I was just thinking there was something especially weird about that Wilkow rant against abortion. He’s asked whether life begins at conception, and he replies with an irksomely stupid question of his own: “…scientifically speaking, when a sperm and egg comes together, what happens? Is death created?” The caller who asked the question is stumped and avoids it, unfortunately, but it’s an interestingly bad reply.
I was a bit baffled by it at first myself, until I realized what Wilkow is hoping for: that the person would answer “no”, and then he could triumphantly declare that therefore he was right, life is created at fertilization. It’s a beautiful example of the bifurcation, or false dichotomy, fallacy—and it’s given an extra special dash of pretentiousness with that clause, “scientifically speaking”. I thought of a few ways it could be answered.
- Yes, death is created. Before fertilization, there is a living egg and a living sperm, two live cells. After fertilization, there is one live cell, the zygote. Mathematically speaking, one cell must have been destroyed. Therefore, fertilization kills. End the slaughter! Contraception for all!
- I would add that what also happens is that before fertilization, there is a huge spherical egg that has been leeching off the products of hardworking follicle cells in the ovary, and an active, independent, motile sperm. After fertilization, the sperm is gone, and what’s sitting there is a fat, bloated, spherical cell that is going to wander off and parasitize the uterus. Patriarchally speaking, we should realize that the ovum must have destroyed the sperm. We can probably work the words “welfare queen” in here and really spark some outrage.
- Cytologically speaking, two cells merge membranes and metabolisms to produce a functioning unit which is still carrying out mostly the same chemical processes. It’s not magical, and people fuse cells in the lab all the time. If by living you mean metabolically active, there is no change, only continuity. The question makes no sense, sir; do you claim to have the power to create life? Are you also going to admit that a hybridoma technician therefore has created life?
- Forensically speaking, what has happened is that the egg has been imprinted with daddy’s unique, identifiable DNA signature—think of it as your penis mischievously and indelibly scrawling your name on a baby. If you’re going to oppose abortion, you might want to think about criminalizing paternity testing and child support payments first. Doing it afterwards is just too obvious.
- Genetically speaking, at fertilization two living haploid cells fuse to form one living diploid cell. Nothing is killed, and there is no new life created. There is a change in state that begins a long, slow process of replication and differentiation that might culminate in about a decade and a half with the maturation of a functional gonad that can produce new haploid germ cells, most of which will be thrown away.
- Developmentally speaking, fertilization is one transition state among many. It’s a major bottleneck and an incredibly wasteful process—the overwhelming majority of gametes fail to fuse—but even when fertilization occurs, Nature is quite cavalier about throwing the whole thing out and requiring us to start again. Other major events in which an error can negate all prior processes are implantation, gastrulation, neurulation, birth, and learning to drive. It’s awfully silly to privilege one event among many as the sole source of humanity, I would think; if it’s mere priority that focuses interest on fertilization, the two meiotic divisions that produce the gametes came first, and that’s also a delicate and critical process. Perhaps you should worship the gonad rather than fertilization…?
The rest of Wilkow’s incoherent rant is just simple fury at being asked to answer this “dilemma”: if a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic, who do you save — a Petri dish with five blastula or a two year-old child?. The interesting thing about the question is that it isn’t a matter of coming up with the correct answer, but that the notion that it is any kind of dilemma at all is the distinguishing factor. There is no question in most sensible people’s minds that you save the child; the dish simply isn’t a factor. It’s the crazies who think that in principle there is a difficult decision to make, although I suspect that in practice they wouldn’t hesitate to save the kid, anyway.
As an equal opportunity rationalist, though, I have to give those crazies a perfectly reasonable answer that they can use to defuse the conflict. Pulling a dish full of embryos out of their nice warm 37°C incubator and running down a hallway, sloshing them about and contaminating the medium with who knows what, is going to kill the embryos anyway. You can’t just keep these things alive for long in a dish on your kitchen table, you know. So, please, anti-abortion nutcases, if you’re ever in that unlikely situation, the little toddler is the only one you can save, so get her out, OK? You can have a nice memorial service for the petri dish later.
You missed the obvious: for every sperm that successfully fertilizes an ovum, something like a billion (give or take an order of magnitude) of its brethren die — some, apparently even sacrificing themselves to give the lucky one a better chance. Every act of love is an unparalleled holocaust! The horror! (And it goes without saying that contraception and self-pleasuring are Right Out….)
(cue the obvious Monty Python song…..)
To me, the most obvious point against ‘life begins at conception’ is that only 70% of all fertilisations that occur fail, and 50% of all fertilisations occur and fail without anyone knowing.
Where is the uproar?
I think this is a point that many people arent aware of.
“Pulling a dish full of embryos out of their nice warm 37°C incubator…is going to kill the embryos anyway.”
Shhhh…that gives them an out!
Let’s not forget that simply leaving the embryos in a freezer kills them slowly. If every life is precious, Wilkow should be begging women to serve as surrogates before these “children” die a horrible death from freezer burn.
Mike Stark handled Wilkow’s challenge very badly. As you alluded to above, he should have answered it with the simple question, “Aren’t the sperm and egg alive already?” instead of trying to answer it.
I think the obvious answer to what happens at fertilization is that a new human life begins, but there is no “person” there. The same situation that we have at brain death, like Terri Schiavo.
None of this answers the central question. At what point do you begin to view the developing human as person worthy of some legal protection? Never before birth? Somewhere before birth but late in pregnancy? What sort of moral reasoning do you use to arrive the “right” answer?
Testing…there was some tinkering behind the scenes that screwed up commenting. I hope it’s all better now.
Once they’ve moved out of home and have a paying job?
The answer to jfk’s question is — you stop focusing on ‘when does life begin’ (as far as I know, it began once, millions of years ago). Instead, you focus on individuation — when do you have a new individual person, rather than a part (technically) of a pre-existing person.
Yes, this is still difficult to decide, but it at least makes it possible to reason about the issue.
For me, individuation occurs when the fetus is capable of indpendant survival.
What about cases of assisted survival? Fine by me, but how does that impact the decision making process?
If a woman wishes to terminate a pregnancy, she may do so up to the point where the fetus is viable. If a medical practitioner chooses to assist the viability ‘prematurely’, fine — but the expense is theirs as is all responsibility. The woman is out of the picture — she’s removed the fetus, the non-human being, and is done with it.
What happens next is somebody else’s problem.
hugs,
Shirley Knott
Abortion — not just a right, a responsibility.
On the Evangelical Outpost — the home of willfully ignorant morons of the lowest stripe — the fertility clinic conundrum question was raised and it was fascinating to watch the fundies dodge.
Instead of a petri dish, put the embryos in a thermos and simply specify that a freezer is waiting outside the clinic.
They simply refused to answer, coming up will sorts of “objections” to the hypothetical.
It’s a really great way to expose the loonies.
You can even sharper it up — make it ten five year olds and a thermos filled with a 1000 frozen embryos.
Or 500 frozen embryos and 50 black teenagers.
Or 1 frozen embryos and 2 babies with incurable spina bifida.
Or 3 frozen embryos that were set aside because they comprised horrible genetic diseases and 3 comatose Jews.
Loads of fun with the fundies!!!!!!!
You’re trying to apply that black&white logic to a levels of gray problem.
There is no “point”. Humanity is an emergent condition that arises gradually over the course of development.
I think setting the bar at fertilization is stupid and demeaning. I think bundling 5 year olds in a burlap bag with some rocks and throwing them in the river is criminal and evil. The line should be drawn somewhere in between, and I think reasonable people can disagree on where that line should be, to some degree.
Personally, I don’t think babies become people until some time after birth. I’m content with the idea that they aren’t persons requiring legal protection before they are capable of some level of autonomy outside the womb (and that’s another gray area!)
There is no question in most sensible people’s minds that you save the child; the dish simply isn’t a factor.
The point of this riddle is to expose the fact that nobody believes that taking a morning after pill is the same thing as offing a six year old. The pro-life people don’t really believe that a blastocyst is a person, and this question highlights that fact. Nobody is firebombing fertility clinics or demanding that fertility drugs be made illegal, even though the use of lab techniques or drugs leads to “excess” embryos.
This is not, and never has been, about abortion. If it were about abortion, these people would leading the charge in providing contraception education and access to young people. There would be condoms in every evangelical pew. They would be working to prevent unwanted pregnancies, which would in turn reduce the number of abortions. That’s not what this is about. It’s about controlling women’s sexual behavior.
(Thanks for explanation of bacterial mutation. I slept soundly that night because of it.)
There may not be a “point” that is defensible as a scientific conclusion, but from a legal or political perspective – yes there is and must be a clearly defined point at which individual rights begin to exist under the law. If I understand your last paragraph, you are saying that a newborn baby ought to have no greater legal protection from harm than a fertilized egg?
Life began for me last January when I turned 40. And I have a coffee mug to prove it!
What sort of moral reasoning do you use to arrive the “right” answer?
Roe’s was pretty good, actually. The state has no interest in the developing human until viability. Another thing that everybody agrees on, but nobody who they put on television will say is that the longer the period of development, the more uncomfortable we are with terminating a pregnancy.
You certainly can’t declare an unborn child a citizen (although they do get Medicaid benefits before birth). That raises all kinds of problems involving, among other things, involuntary servitude.
As long as we’re arbitrarily imposing sharp boundaries on a continuum, sure, I think birth is a better marker than fertilization.
“…Scientifically speaking, when a sperm and egg comes together, what happens? Is death created?”
Well, yes. If “life” is created, then death is created too, since the moment that life exists it starts to die. (Insert zen pause here.) One could argue that the death is only a “potential,” but as anti-abortionists love to claim, a “potential” life is a “life” to them, so therefore…
PZ Myers:
a levels of gray problem
apologize for my ignorance, but does’t an embryo go through various rather well defined stages ?
I mean, where if it is a gastrula , it is 100% not zygote, so there is nothing like smooth borderless
overblend betweeen a zygote and a foetus, as between black and white.
.
Wouldn’t be making legal status dependent, say, of brain development, better than blurring everything into vague ‘shades of gray’ limbo ?
Especially, if the same approach works rather well for the other end of individual’s existence – death ?
I mean, crackpots claiming someone is alive till the last cell are much less common than ones saying someone is alive form the first cell on…
For me this has always been pretty easy: no personality = no person. Since the brain structures that support personality don’t even develop until the third trimester, I don’t see any issue until then. Viability is a side issue.
[Awkward Transition]
Could it be that the fundies have some unrecognized assumption that genetic uniqueness is entanled with ensoulment? Would it be a lesser crime or sin of murder to kill an identical twin? Maybe this is related to how disturbed they get about human cloning. If they just looked at it differently, this could be a morally free source of slaves and cannon fodder.
On Topic: Rich Little had a routine where Reagan was asked at what point a fetus should be considered a human being: “When it votes Republican.”
Off Topic: How many errors can we find in this story…
Human Quadripeds Found in Turkey
related to the concept of evolution. It is interesting how the “missing link” meme still pervades human evolutionary discussions. Personally, I think these poor people are unlikely to tell us any more about our ancestors than JoJo the Dog Faced Boy. It does make good news copy though.
I think it more likely to be someting like when the genetic defect that cause progeria was finally mapped it turned out to be mostly unrelated to changes seen in typical aging. Interesting but ultimately not that significant.
I find this debate rather difficult for numerous reasons, but the ultimate point of the matter is that the pro-life group want control. They want control over how women make decisions and having women make a decision without a man being required bothers them no end. As a man myself, I’ll never have to make a decision regarding abortion (thankfully) and I’ll certainly never oppose someone else wanting that choice.
As for when ‘life’ occurs I don’t see the particular point of the ‘life begins at fertilisation nonsense’. It’s still just as much of a ‘potential’ life as it was when it was just egg and sperm (all potential lives themselves). A blastocyst is not a ‘certain person’ until its firmly embedded and accepted in the uterine wall.
It’s much later on in a pregnancy, when the fertilised egg of a while ago is now more like a human being with fully formed features, that I think an abortion should not be allowed. That’s getting pretty late into a pregnancy and the baby could probably even survive if it was delivered at that time too.
But before independant survival from the woman I think it’s very much a part of her. As long as it is a part of her body it is her decision as to what to do with it. Nobody has the right to take that decision from someone.
I think this misses the obvious point — who cares if life is created? We happily kill living things all the time (humburger anyone)? His trick is not speaking “human” before life and leaving it implicit to confuse things. When you add it in explicitly, the real arguments on both sides are revealed.
Pro-life: sperm are not human, eggs are not human, when they fuse they are human.
Pro-choice: bollocks.
Soylent green eh B. Murray?
Doesn’t the Bible say that not only are you allowed to kill your children, you are OBLIGATED to BY GOD if they are disobedient?
Therefore, the fundies should be decriminalizing murder, as long as it’s your own children that you kill, and that they were talking back at the time.
“scientifically speaking, when a sperm and egg comes together, what happens? Is death created?”
Scientifically speaking, when two slices of bread, a slice of cheese, and a slice of tomato come together, what happens? Is death created?
No?
Well then I guess life must be created.
Oh, wait, nevermind. A sandwich is created…
I would just like to ask that Joseph O’Donnell use Pro-Choice and Anti-Choice.
In this debate as in most debates, it is a matter of framing.
I don’t believe anyone is “pro-death”…. You either believe in a woman’s right to choose (Pro-choice) or you don’t (Anti-choice)
I believe it is unfortunate when the term “pro-life” is ceded.
Actually that is fair enough Lorlee and I was just following accepted ‘definitions’ of what groups like to call themselves. In reality, I don’t really think the ‘pro-life’ group are really all they are cracked up to be morally. A true ‘pro-life’ group would be just as opposed to the destruction of embryos from artificial fertilisation methods as they would to abortion.
Fetuses don’t become people, legally-speaking, until they’re born alive. I don’t think we need to have special laws to protect fetuses — though perhaps there should be special criminal charges and punishments for assaulting or harming that part of a pregnant woman’s body (i.e., the fetus that is part of her), which would reinforce the idea that fetuses do have special value (especially to the person carrying the fetus), but are neither legally nor morally persons in their own right.
The question “when does life begin” is just a ploy used by anti-abortionists and those opposed to stem cell research to obfuscate the real questions: when it is okay to kill a living thing, and do adults have the right to consent to the creation and destruction of their own body tissues?
I’ll happily concede that human totipotent, pluripotent, and multipotent stem cells are all forms of human life, as are embryos and fetuses, and children and grown-folk. But most of us have intuitions about the varying values of various forms of human life, and an alarming proportion of us think it’s okay to kill (or allow to be killed) children and adults in wars, and to execute people who’ve committed certain crimes. And some of us believe that it’s not okay to kill children or adults, but that human life that has not developed into a live-birth baby can be killed or destroyed, when the sexually-mature person who is gestating that life choses to abort her pregnancy. Some of us also think it’s morally acceptable and would like to make it legal for adults to donate their tissues for the intentional creation of stem cell lines, which requires the destruction of a fetilized ova (this is currently illegal in Canada).
So the question shouldn’t be “when does life begin”, but rather, “when does consent to destroy life begin”? Perhaps if fetuses were standing in the way of American control of oil-producing nations, then Republicans would say it’s okay to kill them.
“A true ‘pro-life’ group would be just as opposed to the destruction of embryos from artificial fertilisation methods as they would to abortion.”
And against the dealth penalty. Im curious if anyone who has the stats on the % of pro-life that are pro-dealth-penalty. I’d guess thats there would be a high correlation.
Posted by: Lorlee Bartos:
I believe it is unfortunate when the term “pro-life” is ceded.
Thanks for this observation Lorlee. The Right has knowledgeably framed the discourse by setting the vocabulary without opposition for so long:
“Qupotas” for Affirmative action, “Pro Life” for people who are mostly pro death penalty etc.
I wish I could popularize some anti-Right formulations: “Anti-Choice” is good. How about “Judicial Murder” for Capital Punishment? Police State Implementation” for Homeland Security?
Does anyone have other suggestions?
> “Is death created?”
Yes, that’s exactly what he was hoping for – to create a false dichotomy.
My thought at the time was, “the sperm and the egg are both alive before conception and they are both alive afterwards. There is no life or death created.”
The rest of his rant was merely his way of dodging the question. For example, he asks the caller if he had two children and could only save one of them, what would he do? Of course, the caller would likely regard each child as equally valuable, and therefore, a hard question to answer. On the other hand, the caller setup the situation of *5* blastula versus one toddler. If the wingnut really wants a comparible situation he should say, “You can save five children or one child”. Most people would quickly decide to save the five, so why can’t he choose to save the five blastula? Of course, he doesn’t want to create a comparible situation. In light of the fact that he gets enough ratings to stay on the air, the whole thing is rather depressing. I would hope that people would laugh this wingnut off the air for his childish abuse of logic. I can’t help but wonder how many idiots were behind this wingnut going, “yeah, you sure did prove that caller wrong!”
I think the best thing the wingnut could’ve said was, “save the toddler”. Then he could say that although the blastula aren’t given equal value to a living human being, they are significant enough to be protected by pro-life laws. The problem is that most pro-lifers don’t want to admit that no one in their right mind would consider blastula to be of equal value to a living human being. There is a deep flaw in their thinking that they don’t want to acknowledge.
I think trying to apply nebulous terms like soul and personality do not help in assessing the science behind the issue. The scientific role is to establish when the fetus is viable; and viability in this case is the ability to live independently. If we push, this would imply the period immediately following birth. (Note that this does not speak to couples that seek to enable a fetus to be viable prior to birth; nor does it allow the perfidy that the state establishes other criteria)
The problem is with the supreme court decisions that allow a woman’s choice only to the second trimester probably failed to address either the biological or theological positions adequately, and pulled a King Solomon when may be they should not have. What they did was to trespass into an area of science where science should have the last word.
Although I am 80% certain that the current SCOTUS will deny woman a constitutional right to abortion, I however imagine a shit storm if they deny that there is a right to privacy in the constitution. The South Dakota legislature must be full of congenital idiots not to see the implication. And if they affirm the right, expect Bush, if still in office, to be impeached.
Mike
What’s cute is, if you read the history of the pro-life movement, they readily and happily accepted the findings of modern embryology to butress their claims that the fertilized egg is uniquely human. Prior to that, the embryo was thought to go through the vegetable and animal stages (ala Aristotle) before becoming human, at the quickening (first detection of fetal movement).
What’s ironic is that although these scientific advances were accepted and used to rationalize religious and secular policies against abortion in the US, the same acceptance was never available to Darwin and later evolutionary ideas.
Evangelicals are very haphazard in what scientific findings they accept and integrate into their world views. Perhaps if the evo/devo wars had occured in 1860 rather than 1990, their outlook on the human sould would be completely different.
I think trying to apply nebulous terms like soul and personality do not help in assessing the science behind the issue. The scientific role is to establish when the fetus is viable; and viability in this case is the ability to live independently. If we push, this would imply the period immediately following birth. (Note that this does not speak to couples that seek to enable a fetus to be viable prior to birth; nor does it allow the perfidy that the state establishes other criteria)
The problem is with the supreme court decisions that allow a woman’s choice only to the second trimester probably failed to address either the biological or theological positions adequately, and pulled a King Solomon when may be they should not have. What they did was to trespass into an area of science where science should have the last word.
Although I am 80% certain that the current SCOTUS will deny woman a constitutional right to abortion, I however imagine a shit storm if they deny that there is a right to privacy in the constitution. The South Dakota legislature must be full of congenital idiots not to see the implication. And if they affirm the right, expect Bush, if still in office, to be impeached.
Mike
What I find fascinating about the life-begins-at conception debate is, as it has been pointed out, the great number of fertilized eggs that never make it. In fact, I have read that some single-embryo in vitro procedures have a better record than natural fertilization. I have used this fact to argue that if pro-lifers have serious convictions that life begins at conception, then they have to take birth control until they want to have kids, and then conceive by a more reliable in vitro method. That way they would minimize the number of fertilized eggs lost.
The response has been less than positive. Besides one Catholic saying that in vitro fertilization is an evil unto itself (wow), they usually conclude that my proposition is absurd. Yes. It is. That’s the point! Their belief leads to absurd conclusions. A local pro-life student group has ignored my requests for one of them to come on my show and debate me. :)
They are all about preserving a certain ‘natural’ reproduction where the decision-making is kept out of human hands. Belief systems that remove human reason, in my book, are an evil unto themselves. If someone ‘rescued’ the petri dish, and left the 2-year old to die, they should be prosecuted. That’s like putting off treatment for a baptism that results in a child’s death.
Scientifically speaking, life begins at 40!
(Meaning I’m still -8 years old!)
georgia10 over at DailyKos illustrates the fact that even the wingnuts in SD don’t believe that an embryo is a child, and that aborttion is murder.
The penalty for an abortion is five years, a class 5 felony. Murder is a class A or B felony, involving much longer terms.
Now, just to make things clear, South Dakota classifies the unlawful killing an unborn child as “fetal homicide”, a Class B felony (S.D. Codified Laws Ann. � 22-16-1.1 22-16-1.1). So if a husband, knowing his wife is a few weeks pregnant, beats her up and causes her to miscarry, he’s guilty of fetal homicide, a Class B felony punishable with a very, very long time in jail. Yet if a doctor performs an abortion, he gets a maximum of five years in prison.
The woman involved is not charged with any crime. This is clear, unmistakeable evidence that this whole “abortion is murder” has been a lie all along. They don’t believe a two year old is the same as a 16 cell blastocyst. As I said above, they never did believe this. It has been a lie all along.
“Would it be a lesser crime or sin of murder to kill an identical twin?”
There’s another one to hang them on. If ensoulment occurs at fertilization, and since twinning occurs long after fertilization, why do fundy churches baptize twins separately? Why do they have funerals for each individual twin?
Here’s what I’ve been wondering — if the fundies really feel a non-viable fetus has the same rights as an independent, already-born human, and in fact is considered a whole, separate child from the mother, could you then claim the fetus as a dependent and take the deduction on your 1040? And if so, what if the woman miscarries at some point? I would assume (not having children of my own yet) that the parents have already spent time and money on doctor’s visits, baby clothes and furniture, maybe even home improvement materials to remodel the baby’s room. After all, the deduction is on the books as some small measure of compensation for expenses in raising a child, so if the fetus is considered one, why couldn’t a couple claim said deduction, even if they do miscarry?
“you stop focusing on ‘when does life begin’ (as far as I know, it began once, millions of years ago)”
Exactly. And I think it’s illustrative to think further of the difficulties to both define ‘life’ and ‘when life began’. Some evolutionary processes (at least natural selection and environmental variation) was certainly present in the prebiotic soup long before ‘first life’ could be found. It seems much easier to look at a welldefined property of a process (‘viable foetus’, ‘first reproducing system’) than on an illdefined property of a system (‘life’, ‘first life’).
I thought I remember reading somewhere, and hopefully someone can confirm, that in the old testament, (which is the law being applied by the fundies, right?), a baby was not considered a “person” and named until a week went by. The opinion I read said this was because of infant mortality in those times.
IF that is correct, why does it not apply for them now?
I have long found the “life begins at conception” line perplexing, precisely because both the egg and sperm are most certainly alive prior to fertilization. This is sometimes countered with the assertion that the fertilized egg is unique and different from the parents, yet the sperm and egg are also unique and different from the parents. The best argument claims that there is some sort of continuity between the fertilized egg and the (eventual/potential) child that may result. As a result, I base my moral support for abortion rights on a claim that the rights of the (pregnant) woman are being weighed against the rights of the (potential) human being that is the result of fertilization. In my mind, the autonomy and rights of an adult female far outweigh any rights we might assign to a barely multicellular entity.
My personal comfort level (as opposed to recommended legal regime) goes a little something like this: first trimester — no moral qualms at all; second trimester — no moral qualms until viability has been reached…then slightly less comfortable, but really it’s the woman’s decision, and who am I to question it; third trimester — icky, but sometimes it’s clearly necessary to protect the health and welfare of the woman…and do you want the morality police second-guessing a woman and her doctor making these kinds of decisions, and if you’ve made it all the way to the third trimester, the circumstances surrounding the decision to terminate are probably highly tragic and do we really need to make her feel any worse? FWIW, my OB didn’t recommend the “Jewish” genetic screening panel (because only my husband is Jewish); when I saw a speciality to get the fancy 20 week ultrasound done, he recommended that we do it anyway, since genes don’t always announce “Hey! I’m Jewish! You’re a Tay-Sachs carrier!” But I couldn’t bear to contemplate what I would do with the results, since I could already feel fetal movement. So I never went through with it.
The notion that there is a sliding scale where the relative rights of the woman and the (potential) child must be weighed also provide a reasonable answer to the arguments about infanticide.
“…Wouldn’t be making legal status dependent, say, of brain development, better than blurring everything into vague ‘shades of gray’ limbo ?…
Posted by: T_U_T | March 7, 2006 11:48 AM”
But isn’t that also a “gray matter?” :-D
Sorry, I promise to eventually post something serious.
wswilso said:
Here’s another I’ve seen on other sites/blogs – “Forced Pregnancy Advocates“. I think that says it all.
Personally, I don’t understand why anybody believes that the “personhood” of the zygote/embryo/fetus is the least bit relevant to the subject of abortion. Even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that a fetus should have full individual human status, I still would support a woman’s right to end her participation in a pregnancy at any time and for any reason.
As a human being, I have the right (at least in my country), to refuse to donate my blood, organs, tissues, or life to any other human being. I have the right to refuse this even if I not longer need them (am dead). I have the right to refuse them if the being in question is my wife, parent, best friend, and even my own child. I have the right to refuse them even if the need was caused by my own negligence (a car accident for example). I have the right to refuse even when that negligence is criminal (drunk driving). And most importantly, I have that right even when I intentionally cause the damage that creates the necessity in a purposeful criminal act (I.E. If I shot you).
I see no compelling reason why having sex should cost a woman these rights. I see no compelling reason why a fetus should be granted rights that no born human being possesses.
There was an interesting article in the New Yorker a few months ago suggesting that Blackmun’s analysis of the development of a fetus used to determine when it becomes a potentially viable infant has held up remarkable well from a medical point of view.
I’m not fully conversant with the medical details, but the gist of the article was that even with the medical advances over the past thirty years, the trimester guidelines for abortion established under Roe vs. Wade are still appropriate.
Food for thought I suppose.
I personally take the view (with tongue firmly in cheek), that a Homo Sapien is only potentially human until s/he recognizes that other intelligences, with other motivations, exist. In other words, if you can’t imagine anyone thinking differently than you, you are not yet human. I know some mature members of the species Homo Sapien who aren’t human by that definition.
I’m willing to abide by Roe vs. Wade and give them the benifit of the doubt. After all, the potential is still there to think, even if they choose not to use it.
Cheers,
-Flex
It’s offensive that people think that without legislation women would be aborting third trimester pregnancies all over the place. As though there are not two adults involved, a doctor and a woman, who can make a moral decision. The women I know who have had abortions (most of the women know) had them done in first trimester because we aren’t monsters. The women I know who have had them later had serious complications with the pregnancies, including fetuses with no brains, etc.
To put the focus on trimesters, as though we are willy nilly running out there to have an 8 month old baby cut out us is just more anit-women.
Pro-choice or Anti-women. Those are the differences.
The analogy that is most accurate is one of bone marrow donor and reciever. All the marrow must be killed before transplant. A donor may change their mind all the way to the point of the procedure. IF they decide they can not do it after reciever’s marrow is gone they have effectively terminate this other person. But this other person still has no right to the donor’s marrow and the donor is not a murderer.
And yes, if Roe v Wade goes down it’s time to do paternity testing on EVERY CHILD BORN! and make sure the papa pay the money.
zombiedeathkoala:
If you live in Canada, then you may very well soon find yourself in a situation where unless you expressly opt-out beforehand, you will automatically become an organ donor should you die in hospital and your organs are still viable and harvestable.
p.s. a fetus can be regarded as a moral person and valued rather highly without suggesting that it has “full individual human status”, i.e., legal or moral personhood (consent, agency, legal standing as a person before the law). i happen to regard my cat as a person, and frankly i value him much more than i do some human persons i know.
“Personally, I don’t think babies become people until some time after birth.”
The average Homo sapiens can pass the rouge test at around 18 months. So they’re definitely people then. Like dolphins and some chimpanzees, both of which can also pass the rouge test. On the other hand, while passing the rouge test appears to be proof of sentience, does failing it prove non-sentience? Maybe animals and infants who don’t pass simply don’t want to remove the rouge from their forehead or can’t figure out what the mirror is all about, but do have an internal “I”.
Only peripherally related, but there is some evidence to suggest that a newborn baby is concious whereas a nine month old fetus is not: oxygen levels in the uterus may be too low to support cerebral cortex activity to the extent that concious thought is possible. So it may be that concious thought can only start after birth, regardless of whether or not the neural equipment is ready earlier.
“…Scientifically speaking, when a sperm and egg comes together, what happens? Is death created?”
Jake above beat me to this, but this question is beyond stupid.
Scientifically speaking, when you drive a nail into a board, what happens? Is death created? No? Then it must be alive. It’s Frankenboard!
Scientifically speaking, when you coat a wall with green paint, what happens? Do you have a black wall? No? Then you must have the opposite of a black wall, namely a white wall!
I mean, this is just the stupidest sort of “reasoning” I’ve ever heard.
If you live in Canada, then you may very well soon find yourself in a situation where unless you expressly opt-out beforehand, you will automatically become an organ donor should you die in hospital and your organs are still viable and harvestable.
No matter where you live, after you have donated tissue or blood you’re not allowed to take it back.
Slightly off topic, but a good question to ask those who believe souls are added as soon as fertilization takes place is “What about chimeras?” In this case, two seperately fertilized embryos merge and a single person is eventuall born (instead of fraternal twins). If each embryo has a soul, does the single person now have two? If not, where does the other one go? This could be great fun, try it out on your fundie friends. If they don’t believe you, refer em to this: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=412
…darth
“If you live in Canada, then you may very well soon find yourself in a situation where unless you expressly opt-out beforehand, you will automatically become an organ donor should you die in hospital and your organs are still viable and harvestable.”
That doesn’t bother me especially, since I’m already an organ donor. However, the real point is that the legislation you mention still allows the individual to “opt out.” It would still be illegal for anybody to use your organs or tissues against your wishes. Contrary to what many would have you believe, human women are more than capable of expressing their desire to “opt-out” of donating their uteruses.
“No matter where you live, after you have donated tissue or blood you’re not allowed to take it back.”
Of course not, and I don’t think any woman would want to “get back” the tissues that had already been used by the pregnancy she is aborting. I’ve yet to hear about a woman who asked to have her fetus ground up and shot back into her after the abortion.
However, you are permitted to refuse to continue donating. It’s not like after you give blood one time the Red Cross gains the right to come harvest your blood whenever they please. Donating a kidney once does not mean that you are suddenly obligated to continue donating organs for as long as there is somebody who needs one.
How about instead of trying to play the “when does life begin” game we acknowledge that if we consider ourselves capable of making the decisions for our family then we need to accord others the same respect.
Keeping abortion safe and legal doesn’t mean you have to have one. It just makes it possible for me, a married 41yo mother of 4 to make the very hard and frankly heartbreaking decision to have an abortion because having a 5th child would have been one of the worst things I can imagine happening to my family. Would I make the same choice today, two years later? Absolutely.
As I gear up, again, to oppose parental notification laws and to make my pro-choice stance absolutely clear to my state and federal representatives I find myself increasingly weary of the disrespect. You know – it’s that I’m assertive he’s agressive she’s a bitch crap. The “I’m capable of making well thought out and reasonable decisions for my family but my neighbors are a bit suspect and goodness knows those anonymous women? Obviously they don’t have a brain in their heads.”
As a commenter said on an earlier blog I don’t know why we aren’t rioting.
No abortion for me? No sex for you.
Brook
it’s clear to me the declaration of life at conception is an unsubstantiated edict, and the fight to deprive women control of their bodies using emotional appeals about abortion is a crude and manipulative ploy. both have powerful counterarguments, many of them presented above.
as others may have mentioned, to me, if abortion is murder as a consequence of the edict, then chemical and other contraceptive measures ought to be greatly encouraged. they are not, and that posture shows up the ploy.
but, like so many other issues in this public, noone listens to arguments or cares about fact. political positions become religious beliefs, and we’re ill with the idea that people having unassailable beliefs are strong. they who do not change, who cannot be convinced, are dead.
“Of course not, and I don’t think any woman would want to “get back” the tissues that had already been used by the pregnancy she is aborting. I’ve yet to hear about a woman who asked to have her fetus ground up and shot back into her after the abortion. ”
I think a woman should be allowed to use the pre-term products of conception (the fetus, umbilical chord) that have been removed from her body for say, stem-cell treatment for a disease she herself or any of her living children is suffering from. Why not? To suggest that ova and sperm are a kind of “tissue donation” to the zygote that is conceived is a very problematic statement. I’d prefer to stick to the idea that a fetus, while a “product” of sperm, is itself wholly in and of the woman’s body, and she can really do as she pleases with it, so long as she doesn’t harm a fetus that she intends to carry to term (there is a feeling that if a woman intends for a baby to live, that she has some duty not to harm it during its pre-natal development).
Opting-out for organ and tissue donation sounds well and good, but how would you like it if transactions in the business world were structured like that — would you be happy to pay whatever the cable company was charging you for a service you didn’t sign up for but is being provided by default unless you expressly opt-out? What about those who typically fall outside the health care system — are you going to send street outreach vans to ensure that homeless people have a chance to have their say in the opt-out campaign?
Well, that’s the whole point. They’re incandescent with rage that private citizens dare to make a moral decision–what if you make the wrong one, after all? Far better to let the “community” be your OB/GYN.
Chimeras forming from embryonic fusion have two souls.
Identical twins are the hard case. Its not clear whether each gets half a soul, or or one gets a soul and the other doesn’t.
And of course, it gets really weird over multiple generations of such splitting and fusing. I’m guessing there are some people walking around with 3/16 of a soul, and others with 2 1/4.
Naturally there’s a racial component to this. On average, black people seem to have at least 1.8x more soul.
There’re also many problems associated with claiming that a collection of cells has a ‘soul’. If I understand correctly, the Catholic Church (which is one of the biggest groups to oppose abortion and contraception) favors organ donation.
Organs need to be taken from mostly-functional bodies, as they’ll be ruined if general physiological failure lasts too long. It stands to reason that donating the organs of a brain-dead but otherwise healthy person would be “killing” them — and since the body surely isn’t associated with the brain, the entity being killed has a soul. Why, then, does the Catholic Church not condemn organ donation as murder? Surely it doesn’t matter if it saves a hundred people or not — isn’t still supposed to be murder?
One way of looking at the fetus versus child problem is a problem I used to present to my Drug Education classes (in south Dakota). After presenting information about the developmental problems associated with “recreational drug” use, I then asked a question about whether it is OK to give a 3 year old alcohol, crack, tobacco etc. Unanimous answer was NO. What should the consequences be for a parent be? Unanimous answer was prosecuction under child abuse statutes.
Is it OK for a pregnant mother to use drugs with known teratological effects? Unanimous answer is NO. What is to be done with the mother? Lock her up for child abuse? Quite a few said yes while the majority were inclined to heavily promote treatment programs (this was about 3-6 years post crack-baby hysteria since this was the focus of most people’s thoughts).
Then I tried to focus on alcohol and tobacco use and the issues of personal freedom/responsibility for the mother. Lock up pregnant women who smoke and drink? It’s child abuse isn’t it? In the end, this certainly applies to the issue of the “value” of a fetus compared to the value of a child and the way that society views each.
… and now for the utterly crude and gross, but applicable question for anti-abortion advocates: Should there be funerals for sexually active women’s menstrual products since there might be an unimplanted blastula somewhere in there?
Caledonian,
I’m no Catholic, but I think the argument is that “souls” are immortal, and actually exisit prior to being deposited into zygotes…imagine all those souls, waiting around in God’s parlour, bored to tears (which of course they can’t shed, since they have no eyes). Of course, if you believe this, when you kill a person you’re just killing their body, you’re not killing the soul, which is immortal — the issue that Catholics have is that with the exception of the Virgin Mary (who I have been told was baptized in-utero, which is why she was able to carry the Christ-fetus in a state of grace), babies don’t get baptized before they’re born, which means that un-baptized aborted fetuses don’t get to go to heaven.
Paul W.,
You’re a hoot. Keep ’em comin’.
Judy L: Fetuses don’t become people, legally-speaking, until they’re born alive
Unless it’s last name is Peterson. Or the mother is a casualty of the War on some Drugs.
Should there be funerals for sexually active women’s menstrual products since there might be an unimplanted blastula somewhere in there?
Someone’s being silly.
Remember how the fundies went nuts over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village” ? But watch them now insisting that a pregnant woman needs the guidance and oversight of the (political) society to make a moral decision.
These peoploe are utterly without principals: Anti abortion because life is sacred, and pro Judicial Murder (capital punishment) because life is sacred ?!?! Where is the principal here?
Some old Teacher said “Blessed are the poor.” His boastful followers support every policy to starve and oppress the poor today. There was just passed the third cut in subsidies for the elderly poor to pay their heating bills. Situational ethics of a particularly cynical sort.
I have asked rightwing xians to explain the principal to me of the state legislation passed in Colorado in response to the Columbine massacre that parents should be held harmless from prosecution for child abuse when they beat their children. Apparently society shouln’t interfere in intra family moral decisions — except abortion.
I’m confused just watching and listening. What must it be like to be inside the fun house.
While kicking around ideas about “soul” amongst intelligent, intellectually curious, rational people like those found here is fun, I think it is important to keep in mind that these are not good choices for arguments with true fundies/anti-choice advocates. First, unless you grew up fundi it is unlikely that you know the bible as well as they do, or at least as well as they think they do, so you lose. Second, even if you present one of the above dilemmas to them unless they are pretty much vacuous followers they can just make up a new answer because god says so (i.e. MAGIC HAPPENS). Even if you get one of the really dumb ones they’ll go ask Pastor what the right answer is and get the new Magical Revelation, so you lose.
But third, and most importantly, using these arguments cedes the ground of argument to them, putting you at a distinct disadvantage. By promoting this ground for argument you accept, a priori, that mysticism or magic should inform the debate. Using magic as the basis for laws is silly [heavy understatement here]. Discussion of a soul is irrelevant because it is unverifiable. This is, incidentally, the basis for my identification as none-of-the-above (I’ve got to come up with a catchier name) when people find out I’m not religious and ask if I’m an atheist or agnostic: none-of-the-above, an atheist believes that there is no god without ability to verify, and an agnostic wastes time wondering. There either is or isn’t, but you can’t know so why worry. Like worrying if you are going to die in a car accident today. Waste of time.
I love these silly ethical ‘what if…’ situations; they really do make us think about difficult situations. Clearly almost everyone at that burning fertility clinic would grab the toddler and leave the petri dish. Even those who honestly believe life begins at conception, and the reason why is interesting. They can be truly convinced of their doctrine, yet leave five to die and save just one, simply because we sympathise/empathise with the creature that looks like us, has eyes to stare at us, can talk and scream for help. It’s instinctive to grab the endangered child and we would do it automatically. Even if we believed what the pro-lifers believe. Such instincts are strong enough that I couldn’t even find it in my black and withered heart to accuse a pro-lifer of being untrue to his principles when he did this. Instead, I would say how we have evolved to help those of our fellows in distress, and real help for a real person, given when it is needed often overrules intellectual considerations – the same mechanism, in fact, that makes me assist my patients to get abortions, whatever my scruples about when life begins or doesn’t. I guess it would just mean that he and I are both equally imperfect!
Speaking of freezing blastula:
http://plif.andkon.com/archive/wc206.gif
When does a human become a grownup?
It’s self-evident that there’s no magic moment where BING! you instantaneously cease being a child and start being an adult, and that not everybody grows up at the same rate.
Laws have to recognise the huge gap between the typical two-year-old’s decision-making powers and the typical forty-year-old’s, and laws need to be based on objectively measurable criteria. So *legally*, adulthood begins at 18 (or 16, or 21, or menarche, or any of various other benchmarks societies have used over the millennia). But we rarely delude ourselves into thinking that intellectual or moral adulthood are neatly Boolean quantities that tick over on one’s birthday.
By the same token, we have to establish an age at which people become ‘human enough’ to be legally protected, whether that happens at conception, birth, or somewhere in between. But that does *not* mean we have to suppose that they really do transform from ‘non-alive’ to ‘alive’ or ‘non-human’ to ‘human’ at that moment.
Identical twins with half a soul each…
Chimeras with double souls…
Sheeesh! You Scientismists haven’t learned yerselves how to think outside your test tubes. You forgot about the omniscience factor! At conception God already knows which ones are going to be split into twins, so he adds an extra dollop of soul. He also knows which ones are going to merge, so He splits a single soul between them.
See! Now don’t you feel stupid for asking such simple questions about souls?
(One of my work colleagues suggested a different answer for the identical twin situation–noting that whenever you have identical twins, there’s always a good twin and an evil twin…
Guess which one gets the soul.)
All you guys are pretty silly. I’m beginning to think you lack the capacity for abstract thought. Maybe it should be called the delmar and pete blog.
This is what you’re suppose to be doing, OK? You’re supposed to be supporting a woman’s choice. If she chooses to have a baby or not, right? What kind of support are you giving when a woman chooses to have a baby and you’ve called it a leech? It lacks a soul?
You’re leaving out the fact that some woman really regretted having an abortion. What are you going to say to them? You’re leaving out so much of a real discussion. It’s not about making fun of a fetus. You sound so adolescence.
What about if a woman gets attacked and loses the baby? Should the attacker be held responsible? If so, why? Should she be held responsible if she takes drugs while pregnant and loses the baby?
A few posts back PZ put himself in the pants of a 17 year old girl (so to speak). He showed real empathy to her plight. You guys aren’t showing any here by just seeing how ridiculous you can get. Let’s try to top one another with nonsense.
NatureSelectedMe,
we’re taking a lighthearted look at the specious arguments and absurd mystical thinking of the religious. It helps to put the anti-abortionist arguments into perspective.
“This is what you’re suppose to be doing, OK?”
What makes you think that this discussion thread should exist to offer sympathy and support to pregnant women? Why should it be broadened to cover all the aspects of abortion that you demand? Re-read PZ’s post and you’ll see who’s on-topic. This whole thread exists because Wilkow was spouting nonsense.
Virge – I know, I let my annoyance get the better of me.
In three-dimensional space, human beings are seen as objects but in four-dimensional spacetime they are better envisaged as events – Heinlein’s “pink worms” – arrangements of matter and energy which form and develop over a brief period of time before eventually disintegrating.
Seen in those terms, the point at which an individual human life begins as an event is the point of conception, so, if there is an absolute ‘right to life‘, ending that process of development at any point after conception is a breach of that right.
If the right to life is not absolute but qualified or conditional then the circumstances under which a life may be ended are arbitrary choices.
Another point to bear in mind is that each human life is unique and utterly irreplaceable. There can never be another person occupying the same space and time; there can never be another you or me.
As an agnostic, I find myself opposed to abortion on the grounds I’ve outlined above: each individual human life is unique and irreplaceable; as an event, it begins at the moment of conception and we are not entitled to end it except under the most extreme circumstances. The fact that a mother might find a pregnancy inconvenient is not in itself a sufficient justification for ending it.
As an aside, it is the very uniqueness and irreplaceability of each human life that makes murder the worst crime one human being can commit against another and hence the one which should incur the most extreme penalty, that of capital punishment.
In three-dimensional space, human beings are seen as objects but in four-dimensional spacetime they are better envisaged as events – Heinlein’s “pink worms” – arrangements of matter and energy which form and develop over a brief period of time before eventually disintegrating.
Seen in those terms, the point at which an individual human life begins as an event is the point of conception, so, if there is an absolute ‘right to life‘, ending that process of development at any point after conception is a breach of that right.
If the right to life is not absolute but qualified or conditional then the circumstances under which a life may be ended are arbitrary choices.
Another point to bear in mind is that each human life is unique and utterly irreplaceable. There can never be another person occupying the same space and time; there can never be another you or me.
As an agnostic, I find myself opposed to abortion on the grounds I’ve outlined above: each individual human life is unique and irreplaceable; as an event, it begins at the moment of conception and we are not entitled to end it except under the most extreme circumstances. The fact that a mother might find a pregnancy inconvenient is not in itself a sufficient justification for ending it.
As an aside, it is the very uniqueness and irreplaceability of each human life that makes murder the worst crime one human being can commit against another and hence the one which should incur the most extreme penalty, that of capital punishment.
In three-dimensional space, human beings are seen as objects but in four-dimensional spacetime they are better envisaged as events – Heinlein’s “pink worms” – arrangements of matter and energy which form and develop over a brief period of time before eventually disintegrating.
Seen in those terms, the point at which an individual human life begins as an event is the point of conception, so, if there is an absolute ‘right to life‘, ending that process of development at any point after conception is a breach of that right.
If the right to life is not absolute but qualified or conditional then the circumstances under which a life may be ended are arbitrary choices.
Another point to bear in mind is that each human life is unique and utterly irreplaceable. There can never be another person occupying the same space and time; there can never be another you or me.
As an agnostic, I find myself opposed to abortion on the grounds I’ve outlined above: each individual human life is unique and irreplaceable; as an event, it begins at the moment of conception and we are not entitled to end it except under the most extreme circumstances. The fact that a mother might find a pregnancy inconvenient is not in itself a sufficient justification for ending it.
As an aside, it is the very uniqueness and irreplaceability of each human life that makes murder the worst crime one human being can commit against another and hence the one which should incur the most extreme penalty, that of capital punishment.
In three-dimensional space, human beings are seen as objects but in four-dimensional spacetime they are better envisaged as events – Heinlein’s “pink worms” – arrangements of matter and energy which form and develop over a brief period of time before eventually disintegrating.
Seen in those terms, the point at which an individual human life begins as an event is the point of conception, so, if there is an absolute ‘right to life‘, ending that process of development at any point after conception is a breach of that right.
If the right to life is not absolute but qualified or conditional then the circumstances under which a life may be ended are arbitrary choices.
Another point to bear in mind is that each human life is unique and utterly irreplaceable. There can never be another person occupying the same space and time; there can never be another you or me.
As an agnostic, I find myself opposed to abortion on the grounds I’ve outlined above: each individual human life is unique and irreplaceable; as an event, it begins at the moment of conception and we are not entitled to end it except under the most extreme circumstances. The fact that a mother might find a pregnancy inconvenient is not in itself a sufficient justification for ending it.
As an aside, it is the very uniqueness and irreplaceability of each human life that makes murder the worst crime one human being can commit against another and hence the one which should incur the most extreme penalty, that of capital punishment.
Ian,
exactly how do you get from
A. unique and irreplaceable, to
B. an absolute ‘right to life’?
Every carrot I eat is alive and unique and irreplaceable. I do not accept your non sequitur.
Rights are defined by convention. Are you really an agnostic? Or do you base your ideas of absolute rights on a system of beliefs that infected you and has left scars?
Other major events in which an error can negate all prior processes are implantation, gastrulation, neurulation, birth, and learning to drive.
As usual, I have nothing to add, but this was hilarious.
Wow, Shirley, you start out about individuation of (unspoken but assumed) humans and by the end of a short paragraph the (at least conceptually) individual human has turned into a ‘non-human.’
It’s no wonder that disabled people get nervous when people like you are around.
“…each individual human life is unique and irreplaceable;”
So was the human life that didn’t begin last month because I carelessly failed to get the oocyte I ovulated fertilized. Oops. For that matter so was the oocyte: unique, irreplacable, and completely human. Is it immoral to fail to conceive at every opportunity (whether the failure is due to abstinence or use of birth control)?
“as an event, it begins at the moment of conception and we are not entitled to end it”
Why? We end events all the time. Booting up the computer started an event. Should I never log off because that would be ending the event? In terms of the humanity of the conceptus, the earliest that one could conceivably imagine that a conceptus could possibly have any brain activity is the end of the embryonic period (though it’s probably really later). And the earliest it could possibly have any conciousness is about the 25th week (though it’s probably really later.) We allow relatives of people in persistent vegatative state to decide to withdraw care from the individual, even though that will cause their death. And the current definition of death is brain death–not the cessation of heartbeat, not the death of the last cell in the body, but when the brain no longer functions. Why should the definition for a zygote/embryo/fetus be any different?
Shirley Knott, the problem with the “independent survival” criterion is that it varies with the available technologies and techniques. Someday soon there will be completely artificial uteruses. Does that make abortion never permissable, as one could in principle remove the embryo and put it in such a thing? I am sympathetic to the survival criterion, but I don’t know how to exactify it.
wswilso, similar to the above: I agree that personhood develops, but where does it begin? What features do you select? Why?
zac: As far as I recall, the only major group that is “pro-life” but not “pro-death penalty” is Catholicism.
We got some serious conceptual difficulties among posters here.
A few days ago an embryo was equated to ‘scar tissue.’
Then Shirley decided an embryo doesn’t even share that little bit of humanity.
And wswilso asserts no personality=no person.
I had a friend who fathered a girl who had no personality. None, zero, zip, nada. He shot her.
I guess most posters here would have been cool with that.
(Keith, it is most amusing to hear Catholics of today claim to be against the death penalty. They used to be foursquare for it, as we were taught at Our Lady of the Assumption School.)
I think of myself as agnostic for the same reasons that Huxley gave for coining the term.
And I agree that human rights are freedoms, permissions, privileges which a society agrees to grant to its members.
In my view, there is no absolute right to life but the only circumstances in which the right can be set aside are where an individual is unlawfully threatening the right to life of another or where that person has already unlawfully taken the life of another.
An abortion is permissible where allowing the pregnancy to proceed would threaten the life of the mother because it is the lesser of two evils. The death of the mother would cause suffering to her husband, children, other relatives and friends. The death of the embryo or foetus would have no such effects.
And, yes, each carrot you eat is unique but it is not a human being and is therefore not entitled to human rights. Furthermore, no carrot is going to develop into an individual who can paint a Mona Lisa, compose an 1812 Overture, formulate a theory of evolution or devote their lives to caring for an ailing parent or sickly child. When you abort a foetus you might be preventing the development of of someone with such skills or attributes. We have no way of knowing. But we should allow a mother to destroy that potential, to kill the foetus, simply because it happens to be inconvenient to her at that time?
All we know is that each human being is unique and irreplaceable and should be valued on those grounds.
Harry, Harry, Harry…
What a wonderful game you play when you take what people say and use the ambiguous words in a completely different context, then draw an outrageously inaccurate conclusion i.e. “I guess most posters here would have been cool with that.”
You’re not fooling anyone but yourself with arguments like that. If you reject Shirley’s categorization of human vs non-human, then be so good as to tell us where you would draw the line and why. I’m guessing you wouldn’t save the Petri dish.
Ian,
Thanks for the clarification. The idea of “absolute rights” was my main sticking point. Since we both understand that human rights are conferred by human convention, we can agree to disagree on how those conventions should be formulated, e.g. we’ll continue to disagree on the specific stage of development of a new human at which we consider it entitled to our (current) definition of human rights.
Dianne wrote:
No, I am not arguing that every egg has a right to be fertilized, only that, once it has been, you have set in train a process of development which does not just lead to but is an integral part of the event which is an individual human life.
Are you arguing that the acts of switching off a computer and killing a human being are equivalent?
And if humanity is defined by electrical activity in the brain, where do you draw the line? How much electrical activity is necessary for someone to be human? How much is necessary to support consciousness? Is the brain and central nervous system of someone in a persistent vegetative state entirely devoid of electrical activity?
The question of when death has occured is a different matter. The withdrawal of life suppport from someone who has suffered irreversible brain damage is not the same as killing an individual who is in all respects viable.
And bringing about the death of a collection of cells, or a fetus that couldn’t survive outside of the womb, is not the same as killing an individual who is in all respects viable.
“Are you arguing that the acts of switching off a computer and killing a human being are equivalent?”
It depends. If the computer can pass the Turing test and turning it off is irreversible then yes. Otherwise, no. According to my value system. But it is certainly ending “an event” (in this case, that particular programming or use session) and if I understand you correctly, you say that ending an event–any event–prematurely or artificially is immoral so surely it would be better to let the computer run until it crashes on its own. Shouldn’t take long if you’re using Microsoft. Mac OSX or Linux you’ll have to wait a little longer.
“…an individual who can paint a Mona Lisa, compose an 1812 Overture, formulate a theory of evolution or devote their lives to caring for an ailing parent or sickly child. When you abort a foetus you might be preventing the development of of someone with such skills or attributes. We have no way of knowing.”
And if you fail to conceive a child, you might be preventing the development of someone with such skills or attributes. We have no way of knowing. On the other hand, you might be preventing the birth of the next Stalin, HItler, or Bush. I still don’t see a convincing reason that abortion, contraception, and abstinence are morally different under you definition.
“…once it [conception] has been, you have set in train a process of development which does not just lead to but is an integral part of the event which is an individual human life.”
Not necessarily. Between 60 and 80% of concepti die within the first two weeks after conception. Some concepti develop into cancers instead of people (molar pregnancy). Some develop into two people (twins). Some develop into part of a person (chimerism due to fusion of two zygotes). Conception is hardly the most biologically significant event in reproduction. And, again, spermatogenesis and ovulation are intregral parts of the events that lead to a new human life. I still don’t see any rationale for declaring abortion bad and abstinence good under your schema.
Ian,
Consider the following two cases:
(1) People have sex and conceive an embryo, but abort it before its nervous system develops and becomes active. For concreteness and simplicity, suppose they abort a 16-cell clump with no differentiated tissues at all, much less functioning nerves. It doesn’t feel a thing, doesn’t ever know it existed, and ceases to exist, or…
(2) Those people choose to use very a very effective combination birth control methods, reducing the chance of conception to essentially zero and have sex without fertilizing an egg.
Now, a few weeks later, there is no person in either case. And in between, the embryo never experienced anything.
My question is this: was the egg or fertilized embryo harmed by allowing fertilization followed by abortion, as opposed to simply letting the egg and sperm die without fertilization?
It seems pretty obvious to me that nobody is harmed here, except perhaps the woman, depending on the relative harm of birth control methods or abortifacient.
The outcome is the same either way—the egg and sperm die. In one case, they get together first, and in the other they don’t, but in neither case are they aware of their own existence(s) or able to experience any loss.
It literally makes no difference to the egg and sperm whether they fertilize before both dying, or don’t—sure, there’s a difference, but there is nobody home to care about the difference.
I’d say this is a case of “no harm, no foul,” because the outcomes are the same.
If one is allowed, the other should be, too. Whether fertilization occurs before the egg and sperm die is irrelevant.
i was reading Steven Vogel’s Comparative Biomechanics today and came across a passage that is at least interesting and might lend another insight to the relationship between fetus and mother, that of the mammalian cell. this is from page 64.
(emphasis added.)
In the Netherlands, organ donation is already opt-out rather than opt-in.
It’s absolutely fascinating to see all this just-so storying, this bouncy little
game of the sort that Norbizness brilliantly called “fictitious concept Calvinball,” being played here. Here’s a first step toward making it other than a masturbatory exercise, for those who are interested in something besides hearing their own cleverness: for every occurrence of the phrase “the womb” substitute “in my guts.”
And when pondering those drawn lines, you might also decide you need to set an age limit on how old these souls have to be before they lose the right to cannibalize any human being they meet. Just as an exercise in reasoning, you understand. Maybe we could specify that pound of flesh nearest the heart.
There is no such thing as “the womb.” There is, for those who have failed to notice, no abstract “reasoning” that matters here. None of the process being discussed here happens outside someone’s body and self — unless you’re talking about that Petri dish.
I’m all for making laws to preserve unique human life in “the” Petri dish. And I expect a rush of volunteers from the South Dakota legislature to take a Petri dish to lunch tomorrow.
Have a uterus= become invisible. Amazing. Think of the fun I could have had and the mischief I couold have done and gossip I could have gathered if I’d known that before now.
I guess there isn’t, if you utterly beg the question. Sure can skip a lot of abstract reasoning if you start with your conclusions! Thanks for enlightening us.
I guess people who talk about morality seriously can all stop wanking now. And then I’m sure they’ll just see the obvious concrete truth and agree with you, about as much as they do now.
Virge, how fascinating. People post — I assume thoughtfully — and I take them seriously. And you object. How did that work? There was no ambiguity in the no personality=no person statement, and I didn’t see anybody but me objecting to it.
Of course I wouldn’t save the Petri dish. Spare me your moral juggling, please.
I approach the question thus (as a strict materialist and antivitalist):
If natural selection operates on individuals to modify species, there must be individuals. How do we identify them?
Our answer ought to be generalizable across species, at least among the metazoa. Even better if it works for metaphyta, too, but perhaps it will not. (I provisionally accept Dawkins’s argument that prokaryotes don’t qualify to get into this sort of distinction.)
Professor Myers asserts that this is a gray area, with no clarity on offer, as he sees steps such as gastrulation or innervation as pure steps. That may well be wrong, but no matter. There is, as it happens, one biological process that is seamless, with a discrete beginning and a discrete end. Just what we were looking for.
Cell division. (I brought this up once before and was challenged to bring HeLa cells into the definition. More moral juggling. When the surgeon took my thyroid out, I didn’t become an unperson, and my thyroid did not become an individual human. Catholic school produced catty little moral entrepreneurs who argued points like that all the time, and I can do it as well as you, but it’s pointless.)
It may not be the answer most convenient to me, but from reading Darwin, I learned that nature was not set up to be convenient to me.
I absolutely agree with the pro-lifers: killing of babies is awful. Anyone who feels different obviously has no respect for life and is in no position to care for an embryo. Such people should have those embryos removed from their uteri (forcefully, if necessary), so the embryos can be released into the wild, where they can raise themselves away from such bad bad people.
Better yet, give all the unwanted embryos to the pro-lifers to receive some proper loving care. Because life is so important that pro-lifers would be willing to implant and bear those embryos themselves. Right?
Paul W wrote:
It depends on what you mean by “harm” but I agree that a fertilized egg or cluster of undifferentiated cells is unlikely to suffer when killed in the way that an adult human being would.
The difference is that sperm or unfertilized eggs on their own do not lead to an adult human being.
The point is that, although an adult human being appears to be very different from a fertilized egg, one would not exist without the other. All the ‘information’ needed to make the adult is present in the fertilized egg and there is a continuous process of development connecting the two. In many respects, what we call life is that process.
If, as a society, we decide that it is immoral and unlawful to terminate that life at some stages along that process – except in certain extreme situations – then why not at all stages?
Dianne wrote:
I find XP more stable than ’98 but neither is what I would call intelligent.
And I would also have moral problems with switching off a HAL 9000 or Commander Data.
What I am saying is that I am not objecting to terminating any event just because it is an event but that a human life should be viewed as an event so that – as I wrote to Paul W: – “If, as a society, we decide that it is immoral and unlawful to terminate that life at some stages along that process – except in certain extreme situations – then why not at all stages?”
That’s the risk we take but the lesson from genetics seems to be that the greater the range and variety of available options the better.
Surely the fact that the human reproductive process is so incredibly wasteful means that we should value all the more those concepti that do make through.
I have no problems with abstinence or birth control since they stop conception happening. There is no moral imperative to reproduce so it is not immoral to refrain from doing it or prevent it from starting.
Once the process of development of an individual has begun, however, the question is raised as to whether terminating it at any stage is immoral given that we agree that killing a human being at any time after birth is wrong except in certain extreme circumstances.
Paul W: My question is this: was the egg or fertilized embryo harmed by allowing fertilization followed by abortion, as opposed to simply letting the egg and sperm die without fertilization?
Is this the lighthearted stuff Virge was talking about? This guy Paul W. really has no clue. He sees no difference between a fertilized egg and an un-fertilized egg. Amazing. Talk about denial.
You’ve put your finger on part of the problem of the argument, Ian.
Once it is conceded that terminating a life at some stage is immoral, then the question of when is, necessarily, a moral question.
Yet here we have a lot of people arguing that it isn’t a moral question at all, that it’s a matter of scar tissue or something, no moral question, move along, folks, nothing to see.
Yet the same people who argue that there is no moral question involved simultaneously condemn the South Dakotans for their immoral position.
How can that be immoral? Didn’t we just establish that it’s gray, nobody’s opinion is any more privileged than anybody else’s opinion?
It was very, very strange when the baby v. Petri dish challenge was thrown out.
This isn’t an argument that can be won by either facts or logic, because the positions are internally incoherent.
Harry Eagar: “There was no ambiguity in the no personality=no person statement, and I didn’t see anybody but me objecting to it.”
Harry Eagar: “People post — I assume thoughtfully — and I take them seriously”
The reason there was nobody objecting to it was that everybody else read the whole paragraph and interpreted wswilso’s statement in context. It ended with “I don’t see any issue until then” [my emphasis]. It was clear to me that wswilso was specifying the first point at which a human should be considered a person, not a condition for continued personhood.
Did you take people’s comments seriously? Did you really think it was fair to interpret a statement out of context and then generalize to “most posters here would have been cool” with the actions of your friend?
Harry Eagar: “Yet the same people who argue that there is no moral question…”
Hold on. Who are these mythical posters who have claimed that there is no moral question? If they don’t agree with your definition of when human life begins, that doesn’t mean they don’t have strong moral principles on the value of life. Please stop making unsupportable assumptions about those you’re arguing with. You’re not taking them seriously.
Ian H Spedding: “All the ‘information’ needed to make the adult is present in the fertilized egg and there is a continuous process of development connecting the two. In many respects, what we call life is that process.”
Ian, I’ll have to vigorously disagree with your claim about all the ‘information’ needed. Even though the earlier comments on chimeras were intended to make fun of the magical concept of souls, it’s worth noting that a person who’s a chimera has genetic material from two previously independent “humans”. Development environment makes a big difference. Why aren’t identical twins identical in all respects? Think also of how much difference development environment makes for a queen bee. It’s not all in the genes. (Remember we’re posting on an evo-devo blog.)
If you choose fertilization as the start of a human life, for reasons of uniqueness of identity of the person, then I guess you’ll have to make an exception for identical twins. Reset the human-starts-here clock at split time.
Suppose the Raelian religious sect managed to implant a cloned human in a woman (as they claim to have done), and the woman, when liberated from the mind-washing of the cult decided that she wanted it aborted. Would she be taking a human life? What if she was also the supplier of all the genetic material?
Your selection of fertilization as the best time to declare a human has begun may be simple, but it can’t even uniquely define the start of a single human. Life is more complicated than that. To chose fertilization just because of it’s simplicity is to ignore all the other factors that we recognize as truly human. (Golomb’s Law: Everything in biology is more complicated than you think it is, even taking into account Golomb’s Law.)
You speak of moral imperatives. How did you decide on your moral imperatives? Are they based on empathy, a religious code, a particular philosophical position…? I’d be interested to hear how you would evaluate the moral calculus of saving five unique and irreplaceable human blastulae vs. saving a single toddler.
Yes, Virge, but in my example, the daughter never had any personality. Her body lived, after birth, 30-some years.
Then he shot her. So I’m still assuming you’re cool with that. If not, why not?
The persons who argue there is no moral question are the ones who claim that an embryo is like scar tissue, or that their womb is so sacred it is beyond reach of law or criticism, or that there is no reason so whimsical or trivial that a woman cannot go ahead and have that abortion.
The ones, like Professor Myers, who say it all gray and one opinion is as well founded as another, although he thinks some are — in some mystical fashion he has never bothered to explain — better and worse opinions; but, nevertheless, people who do not share his mysticism are immoral.
Completely incoherent.
Harry Eagar: “Yes, Virge, but in my example, the daughter never had any personality. Her body lived, after birth, 30-some years.
Then he shot her. So I’m still assuming you’re cool with that. If not, why not?”
I hadn’t responded on that question, because your terse summary (“no personality”) was extremely ambiguous. Did she respond to pain? Did she move of her own accord? If food was placed in her mouth, would she chew? Who diagnosed her 0.0000% personality and what was their definition of personality? Do you see the ambiguity of your statements now? You picked up on one commenter’s vague colloquial terms and decided that it meant all people disagreeing with you were cool with shooting mentally handicapped people.
If she was in a permanent vegetative state and required external life support, then I’d have no problems with the family removing life support if it was done according to the law.
If she was a viable human exhibiting any of the human qualities of memory, thought, emotion, etc, then I wouldn’t even condone termination by the state, much less by a family member who takes it upon himself to decide she wasn’t worth the effort.
Harry, what’s with the “incoherent” comment? You’ve used it twice now, and I wonder if it’s short for “incoherent to me.” The arguments are going to stay incoherent while you keep trying to put your own spins on what other people have contributed to the conversation. They disagree with you. Fine. Try to understand why before you assume the worst and put words into other people’s mouths. e.g. where on earth did you get the idea that PZ thought one opinion was as well founded as another? You’ve been reading Pharyngula for how long now? Making those patently wrong assertions is what gets you treated as a troll rather than a serious contributor.
Have a nice day.
Funny, the one who introduced the ‘no personality=no person’ trope did not feel any need to hedge that about with any further definitions.
In the case of my friend’s daughter, she was unable to speak or to recognize her parents (or any other person). If being able to react to pain or to eat is a sign of ‘personality,’ then PETA isn’t as crazy as I think they are.
Incoherent means incoherent. I specified that I meant internally incoherent. And, yes, Professor Myers has stated some not too helpful marks to distinguish an individual, some of which don’t come into play until the fourth or fifth trimester.
OK, that’s an argument.
So is embryo=scar tissue, though when I visit the dermatologist to have my keratoses frozen off, we don’t discuss the morality of it.
But if the professor can put off the mark of individuation to the fifth trimester without any moral qualms, where does he get off moralizing about those who want to set the mark at conception?
He can certainly argue that their evidence is uncertain, or even (as he has done, incorrectly) that there is no biological argument to set it early. But that wasn’t what he did. He makes his opinions neutral but somehow their opinions are immoral.
That’s incoherent.
Also incoherent is the argument that if a person objects to killing what he takes to be (perhaps incorrectly) innocent life, it is somehow inconsistent or hypocritical for him not to also object to taking a guilty life. (How guilty? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, infinitely guilty, since the unborn fetus may not be a human person but it certainly is infinitely innocent.)
Some of us Liberals are so old-fashioned that we like to make a distinction between innocence and guilt. Equality before the law and due process, all that obsolete claptrap.
I understand that liberals have a different take on it — they would rather kill the innocent than the guilty.
Now, I am not saying that that is, of itself, incoherent. The Christian religion is based on a perfectly coherent argument of universal guilt.
I expect better from atheists.
I also note, just for the record, that all the people who so triumphantly dragged in the Petri dishes of frozen embyros, as if somehow that posed an insoluble difficulty for persons who would set the humanness of an individual somewhere earlier than the fifth trimester, have not bothered to say whether they think it is OK to shoot 35-year-old retarded people.
Ian writes:
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Fertilization or non-fertilization is not the central issue.
The central issue is about which possible persons have a right to become actual persons.
Consider a typical family-planning situation, where a couple wants to have, say, one child (or one more child) eventually, but not yet. If they have to bear an accidentally-conceived embryo to term now, they’ll forgo having another, intentionally-conceived child at some point in the future.
What gives the accidentally-fertilized egg the right to become an actual person, instead of the not-yet-fertilized egg that would otherwise have become a person, later? Does the breakage of a condom somehow give one possible person the right to become an actual person, such that another possible person is denied that opportunity?
In this example, at least, we have a zero-sum game. Any possible person who “wins the lottery” and becomes actual means that there is some other possible person who would otherwise have won, but instead loses like all the rest.
Or, to avoid that, is the couple obliged to incubate and raise the first possible person, and go ahead and conceive the child they would have had, as well?
In the bigger picture, we have something like this zero-sum game. We can’t afford to bring too many people into this finite world.
The deep underlying questions are:
(1) is a fertilized egg a person? Or if not
(2) what gives a possible person the right to become an actual person, and creates an obligation for somebody to bear a child, and for somebody to raise that child? (Maybe somebody else, but who?)
As far as I’m concerned, fertilization is just no big deal. It’s mainly creating a sort of blueprint, or actually much less than a blueprint, by combining parts of plans for constructing an organism. Blueprints are cheap, and tossing randomly-selected blueprint parts together to make a more specific blueprint is no big deal.
A blueprint for a house is not itself a house, and certainly isn’t a home of somebody who’s home. Creating a particular blueprint for a possible house doesn’t itself entail an obligation to build that house, and to house the homeless in it.
I don’t think that the accidental assembly of a particular combination of chromosomes in a fertilized egg is particularly important—that combination has no more right to develop into a person than any of the myriad other random combinations of chromosomes, which happen not to have been combined yet. Being an accident isn’t a vice, but it’s certainly no virtue, either.
A lot of people seem to be able to put themselves in the position of a fertilized egg and say “don’t kill me.” I don’t think that makes any more sense than putting yourself in the position of some other combination of an egg and a sperm and saying “pick me! pick me!”
No matter how you slice it, there’s only a finite number of egg-sperm combinations that we’re going to gestate and raise. And none of them exhibited any personhood properties that make them morally superior to the others, in any way that gives them more of a right to become a person. (For example, none has done a lick of work to earn the right to become actual. And if a condom breaks, that shouldn’t be decisive in which possible person gets to become actual.)
The simple fact is that the vast majority of possible people can never become people. A fertilized egg has not done anything to deserve that chance, either.
Fertilizing an egg is like pushing a button to randomly assemble a blueprint. It is not a promise to a possible person, creating an obligation to create an actual person from that particular blueprint.
Blueprints are cheap, people are not, and blueprints are not people.
That is either the ‘life unworthy of life’ argument or its first cousin. Or what a friend of mine who adopted two abandoned children — one of whom turned out later to have severe physical ‘deficits’ that were not apparent when he was an infant — calls the ‘Gerber Baby syndrome,’ nothing but perfection.
No, it isn’t. You clearly missed the entire point.
I was only assuming that the number of possible people who become actual actual people is bounded. (Or in the particular example case, exactly one.)
I was not talking about whether any of those possible lives are actually worth living. For the sake of my argument, you can assume that all of those possible human lives are about equally worth living.
My point is not about that. It’s that I don’t think the actual fusing of an egg and a sperm changes anything much, in a moral sense. An already-fused egg-sperm pair is no more morally valuable than another possible combination of egg and sperm that would win the lottery otherwise.
Anti-abortion generally rhetoric overlooks the fact that the basic situation is something close to a zero-sum game, where it’s just not feasible to let every possible person become an actual person. The basic situation is one of pruning a vast space of possible people—i.e., combinations of eggs and sperms—and only letting a tiny minority of them become actual people to whom we are obligated to give a life. (And hopefully a reasonable shot in life.)
You seem to assume that a fertilized egg is an actual person, or something very like it. To me, it isn’t, any more than any other egg-sperm pair that we might put together and gestate and raise. I’ll freely admit that it’s an actual organism, but it’s not a person. It’s still only a possible person, and I’m trying to figure out what makes an already-fertilized egg so all-fired important compared to any other egg-sperm combination.
In the simple family planning example, where an accidental conception of one particular possible person precludes> the conception of another possible person who would otherwise have become an actual person, the question is fairly clear: what makes the accidentally-fused pair now morally more valuable than the intentionally-fused pair later?
Assume for simplicity that the lives that these possible people would lead are equally good and equally valuable. Leave the parents’ interests out of it entirely. The question then is what makes one of these possible people more deserving of actual personhood than the other?
Seriously, answer the question about the specific case. Don’t make a weak analogy to different cases, and avoid the issue. What exactly is it that makes an already-fused egg-sperm pair better than some other egg-sperm pair, and more deserving of continued existence, food, shelter, and maybe a college education?
Put yourself in the position of each egg-sperm pair. If you’re the egg-sperm pair that’s already fused, with a whole life ahead of you, sure, you might say “please gestate and raise me!” But if you the other egg-sperm pair, not yet fused, you can also say “hey, don’t keep the accident! Fuse me, according to plan, and gestate and raise me!”
I don’t think either possible person has a special claim to the right to become an actual person. Neither is anything, or did anything, to make itself more morally valuable than the other.
Sure, there’s a biological difference between a fused egg-sperm pair and a not-yet-fused egg-sperm pair. Duh. But where’s the moral difference such that one has the right to an actual human future and the other does not?
Why shoudn’t they be regarded as equivalent? Why keep one egg-sperm combination now, and kill off the other later, rather than the other way around?
The overwhelmingly vast majority of eggs and sperms will die without becoming people. The even more vastly overwhelming majority of possible combinations will never become actual people. That’s just the way it is.
What’s wrong with accepting the fact that egg-sperm combinations are cheap, and are nowhere near being people, and that already-combined egg-sperm pairs have no special claim to deserving a human life, as opposed to other egg-sperm pairs whose places they might take.
Antiabortion rhetoric hinges on missing the big picture. It’s not about individual, actual humans. It’s about how few possible humans get to be actual humans, and how to pick. Picking on the basis of accidents is not morally superior.
I am trying to stay away from moral arguments. Until we can agree what is an individual, it is premature to argue when is an individual.
Picking on the basis of accidents may not be morally superior. I never said it was (and I never said what my position on abortion is, either, yet). However, it is sorta evolutionarily superior.
That is, evolution stacks the deck first come, first served; and artificially selected populations are (usually or perhaps always) less viable in an open environment.
As a practical matter, in some societies (India, China), once you start choosing embryos (or neonates), what you do NOT get is a stochastic population indistinguishable from what you would have gotten by taking your chances.
In other words, the outcomes are not nearly as similar as you have assumed they would be.
That is why I find your approach very, very close to a ‘life unworthy of life’ argument.
And you might notice that I did not put a moral value on ‘life unworthy of life’ arguments. The natural assumption, at least among decent people, is that that’s a bad argument. It is not perfectly clear, at least to me, that it is always a bad argument. Tay-Sachs embryos offer an example of life being chosen against by an unconscious agent. Early intervention in this case could be regarded as ratifying, not imposing, a decision already made.
It seems to me that you’re trying exactly to rig up a moral argument, or a rebuttal of one by planting certain ideas that I consider red herrings.
I don’t think anybody here disagrees that a zygote is a new individual organism of our biologic species. That is not in question. The question is why and how much we should care about that.
A zygote is clearly not a person; it may be an “actual human organism,” and an “individual” in that sense, but it’s not a “human being” or an “individual” in the vernacular sense—it is not a person.
The question I’m asking you is whether fertilization is a particularly interesting point for distinguishing between possible people; if we’re going to let an egg and a sperm die, does it really matter whether we put them together first or not?
And please don’t drag in the question of eugenics, by implying that’s where I’m headed, or that it’s the can of worms I’m opening, or whatever.
(And please stop talking out of both sides of your mouth—as though possible abuses of eugenics somehow counts against my argument, even though you yourself aren’t against all forms of eugenics. We can deal with that later.)
I wasn’t talking about eugenics. I was trying to estabilish a more basic point, which must be understood before any discussion of what’s right or wrong about eugenics (and which kinds) could even be tractable.
Please answer the question about the particular example case I was talking about—plain old family planning, and choosing to abort one randomly-assembled accidentally-assembled zygote in favor of a later, intentionally-but-randomly-assembled zygote.
The question is: if you’re only going to have one kid, is it morally superior to have the first one rather than the second? Why would an already-assembled zygote, which is not an actual person, have more of a right to become an actual person than some other yet-to-be-assembled zygote that otherwise would be conceived, gestated, and raised?
Please address that issue clearly before bringing up alternative scenarios. It’s a thought experiment—albeit a realistic example of one common kind of situation—intended to illuminate certain basic principles.
Eugenics enters into it because that’s what happens. You cannot get off by saying, as so many do, ‘I’m not pro-abortion, I personally would never choose that, but I’m for another person’s right to choose.’
And we are not talking about one particular zygote, either. The law, if we’re going to approach reproduction through law, deals in generalities. Not one zygote, but all zygotes.
So, in my view, does nature. Nature does not assign value to any particular zygote (of any species, not just us) beforehand.
Further, is does not imply ought. Once we know what an individual is — and you are incorrect to state that everyone agrees a human zygote is a consensus ‘actual human organism,’ since many posters here have denied that already — we could then try to figure out when it is.
And if we knew when, then we would have some sort of non-mystical basis to ask ourselves, full rights or partial rights or no rights at all?
But it does not follow that the individual begins at conception. It might. My opinion is that it begins with the first cell division (and ends with the last), which is for practical purposes indistinguishably close to conception; but I can make slightly different assumptions about the biology that pushes it out later. I’m pretty sure, though, that it begins before the fifth trimester.
Fine. If you want to keep going around in circles, I guess that’s your choice.
I was trying to separate out some issues, that’s all.
Clearly, one of the questions that’s come up is the relatively “local” question of whether aborting an embryo or a fetus is, in itself, killing a “human being” in the vernacular sense or an “individual” in the legal sense, i.e., a person.
Another question is whether the biological fact of coming up with a particular, concrete assortment of chromosomes and creating a new biologic “individual” organism, should be conflated with creating a vernacular/legal person with rights and all that.
You seem to want to run together those two notions of “individual,” at your convenience, so that you can sort-of take a stand and disagree with anything anybody else says, despite being unwilling to state your own view and defend it.
This running-together of the notions of “an individual” at very different levels is generally untenable. For example, a biological-organism-individual may split into two individuals that later develop into different people. Or it may fuse with another, and the fusion may develop into one person.
Equally important, the sense in which a new “individual” is created by fertilization is not the only relevant biological sense of “individual.” Is it more like creating a person, or more like automatically and stochastically assembling something both more and less than a blueprint for an eventual complex organism/person thing?
So biologically, scientifically, and factually, an individual organism IS CLEARLY NOT SIMPLY THE SAME THING AS A PERSON, and it remains to be clarified what the relation is between zygotes or embyros and persons in the moral and legal sense.
If you ignore all of those distinctions that other people try to make clear, you can of course continue to conflate things at your convenience, eliminate any chance of coming to a shared understanding of what’s actually going on, and take cheap potshots at anybody who’s actually trying to make sense of this stuff.
You can equate zygotes with walking, talking, emoting and committing people if you want. You’ll just be wrong.
You can equate abortion for plain family planning purposes with nasty forms of eugenics, if you want. You’ll just be wrong.
You can avoid getting anywhere in clarifying small-picture issues, by running together the big- and small- picture issues, and then criticizing anybody who says things in one context by conflating it with another context.
You’ll just be wrong.
In short, Harry, you’re not worth arguing with. I have better things to do than argue with somebody who doesn’t recognize the point of a thought experiment for clarifying a particular principle, and thinks that arguing is a game of You Can’t Catch Me.
Virge wrote:
All I meant was that the fertilized egg contains the ‘blueprint’ or ‘recipe’ which controls the physical development of an individual human being. That does not preclude or ignore any environmental forces which might influence that developmental process, it just makes the point that there is a minimum that must be there in the first place for there to be something for those forces to influence.
I realise that the likes of clones, twins and chimeras complicate the moral issues but the principle remains one of tracking the development of the individual back to the starting-point of the process. The question then becomes one of at what subsequent point, if any, are we entitled to stop it.
As a philosophical position, I am agnostic on the question of whether or not a god exists. I do not know of any evidence for the existence of such a being and, for supernatural deities like the Christian God, I would argue there is no way for us to reliably identify such evidence even if it does exist.
Effectively, therefore, I am an atheist. I act on the assumption that there is no God or, of there is one, it does not interfere in the workings of the Universe.
That Universe extends, so far as science has yet been able to discover, some 13.7 billion light-years in space and time. It is populated by billions of galaxies, each comprising billions of stars. Somewhere in that unimaginable vastness, a small retinue of planets gathered around an otherwise unremarkable yellow star over 4 billion years ago. On the third planet out, life began which led to a species of smart ape which flatters itself that it is of some significance in all that indifference.
While there may be life elsewhere in the Universe, for all practical purposes we are alone. For the present, we have only ourselves and the resources of this small and vulnerable planet to draw on for survival – a survival which is not guaranteed. There are forces in Nature that could wipe us out of existence, which we would be powerless to resist, and no one would know of our passing.
Being so few and so weak, it seems to me absurd to waste what little we have. So, given that the potential in each human being is our primary resource, aborting a viable human foetus, for no other reason than that it would be inconvenient to the mother to have to carry it to term, is wasteful in the extreme.
The other consideration is the human capacity to love and care for each other and our fellow creatures. While it is clearly not universal, it exists regardless of culture and, in spite of the claims of some believers, is not dependent on adhering to a particular faith. That makes it the ideal foundation for a universal morality which holds that life is not to be taken beyond necessity.
Paul W. wrote:
To make the moral problem clearer, I would turn the question around and ask by what right do we say to another living creature, albeit in the very early stages of development, “You are not entitled to the life that we enjoy.”?
A fertilized egg is clearly not the same as a cluster of undifferentiated cells, which is clearly not the same as an embryo, which is not the same as a foetus, which is not the same as a newborn baby, which is not the same as a toddler, which is not the same as a young child, which is not the same as an adolescent, which is not the same as a young adult, which is not the same as a middle-aged adult, which is not the same as a ‘senior citizen’, which is not the same as the corpse we all become eventually. But, barring accident or illness, we are all those things at various times. They are contiguous stages in the event that is the life of an individual. How are we to decide that one or some of those stages are more important than others given that each stage depends on all the preceding stages?
Almost all the cells of the human body are replaced every few years or so but the replication process is not perfect and normal wear and tear is not completely repaired. Our personalities are moulded by the knowledge and experiences we accumulate over the years. Physically and psychologically, we are not the people we were ten or twenty years ago.
So what is this “I” that apparently exists continuously throughout our life other than an event – a slowly changing arrangement of matter and energy which is assembled for a brief period before dispersing? We can initiate such events but we cannot predict the exact course or outcome of any individual event so we have no way of knowing their value to us in advance. Why waste them unnecessarily?
Seems to me that’s not making the moral problem clearer—it’s evading the question and the point of my thought experiment.
The point is that we are going to bring a finite number of people into the world, and each combination of chromosomes is precious, if you want to think of it that way.
But if I’m only going to have one child, or one more child, is there a moral difference between not gestating an embryo in hand vs. not gestating a future one that happens not to have been conceived yet? Either way, a possible person wins and another possible person loses. What is so morally superior about a sperm and an egg that have already been combined—by a mechanical, mindless, automatic process—and a sperm and an egg that have not.
You can refer to the former as a “living creature” if you want, but an amoeba is a living creature too. The not-yet conceived child may not be a “living creature” yet, but refusing to conceive it will indeed consign a possible person to impossibility just as surely as aborting a zygote. There will be a different person in the world in either case.
I don’t see any reason to sentimentalize zygotes just because they’re already living. We kill living microbes all the time. And I don’t see how the fact that it’s already living makes a big difference; the egg and sperm in the other case are already alive, and we’re going to kill them off, too. Putting an egg and sperm together and killing them doesn’t do them any more harm than not putting them together and killing them. Either way, there’s no person there to notice.
So please, return back to the one-child family-planning situation.
About that situation, you “turn the question” around and ask about the already-fertilized zygote which could become a person.
That’s not fair. I’d already “turned the question around,” and asked you the
corresponding hard question, to show that your analysis is missing something important.
If you think we should have the first child in preference to the second, who are we to say to that creature, that “You are not entitled to the life we enjoy.”?
You seem to think it makes a big difference whether we say that to a zygote, rather than to an egg and a sperm. I don’t think one is any worse than the other. It doesn’t matter whether you “say that to” a zygote or to a pre-zygotic egg-sperm pair, because neither is yet a person who can hear you, and either could be
No matter how you slice it, you’re saying to one possible person “okay, you’re in the club” and to the other “sorry, you’re not in the club.”
That is the basic underlying fact of family planning. Most possible people aren’t going to become actual people, period. I think it’s a good idea to stop sentimentalizing zygotes.
Fertilization is a special step, biologically, but not morally. And even biologically, it’s not as special as people sentimentalize it to be.
Zygotes are not rare and precious; they’re cheap and all too easy to create, like accidentally pushing a button and combining blueprint parts. That doesn’t make them people.