion’ are inexact (as I said) but certainly better than the meaningless ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’. And, in essence, the extreme part of the argument (which those terms do, I think, capture) is about whether or not abortion is a ‘valid medical procedure’ at all. And yes, as Sean says, if you’re not of the opinion that the foetus (at that stage of development, or even at all) is a human being, it is a medical procedure not unlike open heart surgery, etc. You’re for it because you think that it’s a valid solution to a medical problem (this approach is there in Roe because as a medical issue, it’s a privacy matter and not an issue between two people (mother and child) into which the government can intrude).
March 21st, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Mark,
it’s not only her body… there is another body inside her.
So a first question is is she has the right to kill the other one?
But, ad I said, our society should promote the value of this new life and help the mother to see this value: we live in a society that should give value to human lives and not consider them as burdens.
March 21st, 2006 at 1:56 pm
You’re talking from a point of assuming that the foetus in question is a human life. If you’re speaking to someone who doesn’t believe that, you’re not going to make any headway, and this is why the ‘is it/he/she/whatever human’ is the issue to address.
March 21st, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Mind you, I can’t see both sides coming together on that, although some people on each side probably have a feeling that there is a time after which the foetus is human, although they may not agree on when that time is to be. But at least if the fundamental issue was being discussed, we’d be better off just on account of that, I think.
March 21st, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Perhaps this is indelicate, but what does ’sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it’ actually mean? What does Mr. Napoli know? When did he know it? How did he find out?
March 21st, 2006 at 2:09 pm
I just had a long talk with Bill Napoli’s wife (Peggy) – thanks Eliot – she answers the phone if you call him at his work number.
I had called to express my outrage about his comments and found myself drawn into a conversation with her. So, on a prosaic matter, yes his remarks were taken out of context. He was interviewed for 45 minutes (for a three minute segment) and was repeatedly pressed by the reporter for his “worst case” scenario and this is what he came up with. However, these are not his only criteria for an abortion – he has (what I think of as) the standard red-state views about abortion being possible after any rape and when the mother’s life is in danger. Just for the record.
In talking to Mrs. Napoli (who is jolly nice), I was struck by how many women she knew by name, (these were not friends of friends) that had had abortions and then suffered psychologically as a result of this (she claimed they were coerced into them). What she really seemed to want was a mechanism by which women (and I think we are talking about working class women here) would receive counseling and support as they were making their decision. And a much better program of birth control education. All in all, it wasn’t so hard for us (and yes I told her I was a Democratic, blue state, scientist atheist – she didn’t blink) to come to some sort of consensus.
March 21st, 2006 at 2:24 pm
The thing that just pisses me off about this ‘the blastocyst/embryo is alive’ (since the arguments made above state that life begins at conception) is: why the f#*% don’t you people scream and complain about in vitro fertilization and the legions of frozen/destroyed embryos that it creates? It is far worse than abortion, and, in contrast to abortion, is done completely electively at great expense by wealthy individuals who could be adopting (and there are plenty of babies out there to adopt, if you are willing to adopt a non-white one).
Go ban IVF first, and then I’ll listen to your holier than thou arguments about abortion.
March 21st, 2006 at 2:26 pm
To be fair, most of them are angry about that; indeed, the laws banning federal funding of IVF (research and/or practice) are for that reason.
March 21st, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Legislate that all rape must be oral or anal sodomy. Rape of post-menopausal women is a freebie. For that matter, any fertile women who menstruates has killed an oocyte. Every fertile woman must be pregnant or nursing. Every possible egg must be given a soul, everywhere, planetwide. Forever. Only nuns – brides of Christ Himself – may be spared.
Miscarriages are homocidal crimes against God. Said women must be imprisoned and impregnated. Menarche must initiate an unending celebration of Holy presence. It is woman’s assigned duty to bear and bear and bear some more until death.
Where is your faith?
March 21st, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Homocidal?
What’s that, killing gays?
March 21st, 2006 at 3:06 pm
adam–
I realize that most of them are against that when talking to each other,, but they never seem to talk very loudly about it at all. It’s never STOP ABORTION AND IVF NOW! And I don’t see the SD law really banning IVF. And discussions on this issue usually end up somewhat civil. It just enrages me, b/c if you are a prolifer, then this issue should be MORE enraging to you, not less. But somehow, it’s not. but I guess IVF doesn’t conjure up images of 16 year old teenagers with heaving busoms.
March 21st, 2006 at 3:14 pm
What about the business last year with Bush and those children that had come from ‘adopted’ spare eggs from IVF? Add to that the enormous opposition to general cloning research and/or embryonic stem cell researchfrom material taken from those fertilised eggs and the aforementioned funding ban and I think that it’s really pretty clear of the opinion of the anti-abortion folks on the IVF issue too.
I do think, though, that the later in gestation the termination occurs, the louder the protests get, which pretty much makes sense.
March 21st, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Hi Samantha,
that’s very interesting – nice work! (Although I still think his “worst case” is absolutely ridiculous.) I certainly know women who’ve had abortions and not been psychologically bothered by it at all. I’m definitely all for counseling being readily available to women who would like it. I am not for them being forced to have it as a prerequisite of being allowed to have an abortion.
The people I know who work for Planned Parenthood in states where they haven’t been decimated by fundamentalists are always available to support and counsel women for free whenever they’d like. The reason such counseling isn’t always readily available is that PP has been ruined in many states because what most of the fundamentalists want is not that there be counseling but that abortions just plain not be allowed.
If Mrs. Napoli is for better birth control eduction and availability that’s great. This is another area where the religious right has been the primary reason we don’t have these – pushing abstinence only programs that don’t work and preventing availability of condoms in schools. Has her husband been working against the forces of silliness within his own party – that would be impressive?
Cheers,
March 21st, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Out of context or not Napoli is the one that is promoting this forced childbirth law that is all about imposing his stupid immoral religous views on everyone else and about controlling others reather than empowereing and helping them. His wifes bleating about how she wants these women to have access to couselling is utterly bogus, why is her husband’s law not worded accordingly and why did it get proposed right after Altio got confirmed? The only couselling they want women to get is to shut up and do what you are told.
I realize I am ranting about a country other than my own but this is getting ridiculous. I might as well be living next to Iran as the to the US.
March 21st, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Holier than thou? Bittgradstudent seems to have an overactive imagination. However, he/she is right: IVF is also wrong, but also not as ‘high-profile’ as abortion. But we’re not talking about IVF are we?
Uncle Al: An oocyte isn’t a human being isn’t it? A miscarriage isn’t immoral, unless the mother intended it to happen and took measures to have it happen. Don’t talk about faith when you’re obviously not willing to think about and investigate it before you write.
The question of when a new human life begins is one with a definite answer. Something is inside the woman’s uterus, and its actual status is neither undefined nor unknowable nor purely subjective. It is something definite. You don’t need religion to arrive at an answer. My stance against abortion is no more grounded in religion than is my stance for helping the poor, or my stance against breaking inside someone’s house and robbing it.
Check out this interesting article. Note the url. You can see what he’s arguing for.
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_24natureofembryo.html
Back to my physics work.
March 21st, 2006 at 6:07 pm
I don’t think that the question is as simple as all that, Vince. There’s plenty of good arguments on either side.
March 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I have noticed the lack of female responses to this thread. Not surprising. What can one say? I wonder how many of these vocal male anti-abortion types (we don’t use the American terms here) take responsibility for contraception in their relationships. Let alone children. Someone mentioned ‘biology’. Goddammit – I must’ve dropped those inbuilt maternal instincts off a cliff one day when rummaging in my pockets. Oh no! I’m not human! Lock me up!
March 21st, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Found the following on the page
US Statistics:
25.5% of women deciding to have an abortion want to postpone childbearing.
21.3% of women cannot afford a baby.
14.1% of women have a relationship issue or their partner does not want a child.
12.2% of women are too young (their parents or others object to the pregnancy.)
10.8% of women feel a child will disrupt their education or career.
7.9% of women want no (more) children.
3.3% of women have an abortion due to a risk to fetal health.
2.8% of women have an abortion due to a risk to maternal health.
March 21st, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Whatever the demographic in this thread, the fact is that anti-abortion campaigning isn’t just a male thing, any more than the pro-abortion campaign is just females.
March 21st, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Hi Mark!
Of course I agree with everything you say about counseling! I was just surprised that that was the particular tack our conversation took (I don’t get to talk to the wives of anti-abortion Republican minor politicians in South Dakota very often). I would have predicted there would be more of a religious component to her objections to abortion, but instead she seemed far more bothered by the experiences of women she knew. And I disagree a little with the sentiment of Sean’s comment. I do think abortion can be (doesn’t have to be) a dreadful thing for some women to go through. Not quite comparable to other operations.
I asked Peggy about Bill Napoli’s views on contraception, knowing how much the Republicans have worked against it (tying foreign aid to third world countries to this issue is something that makes me grind my teeth at night for example). Of course I doubt (but I didn’t ask!) that Bill Napoli actively works for any sensible resolution on this – and don’t mean to defend him much further – except that I got the impression (from talking to his wife) that he is unsophisticated in dealing with the press (he’s a State Senator from SD!) and was stitched up by the Lehrer Newshour who were looking for a frothing red state Republican for us to hate.
March 21st, 2006 at 8:23 pm
Kea, I thought of the same thing (i.e., that the majority of comments come from men) as I was looking at this thread, and I couldn’t help but smile sadly. How many men and with what vigor are trying to tell me what I should do with my own body…
So many people seem to miss the point that the moment they would be forcing a woman to bring a pregnancy to term against her will, they would be reducing her from a human being to simply a vessel, also creating two classes of citizens in the process. It is a matter of basic human as well as civil rights.
It is just sad…
March 21st, 2006 at 8:58 pm
“how many men” in this thread? Vince, maybe, Napoli, certainly, and is Cisco a man?
Additionally, be clear that the anti-abortionists see themselves as telling what you can’t do with someone else’s body. They think that the foetus is human. Ascribing moronic views to them won’t help you win your case.
Of course, some of the same people will try to tell us all what we can do with our own bodies, but most won’t and it’s not a unique theme (why should someone with adequate insurance be legislated into wearing a motorcycle helmet?).
March 21st, 2006 at 9:03 pm
By the same token, I have no idea what the guy’s wife thinks she’s doing talking about people who have abortions and then regret it, as if she wants the government to protrect them from that. These women are either adults or at least considered to be competent to make the decision, and for as long as that decision is legal to make, they can live with the consequences like other adults. Requiring the availability of counseling can easily be defended as legislating on best medical practice but forcing it only makes sense if your position is that the foetus is human (in which case, the real aim should be to ban the practice of abortion in at least nearly all cases); banning abortion for alleged concern about the mothers is just mindless paternalism, and we see enough of that from the government, at all levels, as it is.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:04 pm
Americans could still go to Canada if abortion is banned. In Canada there are no laws limiting abortion at all, see here.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:33 pm
adam, I am not trying to ascribe moronic views to anybody. I am only trying to raise the civil-rights aspect of the issue.
“Additionally, be clear that the anti-abortionists see themselves as telling what you can’t do with someone else’s body.”
This “somebody else” does not have an independent existence as long as it exists inside my body. Can you dispute that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will would reduce her to a “vessel”?
March 21st, 2006 at 9:44 pm
It’s only a civil rights issue, in most cases, when you accept that the foetus isn’t a human. If you believe that it is a human, ‘woman’s right to choose’ just doesn’t apply (although if there were a more serious medical case for an abortion, that would be a different matter). Lack of an independent existence isn’t enough to mitigate the fact that the foetus is human, for those people that believe that it is, and frankly, that’s pretty logical if you accept their premise. Additionally, if you take ‘independent existence’ as the criterion (which is the case, pretty much, in UK abortion law) then you accept limits on abortion past the stage at which the foetus/child/whatever can be delivered and sustained. There’s plenty of people who favour additional restrictions on abortion that are in that camp (moving allowable time for abortion in their state back to earlier in pregnancy).
The problem with the ‘independent existence’ criterion, of course, is that it puts something that one would think ought to be relatively intrinsic, which is to say, humanity, into a position of being contingent on the current state of medical science. But then, there’s no solution that’s going to suit everyone’s prejudices/beliefs/whatever.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:50 pm
I’m not, incidentally, arguing either side. But I’ve never seen the point in the mixture of incredulity, outrage and misrepresentation of the people on the other side. There’s intelligent arguments on both sides, even if the people shouting the loudest don’t often make them. And yeah, there are people on nearly any political issue that are so extreme as to be almost grotesque, but we should be careful to restrain our condemnation just to those identified individuals. Indeed, it’s so obvious (condemning the morons) that it’s almost pointless doing it.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:52 pm
That last post wasn’t addressed to anyone here, I should add. It was supposed to be an actual reply, but became much more of a comment on something that I have found irritating in general, in seeing this issue discussed elsewhere.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:27 pm
It’s only a civil rights issue, in most cases, when you accept that the foetus isn’t a human. If you believe that it is a human, ‘woman’s right to choose’ just doesn’t apply (although if there were a more serious medical case for an abortion, that would be a different matter).
Of course it’s a civil rights issue. Even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that the embryo/fetus is a person, can you think of another situation in which a person would be required to make a physiological sacrifice in order to sustain another person’s life? Sure, it’s an admirable thing to make that sacrifice, but if, for example, another person needs a kidney to survive, you are free to refuse to donate yours, even if it’s your own child and you are the only compatible donor.
I love the way men seem to view pregnancy as no big deal unless there’s a specific, known, high-risk factor involved. The experience of pregnancy varies widely — could be 9 months of supernatural joy, or 9 months of utter misery. And the physical experience doesn’t necessarily correlate with how much you want the baby, either. But for most women it’s not a trivial experience, and even a normal, healthy pregnacy permanently changes the body; even an apparently normal pregnancy carries risks to health and life.
P.S. I typed this message with one hand while nursing my 3-month-old daughter.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:32 pm
“Additionally, if you take ‘independent existence’ as the criterion (which is the case, pretty much, in UK abortion law) then you accept limits on abortion past the stage at which the foetus/child/whatever can be delivered and sustained.”
No, not necessarily. For it would require forced (i.e., against her will) medical intervention in the woman’s body in order to remove the pre-term foetus and sustain it in an incubator.
I am not trying to say that this an easy issue. I understand that some people believe that human life starts at conception, others that it starts at birth, and yet others can not say. This is more of a philosophical issue. People are entitled to their opinions and beliefs, but they should not try to force those on others. The legal and civil-rights issue at hand is messing or not with a woman’s body against her own free will.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Siamese twin seperations are subject to considerable legal consideration, for example, I think. But anyhow, if you believe that the foetus is human, you’d need a compelling threat to the mother to allow for the human inside her to be terminated/killed/murdered. The ‘human foetus’ has civil rights too; most states don’t even allow a consenting adult to be medically terminated, so the idea that they’d allow one adult to terminate a child based on ‘physiological dependence’ doesn’t seem so likely to me. Given that a position would have to be taken, the ‘you can’t kill that baby’ position would seem to be the more logical one, if you accept the ‘foetus is human’ premise, excepting cases of significant medical danger to the mother and maybe the normal rape/incest stuff that many anti-abortion ‘moderates’ would accept in any case.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:48 pm
The idea that, in principle, ‘forced/against her will’ medical intervention would be outlawed doesn’t stand up. Sure, it may be prohibited at the stage where the foetus is not considered ‘human’ in some sense, or at least to have some rights, based on the privacy precedent from Griswold that reappeared in Roe, but what about, say, as labour commences? The baby can at that stage be delivered. What about the day before?
I don’t think that most of the pro-abortion majority in this country (who don’t mostly fit the ‘pro abortion’ label that I’m using because they’re not at the extreme) think that, right up until the point of delivery, abortion is OK. Even in the UK, which isn’t a particularly religious society, people don’t generally believe that. So, in fact, in principle, it seems to me that a lot of people are happy with some restrictions on what the mother can do.
By the by, I have no idea why the courts allow for the ludicrous inconsistency that has been brought about in some states by ‘double murder’ statutes for killing a pregnant woman, unless they say (unbeknownst to me) that the ‘double murder’ rule can only be applied further on in pregnancy than abortion is generally allowed. I mean, sure, I can see that the people that call themselves ‘pro life’ feel that way about the murder of a pregnant woman, but if the body of law has to be anything, it has to be pretty consistent. That’s even more important than it being fair or right.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:52 pm
Sodomy won’t make Bill Napoli pregnant, but for women there is a finitely small chance of a pregnancy resulting from anal sex.
March 21st, 2006 at 11:09 pm
“but what about, say, as labour commences? The baby can at that stage be delivered.”
I think that as long as the woman’s own life and body is involved, she can not be forced to make a decision against her will.
Please don’t think that I say this light-heartedly. I think that most women would be torn apart if they had to make such a decision late in the pregnancy. Even early in the pregnancy, it is not an easy decision, at least for most women. But it is THEIR decision, as long as their body and life is involved.
March 21st, 2006 at 11:38 pm
Adam, either I’m extremely confused, or you are. If labor has begun, exactly what would ”’having an abortion” consist of? For that matter, if the fetus is full-term, whether or not labor has begun, what would “having an abortion” consist of?
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:22 am
Since I’m arguing from the premise that a new human being’s life begins at conception, I have to say that abortion involves two bodies, not one. Of course, the two bodies are definitely NOT independent of each other, but I have to admit that there are two bodies to worry about, and that abortion also involves the mother having something done to that other body. The two bodies will also not be independent of each other when the baby is born. Each has an effect on the other.
Anna said: “So many people seem to miss the point that the moment they would be forcing a woman to bring a pregnancy to term against her will, they would be reducing her from a human being to simply a vessel, also creating two classes of citizens in the process.” True, a pregnant woman is kind of like a vessel, carrying the unborn child. But it simply doesn’t follow that in forcing a woman to bear a child (as long as such an action isn’t seriously threatening the woman’s life) you’re reducing her to nothing but a vessel. Rather, you recognize that two human lives are in existence, each having a right to keep on living. Two classes of citizens? What ‘classes’ are these?
I’m not trying to trivialise pregnancies. I do understand (though can’t imagine) the changes in a woman’s body (both during and after pregnancy) involved, as well as the pain. However, when it involves the possibility that human life is killed, these things are not important. If we conclude that the zygote, or fetus for that matter (and any other name for it after conception), is a human being, then everything else involved doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is whether or not the mother has a high risk of dying if the pregnancy continues (eg. ectopic pregnancies). If that be the case, then abortion is justified since one is not intending that the zygote or fetus be killed.
Count Iblis added: “The Canadian courts have determined that a fetus has no inherent right to life in Canadian law, and no legal protection as a person until born alive. As such, legally speaking, a fetus is only part of a pregnant woman’s body, as opposed to having an independent existence.” So, legally speaking, a fetus is only part of a pregnant woman’s body. But what about “actually speaking”? And does anyone know how these judges arrived at their conclusion. Presumably, they have determined that the fetus is not human, for if they determined that it was, then it should follow that it has an inherent right to life. So how did they conclude that a fetus is not human? I would like to know.
My newborn baby is dependent on my body, for I need to use my body to feed it and to do other things for it in order for it to live. I have a rare form of arthritis, and taking care of this baby is adversely affecting my body. So what right does the government have to tell me what to do with my body; forcing me, against my will, to care for my baby? If I want to kill my baby, I should be entitled to.
Anna said: “I am not trying to say that this is an easy issue. I understand that some people believe that human life starts at conception, others that it starts at birth, and yet others can not say. This is more of a philosophical issue. People are entitled to their opinions and beliefs, but they should not try to force those on others.” Please note that, at conception, the zygote is either human or not. But it’s definitely one or the other, regardless what people’s opinions or beliefs are, and I do believe we can figure it out. It’s not a matter of belief. Each person’s opinion is not equally valid, for (using The X-Files) “the truth is out there”. If one starts with true premises and uses sound logic to conclude that the zygote is human, then it must be true. So it should be imposed, even if one disagrees. Of course, we need to be confident about what those true premises are. That’s the problem.
Sorry for the length!!
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:27 am
vince:
The problem with trying to settle this via logic is that you have to start from axioms. The basic assumption made will be a definition of humanness. Give me a logical way to arrive at an objective definition of humanness. I don’t think that it is possible.
I also take exception to the statement “the zygote is either human or not”. Why? What makes humanness a binary property that is either on or off? You are clearly working from definitions that you are not placing up front.
For me, a beginning of a definition would have to include that a ‘human’ does some subset of ‘human things’, like vocalise, walk, think, communcate, etc. There are also, clearly some physical characteristics that a human should have, too. I don’t claim this to be an actual definition of ‘human’, but it at least has to start operationally like that. The only definition that I could see you give that would make a blastocyst ‘human’ would to be to define a human as something posessing a unique strain of human DNA. Somewhat useful, but hardly satisfying.
but anyway, if the argument is that the debate is over the definiton of ‘the human’, then a definition supporting the stated position should be thrown out there, and the debate should be about which definition is better, though, in the end, it still ends up as a matter of opinion.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:09 am
Janet #56, it would mean termination of the baby (possibly by the now somewhat banned ‘partial birth abortion’ method). I mentioned that so that I could ask the question about the day before. Clearly abortions have been carried out in the past on foetuses past what would, at current technology, be viability, as there is a sliding scale of when viability occurs (and it changes from country to country, too, depending on their state of medical advancement; it may even change from person to person, according to what level of medical expertise they have access). Presumably, ‘viability’ will continue to move earlier as medical practice improves. Roe itself takes some attention to matters of timing, although its recommendations are relatively loose outside of first trimester and commentary on the need for a regard for the mother’s health.
Bittergradstudent #58, if the question is one of ‘human rights’ or its legal equivalent, then you should get them or you don’t. That doesn’t preclude the instantiation of a sliding scale in the law (if voting and the ability to gamble, buy alcohol or cigarettes or drive a car are ‘human rights’ then we have something of a sliding scale already, but I don’t think that they fall under that description, myself), but in the logic of the argument, so long as we are clear that we are talking about a binary state of ‘humanity’ then that’s fine, as we are setting our definitions. If you wish to propose an advancing scale of humanity, then fine; it’ll presumably have to exclude all animals and not be based simply on cognitive ability (given that the severly cognitively disabled are still humans, although I would agree that decisions about their medical treatments are often made rather too glibly). The subset that you’re describing would appear to preclude as ‘human’ some that are currently considered to actually be human, because of their developmental disabilities. Would you go beyond the current ‘letting them die’ boundary to a ‘euthanase them’ boundary? Fair enough if you would, and it’d certainly save us all some tax money (ironically, Bush signed legislation in TX as Governor that allowed for easier ending of life of this nature, although still only through withdrawal of treatment).
I would also say that I don’t think that anyone here is taking the issue itself light-heartedly. I also appreciate that there is a political battle to be fought, for both sides.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:57 am
On the subject of Napoli the naif being stitched up by Jim Lehrer’s team of treehugging commies, I can believe it, but then, if it wasn’t true and he suddenly realised that he sounded like a neanderthal scumbag when his words were in a wider context, blaming Jim Lehrer’s team of Americahating treehugging commies would be the smartest political move. And maybe the truth is a bit of both.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:34 am
If the point where a zygote turns into a human is a matter of opinion, and cannot be established by some objective criteria then there can be no law enforcing one opinion.
To “either the zygote is human or not”, one could answer that “either the Bible or Quran or Book of Mormon is true or not, and they cannot all be simultaneously true”, and the First Amendment is there to say that neither law nor government shall pronounce on the truth of falsity of these books (even though Sean and Mark and company would argue that there are plenty of objective criteria, far more clear cut than the humanity of the zygote, by which these books are false).
Objectively, if God does not exist, then someone raising money in the name of God is committing a fraud; but is able to do so tax-free instead. The whole basis of our society is that we’ve agreed we will not thrust belief into the law; and I think those who would take away a woman’s right to decide about abortion are breaking that agreement.
I’ll add that those arguing that human life begins at conception don’t display any conviction in this belief, because somewhere between 15-30% of all conceptions fail, and I don’t see this being addressed anywhere as the biggest public health crisis facing humans – certainly miscarriage should count as the leading cause of death!
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:07 am
If God doesn’t exist, then someone raising money in the ‘Name of God’ may or may not be committing a fraud. I would think that it’s only fraud if, for example, they know that God doesn’t exist (or, at least, should have realised) but keep on collecting money anyhow.
I’ve seen the miscarriage issue discussed, actually, as a tragedy. The Catholics mention it (”will of God” rather than human action, you see, so clearly not murder; the Catholics do put a burden of responsibility on anyone with a position to make a difference to the status of the foetus to act so as to avoid a miscarriage, I think, also), for sure. However, that’s not a hot debate because no one’s arguing about it, particularly, from either side.
Personally, I am very sceptical of the ‘deafening silence’ argument in general, because it’s generally either somewhat anecdotal or else dependent on media coverage. Recently, I’ve heard it used quite a bit to show that that moslems are all somehow bad because they’re not protesting Islamicist terrorism, and looking at some of the people that use this argument tells us about its merits even before we examine its particular weaknesses.
As for disproving, say, the central messages of a religious text like the Bible, that’s like nailing jelly to the ceiling. There’s nearly as many interpretations of it as there are people that have read it and the stuff that most would agree on, like ‘God exists’, aren’t at all disproveable. It’s riddled with inconsistencies, and you can skewer some interpretations (and whole denominations, perhaps) on that account, but really, you’re wasting your time pursuing that line of argumentation, I think. As I’ve said, of course, I have no real missionary zeal for any point of view. I’ll argue the political case for keeping, say, ID out of science teaching, because it’s not science and as a former science teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to teach it; I won’t try to crush the belief, though (in fact, I don’t think that it’s possible to do so, given that supernatural all-powerful Creators can do pretty much what they like, if they exist).
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:12 am
On the comment: “the zygote is either human or not”. In the period between fertilization and nine months later, the amount of physical change undergone by a developing human roughly tracks the amount of physical change experienced in the 3.5 billion years of life on earth. Such a binary representation is not only nonsense but it creates nothing helpful in communication on this topic.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:43 am
If you are in the business of dispensing or confirming or conferring rights, you have them or you don’t, pretty much, certainly in law. While it is true that you don’t have to get them all at once (as I said earlier, you get the right to vote, drink, get a tattoo, etc, with age), it is certainly true, I think, that in the law there is a big difference between ‘being a human’ and ‘not being a human’, in terms of your status. The binary distinction isn’t a moral one, it’s one about legal status, which has considerable impact on how the object/person in question is treated.
Of course, you can also make the moral distinction a binary one (given that we’re talking about definitions and we have freedom of choice), particularly if you believe in ‘human rights’, or you can make it a sliding scale; that’s another argument and I don’t think that its resolution is so easy as calling the non-favoured approach ‘nonsense’ and unhelpful, because there’s a logic to either way of looking at it. And why should we expect difficult philosophical/ethical questions to be easily soluble, or that some approaches to be so easily disregarded. The questions of ‘what is a human’ or ‘what is a person’ aren’t simple. Either that or I’m just too stupid to know the answers*. Picking the right definition framework to model/discuss an issue is a difficult thing in and of itself, but it’s pretty important. I haven’t, in my internerd readings, seen a great deal of discussion between the camps on this stuff, but it seems to me to be a fundamental pre-requirement to having an informed debate.
*Note to self: never discard the “I’m too stupid to know the answers” option.
March 22nd, 2006 at 1:00 pm
I vote for letting women alone make the decisions on laws that pertain to control of women’s bodies.
March 22nd, 2006 at 1:08 pm
That’s the beauty of living in a democracy.
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Abortion needs to be legal because otherwise women and girls who don’t want to have that baby whatever the cost will DIE.
This isn’t about the life of a few cells. It’s about the life of THE WOMAN, and it’s HER CHOICE.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:29 pm
.
But they get a tax-exemption regardless.
I haven’t seen it discussed as a public health crisis. I do not see people asking government or private firms to invest heavily in solving the problem.
For the case in point, what is the research budget for making sure all conceptions lead to successful deliveries? That is something independent of media coverage, no?
We need not draw the human/not-human distinction if it bothers you so much.
A corporation is legally almost a person. I think the law is able to draw distinctions. Codes of law in the past made the distinction of “not-fully-a-person” – women, slaves, prisoners of war, people with various diseases or handicaps, or people of different races have all in some place and some era had less rights than other people. There is no intrinsic logical problem for the law to distinguish between a zygote and a human, or to treat different classes of humans differently. All the law needs is a clear definition, even if the definition is faulty.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:34 pm
That’s the version for the placard (for the counterdemonstration to the people with ‘MURDERERS! LIBERALS LIE, BABIES DIE!’ placards) but is it really so simple? Are the anti-abortion people just, what, stupid? Or womenhating lunatics?*
Maybe I’m just stupid, because I don’t have any placard answers (I suspect that ‘IT’S A COMPLICATED QUESTION; LET’S ADDRESS THE UNDERLYING FUNDAMENTALS AND ESTABLISH OUR ASSUMPTIONS’ isn’t going to be a great placard, particularly given that its size, if readable, will enganger the carrier in a wind of even moderate size).
*I’ve asked the same things of the people wanting abortion banned, incidentally. I’m just full of questions**.
**Great opportunity for hilarious jokes about what else I’m full of. Don’t pass it up.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:44 pm
My last post was addressed to Donna #67.
To Arun #68: sure, we can both agree that the law can address the issue (indeed, it already does, although not to everyone’s tastes and perhaps not consistently). My point was that, broadly speaking, laws about rights or entitlements are binary; while I pointed out that you don’t necessarily get the whole bunch of rights at once, you either have a right or you don’t. Freedom from state-sanctioned termination, at least without ‘due process of law’, is a pretty fundamental human right in US law, though; there is a ruling on this subject, Roe v Wade, although it’s a bit fuzzy (in that first trimester is a privacy issue because that foetus isn’t human, second trimester seems to be ‘you’d better have a good reason to be legislating on this’ and third trimester is pretty open), but constitutional law isn’t always as clear as it ought to be (the second amendment being a pretty good example, for my money, and one that the Supreme Court has dodged for over 50 years). But I digress. As normal.
In the way that I’ve been using it, implicitly (apologies for my lack of clarity), ‘human rights’ would be things that you either have or you don’t, en masse (so, say, the right to get a license to drive a car isn’t a ‘human right’). That’s just a matter of my terminology, though; there are clearly important rights that aren’t received at birth, either, mostly relating to self-determination. They wouldn’t fall under my use of the words ‘human rights’, but are clearly of fundamental importance.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Well, the problem is that the pro-lifers that showed up at the top of the thread are now gone. I really wanted one of them to offer up a reason why they believed that life began at conception. Devils’ advocacy is great, but there was such surety in the writing tone they offered, that I thought I’d get an interesting argument regarding this.
Ah well.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Adam,
I would humbly suggest you may be full of caffeine.
Its really about framing the issue. For me its framed around the right of a woman to control her own body. Obviously other think differently.
I do want to suggest that the common ground on this issue is to reduce demand not constrain supply. To reduce demand requires education, unfettered access to contraception, and economic justice.
Although Sean says he is pro-abortion, I think what he is really saying (if I can put words in his mouth) is that he is in favor of the unrestricted ability to choose abortion if that is the desire of the woman. In that view I am in complete agreement with him.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:05 pm
No coffee, for me. But if you start at the ‘woman’s right to control her body’ as the absolute (including whatever may be dependent on it) then where you end up is logical.
I haven’t (and won’t) said anything about what my actual views are. For me, though, the debate is largely about the state of the foetus. From there, depending on how the argument goes and on what premises it starts, you can end up at a position of favouring or opposing abortion.
To bittergradstudent; I guess that a lot of the anti-abortion types start from interpretation of their favoured religious texts, although I know some fervent atheists who are also anti-abortion. I do wonder if the initial assumptions, for people on both sides, are so strong that the likelihood of deciding a particular way is almost at ‘certainty’.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Having said ‘no coffee, for me’, I realise that I am sitting in front of a huge cup of coke. So, you are in fact right or, at least, you will be.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:32 pm
PZMyers has a nice post about masturbiblation, deductions from the Scripture that one must have haemoglobin to be considered alive.
PZM points out
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:05 pm
That blood business was mentioned in a CSI a while back, too.
Not that that makes up for this line that turned up in one of the earlier episodes: ‘terminal velocity is thirty-two feet per second squared’.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Except men can still vote on abortion rights in the US…
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:20 pm
Whoa! So many new comments to catch up on. I need to grade, and begin my statistical mechanics assignment!
I’ve never really sat down and explained to myself, in detail, step-by-step, the arguments for why human life begins at conception. I’ve read a lot on this topic, and it’s not very simple, but I listed a link near the top containing a document written by a friend of mine. He writes a lot of good stuff, and I agree with his arguments he wrote about. Maybe my biology is off, but I just look at the zygote as beginning its life of development; devlepment which continues to the point at which it is ready to exist outside the womb, and continue developing past birth. It’s obviously working for a purpose, just as each of our adult bodies, and the organs and cells inside, work together as a single unit (ie. to live and make lots of babies and pass on our genes, in accordance with evolution). The zygote, and the resulting dividing cells slowly form themselves into organs, and so on, gradually looking more and more like a newborn baby. I just look at this and can’t help but think that the group of cells (originating from the zygote) make up, in fact, a new human being. A very primitive human being, but nevertheless a group of cells functioning as an integrated whole, just as we do now. Perhaps this is too simplified, but this is how I think.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Thanks for the discussion! It’s been interesting!
Please allow me to paste the article I referenced near the top.
On the Nature of the Embryo
Doug McManaman
Copyright 2005
Reproduced with Permission
The question whether or not human life begins at conception is strictly speaking a philosophical question. This does not mean, as is often assumed, that the question cannot be answered with certainty and that it is only a matter of opinion whether the embryo is a human being or not. What it means is that the question cannot be resolved by sensation or investigation, but by reason. For it is quite possible for two embryologists who have the same data to draw two contradictory conclusions regarding the status of the developing embryo. The differences are not due to the scientific data, if the data is the same in both cases. Rather, their divergent perspectives are due to their reasoning. Nevertheless, philosophy depends upon science in order to be able to resolve the question through reason. The science of human embryology provides the data without which a philosopher cannot begin to answer the question about the status of the embryo and the beginning of human life.
In order to resolve this question, I’d like to begin with some basic philosophical principles. We know from our own experience that all knowledge begins in sense perception. But to say this is not to say that it ends in perception. Indeed, knowledge is much more than sense perception, for intelligence is the ability to apprehend the intelligible structures of things. What is sensible, such as the temperature of an ice cube or the color of a surface, is not the same as what is intelligible, such as the nature of a triangle or the essence of a dog. But human persons do not grasp the intelligible natures of things immediately, but only indirectly. It is only through its activity that we come to understand the nature of a thing; for activity discloses to us precisely what a thing is. The reason for this is that a thing acts according to the powers of its nature. For example, dogs bark, ducks quack, plants grow and reproduce, birds fly, and human persons reason and laugh, etc. Thus, activity precedes essence in the order of human knowing, while essence precedes activity in the order of being for a thing cannot act unless it first exists as a certain kind of thing.
Pawns, Kings, and Queens
To understand this better, consider the game of chess. If someone were to ask about the pieces, for example the Queen, the Bishop, or the Rook, that is, if he were to ask what they were, it would not be enough simply to point to them on a board. To really understand the pieces, we need to know what they do, that is, how they move. The Bishop moves diagonally, the Pawns move forward one space at a time and capture diagonally, the King moves one space at a time in any direction, and the Queen moves in any direction as many spaces as the player desires, etc. In other words, we know each piece by its function or activity.
A King has the potential to move one space at a time in any direction, but circumstances might be such that it cannot move at all, for example, if there are no empty spaces next to it, as is the case at the beginning of a game. But the King is still a King, that is, it still has the power to move in any direction, one space at a time, circumstances permitting. And should a Pawn successfully make it to the 8th rank, it turns into a Queen, just as a checker piece that makes it to the 8th rank is crowned a King. It often happens that the player still has his Queen on the board when his Pawn becomes a second Queen. What usually happens in such cases is that the player will retrieve a captured Rook, and that piece becomes a Queen. It does not look like a Queen, but it is a Queen because it functions like a Queen, that is, it has the power to move in any direction and for as many spaces as the player wishes. Despite its appearance, it is more than a Rook, and we know this only by observing how it functions. It functions like a Queen, because it has the potentiality of a Queen, because it is a Queen.
Imagine that we’ve only been given the function of each piece, that is, a description of how each piece can move, without being told what those pieces look like. For example, we’ve been told that a Bishop can only move diagonally, but we have not been told what the Bishop looks like in order to identify it. It is up to us observe a game in action and correctly match each name to its corresponding piece on the board. A game has just begun, and after a few opening moves, a piece (the Queen) is moved only one space forward. At this point all we know is that it is behaving like a Pawn. The Queen, though, is more than a Pawn, even though at this point in the game it has only moved like a Pawn would move. Likewise for the next move; the second player moves the Queen three spaces diagonally, thus moving like a Bishop. At this point it only appears to move as a Bishop would. It actually has the power to move in any direction, that is, horizontally, forwards, backwards, etc. Hence, it is more than a Bishop, even though we may not know this for certain at this stage of the game. It is only by observing the pieces as the game progresses that we will discover that the Queen is more than a Pawn, more than a Bishop, and more than a Rook, because eventually we see that it functions in a way that these pieces do not and cannot.
The Embryo
So too in the case of the developing embryo. We can come to understand what an embryo is by observing its behavior. Now any developing organism, in the initial stages of its existence, does not and cannot behave as it would fully developed. The reason is that development implies that the organism is in some ways different initially than subsequently. But developing organisms become what they are. They do not become what they are not. A single cell zygote is actually, not potentially, a human person. Spermatozoa do not become human persons. Oocytes do not become human persons. But the oocyte becomes something else entirely when touched by a sperm. What results is something entirely new, moving in an entirely new direction. What this new something is can be determined by observing its new behavior.
When a sperm reaches the protective shell surrounding the oocyte, called the zona pellucida, it binds with a glyco-protein sperm receptor molecule. The acrosome, a vesicle that caps the head of the sperm, releases degradative enzymes that allow the sperm to penetrate the zona pellucida. When the sperm successfully penetrates the zona pellucida, the cell membranes of the two cells fuse. This immediately causes thousands of small cortical granules located just beneath the cell membrane of the oocyte to release their contents into the space between the oocyte and the zona pellucida. These substances interact with the zona pellucida, altering the sperm receptor molecules, causing the zona to become impenetrable by additional sperm.
The fusion of the cell membrane of the sperm with the membrane of the oocyte causes the oocyte to resume meiosis. The embryo now contains a diploid complement of chromosomes and a 2N quantity of DNA. Hence, the fertilized oocyte is called a zygote.1
A zygote is neither a sperm nor an oocyte. What it is becomes evident as we observe its behavior and watch it unfold, just as we come to understand the nature of anything by observing its activity.
Just before implantation on the lining of the uterus, the cells of the embryoblast begin to differentiate into two layers called the epiblast (primary ectoderm) and an internal layer called the hypoblast (primary endoderm). The trophoblast at the embryonic pole of the blastocyst proliferates to form the syncytiotrophoblast, which erodes the lining of the uterus, creating an implantation site for the blastocyst and drawing the blastocyst into the uterine wall.
In the third week of development, the bilaminar or two-layered germ disc is converted into a trilaminar or three-layered germ disc (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm). The cells of the endoderm will form the lining of the lungs, tongue, tonsils, digestive tract, and more. The cells of the mesoderm will form muscles, bones, lymphatic tissue, heart, lungs, and more. The ectoderm will form the skin, nails, hair, the lens of the eye, nose and mouth, the parts of the nervous system, and more.
Why does the single cell zygote develop into a two cell embryo, and then a morula (4 days), and then a blastocyst (5-7 days), then a bilaminar germ disc, then a trilaminar germ disc, etc? After a time we know that it always had the power to become a blastocyst, that is, right from fertilization, yet it needed time to become a blastocyst, or a germ disc, because it takes time for cells to divide. If it did not have the power to become a blastocyst, for example, it would not have done so.
Equivocation and “Potentiality”
What often happens in a discussion on the nature of the embryo is that the term “potentiality” or “potential” is used equivocally. Terms that are equivocal are called one thing, but they have either a slightly or entirely different meaning, as “bark” can be said of the tough outer covering of a tree, as well as the harsh sound of a dog and/or a small sailing vessel. In the case of “potential” in the context of this discussion, there are two modes of having potentiality that are slightly different. Failing to distinguish the two leads to equivocation.
Potentiality means ability or capability. All potentiality has reference to actuality, but there are two kinds of actuality: first act and second act or activity, and corresponding to these two acts are two different potentialities. Firstly, there is the potentiality to become a different entity. I am actually a living human thing (first act), but I have the potentiality to become a corpse (a collection of non-living substances). I become a corpse by ceasing to be what I actually am, namely a living human kind of thing. A sperm becomes a zygote by ceasing to be what it is. So too, an oocyte becomes a zygote by ceasing to be what it is.
Activity (second act) manifests power or potentiality, but this potentiality has reference to activity, not to an entirely new entity (first act). The actualization of these potentialities to activity does not entail that the thing cease to be what it is. Rather, it is through these activities that it comes to be itself most fully. I am actually a human person with a host of potentialities (to activity) that belong to the nature of the human person, not to a corpse, for example the potentiality to actually see (second act or activity), to hear (activity), to run (activity), to think (activity), etc. These latter potentialities are powers to further activity. Only actual human persons actually have the power or potentiality to see, hear, and laugh, etc. We know through observation that sperms do not, because they never eventually come to see, hear, and laugh. But the embryo does eventually come to see, hear, kick, suck its thumb, and cry. It functions like a human person, because it has the potentialities of a human person, because it is a human person. The single or two cell zygote or bilaminar germ disc cannot realize all its initial potentialities until parts of itself undergo further development and maturation, just as the newborn infant cannot realize many of its potentialities until its parts undergo further development. But it is not potentially a human person, but is actually a developing human person with a host of potentialities that the sperm and oocyte, considered in themselves, do not have. The potentialities belonging to the zygote require material organs as conditions for their realization, organs that are already in the process of being developed.
A sperm, on the other hand, is not actually a zygote, but potentially a zygote. One can continue and assert that the zygote is not actually a blastocyst, but potentially a blastocyst, and that a blastocyst is not actually a fetus, but potentially a fetus, etc. This is true, but there is an equivocation here, subtle and difficult to detect, that confuses the two different kinds of potentiality. The sperm is actually a sperm, and it does not develop into a zygote. It is a haploid with a relatively short life span. So too, oocytes do not undergo cleavage and develop into bilaminar and trilaminar germ discs. The sperm (or oocyte) and zygote are two entirely different entities, neither one having the same potentialities and thus the same behavior. The zygote and the blastocyst, on the contrary, are the same entity, the latter being more of the former. There is a continuum between the zygote, the morula, the blastocyst, etc. There is no continuum between the sperm and the zygote, or the oocyte and the zygote.
Is the Embryo a Part or a Whole?
In order to deal with the question whether the embryo is a part or a whole, let’s consider once again the analogy of the chessboard, but this time from a different angle. The Queen is a part of the game of chess, not a whole unto itself. The game as a whole is understood through its end (to achieve checkmate). Each piece has a function that, ultimately, can only be understood within the context of the entire game. Take a Queen off of a chessboard and put it onto a checkerboard in order to replace a missing checker piece and it is no longer a Queen. In the context of the game of checkers, it does not have the power to move in any direction and as many spaces as we wish to move it. It is nothing more than a single checker piece. In fact, it has less power than a crowned King. What was once a Queen is now a part of a different game, having an entirely different function within the context of the new game.
Part and whole thus have a relationship to one another. Parts have a place within the whole, and their function can only be understood in relation to the whole, because they function for its sake. A living whole tends to preserve its own integrity, and its parts function for the sake of that integrity. The function of a part of a living whole, such as the heart or liver, is ultimately to contribute in some way to the integrity of the whole organism.
In this light we can say that the embryo is not a part of the mother. For it does not function as a part. It does not function for the sake of her physical integrity. Rather, the embryo is a whole unto itself. Indeed, it has a certain likeness to the various parts of the mother. For example, the embryo depends upon the mother, as parts depend upon the whole of which they are a part. In addition, the embryo is inside the mother, as the mother’s liver and kidney are inside of her. But the child’s dependency on the mother is only temporary, and one cannot conclude that because parts are inside the whole, and the embryo is inside the mother, the embryo is a part of the mother any more than one can conclude that because all turkeys are born from eggs and all chickens are born from eggs, all turkeys are chickens. Such logic is invalid and involves an undistributed middle term.
A living part of a living organism is alive not by virtue of a distinct life principle, but by virtue of the life principle of the whole. My finger is alive because I am alive. Sever any part from the whole and it ceases to be what it was2. The life of the embryo is not the life of the mother. The embryo, unlike any part of the mother, has a life unto itself. It is a whole unto itself with its own parts, working in harmony for the sake of its own integrity, depending on the mother for matter, but not in order to be what it is. The definitive proof of that is the birth of the child.
Notes
1 William J. Larsen. Human Embryology (3rd edition). New York. Churchill Livingstone. 2001. p. 18. [Back]
2 There are exceptions to this rule. Many plants can be cloned with cuttings. This is done when a portion of the stem with leaves is severed from the parent and placed in a suitable rooting medium for that species of plant (moist sand, a mixture of peat moss and soil, or water). The stem is later transplanted to soil after roots have developed from the cut end of the stem. Some plant life and the simplest of animal life forms (such as worms) are so lacking in complexity and differentiated organization that all the parts share rather closely in the operation of the whole. But this is not so for more complex life forms. [Back]
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Stephen #77: that’s what democracies are about. One person, one vote.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Vince #79; that paste got dubious in the first paragraph, for my money. The idea of just solving this sort of problem through reason, presumably from the comfort of our armchairs, pretty much always looks like a false promise, to me. And if it’s ever so obvious, why is there such disagreement amongst intelligent people? Perhaps again, I am just too stupid to see what’s obvious.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:34 am
Getting back to my post #50, which nobody seems to have noticed, the questions of when life begins, or when personhood begins (which to my mind are separate questions), though important to the debate, aren’t the be all and end all of the issue.
Adam, the reason I asked about what “having an abortion” would mean at term is that for the woman, medically it amounts to giving birth. The difference is that aborting means that no attempt is made to spare the fetus’s life. But, after all, the fetus has to be removed from the woman’s body somehow, and that means either a c-section or a vaginal delivery. Dilation and extraction (the so-called “partial birth abortion”) involves dilation of the cervix to the point that the fetus can be delivered more or less intact, but not full dilation. During the third trimester, it’s either that or complete labor and delivery. By the third trimester, no OB would agree to perform an abortion unless there were a clear medical reason that either a) the pregnant woman couldn’t go through either a c-section or a normal vaginal birth with relative safety, or b) the fetus was not viable.
On another medical point, the gestational age at which viability becomes possible hasn’t changed much — it’s around 23 weeks. What has changed is that medical advances have made the outcome more hopeful for babies born at the earliest point of viability, though it’s still pretty grim, with survival very dicey and the possibility of longterm impairment extremely high. For various reasons I don’t have time to get into at the moment, I doubt that the point of earliest potential viability will change much any time soon.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:56 am
Vince writes:
I just look at this and can’t help but think that the group of cells (originating from the zygote) make up, in fact, a new human being. A very primitive human being, but nevertheless a group of cells functioning as an integrated whole, just as we do now. Perhaps this is too simplified, but this is how I think.
Even if you choose to define it as a “human being”–and this seems to me like purely a question of word-definitions, not of any objective statement about reality–why do you think all “human beings” have the same moral worth? To me it is clear that moral worth is rooted in consciousness, the personality, and thus in the brain, and the brain of a fetus does not even begin to function until near the end of the second trimester when the synapses first form. As an analogy, a living human body which is completely brain-dead is morally no different than a corpse, in my opinion. If you disagree, imagine a more extreme case where the brain has been completely removed, yet the rest of the body can be kept alive by artificial means–is this still a human being to you? We could then imagine a continuum of cases where more and more of the body is removed while the remainder is kept alive artificially, until you have just a nose on life support a la Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, or even a few human cells in a petri dish–surely this shows either that “human being” is going to be difficult to define in a clear-cut binary way, or else that the body ceases to be a human being at the moment the brain is destroyed (before that, I think everyone would agree it’s still a human being no matter how many of the organs are replaced by artificial parts–cyborgs are people too!)
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:06 am
I was answering your point #50 in my point #52, Janet.
I’m not interested, in this instance, in what a likely OB would allow or agree to perform, not because it’s not important, but because we’re discussing how we might set up an argument about what is wrong or right. Or, at least, I’m discussing that. The Roe judgement, as it stands, wouldn’t offer any real protection for someone that performed an abortion that late for reasons other than the health of the mother, but if we are to talk of what should or should not be the case, we might well consider issues like that. In any case, the partial birth abortion procedure was considered to be germane to the debate by people on both sides of it, when it was the subject of legislation not so long ago.
There has been a debate in the UK recently about changing the period after which abortion becomes illegal in general (excluding risk to mother’s life) because of advanced in medical technology. I am not sure to what stage the cut-off may be set back (22 weeks? 24 weeks?), nor whether it is likely to happen, but it seems that for many people, the idea that medical practice [i]might[/i] further push back the viability cut-off does, in fact, have a bearing on how they would see abortion at a particular stage of pregnancy. I am no expert on the subject, so you’ll know more than me as to how long it is likely to be before viability does move, if it moves at all, from advances in medical science. Admitting the possibility might be a part of the debate, I guess; if it never happens, it never happens, but the possibility might well be germane.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:11 am
Jesse M #83 raises the interesting “Ship of Theseus” question of personal identity. Parfitt’s paper (I think that it was just called Personal Identity) is an accessible look at that issue (psychological continuity and physical connectedness are what he considers important, if I recall, but it was a long time ago), although I’m not sure entirely where I stand on it. But anyhow, yes, it’s a difficult issue. I don’t personally think that Parfitt’s breaking of the actual identity requirement in favour of a transitional approach is entirely right, either, although the strict identity approach seems pretty unpalatable.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:45 am
Sorry, Adam, but your reply (#52) didn’t seem to me like a response to the point I was trying to make. It still doesn’t. A woman’s body isn’t merely life support.
March 23rd, 2006 at 6:40 am
I never said ‘merely’, Janet (and I’m not arguing for either side). You can’t get ‘merely’ from what I said, so far as I can see.
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:01 am
Instead of reproducing Mcmanaman’s long and unconvincing argument, Vince, you could have merely told us “I believe apple seeds are apple trees.”
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:21 am
I believe zygotes are humans.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:40 am
Arun, it seems to me that appleseeds aren’t appletrees. The words mean certain things and these are understood in conversation (they pretty much correspond to physical configurations and are words to describe those configurations). The only reason that you can use it as an analogy is because you have already decided that foetuses aren’t humans, but that is precisely the thing that should be debated. It’s clearly not going to illuminate the underlying issue, because in effect, the use of the analogy is just a roundabout way of saying ‘I think that the foetus/zygote/whatever isn’t a human’. Which we already know.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:56 am
Okay, you didn’t say “merely.” But you seem to believe that it’s self-evident that a woman has no right to refuse to allow her body to be used as life support for another person unless doing so would be “a compelling threat to a her health.” I’m not sure what you mean by “compelling”: any pregnancy carries some degree of risk, and it’s not always possible to predict when complications are going to occur.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Woah, I haven’t said what I believe at all, with regards to whether or not abortion should be legal, or when, etc.
By ‘compelling’ I would imagine that (if anti-abortion laws were to pass but include the ‘mother’s health’ clause that even current second and, particularly, third-trimester rules must contain) it would decided by ‘medical experts’, like siamese twin seperations are. And yes, every pregnancy carries some risk to the mother, although thankfully that risk is much smaller now, at least in this country and others like it, than it was.
But I’m not advocating anything here. I’m just interested in what each side are saying, rationally, at root (when the emotive political stuff is stripped away). The way that the debate on this in the US has generally been conducted in public borders on the deranged, I’d say.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:46 pm
“a woman has no right to refuse to allow her body to be used as life support for another person unless doing so would be ‘a compelling threat to a her health.’”
If there is, indeed, another person inside, then that’s exactly correct. It’s better for your body to be used as life support for another person (who cannot be on life support elsewhere due to the state of this particular human in question), than to have the person killed. It’s better for two people to live, than for one person to live, as long as one of the persons doesn’t pose a threat to the life of anybody else.
So, if you assume that the zygote/fetus/whatever is another person, the woman has a duty to care for that person, just as your mother has a duty to care for you (at least when you were a child). However, this means that the woman’s body has to go through many changes to allow for the person to properly grow inside of her so that he or she can be ready to exist outside the womb.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Vince:
If there is, indeed, another person inside, then that’s exactly correct. It’s better for your body to be used as life support for another person (who cannot be on life support elsewhere due to the state of this particular human in question), than to have the person killed. It’s better for two people to live, than for one person to live, as long as one of the persons doesn’t pose a threat to the life of anybody else.
From a moral point of view this may be true, but I don’t think it’d be true from a legal point of view. For example, the government could not force me to donate a kidney to a person who needed it, even though it might be better for me to suffer the inconvenience of the operation and of losing a kidney than for the person to die–this would violate my right to privacy. And even from a strictly utilitarian point of view, the larger negative consequences of creating a society where the government can comandeer body parts any time they want may outweigh the positive consequences of giving organs to specific people who need them.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Well, from a legal point of view it’d require legislation (and if that passed, then it’d become true). But that’s the mission of many of the anti-abortion activists.
I would guess that it might be more akin to the ethanasia v withdrawing treatment issue. With the addition of the inability of the ‘human foetus’ to contribute to the issue.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:21 pm
And your right to privacy isn’t that solid or that old (at least, not as an explicitly stated right; the Justices found that it had always been there, between the lines). The worst thing about Roe being overturned, for many Americans, might well be that it could take Griswold with it, as I mentioned earlier. Also, the strength of the ‘right to privacy’ isn’t necessarily that solid. Not that Congress are about to legislate forced organ donation.
I imagine that anti-abortion types would say that the kidney removal is an action, and not having an abortion is inaction. Although I’m not sure how much merit there is in that, I’m not any sort of expert on the ethics of medical procedures.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Vince, there is a big, big difference between saying that someone has a moral duty or obligation to do something, and saying that they have no right to refuse to do it. I might believe that you have an moral duty to donate blood (which of course is a minuscule burden compared to going through a pregnancy), but I firmly believe that you have the right to refuse to do it, even if you are the only compatible donor for a specific person, even if that person will die without your blood, and even if that person is your own child. And of course legally, it’s very clear that you have that right.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Adam, I realize that you haven’t said what you believe about the morality or legality of abortion. But you did say “But anyhow, if you believe that the foetus is human, you’d need a compelling threat to the mother to allow for the human inside her to be terminated/killed/murdered.” So you believe that it’s self-evident that a woman has no right to refuse to allow her body to be used as life support for another person unless doing so would be “a compelling threat to a her health.” Am I wrong?
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:51 pm
P.S. Just to be clear, I think you’d be a complete waste of protoplasm if your child was dying and could be saved with a transfusion of your blood, and you didn’t immediately bare your arm and say “please, please take my blood right now.” But there are people who believe that blood transfusion is morally wrong for religious reasons and would therefore refuse, and though I think they’re idiots, that’s their right. And of course, giving blood is, as I said, a minuscule burden compared to going through a pregnancy.
March 23rd, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Janet, ‘compelling’ could be different depending on how exactly one felt about the foetus v mother rights issue and decided according to what definitions were accepted in the law (probably decided by medical people who knew the law, I guess). So ‘compelling’ wasn’t supposed to be a definite modifier, but rather one that would reflect whatever the law was. After all, that criterion currently does exist in some states for third trimester abortions, I thought?
March 23rd, 2006 at 3:49 pm
Adam, I think you’re seizing on a side point here. To quote you again, “It’s only a civil rights issue, in most cases, when you accept that the foetus isn’t a human. If you believe that it is a human, ‘woman’s right to choose’ just doesn’t apply (although if there were a more serious medical case for an abortion, that would be a different matter).” What you seem to be saying here is that if we could all agree on whether or not a fetus is “human” (I prefer the term “person” for various reasons that I can explain if necessary), there would be no more debate. And I am saying, not necessarily — one human’s right to life doesn’t necessarilly trump another human’s right to decide how his or her body will be used, and this is pretty universally accepted outside of the abortion debate.
As far as the issue of late term abortion goes, one thing to consider is that as a pregnancy continues, the burden of carrying it to term decreases. At the same time, from the point of view of the woman, the medical reality of aborting becomes more similar to the medical reality of giving birth to a live baby — in most cases, anyway. So by the time you get to the third trimester, there is less and less to be gained for the woman by aborting, and that is why it never happens except when there’s a medical issue involved, either for the woman or the fetus.
My personal belief is that an emryo is not a person, but that as a fetus develops it acquires more and more claim to personhood. So at a certain point in the pregnancy, I think there is reason to start taking the interest of the fetus into account. I think are the important factors are consciousness, the ability to feel pain, and the potential for independent existence. (I have a similar stance on animal rights: the rights of an animal aren’t equivalent to those of a human, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill an animal or cause it pain without a good reason. The question then becomes, “what is a good reason?”) There are ways to value fetal life and recognize the ineterest of the fetus without according it full personhood.
March 23rd, 2006 at 4:29 pm
I don’t think that it’s a side point.
I guess that what I mean to say is that if you have the foetus as ‘human’ (I prefer human by analogy with ‘human rights’, but I think that I understand what you mean by ‘person’) then it’s not just a matter of the mother’s rights, but also those of this ‘human foetus’. As to who trumps whom in the rights issue, I think that would also be up for debate amongst those people who do
I think that there’s more to the Third Trimester business, in the US, than just medical matters, because the law can actually forbid an abortion, not performed in order to avert significant risk to the mother, at that stage, I think, under Roe (I imagine that would be a state-by-state thing, as to whether it is forbidden for reasons other than of the mother’s health). It’s certainly forbidden for reasons of non-medical necessity in the UK, that late on. Of course, that’s just a matter of what the current situation is, and could be changed to be more or less restrictive, if enough people agreed, and we’re talking more about what the arguments, which determine what laws are actually made, should be.
Even if you have a gradual assumption of ‘personhood’ and don’t accord all the legal rights of full ‘personhood’ at once, you still need a schedule for assigning legal rights to the developing foetus and that still has potential to impact on the mother’s ability to make a decision to terminate the pregnancy at different stages along that schedule, I’d have thought. Unless something like ‘right not to be killed/terminated’ doesn’t come until birth, anyhow, but it doesn’t seem like you’re saying that that is what you’d go for. Viability, that you mentioned, is something I’ve often seen given as the primary factor in assessing at what point termination can no longer be performed for most reasons (excepting medical necessity).
For all the problems with binary solutions, when it comes to questions like ‘can I legally do this’, the answer will be binary. Questions like ‘should I do this WILL have shades of grey, but the legal questions return definite constraints, because the questions are formulated as decision problems.
March 24th, 2006 at 2:56 am
Janet: I have a moral duty or obligation not to kill a human being if he or she doesn’t pose an immediate threat to my life. It therefore follows that I have no right to refuse not to kill such a human being, for if I did have that right, then I could refuse not to kill this human being. Regarding donating blood, you said: “but I firmly believe that you have the right to refuse to do it, even if you are the only compatible donor for a specific person, even if that person will die without your blood, and even if that person is your own child. And of course legally, it’s very clear that you have that right.” So if I need to do something in order for another person to live, something no one else can do, and I refuse to do it, how can you say I am within my rights? If I see someone alone on the street, in need of CPR, and I refuse to give him CPR when I know how to give CPR, and he dies, how can I have possibly acted within my rights as a human being? You wouldn’t feel like you did something wrong in that situation? Who cares about what my legal duties are. Maybe, legally, I have the right to walk past that person and pretend he or she doesn’t exist, but don’t you think that’s totally wrong? If a mother denies food and water to her newborn baby, because she wants to spend money on drugs she has killed it. She hasn’t directly killed it, by inflicting harm on the baby, but, nevertheless, she has killed it. And, if a woman takes a drug to alter the lining of her uterus to prevent the implantation of the zygote, she has killed “that” too, again not directly.
March 24th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Have you donated one of your kidneys to a person with kidney failure, Vince? Chances are that you would save someone’s life, and it probably wouldn’t do any major damage to you. By your reasoning, you have no right to refuse to do this.
March 24th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Oh, and “who cares what your legal duties are?” That’s exactly what’s at stake in the abortion debate — legal rights.
As for your question about what I would think of someone who refuses to make a reasonable sacrifice to help another person, see my post #99. But what are the limits of reasonable expectation of our duty to others? They are not limitless. Going through an entire pregnancy is hardly comparable, in terms of personal risk, personal burden, etc., to stopping on the street to give CPR.
March 24th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
I presume that this part of the debate is where the issue of initial responsibility would be included, and why there are quite many people who are against abortion in general but less so when the conception occurred as a result of rape. If one consented to be engaged in sexual activity from which arose a pregnancy, then the relationship to the foetus, if you consider it to be ‘human’ or ‘person’ or something similar, is different to that between you and your average stranger. Obviously, that isn’t the case if the pregnancy arose as the result of rape (I’m no expert on the formal legal definition of rape, and am using the word as a catch-all for the case where the sexual activity wasn’t consensual). None of this, of course, alters the fundamental asymmetry between the role and responsibility of the male versus that of the female, because one can very easily (and, one would assume, relatively uncontentiously) make the case that the women is in fact the one that is left with an extremely disproportionate amount of the downside (assuming that the pregnancy was unwanted). At the very least, even if they are not swayed by that fact, the anti-abortion camp should acknowledge it, although in asking for such an acknowledgement you risk being treated to a somewhat tedious ‘God’s chosen role for women’ speech.
And now, to New Joisey I go.
March 24th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Can we please go back to the Mac vs. PC discussion?
March 24th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
As someone who is staunchly pro-choice, I don’t think the question can be settled indepedently of the question of whether the embryo should be considered a rational being with rights.
To simplify it, imagine three situations.
1) Not as a consequence of her action but just by accident person A acquires a depedent person B. Person B is a rational entity that has human rights; it is somehow attached to person A (though not as a result of person A’s actions) and needs person A to survive. The options are a) severe the link between person A,B causing person A to live but B to die or b) A to undergo a painful operation that will liberate B and eventually let both of them survive.
2) As a result of her action person A acquires a dependent person B. B was either created by A or already existed – but the important point is that it is A’s responsibility that B is dependent on A. B should be considered a rational being with rights. Again the options are for a) severing the link causing A to live but B to die or b) undergo a painful-for-A operation to liberate B.
3) Either as a result of her actions or not person A acquires a dependent clump of cells B. The creation and dependence of B on A may well have been A’s responsibility but there is no sensible argument for why B should have any rights at all. Again the options are: a) severe the link causing B to die or b) make A undergo a painful operation liberating B (that may eventually cause B to develop into a being with rights).
It seems to me you could make a strong case that in 1) then A shouldn’t be _forced_ to undergo the operation. Thus if abortion falls into this category you could then make issue solely about civil rights (what a woman can do with her body) and completely independent of the more philosophical issue of whether an embryo has rights.
However the case 1) is clearly not the case relevant for abortion since the mother is responsible for the creation and dependence of the baby (except in cases like rape etc, which I’m not addressing). Since the mother (A) is responsible for the dependence of the embryo (B) it is quite clear that either case 2) or 3) apply.
If case 2) was relevant then I think that the mother (A) should be forced to have the baby (B). On the other hand if case 3) were relevant then it is quite clear that the mother (A) should be free to abort.
Although I don’t think the distinction between 2) and 3) is completely sharp to me, in my opinion an abortion within, say, the first 20 weeks of pregnancy clearly falls into category 3) whereas abortions much later, e.g. just before birth, are much more problematic.
Therefore I don’t think it is irrelevant whether the embryo has rights or not because if you grant the fact the embryo should have rights the issue falls into category 2) not 1).
March 25th, 2006 at 1:19 am
Aren’t you forgetting the third party, C? He is equally responsible, with A, for the existence of B or the clump of cells, depending on which scenario you’re in. Unfortunately, C cannot assume A’s physical link to B.
There is a large subset of the human population that is physically incapable of ever being in A’s situation. This class of persons, class C, will never be asked to bear physical responsibility for B. The situation is fundamentally asymmetric. That’s one reason it’s a civil rights issue: rules are being made that can apply only to one class of persons, class A.
Meanwhile, let’s say you hit someone with your car, and as a result, that person suffers kidney failure. By luck, you are a compatible donor and you are healthy enough to undergo surgery. No other compatible donor is available. You are responsible for the situation; you may feel obligated to donate your kidney; people may think you’re a jerk if you don’t agree to donate your kidney — but you can’t be forced to do it.
March 25th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I’m sorry, Janet, I don’t see how the existence of C has any relevance to the classification I proposed above. One of cases 2), 3) applies regardless of the existence or not of other responisble parties.
Yes the situation is asymmetric between the sexes. (Thus the abortion laws are, rightly, asymmetric: the woman has the right to abort or not as she chooses and the man has no say in the matter.) That does not touch the issue of whether it’s simply a civil rights issue or whether the question of whether the fetus has rights has to be addressed.
March 25th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Can someone explain to me why all the people who are so reactionary about the issue of “killing” a human in the abortion discussion aren’t making an equal or greater effort to stop wars and end the death penalty? Why is a little bundle of cells in the womb of a woman so much more sacred than the life of fully formed person sure to have a family who loves them, a place in the world, responsibilities and dependents, economic impact? Why the big uproar over life when clearly life is not really the issue?
March 25th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
This discussion is a perfect example of why I usually don’t get involved in debates on thus topic. The tone here has been relatively mild and respectful — no cries of “babykiller,” “whore,” or (from the pro-abortion-rights side) “fascist” or “sexist pig.” Even so, the discussion circles around an attitude that I find deeply offensive: that women’s bodies are a public resource, that it is appropriate to discuss the legitimacy of allowing a woman to control how her body is used. That’s why I find statements like “the mother (A) should be forced to have the baby (B)” so disquieting — even if the statement is purely hypothetical, even though it comes from someone who assures me that he doesn’t agree with the premise on which the statement is based. For me, this issue is as far from abstract and hypothetical as it can be. I am virtually certain that I’m the only person who has posted here who has had an abortion and also given birth to a live baby. I have, quite literally, written most of my posts on this topic while breastfeeding my baby girl.
I recall a statement by a black person from a while back, in the context of discussions about race: “I refuse to have a polite, civil discussion about whether or not I am a monkey.” That sums up how I feel about this discussion.
March 25th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
I’m sorry you were offended Janet, but I can only assure you that if you replace the (incorrect) hypothetical on which that statement was based with one where the role of the sexes were switched I would say exactly the same thing.
The whole point in question is whether the issue is simply about “the legitimacy of allowing a woman to control how her body is used”. Once you accept that premise, which I do, then the issue is clear-cut. All I have been arguing is that this premise does indeed have to be established.
March 25th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
To put that last bit another way, one may make the case for abortion as follows:
1) The issue of abortion reduces to whether a woman has a right to control her own body.
2) A woman has the right to control her own body.
It seems to me that you have taken 1) as being absolute and thus see anyone who argues against abortion as arguing against 2). On the contrary, 1) is very much part of the issue – in fact attacks on 2) are so irrational that they don’t really deserve to be addressed, as you suggest at the end of your last message.
As advocators of the right of a woman to abort we should be defending 1) and not igoring attacks on 1) by misrepresenting them as being attacks on 2).
I hope that clarifies what I have been saying.
March 31st, 2006 at 11:27 am
It sounds like the sick fantasies of a closet rapist. The guy is a pervert. He should be forced to register as a potential sex offender.
April 1st, 2006 at 12:37 am
I read an article in a book for a philosophy class that was written by a woman who worked in an abortion clinic. She described the atmosphere in which she worked (ie: dealing with protesters outside the clinic everyday) and the women who came in to have an abortion. The women came from many different socioeconomic backgrounds and all had different reasons for having the abortion. Nonetheless, the author also described the process of how the abortion is performed and the results. Without going into the gory detail, the doctor uses something similar to a vacuum to suck the fetus out of the womb and it gets dumped into a biohazard tub and discarded.
The author described a situation in which a fetus was aborted near the end of the pregnancy and she could actually hear the screams of the fetus. She’s never had an abortion, but she has been psychologically affected by working in an abortion clinic, even if she’s not the one actually performing the abortion.
I don’t think the argument that abortion is religiously immoral is sound. By making laws that outlaw abortion based on religious teachings, we are entangling church and state, two entities that should NOT be entangled.
In addition, how is it possible to list criteria used to determine what women are allowed to have abortions? Every woman differs and I think it’s somewhat ridiculous to have a checklist on what makes a woman eligible to have an abortion.