by hilzoy
When I ask myself what exactly is it that makes killing a person such a terrible thing, the answers I come up with generally involve the possession of consciousness or sentience. It’s a terrible thing to cause someone pain, as killing her often does. It’s worse to kill a being who can feel not only pain but emotions, and who can participate in social relationships. And it’s worst of all to kill someone who is capable of autonomy: to cut short the story that someone is trying to tell with her life, or to pull the curtain down on all her hopes and plans and dreams. She has the right to decide what to do with her life, I think; and for someone else to barge in and end it without consulting her — to tear apart the web of relationships, aspirations, idiosyncrasies, and so forth that is her life, and to ignore completely her right to decide for herself what to make of it — is unconscionable.
I could go on and list more reasons for objecting to killing people. All the items I could list, however, require the possession of some sort of sentience or consciousness, or on the fact that the person in question has developed sentience or consciousness, but has temporarily lost it. (Thus, it is wrong to kill someone who is in a coma, since this person retains the right to determine what to do with her life, just as she retains, for instance, her property rights, or her marriage. It does not follow from the fact that someone can remain married while in a coma that someone who had been in a coma all her life could get married. Likewise, I think, for the right to autonomy: it is retained when all consciousness has been temporarily lost, but is not possessed by those who have never been conscious to start with.)
For this reason, I think that there is no reason to object to think that abortions that take place before the earliest point at which these sorts of considerations kick in are morally wrong*. The first to appear is the capacity to feel pain, and it probably does not occur before the third trimester. The third trimester begins at 27 weeks; according to the CDC (PDF: Table 16, p. 166), 98.6% of abortions in this country are performed before the 21st week, and 94% before the end of the first trimester. So even if, to be on the safe side, I were to conclude that abortions after, say, the 22nd week were immoral, the vast majority of abortions in this country would still be OK by my lights.
Not everyone agrees, of course. But it’s harder than you’d think to be consistently pro-life.
Some people make it needlessly difficult. Tacitus, for instance, thinks that the crucial issue is the humanity of a fetus, and that humanity means what we share with stem cells — that is, being biologically human (as opposed to lupine, bovine, feline, etc.) A “consistent ethic of life” developed on this basis would preclude the destruction of any living human cells, including, for instance, cancer cells. It would therefore entail that amputation, chemotherapy, appendectomy, pulling your hair out by its roots, and any other procedure in which living human cells were consigned to death is murder.
But even those who restrict their solicitude to human embryos, as opposed to human cells, face more difficulties than one would think. Obviously, they should oppose all elective abortions (though the idea of saying, for instance, that a single woman who decides not to have a child because she would have to drop out of her medical residency in order to care for it adequately, thereby scuttling a career that she has worked towards for years, is having an “abortion of convenience” seems to me grotesque. Deciding to pay more for milk rather than drive to a more distant store is a matter of convenience. Declining the enormous changes in one’s life entailed by anything resembling responsible parenthood is not.)
While it should go without saying that anyone who believes that killing any human embryo is murder should oppose any form of IVF in which excess embryos are created, it doesn’t. Most such embryos are simply discarded; and the fact that some might be frozen should not comfort anyone. Embryos do not last forever in a freezer. There is such a thing as freezer burn. Even if there weren’t, an eternity in a freezer is less life than life-in-death:
“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold :
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”
Moreover, someone who believes that abortion is wrong at any stage of fetal development, because it is wrong to kill any fetus, should take a dim view of our current practice of declaring people dead when their brains have died. I have no problem with this: as I said, I think that sentience and consciousness are crucial, and therefore I can accept both brain death and first- and second-trimester abortions, which you might think of as occurring before ‘brain life’. Those who oppose killing fetuses who have not yet developed brains, however, cannot take this view. To be consistent, they should regard our current practice of declaring people to be dead when their hearts are still beating as completely wrong, and the practice of removing people’s organs when they are in this condition as carving up living human beings for their body parts. And they should, on these grounds, oppose any form of transplantation that uses the organs of people who are brain-dead.
They should also oppose any exceptions to a ban on abortion. For instance, normally we don’t think that the circumstances of someone’s conception affect her right to go on living, or that a person conceived in rape is somehow more expendable than other people. We would be appalled by a mother who decided that her ten year old son reminded her of the rape in which he was conceived, and therefore decided to kill him. If killing a fetus or embryo at any stage of development is just like killing a child, we should regard rape exceptions to abortion bans in the same way.
Likewise, the law of self-defense does not allow you to kill people if they merely threaten to injure you, especially if the threat they pose is unintentional. While there might be a good reason for adherents of a “consistent ethic of life” to allow exceptions to save the mother’s life, therefore, there is no good reason for them to allow exceptions to spare her serious injury or disability.
Adherents of a “consistent ethic of life” should absolutely oppose any failure to enforce abortion bans vigorously. If killing an eight week old fetus is murder, then people who perform abortions are murderers, and the women who ask them to perform them are, essentially, people who hire assassins to do their dirty work. And if you think that, then the idea of passing abortion bans and then refusing to enforce them would be appalling.
(This means that Scott Lemieux’s takedown of James Joyner is absolutely right:
“Shorter Joyner: It’s so unfair to compare American pro-lifers to ones in El Salvador–I swear, we’re completely unprincipled hacks who don’t take the only legitimate rationale for abortion criminalization seriously, and don’t think women are moral agents! It never ceases to amaze me that American pro-lifers think that the illogical construction and aribtrary enforcement of abortion statutes is an argument in their favor.”
He’s also right about this:
“The only major question about abortion policy is whether poor women will have the same access to safe abortions inevitably enjoyed by the affluent.)”
Naturally, none of this should matter to those who believe that killing any human fetus or embryo is murder. We do not contemplate relaxing the murder laws on the grounds that they might actually be enforced, or that the poor should have the same right to kill people that wealthy mafia bosses now enjoy. But it is part of what consistency requires of anyone who thinks not only that abortion is wrong, but that their views on this topic should be written into law.
***
What would a consistent anti-abortion policy mean in practice? There’s a fascinating and terrifying story in today’s NYT magazine that allows us to answer that question in detail. It’s about El Salvador’s abortion laws and their effects:
“There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor’s office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. (…)
Today, Article 1 of El Salvador’s constitution declares that the prime directive of government is to protect life from the “very moment of conception.” The penal code detailing the Crimes Against the Life of Human Beings in the First Stages of Development provides stiff penalties: the abortion provider, whether a medical doctor or a back-alley practitioner, faces 6 to 12 years in prison. The woman herself can get 2 to 8 years. Anyone who helps her can get 2 to 5 years. Additionally, judges have ruled that if the fetus was viable, a charge of aggravated homicide can be brought, and the penalty for the woman can be 30 to 50 years in prison.”
Moreover, there are no exceptions whatsoever. Are you a rape victim? A ten year old girl impregnated by her father? Too bad. Does your pregnancy come with horrifying health problems, like the ones Mary Beth Williams describes here? Tough luck; suck it up. Will the pregnancy endanger your life? Oh well, them’s the breaks.
There is, of course, a de facto exemption for the wealthy:
“Abortion as it exists in El Salvador today tends to operate on three levels. The well-off retain the “right to choose” that comes of simply having money. They can fly to Miami for an abortion, or visit the private office of a discreet and well-compensated doctor. Among the very poor, you can still find the back-alley world described by D.C. and the others who turn up in hospitals with damaged or lacerated wombs. Then there are the women in the middle; they often rely on home-brewed cures that are shared on the Internet or on a new underground railroad that has formed to aid them.”
To see what this means for the poor, we might start with this list: “A report by the Center for Reproductive Rights offers this grim list of tools used in clandestine abortions: “clothes hangers, iron bars, high doses of contraceptives, fertilizers, gastritis remedies, soapy water and caustic agents (such as car battery acid).””
Alternately, consider ectopic pregnancies: pregnancies that occur outside the uterus, most commonly in the fallopian tubes. Such pregnancies are doomed: a fetus needs the uterus in order to develop, and cannot be brought anywhere near term elsewhere. If an ectopic pregnancy is caught early, it can be treated with drugs or laparoscopic surgery, and presents relatively little risk to the mother. If not, the fallopian tube will eventually rupture. In this case, treatment requires major abdominal surgery, and the mother may die. As of 1992, the CDC estimated that almost 2% of pregnancies in the US (or 108,800 pregnancies) are ectopic. While improvements in treatment have caused the mortality rate for ectopic pregnancy to plummet, ectopic pregnancies are still the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths in this country, and all of those deaths involve ectopic pregnancies that rupture before they can be treated.
So: catching ectopic pregnancies early, and treating them before the fallopian tube ruptures, is critical. If you do this, the treatment is relatively minor; if not, it’s a serious health emergency. The problem is that all the early treatments involve killing the fetus. The fetus is doomed in any case: it cannot come to term in the fallopian tube, or anywhere else outside the uterus, nor can it be relocated to the uterus at this stage. It will therefore die long before it would be viable. The only question is: should one kill it, thereby preventing a potentially lethal health emergency for the mother, or allow the fallopian tube to rupture, and the fetus to die a natural death, before operating?
Guess which approach is legally required in El Salvador?
“According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. “That is our policy,” Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. “That is the law,” she said. “The D.A.’s office told us that this was the law.” Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital’s practice. “Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital,” she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. “If it’s dead, we can operate,” she said. “Before that, we can’t.” If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture. If they are able to persuade the patient to stay, though, doctors can operate the minute any signs of early rupturing are detected. Even a few drops of blood seeping from a fallopian tube will “irritate the abdominal wall and cause pain,” Valdés explained. By operating at the earliest signs of a potential rupture, she said, her doctors are able to minimize the risk to the woman.
One doctor, who asked to remain anonymous because of the risk of prosecution, explained that there are creative solutions to the problem of ectopic pregnancies: “Sometimes when an ectopic pregnancy comes in, the attendant will say, ‘Send this patient to the best ultrasound doctor.’ And I’ll say, ‘No, send her to the least-experienced ultrasound doctor.’ He’ll say, ‘I can’t find a heartbeat here.’ Then we can operate.””
This is a lot like saying that you have to wait for an appendix to rupture before removing it, or that you have to wait for an amputated limb to develop gangrene before you can prescribe antibiotics. It’s irresponsible and inhumane: it involves placing the woman’s life at risk, and subjecting her to major surgery when much less serious treatments are available. And this is not done to save the fetus’ life; it is doomed in any case.
***
Doctors in El Salvador are legally required to report women they suspect of having an abortion:
“Doctors in El Salvador now understand that it is their legal duty to report any woman suspected of having had an abortion. Abortion rights advocates point out that Salvadoran law also spells out a conflicting responsibility: the doctor’s duty to keep the patient’s medical information confidential. What this blurring of medical and legal obligations means, in practice, is that doctors have to choose for themselves what to do. The result is a country in which some doctors eagerly report women, some eagerly search for loopholes to avoid having to report and some simply want to stay out of trouble.
“Many doctors are afraid not to report,” says Mira, the obstetrician I spoke to. This fear is heightened for doctors, she explains, by the fact that nurses also have a legal duty to report abortion crimes but are often confused about their obligation of confidentiality. So doctors are afraid that the nurses will report them for not reporting. “The entire system is run on fear,” Mira said.”
Sometimes, the grounds for suspicion are fairly clear: if your uterus has been perforated by a coat hanger, scorched with lye, or poisoned with pesticides, that’s a fairly good indication. However, there are other grounds for suspicion:
“Vargas said that in medical school she read in a gynecological textbook, published in the late 1990’s in Chile, that the doctor should listen carefully to the patient’s story. If the woman is “confused in her narrative,” Vargas said, that could well indicate that she’d had an abortion.”
Because heaven knows there’s no other reason why a pregnant woman might be confused or uncertain.
Once reported, the woman must be investigated. Here’s where the forensic vagina inspectors come in:
“During the first round of investigations, police officers interview the woman’s family and friends. “The collecting of evidence usually takes place where the events transpired — by visiting the home or by speaking with the doctor at the hospital,” Tópez said. In some cases, the police also interrogate people who work with the woman. Tópez added that that didn’t happen very often because, she said, “these are women who don’t work outside the home.” (Indeed, the evidence suggests that the ban in El Salvador disproportionately affects poor women. The researchers who conducted the Journal of Public Health study found that common occupations listed for women charged with abortion-related crimes were homemaker, student, housekeeper and market vendor. The earlier study by the Center for Reproductive Rights found that the majority were domestic servants, followed by factory workers, ticket takers on buses, housewives, saleswomen and messengers.)
As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman’s vagina.
“Yes, we sometimes call doctors from the Forensic Institute to do a pelvic exam,” Tópez said, referring to the nation’s main forensic lab, “and we ask them to document lacerations or any evidence such as cuts or a perforated uterus.” In other words, if the suspicions of the patient’s doctor are not conclusive enough, then in that initial 72-hour period, a forensic doctor can legally conduct a separate search of the crime scene. Tópez said, however, that vaginal searches can take place only with “a judge’s permission.” Tópez frequently turned the pages of a thick law book she kept at hand. “The prosecutor can order a medical exam on a woman, because that’s within the prosecutor’s authority,” she said.
In the event that the woman’s illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute, where the government’s doctors analyze it and retain custody of her uterus as evidence against her.”
The vagina: a crime scene, for which search warrants can be issued, and to which forensic inspectors can be dispatched. The uterus: evidence of a crime, which can be retained by the state as evidence. This is where the logic of criminalizing abortion leads.
***
Criminalizing abortion also affects women who do not want to abort. Here’s a horrible story that came out last year, about a woman whose child died in the uterus. It turns out that the procedure known as ‘partial birth abortion’ is also the best procedure for removing a fetus that dies at an advanced stage of development.
“Legally, a doctor can still surgically take a dead body out of a pregnant woman. But in reality, the years of angry debate that led to the law’s passage, restrictive state laws and the violence targeting physicians have reduced the number of hospitals and doctors willing to do dilations and evacuations (D&Es) and dilations and extractions (intact D&Es), which involve removing a larger fetus, sometimes in pieces, from the womb.
At the same time, fewer medical schools are training doctors to do these procedures. After all, why spend time training for a surgery that’s likely to be made illegal?”
Thus it was that the woman who wrote the story found herself in this situation:
“My doctor turned around and faced me. She told me that because dilation and evacuation is rarely offered in my community, I could opt instead to chemically induce labor over several days and then deliver the little body at my local maternity ward. “It’s up to you,” she said.
I’d been through labor and delivery three times before, with great joy as well as pain, and the notion of going through that profound experience only to deliver a dead fetus (whose skin was already starting to slough off, whose skull might be collapsing) was horrifying.
I also did some research, spoke with friends who were obstetricians and gynecologists, and quickly learned this: Study after study shows D&Es are safer than labor and delivery. Women who had D&Es were far less likely to have bleeding requiring transfusion, infection requiring intravenous antibiotics, organ injuries requiring additional surgery or cervical laceration requiring repair and hospital readmission.
A review of 300 second- trimester abortions published in 2002 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that 29 percent of women who went through labor and delivery had complications, compared with just 4 percent of those who had D&Es. (…)
We told our doctor we had chosen a dilation and evacuation.
“I can’t do these myself,” said my doctor. “I trained at a Catholic hospital.”
My doctor recommended a specialist in a neighboring county, but when I called for an appointment, they said they couldn’t see me for almost a week.
I could feel my baby’s dead body inside of mine. This baby had thrilled me with kicks and flutters, those first soft tickles of life bringing a smile to my face and my hand to my rounding belly. Now this baby floated, limp and heavy, from one side to the other, as I rolled in my bed.
And within a day, I started to bleed. My body, with or without a doctor’s help, was starting to expel the fetus. Technically, I was threatening a spontaneous abortion, the least safe of the available options.
I did what any pregnant patient would do. I called my doctor. And she advised me to wait.”
It took over a week of heavy bleeding, with her dead child decomposing inside her, before this woman was able to find someone who could perform the safest and best surgical procedure to remove the corpse from her body.
***
These are the horror stories. But it should not take horror stories to convince people. As I noted earlier, 94% of abortions are performed in the first trimester, long before it is possible that the fetus feels pain. Most abortions are not performed “for convenience” or “as a form of birth control”. They are performed because, for any number of reasons, women do not wish to accept the enormous responsibilities of motherhood. Some women choose to have abortions because pregnancy threatens their health, or because their children were conceived as a result of rape or incest.
Some choose to have abortions for other reasons. Sometimes the reason for an abortion is simply that the woman recognizes the enormous responsibilities that motherhood entails, and does not want to accept them at a given point in her life. As I said earlier, this is not a matter of “convenience”. When you have worked towards a given career for years, and having a child and raising it responsibly would force you to give it up, for instance, that is not “convenience”; that’s the entire shape of your life. When you are not married, and you cannot raise a child alone, that is not “convenience”. When you already have more children than you can really afford, and having another would place an enormous strain on your limited resources and perhaps on your marriage itself, that’s not “convenience”. When you are fifteen years old and not remotely ready for parenthood, that’s not “convenience”.
(Every so often, in this debate, someone notes that perhaps fewer men will support banning abortion when they realize that with modern paternity testing, they might become liable for more child support. That’s true, although I would hope that men would support legal abortion for better reasons. However, it’s worth noting that onerous as child support is, it’s nothing compared to what women are asked to accept by people who would criminalize abortion. For starters, women already make serious financial sacrifices for the sake of their children. For another, child support payments only affect your wallet. They do not involve massive changes to your body itself, and the risk of serious health problems and death.
Any man whose mind might be changed on these grounds should already have become pro-choice. For he plainly accepts the idea that it’s OK to abort a fetus if it involves a significant sacrifice to anyone he cares about. He just hasn’t had either the imagination to realize that pregnancy, even planned and wanted pregnancy, involves significant sacrifices, or the compassion to care about anyone other than himself.)
And it’s no good saying that if these women didn’t want to have children, they shouldn’t have unprotected sex. For one thing, not all sex is voluntary. For another, contraception is not infallible. More importantly, though, there are a lot of areas in which we recognize that people can accept risks without thereby forfeiting their right to do anything to help themselves if those risks materialize.
When people get into car crashes, for instance, we do not look at them with disdain and say: well, if you didn’t want to get into a car crash, you shouldn’t have chosen to drive. We recognize that the risks of getting into a car crash are relatively small, if you’re a safe driver; that for many people, not driving at all would involve real sacrifice; and therefore that there are a lot of people for whom accepting that risk makes sense.
Sex is a wonderful thing. A life without it would be impoverished — a lot more impoverished than a life without driving. Expecting people not to have sex except in situations in which they would welcome a child, and be able to raise it responsibly, is, for many people, expecting them to sacrifice a genuinely wonderful human good for much of their lives. This sacrifice would of course be worth making if the alternative were murder. But if the alternative is not murder — as anyone who accepts exemptions to a ban on abortion, or who opposes treating women who have had abortions like criminals, would seem to believe — then it’s not at all clear why it makes sense to ask it of someone else who does not share your view of the matter.
***
Since there are lots and lots of people, and human nature is various, I am sure that there are women who have abortions for stupid or frivolous reasons. However, I have known a variety of women who have had abortions, and none of them have done so. (I leave you to speculate on whether or not I am one of those women. If I’m not, it’s entirely a matter of luck: of things like contraceptives that might have failed, but didn’t.) Every one took the decision to have an abortion extremely seriously. While none thought that abortion was morally wrong, all those I’ve asked would count the day they had their abortions as one of the worst days in their lives. All had very serious reasons for deciding not to continue with the pregnancy. And all of them, including the one who decided to abort because the internal physical damage caused by childhood sexual abuse precluded bringing any pregnancy to term, would be criminals, not only in El Salvador but in South Dakota.
It’s up to all of us whether they, or we, become criminals here.
***
* Update (near the top): Thanks to rilkefan for pointing out that when I originally said that there “was no reason to object to” abortions performed before the development of sentience, that sounded like the claim that they were just a sort of minor inconvenience. I didn’t mean that, and as I said in comments, I don’t know anyone who has had an abortion who feels that way. What I meant was that there is no reason to think that they are morally wrong. I should have said so more clearly.
hilzoy:
Another excellent post – par for the course, naturally – but I wonder if any explication against the sort of absolutist ban on abortions El Salvador [irregularly] enforces will ever have any influence on the minds of those (like Tacitus) who have long since made up their minds on the issue (and in Tac’s case, formulated articulate intellectual frameworks for their opinions)
I think the fundamental problem is that the obsessive anti-abortion movement (at least in this country) has committed itself to a crusade against the idea of abortion; and like all such crusades, has been pushed to base their absolutist policies on a “moral” basis, so that the (often grisly) practicalities and realities of pregnancy/abortion issues (like those the NYTM illuminates) can be ignored or dismissed: and the blatant hollowness of “victories” in the legislative or legal arenas glossed over.
Good job, but I really wonder if this (or anything) will ever truly change anyone’s opinion.
“Good job, but I wonder if this (or anything)
will ever truly change anyone’s opinion.”
No. Absolutism won’t allow it. In El Salvador, a female fetus who grows up to require an abortion for medical reasons will be hunted down by death squads financed by abstinence funds funneled from HHS through Defense Department accounts.
In South Dakota, a female fetus who grows up to require an abortion for medical reasons will be denied pre-natal medical care through Medicaid because the budget is about to go kablooey. On purpose. Like a death squad, but it permits the absolutists to keep God, who aborts at will, in their confidence.
Yes, this is a good post. But just now, I wager, Hilzoy is being called a murderer across the galaxy of absolutist bloggers.
I recall two recent internet discussions on this topic, in which it was pointed out that if we assume the motivation of the anti-choicers is to prevent abortions, their other policies make no sense at all: they are generally consistently opposed to free/accessible provision of contraception, especially “morning-after” contraception; they are generally consistently in support of employers having the right to fire a woman for getting pregnant outside marriage; they are generally consistently against informative and thorough sex education, or women and children getting free healthcare, or free child care, or paid maternity leave, or any of the other economic supports that would make it less likely for a woman to need to terminate a pregnancy for economic reasons.
But if we assume that the anti-choicers are really against women having the freedom to have sex and get to make decisions about whether or not to bear children, then all their policies make consistent sense.
One of the discussions was on Slacktivist: a slightly later one, possibly inspired by Slacktivist or possibly coming out of the zeitgeist, was on Alas A Blog.
Discussions like this honestly make me despair… to have to re-argue and re-fight something we struggled through thirty-five years ago. It’s as if none of it ever happened, and once again we’re lesser persons than men.
This right-wing tide isn’t about protecting life, it’s about punishing sexuality and controlling women.
That NYT article just appalled me. Particularly the prosecutor who said that the longer the prison term they could sentence women to, the better.
The prosecutor who said that is a woman. Women who enthusiastically join in oppressing other women is no surprise – think foot-binding in pre-Revolutionary China, genital mutilation in African and Arab countries, and our own misogynistic harpies like Phyllis Schlafly & Friends.
Individuals in oppressive cultures who are themselves members of the groups singled out for particular cruelty can sometimes be the cruelest of all, in a frantic resolve to identify completely with the ones in control.
I think that kind of soul-death leaves a mark, though. The photo of that prosecutor shows a face as hard as any Soviet-era apparatchik’s.
El Salvador’s laws are, as the Times said, the logically consistent consequence of a forced-pregnancy philosophy. The forced-pregnancy advocates in this country are well aware of that, and well aware that such logical consistency would outrage and repulse all but their most extreme members.
Thus they insist that they don’t intend to prosecute women, “just the doctors.” But that’s a lie, a politically expedient lie, and it will be revealed as a lie once they get their wish and Roe is overturned. North Dakota and Missouri passed very draconian forced-pregnancy laws – which might or might not be overturned in court. In Virginia a year or so ago, a state legislator introduced (or tried to introduce) a bill requiring women to report anything that might be a miscarriage to the police, to see if the “miscarriage” was an abortion. The legislator caught so much flak that the bill went nowhere – but once Roe is overturned, I expect to see a lot more bills like it.
The reason I expect more of that, and a shift from “prosecuting only doctors” to prosecuting women in general, is because the forced-pregnancy lobby is not “pro-life” in any meaningful sense. They make this clear every time they think it’s safe to speak freely (RW blogs are very useful for finding out what they really think): they’re anti-sex, anti-woman, and esp. anti-female sexuality.
The first to appear is the capacity to feel pain
Perhaps, but only in the absence of consciousness, i.e. in the same way that animals feel pain. If the presence of human genes and the potential for consciousness are to be ignored, then why should we respect the life of a newborn any more than we do the life of a cow or pig?
It seems as though mainstream journalists woke up about six months ago and realized that the anti-abortion movement was not only very serious but about to dismantle reproductive choice as we’ve known it. If I hadn’t spent so much time online in the past few years, I might’ve been similarly blinded.
As long as the “pro-life” case was being made as an ethical plea, I was rather sympathetic to it, and particularly so when I was young, had rarely had sex, and had never known any poor or depressive people. But even after I’d come to understand the stakes better, what I saw as a minority moralist movement seemed an interesting factor for debate. Because I was convinced that the public health grounds for a permissive abortion policy could not seriously be debated.
Roe was already the precedent by the time I came into political consciousness. As the granddaughter of a nurse who had good reason to be vehemently pro-legalized-abortion, I’d never seriously considered the possibility that the moral ambiguities about potential life, arguments with which I had some sympathy, could be made into binding law.
The moral arguments are much more palatable in the moral sphere; they make for terrible law. The more I read and listen to anti-abortion writers, the less willing I have become to entertain their concerns.
“Principles won’t do,” wrote Conrad in A Heart of Darkness. Hilzoy here has done an excellent job in countering their nebulous first principle of “life” with a more scientifically helpful ethos of “sentience,” but in the political world, I’m beginning to get much more worried about consequences.
Every anti-abortion politician should be asked about El Salvador’s policy. They should be asked whether they would support such measures, if not, how would they justify falling short of such. Federal-level candidates should be asked their opinions about the rights of tribally sovereign lands to host abortion clinics, about a nation-wide abortion ban.
It’s time to bring the abortion debate out of the shadows. I am one-hundred-percent fine with exhortating women not to have abortions or to use contraception, as long as that exhortation doesn’t interfere with sensible public education or amount to harrassment of private individuals. Everything else, the chipping away tactics, the criminalization of often-necessary medical procedures, churches’ buying out private hospitals to eliminate abortions, oh it goes on–that is starting to make me very very worried. Paranoid, even.
So just what is it you want, ye who are against abortion? And what consequences of your doughty first principles are you willing to oversee?
kenB: “The first to appear is the capacity to feel pain
Perhaps, but only in the absence of consciousness, i.e. in the same way that animals feel pain. If the presence of human genes and the potential for consciousness are to be ignored, then why should we respect the life of a newborn any more than we do the life of a cow or pig?”
— Possibly I should have been clearer. The appearance of sentience is the earliest point for which I think a non-religious case for moral standing can be made. I don’t eat meat myself, and I think there’s also a very strong moral case against doing so, so I’m not particularly troubled by the last question you ask.
I really don’t think the presence of human genes can count for anything. As I said, human cancer cells have them; intelligent members of non-human species don’t. (Think of all the aliens in Star Trek: if membership in the human species is a necessary condition for its being wrong to kill someone, then we could dispatch any of them with a clean conscience.)
Potential is also a losing argument, I think. To see why, first note that if the potential being appealed to is ‘the potential to develop into a human individual without a lot of help’, then embryos don’t qualify.
First question: are we required not just to refrain from killing them, but also to provide the help they need (in thiss case, the use of the woman’s womb)? If not, then methods of abortion that merely remove the fetus without killing it are OK. (Vacuum aspiration for early abortions. The fetus dies as a result of being taken off its uterine life support, not as a result of the abortion procedure itself.) If so, does this principle cover just fetuses and embryos? That would be bizarre. So is it generally true that we cannot morally refrain from saving any life we can save by providing assistance? Then we are morally required to donate all the money we can spare without dying to Oxfam or some similar life-saving charity. Not to provide this assistance is just as wrong as removing a fetus from a uterus. In which case we are all mass murderers.
Moving on: suppose, for the sake of argument, that to kill any thing that has the potential to develop into a human child is wrong, even if that development requires a lot of assistance, and would not occur on its own. Now ask yourself: what counts as a “thing”, for these purposes? Philosophers have a lot of trouble with that one. Should the set of objects consisting of a given sperm and a given egg (before they unite) be considered a “thing”? Why not? I mean, surely spatio-temporal contiguity isn’t crucial for moral standing, is it? But if this counts, then every time a sperm or egg dies, not just one but infinitely many people die with it (since any sperm or egg could unite with any one of an infinite number of eggs or sperm, respectively.) In which case, again, we are all mass murderers. (Stop me before I ovulate again!)
Suppose you think this is hokey, and say: no, a human individual has to have, oh, two strands of DNA, not one. In this case, consider the fact that in all likelihood, any one of your cells will shortly be able to have its DNA extracted, placed in an unfertilized egg, and induced to start dividing like a normally fertilized egg. If implanted, it might well turn into a person. (Probably a deformed person, but a person for all that.) Don’t say: well, it won’t be a different person, it will have my DNA — identical twins have identical DNA, being originally products of the same fertilized egg, but they are distinct human beings for all that, and killing one identical twin is not OK just because the other survives. — Does the fact that any of your cells could develop into a baby mean that you commit murder by not allowing it to do so? Again, we’re all mass murderers, or will be as soon as somatic cell nuclear transfer technology works on humans.
I could go on, but why?
Being in such agreement, it remains only to quibble. So: I just don’t buy the whole “no pro-lifer can consistently allow exceptions for rape and incest” line. There’s a plausibly consistent worldview wherein (1) the embryo is a human person with the moral rights that come with that status; but (2) a woman has a moral obligation to preserve its life only when she is in some sense responsible for its being dependent on her. With rape, she obviously isn’t; and with incest, she isn’t if you presume the absence of real consent. Now, I don’t subscribe to this worldview, but I don’t think it’s inconsistent. Just wrong.
Christopher M: Actually, I think you’re right so long as the method of abortion does not involve killing the fetus directly. (See previous comment: vacuum aspiration, used for early abortions. The later the abortion, the greater the chance that the vacuum will end up actually killing the fetus directly — with a very small embryo/fetus, it might just get vacuumed out whole; with a larger one, it might get torn apart. As I understand it.) With such methods, one could say: I’m not killing the fetus, just declining to offer it assistance, which will result in its death.
I don’t see how someone who thinks that killing a fetus at any stage is murder could consistently think that the fact that I’m not responsible for someone’s existence makes it OK for me to kill that person. It would be different if I were just expelling the fetus. But D&C and D&E involve more than that.
hilzoy,
As an ethical vegetarian (somewhat lapsed) myself, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of drawing the line at sentience and extending it consistently to all sentient beings. However, I hardly need to point out that you (we) leave behind the vast majority of world by doing so. Do you think there’s a consistent non-religious case to be made for the more typical stance of privileging the life of, say, an unwanted 9-month-old fetus over that of a farm animal?
Hilzoy: It’s kind of an academic excercise, disputing the consistency of a position neither of us believes in, but but what the hell. I still think there’s a consistent, extremely libertarian position, wherein (1) having to carry a baby around and give birth to it is an extremely heavy burden on autonomy, bodily and otherwise; (2) a woman who chooses to have sex assumes the risk of having to bear that burden; but (3) a woman who is raped has not assumed any such risk, and thus is justified in intentionally killing even an innocent person (the embryo/fetus) in order to avoid it.
(As an analogy–imagine that a woman has a gun trained on an innocent four-year-old child who is about to push a button that will activate a trap that will somehow imprison the woman for nine months: I don’t think it’s inconsistent to say the woman is justified in killing the child to avoid the nine-months’ captivity. Probably wrong, but not inconsistent. On the other hand, if she negligently got herself into this situation, then maybe she isn’t justified.)
[Anyway, since this is the internet I should make clear that the above is an exercise in hair-splitting (though a useful one, I think) and abortion is not morally comparable to killing an innocent four-year-old.]
“All the items I could list, however, require the possession of some sort of sentience or consciousness, or on the fact that the person in question has developed sentience or consciousness, but has temporarily lost it.”
Think your argument is question-begging.
“For this reason, I think that there is no reason to object to abortions that take place before the earliest point at which these sorts of considerations kick in.”
This sounds too much like “[early] abortion is like appendectomy” a la Atrios for my comfort.
As a WASP male I would usually be expected to be categorized as the “enemy”. My own prejudice is that I expect the female of the species to be inherently capable of being a complete jerk also, including to her own sex.
Global Citizen is a medical researcher and leftie blogger/commenter with special professional interest in genetics. She can be found at http://bluegalinaredstate.blogspot.com/ if you like.
“saying a single woman who decides not to have a child because she would have to drop out of her medical residency in order to care for it adequately, thereby scuttling a career that she has worked towards for years, is having an “abortion of convenience” seems to me grotesque.”
It’s too bad that giving up a child for adoption is a sin against nature and a heinous crime in the eyes of the law.
rilkefan: point taken about the ‘no reason to object’. I meant: no reason to think it’s immoral, and will update accordingly. For what it’s worth, I don;t think abortion is anything like appendectomy. Whether or not it’s wrong, it’s always a tragedy, and everyone I know who has had one regards it as such.
Some people do not want to give their children up for adoption, and some have predictable problems with pregnancy that would require them to drop out of a residency were they to carry a pregnancy to term. I don’t think either of them can fairly be characterized as having an abortion for the sake of convenience either. I’m with you on not describing abortions as appendictomies; this seems to me to be the exact analog on the other side.
Opit: any particular reason you expect anyone to categorize you as the enemy? Or anyone to disagree that women, being human, are capable of being jerks?
hilzoy, I understand why we have to look at this from a consistency viewpoint, and why we talk of not later than the 2nd trimester, but all this discussion still misses the central point – the woman’s body is HER body, and not subject to the demands of the fetus.
Would we say to the man who has two kidneys, one of which could save the life of his brother, that if you do not give a kidney to your brother and your brother dies, you have murdered him? No. We might be angry with him, but we have no legal or ethical basis to require him to save the life of his brother. Why then do we require women to save the life of a fetus, who is not even yet a person?
I think this – up until the fetus can be removed from the womb and remain alive, it is no more than parasitic tissue. At that time, if the state insists on ensuring the viability of the fetus, then the woman can have the fetus removed alive and turned over to the state. Of course, she still has the choice to take the fetus to term and deliver a baby, with all those attendant possibilities.
Anything less than what I have described is nor more nor less than the state dictating what a being may do with HER body.
We have at least one other law that goes to the same end – it is illegal to commit self-murder. Why is that? Because of the pain felt by those left behind. Neither the victim nor the perpetrator have feelings to be injured.
We are a strangers in a strange land, hilzoy. Logic and ethics need not apply here.
Jake
“Some people do not want to give their children up for adoption”
And we should therefore allow them to instead kill their children?
“some have predictable problems with pregnancy that would require them to drop out of a residency were they to carry a pregnancy to term.”
I don’t know how residencies work – if a woman has a problem pregnancy and has to stay in bed, does she permanently lose her place? If she gets hit by a car and is out of action for a month?
To be clear, I agree in principle, but I’m not feeling this example yet. And my sense is that clarifying it will weaken your point.
Jake: I agree that the woman’s body is her body, but not that a fetus is just a form of parasitic tissue. That’s why I stop to consider its rights and its moral standing: because pregnancy is unique in that a being who is, at the moment before birth, pretty clearly a person worthy of protection requires not just the use of another person’s body, but to actually inhabit that body, in order to survive.
Because I don’t think that a fetus has rights (or any other relevant sort of moral standing) before the development of sentience, I think that at that stage the woman’s rights unquestionably come out ahead, and that while abortion is pretty much always a horrible and tragic event, it is not, at that point, wrong. But I think that to regard the fetus as ‘parasitic tissue’ misses what makes it horrible and tragic — it’s a parallel mistake to thinking of a decision to abort because of damage to one’s life as ‘convenience’.
rilkefan: I did try to explain why I don’t think it’s at all like ‘killing one’s children’. If I did, I’d think it was wrong. What I was objecting to was describing the case I mentioned as ‘convenience’, which I think just completely misses what carrying a child to term does to you. I think that whether or not the pregnancy is complicated: even under the best of circumstances, pregnancy involves massive physical changes, and massive changes to one’s life.
Of course I don’t think that this would be a good reason to kill, say, a four year old. Having a four year old is a lot of work, and it, too, changes your life a lot. But that doesn’t mean that parents should be able to kill them at will when they get tired of having them around. It’s only because of the earlier argument about why these two cases are not at all analogous that I say what I do.
That said, the idea that having an abortion during the first trimester because: (a) you don’t want to carry a child for nine months, or (b) you wouldn’t be able to give it up if you had it, and you do not wish to raise a child at this point without major changes in your life, count as ‘abortions for the sake of convenience’. There are times when having a child can change your entire life. Wanting not to have one at such a time is not just about wanting to avoid a minor inconvenience.
As I said to Jake, I think that this is the flip side of thinking that a fetus is just unwanted tissue: both of these views needlessly trivialize one side of the problem.
“What I meant was that there is no reason to think that they are morally wrong.”
Broken-recording, but:
Don’t you mean, no reason based on the above framework to think they are morally wrong? That’s what I meant with “question-begging” – you’ve almost stated a tautology: human life in state x isn’t of value (note, kind of vague here), therefore abortion is moral. Setting aside my usual “so what about your axioms” objection, I’ve got serious sorites objections to your argument here. I think only an explicit weighing of the baby’s rights vs the mother’s can lead to a solid position.
rilkefan: I don’t think it’s question-begging, actually. I think there’s a serious question about why it’s wrong to kill a fetus or an embryo, and I do not see any reason to say that it is other than the sorts of considerations I adduced above. I did skip over the argument from potentiality, which I addressed in this comment, but that was mostly because I think it;s a complete non-starter. I didn’t so much reject the supposition that all human life is worthy of protection as try to draw out its consequences.
Personally, I think that making everything turn on membership in the human species is also a non-starter. It excludes too much (intelligent non-humans); it includes too much (leaving embryos aside, the brain dead); and it doesn’t identify anything that looks like a morally relevant consideration, as opposed to an arbitrary one. But the point of this piece was less to argue against it directly than to point out what, taken seriously, it would entail.
“anyone who believes that killing any human embryo is murder should oppose any form of IVF in which excess embryos are created”
It’s not clear to me that this is correct. I.e., one might think
0) a fertilized egg is a human life
1) a fertilized egg is not the equivalent of a 4-year-old
2) the difference in 1) justifies the creation of some limited number of fertilized eggs to produce one four-year-old, even though the extras will be discarded
Hil, just thank you. Outraged and saddened since Sat. a.m. by NYT Magazine piece. Your clarity has really helped me take a breath and think as well as feel.
I’ll skirt the medicine and biology and focus on women’s reasons for choosing not to have a child (at all, or with a particular partner, or at a particular time).
Sometime in the 1980s I read an article in which the author (who must have had superhuman mind-reading skills) claimed it was obvious that the women he had watched walking into an abortion clinic were terminating their pregancies for “frivolous reasons” (no, I am not making that up, nor exaggerating) (no, can’t cite source either).
My reaction was, and remains: It is never frivolous to decide to have a child; therefore it is never frivolous to decide not to.
Gratuitous mathesque way of looking at the above: a four-year-old has value aleph_1, an embryo has value aleph_0. You can’t destroy an embryo except to lead directly to aleph_1 value or to directly avoid destroying aleph_1 value.
rilkefan: you’re right to point out that I was presupposing that murder is not justified by the claim that it’s necessary in order to produce a greater value. It may be justified when (for instance) the person killed is about to kill other people and this is the only way to stop him or her, but in that case one need not appeal to greater value. (One might, for instance, think that someone intent on killing others has waived his or her right not to be killed, which is clearly not the case with the IVF embryos.)
Of course, it’s an assumption I think is eminently defensible, and do not wish to retract, but there we are.
Javelina: thanks. I started out feeling more than thinking, but based on the comments here, I think I may have overcompensated.
“therefore it is never frivolous to decide not to.”
I can’t argue what’s frivolous or not, but google “cleft palate abortion”.
rilkefan, you’ve made a very good point. However, the vast majority of abortions have nothing to do with this kind of thing – so I’ll substitute “virtually never frivolous.”
NB since we’re getting close to the topic of the deliberate abortion of female fetuses in India, China, and other countries – I’ll say that I personally believe that the practice is wrong, but that I don’t think the women making that decision are doing so frivolously. They are making in it societies where the entire atmosphere, w/r/t women’s value and rights, is morally askew.
And I still do not think that any abortions before a fetus is viable constitute murder.
And now I have opened a nasty can of worms and my 8-year-old has just announced his ear hurts A LOT and I must withdraw.
Hilzoy–thanks for the link! It’s definitely an honor…
javelina, hope your son feels better.
How do we know this, and how well? My (extremely uninformed) impression is that NARAL et al. are entirely mum on the question of women having multiple abortions because of this issue. I’m esp. interested in an estimate of what “most” means because I think it’s reasonable to set the law to balance the rights of women in the “most” category against the wrong from the “frivolous” category. That is, the moral line and the legal line probably shouldn’t match, and the degree of difference depends on the convenience rate.
I don’t have time to jump in too much, but a couple of comments stuck out to me. Hilzoy:
I don’t understand why it’s a tragedy in that regard. If it’s not wrong, and the fetus is not human in any meaningful way, what’s tragic about it? Any more than any other medical procedure?
Again, I’m not sure I understand this particularly. Why is that practice wrong?
Hilzoy, I think that the article is a good one, though I think I may come from the opposite side of the fence. I consider myself pro-life, though a lot of Pro-lifers part ways with me on how one’s convictions in this area should play out.
The stuff about El Salvador depresses the hell out of me; for years I’ve said that at this point in our culture, the only way to end abortion in a morally and ethically acceptable way is to first ramp up a serious, meaningful contraception and sex education infrastructure, as well as pouring support into programs to support mothers that would bear the burden of pregnancies that wouldn’t have been carried to term.
I cringe as I write this, because I know the crowd here and I am almost always nodding my head along with the rest of the gang in comments, etc. Things like, ‘Oh, I’m not THAT sort of pro-lifer’ are unlikely to be much comfort to any reading. After all, that’s what ‘those sort’ say, too.
Rilkefan, you appear to be the only anti-choice person commenting on this thread: are you willing to answer Jackmormon’s question, or do you prefer to continue trashing women who choose to terminate their pregnancies?
Jackmormon asked: So just what is it you want, ye who are against abortion? And what consequences of your doughty first principles are you willing to oversee?
Jeff: The stuff about El Salvador depresses the hell out of me; for years I’ve said that at this point in our culture, the only way to end abortion in a morally and ethically acceptable way is to first ramp up a serious, meaningful contraception and sex education infrastructure, as well as pouring support into programs to support mothers that would bear the burden of pregnancies that wouldn’t have been carried to term.
This is why I do think that we ought to refer to anti-choice and pro-choice. Because that’s where the important division lies. I think (on the whole) you’re on the same side of the fence as me, no matter than I think we have different moral views about abortion: the difference in the real world is not what moral view you take of abortion, but whether or not you are willing to assume that a woman is able to make decisions for herself and ought to be legally entitled to do so.
I shared an apartment for several years with a fundamentalist Christian, R, with whom I had not thing one in common, and we generally had a careful agreement not to push our disagreements to the point of actual quarrelling. Once, however, a Catholic friend was visiting me, and R said brightly “So, how do you and J deal with your different beliefs about abortion?” to which my friend responded, equally brightly, “We have the same belief about abortion: we both believe it’s the woman who’s pregnant who’s got to make the decision, no one else.”
The problem for China and India, aside from questions of morality, is in the aggregate, in that the ratio between boys and girls is such that the potential for serious social problems has emerged. Slarti is better read on this than I am, but this pdf provides the basic info. The abstract:
Using data from various sources, this paper reviews studies on child survival of female children in China and intervention activities by the Chinese government to improve this survival. Discrimination against girls has existed for a long time in China, and the abnormally high sex ratio at birth and excess female child mortality in the recent years reflect women’s low social status and a relatively deteriorating survival environment for girls. The discrimination against girls is both prenatal and postnatal and is manifest in sex-selective abortion of female fetuses leading to a high sex ratio at birth, and in neglect of and insufficient investment in girls resulting in excess female child mortality. The paper presents analyses of the levels, trends, and regional variations in the sex ratio at birth and excess girl child mortality, and discusses direct and indirect causes of the deteriorating survival environment for girls as well as its demographic and social implications.
A little less academic link is here.
It’s ironic to me, because I believe that the over abundance of women in post war Japan forced Japanese women to compete more for men, and led to an over-emphasis on being good marriage material. However, it seems that the lack of women in China is leading to a similar entrenchment of male dominance.
To the topic at hand, I have simply never felt comfortable telling anyone how much pain they are supposed to accept, and I just think (especially after watching my wife’s two pregnancies) that I have no standing to express my opinion on this. While I don’t know if a lot of people are of a similar opinion as me, if this is the case, it explains why a possibly small proportion of pro-life activists can influence the debate so profoundly. I am certainly not going to be able to call on the moral certainty that is required to argue the other side, and, if there are more people of a similar opinion, the debate is always going to be between two far poles of the issue, with all of the concomitant ill will.
I don’t understand why it’s a tragedy in that regard. If it’s not wrong, and the fetus is not human in any meaningful way, what’s tragic about it? Any more than any other medical procedure?
It is tragic because of the potential that does not come true. Just like infertility is tragic, or as a better example: accidents causing infertility are tragic.
Broken record here too I guess: for me at the end of pregnancy there is a baby – even if it is not born yet. Just after conception is not a baby for me, but a blob-of-cells-with-potential. There is a proces in which the blob becomes the baby and there is no clear cut-off point.
It never is just about the baby though; it is also about the women who is pregnant. She is an entity with rights too, which means that in case of doubt (about the cut-off point for instance) here rights prevail. IMHO of course.
Jeff: Though I have no moral problems with most abortions, especially in first trimester (which is at least 90% of abortions in most countries where abortions are legal I think) I agree that minimizing them is a great good. Most pro-choice people agree with that AFAIK.
Rilkefan,
There is a little bit of information out there. Planned Parenthood notes
That probably isn’t the entirety of the information you’d be looking for. The finalized CDC Surveillance data is posted for three years prior (2005 release of 2002 data), generally in November. These are the 2002 figures. The CDC data on legal abortions show 60% of all abortion procedures received by women who have had one or more children. There certainly are some women whose first abortion was when they were much younger, before having children. Specific data on timelines would probably be difficult to collect; in any case it doesn’t appear in the CDC data.
Looking at trends from the CDC data, Safe, Legal, and Rare seems to have had success, with ~1.3 million abortions reported yearly for 1980-1993, declining to ~850k in 2000 (and steady through 2002).
One trend I noticed that might deserve a little scrutiny is in the Type of Procedure section of Table 1. “Other” seems to be increasing rapidly, particularly from 2000 to 2002. The yearly reports’ (2001, 2000, or change the year in this search) Table 8 break this data down by state. The changes aren’t uniform. For example, North Carolina went from 40ish in 1999 and 2000 to 475 in 2001 and 4400 in 2002. The fact that the change isn’t uniform across states leads me to speculate that this is more likely to be related to social policy than medicine. I believe we have a North Carolina reader or two, perhaps they’ll be willing to run this down?
One other note on the CDC totals. They include reporting from over 40 states, but California and Florida don’t report.
Some people make it needlessly difficult. Tacitus, for instance, thinks that the crucial issue is the humanity of a fetus, and that humanity means what we share with stem cells — that is, being biologically human (as opposed to lupine, bovine, feline, etc.) A “consistent ethic of life” developed on this basis would preclude the destruction of any living human cells, including, for instance, cancer cells. It would therefore entail that amputation, chemotherapy, appendectomy, pulling your hair out by its roots, and any other procedure in which living human cells were consigned to death is murder.
That’s a straw man — and a poor one at that — and not the actual argument. The “consistent ethic of life” holds that where a cell or clump of cells is biologically human and will become a human life by the natural passage of time, it is human and should be treated as one.* Indeed, the objections to stem cell research are not objections to the use of stem cells, but rather an objection to the use of fetal stem cells that are harvested via the destruction of a human embryo.
Now — though generally anti-abortion — I am not a proponent of the so-called “consistent ethic of life.” Nor am I in favor of an abortion regime anything remotely like that in El Salvador (neither, necessarily, would someone adhering to the consistent ethic of life.) But you need to get the other side’s argument right if you’re going to have a dialog. It’s not so simplistic as you imagine.
*I’m grossly oversimplifying.
Von: But you need to get the other side’s argument right if you’re going to have a dialog. It’s not so simplistic as you imagine.
But the other side’s argument really is not connected with valuing human life: it’s connected with devaluing women and arguing that women ought not to get to have legal control of reproduction. El Salvador is the logical outcome of the anti-choice argument, because you can only give a fetus human rights if you remove human rights from pregnant women: if you want to give a fetus legal rights independently of the pregnant woman, someone other than the pregnant woman is therefore given legal rights over the pregnant woman’s body.
Whereas, if you are pro-choice, regardless of what moral value you set on a fetus, you are steering safely away from El Salvador: pregnant woman simply have the same human rights as women do when not pregnant, or any man, and get to make their own decisions about their own bodies.
Jackmormon is right, basically: attempting to give ethical arguments about when a fertilized blastocyte becomes human and can’t be terminated simply makes lousy law.
I’m going to chime in with von here, but on a slightly different note. Although it is useful for “our” side — and it is my side, too — to talk about contraceptive failure,* rape and incest, I’m not sure how intellectually honest it really is. Sure, the existence of these 3 causes of pregnancy is adequate to defeat an outright-ban-based-solely-on-blame. But it’s also perfectly fair for the folks on the other side to point out that relatively few abortions end pregnancies with these three causes.
I’m not saying that the majority of abortions are therefore “frivolous.”** Just that the reality is a whole lot more complicated in most cases than a simple binary blame/blameless split.
* By which I mean technical failure. It is my unscientific belief that the vast majority of unwanted pregenancies are the result of human failure: gambles gone bad, made under various states of impairment and/or lack of understanding of actual odds.
** I think this word is pretty objectionable, unless someone can show me what I’ve never seen: that there are women who approach the decision lightheartedly.
Jes, I’ve known plenty of “pro-life” people, especially from having attended a Catholic law school. You do them, and yourself, no favor by refusing to acknowledge that a great many have objections to abortion that are life-based.
I agree with you that there are ‘pro-life’ people for whom the driving motivation is punishing women for sin, and/or controlling women — this may even be the majority — but it is certainly not everyone on the other side.
On the legal question, it is important, in US terms anyway, to distinguish between what a state may do, and what it must (not) do. My own inclinations are much like those of Jack (see her HOCB entry), but while I think a state may enact such a policy, and would vote for representatives that would do so, I can’t say that a state must do so. Or lacks the power to do anything different.
Jes:
What Rilkefan appears to be from my point of view is someone who argues sensitively and in a (politically) non-absolutist way, even if his principles are absolutist about this subject, not that they are, for all I know.
For the record. I’m anti-abortion and pro-choice. Which means many, many things.
I am in favor of aborting all absolutist positions on everything — because the world as it is can’t tolerate absolute principles for too long without making things much worse.
CharleyCarp: Jes, I’ve known plenty of “pro-life” people, especially from having attended a Catholic law school. You do them, and yourself, no favor by refusing to acknowledge that a great many have objections to abortion that are life-based
I will do them the credit of believing their objections to abortion are life-based if they are pro-choice. If they’re anti-choice, they are sailing towards El Salvador, and if they don’t like the look of the landfall, it’s up to them to steer away from it.
I agree with you that there are ‘pro-life’ people for whom the driving motivation is punishing women for sin, and/or controlling women — this may even be the majority — but it is certainly not everyone on the other side.
The “other side” is the anti-choicers, Charley. They are not “pro life”: they want women to die rather than have the option of safe legal abortion.
John Thullen: What Rilkefan appears to be from my point of view is someone who argues sensitively…
You may have missed the thread where Rilke argued that women can’t be allowed to decide for themselves to terminate an pregnancy because that could mean women deciding to have an abortion because they were getting too fat in the third trimester. That wasn’t a “sensitive” argument: it displayed brutal contempt for women, and I’ve frankly never felt the same about Rilke since. (Nor was it a one-off OMG did I really say that, argument: Rilke actually defended it both on that thread and elsewhere.)
Hilzoy, I am having trouble with the second part of your argument against potentiality arguments above:
Now ask yourself: what counts as a “thing”, for these purposes? Philosophers have a lot of trouble with that one. Should the set of objects consisting of a given sperm and a given egg (before they unite) be considered a “thing”? Why not? I mean, surely spatio-temporal contiguity isn’t crucial for moral standing, is it?
I don’t find myself having the latter intuition. It seems to me that in general we take spatiotemporal contiguity to be crucial in deciding what’s a thing and what isn’t, and you have to identify a thing before addressing the question of its moral standing. I just don’t see it as plausible to regard any possible as-yet-unassembled set of components as already being, for the purpose of moral assessment, the thing they would be if they were assembled. But maybe I’ve misunderstood you.
I don’t like potentiality arguments either, but my (vaguer, amateur) objection to them has always been this: that it isn’t legitimate to project moral standing backwards from some possible later state of an entity to its present state. Just because X will (if all goes well) at some later point in time have the properties in virtue of which we ascribe a certain moral standing to it does not mean that now, while the actually existing X lacks those morally relevant properties, we have to ascribe it that same moral standing.
Analogy: if all goes well, my 3-year-old will someday have the legal right to vote, based on her future property of being a certain age (etc.). But we don’t use that fact to ascribe the right to vote to her now, because now she lacks the relevant property.
It’s just an analogy, of course, legal rights being purely conventional.
Jes, I have to say that I think this statement:
…is insulting and untrue, no less so than someone who says, ‘Pro-choicers want babies to be torn limb from limb so that women don’t have to lose their figures.’ It’s ugly, it’s untrue, and it serves no purpose beyond demonizing. The vast majority of abortions are not ‘life or death emergencies,’ nor are they ‘brutal calculations of convenience.’ Both ‘sides’ would do well to recognize that.
There are certainly a tiny sliver of the population for which one of those two statements is true, but I think it can easily be established by listening to any of the voices in THIS discussion that we are not dealing with either of those extremes.
I DO find the rhetoric of Pro-life activism tremendously ugly and disingenuous where it intersects with conservative opposition to contraception education and the creation of support systems for mothers. Around 30% of abortions are performed for women who are in a long-term relationship (Inclusive of marriage), and do NOT want children, but they and their partner are NOT using any contraceptives. Not ‘incorrectly’ or ‘infrequently’ but not at all.
But I digress.
Jeff: …is insulting and untrue, …. It’s ugly, it’s untrue, and it serves no purpose beyond demonizing.
It forces anti-choicers to recognize the ugly reality that they attempt to smooth over by appealling pictures of photoshopped fetuses, floating detached in mid air without reference to any pregnant woman.
El Salvador is the anti-choice reality.
People who think abortions are morally wrong but who do not want women to die or be made sterile in illegal abortions need to recognize that they belong on the pro-choice side of the fence, not with the anti-choicers who prefer women dying to women having equal human rights.
So many comments.
Jeff: “I don’t understand why it’s a tragedy in that regard. If it’s not wrong, and the fetus is not human in any meaningful way, what’s tragic about it?”
Well, start by thinking of the many things that are tragic without being morally wrong. Serious breakups, for instance: when you are the one doing the breaking up, and it’s not because e.g. you couldn’t care less about the person in question and have decided to move on, but because (let’s say) while you love her, or are as close to that state as possible while thinking you need to break up with her, she has some character trait (or something) that makes you think that it’s really never going to work out.
That’s tragic, and it’s tragic not just because e.g. you are causing pain to someone else, but because there is a whole other life of yours out there, one that has a lot to be said for it, which you have decided to cut off because, when you really think hard about it, you can’t see that it’s going to work.
The decision to have an abortion is a decision not to have a child. It’s tragic, mostly, in the same way, though of course, depending on the circumstances, it can be overlayed with different stuff. Aborting a child conceived in rape is a different tragedy from aborting the child of someone you love because you cannot see how the two of you can raise it. But to me, it’s always tragic, and people who make this decision frivolously are missing something that matters. (Just as, to take another example involving the destruction of something that has value but no rights, someone who blithely destroyed a work of art would be missing something important.)
Also, for what it’s worth, I think that while some anti-abortion people, including a lot of the most vocal ones, really are anti-choice, anti- woman, and/or anti-sex (or: anti-women-having-sex), there are people who can truly say “Oh, I’m not THAT sort of pro-lifer”; and as far as I can tell, you’re among them. Obviously I don’t know you, so I could be wrong, but I’m perfectly willing to take you at your word here, having no antecedent commitment to the nonexistence of people who are not THAT sort of pro-lifer. (As I always say, humanity is various, so I tend not to have antecedent commitments to the idea that any sort of person couldn’t exist.)
von: “That’s a straw man — and a poor one at that — and not the actual argument. … But you need to get the other side’s argument right if you’re going to have a dialog. It’s not so simplistic as you imagine.”
I agree that it’s a lousy argument. However, I didn’t invent it. What Tac actually wrote was:
You tell me how it’s possible to read that without concluding that ‘humanity’ means ‘being a human, as opposed to e.g. a bovine, cell’, or ‘having human genetic material’, or something similar such that both we and stem cells have ‘humanity’. And stem cells will not “become a human life by the natural passage of time”.
I put that part in because when I discuss this with students, a lot of them do in fact believe that something’s being genetically human is what matters. They haven’t thought about it, and back off immediately when pressed, but it is a view that many of them hold to begin with. For that reason it seemed important to get it out of the way.
I’d agree with you that I had attacked a straw man had I not proceeded to address its much more interesting relatives, who are not made of straw.
Jason: When the potentiality argument takes the form: this will one day be an X, so we should treat it as an X now, it’s clearly wrong. (One day this acorn will be a mighty oak, but it isn’t one now; one day my child will be able to support herself, but that doesn’t mean that I can put her out of the house at the age of two and expect her to do so, etc.)
The better potentiality argument goes: when something will become an X, that fact may mean that it should be treated in a certain way, not because we somehow assume that it is an X now, which is false, but because potential Xs must be treated in a certain way. Here is where I ask: what makes something a potential X? Is it anything that could become an X, in the sense that any one of my cells could (given developments in somatic cell nuclear transfer) become a baby? If not, is the reason ‘because we have to do all that work to make it happen; it doesn’t happen independently’? If so, then it’s worth pointing out that embryos don’t develop into babies without an awful lot of help either — help from the mother, whose body is essential to the whole proceeding. — And what counts as a ‘thing’? What’s ‘becoming’? What’s ‘the natural course of things’? Etc.
s/anti-choicers/anti-lifers
s/photoshopped fetuses/self-actualized women
s/pregnant women/shredded babies
It’s fun, isn’t it?
So, what you’re saying is that it’s either liberal abortion laws or dead women: no other options, no other choices. That’s a false dilemma — the same as saying, ‘If you don’t want unhealthy children strangled in their cribs and drowned in the river, you need to wake up and realize that you’re pro-life.’
The phrases ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ are brand names at this point, devoid of inherent meaning. Can I be pro-choice but favor strict parental notification laws? Can I be pro-life but favor the legalization of first-trimester abortions? Is anyone here pro-death? Or anti-choice? They’re just rhetorical levers at this point.
Honestly, if you want to group me with El Salvador’s grim spectacle I don’t see much point in continuing a conversation with you. I have no desire to demonize people who support legal abortion. I have no desire to demonize you. I just ask that you exercise some basic, fundamental courtesy when talking to someone who disagrees with you about a very divisive and heated subject. Thanks.
Jes:
Yes, I either missed that thread or have forgotten it. I’ll let Rilkefan argue that train of thought one way or the other today if he chooses. I will say that I reject the idea that there are many women who consider abortion for vanity reasons. But I reject the idea too that there are no women who might consider abortion for vanity reasons.
Which is one wrinkle in my very wrinkled anti-abortion, pro-choice stance.
I’m just pointing out my preference for debating this with Rilkefan over debating it with a species of argument on the other side, now in the ascendancy on that side, which in fact, as you point out, wants women to die rather than have access to safe, legal abortion.
To be clear, I agree too with CharleyCarp that many honest, good people who are against abortion do not “want” women to die.
And I agree with Jackmormon that how the subtlety or nonsubtlety of that argument plays out on the real-world ground of law and politics is highly problematic.
See, I know nothing for sure.
Moreover, someone who believes that abortion is wrong at any stage of fetal development, because it is wrong to kill any fetus, should take a dim view of our current practice of declaring people dead when their brains have died. I have no problem with this: as I said, I think that sentience and consciousness are crucial, and therefore I can accept both brain death and first- and second-trimester abortions, which you might think of as occurring before ‘brain life’. Those who oppose killing fetuses who have not yet developed brains, however, cannot take this view. To be consistent, they should regard our current practice of declaring people to be dead when their hearts are still beating as completely wrong,
Not at all. I believe abortion of any embryo or fetus is morally wrong, unless his/her existence resulted from rape or its continuing to reside within the mother threatens her life. The fetus, if left alone and not killed, will awake to sentience. Not at birth, but some time after that — it is generally believed that newborns do not have a sense of their own individuality. The fetus’s brain is not dead, simply not fully developed; it is exactly where all of our brains were supposed to be at various stages of development.We all woke up.
By contrast, a “brain dead” person is never going to awaken again. If it were otherwise, if it could be assumed that a brain dead person would awake to consciousness in another few months, killing the brain dead person would be an abomination. It would be criminal to hold that it is ok to kill the brain dead person as long as we “beat the clock” and do it before they regain sentience.
But that’s what these “brain dead” fetus arguments amount to. Just be sure to kill it before some arbitrary time when it is assumed there is enough neurological activity, and that is hunky dory.
For pragmatic reasons I don’t support criminalizing early abortions. But the moral arguments against it seem quite persuasive.
hilzoy writes: Whether or not it’s wrong, it’s always a tragedy, and everyone I know who has had one regards it as such.
Why? Why do you and everyone regard aborting a fetus as a “tragedy”?
That’s a straw man — and a poor one at that — and not the actual argument. The “consistent ethic of life” holds that where a cell or clump of cells is biologically human and will become a human life by the natural passage of time, it is human and should be treated as one.*
I’m not sure how you extract this from what was written. In the post, it states
The left at large is willing to fight for the certain humanity of the most base savage; but it can barely be stirred for the probable humanity of the innocent child. The right at large defends the unborn with admirable tenacity; but it happily slaughters those whom a judiciary (that it otherwise despises) deems unfit to live, and thereby implicitly subscribes to an ethic whereby humanity’s value is a thing earned rather than inherent. (emphasis mine)
When one makes an elision like that, one can’t really complain of straw figures. Furthermore, the consistent life ethic is supposedly strongly drawn from “the evolved practices, beliefs and customs of humanity over the course of history” is another elision if points like this and this are suggestive, as well as the notion of quickening.
On preview, I see hilzoy has dealt with this, but what I find interesting is that when you start to look at the arguments we see this sort of metonymy, and it functions to create the appearance of clear cut moral choices when they aren’t there. What people need is a Solomon like judge who could look at each case and decide what should be done. Unfortunately, we only have a pale Solomon like judge in the form of our own personal compass, which sadly can go off kilter for any number of reasons.
Hilzoy, thanks for the clarification. At an abstract level, I can see what you’re saying making about tragedy.
I have an easier time recognizing something as tragic when the desire of an individual is thwarted. For example, a miscarriage. When the decision aligns with the desires of the individual, it’s less clear. In the case of your dating analogy: if two people deside amicably to part ways, because they have enjoyed being with each other and want to pursue other things, I see no tragedy. In that sense, I don’t see ‘the decision not to have a child’ as a tragedy — my wife and I have made that decision for now. We know that we’re not in a position to raise a child the way we’d like to, and we’re pretty newly married.
If you’re saying that the majority of women do NOT make the decision to have an abortion happily, and would prefer NOT to, but see no other way to avoid ruinous consequences in their lives, then we have another situation entirely.
In my perfect-compromise world, first-trimester abortions would be legal, later ones would not, comprehensive sex and contraceptive education and distribution programs would be the norm across the country, and medical support, job training and assistance, and other aid for mothers would be agressively funded.
I think there’s a much larger contingent that just doesn’t realize that abortion is part of a much larger social, economic, and cultural structure and can’t be trated as a free-standing bio-ethics or morality issue. They know that there are many problems for woman in bad dituations — parents who’ll kick them out, jobs who’ll fire them, medical problems, boyfriends who’ll ditch them, medical bills they have no way of paying — but they see those as a class of problem that will somehow ‘be taken care of.’ That’s depressingly naive, and I think the failure to honestly grapple with those problems, trating them as JUST as important as the issue of abortion itself, is a big part of the pro-life pro-choice conflict.
You tell me how it’s possible to read that without concluding that ‘humanity’ means ‘being a human, as opposed to e.g. a bovine, cell’, or ‘having human genetic material’, or something similar such that both we and stem cells have ‘humanity’. And stem cells will not “become a human life by the natural passage of time”.
Way too thin. Tacitus is infering a tacit concession from pro-choice folks, and you’re infering a tacit concession from his interference. That’s one inference and at least one tacit concession too far.
Jeff: I think that there are a lot of things that people regard as tragic even though they are in some sense the agent of the tragedy, or one of its agents. Any time you can see that something would be in many ways good, but for some reason think that it would not be good now, or for you, or given everything else in the world, etc., you can have reason to give it up, while still thinking that it’s a tragedy.
That was one of the points of the breakup example: it was meant to be a case in which you can absolutely see why this particular person is someone you love, or nearly love, and why making a life with her would be in a lot of ways a good thing, but nonetheless feel that given the two of you as you are (or: the two of you and the world, etc.), it won’t actually work. Then you break it off, but not without an enormous sense of loss.
It’s probably relevant that most of the women I know who have had abortions are people who love kids, and wanted to have kids. But for one reason or another, the prospect of a kid appeared at an impossible time, or with an impossible person, or something. That’s still tragic, even though it’s neither immoral nor a choice that they’d make differently if they had to do it over again.
von: he says that stem cells have ‘humanity’, and that it is this humanity that makes them useful therapeutically. He also says that whether or not something has ‘humanity’ is the crucial point in the abortion debate. I don’t see that I’m inferring at all.
I do assume he would not actually maintain this position if questioned, but it is what he said.
“Why? Why do you and everyone regard aborting a fetus as a “tragedy”?” …mona
“…someone who blithely destroyed a work of art would be missing something important”…hilzoy
I also haven’t quite gotten this since last night, and I think you may be conceding too much in describing the abortion of a blastula or 1st trimester foetus as “tragic”.
The proper comparison is not to a work of art but perhaps a block of fine marble in Michelangelo’s or Rodin’s studio. The marble has value in itself, and potential, but it is not a tragedy if it is destroyed. A foetus is not yet the “Pieta.”
hilzoy writes: It’s probably relevant that most of the women I know who have had abortions are people who love kids, and wanted to have kids. But for one reason or another, the prospect of a kid appeared at an impossible time, or with an impossible person, or something. That’s still tragic,
But why? What is so tragic about having an abortion?
In addition, from common understanding, most people would consider a 1st trimester spontaneous abortion or miscarriage as sad but not quite “tragic.”
I think the emotional distinction between early miscarriages/1st trimester abortions/infertility and later events or the death of children are critical to the understanding of the issue. The death of a child is “tragic”. If we use the same word for those earlier events what words are we left with for the death of a 5-yr-old?
“Really REALLY tragic,” I guess.
A friend of mine had an early miscarriage some years ago, and it was still pretty devastating. Certainly it would’ve been much worse had she lost a child at, say, age three. But I’m not comfortable brushing aside the miscarriage because it might’ve been worse later.
If we use that word for a 5-year old child, though, what words are we left with for the death of a vibrant mother of two, or a devoted husband, or a brilliant writer?
“If we use that word for a 5-year old child, though, what words are we left with for the death of a vibrant mother of two, or a devoted husband, or a brilliant writer?”
All tragic. Do we really want to concede that word for an early miscarriage, and concede the implication? The Church has always considered it an important distinction, in terms of ritual for instance.
We do make a distinction, or at least used to, before our present age of excess, or competitive compassion and empathy.
I think the anti-choice movement is characterized by a lack of judgement and excess sentimantality, and the pro-choice movement should avoid that trap.
Just because I think it a tragedy if the Mavericks don’t make the finals, and my feelings may be very real, doesn’t mean you are required to validate those feelings with empathy.
Hilzoy:
Jason: When the potentiality argument takes the form: this will one day be an X, so we should treat it as an X now, it’s clearly wrong. (One day this acorn will be a mighty oak, but it isn’t one now; one day my child will be able to support herself, but that doesn’t mean that I can put her out of the house at the age of two and expect her to do so, etc.)
Agreed.
The better potentiality argument goes: when something will become an X, that fact may mean that it should be treated in a certain way, not because we somehow assume that it is an X now, which is false, but because potential Xs must be treated in a certain way.
I have a hard time seeing an argument here at all. It doesn’t answer the question: what is it about potential that requires such treatment? What’s morally relevant about potential? The only answer I can think of to that question is that potential consists in the possible possession, in the future, of properties that confer a certain moral standing. But then this “better” argument just collapses into the first, clearly wrong version. So to avoid that collapse, potential must be morally significant for some other reason. But I can’t see what that would be.
Sorry if I am being dense.
Also, in my original comment above at 1:35 I tried to address my puzzlement with your earlier objection to potentiality arguments based on metaphysical considerations about thinghood:
[Hilzoy:] Now ask yourself: what counts as a “thing”, for these purposes? Philosophers have a lot of trouble with that one. Should the set of objects consisting of a given sperm and a given egg (before they unite) be considered a “thing”? Why not? I mean, surely spatio-temporal contiguity isn’t crucial for moral standing, is it?
It seemed to me that this refutation depends on the opponent accepting a notion of thinghood according to which any un-united sperm and egg can be regarded as a thing, but I still don’t see why anyone would have to accept that. My intuition is that spatiotemporal contiguity is a crucial factor in attributing thinghood, which attribution is prior to assessing that thing’s moral standing. The exact signifigance of spatiotemporal continuity in deciding thinghood will depend on the individual case under consideration, but in the case of the sperm and egg it is precisely the lack of spatiotemporal contiguity that means that we ain’t got a thing here yet. So it looks to me like this refutation of the potentiality argument doesn’t work.
Again, sorry if I have misunderstood your arguments.
um, “significance.”
jason: my “arguments” are more like a list of questions that someone who wants to make a potentiality argument should answer, combined with reasons why some of those answers might cause trouble. Myself, I don’t think the potentiality argument works, and in fact don’t really see how it’s supposed to work; it often seems to rely on the idea that it’s just obvious. (Not to me, it isn’t.) So I’m open to the idea that there are better ways of answering these questions than I’ve provided.
Mona: the reason why I think the brain death analogy works is this. When someone undergoes brain death, one natural way to think of it is: the person has already died, even if her heart is still beating. She has gone, and will not return. If one thinks of it this way, then when we consider a fetus that has not yet developed a functioning brain, we should say: she does not yet exist, even though a rudimentary body does.
Someone who thinks that killing such an embryo is murder must, I think, believe that what matters is not ‘brain life’, or any of the things we might mean when we say, of someone who is brain dead, that “she” has already died. They must mean something like: there is a living organism, albeit one without a functioning brain. And killing such a being is murder.
But in that case I don’t see why killing someone who is brain dead, but whose body is still in other ways alive — heart beating, blood pumping, etc. — is not murder as well, or why taking their organs for transplant is not carving up the living.
“I could go on and list more reasons for objecting to killing people. All the items I could list, however, require the possession of some sort of sentience or consciousness, or on the fact that the person in question has developed sentience or consciousness, but has temporarily lost it.”
This combined with:
“I really don’t think the presence of human genes can count for anything. As I said, human cancer cells have them; intelligent members of non-human species don’t. (Think of all the aliens in Star Trek: if membership in the human species is a necessary condition for its being wrong to kill someone, then we could dispatch any of them with a clean conscience.)”
proves too much. I hate to bring up the specter of infanticide since you certainly aren’t for it, but your argument has trouble with post-birth infants.
“Potential is also a losing argument, I think. To see why, first note that if the potential being appealed to is ‘the potential to develop into a human individual without a lot of help’, then embryos don’t qualify. “
Also true of infants, though if you would allow a potentiality argument it would be easy to save the infant case.
“So is it generally true that we cannot morally refrain from saving any life we can save by providing assistance?”
I think this may be overstating the issue. Any human life anywhere in the world? Am I morally required to save someone’s life if I am present and can take immediate personal action at zero risk to myself (barring strong moral counterweights like being forced to kill some other innocent person)? Not to overdo the hoary train thought experiments but what the heck:
Two trains are headed toward each other on a track, each with 500 people on it. Trains being what they are, if they hit each other many people will be killed. By pushing a button I can switch one of them on to another track—a track where, unlike most thought experiments of this type, no one will be hurt if I do so. I am the only person present at the switching station but train switching is not my job. I can reach over and push the button with no risk to myself. Am I morally required to do so? Am I off the hook if I don’t?
What if I have to cross a wet and slippery floor, risking a small chance of a fall with possible bruising?
What if it is a small chance of a fall with a possible broken arm?
What if I have to navigate a chair and a desk precipitating a small but non-zero chance of tripping and breaking my neck?
What if I am guaranteed to break my arm?
What if I have to cross a room where there is a 0.4% chance of there being a wild and hungry cheetah which will have a 90% chance of eating me? If I can enter the room, ascertain whether or not there is a cheetah and escape safely if there is (but would have a 50% chance of getting eaten if I press on) am I morally not required to even check the room for the cheetah? Does the 0.4% chance of there being a cheetah and a 90% chance of dying only if I press on once I see it mean I don’t have to even enter the room where I could push the button that will save 1,000 people? However you value the 90% chance of being killed once you see the cheetah don’t most ideas of morality require that you at least check?
I’m not sure that I can formulate it with philosophic rigor, but I’m pretty sure there is a generally (though not universally) accepted moral principle of saving people around you (especially when it requires no or very little risk) that doesn’t extend to everyone in the world. Whatever the law in a particular jurisdiction may say, there is a high level of appropriate social ostracism in store for the person on the dock who won’t throw down the life preserver.
“Moving on: suppose, for the sake of argument, that to kill any thing that has the potential to develop into a human child is wrong, even if that development requires a lot of assistance, and would not occur on its own. Now ask yourself: what counts as a “thing”, for these purposes? Philosophers have a lot of trouble with that one.”
I think this is the ‘pile’ or ‘baldness’ problem. The fact that philosophers have a lot of trouble with defining how many grains of sand make a heap or how few hairs on the head make me bald doesn’t really trouble me at all. It certainly won’t stop me from using the ideas of ‘heap’ and ‘baldness’.
“Should the set of objects consisting of a given sperm and a given egg (before they unite) be considered a “thing”? Why not? I mean, surely spatio-temporal contiguity isn’t crucial for moral standing, is it?”
Maybe I’m not understanding this argument, but it seems to me that all of the arguments you think are ok involve a crucial spatio-temporal contiguity. For example you assume a locus between sentience (assuming we can get out of the heap vagueness in that word) and the physical body of the person not to be killed. Furthermore there is a sense of the natural progression of things that I realize philosophers are uncomfortable with, but which come in to play. This intersects with views of generally preferring life to death by resisting the natural order when it leads to death and trying to help it out when it leads to life. (Hence we have both in vitro fertilization and open-heart surgery). In the natural course of things not all sperm will unite with every egg to form a human life. Once they have united and implanted in a uterus the natural course will tend toward a human life. Now it is possible to argue that we should not actually value the natural progression as it pertains toward life over the natural progression as it pertains toward death—but that is a vastly different argument. We do in fact value that differently
I would also like to strenuously object to the idea that we know that very few—approaching no—women use abortions as a matter of convenience. For political reasons every attempt to look in to that has been stopped by pro-choice groups. But the troubling repeat abortion rate suggests otherwise.
Regarding the abortion as a morally acceptable tragedy discussion, I’m not really convinced that it makes sense in the context of your dismissal of the potentiality argument. If there is no moral interest in potentiality there should be no sense of ‘loss’ or ‘tragedy’ when you destroy that potentiality. If you dismiss potentiality, statements like “But for one reason or another, the prospect of a kid appeared at an impossible time, or with an impossible person, or something.” make no sense.
Jeff:
Having a few weeks ago given the eulogy at my beloved sister’s memorial service after 20 years of progressive devastating illness, during the last weeks of which awful decisions had to be made by her (our)caregiver mother, who kepther going day-day all those years, I would say no words adequately suffice to describe any of the examples you provide.
Death sucks.
My personal problem is that the very decisions that my mother had to make, which are made every day around the world by good people, are increasingly (yes, still a small sliver of the argument) being called murder, as we saw in the Schiavo case.
Not by you, I emphasize. But the debate in its political incarnation is unfortunately and increasingly defining how we talk to each other.
I would not brush aside a miscarriage either. It’s all unspeakable stuff. Life eats us and I hate every effing example of it.
I relate this personal experience merely to make the point that words are inadequate, so please hold the condolences. What happened, happened.
I must say though that the increasing political debate that has one small segment of extremists calling my sister’s experience murder voting alongside another group of extremists in the same Party to defund Medicare and Medicaid (the taxpayer paid for much of the last 20 years of my sister’s care including probably upwards of a million dollars for the last six weeks of her life),
is not a world I will abide.
I’ll nuke that world.
Again, Jeff. I’m not ascribing these views to you. I’m now shouting into the political ether. Not about abortion, but in the same ballpark.
Sorry.
John Thullen: “I’ll let Rilkefan argue that train of thought one way or the other today if he chooses.”
The comment in question is probably here – that Jes has failed to understand the argument and its tenor despite repeated explanation of the simple concept has convinced me she’s unable to think about this subject in a nonpartisan or even reasoned way (see more evidence above), so I’ve just given up discussing it with her.
Once again, for the record, I’m pro-choice, and support the Roe framework in the safe/legal/rare way. I also happen to think that argument on both sides of this issue tends to be unusually poor, even more so than is typical for moral and emotionally-fraught subjects.
CMatt, thanks for the data. I’m rather surprised at the rate of second abortions – would have thought it was much lower; but then it still surprises me that 20% of pregnancies end in abortions.
This is where potentiality makes a lot of sense to me. By our current understanding of medicine the brain dead person has no further potential for sentience or consciousness—the things you suggest make killing wrong. The potential is gone. No amount of nurture will bring forth the potential into personhood again—and if medical technology advances enough to help with that, we won’t be declaring them dead at that point either. That is not true when you kill a developing embryo. There you cut off the potential, when normal nurturing would have brought forth the already existing potential for personhood.
The idea of potential also saves us from infanticide because infants are not sentient or able to take care of themselves, but if we nurture them they will be.
You also allude to it in another guise with “All the items I could list, however, require the possession of some sort of sentience or consciousness, or on the fact that the person in question has developed sentience or consciousness, but has temporarily lost it. (Thus, it is wrong to kill someone who is in a coma, since this person retains the right to determine what to do with her life, just as she retains, for instance, her property rights, or her marriage.” What is the difference from a mere coma and brain death? The potential to wake up. Coma victims do not typically exhibit present sentience, but they retain the potential for sentience. Brain death cuts the potential.
I think there’s reason to distinguish between a new-born and a four-year-old – I think one opts to save the mother’s life over the former, but not necessarily the latter. We certainly would look differently on the Greeks and Romans if they had had a tradition of exposing four-year-olds.
I thought there was a philosophical argument for the value of human life based on uniqueness. I think the example was cows – any two cows aren’t very different, but any two people are. A newborn is in some regards a phenotype – a four-year-old is an individual combining a genome and a complex interaction with the world – so the difference between two four-year-olds is much more tangible.
“Coma victims do not typically exhibit present sentience, but they retain the potential for sentience. Brain death cuts the potential.”
I would like to revise this slightly. Some coma victims retain the potential for sentience. Others don’t. Some will wake up, others never will and perhaps cannot for reason we don’t understand. We can’t reliably distinguish between the two, so we treat them as if they all retain the potential.
“We certainly would look differently on the Greeks and Romans if they had had a tradition of exposing four-year-olds.”
IIRC, Roman fathers did have the right to kill their children, up to a certain age. If you are distinguishing between newborns and 4-yr-olds, then perhaps we could further make a further distinction based on the research of Jean Piaget, and mark age 12 as the point at which full “sentience” is achieved. 12-16 as the point at which one becomes a human would grant some primitive validity to the Roman practice. OTOH, if a partial or limited or potential sentience is adequate, then the argument has a problem.
Regarding the abortion as a morally acceptable tragedy discussion, I’m not really convinced that it makes sense in the context of your dismissal of the potentiality argument. If there is no moral interest in potentiality there should be no sense of ‘loss’ or ‘tragedy’ when you destroy that potentiality.
I don’t believe this follows. Hilzoy above made an analogy with a romantic relationship — that a break-up, even one intentionally chosen as the best for both parties, gives rise to a feeling of loss and regret, due to the lost potential for a future relationship. That regret for the lost possibilities doesn’t imply that the relationship had moral standing to resist dissolution, or however you would put it.
“That regret for the lost possibilities doesn’t imply that the relationship had moral standing to resist dissolution”
The relationship does in conventional wisdom gain such moral standing as a function of time, a 2-week affair has less standing than a twenty year marriage. Although perhaps there is a bell curve, and a fifty year marriage loses some of the resistance to dissolution. Is the latter based on a loss of potential?
(Presuming no external moral considerations, such as children. Even without children, most people would think a long marriage has earned more maintenance than a recently initiated affair)
The moral argument in a nutshell:
Some people believe that protectable personhood begins at conception.
The fact that (a) this reduces personhood to a mechanistic assemblage of genetic material; and (b) neither nature nor the Bible attach much importance to conception does not shake people from this belief.
Also, the fact that people who hold this belief are unwilling to act, in the political sphere, consistently with this belief (see, eg, IVF, El Salvador) does not shake people from this belief.
(note: if El Salvador were truly serious about preventing all abortions, then fertile women [15-55?] would need to take pregnancy tests before leaving the country, and face prosecution if they leave pregnant and return not.)
Also, the fact that most women in this country actively choose the number of children that they will have, so the birth of an unwanted child prevents the subsequent birth of a wanted child (at least half of whose genome is identifiable in advance) does not shake people from this belief.
Also, the fact that this belief turns women into incubators, stripped of their ability to control their own bodies, does not shake people from this belief.
the consequentialist argument in a nutshell:
allowing people who hold the belief that protectable personhood begins at conception to have their way on this issue in the political sphere will have dire adverse consequences.
“Also, the fact that this belief turns women into incubators, stripped of their ability to control their own bodies, does not shake people from this belief.”
All the comment very good, Francis. I have also said that since I think either now or soon in the future, the technology will exist to remove by surgery any blastula or foetus and implant it in another womb, thereby rendering every conception “viable” any pro choice arguments based on condition, status, or rights of the foetus are incoherent, illogical, and losers.
The choice argument explains itself, in the word. It is unconditioned.
Many people believe that protectable personhood does not begin until birth. Does the lack of biological grounding for that shake you Francis?
SH:
First, in the context of this debate, I think your comment is grossly overbroad absent some proof.
If the pro-life rhetoric were put aside for a moment, I think that many / most / virtually all people who are pro-choice recognize that infanticide is a crime and that the abortion of a normal healthy fetus 24 hours before delivery was expected should be charged as such. But absolutism on one side tends to engender absolutism on the other.
Second, protectable personhood is a legal concept, not a biological one. Deciding when to impose criminal penalties on women who have abortions is a legal and moral choice for a society to make.
For example, it is perfectly possible to conceive of a society in which “personhood” does not attach to an infant for 60 days after birth. In a nomadic society with only the most rudimentary health care, a law allowing the parents to commit infanticide up to 60 days after birth may be, on a consequential basis, the best law.
It is also possible to conceive of a society in which personhood never attaches to a human due the melanin content of her skin. (Eg, southern US prior to 1860.)
The point being, again, that biology should not be used to make law.
“Many people believe that protectable personhood does not begin until birth.”
Yep. As I am unable to find convincing arguments that some sort of “personhood” does not begin at conception, and the consequentialist and libertarian arguments against legally protecting that personhood are compelling.
“…that the abortion of a normal healthy fetus 24 hours before delivery was expected should be charged as such.”
Nope. Sorry. This slippery slope is real and demonstrated in El Salvador. The distinction is spatial, where the “person” resides. It is the critical distinction, and the only indisputable fact on which to base law.
Re ultra-late abortions, I think I can point to blog comments at e.g. Hullabaloo that are evidence in favor of SH‘s contention.
“The point being, again, that biology should not be used to make law.”
I’m ok with using viability, a biological fact, to set the law. Ditto brain death in end-of-life matters. Of course it all comes down to picking one’s axioms in the end.
“But absolutism on one side tends to engender absolutism on the other.”
People on the other side say that too, of course.
“Second, protectable personhood is a legal concept, not a biological one.”
“The point being, again, that biology should not be used to make law.”
Are you the same person who scathingly wrote: “and (b) neither nature nor the Bible attach much importance to conception does not shake people from this belief.”?
Or maybe you meant that it ought not shake people from this belief because nature should not be used to make law?
“If the pro-life rhetoric were put aside for a moment, I think that many / most / virtually all people who are pro-choice recognize that infanticide is a crime and that the abortion of a normal healthy fetus 24 hours before delivery was expected should be charged as such. But absolutism on one side tends to engender absolutism on the other.”
I think the first sentence is wrong. If I may use hilzoy’s trope, if most pro-choice people REALLY BELIEVED that abortion of a normal healthy fetus 24 hours before delivery was similar to infanticide we could make it illegal. Hell, we would be allowed to at least statistically investigate whether or not they were medically necessary.
The second sentence is just odd. The pro-lifers forced you to make something you think is just like infanticide legal? What in the world does that show? It suggests that you don’t think infanticide is that big a deal, or it shows that you really don’t think it is much like infanticide. In the interest of charitable discussion I presume the latter.
Certainly you wouldn’t think I made sense if I said that capital punishment was indefensible and exactly like murder, but I refused to outlaw it because I feared that Amnesty International would next try to outlaw life sentences as cruel.
If infanticide is murder and killing a healthy pre-born baby just before it is born is just like infanticide you ought to figure out where you draw the line between not-like-infanticide abortion and like-infanticide abortion and try to draw it there. The fact that other people want to draw the line earlier or later doesn’t change where you should want to draw the line. The political compromise comes from hashing that out and drawing the line. The fact that other people disagree with where to draw the line because they want to draw it earlier than you do shouldn’t cause you to attempt to draw it later than you would normally want to. That would only work as some sort of meta-game which by apparent overreaction gets you to exactly the line you want it. That isn’t how it actually has played out in abortion politics. (This is of course largely because the Supreme Court removed it from normal politics but that is a different argument).
The same slippery slope points us back towards the greeks and romans and their practice of exposing unwanted infants. I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that — or secretly wants to. Having a discussion in good faith requires trusting each participant when they explain what their legitimate beliefs and goals are. That’s one of the reasons I have nothing but venom for those who want one thing (say, an enforced Judeo-Christian sexual ethic in all areas of life) but pretend they only want ‘parental consent laws for sex ed’ or something like that.
“I’m ok with using viability, a biological fact, to set the law.”
What does IVF say about “viability”? That we don’t care to, or bother with, or whatever protect early foetuses does not mean they are not viable. Give me resources, power, willing hosts, and luck, and every fertlized egg can become a child. That I have to cut it out of its original host or have difficulty implanting it or finding surrogate mothers does not speak to the “viability” of the foetus.
I don’t understand.
“Nope. Sorry. This slippery slope is real and demonstrated in El Salvador. The distinction is spatial, where the “person” resides. It is the critical distinction, and the only indisputable fact on which to base law.”
The slippery slope toward government-mandated abortions is real and demonstrated in China.
Except that it isn’t–in either case.
Hilzoy: Thoughtful and well written as always – a lot to mentally digest.
Jeff:
The phrases ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ are brand names at this point, devoid of inherent meaning. Can I be pro-choice but favor strict parental notification laws? Can I be pro-life but favor the legalization of first-trimester abortions? Is anyone here pro-death? Or anti-choice?
That sums up much of what would have taken me a half hour to write – thanks. Both sides of this debate need to become a lot less extreme before any meaningful headway will ever be made on the issue.
I do think it should be legal, safe, and rare – but only in the first trimester. I don’t think it should be used as an alternative to responsible birth control.
While I believe it should be (conditionally) legal and for the most part a personal choice, I will never agree with those that fight against all attempts at requiring parental or spousal notification.
And I find the song about it being entirely a women’s choice with the father having no input into the decision to be ridiculous. Who is to say which man is in the better position: the one who does not want the child with the incumbent life-long financial commitment; or the one who very badly wants the child but does not even have a right to be notified before an abortion is over and done with?
bob, I think any fertilized egg unclaimed for implantation by its parents should probably be given to someone who will bring it to term. But I do not view a blastocyst to be equivalent to a 24-week-old fetus [not wearing my nihilist hat].
I also think that “luck” above is important in thinking about these issues.
When medicine achieves artificial wombs or otherwise makes embryo transplant surgery safe, get back to me on my legal judgement.
Jeff, what about people who have a clear belief system which entails politically untenable consequences and thus push for an intermediate inconsistent result? There must have been practical abolitionists who thought all men are created equal but didn’t argue that in order to achieve what was possible.
Honestly, I think that pregnancy is still one of the legitimate ‘special cases’ in areas of personal responsibility, autonomy, and so on. It is one of the very, very few areas where a person by definition must sacrifice the autonomy of their body for nine months. There is no way around that if one has a child — period. A man who wants a child but does not get one has lost potentiality. A woman who wants control of her body but loses it, even by degree, has lost something tangible for almost a year of her life. In an imperfect world, it is also frequently compounded by other complicating issues. (Naturally)
It is a special consideration that is pretty much without peer, and while I am the sort of ‘modified pro-lifer’ that you seem to be (first trimester legal, agressive contraceptive programs, etc), I think that it’s very very important to realize the fundamental ‘specialness’ of this aspect of the debate.
You make a good point. There is a difference, though, between believing one thing but advocating a limited, achievable version of it and pretending that you only believe the limited, achievable version of it. The former is about compromise in a democratic society. The latter poisons the well of discourse, by destroying trust and fostering absolutism. Rather than breeding compromises, it breeds extremism, with everyone assuming the worst (‘A Handmaiden’s Tail vs. Infanticide’) and staking out their absolutes lest the other gain any ‘ground’ in the fight.
Perhaps I’m an idealist.
I would also like to strenuously object to the idea that we know that very few—approaching no—women use abortions as a matter of convenience. For political reasons every attempt to look in to that has been stopped by pro-choice groups. But the troubling repeat abortion rate suggests otherwise.
I don’t think it suggests any such thing, unless you’re using some Martian definition of the word “convenience” which omits “I’ll go on the pill” or “I’ll start getting depro shots” but not “I’ll just have a quick surgical procedure.”
I think that it’s very very important to realize the fundamental ‘specialness’ of this aspect of the debate.
Absolutely – and I would weight the argument in that direction in the case of a disagreement where the man wants the child and the woman does not. After all, the man has recourse (find another woman who wants a child). I would not go as far as requiring consent – but I do believe the man should have a right to know he is a father, even if he has no legal standing to do anything about that.
Reverse the case though and I have to side with the man. If the woman wants the child and a man does not, he has no rights there either. He is legally compelled to provide financial support. He may have to sacrifice his entire career plan at that point, not just 9 months of autonomy. Certainly he can’t compel an abortion – but he should have a legal out as well.
“Except that it isn’t–in either case.”
Well, it is. The “slippery slope” is the decision as to at what point of development we grant the rights of “personhood”…which are apparently different than the full rights of citizenship, which 15-yr-olds don’t enjoy;whatever…and recognize a conflict between two sets of rights that the state can mediate. The Chinese mandated abortions is certainly not a libertarian counter-example.
I cannot with intellectual integrity find a compelling stage of development that works for me; others struggle, come up with something that strikes me as more practical or convenient than principled, but the struggle to arrive at that principled definition of “personhood” is the source of all difficulty. From my position(life at conception), it is not a rationally solvable dilemma, and the arbitrariness creates the slope. What is not arbitrary is the personhood of the woman.
But arbitrariness lies at the heart of children’s rights and many other issues, and most people seem content with forever arguing.
“I don’t think it suggests any such thing, unless you’re using some Martian definition of the word “convenience” which omits “I’ll go on the pill” or “I’ll start getting depro shots” but not “I’ll just have a quick surgical procedure.”
People famously put immediate convenience (I’ll exercise right after I watch this TV show, and finish that phone call, and eat this cake, well I’ll do it tomorrow.) ahead of long term consequence. When that doesn’t work out, the next step for immediate convenience often comes in the form of a quick fix for the bad consequences of the earlier decisions.
Your argument basically suggests that procrastination coupled with a put-out-the-fire response doesn’t exist. I can personally assure you that it does.
🙂
Years ago, I was dating someone who put off dental checkups because she really, really disliked them and feared that they would be painful. I learned a few months ago that — years after we parted ways — she’d continued putting them off until they required several thousand dollars worth of difficult emergency surgery and a goodly chunk of recovery time.
Not sayin’ it’s like abortion, but assuming that people are always rational actors is a bad idea. Again, I cite the Alan Gutmacher Institute: 30% of all abortions are performed in cases where a couple was having sex regularly, didn’t want children, but made no attempt to use contraception of any kind. Cue forehead-slapping.
bob, in my view the best approach is to perform a weighing calculation – the fetus doesn’t get sudden full human rights at any point on its journey from 0 (a pair of gametes) to 100% (a something-year-old), but the slope changes at viability because there are more reasons to consider it human. The woman’s right to decide what will happen with those cells depends on many varying factors (perhaps how she got pregnant, perhaps how the pregnancy affects her life), and at birth that changes again (most people would say to zero, though the right not to give up one’s child might be considered). One set of rights may be judged stronger earlier, the other stronger later, without harming the dignity of either set of rights.
“30% of all abortions”
Seems impossibly high to me, unless this is mostly teenagers.
I was pretty boggled when I pored over the numbers at the time. When I thought about it, though, it didn’t seem so strange. Is it so hard to comprehend that 1/3 of unexpected pregnancies occur when people Just Don’t Use Contraception?
It always made me sad, as eliminating that chunk of cases seemed like a VERY easy place for pro-choice and pro-life people to find common ground. But other factors most likely mean it will never happen.
With Jeff’s and Sebastian’s points in mind, I still think that vanity abortions in the third trimester are exceedingly rare. I’m sympathetic to Sebastian’s point about the way that efforts to verify this have been stymied, but only to a point: the toxicity introduced into the subject from his side of the argument (not him, of course) is sufficient, I think, to prevent anyone with medical confidences to protect from feeling like cooperation is any easy choice to make.
I’d like to see stats collected by someone neutral — that is, not a pro-lfe prosecutor — to show what the true facts are.
I’ll tell you what I suspect, based only of several decades of observing human nature: while a significant number of late abortions are undertaken out of health concerns for the mother, by far the majority are undertaken because of health issues on the part of the child. This is outside of the framework of the law, and such procedures can be made illegal. I have to say, though, that while some may feel competent to judge strangers who reluctantly conclude that they are not up to the burden of having a short-lived child,* I’m not. My scenario for dealing with this is that in states where the people feel strongly enough about this, such abortions can be banned, but the state needs to really step up with helping with the burdens.
* We’re not talking about aborting a child because it has blue eyes, and not green.
rilkefan, I’m still trying to track down the detailed stats but I did find a ‘facts in brief’ document with more recent numbers from AGI. The 30% number I threw out may be inaccurate with the newer statistics (if so, I apologize) but the fact remains that a very large percentabe of abortions are due to either complete or sporadic neglect of contraception, particularly in the under-26 set. Some hilights include:
Charley:
In that, I imagine that you are completely correct. The document I linked to above indicates that only 1.4% of all abortions occur after 21 weeks; reducing THAT to the number of hypothetical third trimester vanity abortions indicates that it is a moral issue to be sure, but probably just a rhetorical wedge when brought into the debate.
A quick comment while I’m digesting what people have written while I was off, you know, working:
sentience means: the ability to feel e.g. pleasure, pain, etc. It’s not a higher form of consciousness. Thus newborn infants are sentient, as (so the best evidence seems to suggest) are third-trimester fetuses.
The point of bringing in sentience was to say: this is the earliest point at which I can conceive of a fetus as having anything like rights. Thinking that sentient beings have rights would of course entail rethinking eating meat (at least, factory farmed meat), but I’m OK with that.
But it’s not true to say that my argument opens me up to infanticide. At least, not that I can see,
Can’t a fetus be the heir (presumptive?) to a fortune? Say carried by a surrogate after the parents’ deaths?
What about a 1st-trimester fetus carried by a woman in a PVS? Doesn’t it have some sort of rights? To be allowed to be born if possible, if nothing else?
Note that 1.4% of a lot is still a lot, usually. And note that we’re talking about human lives, maybe, so normal counting rules don’t apply. This sort of argument works (or rather, doesn’t work either) the other way – “it’s a small number of cases, few people will be inconvenienced if we ban this”.
This is true, I suppose, but an honest assessment of it would have to consist of getting more details about that 1.4%. By gut feel is that ‘vanity abortions’ if they occur in the way that others have described them here, would occur far more in the early stages than the later ones, while medical complications would weigh more heavily in the later terms. If the majority of the 1.4% are being performed due to grave medical issues, then it would certainly be a major ‘inconvenience.’
Again, we’re talking about hypothetical slices of 1.4% of all abortions, total. Even as a self-identified pro-lifer I think anyone who uses ‘third-trimester vanity abortions’ as a representative of abortion in general is terribly disingenuous. I’m not saying that you are, rilkefan, just clarifying my thoughts on it.
From a philosophical standpoint it’s interesting, but from a practical standpoint it’s still completely outweighed by basics like rejection of or irresponsibility with contraception.
[deep sigh.]
1. Biology does not and should not dictate morality. From putting elderly on ice flows to committing infanticide, many human societies have considered it perfectly moral to kill off the living, so that the remainder could survive. Their morality is not my morality, but I’m not the one at risk of starving to death.
2. To the extent one tries to vest nature with morality, she doesn’t appear to care much about human conception. Failure rates are way too high in early pregnancy.
3. SH, you are far too smart to assert the false naivete about late term abortion bans. I would bet that most people in the pro-choice community believe that abortions where the fetus is well and truly viable (post week 30, say) are already extremely rare and are virtually entirely driven by major health issues. So, the pro-choice community does not see the need for legislation.
Who would be the political allies for a narrowly tailored law to require a second opinion by an authorized physician before allowing a late-term abortion to proceed? No one. The pro-choice community would see the bill as a camel’s nose under the tent and oppose. The pro-life community would consider the bill pathetically weak. (South Dakota)
Since SH appeared to have a problem with understanding my comment on absolutism, I’ll spell it out. Compromise is difficult to forge on highly contentious issues, whether the issue is abortion or water. Even where consensus is theoretically possible on issues at the fringe, the political reality is that the issue is defined by long-standing opposition. Since the most articulate, noisy and best-reported section of the pro-life community is the absolutists (read Redstate for a month if you have any doubts), the pro-choice community has virtually nothing to gain by giving any ground, because their opponents have no interest in giving ground in return.
My Russian history professor in college, who was involved in some of the disarmament talks with the Soviet Union told a story that the Soviets’ negotiating position was: “What’s ours is ours; what’s yours is negotiable.”
That’s what the pro-choice community hears. If you want them to hear something else, the moderate pro-lifers need to speak up and work toward finding common ground.
I’m workin’ on it. It’s kind of an uphill slog both ways, sadly.
“The word fetus originates from the Latin fetus meaning “offspring,” “act of bearing young,” or “is or was filled with young”. Foetus is an English variation on this rather than a Latin or Greek word, but has been in use since at least 1594 according to the OED, which describes fetus as etymologically preferable but almost unknown in actual use. In general, the medical community only permits the spelling fetus (preferred by the British Medical Journal, for example), but the spelling foetus persists in general use, especially in Britain.” …Wikipedia
Francis, I’ve spoken in favor of limited reasonable measures to address SH‘s kind of concern in liberal fora and gotten rather hostile receptions. I think it’s in my side’s interest to have someone like SH be less motivated to oppose it – I don’t expect to convince him, but I would like to as it were wrong-foot him by clearing the issue of “elective” late-term abortions in a reasonable way. And it seems the right thing to do, assuming there aren’t unacceptable slippery consequences.
It’s like in that other perennial favorite, the I/P conflict – each side points to the other’s fringe and says, it’s their fault. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes one just has to ignore the bad guys and go about one’s duty.
I’m sorry I may have confused sentient with sapient. I apologize for muddling the discussion that way.
Sentient suggests drawing the line at the end of the second trimester but offers pretty much no difference between third trimester abortions and infanticide.
But that draws us well into this paragraph:
“It’s a terrible thing to cause someone pain, as killing her often does. It’s worse to kill a being who can feel not only pain but emotions, and who can participate in social relationships. And it’s worst of all to kill someone who is capable of autonomy: to cut short the story that someone is trying to tell with her life, or to pull the curtain down on all her hopes and plans and dreams. She has the right to decide what to do with her life, I think; and for someone else to barge in and end it without consulting her — to tear apart the web of relationships, aspirations, idiosyncrasies, and so forth that is her life, and to ignore completely her right to decide for herself what to make of it — is unconscionable.”
These pretty much apply equally to newborns and third trimester fetuses. I say equally because I’m not at all sure how much they apply and I would be skeptical of hanging a right to life argument on most of them on a present-at-the-time of decision basis. For newborns these things are mostly prospective.
To put all my cards out on the table (since we aren’t playing poker) I can outline my hierarchy of understandings on abortion like this:
I am certain that third trimester abortions of fetuses that could survive outside the womb are murder in cases where the mother’s death in continuing the pregnancy is not likely (in cases that don’t amount to self defense in other contexts). Even more than the torture issue I find it shocking that people disagree with me on this. I don’t base this on ideas of present personhood nearly so much as I do on prospective personhood.
I strongly believe that second and third trimester abortions of fetuses (subject to self-defense restriction above which should be implied in all further discussion) are murder if they would normally develop into fetuses that could survive outside the womb and if they exhibit signs of sentience (now that I’m using the word properly). I find it very surprising that people disagree with me on that. As far as I can tell this is clearly present by week 18 and may be present somewhat earlier. That is well before we cross into the third trimester.
I believe that somewhat earlier abortions are wrong but not murder. I believe that on the basis of caution about taking life. (This is the same reason why I think that arguments about innocent people being put to death under the death penalty have much greater force than an ‘all killing is wrong’ type of argument). I can clearly see why people might disagree with me on this because the factors which make me think it is wrong are much more amorphous than the previous cases.
I believe that first trimester abortions are unfortunate because I believe that the ‘prospective human’ discussion has value apart from other contributing factors, but I can fully see how people disagree. I don’t believe it is so clearly wrong as to be illegal though if it were somehow possible to save fetuses and put them in some sort of artificial womb I would probably have to revisit the issue.
One of my frustrations with the ‘abortion’ debate is the all-or-nothing nature of it. And voices upthread to the contrary that is not just a pro-life phenomenon. The views above make me a pro-life extremist according to NARAL or NOW because they won’t even accept my first concept. If you ever feel frustrated about torture and government, realize that I feel the same way about last trimester abortions—the shock that people just don’t see what is so obviously (to me) wrong never wears off. It is that attitude that drove people like my mother out of the Democratic Party in the 1970s and you otherwise would have liked her.
Sebastian, thanks for that post. At a purely philosophical level, I’d have to say that I agree with the comments you made. My aunt — a long-time Democratic activist, feminist, and veteran of the 60s’ protest movement, parted ways with the Democratic party for the same reasons. She can’t bring herself to join ranks with the Republicans — she feels it’s a party utterly beholden to exploitation and corporate interests — but also feels that the Democrats’ principle of defending the defenseless and speaking out for those with no voice is being violated by abortion-rights litmus tests.
I can absolutely understand that others do not see it in the same way, but I hope that others can understand how someone outside the stereotype can come to such conclusions.
Sebastian,
Though I totally agree with your point that people will put off put immediate convenience ahead of long term consequence (as I always realize when the new term starts), I’ve always thought that this was a fatal flaw in libertarian thinking. How do we draw a principled and defensible line when we talk about libertarianism if we accept that observation?
“SH, you are far too smart to assert the false naivete about late term abortion bans. I would bet that most people in the pro-choice community believe that abortions where the fetus is well and truly viable (post week 30, say) are already extremely rare and are virtually entirely driven by major health issues. So, the pro-choice community does not see the need for legislation.”
Very tricky , appealing to my pride. 🙂
If we are talking about small numbers I’ll make a contentious conjecture: each year the number of aborted late term fetuses that could have survived outside the womb and were not a grave threat to the mother’s health exceeds the total number of all innocent people executed in the United States since 1973. (Pretty much unprovable in a strong sense since we can’t definitively know the number of innocent people executed but I would estimate it to be in the 1-20 range. Considering that the number of late term abortions is in the thousands you would have to posit a vanishingly small percentage of ‘bad decision-makers’ for the conjecture not to be true). And I am as certain as I can be about something based on statistics that the conjecture is true on a year to year basis rather than a one year compared to 1973-Present basis.
Nevertheless opposing the death penalty on the basis of conjectured innocent deaths is considered quite popular among some circles. And those who oppose the death penalty on “it is just wrong” grounds don’t have trouble allying themselves with those who oppose it on procedural grounds.
Furthermore the infrequency of the general total doesn’t let us off the hook on trying to stop innocent ones from being executed. While any human institution gets things wrong, you at least have to try to have some safeguards. That is not the position of the pro-choice crowd at this time. That position is more akin to the executioner who bans investigation into the innocence of those executed because it might cause people to question the practice if such investigation turned up any problems it would lower support for the whole endeavor.
Sebastian: I strongly believe that second and third trimester abortions of fetuses (subject to self-defense restriction above which should be implied in all further discussion) are murder if they would normally develop into fetuses that could survive outside the womb and if they exhibit signs of sentience (now that I’m using the word properly). I find it very surprising that people disagree with me on that.
I find it very surprising that you expect anyone except other anti-choicers to believe you when you claim you think that abortion is murder.
I find in not in the least surprising that so many anti-choicers do claim to believe that abortion is murder, as it is a very convenient rhetorical trick to avoid talking about letting women die rather than get to make decisions about our own bodies.
“How do we draw a principled and defensible line when we talk about libertarianism if we accept that observation?”
You say that if you always save people from the consequences of such decisions they never learn to make better ones. It is a short term vs. long term problem in itself. In the long term you want citizens who make better decisions. If you never let them feel the consequences of their decisions you save the short term pain but you forgo the long term benefit.
In my view this is a strong argument in favor of libertarianism–so long as it has to do with the consequences accruing to yourself or people who voluntarily deal with you. I’m not willing to wholly play into that with the not-so-limited exception of children. You bad choices shouldn’t be allowed to totally ruin the lives of your children (with some broad but not enormous definition of ‘totally ruin’). To take extreme examples I would be willing to take your kids away if you gave them crack, but not if you taught them that being good at sports was crucial to life success.
Jes, if I understand correctly, you seem to be claiming that 100% of abortions are due to the life of the mother being in danger. Either that, or you’re overextending your argument in a wild and irresponsible fashion. Am I missing something?
It’s distressing that you refuse to even believe that some people think abortion is murder, that it is merely a ‘politically acceptable’ way of articulating hatred for women. It strikes me as not dissimilar to pro-lifers who claim that abortion supporters are crypto-eugenecists, out to exterminate blacks and hispanics and the weak and infirm to build a master race.
This is what I mean about ‘poisoning the well of discourse’: there comes a time when we must either accept our discussion partners at their word, or leave the discussion.
“as it is a very convenient rhetorical trick to avoid talking about letting women die rather than get to make decisions about our own bodies.”
One would almost think that you didn’t see the self-defense portion of my comment. But you quoted it so this is mysterious.
Like Sebastian, I find the potentiality argument seems to iron out a lot of our intuitions about fetus’s quite well and is less problematic than it might seem.
For instance, if I remember correctly, there are quite a few problem cases with the idea of continuity of personhood based on spaciotemporal cotniguity as well. I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that the problem of potentiality is significantly worse than that of persons. The only complaint that seems to apply to the potential person but not the actual one is that potentiality, dealing with things that are “not quite”, opens the door to vagueness problems.
However, again like SH, the fact that a concept is vague isn’t a disqualifier for me. I still beleieve there are some cases where someone is pretty clearly bald even though they have a few hairs on their head (and other similar examples that are well thought out and make me seem witty to boot).
Thus, it seems a straightforward matter to assert that the union of the sperm and the egg is a pretty significant change in terms of potentiality and likewise natural to note that any morally significant aggregation of moral standing based on potentiality must occur sometime after this event.
The basic argument for that claim should run something like what follows. Once united, a fetus begins moving toward reaching its potentiality as a result of largely internal mechanisms. It does indeed require sustenance from the mother, but she does not offer the order nor the impetus of the developement (except insofar as she is responsible for half of the genetic material involved). That distinguishes the fertilized embryo pretty significantly from a distinct egg and sperm in terms of their potential, I would think.
I think the interesting argument here actually has to do with what that potential actually requires of the mother and society in general. I believe it should be clear that mere potential sentience shouldn’t outweigh an actual sentient being’s life. I also note that there are points where the potentiality is stronger than it is even at mere conception, owing largely to biological facts about how cells replicate in the very early stages of embrionic development. My own meditations on this, as well as some very heated debates with various aquaintances have led me to believe that the point where potential sentience becomes problematic occurs somewhere after the 1st trimester but before birth, which shapes my approach to the issue. However, in any case I feel that the interesting argument is here in the midst of potentiality as that is what makes the tragedy of abortion tragic and what makes the moral consideration relevant at all.
“Nevertheless opposing the death penalty on the basis of conjectured innocent deaths is considered quite popular among some circles.”
I oppose the death penalty on those grounds, but it’s part of complex argument in which the death of innocents is exacerbated by racism etc. and not balanced by any good I recognize – i.e., it doesn’t reduce murder rates – and the simple expedient of life in prison is in my view clearly an entirely satisfactory solution from either reasonable side. If the choice were let all convicted murderes free or execute them, the analogy might be more reasonable. Furthermore, the death penalty is carried out by the state, which makes the morality/legality very different in my view.
All that said, I acknowledge your argument has force, which is why I would like to see the requirement for a second doctor to sign off or other such measures following the French or Dutch systems. And I imagine you share my horror at death penalty proponents who aren’t in favor of safeguards – e.g., doesn’t Scalia think evidence of innocence is irrelevant?
You say that if you always save people from the consequences of such decisions they never learn to make better ones. It is a short term vs. long term problem in itself. In the long term you want citizens who make better decisions. If you never let them feel the consequences of their decisions you save the short term pain but you forgo the long term benefit.
But it seems that criminalizing abortion is enforcing the most drastic set of consequences on people in a way which is very non-libertarian (in my own understanding). While I am sympathetic to the notion that making it too easy can serve to virtually erase those consequences, I’ve know a few women who have had early miscarriages and two women who had abortions, and they certainly felt those things in a way that affected them deeply, so the basic line you seem to be taking is a sort of enforced libertarianism, which seems like a contradiction in terms.
Jeff: Jes, if I understand correctly, you seem to be claiming that 100% of abortions are due to the life of the mother being in danger.
No: I am pointing out that people who manage to criminalize abortions succeed only in making sure women who need to terminate a pregnancy get an illegal abortion. Illegal abortions are far more likely to be lethal to the woman. Anyone arguing for making abortion illegal is directly arguing that women should and will die – or has taken the brute ignorance approach of pretending that the millions of deaths worldwide due to illegal abortions either don’t exist or aren’t enough deaths to matter.
It’s distressing that you refuse to even believe that some people think abortion is murder, that it is merely a ‘politically acceptable’ way of articulating hatred for women.
I will grant you actually that plainly some few people do believe that abortion is murder. I merely refuse to believe that Sebastian is one of those people: I have a better opinion of him than that.
Of course it’s possible I’m wrong, and Sebastian really does think that any woman who has a miscarriage in the second or third trimester ought to find herself subject to a Homicide investigation to make sure she didn’t abort it – and if she did abort it, ought to face the death penalty for premeditated murder, along with the doctor who performed the abortion.
It’s possible that Sebastian supports the terrorists who bomb clinics and kill doctors. I just don’t think it’s likely or true: I think it much more likely that Sebastian has never thought through the direct consequences of believing that a woman who terminates her pregnancy in the second trimester is guilty of murder, along with the doctor who performed the termination, and thus has never really faced the fact that he does not believe abortion=murder.
Not only do I believe that late term abortions can be murder (and at least sometimes are) I also believe that OJ Simpson is a murderer. Nevertheless I’m not trying to punish him. Hypocrite or non-vigilante?
It’s interesting – in a black humor kind of way – that if abortion=murder was actually passed into law, so many women have had abortions that (a) Death Row in every state with a death penalty would become seriously overcrowded for a few years until all the people now guilty of murder were killed, and (b) the US would suddenly have the same kind of disproportion of men to women as India does. Not to mention a serious shortage of doctors.
Sebastian: There are quite some serious health problems that can only be found later in the pregnancy. If the child has no brain, that shows in the 20 week ultrasound (I had that happen to friends). Is it murder for you if the baby will die after birth? Or is it just moving the after-birth death to the pre-birth death?
In the Netherlands abortions after 24 weeks (in practise 22 weeks) are illegal and late-term ultrasounds are not a standard thing (yet, that is changing now). Which is one of the reasons why our babymortality figures these days are slightly higher than those of comparable countries where those scans are routine.
If you know your child will be born with a condition that will cause it to be in pain all its life, and that life will be measured in months or weeks rather than years – and you know that after the birth of the child you cannot save it from that fate… what is the choice you should make? As a parent and thus responsible for the baby?
Jes,
It seems that you’re saying that if someone believes abortion is murder, the only morally consistent response is to murder those who perform abortions. I’m hoping that’s where the crux of our disagreement lies.
I worry that it’s an insurmountable gap, though. I’ll reiterate my concern about the poisoned well of discourse. When you presuppose that anyone who disagrees with you has manifestly evil motives, and ascribe chains of logic to them them while ignoring their explanations to the contrary, I have to question the purpose of the continued dialogue.
This sort od statement can go on forever; have you seriously thought through the experiences of a fetus being aborted twenty-four hours before birth? It’s an extreme case, clearly, but ‘women dying for lack of access to an illegal abortion’ is also an extreme case. Neither side is interested in seeing those extremes perpetuated, and acknowledging that is important for everyone.
Please, listen for a moment and think about that?
It’s an extreme case, clearly, but ‘women dying for lack of access to an illegal abortion’ is also an extreme case
unfortunately not.
And I should have been in bed two hours ago, so I’ll leave it at that.
dutchmarbel,
I’d like to point out that I used the word ‘extreme’ there for a reason. It’s something that no one involved desires, and no one is suggesting ‘choosing.’ The use of pre-fall Romania as an example is telling: the utter and complete lack of contraceptives, and the complete ban on abortion (rather than the legal-in-the-first-trimester stuff that has been kicked around in this discussion) certainly does change things dramatically.
I’m not suggesting that it is a non-issue, but rather that the reasons it was such a tremendously grave issue under Ceausescu’s reign are some of the things I’m hoping we can find COMMON ground on.
To echo DM a little, it seems to me that there are times when a late abortion is more or less the equivalent of ‘pulling the plug.’ This is why I don’t think it’s murder.
I cannot imagine that a decision to do this is anything but agonizing for the parents involved. And I don’t see that the interest of the state in promoting respect for individual autonomy is advanced by forcing people in that kind of agony to prolong it while the child suffers.
As noted above, under the current state of the law, these kind of terminations can be made illegal, and are in fact illegal in a number of places. I can certainly see, though, why someone who’s gone through this doesn’t want zealots to have their medical file, and home address.
Sebastian of course has very little influence on my own position on abortion, but he, and the actual examples of South Dakota (North? I have seen some confusion lately) and El Salvador should gave moderates like hilzoy and rilkefan pause as to how their careful reasoning might be misused. A moderate position will likely not result in legislation to their liking, but in something between themselves and Sebastian. If they are very lucky.
I have no particularly strong position on the death penalty, in principle. I believe O.J. is innocent. Really. And I will never move a millimeter on women’s autonomy.
Also, as a quick side note, some better-than-anecdotal data on how many women will die if abortion is made illegal.
No it wouldn’t Jes. That would be an ex post facto law.
Sebastian:
“if most pro-choice people REALLY BELIEVED that abortion of a normal healthy fetus 24 hours before delivery was similar to infanticide we could make it illegal.”
Not necessarily:
1) Intensity of motivation matters. The most motivated people have a disproportionate influence, and they tend to be the most extreme. See: the President’s appointees’ position on the morning after pill.
2) While you’re quite right that pro-choice people shouldn’t draw the line too late to spite pro-lifers for trying to draw it too soon, there is an incredible amount of distrust on both sides, that:
–pro-choicers simply do not believe pro-lifers’ claims about the prevalence of unnecessary late term abortions.
I don’t get, I must say, why would you have an abortion “of convenience” in the seventh month rather than the fourth or fifth. It’s so much worse, in every way. It’s medically more invasive, you go through so much more of the pregnancy, it’s morally worse, you’ve felt it kicking for months…I think it would take quite a bit more than a “poor decision maker” to up and decide to do this late in the game except for medical reasons. I can see it happening in cases of people in deep, deep, denial about the fact that they are pregnant–like the cases where women (often teenagers) hide the pregnancy and then abandon an infant next to a dumpster or what have you. I can also see it happening if people find out about a birth defect fairly late in the game and panic. I’m not claiming the number of cases is zero, and there are probably scenarious I’m not coming up with. But the “late term abortion of convenience” thing flatly doesn’t make sense as far as people’s motivations.
–pro-choicers believe that pro-lifers are going to try to stop medically necessary late term abortions, prosecute doctors who perform them for murder, make doctors terrified of performing them to the point that they close up shop. As a result, women who really need late term abortions and/or who need a medically very similar procedure to remove a stillborn fetus will die.
There may also be an attempt to harass or intimidate women; I think prosecution of women is unlike as it would be politically disastrous, but I’m not a particularly strong pro-choicer and there are almost certainly people more worried about it than I am.
As for the comparisons to execution: you’re not going to get to intensity of feeling by just tallying up the numbers. There is a relevant difference between the state killing innocent people and the state failing to prevent its citizens from killing innocent people. Sins of omission and comission are both sins, but sins of omission are lesser sins.
That said, you’re right: there should be more safeguards, and there is probably a way to write them into the laws without enabling malicious prosecutions or endangering women’s lives.
I don’t think anyone in Washington is interested in writing such laws. The closest I’ve seen is something Durbin introduced as an alternative to the partial birth ban. The Republicans were completely uninterested, and Democrats weren’t interested except as an alternative to the partial birth ban.
Jeff: It seems that you’re saying that if someone believes abortion is murder, the only morally consistent response is to murder those who perform abortions. I’m hoping that’s where the crux of our disagreement lies.
I’m saying that if someone is seriously claiming they believe that around 850 000 murders are committed by pregnant women and doctors in the US every year, murders carried out with the state’s approval, then yes, vigilante action to stop those murders is the only moral choice. If I believed that 850 000 murders were being committed annually and that the murderers would walk free because by law they had committed no crime, I would not be a “good German” and go along with it: I would act. But I don’t believe that abortion is murder. Sebastian claims he does.
have you seriously thought through the experiences of a fetus being aborted twenty-four hours before birth?
Are you seriously claiming you think that a woman with a healthy fetus aborts in the 39th week?
“I don’t get, I must say, why would you have an abortion “of convenience” in the seventh month rather than the fourth or fifth. It’s so much worse, in every way. It’s medically more invasive, you go through so much more of the pregnancy, it’s morally worse, you’ve felt it kicking for months…I think it would take quite a bit more than a “poor decision maker” to up and decide to do this late in the game except for medical reasons.”
People don’t get their teeth cleaned for 15 years and will put up with the pain of rotting tooth for years because they don’t want to go to the dentist. By the time they do they have to have a root canal–meet my ex-roommate and someone upthread’s (I can’t find it now) ex girlfriend. Some people will let a tumor grow to grapefruit size before getting it checked out because they don’t want to deal with what it might be. A person with an addiction problem will often lose a job, a house and multiple loved ones before dealing with it. The idea that a couple hundred women per year might wait until well into fetal development before dealing with the fact that they just don’t want a baby wouldn’t shock me at all.
“Are you seriously claiming you think that a woman with a healthy fetus aborts in the 39th week?”
“A woman” is too easy. You can find an example of practically anything. So of course I think there is a woman who has had a healthy fetus aborted so late. And I think it was murder. And I think we won’t ever find out who it was because the abortionist has no incentive to tell us about it.
Jeff: I’m not suggesting that it is a non-issue, but rather that the reasons it was such a tremendously grave issue under Ceausescu’s reign are some of the things I’m hoping we can find COMMON ground on.
We can, if you’re willing. We can agree that women have human rights that ought not to be removed on pregnancy, and that a pregnant woman is the only one who gets to make a decision about her own body – with her physician’s advice. If you aren’t willing to allow women to make decisions about our own bodies, and aren’t willing to allow that women ought not to lose basic human rights when pregnant, then we have no common ground.
Sebastian: So of course I think there is a woman who has had a healthy fetus aborted so late. And I think it was murder.
And I think Soylent Green is people.
I suspect you are misusing the reference. Soylent Green was people.
I suspect you have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality: Soylent Green is fictional.
As is your example.
Have you ever seen an electron?
No, but there are plenty of good inferences that they are there.
Arguing that it isn’t common enough to be important is one thing. Saying that I can’t prove that it happened would be chicken but at least mildly defensible. Arguing that it just couldn’t possibly happen because no woman would ever be so irresponsible underestimates the stupidity of human nature.
A few more responses: first, in the post I said that the beginnings of sentience mark the first point at which I could see a claim for the fetus having moral standing. (rilkefan: I should have said ‘moral rights’. You’re right, of course, that for all I know a fetus can be an heir, and have other legal rights. So can a corporation, and yet for all that we don’t think that dissolving one is murder. Seb: check out this link to a JAMA article on fetal pain; I can send you the pdf if you want.) At that point, it seems to me to have the sort of moral rights that I think animals have, and to have more as it develops further.
What this means is: I think that it is wrong to cause it pain unnecessarily, but not, per se, to kill it. In particular, it is not wrong if either the pregnancy will endanger the life of the mother, or if the fetus will be severely disabled, in a way that involves severe pain, and especially if this is accompanied by short life expectancy. The reasons for this are: the fetus has not yet (i.e., at the start of the 3rd trimester) developed the full range of capacities that make killing a child wrong, and if its life will be full of pain, then the sort of reasoning that can justify killing a beloved pet with a seriously painful and untreatable disease can justify killing a third trimester fetus with the same prognosis.
I do accept one version of a capability argument, but it’s one that only kicks into gear at the development of sentience, if not later. Namely: I think it’s very hard to understand children — what they are doing and thinking — without bringing in the fact that they are learning to be adults; that they are directed, in much of what they do, towards a goal that lies in the future. This is true of a lot of things — e.g., plants — and the fact that something seems to display goal-directed behavior does not seem to me in itself to justify the claim that one should not thwart it. But in the case of kids, the fact that they are conscious beings with their own experience of the world, their own interests, and their own independent point of view seems to me to provide the foundation for the idea that one should assume that point of view and consider those interests in considering how to treat them; and since that point of view and those interests are hard to make sense of without bringing in the future, once they become conscious I think one can and should consider them not just as they are now, but also as unfolding persons.
Plants, by contrast, have no independent point of view. There’s no perspective that is theirs, and that we should consider when deciding e.g. whether to uproot a dandelion. Fetuses before (at least) sentience seem to me to be similar in this respect. They are organizing themselves, but have not yet acquired the moral standing that would make interrupting this organization wrong.
in that last comment, “capability argument” should have been “potentiality argument”.
“People don’t get their teeth cleaned for 15 years and will put up with the pain of rotting tooth for years because they don’t want to go to the dentist. By the time they do they have to have a root canal–meet my ex-roommate and someone upthread’s (I can’t find it now) ex girlfriend. Some people will let a tumor grow to grapefruit size before getting it checked out because they don’t want to deal with what it might be. A person with an addiction problem will often lose a job, a house and multiple loved ones before dealing with it.”
There’s a difference here, though: if you continue to ignore the root canal or the tumor it will just get worse, and worse, and worse, but there is another way out of an unwanted pregnancy. You can give birth and give it up for adoption. If there are no medical dangers to you and the child is going live, why would you have a third trimester abortion of a viable fetus instead of a caesarean and adoption? Is it so much less medically invasive?
I know people are strange and irrational, but it’s not not only irrational; emotionally, it makes no sense.
Also, you’re positing a woman and a doctor who are both willing to do this.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. People are capable of just about any good or bad thing you can think of. It’s just when you combine something that doesn’t make any sense to people and a lack of documented examples, people will be skeptical.
Now, for obvious reasons I’m sympathetic to your argument that you can’t necessarily trust the people accused of a horrible crime when they promise you that the evidence doesn’t exist–but there is a real possibility of gross violations of privacy of people in horrible situations, and you’re going to have to deal with those to convince people on the left.
No, I don’t. At least, not in any sort of statistically relevant numbers. As Katherine mentioned upthread, anyone who is having a ‘convenience’ abortion at T-24 hours is better off just having a C-section and giving the kid up for adoption. It’s an absurd extreme example.
“It’s just when you combine something that doesn’t make any sense to people and a lack of documented examples, people will be skeptical.”
And if NOW doesn’t let us track it we will never prove it. Basically I’m in your position on torture. The doctor says it never happens. When asked if we can have basic safeguards the answer is no. When asked if we can investigate whether it ever happens the answer is no. When asked if we can have access to even easily falsified information that would tend to hint that it doesn’t happen (like affidavits for each late term abortion stating the cause of the abortion) the answer is no. I’m asked to trust that no women would ever think of doing it (a ridiculous assumption given the numbers we are talking about) and that the doctors are perfectly self-policing. Sorry but in matters of life or death that just isn’t going to cut it. We don’t even allow that for prescribing strong anti-histamines.
If this were about torture or prison beatings, NOW (and the Democratic Party) wouldn’t even let us get each of the guards on record saying “I had to bruise him because he was trying to escape”. Bob Mcmanus says above that he thinks the fetus definitely doesn’t/shouldn’t have rights until after birth. There are surely a few doctors like him in every state. That view just isn’t so ridiculously uncommon that we would should guess otherwise.
but SH, the reason the pro-choice says no to what appears to be reasonable safeguards against a very rare crime is that there is no trust. and as we have seen with the USA PATRIOT Act, governments with strong ties to the evangelical movement are willing to use existing laws in creative ways that appear inconsistent with traditional views of the Constitutional limits of federal power.
so there’s a reason for the lack of trust. i don’t want doctors to have to report medical procedures to the feds, because I don’t want the feds (or, for that matter, the state) to have that information.
my wife already deals with ambitious young prosecutors with incredible powers. the last thing she needs to see is a prosecutor with the power to charge a woman who had a late term abortion with murder. how would you limit prosecutorial discretion? where does the line get drawn?
as conservatives have no problem recognizing in just about every other sphere of life, there are some things a government cannot do well. Trying to determine whether a particular abortion was murder is one of them.
[however, in order to keep my cred. as a moderate, i could probably support a law which requires a doctor, before performing an abortion where he believes the fetus to be past 30 weeks, to obtain a second opinion. my quid pro quo would be a commitment by the state to provide a broad range of family planning services, including funding services for the low income pop. and requiring hospitals to provide abortions as a condition of licensure.]
I didn’t flip out on the torture issue until I knew of specific cases. But arguably I should have as soon as I knew about the Stanford prison experiments, the Milgram experiments, and the fact that we were suspending Geneva and basically not replacing other laws. Anyway, it is similar, and I did realize that–hence me saying that:
“Now, for obvious reasons I’m sympathetic to your argument that you can’t necessarily trust the people accused of a horrible crime when they promise you that the evidence doesn’t exist.”
(I don’t really know why I thought it would be obvious if I didn’t say it.)
I realized, also, that being told that “privacy” requires that we never find out, must be as satisfying as it is for me to be told that “national security” requires that we never find out.
I do think the people who want to see real investigations of torture by U.S. personnel and effective enforcement of the laws against it have proposals that are actually a net gain for national security, which they are seriously pushing for and being thwarted by the administration and the opposition, despite having come up with a huge quantity of information showing that abuses have happened.
I don’t see any comparable proposals for investigating or stopping non-medically-necessary third-trimester abortions. Which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t exist or it’s pro-lifers’ responsibility. Frankly, I don’t think many pro-life politicians are all that interested, and the most genuinely sincere are also the least likely to be willing to countenance ANY third trimester abortion or take privacy concerns seriously (e.g. Brownback). I think guilty Catholic pro-choicers might be your best shot, but frankly I think most people in Washington would see this as high-risk low-reward.
I can in theory see situations in which a woman would abort a healthy fetus in the 3rd trimester, but none of them are “frivolous.”
The “frivolous” label really bugs me. Women who get abortions don’t want the baby. They have reasons for not wanting the baby. You’d think that would be self-evident.
You’d think that any reason at all, whether emotional or pragmatic, would be self-evidently sufficient because the decision is being made by the person who ultimately is the one at risk – for any value of risk.
It frosts me when I hear people say, “Oh, why can’t they just carry it and make some childless couple happy,” as if the only change a woman goes through in the next 9 months is “gaining a little weight,” and labor itself is nothing more than an “uncomfortable few hours.”
That trivialization amazes me, esp. when it comes from the same people who say women get abortions for frivolous reasons.
No, but there are plenty of good inferences that they are there.
Have you ever seen any good inferences that women abort fetuses in the 39th week?
You’re in the position, basically, of claiming that you know aliens are visiting Earth and capturing people to torture them. You can’t offer any evidence that it’s actually happening: you can’t come up with any witnesses: you can’t even show that it’s at all likely. All you can do is keep saying that aliens torturing humans is wrong, and the statistical likelihood is that there is intelligent alien life somewhere else in the galaxy, and some alien species could therefore be visiting Earth to torture humans.
For what it’s worth, I would be willing to sign on for requiring serious medical reasons, relating either to the mother’s health or to the fetus’, for third trimester abortions, provided I had some assurance that this would not mean, in practice, hounding either the doctors who perform them or the women who seek them. (Where ‘hounding’ does not mean ‘request denied’, but something punitive.)
Here the lack of trust definitely gets in the way. However, just being creative: suppose some organization made up of medical professionals that was non-partisan — maybe the AMA, or the college of obstetricians. Ask them to nominate a committee to check on requests, and to move very quickly (e.g., within 48 hours.) Bind them to confidentiality. Require doctors to get their permission first. I could sign on to that.
I would not sign on to anything involving political appointees, because of the aforementioned lack of trust.
Well, I don’t accept the torture example. The people doing the torturing work for me. They have sworn to uphold a set of principles that I also have sworn to uphold. Their adherence to those principles is of direct relevance to me — because if they can torture X, they can torture me.
No doctors treating a patient owes me anything.
As noted, I’d be comfortable with information gathering if not handled by zealots. That hasn’t been the experience so far, though.
Completely understandable. I’d be depressed if political appointees WERE put in charge of that kind of task — it’s all but an assurance the position will be abused.
Francis, what’s your take on this?
I for one don’t believe there have been any cases of abortions of healthy babies of healthy women at 39 months by accredted doctors in the US. Presumably there have been some past 28 weeks, given the above, which I find difficult to accept. If there were a law in place against such abortions, I would be inclined to call them murder. I wouldn’t however support such a law – I would fight it (even though I think it would be consistent with Roe) given the political climate. This sad state of affairs is not in my view anything like NOW’s fault – it’s Falwell’s fault, and now McCain’s, and beyond that their party’s.
I’m biased by the fact that my cousin was born with a cleft palate. It was a very difficult child for her — the surgery, the extra work trying to keep up her studies while carting around the country for medical treatment, etc. Today she’s a vibrant, successful woman who (when last I heard from her) was looking into moving to a state or country where she and her girlfriend could legally marry.
I certainly understand that few have the resources to pursue all that treatment, but you’ll have to excuse me if personal experience causes me to question the ‘a life with cleft palate is not worth living’ rationale.
“If this were about torture or prison beatings”
Uhh, this is, to me about torture and prison beatings, and I am on record on this blog as being more strident and absolutist about habeus and adherence to the conventions than my betters.
Some rights are not conditional. I would rather KSM was set free and killed 3000 more Americans than compromise on the principles of justice. And I would accept thirty or one hundred “child murders” than allow the Sebastian’s to get their foot in the door. You believe 19th week abortions are murder? No I will not bend. There are more like you out there than are like me.
And I trust women and doctors more than I trust a religious government.
my first reaction? MYOB.
my follow-on reaction? It is precisely this kind of case which leads me to believe that the state cannot effectively regulate in this area. It’s easy to say that the mother’s conduct was shameful, but I’m not the one facing the consequences of having to raise that child. but what are the alternatives? deny her the abortion and hope she doesn’t do it herself? And trying her for murder? yikes.
[from early days in crim. law class — why do we outlaw murder? in most societies, once state governments start displacing tribes as law-giver, the state must take over the prosecution of murder in order to put an end to tribal conflict. In other words, as best i remember, societies punish murder not due to some biblical commandment but for the basic consequential reason of cutting down on vendetta.]
The other thing that gets me about this article is that I was recently researching gang violence in El Salvador for my job. It’s a horrible situation, and sort of a Greek tragedy where immigration policy is concerned: El Salvadorans flee the civil war. Most of them come illegally, because we won’t grant them refugee status or asylum because we’re buddies with the government doing most of the killing. The kids join and form street gangs in Los Angeles. They commit crimes, or simply get picked up by immigration for being here illegally. We deport them. El Salvador completely lacks the resources to deal with thousands of angry young men being flown back into the country–often separated from their families–& left in San Salvador. They stay in their gangs, and what’s a serious crime problem in the U.S. becomes uncontrollable there. The murder rate rises, and rises again; it’s now reportedly higher than it was during the civil war. Most murders are not prosecuted, but they do pass tough-on-crime laws that give you years-long sentences for having a gang tattoo or associating with gang members. Lots of mass arrests, overcrowded prisons, people in jail for months before they can be charged or tried. The gangs, in many cases, take over the prisons–people tend to come out far more hardened criminals than they come in. There are prison riots, and fires, that leave dozens of people dead–including some non-gang members, naturally. And vague reports that these riots are “suspicious”, and reports of right wing anti-gang death squads forming, and that the government doesn’t much care.
Now when we try to deport gang and ex-members back to El Salvador, they try to claim politial asylum. And we say that, although they certainly have a well founded fear that they will be murdered (and trying to leave the gang probably only increases this risk), risk of death on the basis of gang membership is not grounds for asylum.
So, the cliche about the culture that protects life from conception until birth, really seems to be true in this case.
I would like to point out that while 1.4% of abortions occur after the 21st week, about 100 abortions per year (.01%) after the 24th week, which is the actual beginning of the the third trimester. We’re proposing an entire legal framework for a handful or less of questionable cases.
“what are the alternatives? deny her the abortion and hope she doesn’t do it herself?”
Give the baby up for adoption?
“about 100 abortions per year (.01%) after the 24th week”
I wonder about this statistic – how well understood is it? As far as I understand, the state doesn’t track pregnancies, and I would guess that those seeking late-term abortions for non-medical emergencies are not likely to be easily counted, and their dating is likely to be difficult. My recollection is that the leading reason listed for (I think) 16+ week abortions is “Didn’t know I was pregnant”.
The stats might be available through one of the national health organizations, like CDC or NIH. Since the stats are anonymous, basically incidence reports, the issue of identity disclosure doesn’t arise.
“Didn’t know I was pregnant” even at 4 months is, while improbable, not impossible. A lot of women don’t menstruate regularly; yes, even for months at a time (that’s one of the non-birth control applications of birth control pills: to regulate cycles). Put that together with an urgent wish to deny, even to themselves, that they might be pregnant… it happens.
“Since the stats are anonymous, basically incidence reports, the issue of identity disclosure doesn’t arise.”
The usual ignorant questions: Is there an incentive to report? To report correctly? Is there cross-checking?
The statistics could certainly be far better. If we had Forensic Vagina Inspectors.
I’m not being entirely snarky. If we want statistics collected that will be credible to the further half of the pro-life movement, they’d probably have to be collected by pro-life folks. Where is that taking us?
Considering the 35% drop in abortions over the last dozen years, and that the same policies and actors who implemented that were principally opposed to late term abortions, I may not buy .01% but would be skeptical about it being far higher.
So, returning to snark, it seems that non-absolutists actually like Roe v. Wade’s trimester framework, and all of the vitriol stems from procedural disagreements with the ruling. Or something.
That said, I empathize (and to some degree sympathize) with Jeff Eaton’s problem. And truly wish him the best of luck bringing pro-lifers to moderation. Sorry Jeff, the shift has to begin from that side. I’ll help bring strident pro-choicers to the table if you have success, though.
CMatt, don’t put “like” and “Roe” together in a roomful of sharp lawyers, it’s likely to cause headaches among us hoi polloi.
I just want statistics I can cite with confidence. I’m not really interested in talking to anyone who won’t pay attention to data.
So, returning to snark, it seems that non-absolutists actually like Roe v. Wade’s trimester framework, and all of the vitriol stems from procedural disagreements with the ruling. Or something.
When I was taking a politics class in college, as a gedankenexperiment I decided to write down my desired framework for a “reasonable”, “fair” abortion policy — where reasonable and fair were, of course, to be measured relative to my internal sense of such things — completely divorced from any existing framework. I managed over the course of a week, though I don’t know how, to remove from my mind any knowledge of the particulars of Roe or any of the other suggestions I had read so that I could begin with a blank slate. Having done so, I went back to the various cases and debates we’d studied.
Turns out, my desired framework, drawn up from scratch without external referrant, was almost exactly what was said in Roe. How weird is that?
According to the Guttmacher Institute in this report the incidence of abortions each year after the 24th week is estimated at 0.08% (see slide 12). At 1.3 million abortions per year that is about 1,000. I’m concerned at the 20 week stage where the rate (21 weeks or more) is 1.4% or about 18,000. For comparison the number of criminals put to death in the US each year is typcially below 100.
Also interesting is slide 15 which shows a higher death rate for late term abortions when compared with taking a pregnancy to term. (This may or may not be misleading depending on the number of such abortions which are performed because the mother’s life is being endangered by the child–statistics unavailabe thank you NARAL).
Slide 24 is odd. It either shows that 48% of women who have an abortion have previously had an abortion, or something odd is going on with the green portion of the graph. I’m not sure if “previous abortion and previous birth” should be interpreted as people with previous abortions plus people with previous births or someone who had at least 2 pregnancies–one abortion and one live birth.
” I managed over the course of a week, though I don’t know how, to remove from my mind any knowledge of the particulars of Roe or any of the other suggestions I had read so that I could begin with a blank slate. Having done so, I went back to the various cases and debates we’d studied.
Turns out, my desired framework, drawn up from scratch without external referrant, was almost exactly what was said in Roe. How weird is that?”
I suspect you didn’t remove as much from your mind as you thought.
That Guttmacher site is really superb. Thanks for giving that Sebastian. Lots of interesting info.
Rilkefan: Give the baby up for adoption?
You mean give the baby up to an institution? There’s never any guarantee that an “imperfect” baby will be adopted.
Or, you know: just accept that a woman has a right to make decisions about her own body, and you don’t have the right to make decisions on her behalf.
I was asked once to suppose that there was a genetic test for the “gay gene” in fetuses, and that the “gay gene” was in fact an accurate predictor that a person would be attracted to their own gender. Having accepted that for the sake of argument, I was then asked: “What if a woman wanted the fetus tested for the ‘gay gene’, and if the test was positive, had an abortion?”
I thought about it. And I did have to think about it. But I finally decided that a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason that seems good to her even if it seems absolutely appalling to me. (Besides, a woman so homophobic that she could not bear to think that she was carrying a fetus that would ultimately grow up to be gay would be a terrible parent to that potential child.)
But the anti-choice side includes the men who think they ought to have the right to force women to have an abortion – whether because the fetus is female (or gay, if we pretend that it’s possible to test for gayness) or because they don’t want to pay 18 years of child support. I am opposed to all of the anti-choicers – both the pro-abortion and the forced-pregnancy anti-choicers. There doesn’t seem to be too much difference between them: both groups think women ought not to be allowed to make decisions.
Really interesting thought experiment, Jes. What do you think should be done with a place like China and India and the question of abortion for the purposes of gender determination?
What do you think should be done with a place like China and India and the question of abortion for the purposes of gender determination?
I think that it’s as ugly and as blatant form of patriarchical devaluing of women as the South Dakota legislation that women are choiceless incubators.
The solution, though, is basic and long-term: it’s no use banning the practice, when the necessity is to change the society that gives rise to the practice. Feminism is successful in the long term, but sometimes we have to look at the very, very long term.
If the Catholic law school Charley Carp went to was Ave Maria, then I have to inform him that the proprietors of that pro-life establishment think that it’s perfectly fine to punish slutty women by expelling or firing any female students or employees who fail in their morals and become pregnant out of wedlock, and by denying unwed mothers the same opportunities to become students, refusing to allow them to have their babies with them. –Unless it would be potentially more embarassing to make an issue about it, in the conservative Catholic community, in which case they are willing to turn a blind eye, in public, while humiliating the “fallen woman” in private.
I know someone who worked in the registrar’s office there, you see, and someone to whom this happened.
–How this jives with being really about “protecting innocent life”, instead of being an encouragement to use clandestine contraception, or in the case of students like the one of my acquaintance, “fell” to temptation while believing firmly in abstinence-only/ignorance-only sex ed, to then go on to a traditional, clandestine Catholic abortion to avoid this punishment – which for obvious reasons is not imposed equally, since who can tell which of the male students is unchaste? – is an excercise left best to M. Gorgias.
Nope, Catholic U.
SH, I read that field in slide 24 as saying ‘at least 2 pregnancies, one of which ended in abortion and another in birth.’ And I think slide 15 is illustrating that the set of women having late abortions is, on average, significantly less healthy than the set of women giving birth. Which is exactly what you would expect, if the decision to have a late abortion was largely health driven, and not vanity driven.
Are there late abortions where the rationale isn’t what I would myself consider sufficient? Even at my most non-judgmental? Surely yes, but exceedingly few. The societal question is how much disruption are we going to have to get to those few cases — how many other lives are we going to mess up.
I went to the airport late last night — and exceeded the speed limit pretty much all the way there and back, to the point of actually setting the cruise at 80. This was not significantly outside the rate of flow of traffic. We could have a system where everyone who did this would be caught every time, but would it be worth it? As a society we say no, although I’m sure there are plenty of zealots who’d go for it in a heartbeat.
It’s understood; considering the fact that the Pro-choice side is essentially defending the legal status quo (rather than an abstract point of philosophy) it’s understandable that there is very little interest in compromise.
Ultimately, the pro-life movement will have to come to grips with the fact that its primary goal (reduction or elimination of abortions) is utterly and completely incompatible with the tenets of conservatism its members often hold as well. (Opposition to contraceptive education, well-funded prenatal care programs and generous education/support programs for at-risk women, etc). Obviously, only a part of the problem, but that ‘Which do you value most’ question will have to be dealt with.
People unwilling to accept credible and reliable statistics should take themselves out of the argument. Pro-lifers unwilling to accept data gathered by organizations with a track record of accuracy (like Alan Guttmacher, one of the single best sources for national and international scale data on the topic) should be dismissed.
This, I would agree with. My long-term desire is to see abortion completely and utterly eliminated — not because I hate women, but because I believe that it is murder, at least in a technical sense. It seems that this makes you believe that I am a woman-hating patriarchal hypocrite, but hopefully we can at least work together on the ‘changing the society that gives rise to this practice’ problem.
For clarification, when I say ‘I want to see abortion completely and utterly eliminated,’ I see it as an equivalent to the statement, ‘I want to see poverty completely and utterly eliminated.’ Strident attacks on the poverty-stricken, for example, is not exactly a productive way to solve anything.
Jeff: Ultimately, the pro-life movement will have to come to grips with the fact that its primary goal (reduction or elimination of abortions) is utterly and completely incompatible with the tenets of conservatism its members often hold as well.
There’s no evidence at all that the anti-choice movement has as its primary goal the reduction or elimination of abortions. No organisation identifying itself as “pro-life” is doing anything as an organisation to improve access to contraception, for example: certainly no anti-choice organisations publicly condemned the pharmacy workers who wanted to be able to deny women access to contraceptive pills. If your goal is even to reduce abortions, you need to leave the anti-choice movement.
My long-term desire is to see abortion completely and utterly eliminated — not because I hate women, but because I believe that it is murder, at least in a technical sense.
Your long-term desire is to force women to endure pregnancy and childbirth against our will: not because you hate women, but because women don’t matter enough to hate: your sole concern is for the fetus. Fine: you’re anti-choice. El Salvador is your goal. Enjoy.
Seriously, Jeff – the last paragraph was angry sarcasm: it does no good to claim you don’t hate women when your goal is ultimately to deny pregnant women the right to make decisions. It may be that you’re inspired by contempt for women rather than hatred: I can’t see inside your mind, I don’t know why you want to force a pregnant woman to carry the fetus full-term against her will and endure unwanted childbirth: but the mere fact that you do want this says something about your opinion of women. Hate? Contempt? Invisibility except as a life-support system for a fetus?
I suppose our conversation has ended, Jes. You’re either unwilling or incapable of listening, and I have better things to do than be insulted. My words, at this point, are nothing more than something for you to dissect for distorted cheap-shot opportunities. Sorry to have made the mistake of entering the conversation.
For the record, Jes, rhetoric like the stuff you’re spewing is what will help the tiny but present El Salvadorian wing of the pro-life movement maintain its power. Moderates who see the issue as more nuanced and part of a broader cultural and societal matrix (poverty, equality, medical issues, womens’ rights to self-determination, and so on) are the losers.
Think of it in terms you might be able to grasp: pro-democracy Iranians were not helped by Bush’s strident condemnation of the current Iranian regime, even though he was advocating their goals.
“‘I want to see abortion completely and utterly eliminated.”
Then support a policy in implant contraceptive devices in everyone, male and female, at some designated age before puberty, that have to be removed in order for anyone, male or female, to become fertile.
That’s the only way to achieve your ultimate end goal.
Making abortion illegal won’t do it. Abortion was illegal before Roe. That didn’t mean there weren’t any abortions. It meant there were no safe, legal abortions.
Women being maimed, or dying, or being subject to El Salvador-type atrocities, is the inescapable and logical outcome of the forced-pregnancy lobby’s goals.
Jeff: For the record, Jes, rhetoric like the stuff you’re spewing is what will help the tiny but present El Salvadorian wing of the pro-life movement maintain its power.
For the record, Jeff, what will help the powerful El Salvadorian wing of the anti-choice movement maintain its power is your support, and those of millions of others like you. If you don’t want women in the US to die in illegal abortions, don’t support a movement whose goal is to make abortions illegal.
I know. That’s why I made it clear that I considered such a goal as being equivalent to ‘eliminating poverty.’ I suppose My mistake was stating something without painstakingly reiterating every qualifier and opinion I’ve shared over the entire thread.
Jes:
You don’t know me, Jes, and with any luck on my part, it will stay that way. When it comes time to write checks, I send them to Planned Parenthood, not Operation Rescue. The fact that you see this discussion as an opportunity to play High School Debate With Hitler is your problem, not mine.
SH: What do you mean by this?
If I may use hilzoy’s trope, if most pro-choice people REALLY BELIEVED that abortion of a normal healthy fetus 24 hours before delivery was similar to infanticide we could make it illegal. Hell, we would be allowed to at least statistically investigate whether or not they were medically necessary.
and
And if NOW doesn’t let us track it we will never prove it.
I haven’t been aware of any substantial political energy around resisting the collection of data on abortions. Obviously, third-trimester abortion for reasons other than to protect the life and health of the mother is illegal in most states, and presumably the indications for those abortions are recorded in the patient’s medical charts.
I’m not trying to play dumb here, but what do you see as the barriers keeping such data from being collected to your satisfaction?
Jes: Explain to Jeff why you think that his views will eventually lead to El Salvador, or that they are incompatible with genuine concern for women, or whatever, if you want. But don’t talk about what his long-term goals or motives are if you want to stay within the posting rules.
Sorry, this:
Obviously, third-trimester abortion for reasons other than to protect the life and health of the mother is illegal in most states,
should be
Obviously, third-trimester abortion for reasons other than to protect the life and health of the mother or in the case of serious fetal abnormality is illegal in most states,
A quick note. The crack about never knowing Jes or what not WAS a needless personal jab on my part and I apologize. It was uncalled for. Heated as the discussion of this kind of issue can be, our passions on these issues don’t reflect our worth as human beings. Jes, you may be someone I would get along with smashingly should we cross paths. Frustration about the nature of some of our exchanges doesn’t change that.
Jeff, I accept your apology, and in return apologise for the offense given to you in some of my comments.
I have a feeling we probably would get along fine even debating this particular topic face-to-face, where it’s possible to see someone’s face change in the course of a comment, stop making the comment and say “Wait, that came out as more offensive than I wanted, let me rephrase”. The Internet is not a good zone for nearly getting along.
Thanks, Jes. I definitely agree on that count. The comment about ‘wanting to see abortion eliminated’ in particular was one I realized should have had more qualifiers even as I hit the ‘post’ button.
I certainly would like to see it eliminated, but I realize that abortion was legalized not because anyone thinks it is an inherently good thing but because it solves a set of serious, fundamental problems for women in our culture.
Abortion on demand has allowed our culture to grow and advance in positive directions that I think are tremendously valuable — it is a solution, as I said, to a number of serious problems.
My objection to it, though, is that I believe it solves those problems by creating other just as serious moral and ethical problems. My desire to work to come up with more win-win solutions, at least to specific subsets of the overal pool of problems, does not mean that I refuse to acknowledge the difficulties women faced (and still do face in many areas).
Thus, when I say ‘I want to see it eliminated,’ I envision not El Salvador, but a nation where the infrastructure is there to make the *outlawing* of second-and-third trimester abortions essentially unecessary. (For the same reasons Sebastian is willing to accept first-trimester abortions, I’m willing to as well. I think that at that point, we can still talk legitimately about ‘potential for personhood’ rather than ‘personhood unable to sustain itself outside of the womb.’ But that’s a side issue, I guess.)
I think that you see my statements as implicit (if not explicit) support for a monolithic ideology that goes hand-in-hand with El Salvador’s horrific system. I parted ways with the ‘pro-life’ movement a number of years ago for some of the very reasons you find it objectionable. I still consider myself, philosophically, to be pro-life however, and am not going to abandon that label. Rather, I’ll take the time to explain to any pro-lifer that I can how their naive approach to a complex issue is detrimental to their stated goals AND to those affected by the work they do.
LB, efforts on the parts of some attorneys general to gather late term abortion data have been resisted. (There was a Kansas case, and another in indiana — I don’t follow this, but remember it from the last go ’round).
Inasmuch as this resistance takes the form of motions to quash subpoenas, I think blaming NOW is maybe over the top. The courts who grant the motions, or narrow the subpoenas because the investigations are overbroad, have played a role too. Can an AG craft an investigation that can pass constitutional muster? I’m sure that the answer is yes, just as I’m sure that a constitutionally sound ‘PBA’ bill can be written. The drivers of the PL movement aren’t interested in ‘constitutionally sound’ though, they want the goalposts moved. Understandable, of course, but then one gets tired of their whining about losing when they haven’t played to win what’s currently winnable.
The SD statute is a perfect example. Almost no one thinks it will be the vehicle for overturning Roe/Casey, or even that it will get to the SCt. It’s an exercise in politics, not either (a) law/morality or (b) health.
Isn’t the Kansas case you’re talking about the one where the clinics were volunteering to release the patients’ charts so long as they were allowed to redact personally identifying information? Because that sort of thing can’t be what SH is talking about – the information that the clinics were willing to relaease is exactly what he would want for research purposes. (I’m not remembering the Indiana one — I’ll go look for it.)
It looks as though the Indiana case is similar.
to jump straight in the middle between Jeff and Jes,
it would be great if we lived in a world without abortions because no woman ever wanted an abortion.
[and had a pony!] but until there is no rape, no fetal abnormalities, no birth control failure, no change in economic circumstances … until humanity achieves perfection, in other words, abortions will occur.
“no change in economic circumstances”
This part at least should be solved in the coming singularity.
Doesn’t stop us from trying to fight poverty, torture, corruption, or any other cultural or societal ethical or moral issue.
It’s already been established upthread that ~95% of abortions occur in a timeframe where I think can be morally and ethically justifiable. The ‘perhaps there’s something we don’t know’ aspect troubles me a lot, but them’s the breaks. It’s also been established that a large (anywhere from 10-45% depending on how strictly you interperet the statistics) of abortions are due to people not using contraception (at all or sporadically).
My position is not the same as the majority of the politicized pro-life movement. At the same time, a huge chunk of the US population (around 80%, if I remember the polling numbers form the last election) is happily camped in pretty much the same position that I am — that late-term abortions should be banned for reasons other than the life of the mother or dire medical problems with the fetus, but others should remain legal. Small minorities support the extremes (all abortion should be illegal, or abortions up to the moment of birth for any reason should be legal).
The polarization on both sides leaves that majority of the population with very little voice and very little choice. The ‘catfight-centric’ media, fueled by ideologues on both sides, exacerbates the problem. “Pro-lifers” look at the support for late-term abortion bans and see an 80% majority that ‘just needs to take the next step’ towards supporting a full ban. “Pro-choicers” look at that group and see a majority that ‘just needs to take the next step’ towards supporting full-term abortion rights. Instead, both groups need to listen to that middle.
Of course, that’s my opinion, and I could easily be mistaken due to the fact that I see myself as part of that ‘grappling middle.’ But being called a baby-killer and a woman-hater, simultaneously, by both sides, is not a position I’d pick by choice unless I felt it was really where the truth could be found.
Anyhow… I know I’ve chewed up a lot of bytes with posts on this. I don’t want to argue with any of the folks here — ObWi is a site that I enjoy tremendously and I have a great deal of respect for those who post and comment here. I just wish more dialogue (like the stuff we’ve scratched the surface of) could happen in the public square.
Our third-trimester abortions are part of the peri-natal mortality (few weeks before birth till 1 week after birth). A few years back we did a study in the Netherlands why our perinatal mortality figures stayed constant whilst those of comparable countries declined (we used to have lowest figure and went to being average). One of the reasons appeared to be that we did not perform standard ultrasounds at 20 weeks gestation to detect neural problems. Countries where those happened more, had more abortions right after the scan and less death just before or after birth.
You cannot discuss late abortions without taking severe handicaps into the equation.
Rilkefan: if two doctors AND the mother think that the handicap was severe enough to warrant a late term abortion it might be slightly more than the average cleft palate.
At the same time, a huge chunk of the US population (around 80%, if I remember the polling numbers form the last election) is happily camped in pretty much the same position that I am — that late-term abortions should be banned for reasons other than the life of the mother or dire medical problems with the fetus, but others should remain legal.
If by late term, you mean third trimester, I think this is pretty much true — SH’s definition of ‘late term’, which I believe is either after 18 or after 20 weeks, is more controversial.
“Pro-choicers” look at that group and see a majority that ‘just needs to take the next step’ towards supporting full-term abortion rights.
See, here, I think you’re confused about the typical pro-choice position. Hilzoy, in this thread, is arguing from a pro-choice standpoint, but is willing to accept restrictions like the ones you describe on third-trimester abortions. I’m pro-choice, and I’m happy with such restrictions. Jes is pro-choice, and I believe she has, in earlier threads if not this one, said that she sees no reason for non-medically indicated third-term abortion. So, while the position that you hold, and that you describe 80% of the population as holding (I’m not sure your numbers are right, but I would bet it’s at least a majority) is not the only position held by pro-choicers, it is at the least a position held by many, many people who would describe themselves as pro-choice.
The position you’ve described isn’t in the middle between extremist pro-lifers and extremist pro-choicers — it’s squarely in the pro-choice camp. You may not think of yourself as pro-choice for reasons of affiliation, but you aren’t at odds with pro-choicers in terms of the policy outcomes you want.
I just got back from a trip where I had little desire to connect to a computer, and I am glad that I didn’t miss anything controversial.
But to put in my two cents worth (and that may well be overestimating the value of my opinion.
After reading the entire thread, I have seen some degree of relative absolutism on both sides. And based upon prior threads, it probably would have been even more contentious if some other commenters had contributed.
For many years, I was pretty much an absolutist on the anti-abortion side. Over the past couple years I have, with great internal turmoil come to a position that probably falls into the same place as Jeff’s.
But I think his last comment tells it all. The debate on this issue is pretty much controlled by the fringes, with almost a total rejection by either side of those who fall into the middle.
I remember getting involved in an abortion thread on another site and stating that this isn’t a black and white issue for many people, and that a lot of people are tormented by the nuances of abortion as they attempt to decide what their personal feelings are. I was promptly told that there is nothing complex about this and if I was wavering at all I was in favor of sending women to jail, etc.
This tends to deny the reality of the human condition, which, except for those who are rigidly in one position or another, dictates that people have complex ways of viewing issues and that total internal consistency is almost impossible to achieve for any of us.
On another thread on another site, I mentioned that I believed that for some people (women and men both), the decision to have an abortion was almost done in a nonchalant way, and that bothered me.
I was told that that was not the case, and it was never a decision taken lightly. The fact was, that in my counseling practice I had seen several women who had had abortions, some of whom did treat it the same as having a bunion removed.
My point in this rambling is to say that, except for a fortunate few who have a simplistic view of those who may question abortion under any and all circumstances, or who may question abortion in every circumstance, it is a complex matter.
And extreme language, such as Jeff pointed to in his last comment, does nothing to resolve the issue, and instead tends to push those in the middle into one or the other extreme camp, which benefits no one at all.
I thought I would make up some stuff because it’s what I do when I’ve nothing better to offer:
Scenario One:
A Communist insurgency, somewhere in time, establishes itself in a barrio in El Salvador. El Salvadoran death squads, employing secretive units of the El Salvadoran Army, financed by money later traced back to USAID abstinence funds transferred to DOD accounts for a HalliParsons private contract to construct medical clinics in Baghdad suburbs and skimmed to a Guatamalan shell company which supplies the latest automatic weaponry and sexual abstinence brochures to the aforementioned El Salvadoran militia, swoops down in a dead of night ambush of the barrio, half of the population of which consists of obviously pregnant peasants and obviously pregnant female intellectuals who spent a semester in college at the Sorbonne — all armed and committed to the Communist insurgency, whose first move should they gain power is to establish government mandated heathcare and daycare across the country. One woman is not pregnant.
The militia takes the village, killing all of the males outright who didn’t die in the battle. By some twist of fate, all of the pregnant but unrepentant women live and are confined to the barrio’s public square and one-by-one, the abstinence and family values unit attached to the militia swiftly and efficiently surgically removes every fetus from every woman. The fetuses are each encased in incubators and transported via mule to the FVPC (Fetal Viability and Programming Unit). The women who didn’t die during the “procedure” are dragged into the jungle and executed via a single bullet to the head, the budget being what it is.
The remaining woman, who is not pregnant, is stripped naked, beaten, and gang-raped by the militia as the abstinence and family unit quietly fiddles with the dials on the fetal-incubators. She is pointed in the direction of the next barrio as the only remaining evidence of what might happen if that next barrio makes the mistake of hosting any leftist social movements.
The human fetuses, each wonderful in their humanity, are subjected over their formative years at the FVPC to a dry barrage of University of Chicago videos featuring Milton Friedman rationally explaining the evils of taxpayer funded anything, William Bennett explaining the basics of virtue and beating the slots in Atlantic City, Neil Boortz explaining that bird flu vaccines will go only to those fetuses who are competent enough to become entrepreneurs (if they’ll pardon his French), and old speeches of George W. Bush prattling on in pidgeon Spanish about the sanctity of secret fraternity handshakes, um, I mean, life.
Some of the fetuses grow up to lead normal lives and want to be left alone to pay their taxes or whine about their taxes. A few, who show a prediliction for thinking the other fetuses don’t pay enough taxes are kidnapped by masked bandits and spend lots of time in dank cells chewing on a cockroach missed by Papillon. A few others grow up to join secret militias and clean out nests of publically-provided daycare lovers. One now-grown fetus moves to a far barrio and falls in love with the now-grown fetus of our gang-raped mother…..
…they (not married) have trouble making a go of it and head North to the Rio Grande and on to either North or South Dakota, the record is unclear. The man finds a below-the-radar job in a poultry slaughterhouse and the woman cleans the toilets of the head of the local chapter of the ProlifeorelseantiimmigrationbutmyteenageddaughterflewtoNewYorkforherabortion Society.
Inevitably, there is sex. Condomless and birthcontrolpillless sex because the above Society got that law passed, too. Pregnancy.
The man is caught by the newly privatized Tancredo Wetback Prevention Corporation and shipped back to the Rio Grande and catapaulted over the immigrant-labor built 100-foot high wall back to Mexico. The
woman tells the pro-choicers to go to hell and has her baby, and then is promptly deported. The baby is charitably adopted by the local head of the youknowwhat Society, and after rebelling because there are too many toilets to be cleaned, makes her way back to El Salvador and founds an insurgency.
Rinse and repeat.
Gee, that was long. So I’ll skip scenario number two in which a married couple (the pregnant woman named Jes and the hubby named Sebastian.. hey, love happens!) are driving to the gynecologist but arguing about various subjects including the desirability of abortion, seatbelt laws (Sebastian is rationally arguing THAT should be a matter of choice), and highway speed limits. Sebastian gets under Jes’ skin and, taking her eyes off the road in a fit of pique, accidentally careens the car across the median and slams into a car driven by a guy named Jeff, who is minding his own business daydreaming about the relative merits of legalizing mixed-gender gay-lesbian marriage (I’m all for it) and we end up with human fetuses and human adults all over the highway. There’s a tow-truck driver named John somewhere is this, but hey, I don’t like this story already.
LizardBreath, I was actually thinking of the question of recording the reasons for abortion in the context of the huge fight in California in the 1980s where NOW and other pro-choice groups successfully fought to keep abortion statistics from being recorded in the state at all. This is vaguely alluded to in this Guttmacher Institute report:
California alone represents more than 10% of the US population.
“presumably the indications for those abortions are recorded in the patient’s medical charts.”
No they do not have to be and in the 1980s NOW (in California) was counseling doctors not to do so. I can’t find any current online resources because the issue has not (to my knowledge) been revisited in California.
Thanks, I was unfamiliar with that.
Still, it’s not nationwide, and it’s not constitutional-law related — I’d be surprised if a political push to collect abortion statistics (as opposed to law-enforcement efforts aimed at individuals, as in the cases linked above) met with much resistance in today’s political climate. And, of course, there are no barriers to the private collection of statistics — the AGI claims to survey all abortion providers nationwide. While they don’t collect the data you want, there’s nothing keeping an alternative group from doing similar surveys.
John Thullen is my hero.
“Jes is pro-choice, and I believe she has, in earlier threads if not this one, said that she sees no reason for non-medically indicated third-term abortion. So, while the position that you hold, and that you describe 80% of the population as holding (I’m not sure your numbers are right, but I would bet it’s at least a majority) is not the only position held by pro-choicers, it is at the least a position held by many, many people who would describe themselves as pro-choice.”
Jes can correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think this is an accurate read on her position. I’m not sure if “sees no reason for non-medically indicated third-term abortion” is even an accurate approximation of her thoughts, but even if so it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. If you think it means sees no reason for non-medically indicated third term abortions and would be willing to back that up with the force of law I would be shocked to find that correctly describes her position. See also Bob Mcmanus upthread (whose position won’t even conceed that much). The “pro-choice” position may be as you claim if you want to claim the 80% of the people in the middle, but it is not the position advocated by those who claim the pro-choice mantle when discussing how the laws ought to be changed (in the legislatures [cough]).
Thus the trickiness of said labels, on both the pro-life and pro-choice side.
Is third trimester abortion for reasons other than risk to life/health of mother or severe fetal abnormalities legal anywhere in the US or, indeed, the world? I know it is not in New York, a state known for liberal abortion laws and don’t know of any place where it is legal (though I concede that I haven’t made a systematic examination of abortion laws). I’ve never seen any concerted effort by any pro-choice group to change this situation.
I’d be perfectly happy with third trimester abortion being legally restricted to cases of serious risk to the mother’s health and severe fetal abnormalities as long as one condition is met: abortion is safe, legal and readily available to any woman who wants it in the first trimester. If that condition were met then it would be fair to say that a reasonable woman should be able to make up her mind as to whether she wants to continue the pregnancy and do something about it before the third trimester and so disallowing it after the 27th week is not an unreasonable restriction. To me, the restrictions on first trimester abortion make further restrictions on later abortions less, not more, morally defensible.
Jes,
I suspect that you seriously underestimate the number of people who support Planned Parenthood and reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and at the same time also think that there are limits that should be placed on abortion. This is not because women are nothing but incubators for a fetus, but because they are that, among other things. The way you reduce everything down to the choice of a woman without any consideration to any other factors really bothers me. As with so many topics, the questions aren’t quite so simple. Answering the question of whether a woman’s autonomy is important doesn’t necessarily answer the question of whether or not abortions should be legal. This is why the pro-choice and pro-life labels are so unhelpful. They try to reduce a very complex issue down to a ridiculously simple one. Insisting on branding the other side anti-life or anti-choice is even more problematic and it causes us moderates who are wrestling with the issue to disengage. When I am wrestling with what appears to me to be a rather nuanced and difficult moral issue, I don’t need to be badgered and treated as though I had already made a decision based on an absurdly simple calculation.
“While they don’t collect the data you want, there’s nothing keeping an alternative group from doing similar surveys.”
And absolutely nothing to suggest that abortion providers would provide answers to such questions given their representatives repeated stance on the issue. If NOW and NARAL resist giving such information why would abortion providers do so.
If Katherine conducted a survey of US torturers saying anything like “Do you torture prisoners under your care” would you trust the statistics? I would be skeptical of them even if the survey was backed by the force of law. I would be especially skeptical if it was wholly voluntary. When NARAL has spent four decades making it almost impossible to even ask the question I really can’t feel that blaming the pro-life movement for not being able to gather good statistics holds much weight in the argument.
“Still, it’s not nationwide, and it’s not constitutional-law related — I’d be surprised if a political push to collect abortion statistics (as opposed to law-enforcement efforts aimed at individuals, as in the cases linked above) met with much resistance in today’s political climate.”
This is hugely frustrating in the context of an argument where the history of the pro-life movement is constantly used to bash anyone on my side of the argument. There are law enforcement efforts to collect the data because NARAL has already been successful in suppressing the data on a routine CDC reporting basis. You object to the current tactics of the pro-life data collectors without acknowledging at all that they have been driven to that by a complete shut down of what in other medical contexts would be routine data collection. California is just the most extreme case. You don’t get in-depth reporting from most of the other states either.
If NARAL in Kansas finally wants to release redacted data as a tactical move because they were worried that they might lose a case and be forced to release even more data, great. But they didn’t come to that position because they wanted to release the data. They have spent 40 years making sure the medical data wasn’t available to anyone. They didn’t come to that position because the pro-choice lobby is so friendly to statistics on the reasons behind late term abortions. They didn’t come to that because they want the information to be well documented. They came to it because after forty years of trying to suppress the information the dam was about to break and they wanted to control the water flow.
Characterizing this as the poor abortion providers who would love to provide routine medical information if only pro-lifers weren’t so mean is completely wrong historically.
I would say that the next step is to have ridiculously uninformative medical chart comments like an unannotated “Medically Neccessary” be passed off as procedural reporting–but we are already there.
You’re right that I’m eliding some differences in what we see as appropriate enforcement of such laws. Those differences, however, are based more about desagreement about the facts of who has late term abortions and why than about valuing the ability of third-trimester non-medically indicated abortions.
I shouldn’t speak for Jes (although I did in my last comment — sorry if I got you wrong!), but my own position will do, because I think we’re pretty close. I think aggressive, punitive enforcement of a ban on elective third-trimester abortion is unnecessary and likely to do more harm than good.
I think it’s unneccessary, because it appears wildly unlikely to me that there’s anyone out there seeking an elective third-trimester abortion. For all the reasons everyone has gone over at great length — it’s major surgery, by the time you’ve reached the third trimester, you’ve already been pregnant for a very long time, most people share the same sense that such an abortion is at least morally troubling — it appears highly unlikely to me that anyone would want an elective, rather than medically indicated, abortion in the third trimester.
Of course, it’s a big world with a lot of strange, strange people in it, so let me say that it is possible, at least, that there are at least some women seeking elective third-trimester abortions. For such an abortion to take place in a state where a ban exists now, the woman in question would have to find a doctor willing to ignore the law, which most people don’t do even in the absence of draconian penalties. The necessary combination of very, very peculiar woman and scofflaw doctor convinces me that this is something that is vastly unlikely to happen.
The statistics gathered by the AGI, showing 600 or fewer abortions performed in the third trimester nationwide, a number which is consonant with what you’d expect if such abortions were only done for good medical reasons, further reassure me that preventing elective third-trimester abortion is not a significant problem. I recognize that you are unhappy with the source and quality of these statistics, and I support any political efforts you might want to make to collect better ones.
Punitive enforcement of laws against elective third-trimester abortion, on the other hand, seems to me likely to create a great deal of hardship and suffering among women who need third-trimester abortions for medical reasons. Such services are hard to find now, and frightening doctors with the risk of legal liability for error or poor record keeping seems likely to me to reduce their availability. So you and I do probably disagree about the best way to enforce a ban on elective third-trimester abortion.
Nonetheless, that’s a pretty fine-grained disagreement. If we agree on what behavior should be prohibited by law, and disagee only about the most socially beneficial way of enforcing that law, we are basically in agreement.
I crossed with your last comment. I would like to point out that this:
If NARAL in Kansas finally wants to release redacted data as a tactical move because they were worried that they might lose a case and be forced to release even more data, great.
isn’t the attitude of the Kansas Attorney General, who rejected the clinic’s offer in that case. He was going after personally identifying information, which is quite a different thing from statistics on indications for abortion.
My point remains that NARAL has successfully resisted providing the not-personally-identifying information on any useful basis for decades. It has done so by first resisting attempts to collect abortion information at all–California. The next tactic is to restrict the abortion information collected on the contentious points–restrict it to number of abortions. This is pretty much the state of information all over the country. The next tactic is when forced to suggest that the abortion is medically neccessary to merely state it as a conclusion without medically useful documentation which would tend to prove or disprove the conclusion. That is why even in the states where theoretically you can’t abort a viable fetus, nothing stops you from doing so. In none of these three situations are we collecting information that would let pro-choice advocates say (though they regularly do) that same-as-infanticide abortions are not being performed.
“The statistics gathered by the AGI, showing 600 or fewer abortions performed in the third trimester nationwide, a number which is consonant with what you’d expect if such abortions were only done for good medical reasons, further reassure me that preventing elective third-trimester abortion is not a significant problem.”
So if only 1% of them are questionable, (a percentage you would find laughable in a prison guard situation if I an advocacy group insisted on avoiding scrutiny for 40 years–and in those cases there are living witnesses who are not implicated in the crime) that is 6 possible infanticides that you think aren’t worth investigating? Of the 100 or so people executed each year would a 1% error rate make it worth avoiding investigation? Clearly it hasn’t in fact. Would you be ok with a form by prosecutors which said “Execution Procedures Valid” and leave it at that? Would that count as adequate oversight for intentionally killing someone?
To me, the restrictions on first trimester abortion make further restrictions on later abortions less, not more, morally defensible.
A very valid point, and often overlooked in the debate.
Sebastian: our system seems more or less what you would be happy with. But it works in a system where unplanned/unwanted pregnancies are a lot more rare than in the US – so one should work on that area. Also: first trimester abortions are legal, free and accessible.
As a country we are rather strict with third trimester abortions. At the same time we do not prosecute ‘mercy killings’: active euthanasia for babies that will die soon and are suffering enourmously. We think we are consistent though…
Another point that plays a role: if you do have a handicapped child, the medical care will be a burden but not bankrupt you. Operations for neural tube defects are free for instance. Having a handicapped child in a society where health costs are one of the mayor causes for personal bankrupties might increase the need/tendency towards abortion.
It’s possible I’m balancing the societal costs wrongly. When I look at it, though, the costs in danger and distress to women in need of medically necessary third-trimester abortions, combined with the fact that I don’t have any strong belief either (a) that there are any elective third-trimester abortions being sought or that (b) a punitive approach to law enforcement would be successful at identifying such elective abortions, leads me to think that such a punitive approach is ill-advised.
socratic_me: The way you reduce everything down to the choice of a woman without any consideration to any other factors really bothers me.
Do you feel such contempt for women that it bothers you to have to acknowledge that a pregnant woman takes all relevant factors into consideration when she makes a decision about whether to terminate or continue her pregnancy? Or is it something else about women making independent decisions that bothers you? Either way, it seems a little absurd to me that it bothers you to think that women make choices: even when legislation makes abortion illegal, women make choices. You cannot stop pregnant women from thinking and making decisions by sitting there saying it bothers you that they do.
Once more into the breach (yikes, bad pun) on late term abortions as infanticide:
1. It’s going to be a crime very difficult to prove. Unless the nurse confesses, the mother and the MD are going to claim the fetus was dead already / the mother was in grave danger.
2. As a society, we want to encourage women who are about to or have just delivered unwanted babies to give them up. So, we have confidential dropoffs at fire stations and hospitals. Making late term abortions a crime is more likely, not less, to drive women with unwanted babies into delivering in secret and sticking the newborn in the dumpster.
3. Take a look at the press coverage of women who kill their living children. Inevitably, a woman accused of killing her fetus will be seen as mentally ill, not worth prosecuting. After all, what sane woman is going to carry around a fetus for 8 months or so, then decide to get an abortion because she can’t go one more month?
4. To the extent people think about the issue at all, I’ll bet that the majority would believe that the act of carrying the fetus to late term then going through the process of a late term abortion is punishment enough.
5. Changing the legal status quo requires building coalitions and demonstrating to legislators, especially in a hot-button area like abortion, that the issue is worth political capital.
The pro-choice community sees no need for reporting laws on abortion. Given what’s going on in Kansas, the pro-choice community is likely to resist any attempt to have the State monitor late-term abortions, on the grounds that the information (a) isn’t useful or relevant and (b) is likely to be misused.
So, yes, in theory, we liberals should care about the poor murdered late-term fetus because our doctrine is about providing assistance to the under-privileged. But that theory has run straight into the practice of the Kansas AG.
When the pro-life community is willing to start serious negotiations about creating conditions to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, I’ll be willing to agree to laws that prevent late-term abortions that are the equivalent of infanticide.
The system we have currently ain’t great but it’s acceptable (this may be changing). If you want pro-choice support to change it, you’re going to need to make the first move.
Sounds like a great plan to me.
Wait, no, scratch that. It sounds like a terrible plan. I support creating conditions to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies regardless of what third-trimester laws others are willing to support. Reducing unwanted pregnancies through better access to and education about contraception is a moral good, not just a negotiating tactic.
Yeah. The thing is, with someone who only wants to stop elective third-trimester abortion, there’s no need to do much negotiating — their position is not particularly far from most pro-choice activists.
The problem is negotiating with people who want to ban all abortions. At that point, there’s not all that much to talk about.
“Making late term abortions a crime is more likely, not less, to drive women with unwanted babies into delivering in secret and sticking the newborn in the dumpster.”
Considering that the choices you offer me are in-the-womb infanticide and out-of-the-womb infanticide I hope you don’t mind that I’ll choose none of the above.
“If you want pro-choice support to change it, you’re going to need to make the first move.”
If you insist on the politics playing that way that is your choice–and it certainly is consonant with the hard core pro-choice community. The problem is that you force me to choose my allies among those who want to limit abortion much more than you do. Since the choice is apparently no allies or the pro-life allies I will choose the pro-life allies. I don’t believe they will ever get what they want with respect to very early abortions so I don’t see much of a risk in doing that. If you don’t want to take that kind of risk it might be better to address the infanticide concerns.
“The problem is negotiating with people who want to ban all abortions. At that point, there’s not all that much to talk about.”
Why is that the problem? You claim that a huge majority of people are pro-choice and that a huge majority of them wouldn’t have a problem with addressing my concerns. If that were true you don’t need to negotiate with the pro-life people at all.
The serious answer to that is that there are huge issues of affiliation around abortion rights, which ends up with a lot of people strongly attached to a side of the controversy that doesn’t necessarily well represent their desired policy outcomes.
The median voter is (as far as I know, I’m guessing here, but I don’t think I’m too far off) someone who roughly agrees with Jeff, favoring a legal regime where elective abortion is legal through the first two trimesters, but has strong moral or emotion concerns about abortion even in that timeframe.
This is a policy position that pro-choice people are very happy with: pretty much it’s the Roe regime. Unfortunately, people who hold this position often seem to identify more strongly with the pro-life rather than the pro-choice side of the controversy. As far as I understand this, it’s because they do have moral qualms about abortion, and they see an absolutist pro-life position, even if they disagree with it in terms of desired legal outcomes, as meaningfully addressing those qualms.
I don’t know what do about this other than pointing out the degree of policy agreement pro-choicers have with this sort of ‘pro-life affiliated but not in favor of a total abortion ban’ voter whenever I can. We’ve got a lot in common, particularly favoring easy access to good sex ed and contraception, to avoid unwanted pregnancies insofar as it’s possible.
SH wrote: I hope you don’t mind that I’ll choose none of the above.
not an available option. once again, isn’t it conservatives who are the hard-nosed realists who understand the law of unintended consequences?
If women believe they could go to prison for a late term abortion [prosecutors are known to make mistakes], some percentage will choose the delivery-alone-and-dumpster route.
this is, SH, your own argument turned back on you. you argue that with so many late term abortions in this country, some must be murder. A realist would argue that some percentage of the murderers will choose a different route to achieve their goals, once a safe abortion is denied to them.
LizardBreath, I’d say that’s roughly my reading of the situation too. Although I’d say that I’m more comfortable with ‘legal first trimester’ than ‘legal first and second trimester,’ the numbers in the second trimester are about as small as the third, and it’s one of those points of negotiating in regards to the desired-legal-outcome-versus-moral-qualms realm.
That was a little convoluted, thanks for the clarifying points. Honestly, I think the biggest thing that could happen (if I’m dreaming) is the emergence of a ‘different kind of pro-life movement’ that marglinalizes the absolutist ‘Our Nation Must Embrace A Total Judeo-Christian Perspective On Sexual Mores, Period, End Of Story’ branch of the movement. It’s that branch (dominated, if we’re to by honest, by those who group contraception and abortion in the SAME category) that makes the discussion even more difficult. Think of the emergence of so-called ‘sex-positive feminism’ for an idea of the sort of transformation I dream of.
I’m not really talking policy at this point, just sighing to myself and thinking about long-term goals.
“A realist would argue that some percentage of the murderers will choose a different route to achieve their goals, once a safe abortion is denied to them.”
And?
You ask me to choose between not prosecuted infanticide and prosecuted infanticide. Please explain again why I should choose the unprosecuted infanticide because I’m not seeing your argument.
I suspect you didn’t remove as much from your mind as you thought.
That’s entirely possible, except that a) I arrived at the conclusions through different reasoning, and b) I was absolutely flabbergasted by the similarity (as opposed to the usual spark of “Oh yeah, *that’s* where I came up with that!”). YMMV.
Accepting first premises – that a fetus is a human being, with all the rights of a human being – it occurs to me to try a thought experiment, in which I posit that a fetus should also have all the responsibilities of a human being, too.
If I’m in my house, minding my own business, and someone enters my house uninvited, I have the right to tell them to leave.
If the intruder doesn’t leave, and instead makes itself at home in my house, to the point of destroying its structure and taking my belongings, I have the right to call the police and have the intruder removed, by force if necessary.
In extreme situations, I have the right to defend myself by killing the intruder. I don’t even have to tolerate “merely” being assaulted in order to justify killing the intruder. All I need, legally and morally, is the conviction that the intruder intends to do me bodily harm.
An unwanted fetus is an intruder, one that threatens its host body’s health, life and well-being. An unwanted fetus that was created in the act of rape or incest is an accessory to a violent crime, one that might also have involved death threats.
If abortion is homocide, then in what way is it not justifiable homocide?
“one that threatens its host body’s health, life and well-being.”
“Threatens” here is a sign of argumentative weakness, but then with “intends” you indicate frivolity so whatever.
Also note that killing a non-violent intruder on one’s property is murder.
Also note that killing a non-violent intruder on one’s property is murder.
Are you stating that from a moral perspective, or a legal one? If it’s a legal one, I’d really like to know on what basis you make it.
IANAL, but my understanding is that the use of deadly force against a non-violent intruder is legally considered murder (though of course in many or most places hard to prosecute). Putting landmines in one’s rosebushes is not lawful.
Consider the case of the I think Japanese tourist who was trick-or-treating, picked the wrong doorstep, was ordered off, and shot to death when he didn’t respond. The homeowner was iirc tried for murder (or homicide or what have you) but got off.
To continue the stupid analogy above, if I come home to find someone collapsed comatose in my garden, and I order her to leave, and she doesn’t get up and go or even respond – if I then hack her to pieces with a chainsaw, I think I’m morally liable for murder.
If I’m in my house, minding my own business, and someone enters my house uninvited, I have the right to tell them to leave.
If the intruder doesn’t leave, and instead makes itself at home in my house, to the point of destroying its structure and taking my belongings, I have the right to call the police and have the intruder removed, by force if necessary.
Now try that with your own toddler…
Consider the case of the I think Japanese tourist who was trick-or-treating, picked the wrong doorstep, was ordered off, and shot to death when he didn’t respond. The homeowner was iirc tried for murder (or homicide or what have you) but got off.
That was Yoshihiro Hattori, who was an exchange student rather than a tourist. The shooter, Rodney Peairs, was tried and acquitted of manslaughter, though the parents won a civil suit.
dangerous analogy.
crim law 1: when threatened you must first retreat before using self defense. but, homeowners have no obligation to retreat IN THE FACE OF A THREAT. the shooting the trick or treater cases turn on the homeowner’s view that he was being threatened.
real estate 1: generally, you do NOT have the right of self-help to evict a squatter. Only the police can do so.
so: when fetus=threat, then self-defense applies. but when fetus not a threat, gotta get an eviction warrant.
I went and looked up the Maryland statute, and reprint it here just for reference:
And for comparison, here’s the Colorado statute, much of which has currently been deemed unconstitutional, but remains on the books should the Supreme Court overrule Casey and/or Danforth.
It may have been addressed in the lower depths of this rather long thread, but I want to comment on the relation of spatial contiguity and thinghood. Apologies if I’m beating a dead horse.
Spatial contiguity is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to count as a thing. A paradigm case of a noncontiguous thing, it seems to me, is a bikini.
Spatial contiguity seems to be an important factor in our carving out objects from the visual field, that is, in our distinguishing things from nonthings. But it’s not a hard-and-fast principle.
Shoot. I should have said: It’s not a hard and fast principle for even that purpose, much less for constructing an ontology. How widely accepted is the notion that a set is a thing?
Jeff Eaton: Jes, I have to say that I think this statement:
The “other side” is the anti-choicers, Charley. They are not “pro life”: they want women to die rather than have the option of safe legal abortion.
…is insulting and untrue
Unfortunately, not untrue.
Don’t forget–an abortion kills a baby. A human baby. If abortion supporters can justify that, then that is sad indeed.
Don’t forget to ignore the entire conversation that is this thread, and every single message in it, because your thought is entirely original, and no one has ever considered it.
Now that they’ve read your observation — doing you the courtesy you have not extended by first reading the comments others have made, rest assured that they will slap themselves upside the head, because your contribution is something no one has ever considered before. It is a stunning revelation. What could anyone have been thinking?
Thank you, so, so, so very much.
The risks of pregnancy bear repeating.
Gary: I’m afraid the proper argument is the converse. It is not that the discussion in the thread has been ignored; it is the thread discussion that, in fact, ignores the obvious. An abortion kills a baby. No tortured rationalization of lifestyle choices can change that fact.
rilkefan: Nor can the certainty of abortion be ignored. A baby dies.
An abortion kills a baby. No tortured rationalization of lifestyle choices can change that fact.
Except for the fact that it’s false. Embryo != fetus != baby, which is pretty much the entire point of this debate in the first place.
Anarch: It is truly a shame that you defend the tortured rationalization with the most blatant rationalization of all. You may try to sweep it under the rug by playing a linguistic shell game, but it is a baby. And, at present, you have a right, under most circumstances, to kill that baby.
but it is a baby
Well, only in the sense that it is also a 5-year-old and a teenager and an adult — i.e. it will potentially become all of those, but it’s not there yet. The term “baby” properly refers to a particular stage of life; you can argue about at what point a fetus qualifies as a “baby”, but there’s no way an embryo does.
Feel free to argue that human embryos are as deserving of life as human babies if you like, but don’t misuse the language in order to make an emotional appeal.
Kenb: Correct. And the unborn deserve their place in your 5-year-old to adult spectrum. My argument is not emotional–it is a fact that an abortion takes a life. If you are OK with that, I am saddened.
it is a fact that an abortion takes a life.
Absolutely. So does having ham for Easter dinner. So does pulling weeds from the garden. What is it about some kinds of life that we give them special protection? At this point I’d recommend that you actually read hilzoy’s post.
kenB: I find your response confusing. You’re not suggesting an equivalence between human life and that of weeds and livestock, are you?
You’re not suggesting an equivalence between human life and that of weeds and livestock, are you?
‘An equivalence’? Absolutely. Complete equivalence? Well, that would be silly.
Had Enough?: “(Superficial) similarity”? Yes. “Equivalence”? No.
You may try to sweep it under the rug by playing a linguistic shell game, but it is a baby.
No, it isn’t. It has nothing to do with a “linguistic shell game” and everything to do with using words in accordance to their actual meaning. An embryo is not a fetus is not a baby is not a toddler is not a teenager is not an adult is not a corpse. The lines there aren’t clear-cut, of course, but to call one the other — to refer to a toddler as an adult, or a fetus as a teenager — is to commit a linguistic sin; and when the purpose of the debate is to clarify instead of obscure, an ontological (and possibly ethical) sin as well.
That said, since you’re clearly uninterested in actual debate, I’m done here. Should you wish to address the original post, or indeed to substantively address any of the points raised subsequently, I’m all ears; until then, enjoy the silence.
buck, perhaps you can give us a rational, coherent explanation of why we should work so hard to protect unfeeling clumps of cells as long as they have a certain pattern of DNA, and yet accept and encourage the slaughter of fully sentient creatures unlucky enough to be non-human? Then perhaps we can move the discussion forward. So far, you’ve relied pretty heavily on assertion, which really doesn’t get us anywhere.
kenb: In an earlier post, you refer to yourself as an “ethical vegetarian”. What does that mean? If I declared myself a “fetal carnivore” and consumed only unborn (read: aborted) chimps and dolphins, would you be offended? And if so, why do you so cavalierly dismiss the abortion of human LIFE?
anarch: The linguistic shell game is the use of the word “fetus” to sanitize the killing of a human life. That said, I’ll somehow muddle through life without your response.
So, buck, what is your opinion of IVF, where multiple eggs are fertilized in order to maximize the chances? And if you personally feel it abhorrent (you might even know people who have had the procedure and therefore have benefitted from taking a ‘life’), what do you think is the likelihood of stopping the procedure, given societal trends? Also, what is your position on capital punishment?
Maybe it would be good to wait to engage until buck reads the post and responds to it…
To all: Buck has read the post. It seems clear that the posters on this board prefer to live in a sanitized microcosm in which human life is no more inherently valuable than that of crabgrass and gophers.
IVF, capital punishment, etc. are red herring arguments intended to divert attention from the numbers. Abortion has killed literally orders of magnitude more people than all the others combined. On top of it all, abortion is racist, in that the African American community is the procedure’s most frequent victim.
Rilke: Maybe it would be good to wait to engage until buck reads the post and responds to it…
To do that, buck would have to admit that women are more than incubators, and it would appear that to buck women are not only just incubators, we’re invisible incubators. I don’t see any way to engage with buck: he’s a classic anti-choicer. For him, I don’t really exist.
Jes, my guess is that buck is less a classic anti-choicer (whatever that is) than a troll. You’re getting poked in the eye, therefore you exist.
Apologies in advance to buck if he or she actually engages the community here, which after all includes people who believe full human life starts at conception and try to work out consistent ethical frameworks based on that, and others (i.e., almost everybody else) who respect that approach while disagreeing with its axiom to varying degrees.
If I declared myself a “fetal carnivore” and consumed only unborn (read: aborted) chimps and dolphins, would you be offended?
No, I’d wonder how you got consent from the chimps and dolphins to perform abortions on them. You do realize that people who are pro-choice are against forced abortion, don’t you?
Rilkefan: Jes, my guess is that buck is less a classic anti-choicer (whatever that is) than a troll. You’re getting poked in the eye, therefore you exist.
I suppose on a meta level it matters whether Buck really holds the anti-choice opinions it expresses, or if it is merely pretending to do so, but either way, it’s pretty clear Buck is here to troll Obsidian Wings, yes.
Seems pretty sincere to me (so probably not a “classic” troll), just more interested in preaching than debate.
BTW, anyone know what a “sanitized microcosm” is? I’m trying to figure out if I should enjoy living in one or start thinking about moving.
kenB: I think one was depicted in The Andromeda Strain. Didn’t look too comfy to me. I seem to recall some treatment that involved incinerating the outer layer of skin, to destroy any bacteria that might be living there.
All: I appreciate the spirited discussion. I am not a troll; I am a member of that majority of Americans who believe that
1. Human life carries more value than that of other animals, and
2. Each abortion claims one of those lives.
You can talk about choice, but that choice involves the taking of a life that is not yours. Your rationalization that having your choice is more important than the unborn life thereby taken is truly disturbing–you place convenience and lifestyle above the life of another.
You can have choice: choose adoption after birth.
kenB: Seems pretty sincere to me (so probably not a “classic” troll), just more interested in preaching than debate.
I think you’re right. And from my Quaker heritage, one thing I still carry with me: I cannot bear preachers who are unwilling to listen. 😉
buck: Can you give a definition of human life that:
1. Includes all post-conception entities with human DNA except:
a. molar pregnancies
b. the fetal component placental tissue
2. Excludes brain dead people (or gives an alternate definition of death)
3. Does not count twins as 1/2 a person apiece or insist that one twin is not a person
4. Excludes cancer cells, including teratomas
5. Is not based on simple prejudice?
I’ve yet to see a pro-lifer who could do this, yet if any of them could, I would find that a highly convincing argument for their side.
Diane: Your post provides an elucidation of a concept that has eluded other readers: the “sanitized microcosm (SM)”. In the SM, the purpose of logic is to derive the convenient, and all herrings are red. I believe that you are posting from the SM.
A fetus growing within a woman is human. Her obligation to nurture it is a greater duty than society’s obligation to provide her a choice to kill it.
“Her obligation to nurture it is a greater duty…”
hmmm.
“greater duty?”… according to whom?
xanax: Is it not a supreme duty to protect innocent human life?
Evidently not. How many spontaneous abortions were induced in Baghdad by George Bush’s shock and awe? It’s mighty hard for me to believe that number was zero.
buck: that depends on your definition of human life. Human cancer cells are genetically human, and they are alive, but it is not a duty, supreme or otherwise, to protect them. If you say they’re not “innocent” (despite their not having the mental wherewithal to incur guilt), then substitute some other living human cell.
This is not a trick question. The answer to your non-trick question depends on it. So answer Dianne’s last question, and I’ll let you know whether I think that protecting human life is a supreme duty..
buck: “supreme duty?”
Honestly unclear on the concept.
But off the top of my head?
Either “no” or no such animal.
xanax: “Her obligation to nurture it is a greater duty…”
hmmm.
“greater duty?”… according to whom?
A “greater duty” than protecting innocent human life, plainly, since Buck is arguing on the side of those who want women to die.
(Dianne, while I doubt Buck will answer your question as put, there needs to be a 6th point to make anti-choicers entirely consistent: their definition of human life to be protected explicitly excludes all pregnant women.)
“No, I’d wonder how you got consent from the chimps and dolphins to perform abortions on them. You do realize that people who are pro-choice are against forced abortion, don’t you?”
Diane, my question to you is:
Do you honestly believe that it is a greater wrong to abort a fetal chimp without the mother chimp’s consent than it is to abort a fetal human with the mother’s consent? If your answer is “yes”, then the value you place on human life is much less than that which the majority of Americans, no, the majority of people, place on that life. As I believe that your answer will in fact be “yes”, it renders your question to me irrelevant. You can’t see the forest for the obfuscating trees.
“buck: “supreme duty?”
Honestly unclear on the concept. ”
xanax: Are you equally unclear about the concept of choice? It’s the obverse of the same coin.
“A “greater duty” than protecting innocent human life, plainly, since Buck is arguing on the side of those who want women to die.”
Jesurgislac: Live Journal is not a credible source. But, to be precise, I argue on the side of babies who deserve a chance to live. It is disingenous to equate that position with one that champions the death of women. Come on, what is the maternal death rate associated with childbirth? Less than that associated with driving on the Interstate, I’m sure…
buck: “Are you equally unclear about the concept of choice? It’s the obverse of the same coin.”
Choice? The obverse of the “supreme duty” coin?
Nonsense.
As I believe that your answer will in fact be “yes”, it renders your question to me irrelevant.
So you’re basing a refusal to answer on a bizarre argument based on your assumption about what I’m going to say to your question? My question must have scared you very badly. But why should it? In essence, all I asked was how you know what is human and what is not? That’s not so hard, is it?
buck, you responded to a link to the maternal mortality rate above…
buck, one last try from me: I’m not at all close-minded to the pro-life view — in fact I’m not wedded to any particular position on the issue, although my default position is pretty close to hilzoy’s. However, preachy assertions aren’t going to convince me of the rightness of your views. If that’s all you’ve got in your toolbox, then I’ll bow out, though others may stay and play.
Oh, one final word: by dismissing logic as a device to “derive the convenient”, you’re left with no way to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. So what exactly do you expect to accomplish with these comments?
All: I believe it’s simple–do you value all human life? If you do, you cannot defend a pro-choice position.
You all seem to refer to my posts as “preachy”. Is that a synonym of “contrary”? I clearly hold the opposite position, in that I value all human life equally, and place human life above that of other animals. My questions to you are as valid as yours to me, yet no one has answered.
“…all I asked was how you know what is human and what is not? That’s not so hard, is it?”
Diane: You REALLY can’t answer that question yourself? You REALLY can’t identify human life? You can’t distinguish between human life and pathological cellular growth, or tortured meta-language constructions of personhood that border on slavery-era definitions of blacks?
You REALLY can’t answer that question yourself?
I’d REALLY like to see how you would answer the question.
buck: “do you value all human life? If you do, you cannot defend a pro-choice position.”
I think you left out at least one important step in your equation: i.e. …”and you consider an embryonic collection of cells to be a human life…” (as opposed to say, a potential life).
Just out of curiosity, is a pupal caterpillar in a cocoon a butterfly?
do you value all human life?
Nope. Silly question really, considering that it was answered in hilzoy’s original post, above the fold.
Your posts are preachy because you don’t make any arguments. We’re all horrible people in your eyes because we don’t respect all human life, but you haven’t told us why we should respect all human life. Explain why we should, and then you’ll have stopped being preachy.
“…but you haven’t told us why we should respect all human life.”
All: That sums it up. I’ve enjoyed the chat, but if you (pl), by your own admission, don’t hold to the fundamental tenet of respecting all human life, then we can go no further. I wish you peace and enlightenment, and I am happy that your mothers made the choice to deliver.
All
But how can we believe that you respect all human life when you can’t even tell us what you mean by all human life? Do you respect the still living cells in a brain dead person’s body as human life? Suppose someone showed you two sets of cells growing in petri dishes. One is an embryo at the eight cell stage. The other is a cluster of human lymphocytes. Why is one, in your view, human life, the other not? (Or are they both? I apologize if I misrepresented your views here.)
Another question for buck or any other pro-lifer out there who might want to answer (no one has so far.) Ok, so suppose we assume that every conceptus is a person. Up to 80% of concepti fail to implant or die shortly after implantation, such that a “clinical pregnancy” (ie one identified as such by the woman who is pregnant) never occurs. If every conceptus is a person, then 80% of the population is dying in their first few days of life! Isn’t this a bigger public health problem than a relatively small number of homicides (ie abortions)? Why aren’t you lobbying for funding of a crash NIH program looking into the causes of these deaths and searching for cures to end the epidemic? I have never, ever seen or heard of a pro-life group lobby Congress for more funding of the causes of miscarriages, muchless failed implantation or setting up a private foundation to fund researchers who would look into the issue or even supporting existing research.
This seems strange. Surely if, say, a new mutant flu was sweeping through the country, infecting essentially the whole population and killing 80% of those it infected, there would be calls for an immediate, massive program to search for the cause of the pandemic (that is, why this flu was so deadly) and look for cures and preventative measures. Yet no one is interested in saving the 80% of “babies” that, according to the pro-life movement, die every day. Why is that? I can only conclude that it is because, really, the pro-lifers don’t believe that a single celled organism or even an eight celled organism is a person. But they can’t admit that to themselves either, lest they have to look at uglier motives for wanting to restrict abortion.
but if you (pl), by your own admission
Awesome, I have the power to speak for all the members of this community. I promise to use this newfound power for Good and not Evil. Well, unless it’s the sort of Evil that happens to make me rich in the process.
kenB: Awesome, I have the power to speak for all the members of this community. I promise to use this newfound power for Good and not Evil. Well, unless it’s the sort of Evil that happens to make me rich in the process.
And if it makes you very rich in the process, share! At least we could have a big ObWing party and toast your newfound wealth in the cause of Evil. 😉
No, no, no. This is and old thread (I’ve been on vacation), and there are hundreds of comments, yet all I can do is add one more.
Hilzoy, you do consider valuable someone that once was conscious, but now lies in a coma, as long as he has a hope of reawakening.
Consider a hypothetical medical situation. A patient has been put into a helpless, comatose state as a result of an accident. To help that someone, a woman has been crudely hooked up to this patient as some sort of life support, through some obscure medical machine. Being hooked up to this patient is at times very painful, but it’s very unlikely that she will die, because the doctors will take whatever steps they can to save her, including disconnecting, as a last resort.
Given enough time, the patient will regain consciousness, and she will be disconnected. That is practically certain.
Now, if that woman had been connected to the patient against her own will, no one could blame her if she disconnected herself. It would be a sad thing to do, even immoral, as not helping someone in need is immoral, but not criminal.
Unless she was responsible for the car accident that placed the patient in a coma in the first place.
And that what it comes down to. The foetus has never been conscious, but it will be, with a high degree of certainty, higher than for comatose patients. It will be like me and you, that process is set into motion already. The machine is connected. If it wasn’t, it would be immoral to connect it against the woman’s will, but it is.
You do admit that an unconscious person can have rights, if he has a hope of gaining consciousness. In that you have come further than most abortion advocates. What you unfortunately do, is make the arbitrary demand that the unconscious person has to have been conscious in the past in order to have rights. I can’t see that this is relevant or reasonable, when it’s clear that he/she will. It’s wrong to deny someone a thing that is rightfully theirs, even if they don’t know about it, or won’t miss it.
In the vast majority of cases, the woman had an option. Abortion would still be wrong if she hadn’t, but then at least it would be understandable. People (women AND men!) should not have sex unless they are willing to take the small chance that prevention fails. You can drive a car even if you don’t want to crash, but if you know you are unwilling to accept your responsibilities if you were to crash, you shouldn’t, no matter how happy driving makes you, or how unhappy the consequences might make you.
(There are other things that should be mentioned, like the problem of pressure and regret. As much as one in four norwegian women who had abortions felt pressure to have an abortion from their boyfriends, according to one study. Restrictions on abortion, or even attitudes against abortion in friends and relatives would give these unhappy women a line of defense. And regret: of women who have abortions, very many regret it. Even if you think abortion is OK, that means those women made a bad choice. Of women who decide against having an abortion, almost no one regrets it. You mentioned some women who had abortions, I could mention some who didn’t, despite serious medical and social “reasons”. They are now very happy that they carried their children to term, even though they have other problems, and need help caring for their children. A third argument against one of your minor points: It’s not OK to kill someone just because they can’t feel pain, otherwise, murderers would use anasthesia, I suppose. Children born before the date they supposedly can feel pain have survived and live normal lives today.)
Harold; Unless she was responsible for the car accident that placed the patient in a coma in the first place.
So (hypothetical): you’re driving a car, and you knock down a pedestrian, and the pedestrian will require a couple of pints of blood and a new kidney. You feel that the government ought to have the legal right to have one of your kidneys and a couple of pints of your blood removed and transplanted/transfused to the pedestrian. You do not have the right to refuse to donate a kidney and a couple of pints of blood: you only had the right to decide not to drive a car in the first place.
That’s not the way the law works – but it’s how you feel the law ought to work? All car drivers legally liable to become involuntary blood and organ donors if they are ever involved in a car accident?
Harald: I, too, know lots of women who have not had abortions, and have wonderful children. I am not saying that I think everyone should have abortions. That would be insane. I just think it should be the woman’s choice, at least in the first two trimesters.
Likewise, I think that regret, pressure, etc. are beside the point. In any case that does not involve harm to another person or costs to society, we let people make their own choices, whether or not they might be pressured, regret it, etc. Lots of people are pressured into buying things, for instance, and lots of people make purchases they come to regret. We don’t think that this is a reason to deprive them of their choice.
Now: as I said, we do this when no harm to others is involved. If someone believes that the fetus is not “another” in this sense, and/or that ending its life before it can realize that it has one does not harm it, then regret would not matter here, any more than it does in the shopping case.
That’s the crucial question: does the fetus count as a person (morally), or more generally as a being to whom moral consideration is due, or not. I explained my reasons for thinking not, at least before sentience, in the post. I don’t think it’s arbitrary to say that a person whose ongoing consciousness has been interrupted is disanalogous to a fetus who has never been sentient or conscious at all. For one thing, the comatose person has all sorts of plans and projects, an ongoing history (that is: her self has an ongoing history, not just her body), etc., that should be respected because we respect her autonomy. A fetus that has not developed sentience has never had any autonomy, and thus there is nothing of the kind to be respected.
Jes, let me ask you this question in return: If it was you who did that, and your blood, and your kidney was the only thing that worked, perhaps because it was your twin you ran down or something (that’s not an entirely unreasonable comparison if family closeness has any meaning), would you give? Of course you would, and I think you would be shocked at someone who didn’t. As it is, in real-life car accidents who gives the blood and the kidney (OK, it has to be a pretty weird car accident to hurt a kidney) is not important. You might take care of that part of your moral obligation by becoming a blood donor if you weren’t one already.
However, only the mother can save the life that is her child. If others could, we wouldn’t have the problem of abortion at all.
If I hurt someone or put them in a helpless state, deliberately or accidentally, I feel I have a duty to give whatever is needed to right the wrong, and is in my right and power to give. That’s my answer, Jes. Asking the same of others is not unreasonable. (Giving someone back the ability to walk is not in my power, unfortunately, and giving someone one of my vital organs is not my right, as I am morally prohibited from killing myself).
Hilzoy, I’ll try to answer in order. Lot of people indeed are pressured to buy things, and regret it. But at least here in Norway, they get propotional protection, through legal mechanisms the people themselves have instated. In the most extreme case, this protection does indeed restrict your right to choose what to buy: we have laws against quackery, since it exploits people’s desperation.
If we look at the other side, the selling side, in Sweden they have laws against prostitution. They argue that this actually protects women’s freedoms, since it gives some measure of protection from being forced into prostitution. Since this applies to a large number of swedish prostitutes (the film Lilja 4 ever is recommended), they reason that the small protection it gives to victims of sex trafficking is more valuable than some women’s “freedom” to sell sex. I’m inclined to agree with them, both in this particular case, and in the general case, that this sort of criminalisation is reasonable. Some people had a freedom the majority of swedes though were abhorrent to use, and which indirectly hurt other people. They restricted this freedom.
By the way, only buying sex is forbidden, to not add to the burden of trafficking victims. I believe some countries have laws against abortion that work in a similar way – that performing them is illegal, but having them is not punished. Such laws could perhaps be defended even if you don’t give full rights to foetuses, by the swedish thinking, so it’s not completely irrelevant.
I agree that the crucial question is what you say above, yet many people speak as if the crucial question is something about women’s freedom. If the foetus doesn’t have the rights of a person, of course no one but the woman should decide. If it is, the woman still has a choice, but one of the options is deeply immoral, so it’s by no means clear that it should be legal.
You say that the comatose person has all sorts of plans and projects, her self and not just her body. That can be disputed. It may be reasonable to say that she had them, and will have them again if and when she wakes up.
But the more important issue is that it is not our plans and projects that make us valuable, that give us a “self”. Autonomy is well and good, but people have differing amounts of it, so unless we want to categorise mentally handicapped people as less than fully valuable, it is also a poor indicator for our worth.
Incidentally, the norwegian abortion law makes no secret of thinking handicapped people less valuable. Abortion is on-demand to week 12, but this is extended in cases of “eugenic indication” – the law’s words, not mine. It was written only 16 years ago.
Let’s see, Harald: You refused to answer my question – should getting a driving licence mean you are automatically an organ donor – and when you ask me a question, you then answer it for me.
Are you going to answer my question? Should getting a driving licence mean that you no longer have the right to refuse if a car accident victim needs your kidney? If you refuse to donate your kidney, do you think you should be prosecuted for murder?
It’s kind of a neat thought, though, if we just declare human freedom to be unimportant – as unimportant as women’s freedom is to anti-choicers. When you pass your driving test and qualify for a license, that carries with it the obligation to go to your nearest blood donor center every six weeks to two months and donate a pint. No exceptions permitted, unless your blood is tested and found unsafe to use. If you resist or evade your obligation, you are subject to prosecution.
If you are driving a car which is involved in an accident, you are promptly tagged as an organ donor – any organs you can lose without actually killing you (part of your liver, a kidney, bone marrow) can be removed from your body without your consent and donated to someone who needs them. If you resist, you will be prosecuted, jailed, and your organs removed anyway. If the person who needed your kidney or your liver dies because you resisted, you are prosecuted for murder, executed, and all your organs become available.
And of course, if you die, no worries about getting your consent or your family’s consent – if you have a driving license, that doubles as an organ donor card.
How about it, Harald: is this the law you would like to see imposed on everyone in the US with a driving license?
Harald: Let’s extend your analogy a little further. The life support connection between the woman and the unconcious person is, as you say, crude. So crude, in fact, that it fails in the first few days in up to 80% of cases. Even if the first few days are passed successfully, there’s still quite a high chance, maybe 10-20% of failure (that is, 10-20% of the 20% who survive the first few days will die later in the process without ever becoming concious.) Furthermore, traffic is so terrible that essentially everyone can expect to be in an accident once in their lives that will require this set up. So, in effect, 80+% of people are dying because of the inefficient life support provided. What would you be willing to do about it? Would you be willing to devote your life to researching ways to improve the life support techniques in order to improve survival? Would you expect the NIH to spend most or all of its budget on such research? Would you expect the government to fund the NIH at very high levels in order to improve the survival rate as quickly as possible/ Would you expect private foundations to spring up to increase funding, perhaps to provide funding for ideas that are too high risk for the government to bother with yet might lead to dramatic improvements? Would you use your money to fund such a program?
I’m a medical researcher. My field is cancer and blood research. But if, say,a mutant avian flu came through and started killing 80% of the population, I would cheerfully abandon my usual research in order to work on treatment/prevention measures to stop the pandemic. I would expect the government to fund all researchers doing so to the point that the Pentagon got jealous. I would expect private citizens to want to donate money and time to the endeaver.
Up to 80% of concepti die within the first few days after conception, usually after failing to implant. A fair number of the survivors fail later in the pregnancy. Yet I’ve never heard of any pro-lifer dedicating his or herself to finding a cure or preventative for these miscarriages and failed implantations. Why don’t they? If abortion is murder then surely miscarriage is pandemic illness. Why is it not important? Perhaps because you don’t really believe in the personhood of a morula?
I expected you would accuse me of dodging your question Jes, that’s why I indicated in my post just where my answer was.
To repeat: Yes. If you drive a car, I say you implicitly take the responsibility that if you cause an accident, and you’re the only one who can help, then you have a duty to help. Whether it’s with a kidney or not. If other people can, it’s a little more complex, we can take that another time.
If you drive a car, I say you implicitly take the responsibility that if you cause an accident, and you’re the only one who can help, then you have a duty to help. Whether it’s with a kidney or not.
So, you are in favor of the law changing so that if you have a driver’s license, the state has a right to take organs you can spare to help people who need them – one of your kidneys, regular pints of blood, etc? And prosecuting you for murder if you resist donation? It’s all very Larry Niven, and quite hard to take seriously: it’s notable that the anti-choice brigade are invariably in favor of these horrendous sacrifices to be made by other people – never by themselves.
Harald: I notice you’re dodging my question. What are you willing to do about the failed implantation pandemic going on around you? Are you willing to donate money, time, or body parts (probably blood, maybe sperm, less likely other tissue) towards finding a cure?
Harald, not to gang up on you, but here’s my question: You say to hilzoy that “it is not our plans and projects that make us valuable, that give us a “self”.” So then, what *does* make us valuable? In particular, what makes the life of a non-sentient clump of cells with human DNA more worth preserving than the life of a fully-sentient farm animal?
And of course, along with that, are people without plans or projects now disposable?
Correction, because I think this is the nub of it:
We talk about organ donation, blood donation. The change to the law proposed, which would make owners of driving licenses compelled by law to surrender pints of blood or non-essential organs while living, and make their cadavers publicly available after their death, would remove that concept of donation completely. No such thing as an “organ donor” any more, or a “blood donor” – not when the state makes it a legal requirement backed up with courts and jail if you don’t surrender parts of your body to whoever needs them. Larry Niven wrote a sequence of stories in which the most trivial criminal offense meant that a criminal got the death penalty and went to the organ banks: a idea which seems to have come true in China, where executed criminals are – it is reported – used for “organ donation”.
I carry an organ donor card. I used to donate blood regularly. I stopped because the veins in my arms were collapsing, and I thought I might need them at some point. I do believe in the principle that once I’m dead, I’m dead, and my organs might as well be of some use to someone else.
But: I cannot say how profoundly I object to the idea that people can be forced by law even to donate blood – the most renewable of organs. Let alone that someone should be forced to undergo surgery and lose a kidney or half a liver or fertile eggs. Or, of course, that any woman should be forced to endure unwanted pregnancy or be compelled through unwanted childbirth. My body belongs to me – as yours does to you. Despite your arguing for just that, I cannot feel it right that the police should be allowed to arrest you, hand you over to a surgeon, and have one of your kidneys removed, without your consent ever having been asked – but just because you drive a car. You may think that in principle you’d have no problem with this – but in practice, I suspect you are thinking that you would voluntarily donate a kidney to help a stranger, and have not thought through the difference it would make if you were not asked to voluntarily donate your kidney, but simply arrested, anesthetised, and a kidney removed without your consent ever having been asked.
Jes: You conveniently removed the italics when you quoted me. I said that yes, you have implicitly agreed to help when you cause an accident __and no one else can help__. Then you have a clear duty, meaning it’s reasonable to make it illegal to not help. If others can help, we have more options, and you can do your duty implicitly through paying your taxes, insurance or whatever.
That is not the same as saying the state should force someone to donate, only that it should severely sanction those who don’t. If you are refusing to help in a situation as described, you are violating a pretty important social contract, so of course there are consequences.
Diana, I am not dodging your question, just answering an earlier post first. (How many posts are there on this old thread by now? 200?)
What you must understand is that I have never disagreed with hilzoy about what makes us sad. The death of someone I don’t know in China does not provoke the same reaction in me as the death of a beloved pet (not that I approve of holding pets), or even the death of one of my Sims, if I accidentaly get attached to them the way the game creators want me to (not that I play the Sims). Millions of zygotes die a natural death, I don’t know them or what they would have become, so I’m not sad. But if I thought I had a chance of saving them, I might well have tried, because I realize that they are what I am, just like the unknown chinese (and unlike the Sim, or the pet).
But unless you have entered into an agreement of some sort, informal or formal, or incurred an obligation to someone, I don’t believe there is a duty to save someone’s life. I might want to, nonetheless. For emotional reasons, if nothing else. Those are strong for you, Diana, wrt. bird flu, but to me and other pro-life people, dying from failed implantation is similar to someone I don’t know dying from natural causes or old age. If I had a cure, or a hope for one, I might give it a try. Since I don’t, I will not worry about it.
Why do I worry about abortions then? Because I worry more about the killers than the killed.
That is not the same as saying the state should force someone to donate, only that it should severely sanction those who don’t.
Huh? If the state is severely sanctioning those who don’t donate blood or organs, of course they are forcing people to surrender blood/organs – the “severe sanctions” you envisage are their means of forcing them to do so.
Just as a state that “severely sanctions” women who choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is trying to make use of women’s bodies against their will, and this is as unacceptable to me as it would be were you forced to “donate” a kidney because you drive a car, someone needed a kidney transplant, and you were the only healthy “donor” who could supply one.
Harald: Why do I worry about abortions then? Because I worry more about the killers than the killed.
So this gross and abhorrent abuse of women who decide to terminate unwanted pregnancies (it is disgusting to call a woman who decides to abort a “killer”) is motivated, you claim, by “worry” for these women?
You don’t realize, evidently, how unconvincing it sounds to insult someone and claim you’re only abusing them because you worry about them.
Telling someone that what they do is wrong, is that gross and abhorrent abuse?
Although some don’t seem to believe it, I do in fact mean what I say.
Would you make it a general rule that people should hide their beliefs to comfort those who they believe are doing something terrible? You’re not exactly an icon of non-confrontation yourself, you know.
By the way, it is usually the doctors who are the killers. To me, a general who commands soldiers to kill is not a killer. He is not technically responsible for murder. However, he is responsible for asking people to kill, which is just as bad. A woman who requests abortion is in a similar position.
I realise that sometimes, both asking to kill and killing is understandable – so I don’t call someone a killer to insult them. However, killing is never justifiable.
It was mentioned above, and you know it well if you have a whit of personal experience with these things, that women who have abortions regret it way more often than women who don’t. Don’t you worry about these women? The large group, who by all measures make the wrong choice?
The apothesosis of the idea that people don’t have the right to make decisions about their own bodies: let the poor sell the rich their organs.
It was mentioned above, and you know it well if you have a whit of personal experience with these things, that women who have abortions regret it way more often than women who don’t.
It was mentioned, yes: it’s a standard invention by anti-choicers, based on no real data. All the women I know who have had abortions have never regretted it: all the women I know who had a baby and gave the baby up for adoption have since regretted it.
Don’t you worry about these women? The large group, who by all measures make the wrong choice?
Well, for starters; we actually have no idea how many women who have abortions later regret having the abortion. Despite the lies of anti-choicers claiming otherwise, there is only anecdotal evidence, the plural of which is not data. Anti-choicers can come up with a handful of women who say they made the wrong choice: many, many more women say they know they made the right choice. This isn’t data, but the anecdotal information, as well as logic and morality, is firnly on the side of being pro-choice.
For the women who think that they should not have chosen to have an abortion: I am feel for them, as I feel for the women who think they should have chosen to have an abortion rather than have a baby to give him/her up for adoption. As I would feel for a woman who donated a kidney and regretted it later, or didn’t donate half her liver and regretted that later. But adults get to make our own choices – and regret them.
You’ve argued that car drivers shouldn’t be allowed to make a choice about handing over blood or kidneys at need – or, once they die, being dissected for other organs. You’ve argued that women shouldn’t be allowed to make a choice about staying pregnant or giving birth. You seem to feel that people don’t own our own bodies – that organs belong to the community, and the use of them is to be determined by law and government, not individual choice. I think this is repulsive.
“You seem to feel that people don’t own our own bodies – that organs belong to the community, and the use of them is to be determined by law and government, not individual choice. I think this is repulsive.”
What do you think about research with fetal tissue?
In abortion the question of individuals comes down to a question of which individuals count under the law.
What do you think about research with fetal tissue?
If the fetal tissue is donated by the woman, I don’t have a problem with it. It’s her fetus: her choice.
In abortion the question of individuals comes down to a question of which individuals count under the law.
Yes, and somehow for some people, it appears fetuses count as individuals, and women don’t.
Speaking of which: New ‘Anti-Abortion Pill’ Kills Mother, Leaves Fetus Alive.
By the way, ‘Forensic Vagina Inspectors’ sounds like the title of a Ron Jeremy motion picture.