It must be funny pages day today—Doonesbury also gives us a good one that raises a good question about blastocysts.
I wish somebody could give a nice, coherent, sensible explanation of the reasoning on this one. We’ve got swarms of people — including good Christian people who want to be parents — going to fertility clinics and getting gametes extracted and put into a dish; this is considered, presumably a good thing by people who value procreation. These gametes are brought together to produce lots of zygotes, that in a typical fashion, begin their program of development and become blastocysts; this is the desired outcome. Then comes the sticky part: each set of parents produces to excess. They have half a dozen or more blastocysts sitting there in the dish. It is not good for the mother or the babies to bear sextuplets or duodecituplets, so some have to be chosen for implantation, and others…must not. That’s just the way the numbers work, and it’s just like the fact that males under natural conditions produce an excess of sperm, most of which will die.
If you don’t like the idea of surplus zygotes that will die, it seems to me that the only consistent solution is to demand an end to the artificial induction of ovulation in humans (since most natural fertilizations end in the demise of the embryo,too, there’s a dilemma there as well: having sex can end in the death of an embryo. But let’s put that argument off for a while.)
If you’ve agree to the utility and value of fertility clinics, then you’ve already agreed to endorse the death of blastocysts, and we’re just haggling over how it is to be done. Do we kill them in a productive way that increases our knowledge and perhaps gives us information that will improve the health of other embryos, increase the efficiency of in vitro fertilization, etc., or do we just chuck them in the hospital incinerator?
I think the rationale here is that the blastocysts will eventually be adopted. I’m not really sure why anyone would think that, given the fact that less than 10% of adoptable children are placed in permanent homes, but there you go.
Even Arnold Schwarzenegger came to the right conclusion on this one. We live in a country where the Decider isn’t as smart as the Terminator.
The right’s response? Stem cell research isn’t needed, because people with Parkinsons are faking it for political reasons (like Michael J. Fox).
Stem-cell research as conducted today is not ‘creating life to destroy it’ (that’s what fertility clinics do, to be blunt), nor is it ‘destroying life to save it’ – it’s like organ donation from children who die in accidents.
For some reason,this puts me in mind of Monty Python.
Man: Um, excuse me, is this the undertaker’s?
Undertaker: Yup, that’s right, what can I do for you, squire?
Man: Um, well, I wonder if you can help me. My mother has just died and I’m not quite sure what I should do.
Undertaker: Ah, well, we can ‘elp you. We deal with stiffs.
Man: Stiffs?
Undertaker: Yea. Now there’s three things we can do with your mum. We can bury her, burn her, or dump her.
Man: Dump her?
Undertaker: Dump her in the Thames.
Man: What?
Undertaker: Oh, did you like her?
Man: Yes!
Undertaker: Oh well, we won’t dump her, then. Well, what do you think: a burner, or a burier?
Man: Um, well, um, which would you recommend?
Undertaker: Well they’re both nasty. If we burn her, she gets stuffed in the flames, crackle, crackle, crackle, which is a bit of a shock if she’s not quite dead. But quick. And then you get a box of ashes, which you can pretend are hers.
Man: Oh.
Undertaker: Or, if you don’t wanna fry her, you can bury her. And then she’ll get eaten up by maggots and weevils, nibble, nibble, nibble, which isn’t so hot if, as I said, she’s not quite dead.
Man: I see. Um. Well, I.. I.. I.. I’m not very sure. She’s definitely dead.
Undertaker: Where is she?
Man: In the sack.
Undertaker: Let’s ‘ave a look. Umm, she looks quite young.
Man: Yes, she was.
Undertaker: (over his shoulder) FRED!
Fred: (offstage) Yea!
Undertaker: I THINK WE’VE GOT AN EATER!
Fred: (offstage) I’ll get the oven on!
Man: Um, er…excuse me, um, are you… are you suggesting we should eat my mother?
Undertaker: Yeah. Not raw, not raw. We cook her. She’d be delicious with a few french fries, a bit of broccoli and stuffing. Delicious! (smacks his lips)
Man: What! Well, actually, I do feel a bit peckish – NO! No, I can’t!
Undertaker: Look, we’ll eat your mum. Then, if you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards, we can dig a grave and you can throw up into it.
Man: All right.
It may not be widely known but I happen to believe that the life of an individual human being begins at conception and that entitlement to the right to that life should also begin at that point.
I regard human rights as constraints on human behaviour. The right to life effectively forbids people from killing one another without sufficient cause. The fact that people die from many other causes such as disease or accidents is tragic but irrelevant. If someone were to shoot you dead, society would try your killer for murder if he or she could be found. But if you were killed by a meteorite landing on you, we might put the offending rock in a museum but we would not put it in prison. In the first case, your right to life was violated, in the second case it was not.
If, as I believe, the zygote is the first stage in the life of the individual and has the right to life then it may not be killed by human intervention. If it dies from some other cause then, providing you have the permission of the parents, it may be used for whatever research purposes you may see fit. The same rationale would also apply to any of the later stages of development.
As for fertility clinics, to be consistent with my beliefs, they would have to limit the process to the fertilization of one egg at a time. If that succeeds in initiating the development of the individual all well and good and it would have to be allowed to continue. If it fails then the doctors could move on to the next egg.
Of course, if you do not believe that the zygote has any right to life then you may do whatever you like with it.
Thanks, Ian. You’ve been pretty circumspect about your beliefs on that particular subject, so it’s nice that you finally decided to come out and tell us about them.
/sarcasm
Does the mystical, magical Right to Life extend to people who are brain dead? Is organ donation a crime against the still-living person?
Because if it’s not, then I don’t see why killing human tissue that doesn’t even have a brain is a violation of the mystical, magical Right to Life.
“As for fertility clinics, to be consistent with my beliefs, they would have to limit the process to the fertilization of one egg at a time”
They don’t. As I understand it, it is not done because it is inefficient to try one egg at a time. It probably could be done that way at greatly increased expense…to the point that most couples who go to in-vitro fertilization would be priced out the possibility. In order for fertility clinics to stop fertilizing multiple eggs at a time, they will have to be compelled by law.
So while you grasp the logical significance, the real question is will you actually apply this in your political decision making? I don’t know if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool pro-lifer who has sworn off ever voting for a pro-choice politician, but if you are, you really need to limit your support for politicians who vow to outlaw the practice of preparing multiple zygotes despite the fact that most pro-lifers don’t. How many strident anti-abortion politicians are on record being opposed to allowing this practice? My guess would be 0.
See, this is what I don’t understand about Pro-Lifers. They say life begins at conception. Therefore, all those little embryos and blastocytes and all that are precious and valuable; we shouldn’t “kill” them (i.e. abort). HOWEVER, if all these precious and valuable embryos are “killed” by natural processes, then all of a sudden we don’t care about them? What the hell?
If you care so much about embryos, and think that they have a soul, then why aren’t you concerned about all the millions of embryos that are spontaneously and naturally aborted by a woman’s body, without her knowing?
I understand your position about the whole human intervention thing. What i’m concerned about is that your concerns seem a little inconsistent.
If human life – and the lovely plethora of rights pertaining thereunto – begin at conception, does this mean that a zygote has the most fundamental of all rights in a democracy?
No, not the right to life, silly. The right to habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus is what allows a democracy to function. It ensures that no matter how much a powerful person might hate me, he cannot silence me by having me thrown into a jail cell forever. It means that I have the freedom to criticize my government without fear that I will be disappeared – and a democracy without criticism of government is not a democracy at all. Democracy does not exist without habeas corpus.
So……if me and my honey get it on tonight, can I rob a bank next week, and then hire an attorney to file a habeas appeal for my blastocyst? After all, it’s a human life, and it has rights, you know. Unless you’re willing to charge my blastocyst with a crime (accessory, perhaps?), I cannot see under what grounds you’d incarcerate it.
Why would you put an innocent baby in jail?
I don’t agree with your choice of landmark for what makes an organism human, Ian, but thank you for being so clear and consistent. I have to be a jerk and ask, though: if that single egg was fertilized successfully and the mother refused to have anything more to do with it, would that be on the same level of immorality as murder? Would it even be as immoral as an abortion at four months? If it’s murder, who’s responsible, and should the offending party or parties be tried?
Alas, your guess is wrong – unless you count the pope as a total nonentity (sorry, you don’t get to count him as a non-politician).
If we assume that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, then we can write 100’s of tracts on the repercussions that follow. And if we assume that a newly fertilized egg is both “human” and “living”, we can write long tracts about that.
But it’s hugely debatable whether either view has any basis.
This sort of abstract silliness can be put to the test. Would Ian sacrifice the life of an adult to save a zygote? Two zygotes (knowing that spontaneous abortion occurs something like 50% of the time anyway)? 1,000 zygotes? Would he kill his dog to save his own zygote? Somebody else’s zygote? Rational, feeling humans know the answers to these moral questions without any problem…it’s the religious nuts who are desensitized to them.
Thanks, Caledonian, you beat me to it.
So people should have the right to go through a process that they know will likely kill several individuals before it is successful? Aren’t the couples (and the doctors) morally culpable for those deaths? How is this any different from an adoption process where two-thirds of the attempted adoptions end in the death of the child? Would that process be morally acceptable?
If one really believes that a zygote is worthy of moral concern in any significant way, then it seems to me that IVF is completely morally indefensible.
Having grown up a Catholic, perhaps I can shed a little light on the morality dilemma. Because these poor babies are there to help people give birth (and the Chorch has always been in favor of In Vitro fertilization) then the ones which are not used become God’s problem when they are dumped. If God wants to let them die once we have washed our human hands of the mess, then “His will be done, que sera, sera.” But if we extract medical information and kill them in the laboratory, then our human hands are stained with their blood, a blood which can never be washed from our souls. (Except in confession, of which atheist scientists never partake.)
(Blastoctysts do bleed, don’t they?)
Ian – “I regard human rights as constraints on human behaviour. The right to life effectively forbids people from killing one another without sufficient cause. The fact that people die from many other causes such as disease or accidents is tragic but irrelevant. If someone were to shoot you dead, society would try your killer for murder if he or she could be found. But if you were killed by a meteorite landing on you, we might put the offending rock in a museum but we would not put it in prison. In the first case, your right to life was violated, in the second case it was not.”
The important factor is not whether the killer is locked away. The criminal justice system is just a means to an end, right? It aims to deter criminals, and while they’re locked away restrain and hopefully rehabilitate them. It’s all done with the aim of countering infringements of people’s rights (or at least, it should be – justice systems tend to get ugly when people try to use them for pure vengeance). We don’t refrain from locking away killer meteorites because we don’t care about meteorite-caused deaths, we refrain because it would be pointless – it’s not going to kill again and its sentence won’t deter other meteorites. It would be like locking away the corpse of a murderer killed during the crime.
A person’s right to security extends to attack by non-human actors too (unless you’re a hardline libertarian), and we can see that because most of us want government to take steps to protect us from them, for instance by building flood defences and paying fire fighters. To take your meteorite example, there’s nothing that can practically be done about a single meteorite, but consider an Armageddon/Deep Impact scenario (big comet/asteroid on a collision course for Earth). If the thing could be blown up or driven off course, we would expect governments to try and do so, right? Why? To protect our right to life from a non-human actor.
I think it’s illuminating that even the Catholic Church, which opposes IVF, seems more concerned about it because it involves masturbation than because it kills embryos — from Mike’s link:
So the death of alleged ensouled humans is an “ancillary evil” that gets mentioned almost as an afterthought, after the true evils that (surprise!) involve sex. And this is from the religion that is a leading opponent of abortion.
Religious thinking around IVF is profoundly inconsistent.
Given as how blastocysts have yet to develop bone marrow tissue with which to produce red and white blood cells, or even a heart or blood vessels, the answer is an emphatic no.
Wish it were so black and white, PZ.
Blastocysts aren’t randomly killed off in the clinics as PZ suggests.
There exists such a thing as blastocyst quality – the Zebrafish taught you this!
We all forget there are high, medium and low quality blastocyts, and every gradient in-between, rated on a scoring system of survivability. Search PubMed all you like – there are thousands upon thousands of scientific papers on this.
Scoring criteria such as cleavage, metabolism, female
age, female health, polar bodies, day of transfer (to name just a few) are all important in the decision making.
The highest quality blastocyst(s) (top 1, 2 or 3 – if there are that many – if there are any more, as PZ suggests, the pregnancy just doesn’t play out) are transferred; the medium and poor quality embryos, that wouldn’t survive anyway (again, peruse PubMed, the research has been done) are incinerated medical waste.
Now, a 5 day blastocyst transfer is getting pretty predictable, and FEW make it that far:
http://www.touchbriefings.com/pdf/992/gardner.pdf
Unfortunately, PZ didn’t mention any of this.
Shorter Ian:
I’m okay with murder as long as it’s done inefficiently.
Ian (commenter #5), there are four words in your post that have any substance of fact: “I happen to believe …”
Everything that follows is simply an extension of your opinion, and not, as far as I can tell, based on any medical or scientific evidence. Recent events should tell you that this is an extremely haphazard and dangerous basis for determining social policy.
It may not be widely known but I happen to believe that the life of an individual human being begins at conception and that entitlement to the right to that life should also begin at that point.
How are your irrational, moronic, woman-hating views on this subject relevant here? As Doonsbury says, “If they’re not used, they’re discarded”.
Hmmm, philos. So do the right-to-lifers discriminate? It’s OK to off a blastocyst if it exhibits obvious cellular granularities, for instance?
This would be step forward if we got them to concede that some embryos don’t warrant preservation. I don’t think they’ll go for it, though.
This guy is saying it is OK to kill people who he thinks might be handicapped. Not that they will necessarily be handicapped. No one can tell that from a blastocyst.
Hmmmm, isn’t this what eugenics was all about? Old, discredited, dead movements should stay that way.
According to Philos mythology, the best blastocysts are always implanted. Leaving the bad blastocysts that “wouldn’t survive anyway.”
OK, so if they wouldn’t survive anyway and they end up torched, what would be wrong with making them into stem cells? Acording to you, these are not potential people but rather contributors to global warming.
Great, you have solved the dilemma. Now if you could state it in 1 syllable words in comic book format, maybe Bush can figure it out. Naw, on second thought probably not.
Hmmmm, isn’t this what eugenics was all about?
No, not all about. There were a lot of people in the eugenics movement who didn’t support killing anyone. They were more into sterilising people and letting them die off by attrition (or, as The Doctor said, “They kill you with kindness, by letting you live to death.”).
I’m kind of down with that, as long as we only apply it to people who don’t think that women are actual human beings, which is the root of the pro-forced-birth philosophy.
That issue always pushes my buttons because I’m handicapped, and lemme tell you, if some aliens or something came down and zapped every congenital handicap out of existence, I’d be thrilled. It’s hard out here for a gimp…
I may be the only person on the political left who isn’t overjoyed with IVF as a concept. There are absolutely tons of kids already in the world who could use parents and/or the privileges accruing to being raised in 21st Century North America, and these people absolutely have to have their genetically-own children, despite needing massive, expensive medical help to do so?! And people say childfree types are selfish.
On the other hand, unlike the forced-birth lobby, I don’t advocate fucking with the law to make the procedure illegal.
Argh, argh, argh. The thing that drives me nuts about pro-lifers (I mean, besides the misgogyny and rabid hatred of sex) is how fundamentally they misunderstand what a human life *is*, and what’s precious about it. If anything, their mindset *cheapens* the value of human life.
A blastocyst is alive, yes, and it contains human DNA. Just like the egg cell and the sperm cell that came before it were alive, and contained human DNA. A blastocyst is *not* a baby, beacuse a baby has something a lot more precious than human DNA: a human *mind*, the capacity for thought, that big, complex brain that sets us apart from every other species on the planet.
How can you venerate something without even a nervous system as a human life? How can you insist that any cell with human DNA in it is of equal value to a sentient being? I just don’t get it. I doubt I ever will.
(And, of course, I spelled “misogyny” wrong. What was that I was saying about the wondrous human brain?)
Ian at # 5. You say, “It may not be widely known but I happen to believe that the life of an individual human being begins at conception and that entitlement to the right to that life should also begin at that point.”
It is important to understand what exactly is meant by terms such as ‘right to life’ and ‘human rights’. There has been concern that they are not grounded in any justifiable concepts. Jeremy Bentham famously described ‘natural and imprescriptible rights’ as, “nonsense upon stilts”.
There is, however, good reason to disagree with this, on the grounds that human rights can arise from a contractual obligation, which was not fully operative in Bentham’s England, and therefore not recognized by him. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) lived about sixty years of his life during which slavery was legally sanctioned in the UK. There are other aspects of British life at that time, such as the lack of full adult suffrage, which meant that he lived in a society that was not democratic. Furthermore, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had not yet been formulated, let alone evolutionary psychology. I think these facts account for his somewhat dyspeptic take on ‘natural rights’.
I would suggest that this is how Human Rights are grounded. For highly intelligent social animals that live in large groups, there are the dangers of depredations that would be visited upon such groups by excessive acts of cheating. Consequently, we have evolved a capacity for moral agency. Moral agents are those who are capable of conforming to at least some of the demands of morality. This is normally taken to exclude young children and non-human animals.
Anthropologists have validated the importance of ‘tit for tat’ in our quotidian affairs. This is the origin of morality, not only because the threat of punishment of other’s transgressions helps keep would-be miscreants in line, but observance of the golden rule allows for cooperative behaviour, and the societal benefits that this confers. Those of us who are moral agents living in a democratic society wish others to treat us as they would themselves wish to be treated. For the proper functioning of democratic societies, the realization of this wish is the fundamental Human Right, which then allows for the implementation of subsidiary rights. Observing this fundamental right is the duty that we owe each other, to enable all to enjoy the benefits of human society. And as the temptation to cheat is quite pervasive, we employ police and a judiciary to maintain this right, and all its subsidiary rights, against threats imposed by cheats.
Democratic societies are a recent development. In the UK or Canada, we live in a parliamentary democracy, and in the internet age, that may seem anachronistic, but it is still democracy of a sort, with almost universal adult suffrage. All of the subsidiary human rights, such as a right to life in most circumstances, are therefore bestowed by the powerful, and in a democratic society, that means, (or should mean), the electorate.
———-
Ian, your supposed right to life has to be voted on – it has to be a democratic choice. Manifestly, this isn’t the case in most, if not all, of the Western democracies. So that right simply doesn’t exist, in most, if not all, of the Western democracies.
You haven’t been paying attention if you aren’t regretting that our parents’ generation had so many children. Our children are going to be regretting it to a much greater extent.
Sooner or later, over-population will be acknowledged as the greatest threat to humanity, possibly not until nature has stepped in, with a vengeance.
Fun, fun, fun, until Mother N. takes the ecosystem away. Well, actually, until we have made it unsustainable in its current configuration.
Wait. I thought the prohibition on masturbation was based on the supposed “sin” of Onan–sexual pleasure without the possibility of pregnancy. But in the case of IVF, you’re masturbating for the express purpose of getting someone pregnant (in a roundabout way, but still).
Gah. Is this the sort of “finer point” and “higher reasoning” apologists are always complaining about atheists not having considered? How can people read this stuff and not just instantly throw up their hands at the lunacy of it?
If full human rights begin at conception, then each and every miscarriage must be investigated as a homicide.
That’s going to be a bit problematic.
Denis Loubet
Now hold on just a minute….A few posts ago, someone told me blastocytes don’t have blood or bone marrow, but now you’re telling me some of them have already developed cleavage?
Not only that, but there’s an actual taxonomy of types of embryonic cleavages. I don’t have them committed to mammary or anything, but I’ll see if I can find it in my old vert embryology notes for you.
Boy, will I feel like a boob if I can’t come up with those notes.
Interrobang: You’re not the only one. I generally avoid polemics on the issue, just because fertility seems to be a personal and highly emotional issue, but I see absolutely no point in going to extraordinary measures to create more children when there are an enormous number already with no parents or homes.
Jillian: Well done. You pretty much blew that argument out of the water — and I notice he hasn’t responded. Ascribing human identity and agency to a fucking blastocyst is a logical and moral obscenity and completely unprecedented.
I notice Ian mentioned that the ‘right to life’ means that we cannot end a human life without reason; presumably, this is intended to make a safe space for state-sanctioned revenge killings or self-defense, because there are no other legal homicides.
But there is a reason to terminate the life of a blastocyst (or fetus) — because for it to continue to live, it must take advantage of the resources of a woman’s body. The law cannot place the life of the fetus above the woman’s right to bodily sovereignty, any more than the law can require me to donate one of my organs to my mother.
That comic really resonates with me, because almost ten years ago, Mr Thusnelda and I underwent the seemingly-endless and intrusive procedures of IVF. No actual kids resulted, in spite of our collectively producing prodigious quantities of embryos, most of which (we were told) we of low quality and simply not suitable for transfer. The lab tech explained that they’d ‘deflated’ and they’d have to be discarded.
The technology has moved on since then, of course, but when the time came for the transfer attempts with the blastocysts, and I was invited to look at my ‘children’ through the microscope, my overriding emotion was disappointment: “What? All that effort, and we get a few translucent cells in a dish?” I can tell you that they weren’t exactly sparkling with magical Humanity and, even at magnification, I don’t recall seeing a Soul in any of those five-cell blobs.
How can the forced-birthers get so worked up about blastocysts? I’d like to have two petrie dishes side by side with a lump of 3-day old cells in each and play a game with them: You Guess Which One is the Wombat!
I think a good question is why is killing human tissue that does have a brain a violation of the mystical, magical Right to Life?
Oh, right, because of the mystical magical brain tissue.
I suppose if you’re going to believe in magic, it’s good to put your finger exactly on where this magic enters into your system of beliefs. Brain tissue! No doubt in the pineal gland…
No, it’s more like this. You’re a puppetmaker, a magic puppet maker. About 6 out of 10 of the puppets you make come to life, becoming real little boys. This pleases childless couples, who you allow to adopt the boys. Several of the boys have grown to be Eagle Scouts and have saved babies from fires and little old ladies from nasty mountaineering accidents.
You think it’s not fair to the various trees in the forest to discriminate against any species of wood, so you have the twelve most common types of wood in your workshop warehouse. You randomly assign a number to each of the species of wood. You roll dice to see which type of wood will be made into a puppet today.
The religious authorities hear about your powers, and they have you arrested for gambling. At trial, you protest that it’s not gambling, since you’re not betting anything and you’re not playing against anyone else. You are convicted because the local anti-gambling statute says use of dice is gambling, period.
In jail, you can make no magic puppets. The local authorities decide to prosecute you for vagrancy, and they threaten to prosecute you for murder, just as soon as they can figure out how many magic puppet boys you haven’t made . . .
You take to talking to a quite intelligent cockroach who visits your cell. He tells you his name is Franz K.
PZ brings up a good point, namely ” . . . if we got them to concede that some embryos don’t warrant preservation.”
The above is a bit of a loaded statement. Change a few words around so it reads ” . . . if we got them to concede that some people don’t warrant preservation.”
Hideous statement isn’t it? Repulses me.
But it’s a bit of an empty statement unless it is in a context to something else. Let us say it is similar to what we’re talking about. Let’s say PZ is the captain of a small clipper, a squall is on it’s way, the radio is out and there are 12 people aboard with just 1 lifeboat capable of holding at most 4 people. All the people had too much to drink and so are unconscious. Captain PZ has to decide who to put in the lifeboat and who to leave out. Is it discrimination or a choice on best survivability with the situation at hand? Any sensible captain would put the youngest, strongest aboard – namely the children. And so with blastocysts. The unfit are not selected.
Discrimination. It isn’t a dirty word. We all do it in subtle ways. And not in the boring racial way (which is ridiculous if anyone understood evolution) but in another way, discriminatory choice.
Highly attractive people don’t call on you and you don’t call upon less attractive people to mate. Why?
That bum you drove by the other day: you didn’t stop to give him some money, take him to lunch and give him a bed to sleep upon and hug goodnight. Why?
Discrimination, choice, is at work.
It’s not fair, but it’s the real world.
We also don’t call ourselves speciest but we are in some regards – we don’t have intercourse with silverbacks, now do we? We prefer our own species. We pick and choose, when.
But what about discrimination upon life and deaht in living entities?
You kill gut Bacteroides by the millions, you stepped on that Formicidae the other day, you swatted that Anopheles on your thigh, you ate that Gallus gallus & Bos taurus (a God in some cultures)…
But what about discrimination in living human entities?
Some babies are born severely malformed and a hard choice is made to put the baby to sleep.
Someone you know was in a severe car accident 15 years ago; the body is alive but they have been neurologically deceased since then. Shall the plug be removed?
Grandpa is 96, needs heart surgery, but can’t travel. Those around him see his situation and make the choice to let nature take it’s course with no surgical intervention.
Now, discrimination upon blastocyst choice.
I consider myself a Pro-Lifer for all species and am ok with the recognition that some blastocysts are better at surviving than others. Some A-grade blastocysts are therefore utilzed and others – it’s the end of the line for them. We don’t necessarily discriminate, we pick and choose the blastocyst that is predicted to have the highest survivability, based upon the circumstances.
I think the gamete donors, namely the mother and father, should have the final say of what happens to the ‘classified poor’ blastocyst.
Some parents may want the blastocyst to meet incineration. That’s that.
Some just don’t want ‘their’ DNA information to be used in research and possibly live on for decades in some Petri dish (such as Henrietta Lacks / HeLa cells) or that it may initiate a social wedge, inevitably to other biomed repulsives. Again, incineration.
Some parents may actually be ‘ok’ with stem-cell research on the unused blastocyst, if it would be of any use to a lab.
I think that the ultimate, discriminatory choice lies with the parents with blastocyst savability.
Once we have blastocyst implantation, however, I am more biased towards Pro-Life – but again, I am open for debate.
The whole debate, remember, is opinion-based. There is no right or wrong answer. Absolutely none.
The pathetic part: most people in natural pregnancies (and all the associated monkey-wrenches within) and assisted fertilization procedures, let alone in heated Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate, haven’t the slightest clue of the details of what is going on their bodies and what is actually happening.
Just remember, Taco Bell serves Grade-E meat.
Think about it.
Considering the number of people here who theoretically ought to be aware of the basic facts of human biology and evolution, I’m amazed to see anyone expressing the least bit of shock that people want genetic heirs, instead of one of the random bits of human flotsam elsewhere in the world in need of parenting.
As others have pointed out, the entire hoo-hah (and by that word I mean the stem-cell issue, not a woman’s, you know, youknow, thingie) all stems, uh, originates, from the magical phrase, “Life begins at conception.”
The problem is, no one seems to want to recognize that this phrase originated with church propaganda. No scripture provided it, in any way shape or form. Science and medicine do not recognize it in the least. Law does not recognize it. No other aspect of culture, ours or anyone else’s, bothers to use this as a valid point. Otherwise, as Denis Loubert said, every miscarriage must be investigated as a potential murder, and we need to change our census questions (“Do you have any conceived cells in the house? How many? How about in other locations? What is their income?”)
It boils down to a cute phrase, that nobody bothers to think about, becoming the main point of their decisions. “I’m sorry, we cannot declare your grandmother dead yet, there is still cell division.”
No, wait, they look for either heart or brainwave activity, don’t they? All those bastard doctors signing death certificates without (somehow) investigating whether all cells in the body have stopped generating. And they only blow up abortion clinics? Somebody better clue in the religious moralists – it’s happening EVERYWHERE!!!!!!
Meanwhile, I’m one of those fringe element cultists, apparently. I tend to think the right to life should be granted to things that can definitely be shown to be alive – you know, like Iraqis who have no Weapons of Mass Destruction and couldn’t use them on us if they did? Funny how that issue, and millions of others like it, don’t crop up in right to life issues.
I also think that the right to life may, and this is the craziest part mind you, just may, extend to someone with cancer or Parkinsons or liver disease or countless other illnesses, people who (by every definition we use) already have a life. People who have names, and families, and others that love and rely on them. I told you it was crazy.
And if cell division is that magical, mystical, key point where the soul springs forth, then who says it does not continue with the tissue that can be cultured from those cells, that can one day replace the dying (by every definition) cells in somebody’s living (by every definition) body? It would seem to me that the right to life would goad us towards ensuring that cell division continues to take place in every way we can, and stem cell research is our moral obligation.
But then again, I have a mind and don’t use it to blindly follow stupid catch phrases from religious leaders.
The funny thing is that many of those people who go to such extraordinary lengths to preserve their genes don’t think that the explanation for why they’re doing it is even real.
This ludicrous analogy doesn’t hold, as it doesn’t recognize that couples doing IVF know prior to the procedure that only a third or so of the produced embryos will live. In your analogy, PZ would have to be aware ahead of time that his ship isn’t seaworthy, and that he routinely has to kill two-thirds of his passengers on each voyage, and yet continues to carry travellers. If that isn’t monstrous, I don’t know what is. So why isn’t IVF similarly horrific?
(Actually, given that IVF isn’t just killing alleged persons, but also intentionally creating its victims, it seems it should be considered especially grotesque, that is if one believes embryos are people.)
what, a monty python comment, but not “every sperm is sacred?”
come on, people!
Sort of on topic. One way out of the stem cell swamp would be to reprogram cells into embryonic stem cells. Work is underway such as the above. The gene transfer won’t really do as it is now.
1. The mice came down with cancer in the F1. Probably due to the retrovirus vector.
2. It only works on mice so far and not humans.
Hard to say when these problems will be solved. Gene therapy worked well in animals decades ago and human results have been almost nonexistent. But if they do get reprogramming to work, that also would make animal and human cloning more feasible.
Caledonian wrote:
Italicised or not, there is nothing mysterious or magical about the Right to Life. It’s simply a rule which most if not all societies agree is a Good Thing as it helps to prevent people from killing each other willy-nilly. It’s probably grounded in The Golden Rule.
It doesn’t make organ donation or the killing of any other human tissue a crime unless that tissue is a zygote or blastula or embryo or fetus.
And since the dead don’t qualify for the right to life by virtue of being dead, the brain-dead have no right to life.
Back to the equivocation fallacy again Ian?
Ian wrote:
I am not eligible to vote in US elections but I would support legislation that prevented fertility clinics from creating large numbers of blastocysts, most of which are bound to be discarded.
Ian, I would very much like to see you respond to the notion that even when human entity isn’t involved, mass deaths of humans are generally investigated and, where possible, prevented (or at least lessened).
I am not sure of the exact figures, but somewhere between 65 and 80% of embryos spontaneously abort. This is huge. You say you do not consider it because it is “natural” – does this mean you would have put vaccines for smallpox and polio (among others) off as irrelevant until all murders were wiped out in the world?
This is not a snide remark. It is about the only inconsistency I can see in your beliefs; I would very much like to know why you don’t seem to think that death by natural disaster is worthy of being investigated, and where possible prevented.
Please, take the time to answer some of the serious questions put to you. Answering only those who have already dismissed your opinions as irrelevant (as evidenced by heavy sarcasm) isn’t helpful to either you or to those of us interested in actual free exchange of ideas.
Thanks.
I’ve always wondered that if “life begins at conception,” why wouldn’t identical twins be considered one life form. Then, if I “terminated” one of the identical twins and was put on trial for murder, could my defense be to call the other twin to the stand and state that I could not have committed murder because the life that began at conception is still going on.
Shnakepup wrote:
I am agnostic and atheist. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a soul. What I believe is that zygote, blastula, embryo etc, are all stages in the life-cycle of what we perceive as a human individual. There is no discontinuity between them or between the later stages of newborn, child, teenager or adult. There is a continuous process of development linking the fertilized egg where we began to the individual human beings we are now. We are beings extended though time as well as space – Heinlein’s “pink worms”. The consciousness that some here think is the only qualification for the right to life would not and could not have emerged if the development of the physical ‘substrate’ were prevented. It seems reasonable to me, therefore, that it should be protected by the right to life as well.
Before awareness, after awareness – no difference, just meat. I don’t believe meat is deserving of rights, especially when such rights would circumvent those of an already sentient being.
Well, that leads us to another issue: That blastocyst has to go somewhere, if you ever want it to grow into something that can think. And if it’s a blastocyst that’s not likely to be viable– if it’s in that two-thirds that don’t get implanted– you’re asking women to start pregnancies that have little chance of surviving, and may in fact decrease their likelihood of a future successful pregnancy.
And that’s only IVF, where the women in question *want* children. When abortion comes into it, you’re talking about forced pregnancy. That’s unacceptable.
I’m amazed to see anyone expressing the least bit of shock that people want genetic heirs, instead of one of the random bits of human flotsam elsewhere in the world in need of parenting.
Guess what, *your* genetic heirs are *my* human flotsam (more likely jetsam). Anyone who thinks their genteic material is somehow more worthy than other people’s has already demonstrated that it isn’t.
If you want to preserve your bloodline, then donate it at the nearest clinic.
Jillian wrote
Nice try, but I have only ever argued that the blastocyst should be entitled to the right to life. Still, if the unborn were ever eligible for habeas corpus then your sentence might have to be delayed until after you had given birth.
Posted by: | July 22, 2007 12:10 PM
What I believe is that zygote, blastula, embryo etc, are all stages in the life-cycle of what we perceive as a human individual. There is no discontinuity between them or between the later stages of newborn, child, teenager or adult.
There is no discontinuity between the sperm of egg and the later stages, either. So what do you do with your used condoms? And how is your collection of used tampons going?
*hums a few bars of “Every Sperm Is Sacred”*
It seems reasonable to me, therefore, that it should be protected by the right to life as well.
I brought this up before, but you didn’t engage with it.
If “rights” are agreed upon between moral agents (as you suggest), then that which is not a moral agent has no rights.. they can have priviledges extended to them, but those are not rights. Blastocysts, embryos, fetuses and very young children are not moral agents. They do not, by this view, have any rights. Your position is logically inconsistent with your argument.
Oh, BTW, I agree, blastocysts, embryos, fetuses and very young children do not have any rights… they have priviledges.
Mindbleach wrote
I think that, in order to be eligible for fertility treatment, parents should agree in advance to be responsible for any successful fertilization. If they refuse later, I would expect the zygote to be held in cryogenic storage and offered to other couples in need of one. If no other host can be found and the zygote ultimately dies then I think the parents should be held accountable, as they were warned in advance might happen. I would not see it as murder, however, since there would have been no intention to kill.
Clearly you’ve never experienced the incredible extravaganza of circular reasoning that is a debate with Ian. I believe he’s already established that he believes there is a difference; that having sex constitutes implicit abdication of bodily autonomy. Somehow this does not qualify, in his eyes, as being either anti-sex or misogynistic.
Clearly you’ve never experienced the incredible extravaganza of circular reasoning that is a debate with Ian.
Well, I haven’t, because he never actually responds to my queries.
A rose by any other name…
Ben Towse wrote:
For me or anyone else to guarantee your life against meteor strike or disease or falling down stairs would be pointless since we don’t have the power to prevent any of those things happening. As for referring to such events as “non-human actors”, it does not change the fact that these are not intelligent beings who are capable of choosing to act otherwise if required.
ken wrote
Unfortunately, no, it can’t be put to the test. As we learned on previous threads, you can’t pose any of the above choices because Ian’s right-to-life does not apply when at least one person will die in either option–even if it’s 1,000,000 deaths versus 1. Also, it does not apply in cases of capital punishment, war, and euthanasia of the brain-dead. Also, it does not apply when the cause of death is natural–apparently we have no moral obligation to help zygotes & embryos stay alive. And it doesn’t matter if it’s testable or not, because it’s not actually supposed to be something he acts on; it’s just an “axiomatic” guideline he’d like the rest of us to follow because he says so.
It still might apply if the choices is between the death of embryos and the mere suffering and disfigurement of a child, but he hasn’t answered that one yet.
Ian wrote:
Dawhuh? You’ve spent all this time talking about how there’s no discontinuity between embryo/fetus/child/adult, but you acknowledge a critical moral discontinuity between adult and adult-whose-brain-isn’t-working? How does that work?
One step at a time, PZ. One step at a time. Don’t imagine this isn’t in the thirty year playbook somewhere.
it does not change the fact that these are not intelligent beings who are capable of choosing to act otherwise if required.
But do they have rights?
Anton:
Just one of the inconsistencies of this particular “right to life” argument. Apparently, (no sentience + dead tissue) = no rights, while (no sentience + living tissue) = rights. The question becomes, what is it that we are conferring rights TO? In this case, it boils down to the fact that the cells in question are ALIVE – and then I ask, “So what?” I have never really gotten a satisfactory answer to that. Why a non-sentient bunch of cells should have rights that supersede those of a sentient female human being… well, no, no decent answer yet.
For me or anyone else to guarantee your life against meteor strike… would be pointless since we don’t have the power to prevent any of those things happening.
Off topic, but we do have this power, at least for the smaller celestial offenders – it is called nuclear weapons. That is why I regard the demand or desire for total nuclear disarmament as an act of treason against the entire human race.
As for embryos – if you don’t want them in the hands of the scientists and you don’t want to incinerate them, implant them into willing recipients with the blessing of the gamete donors. But the recipients have the right to know what they’re getting, and from whom.
The desire to bring up one’s own genetic children is a strong one which I’ve always thought was common to many cultures and nothing to do with God or religion.
The minute you start rubbishing or stamping on this desire, you’re insulting a large proportion of the human race. That doesn’t mean you can’t tell a couple “Look, we’ve failed three times, it really is time to give it a miss and consider adoption or donor blastocyst transfer” or something similar. But they have a right to try to have their own children first, provided that there is indeed a demonstrable medical cause for their infertility which can be reversed or evaded, and which doesn’t provide an overly increased risk of producing congenitally abnormal kids.
The desire to bring up one’s own genetic children is a strong one which I’ve always thought was common to many cultures and nothing to do with God or religion.
the desire to piddle whenever you feel like it (instead of use a bathroom) is also a strong one that seems to have nothing to do with God or religion.
Biology is not destiny.
Oh, well, then. Nice to see you’re not trying to make a legal argument, or a moral argument, or even any sort of consistent argument at all. You’re just sharing your own personal, prejudicial thought idiosyncrasies with us. That’s nice of you, I suppose.
We all have them, after all. Personally, I’ve always thought that people who annoy me shouldn’t be entitled to the right to life. However, I realize that running around claiming that this is some sort of “argument” that other people ought to take seriously would make me look like a lunatic, so I mostly keep this to myself. Perhaps some day you’ll figure that out, Ian. Until then, you’ll be wonderful entertainment, nonetheless.
First off, we should establish that no one here ever comments on the right of an animal having the “right to life.” Ian you don’t think PZ is wrong in killing off a few hundred Zebra fish do you? So lets change the name to “the right to human life.” Now this presupposes that humans are somehow a better or higher form of life then any other creature on the planet merely because we can have this conversation. Most atheists I know think that humans are just another creature. If the collective you could give two shits about experimenting on animal blastocysts then it’s a little hypocritical to protect the human ones.
Just for the record, I would rather see them being used productively then burned into ash. I also love to eat dead cow and other tasty creatures. The only kind of immorality that I or any other human can have is our genetic children. Feel free to call me selfish and arrogant but I like the idea of part of me moving on into the future.
ken wrote:
Would you sacrifice one adult human being to save a thousand others? Would you sacrifice a dog to save one human being? How can anyone answer such vague questions sensibly? The answers are contingent. What anyone would do would depend on the specific circumstances.
Sorry, that should have read immortality not immorality. Sort of changes the context.
FrumiousBandersnark wrote:
I understand how you can find evidence to support an explanation of some aspect of how the world is, but how do you find evidence to support a claim about how the world should be?
Richard Harris, FCD wrote:
More precisely, the right to life for the unborn does not exist. I agree. And I doubt that the situation will change any time soon. Are you saying, therefore, that I should shut up? I am getting the impression that there are some here who think I should.
Denis Loubet wrote:
It certainly would be. Fortunately, I have only ever argued for the right to life to be extended to the point of conception.
The only kind of immortality that I or any other human can have is our genetic children.
Yeah, I remember what great things Socrates children did.
Fortunately, I have only ever argued for the right to life to be extended to the point of conception.
But on no logical or empirical basis.
Ian,
I don’t think you should shut-up. This is a touchy issue that is tied directly to the religious right. So, its kind of a hot button topic.
Do you think the government has a right to restrict the number of children people can have? What about a semi-socialist country that ends up paying for all of those children?
Who is the advocate for these unborn children? You? Me? The parents? Would it be an elected position? Does the President/PM pick?
It seems to me you are suggesting that we open one big ass can of worms.
Djur wrote:
As the law stands you are right. But even Roe v Wade did not judge that the woman’s right to “bodily sovereignty” was unqualified. It also pointed out that if the unborn were ever granted the legal status of person then abortion would become a crime.
True, but you are a man. Would you force a woman to be pregnant for your beliefs?
What anyone would do would depend on the specific circumstances.
I imagine there are plenty of folks who would argue the following: A “human” is created a split second after fertilization. Humans are better than dogs. Ceteris paribus, Fluffy should be sacrificed to save the zygote.
Less abstractly, there certainly are plenty of folks who would argue for the harshest penalties for abortion doctors. Presumably, these folks believe a fetus is precisely as “human” as a fully grown, educated, experienced, conscious, contributing adult.
In your own case, you’ve already made it clear that you would stultify the IVF process because of your belief that zygotes are Human. Nothing contingent in your assessment of that scenario.
It’s fairly obvious that we intuitively understand that there are degrees of humanness (as well as consciousness), and a freshly fertilized zygote hardly qualifies as human. Typically, religion and dogma only confound this common sense morality.
Bobber:
Apparently it’s worse than that. (no sentience + living tissue) = no rights when it’s a brain-dead human, (no sentience + living tissue) = rights when it’s an embryo.
zweiblumen wrote:
Yes, that’s true. There is a great deal of research into preventing human beings from dying from all sorts of causes.
I have seen similar figures for spontaneous abortion and, yes, it is a huge number. So why increase it by the millions of abortions carried out by by human beings?
I have never argued that spontaneous abortion was irrelevant as a problem of human health. What I have said is that it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the unborn should have the right to life. My view has always been that what we call human rights actually exist to regulate human behaviour. The right to life exists to prevent people killing each other, it cannot prevent things like meteorites from killing people and it was never intended to. If there is no human agency involved, as in the case of spontaneous abortion, then no right has been violated.
On the contrary, I do think that the causes of natural disasters, accidents and disease are all very worthy of investigation. It is simply that they are separate issues. The fact that so many pregnancies abort spontaneously has no bearing one way or the other on the question of whether or not human beings should carry out abortions.
I am sorry it has taken so long to reply but, as you may have noticed, I am one against many so it takes time to get around to answering all the comments.
Just out of curiosity, what do people here believe about morality and the blastocyst? I have some opinions but I have not often put them out there for critical analysis very often. I’m sure my opinions need some honing so here they are:
I think that they, blastocysts, are potential human life rather than full on human life so, no, they don’t have a “right to life”. I do have respect for all life, human and otherwise and don’t think any life should be used with total disregard. So, I’m OK with eating bunnies for dinner or using them for medical experimentation for the benefit of other bunnies or humans but not OK with torturing them for fun. This isn’t just an axiomatic guideline for me. I’ve raised all my own meat for over five years and do most of my own butchering. Sorry to drift off a bit but I really don’t see a hard line between human and animal rights. I’d like to modify “all life” a little and say that I do value life more the more “advanced” it is. For example, a bunny should receive more consideration than a virus. Life that is non-sentient should be treated with the respect that we grant our environment in general (er, probably a bit better than we currently treat our general environment but then, we should treat that better too).
Anyway, IMHO conception is not a super important moral point on the scale of development. It’s important in a practical sense as it’s a lot easier (less expensive, less invasive, less risk to health of the woman) to prevent conception rather than to deal with it after the fact.
I don’t have a problem with stem cell research. I would be less thrilled if blastocysts were used to make face cream. Not hot on IVF on practical grounds. There are so many children in need of homes that it seems a bit callous to breed such expensive babies. Yes, I understand the desire to have genetic children but I don’t think it’s a right and I don’t think it trumps all other considerations. I do have genetic children but I honestly don’t believe that I would have chosen to go the IVF route if I couldn’t have had them.
Interested in other opinions and in the weaknesses in my own thoughts.
Ian, I am sorry to pile on, and I appreciate the fact that you hang out and try to address the many replies to you, but I have to continue exploring your idea of seamless continuity from conception until death. When, in your estimation, does “conception” occur? Is it the first division of the fertilized egg, or the moment the sperm cell penetrates the ovum? What about while the sperm cell is still working to get into the ovum? What about when the sperm cell is just about to reach the ovum? And the question about identical twins was never answered, even though it was a very relevant question. The splitting of a zygote into twins happens after the blastocyst stage, so if there is a continuum of life that reaches to the blastocyst and prior stages, twins can only possibly be counted as one life-form. I do not believe that you think this is the case, and I would like you address the discontinuity of life in the case of identical twins when one life suddenly becomes two lives. And if you say it is physical separation, what about conjoined twins in-utero?
Ooh, ooh, another poser; what about the many cases where conjoined twins must be separated to prevent their certain deaths, but with the foreknowledge that one of the twins will die? Not exactly on-topic, but in the ballpark.
Yes; one against an army is daunting. I used to argue on religious message boards when I still thought myself religious – I was probably an athiest on the inside already by this point, but I didn’t want to admit it in case I was wrong and H-ll was real…
Thank you for responding to me. Most of what you say is easy enough to understand, but one part in particular I’d like to discuss a little further…
You write:
“On the contrary, I do think that the causes of natural disasters, accidents and disease are all very worthy of investigation. It is simply that they are separate issues. The fact that so many pregnancies abort spontaneously has no bearing one way or the other on the question of whether or not human beings should carry out abortions. ”
Now, myself, I don’t think “seperate” always means “irrelevant” – and in this case I for one more earnestly wished to understand your position than to argue about abortion per se. I hope you can see that in the context of understanding someone’s position as a whole, this “seperate” issue can be quite relevant.
For instance, if the rate of deaths by murder was a thousand times smaller than the rate of death by disease, and the two were of similar difficulty in solving, then I would turn my attention to disease – assuming I couldn’t do both effectively, of course. Ignoring the murders while dealing with the disease certainly isn’t giving the murderers the A-OK; it’s just taking a practical approach of preventing as many senseless deaths as possible.
[Note: I do not think of abortion as murder. If you wish to understand *me* better, then this may have bearing on the discussion… but while I’m trying to understand *you*, it’s really neither here nor there. As you say, seperate issue – relevance is up to you.]
I suppose what I’m asking about is, do you think more should be done to prevent abortions, or do you think more effort should be put into preventing miscarriages (which kill many millions of times more than human intervention does – I may be exagerating, but not by too much).
If you agree with me that effort should logically go first into that which kills that vastly greater numbers, then I suppose I don’t need too much clarification, so I’m going to go straight into the next question: Assuming you think that abortions are the bigger problem, can you explain why you feel this way?
Thank you for replying.
Just a little bit of irony in the fact that a huge number of posts are directed at Ian. It seems that, whether you think him evasive and maddening, or not, he (or she, don’t want to assume) has, at least, contributed by making everyone else think a bit more clearly about their questions, rather than allowing an unscientific rant-fest of attacks.
I happen to disagree with almost every opinion he has expressed, but we should all remember that any group of people who gather to agree about everything is, quite likely, already mixing the Kool-Aid.
yiela,
You wanted to know others’ opinions on the topics about which you wrote.
You said:
“There are so many children in need of homes that it seems a bit callous to breed such expensive babies. Yes, I understand the desire to have genetic children but I don’t think it’s a right and I don’t think it trumps all other considerations.”
IVF: If anyone wants to spend all that money to do so, fine. It would be nice if they would consent to have any unused blastocysts actually used for something instead of being incinerated or otherwise disposed.
Yes, it would also be nice if, instead, they adopted some of those children who need homes. It would have been nice for me to adopt children. Instead, I had my own. If having your own children naturally is a “right”, I don’t see why having one via IVF, if you yourself pay for the expense of it (not by the insurance group, which means other people who pay into the insurance group would have to finance it), is not a “right”.
You said:
“I don’t have a problem with stem cell research. I would be less thrilled if blastocysts were used to make face cream.”
Blastocysts of any species are living cells with no sentience & no ability to feel pain & lots of other nos, so I have no problem if human ones were used to make face cream or a salve for my dog’s wound, etc.
If a female wanted to sell any of her eggs to a company that would fertilize them & grow them into blasocysts for any such purpose: her choice, as well as the choice of any man whose sperm was used: no greater responsibility whichever sex provides the gametes. Again, a group of non-sentient cells with no organs or organ systems.
By examining the results. Like we’ve said.
I understand your position about the whole human intervention thing. What i’m concerned about is that your concerns seem a little inconsistent.
Demarcating “life” or “individual life” is as much a general problem as defining “species”. And indeed “individual life begins at conception” has been found to give inconsistent results. It is as much debunked as similar dogmatic concepts.
So I think the question should be how we handle the faith-based communities concerns.
Abortion is a related question where we have to find reasonable regulation. As much as a newborn isn’t yet a fully functional individual, we would be hard pressed to continue earlier societies practices of killing the unwanted. So if we consent to compromise on this in the face of the facts, would the faith heads be willing to give up fetal material up to the last abortion date, for the good of verifiably living individual Parkinson victims? (Yes, I willingly conflate dogma with faith – how else?)
Probably not. But since it would be consistent and moral, even as basic morals of their own religions, offering this up front would mean that obfuscating faith heads will produce a hell of a lot of sins to make up for and they will know it.
Btw, life can be consistently considered as the continuing phenomena that once arose, and it can be consistently described as evolution of populations. So what is some of the problem of defining “individual life” or organisms? Que clonal colony organisms such as Pando.
When a soul/conception dogmatist can sort out any level of individuality there (and especially motivate why it is an unique one), he will start to have a basis to at least place one foot on. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I can happily report that females also produce an excess of gametes, instead of using the other ‘option’ of having them all full term.
Demarcating “life” or “individual life” is as much a general problem as defining “species”. And indeed “individual life begins at conception” has been found to give inconsistent results. It is as much debunked as similar dogmatic concepts.
So I think the question should be how we handle the faith-based communities concerns.
Abortion is a related question where we have to find reasonable regulation. As much as a newborn isn’t yet a fully functional individual, we would be hard pressed to continue earlier societies practices of killing the unwanted. So if we consent to compromise on this in the face of the facts, would the faith heads be willing to give up fetal material up to the last abortion date, for the good of verifiably living individual Parkinson victims? (Yes, I willingly conflate dogma with faith – how else?)
Probably not. But since it would be consistent and moral, even as basic morals of their own religions, offering this up front would mean that obfuscating faith heads will produce a hell of a lot of sins to make up for and they will know it.
Btw, life can be consistently considered as the continuing phenomena that once arose, and it can be consistently described as evolution of populations. So what is some of the problem of defining “individual life” or organisms? Que clonal colony organisms such as Pando.
When a soul/conception dogmatist can sort out any level of individuality there (and especially motivate why it is an unique one), he will start to have a basis to at least place one foot on. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I can happily report that females also produce an excess of gametes, instead of using the other ‘option’ of having them all full term.
Ian, you say, “More precisely, the right to life for the unborn does not exist. I agree. And I doubt that the situation will change any time soon. Are you saying, therefore, that I should shut up? I am getting the impression that there are some here who think I should.”
No, I don’t say that you should shut up. You’re entitled to your opinion, & entitled to promote it. However, on a message board largely populated by rationalists, you’ll be in a minority on this. Most of us here think that living entities without a central nervous system are not deserving of being granted a comprehensive right to life.
I doubt that any of us believe that rights exist independently ‘out there’, so therefore we believe that they can only be granted by the powerful. The Catholic Church is fairly powerful, & tries to obtain the right to life that you support. It sees rights as being granted by a god thing. Surely you don’t want to be associated with such magical thinking?
Ian
What I have said is that it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the unborn should have the right to life.
No, but you haven’t presented us with a logical, consistent or empirically-based argument whether or not the unbon have a “right to life”.
I’m saying that I agree with you about the source of rights… they are negotiated between moral agents. Where you and I differ is that that I don’t see how these rights logically extend to a blastocyst.
I realize that there are a lot of people arguing with you, but considering that we agree up to that point, and that I have kept asking you this on thread after thread after thread, I’d really appreciate you putting some effort into the question.
This is a topic that I’ve kind of done to death, as it were by now. What I want to say is said as pithily as I can say it here: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/06/death-of-embryo.html.
Bottom line: an embryo is not the sort of thing that could have something like a right to life, to the extent that this is a meaningful concept at all.
Of course, my approach is totally naturalistic. I see morality as grounded in entirely facts about what things merit our compassion, what is required for social order, why we have good reasons not to be entirely selfish and to cultivate some traditional moral virtues, etc. I realise that religionists add in other stuff, but so much for religion: it just gets in the way of a rational, secular, naturalistic approach to morality … and leaves us with a morality of misery. This is exactly why we need popular debunkers of religion such as Dawkins.
I’m buggered if I know why the link doesn’t work – at least it didn’t for me when I tested it – but anyway the link from my name does and the relevant post is on the page if anyone can be bothered.
Russell Blackford:
Your hyperlink broke because of the period at the end. This one should work properly.
Ah, always a trap.
“I have never argued that spontaneous abortion was irrelevant as a problem of human health. What I have said is that it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the unborn should have the right to life.” – Ian S>
It is entirely relevant. As we discover more of the medical reasons for spontaneous abortion, do you think we must monitor, curtail, and legislate laws regarding the activities of all women who have been sexually active, in order to prevent spontaneous abortion of a potential human life? If it is found that one glass of wine, or a day spent horseback riding, or working in a stressful job contributes to spontaneous abortion of a blastocyst, will you consider it murder for a woman to engage in any of these activities?
Bee, it’s more than even just that. What about a man who exposes his sperm to mutagens? If those sperm are only days away from becoming a person, how are we to allow him to engage in such risky activities as home woodworking, with all the shellac and formaldehyde? He could be condemning his child to a life of disability.
“For me or anyone else to guarantee your life against meteor strike or disease or falling down stairs would be pointless since we don’t have the power to prevent any of those things happening. As for referring to such events as “non-human actors”, it does not change the fact that these are not intelligent beings who are capable of choosing to act otherwise if required.”
The state doesn’t *guarantee* your life against murder either. What it does is to say, “in recognition of your right to life, we will expend reasonable effort and resources in the police force and criminal justice systems to do our best to stop you being murdered”. Similarly, it can quite reasonably invest in firefighters, flood defences, nuclear weapons to blow up comets, natural disaster evacuation and rescue services and (in civilised countries) universal healthcare. All of these are efforts to prevent death (as well as injury and property damage) from non-human causes. Unless you believe that all of these government services should be abolished, then the distinction you are attempting to draw is a lie.
(I don’t have time to read through all the comments, so pardon me if this has come up already.)
If we assume that a human life begins at conception, then it would seem that miscarriage would be among the leading causes of “death,” worthy of a public health crusade on a par with the wars against cancer and heart disease. Anyone willing to take that stance?
Well, I *have* heard people complain fertility zygotes is killing babies.
Unfortunately I have no idea what percentage of fertilized eggs fail to plant themselves into the uterus wall (I’ve heard fifty percent), because I’ve always wanted to ask how do folks with this rationale *feel* about so many deaths unknown and unmourned. I kind of have a feeling they don’t really believe the percentage (which I don’t know so I can’t counter) or feel a general “god’s will” malaise.
I get some of my wishy-washy pro-life friends annoyed when I describe myself as “pro-abortion” in that they somehow feel they need to feel bad about and believe abortions are undesirable. (I counter linguistically that “pro”-x such as pro-appendectomy doesn’t mean you *like* x, but that you think x a positive and good option in some cases.) Personal choice and legalities aside when it just gets down to morality about how one *feels* about abortion, I just can’t feel that a zygote is a person or that being pregnant is the same as “with child”. I figure as a thought experiment that its simply impossible to get upset that a fertalized eggs for whatever reason doesn’t result in a pregnancy. Nor can anyone really think squirting sperm onto a bunch of ova in a petri dish really result in anything requiring protection.
Except people do.
Sigh…
Graculus wrote:
Separate sperm and egg do not develop into individual human beings under normal circumstances. Only when they merge is the life of an individual begun.
If we allow, for the sake of argument, that rights are agreed between moral agents, there is nothing in that concept to limit those to whom rights might be granted. In fact, we see that young children and babies are given the right to life and we do not withdraw it from patients with severe mental disorders or those who are comatose. These examples are ample evidence that we can and do extend the right to life to those who are neither capable of taking part in moral negotiations nor able to consent to being bound by their outcomes. I would argue that this is more than sufficient precedent for extending the right to life to the unborn.
Surely, a privilege is a right or advantage granted to a small, favoured group. My proposal is that the right to life be granted to all unborn children without fear or favour.
Bobber wrote:
So what you are implying is that, as far as you are concerned, these are just any old cells, indistinguishable from amoebas or bacteria or cells that form the lining of a wombat’s intestine? There is nothing distinctive about a human zygote at all?
Because the right to life, being the most fundamental, trumps all others? Because the burdens of pregnancy are no more a justification for killing the unborn child than are the burdens of raising a child after birth a justification for killing it?
What does this have to do with denying the use of unused and leftover zygotes from fertility treatments from being used in stem-cell research?
Again, Ian,
I may disagree with your opinions, but I sincerely respect the fact that you have remained to discuss them.
I think that you are truely being forthright in your attempts to answer the flood of questions, criticisms, and snarks that have come your way.
It does not so much matter to me, in this case, if some find your arguments circular or trivial, as it does that you remain here, without becoming abusive or dissmissive (no more than any of us), but willing to discuss.
An admirable trait, whatever the position espoused.
@comment 103: actually if we considered that life began at the moment of conception, miscarriage wouldn’t just be among the leading cause of death, it would be, overwhelmingly, THE leading cause of death. A majority of fertilised ova miscarry.
@Ian: you really need to answer that question re. identical twins. All the definitions you’ve given so far would imply that identical twins are one life, not two.
Aren’t you in favor of capital punishment?
Well, I find his depictions of how one-dimensionally women supposedly think, his trivialization of the medical risks of pregnancy, his bandying of terms like “feminazi” and “Holocaust”, and his framing of those of us who support choice on issues of bodily autonomy as “pro-abortion” superficial, dismissive, and borderline abusive, but your mileage, as they say, may vary.
Isn’t life the leading cause of death? Just asking.
Chaoswes wrote:
Since this whole discussion has been about abortion I assumed it was taken for granted that we were talking about human rights.
It also means that it says nothing about PZ’s work with zebrafish. As an aside, I would prefer that it were possible to conduct such research without using animals in this way – and I’m sure a lot of researchers feel the same – but if that isn’t possible then we will have to accept it if it can be shown that the potential benefit to humanity outweighs the harm being done to the animals.
I think that, in the grand scheme of things, we are just another animal. That doesn’t prevent us from recognizing that, in some ways, we are rather special but I think true greatness also includes a sense of humility.
Graculus wrote:
How would you provide an empirical basis for any right?
Chaoswes wrote:
I believe there will come a time when we either choose to restrict the number of children we have or nature will do it for us. It is already happening in some parts of the world – as it has throughout history – but eventually it could be on a global scale.
Chaoswes wrote:
I would not force or coerce a woman to become pregnant but I would support a law that restrained her from killing a fetus that did not threaten her life, at least until such time as it could be safely removed from her.
And war. And euthanasia of the brain-dead. Go figure.
Ian
Separate sperm and egg do not develop into individual human beings under normal circumstances. Only when they merge is the life of an individual begun.
Uh, that merging is a normal circumstance. Also, there’s some semantical difficulties. You say that the life of an individual has begun, but being an individual isn’t special. Cows are individuals, and we kill them and eat them.
there is nothing in that concept to limit those to whom rights might be granted.
Rights can be extended as priviledges, not granted, to non-moral agents. It’s a fine difference, but I think it’s very important. Corporations are legal persons… do they have a right to life?
In fact, we see that young children and babies are given the right to life and we do not withdraw it from patients with severe mental disorders or those who are comatose.
I do allow tht young children have rights, they have priviledges. No society allows full enjoyment of “human rights” to young children, in fact.
I would argue that this is more than sufficient precedent for extending the right to life to the unborn.
I would argue it does no such thing. Unless you think that corporations have human rights as well… they are, after all, legal persons (a stance I do not agree with, BTW)
How would you provide an empirical basis for any right?
As social animals with sufficient intelligence and moral agency, we have the capability of of negotiating what are rights. That is a different thing from determining what those rights are, ne c’est pas?
RavenT, I accept that the opinions Ian is expressing are not to the liking of many on this forum, but his choice of the term “pro-abortion”, while baited, is not any more abusive or dismissive than posts 21, 22, 23, and others which used tactics best (or poitely) described as unnecessary. I am simply pointing out that Ian has chosen to remain in touch (even as spotty as his answers have been, you all have to admit he is at least trying to stick around by giving his opinions). I, as I have said, do not agree with Ian’s axioms, and actually want to see his response to the questions that have been raised against them.
It is much more interesting to hear the dissenting opinion than it is to dismiss it.
Ian H Spedding FCD wrote:
Hmmm, show of hands: Honest misinterpretation of the question, or a deliberate attempt to avoid the key issue just about everyone has been bringing up?
I haven’t decided whether I find this sad, amusing, or typical, but Ian shows the same trait I’ve seen frequently in debates like this: Everything can be boiled down to black or white. Life begins at conception. Except that, as we see, it really means human life (animals don’t count), as a single organism (sperm and ova don’t count), with a distinct set of traits, no, wait, we managed to ignore those, as well as the heart or nervous system parts, the definition of life itself, the distinctions of development in the womb, birth, self-animus, and so on. Most of those have been discarded as not even being worth addressing, apparently.
So, we determine we have Ian’s opinion, which he wants us to believe is carefully considered and worth the world’s attention, while he has managed to avoid all of the questions the world has struggled with over the years. All decisions are easy, provided you discard enough of the details.
Sorry, I have yet to have anyone show me pure black or pure white, anywhere – I keep seeing shades of grey. My own opinion is that we stop worrying about the definition of “life” and how sacred it is (not much, apparently, if we can create it in a lab dish), and concern ourselves instead with “quality of life.” Oh yes, a much tougher question, to be sure, and a real pain in the ass to people that have to have everything labeled black or white, good or bad. And yet, so much more useful. I, for one, would rather see a child aborted long before any self-awareness takes place, than watch it grow up in a household without adequate medical care, parental attention, or any of the thousands of things that makes a loving family. Organisms die all the time, regardless of how you want to classify them. It’s another matter entirely to create suffering when there is no need to.
But “Life,” apparently, is the key goal. Doesn’t matter if it’s shitty or not. Want a child? Have a great home for one, the resources and desire to do it conscientiously, the environment to help it thrive? All you lack is the biological ability? Too bad! We can’t accomodate you – it might require crossing this imaginary and arbitrary line! But the underage unwed mother without a job and whose spouse vanished, trying to get her own life in order, ah, welcome to the miracle of parenthood! Let us force this decision on you and then ignore the child from that point on. Shame you made such a bad decision, none of US do that, now let’s take it out on the child. That’s the moral thing to do.
I think I’d be more impressed if Ian had spent half as much time on his initial decision of what constituted “life” as he has trying to defend it.
autumn wrote:
It may not be possible to pinpoint the exact moment at which conception can be said to have occured in what is a clearly a continuous process but does this mean that a threshold is not crossed at some point? Sven DiMilo brought this up in another thread and prompted this reply:
To put it simply, what difference does it make?
Again I would ask what difference does it make?
If the right to life attaches to the individual from conception then the zygote and all subsequent stages of development are protected. If division into two separate individuals happens after the blastula stage then both are entitled to the right to life.
Remember, in my view, the right to life only functions as a constraint on human behaviour. It prohibits each of us from killing other without sufficient cause. All that means is that, before the division, there is one individual we must not kill, after the division there are two we must
…not kill.
autumn wrote:
In a sense, this is easier because the decision is forced on us. We have a choice between saving one or none. It’s a straightforward lesser-of-two-evils situation. You try to save both but if that’s not possible you save what you can.
zweiblumen wrote:
I do not believe abortion is a bigger problem, I see this as two separate issues, one of human rights and the other of public health.
For me, it goes without saying that we should be doing all we can to understand and, hopefully, prevent miscarriages. But, as far as I know, the people and facilities used for that research are not usually involved in abortion to the extent that there is direct competition for resources.
My opposition to abortion is based solely on my belief that the human right to life should be extended to the unborn phase of an individual’s entire life-span. I believe that to set the start of an individual’s life at conception is the least arbitrary choice. While it is quite obvious that a zygote has almost none of the attributes of an adult human being, it will develop into one if all goes well. That is not true of an unaided egg, sperm, skin or any other cell.
As I have written before, I view a human being not just as a three-dimensional object but also as an event, stretching through time from conception to death. We already grant the right to life to the great majority of that lifespan, why not the small remainder? Laws against physical assault, for example, prohibit others from injuring any part of you, they don’t protect most of you but say it’s okay to chop off your feet.
As for why I feel this way, it’s hard to say. I doubt if any of us can untangle all the influences that shaped how we feel and think about things, many of them coming to bear before we were aware of what was happening to us.
I do not believe in a God of any sort. I suspect that life and, subsequently, intelligence may be an inevitable emergent property of the way this Universe is set up. If so, then even if there is intelligent life elsewhere, it seems we are on our own, for the moment at least. We have to decide for ourselves how we want our lives and our society to be. I find that trying to understand and respect others, not killing or destroying anything that we don’t have to, being constantly aware of our own weakness and ignorance rather than gloating about our small knowledge and feeble powers is a better way to be. What angers me is carelessness and waste. The drunk driver or plain teenage show-off who winds up killing innocent people through sheer thoughtlessness and bravado outrages me almost as much as the psychopathic murderer.
I believe that each human life should be presumed to be a precious resource. Whatever the sociological probablities, we have no way of knowing how each life will unfold. Even if the child is born and raised in what we might feel are less-than-ideal circumstances, it is not for us to kill it, at any point, to prevent what we feel is unnecessary suffering. It is for each of us to decide whether or not our own life is bearable, if we are able. It is not for others to decide to end it for us, except where we are no longer able to make such a choice for ourselves and are never likely to be able to recover that ability.
Bee wrote:
If a mother was found to be giving drugs or alcohol or cigarettes to her newborn baby, what would you say? I suspect most people would at least hold her negligent if not deserving to be prosecuted for more serious offences such as child abuse or supplying drugs to a minor. Almost certainly, the child would be taken into care.
A basic principle of any society which upholds the concept of maximal individual freedom is that anyone should be able to exercise those rights and freedoms only up to the point at which so doing becomes likely to cause harm to others. Whether she likes it or not, a pregnant woman is responsible not just for herself but for the new life she is carrying. For that period, at least, she is not entirely free to do just as she likes.
Azkyroth wrote:
In some cases, yes.
Anton Mates wrote:
In some cases, yes.
How can you euthanize that which is already dead?
It’s not my figuring that’s the problem.
In precisely the same way abortion kills that which has never lived?
I was talking to Azkyroth.
a deeply interesting and significant debate deserving of the widest possible dissemination…
thankyou to all who have taken part, especially Ian, (whom I agree with instinctively)
to PZ for providing the forum
and to everyone for educating a 64 year old retiree who has rediscovered the sheer joy of learning and arguing and evaluating!!
Whether she likes it or not, a pregnant woman is responsible not just for herself but for the new life she is carrying. For that period, at least, she is not entirely free to do just as she likes.
What this requires, of course, is that *all* women who have not reached menopause be prevented from doing anything which may be harmful to a blastocyst, etc. No women may work with chemicals, or have a glass of wine with dinner, or be given lifesaving drugs, etc. .. because she might be pregnant.
That fused germcell thingie is more important that an adult human’s life. This is not a thought exercise, it’s already happened.
No matter how “rational” you think you are being, when your ideology trumps reason, then you have left “rationality” behind.