Forgive me, for I am guilty of the sin of false pride. I’m wont to judge Christians by the worst of them, and in contrast, to regard atheism as the refuge of the more worthy. I am chastised by the existence of The Raving Atheist, however, who shows me that godlessness is not necessarily correlated with rationality. He’s a useful reminder that a reasonable philosophy is not a guarantor that one is on the path to a truth.
If you haven’t been following along, The Raving Atheist is definitely an atheist, but he’s also an odd duck who has gone a bit unhinged on a few subjects. He’s strongly anti-choice, believing that the individual is specified at the instant of conception, in an argument that parallels the idea of ensoulment…but isn’t. He’s an atheist, after all. He’s chummy with a very bizarre character, Dawn Eden, who thinks sex is icky and is even more loony about abortion. Lately, his arguments have taken an anti-feminist twist, and the quote of the day he’s got up right now from Jill of Feministe is deplorable in its use of the dishonest ellipsis.
I’ve argued with him briefly about his idea that human identity begins at conception—I think it’s nonsense. I say that humanity is something that emerges gradually and is far more complex than having the right number of chromosomes and a certain set of genes: information is added continuously during development, and it’s a serious mistake to think everything that defines you is already present at conception. It’s worse than a mistake; I think it trivializes what it means to be a human being, reducing it to cartoon genetics. The Raving Atheist disagrees, and makes a bad argument.
Professor Myers does not pinpoint which moment he believes to be the true beginning of human identity, mathematically, genetically or otherwise. But his criteria do not appear to be all strictly scientific. Responding to a Feministe poll, he stated that he’s “in favor of voluntary late term abortions (where premature birth would impose severe economic hardship, for instance), and can even consider situations where infanticide is ethically tenable.” So at least part of the “complex process” of computation of human life involves dollars and cents, something well outside the competence of developmental biologists.
Well. This amounts to little more than saying a) Myers holds a position I dislike, and b) developmental biologists can only have informed opinions about developmental biology (but of course, he also chooses to disregard those.) Those claims do not support his thesis that conception is the instant of definition, nor does it address my argument that there is no sharp demarcation.
A few lame counterarguments aren’t worth addressing, but the Raving Atheist then proceeds to step over a line, one I’m not going to let go without sharply disagreeing.
Perhaps I am misinterpreting things again. To be charitable, I’ll assume that at least post-birth, he’s not talking about the impoverished but only the “undesirables” (wink wink). Having grown up surrounded by ‘tards, I’m in considerable sympathy with him here, but an unmagical sense of caution grips my non-soul. There are some decisions that might best not be delegated entirely to the professors, the gene counters and the bean counters.
That is contemptible.
No, I’m not talking about culling the undesirables. If you want to find someone who is dead set against eugenics, who thinks we do not have the right to dictate who lives and dies, who is opposed to all interference by the state in reproduction, well, you’re reading his weblog right now. While the Raving Atheist is sympathetic to the idea of killing the “‘tards,” I am not; I do not judge the worth of a human life by its IQ or health or how many fingers and toes it’s got. I’m also not one of the “gene counters” who defines humanity by the adequacy of its chromosome set, an accusation that is particularly ironic considering its source.
Let me clarify the comments that have thrown the Raving Atheist into a tizzy. I am in favor of legal late term abortions. That does not mean I want to impose them. I believe strongly that the decision is entirely that of the woman bearing the fetus. I also believe that the ‘cult of the fetus’, of which the Raving Atheist is a charter member, drives people to make bad decisions that are ridiculously wasteful and destructive. It can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a premature baby. While people should have the right to invest that much of their life in a fetus, we should also recognize that that is an expenditure that can destroy families rather than maintain them.
As for infanticide, it has been a reality throughout human history. Women have made that difficult decision over and over again, not because they like killing babies, but out of necessity. I do not think a few million years of stressed and desperate mothers are guilty of an ethical lapse; they’ve done what was right and needful. Infanticide is a reasonable thing to do if 1) you have no other way to control fertility, and 2) you are so impoverished that the life of an infant must be balanced against your life and that of other members of your family. That is not an endorsement of infanticide, but a recognition of reality, and a refusal to damn people who have been compelled to make painful choices.
(By the way, while I think the instances of justifiable infanticide in America would be extremely rare, our Republican overlords are working hard to generate the conditions where both of my prerequisites are increasingly common.)
I think the Raving Atheist’s interpretation was unwarranted and misleading, verging on outright dishonesty, and I think his sympathy for killing “‘tards” is repellent, but I’ll say one thing for him: he isn’t quite as insane as other people out there. A couple of other blogs have picked up on his idea, and gone even further in their hysteria.
Blogs like Uncommon Descent, and its odious Igor, DaveScot. I’m sure the Raving Atheist will be pleased at the common cause found with some Intelligent Design lunatics. For instance, this interesting sentiment:
That’s the question for PZ and people like him. In PZ’s world there’s nothing underneath our subjective attempt to make sense out of it. At the end of the day it’s all an illusion. So here we have a man who KNOWS there is no such thing as morality, yet he can’t stop talking about it nor can he stop believing in it.
You see, we atheists are intrinsically amoral, with no deity to guide us, which of course explains how I can advocate butchering babies.
Never mind that I’m doing no such thing, or that one can be a moral being without believing in the lies of priests. Despite his fetal derangement, I suspect the Raving Atheist can still see the flaw in that argument.
Oh, and speaking of moral beings…here’s DaveScot.
Actually it makes me feel like doing some pain experiments on PZ Myers. I don’t believe he feels pain. All the blood and screaming from my fists pounding his face to a pulp would be nothing more significant than an automobile engine leaking oil and bearings making noise from lack of lubrication.
Eh. I’ve had much more serious threats. All this does is say something about DaveScot. Something…unsavory. Shortly after he made that comment, another person chimed in:
How horrifying. For anyone who has held a newborn baby in their arms and experienced the exquisite sensitivity and vulnerability of these tiny creatures to talk in such brutalized terms about them just makes the blood run cold. Where are the women in these men’s lives?
In case you’re confused, she isn’t horrified about the brutal language directed at me—she’s horrified that I’m pro-choice. You know, once we human beings get taller than 3 feet and sprout hair and teeth, then it’s OK to pound them to a bloody pulp.
For the record, I love babies and kids, and have been happily married to a woman who also loves babies and kids. We’ve had three of oour own, and I also come from a large family. I value children as people, not as bags of genes. What makes my blood run cold are these mindless ones who reflexively defend any gestating scrap of tissue with 46 chromosomes, and willingly throw full grown women and men who oppose them onto the bonfire of their cultish delusions.
Dead set against eugenics, you say? You say “If you want to find someone who is dead set against eugenics, who thinks we do not have the right to dictate who lives and dies, who is opposed to all interference by the state in reproduction, well, you’re reading his weblog right now”? Like hell. Try this (from this link:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/anencephaly_and_right_wing_moralizers/)
“There are much more difficult cases. What if the fetus was diagnosed with ‘merely’ a case of myelomeningocele that meant it would be paralyzed, require extensive surgeries, and would be a crippling financial burden? The average cost per year of maintaining a child with myelomeningocele is approximately $70,000, and that drain never ends. People with severe spina bifida can be intellectually and socially capable, fully human, but a young family with limited resources ought to have the privilege of making a choice about whether to shoulder the responsibility before the fetus has acquired those mental capacities. I presume we now have a government that will force families to take on that burden, but will refuse to pay any part of the price.”
You reduce humnanity to its economic viability -just as you did in this article as well- and you are talking eugenics, whether you like it or not. The Nazis were no different; wishing to get rid of the “racially and culturally undesirable.” You advocate the removal of the “economically undesireable”. Repellant.
Oh, and a good biologist such as yourself ought to recognize the fact that there IS a means of controlling fertility: It’s called not having sex.
Or is it just all about instinct?
Wow. I understood TRA to be anti-choice but I had no idea about the other stuff. You certainly made your case much more calmly, and I dare say intelligently, than I would have if he had implied such things about me.
Read carefully. Note this crucial statement:
That is not about eugenics. It’s not about me or you or the government or the church telling people that they must abort or must support — it’s the choice of the individual.
I knew some clueless bozo would come along and bring up Nazis. I’m impressed that you did it in the very first comment.
Also, as a good biologist, I recognize that abstinence is not an option. Sex is a natural and important part of biology, and is also an important component of being human. Why do you deny our humanity?
compass, you apparently simply stopped reading at the point where you found something you could attack Professor Myers for. If you’d read on, you would find that he said:
And in the post you don’t link to, PZ never once said that the government should force abortions for children with myelomeningocele, only that it should be an option available to the parents. He was pointing out the amorality of forcing parents to have children they are completely incapable of caring for.
Wow. Is DaveScott supposed to be a christian? To paraphrase Bill Maher the other week, if he thinks Jesus ever had a good word for beating someone to a pulp, then you might as well belive bunnies lay painted eggs.
Dawn Eden always strikes me as a bit naive, with her obsession with married sex and pregnancy. Being married and currently 7 months pregnant, I can say that sex after marriage is exactly the same as sex before marriage, except your catholic mother-in-law no longer gives you dirty looks when you come over for dinner.
And any woman who waxes prosaic about pregnancy has never spent weeks bent over a toilet puking, exhaused, and craving a slurpee and those little wasabi peas while weeping with hormone induced guilt about not being able to go to work.
So, you advocate people should stop having sex. That’s the end of humanity right there. At least the Nazis only wanted to remove a portion of humanity – apparently you want all of humanity to die out. Repellant.
Compass,
Ummm, for lack of a better way to put it, I think it’s a sign that one’s a “‘tard” (to borrow from the Raving Atheist) to suggest that allowing for a family to chose whether they want to have a child that’ll effectively have no brain and will likely live a short and unpleasant life is akin to Nazi eugenics.
In addition, the suggestion that financial matters are of concern in cases like the one you bring up is not a matter of reducing the value of life to a monetary value, it’s a recognition of reality. Many families simply can’t afford to pay $70,000 to keep a child alive. This isn’t PZ’s fault, it’s the fault of a for profit health care industry.
Finally your suggestion of not having sex makes no sense in the context of your argument. Granted, abstaining is a means of birth control but what does it have to do with whether one should abort an embryo that will develop to have a condition that will likely lead to it having a life that is marked only by it’s brevity and suffering? By your reasoning if we want to avoid having children with severe congenital defects we should all remain chaste, which quite frankly is stupid.
“Oh, and a good biologist such as yourself ought to recognize the fact that there IS a means of controlling fertility: It’s called not having sex.”
Or getting raped, presumably.
So does this mean, PZ that we self-identified “Progressive Christians” (you know, the ones at the peace demonstrations and candlelight vigils) are okay by you?
Excellent point, CK. The anti-choicers heads just explode at the thought that sometimes, people CHOOSE to abort pregnancies even though the child would be very much wanted.
I’m sure they would all be willing to step up and provide the money and resources to care for babies with severe congenital defects, just like they are always so willing to provide care for pregnant mothers and other children.. Oh wait, never mind.
I used to read the Raving Atheist, but I just can’t anymore. I don’t agree with his anti-choice stance, but I could read an anti-choice writer who had given his position serious thought and defended it civilly. Unfortunately, RA instead tends to defend his stance with sneering sarcasm and odious analogies, and has never (as far as I can tell) given his position any more thought or justification than “I wouldn’t have wanted to be aborted,” a rather ridiculous argument since by the time there is a you to express it, abortion is no longer a possibility.
It’s not even his anti-choice stance that turns me off as much as his general attitude of insensitivity, nastiness and spite. I’ve never shrunk from calling out the evils of religion when I see them, but calling ordinary theists “Godidiots” does not help. This sort of behavior just reflects badly on all of us nonbelievers and feeds the apologist stereotype that atheists are hostile, bitter people.
For all these reasons and more, I recommend that people in search of a good atheist blog visit mine, conveniently accessible by clicking on my name below. ;)
You are correct to call it a cult of the fetus. It is cult-like, especially in the in-group/out-group relations. This is why members of the cult can be so cavalier about violence against those who think differently. (The irony is that they claim to be against violence to the vulnerable fetus.)
It is also a cult in the sense that its members are bound together by an ideology that is sensible only to those on the inside. It is only a certain theological view or a simple-minded philosophy that explains why abortion and birth control are wrong. Those of us who are without such ideological commitments, who approach family planning from a rational perspective, find the justifications of the cult entirely unconvincing.
They are cult-like in their unscrupulous manner of changing opposing viewpoints into grotesque straw men. To acknowledge that decisions about fertility take place in a political economy is transformed in to a Nazi-esque commitment to “removal of the economically undesirable.”
Finally, they are cultish in the sense that their identity rests on an unspoken hostility towards material existence and sensual experience. (That is, they are anti-pleasure.) How else to explain the obsession with sex? We don’t need contraception, they seem to say, because the only morally correct way to control fertility is to not have sex. Wanting to have sex without fertility is perversion. What is that except a crazy anti-pleasure cult?
You’ve always been OK. You’ve been OK because you’re good people…I just wish you’d leave the silly and irrelevant god business out of it.
“Oh, and a good biologist such as yourself ought to recognize the fact that there IS a means of controlling fertility: It’s called not having sex.”
Excuse me? Perhaps this is an option in your sad little world, but in my world (i.e., the “real” world) sex is part of being human and having a normal relationship with a potentially fertile partner. I am completely cognizant of the fact that I risk becoming a father (regardless of birth-control that we may be using), and take full responsibility for that.
The decision to abort, if it comes to that, is none of my damned business. It is about how my partner feels *at that particular time* because it is her body that little zygote is implanted in, not mine.
We consider this a reasonable risk in return for a full and loving relationship. This is commonly referred to as A Normal Relationship Between Adults. Look it up.
What is implicit in statements like this is that the assumption is one partner is supposed to withhold sex from the other, or making sex contingent on conception. So, one is supposed to punish your partner unless and until she produces offspring?
For once I wish these ridiculous creeps would wake up and smell the coffee and stop proscribing arbitrary and artifical moral demands upon a simple evolutional mechanism.
I would just like to take this moment to comment that it really shows in every position in any argument that PZMyers takes that there is obvious thoughtfulness and an aim at virtue. Bravo.
It’s refreshing to see an absence of knee-jerk metaphysics and straw-manning of critics. What if our elected officials acted this way?
PZ’s comments on this matter remind me of an excellent book that more people should read called *The Worth of a Child* by Thomas Murray. It might be a little touchy-feely, but it’s an adult discussion of abortion and certainly doesn’t use the word “tard.”
The contempt shown for living people by wingnuts combined with their almost blind adoration for fetuses and braindead people on life support betrays their sense of life.
They love fetuses, the braindead, etc. because they have no mind and no identity and are thus not “corrupted” by being real living human beings. They are blameless because they aren’t fully aware.
Real living human beings on the other hand are disgusting filthy sinners who are perfectly ok to torture, beat, and kill. Witness their endless revenge fantasies, genocidal apocalypse fantasies, and *love* of war. You are beautiful and worthy of love when you’re a fetus, but when you grow up and get an identity then you’re cannon fodder.
They aren’t pro-life, except in some strange disassociative sense. They love potential life, or some abstract concept of it that has nothing to do with reality. They hate real *actualized* human life.
If you think about the implications of Platonic idealism, which is really all western religion is, then the reasons for this will become clear pretty quickly.
As a pro-life atheist, I try to keep it a simple “veil of ignorance” argument… something along the lines of, “let’s roleplay a mother and an unborn child. You decide whether abortions should be legal and I’ll decide which role you get to play.” Given enough time to make a more rigorous argument, I usually outline an argument based on liberal principles: governments are instituted for several purposes, one of the most important of which is a defense of the defenseless. If you have to decide when someone is worthy of defense under law, it’s a good idea to broaden your criterion as much as possible; liberals have always been the ones pushing for recognition of human rights as a basic entitlement of humanity. No one here would deny that an unborn child is human, and alive — the question is merely whether these characteristics constitute a human being worthy of legal protection, and I’m leery of instituting any further criteria since there are plenty of people already born that would fail most of the ones I can think of.
It’s a damn shame that so many of the pro-life arguments are so tied up with religion, not to mention a disrespect for the truth (abortion and breast cancer, anybody?). Being a pro-life atheist Texas liberal certainly gives one insight into the variety of opinions that exist in each of those subgroups. ;^)
Aw… An atheist who doesn’t fit the mold you think all atheists should fit into. B-o-o-h-o-o.
I guess he’s not a “true atheist,” eh? Wonder if he’s a Scotsman…
I guess JMcH couldn’t even read as far as the third sentence before jumping to a false conclusion.
Typical.
Hello William,
It’s good to see a rational pro-life atheist, as opposed to people like RA. Allow me to offer some thoughts:
This is a good argument, and I’m glad to see it expressed civilly. Here’s why I don’t agree with it:
Let’s try an analogous argument: let’s roleplay a mother and a child that has not yet been conceived. You decide whether contraception should be legal and I’ll decide which role you play.
Do you object to this? I certainly would. I reject this argument’s premise that anyone can take the position of “a child that has not yet been conceived” – that’s a category fallacy. By definition you can’t imagine yourself in such a position, because anyone in such a position, literally, does not exist. I would certainly hope that no rational policy-making process would be forced to take into account the interests of nonexistent people.
I believe the situation with abortion, at least early-term abortion, is the same. I do not agree that a fetus should be classified as a human being before the brain develops, because at that point the primary trait that constitutes a human – namely, characteristically human thought – does not yet exist. Until that trait develops, the fetus simply is not a human being, and as such, cannot have rights equal to those of existing humans. (How this bears on the question of whether a pregnant mother should or can do things harmful to the growth of the fetus is another story.)
I guess JMcH couldn’t even read as far as the third sentence before jumping to a false conclusion.
Typical.
Simply emulating the behavior of you and your ilk, PZ. I thought you’d be flattered.
While the Raving Atheist is sympathetic to the idea of killing the “‘tards,” I am not
While I can understand why a low-blow would be met with a low-blow, let’s let intellectual honesty reign. He was obviously using (characteristic) dark humor – Step back and it’s clear no parties here want innocent people to die.
The ‘Culture of Life’ exemplified by fetus fondlin’ Santorum, and the perverse Republican antics over Terry Schiavo is a truly screwy world-view. This is underlined even further because ALL the people you find with this world-view, where entities in the hinterlands of human existence are demanded unambiguous human status, show much less sympathy for humans that are, well unambiguously human. Death Penalty? “Fry the fuckers. Even rapists and child molesters.” Torture? “If you want to make an omelette. . .”
How about animal rights? “Vegetarians are wackos and pussies.” Seriously, read the El Salvador article from the Times. These people are more worried about securing the welfare of, and are granting more rights to, microscopic clumps of cell matter than fully conscious, thinking, feeling women!
In fact that’s why I can’t take the metaphysics of pro-lifers seriously – they’re just too disingenuous and mixed up. The day I start meeting large contingents of pro-lifers who would never eat meat or use animal products, because they realize there are complex, thinking, feeling animals on the other end of that action and they can functionally empathize with them, that’s when I start taking this manufactured blastocyst empathy seriously. If you can’t even sympathize with a fully sentient farm animal then why should I believe you’ve managed to tap into the subjective life yearnings of an inanimate zygote?
PZ,
You forgot the rest of my quote from Uncommon Descent. It’s the best part in my opinion because it has a high irony content.
“Sounds like an irrational religious belief. A form of psychosis maybe?”
Ebonmuse: well put. This is the same stance on abortion I take.
I also think it can be a choice that only the parents of the child would have a right to make. To me, the woman who aborts a fetus who would be born without a face or a brain or other genetic abnormality is the same as the family member who elects to take a loved one off life support. (although in some of the more fundamental circles that’s bad too…)
Hope that makes sense. It’s late for me and I’m in the grips of third trimester insomnia.
Put simply, being pro-choice is about individual choice, not forced eugenics or baby killing or whatever. I’ve always felt in a sane world places like Planned Parenthood would be everybody’s favorite charity. It’s called Planned *Parenthood*, not Planned Abortions for All Because We Hate Babies.
JMcH: PZ said “If you haven’t been following along, The Raving Atheist is definitely an atheist, but he’s also an odd duck who has gone a bit unhinged on a few subjects.”
How is that an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy, as you seem to be claiming? PZ never claims RA isn’t a true atheist, and then he spends the rest of the post explaining the “unhinged” business.
Stacy, it’s because JMcH reads only selectively, when he can muster up the brainpower to read at all.
Wow, PZ.
I’m a biologist myself (master’s level), almost done with my 1st year
of medical school, and also hold the opinion that unless you are raped
or otherwise coerced, sex is a choice
I didn’t realize that by my personal abstinence I had removed myself
from the human race. I know you’d disqualify me because I don’t
believe in your belief in positive liberty, the importance of the
state in the individual’s life, and probably for being an agnostic
because I see atheism as much a belief state as belief in god. But
really, my ability to keep my thing in my pants makes me not human?
I find myself alternately agreeing with what you’ve said and shaking
my head at the inherent contradictions in your stance. As a raving
‘phenotypist’ many of the posts on my blog deal with the fact that the
product of our genes is the smallest part of who we are,
whether speaking biologically or from a more humanistic perspective.
But unlike you, I don’t see why the same protections, rights, and
privileges you wish to extend to adults you are unwilling to
give to children. In my mind, it should be the opposite way.
Children are defenseless, they are still learning, becoming
self-actualized people. Adults on the other hand, have the logical
and rational capacity that we can and should hold them responsible for
their actions and responsible for their own destiny.
My personal belief is that life begins at conception. But i’m at
least intelligent enough to understand that that is nothing more than
belief. Which is why, once an ardent pro-life demonstrator, I
restrict my arguments specifically to late term abortion.
There’s a point at which the anti-life (heh, see I can play with
adjectives too) stance becomes biologically untenable. I was born a
full 5 weeks early. Completely fully formed and back at home with
mommy in the normal amount of time.
According to you and your ilk, there’s a substantive difference
between me and a baby who, other than location deep in mommy’s womb,
is identical in all tangible aspects.
You give me reminders every day that people can be wholly rational and
logical about one thing (science) while being completely irrational
and unwilling to challenge one’s beliefs in another (politics).
Dogmatic about your atheism, dogmatic about your politics.
It’s really a beautiful thing.
clevermonkey,
if she does get pregnant (hopefully it’ll come when yall are ready, and not unexpectedly), do you believe she has the right to hold you liable for any of the future costs, both economic and temporal?
If you do, then it is your business. Because her ‘choice’ directly impacts you.
Also, in my world, there are actions and there are consequences. One partakes in an activity with full knowledge of the possible outcomes. When I go bouldering, I know bad things can happen (and nearly have). When I go hiking, I could be mauled to death by a big brown bear (and nearly have). When I go down to the casino and gamble with 500 dollars, I could lose 500 dollars.
Sex, when between two willing partners, is a risky activity. It’s a risky activity that could not only impact the two lives involved, but a new life as well. Like all risky activities, when you engage in it you should be cognizant of the consequences. “I like sex” is not a valid argument with regard to abortion. Pregnancy is a possible outcome. The fact that it’s an outcome you don’t want is not a valid justification for allowing abortion.
I got no problem with contraception of any kind. And while I have a personal problem with early abortion, I wouldn’t restrict it. But aborting a healthy infant (and they are infants) at 7 or 8 months is morally objectionable in the extreme. It’s funny, but European law for once is a sterling example of how rational abortion law should look. They don’t take the dogmatic position yall do, defining abortion as legal until such point as an infant could survive outside the womb.
I’d also note that justification of late term abortion and infanticide is extensible all the way up until you reach legal majority. If you all are really arguing that there is nothing morally wrong with killing a 15 year old, that’s one thing. If there’s a difference between infanticide or 3rd trimester abortion and killing a 12 year old, you need to tighten up your arguments considerably
You have to understand that atheism can be either an active “I declare that there is no God!” or a more passive “I don’t believe there is reasonable evidence to believe in God”. Active atheism is a belief state. Passive atheism is not. Do you believe in Santa Clause? Are you an Santa Clause agnostic? I could very well argue that you can’t disbelieve in Santa because there is no positive proof for the non-existence of Santa. Does that mean you are a Santa agnostic? No, you are a passive disbeliever in Santa – you know there isn’t any good reason to believe in Santa. You disbelieve in the existence of Santa, just like the (passive) atheist disbelieves in God, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
IndianCowboy: I personally have never seen a pro-choice advocate argue in favor of aborting a healthy fetus at 7 or 8 months because the parents gambled on a risky behaivor and lost.
Am I missing something? This sounds like yet another strawman to me, and comes perilously close to the misogynist sterotypes flung about by many a fundie.
I’d think the amount of women saying “I’m getting an abortion at 8 months because I’d rather get a mani-pedi” is going to be relatively small compared to the amount of women who get late-term (which, and I could be wrong, I thought meant 2nd or 3rd trimester, not just 3rd trimester) abortions because they’ve made the agonizing decision not to give birth to a child with anencephaly (for example) or because of risk to the life or future fertility of the mother.
Also, *any* discussion about abortion that doesn’t mention what happens to the victims of rape who get pregnant is, in my opinion, incomplete. Simplistic arguments like, just don’t have sex, etc., ignores the experiences of an overwhelming number of women in the world.
P Z Myers wrote:
I was going to say the same thing, Ebonmuse. You can easily twist these arguments into something absurd. Another example: “You are a woman with n children. You are deciding whether to have another child. You decide whether the mother should attempt to conceive another child and I’ll decide which role you play (mother or unconceived child).” In this case, there is a limit where people would start to say, “Ok, if the mother already has 10 children, I think the burden of another child would outweigh the benefit of being born.” But, that means that all women should have 10 children (or some similarly high number)! And those people who argue the more simplistic “I wouldn’t want to be aborted” (note that the phrasing makes no mention of the burden on the mother) should argue the similar absurd statement that “If I was an unconceived child, I would want to be born”. But, if that’s the case, then every woman should make every effort to turn every viable egg into a baby.
You’re adding on some implicit categorization here. The government does not and cannot defend the defenseless – which includes everything from farm animals to sperm to fetuses. When you say that it should, what you really mean is that the government should defend the defenseless *people*. But, then you get into the issue of what is a fetus. PZ says that personhood develops over time. Fetuses are partway between sperm (which are defenseless and which we have no intention of defending), and a defenseless person (which maybe the government should defend). It all depends on where you think a fetus lies on the continuum.
I give you a lot of credit for even trying to reason with him. I gave up a while ago, but occassionally still dropped by to argue when he decided to quote me creatively. I’ve since called it a day with the RA, and don’t even bother reading his site anymore. Really, it’s a fight you can’t win — when he claims to deplore “Godidiots” then spends his time licking Dawn Eden’s asshole, you realize that something just isn’t right.
Plucky, aborting healthy infants at 7 or 8 months gestation is exactly what PZ mentioned in his post:
No mention made here about health of the infant, just about personal circumstance. And here he’s actually talking about ‘post term abortion’
Can you show me stats? Do they even have stats about how many late term abortions are done for reasons of health (mental health don’t count, too easy to fudge numbers and diagnosis) rather than convenience? I haven’t seen any. And like I said, I used to be an activist and a debater at a pretty big university. Which is why I didn’t say that most late term abortions could be avoided or were done for reasons of convenience. The straw man isn’t my argument but the argument that because of this specific (and rare) instance all abortion should be legal.
As for exceptions, my entire pro-life stance is predicated on a few things:
1. The two parties involved in the process of copulation are both willing participants in a mutually agreed upon activity.
2. At some point in pregnancy there is no difference between an infant and a fetus; therefore at that point either the fetus must be treated as an infant under the law, or infants must continue to be treated as fetuses (i.e. abortable).
3). The infant/fetus/whatever is capable of attaining a state of adult independence, majority, and treatement under the law.
If any of those three conditions are violated, then my argument no longer stands and there is no moral issue WRT abortion.
The interesting thing about Hindus is that although we believe in a right to live, we also believe in a right to die. (and yes, agnostic hinduism has a long and storied tradition). I wouldn’t bring a child into the world that would have a painful, short life, and die at 7. It hurts the child, it hurts us.
But no matter how poor I was, I couldn’t abort a healthy fetus. When I was born, know how much my parents made? 6000 dollars a year. We lived like that for a while before Dad finished his PhD and got a real job. 6000 dollars a year with a newborn (which in today’s dollars is about 10k, IIRC). Not a whole lot.
Dawn Eden wrote some really, really good liner notes back in the day.
Pity she developed this new hobby.
First of all, define “living” in this case. We just had a discussion over here of whether or not infants and fetuses could even feel pain, which is a significantly lower level of cognition than self-awareness, and I really do believe there is a viability argument to be made. Nobody but nobody gets third-trimester abortions unless something’s really wrong; not very many people get them at all. The numbers are just tiny, something like 800 per year in the US.
Secondly, the reason I get to deny the parasite in my womb the opportunity to have a life is that I was here first and it’s still inhabiting my body, with very real potentially life-threatening consequenses for me if I carry to term or delivery, whichever comes first. What are maternal mortality rates in the US? They’re scarily high, compared to other industrialised Western countries, but that’s still not the point. More women die in childbirth than from abortions, but I guess it’s more important to you to make sure that the clump of cells gets a shot at the world instead of allowing the already living, presumably adult woman to make the decision for herself. The way you folks talk about it, you sound as though you’re all men. In my books, that means you don’t get an opinion on the subject, let alone a vote or veto.
(If you don’t like abortion, don’t leave your gametes in other people’s bodies, some way or another. Otherwise, chew on it. And keep your laws off my internal organs while you’re at it.)
PZ, you’ve got an infestation of stealth misogynists hereabouts, and some of them are not so stealthy at all.
BC, totally agreed. I see little difference between passive atheism and agnosticism, which is why I made the comment that atheism is a belief state. Defined as you have, my criticism applies only to active atheism. And what I tend to see from PZ (recalling the one where they talk about the down sides of rabid atheism among evolution-supporters in the political debate), is the active kind.
Passive atheism isn’t something you trumpet aloud as a major part of your ideology, IMO. Active atheism is. PZ routinely makes the pronouncement that “GOD DOES NOT EXIST” which is active atheism. Passive atheism is, as you said, passive. Active atheism, is a strident harsh, and slightly maniacal screaming with no regard for evidence.
Bravo to Mr. Ian Spedding. To set the record staight, I was not advocating “gene counting” in any way, shape, or form. In fact, to the contrary, I was advocating the opposing direction of thought. The mere fact that cell division is not always perfect, (trisomy 21), does not in any way diminish the fact that an egg and sperm at conception (zygote) have the same number of chromosomes as me or anyone else. A human (homo sapien)is classified as having forty-six chromosomes, a zygote at the moment of conception has 46 chromosomes, where is the cognitive dissonance with that fact. Those who adhere to the pro-life or anti-murder (just playing your word game) viewpoint, simply believe that each person has the right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness. Is it not true that the terms or definitions of abortion versus murder are not dictated by only a few centimeters of a mother’s uterus at 7 months of age. In the womb at 7-9 months, it is classified as abortion, outside the womb during the same time frame would be termed murder. If the same doctor who performed a late term abortion were to deliver the baby either as a pre-mature birth or to full term, and then after the same doctor raised the baby to show the parents “it’s a boy or it’s a girl,” and were to then turn to remove or suck the brains and organs out of a baby, he would be viewed as a repugnant criminal commiting a heinous crime. I pose the question one more time, does a few centimeters of skin make that much of a difference between a “fetus” and a baby, or of an abortion and a murder? In closing, granted there are cases in which a pregnancy is due to the fact that a rape took place. Many of the writers want to use a birth defect that occurs as a reason to opt for abortion. But the majority of abortions are due to conveniece because either two people were to incompetent to protect themselves, too lazy, or simply just didn’t care. And then guess what, most of the time the taxpayers get to pay for one very expensive “condom.”
i was going to reply to interrobang but then decided his/her thinly-veiled dogma and spittle-flecked tirade wasn’t worth my effort.
And now for a retarded pronouncement of my own:
Anyone who supports the justification of alimony and child support is a man-hater.
I find the concept of late-term elective abortion disturbing. … but I know how unlikely it is to happen at all, unless, of course, we put all sorts of obstacles in the way of early abortions, like waiting periods…
I don’t find the concept of first-trimester abortion to be significantly more disturbing than contraception or, say, the rhythm method.
And since we all know that your base emotional reaction is the only real criterion anyone uses when deciding this topic, I’m in favor of clearly delineated laws preventing (only) third-trimester elective abortions… as long as they aren’t as absurd as, say, the partial birth abortion ban was. (A procedure that simply had no advantages whatsoever for elective abortions, and that was normally done for cases such as hydrocephaly, where the fetus is close enough to non-viable as makes no difference anyway…)
I wish the first sentence of the last paragraph was sarcasm, but I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a single meaningful argument (aside from the economic one PZ has presented) on either side that doesn’t stem from emotional distaste.
(Although I will note there is one key difference between “post-natal abortion” and third-trimester abortion – by and large, the former can be obviated via adoption. Of course, our adoption system is in rather a lot of trouble too, but…)
To be fair, IndianCowboy, I don’t think PZ was talking about any sort of situation that would be likely to happen in the US or other ‘first-world’ country (too sleepy to think of more politically correct term…) I think he was thinking more of the type of infanticide that has happened throughout human history in subsistance-type cultures with no other method of birth control.
One of us is probably misreading him. (If its me, PZ, please correct me.)
Do I have stats? Well, no. I’d be interested to find some good data on abortions in the second or third trimester for health reasons. Apparently, the CDC doesn’t keep track of this sort of thing.
This Wikipedia article, however, does mention some rough estimates on late term abortion in general, stating ‘1.4% of abortions occur at 21 weeks or later’ and ‘number of abortions past 24 weeks to be 0.08%.’ According to my pregnancy book (paraphrasing from memory) a baby born before 26 weeks has less than 50 percent chance of survival.
The article goes on to mention a survey of 420 women in 1987 who had abortions at 16 weeks (well before viability, but at a stage where the so-called ‘partial birth abortion’ would be indicated) and these were the reasons given:
Two percent (2%) said “a fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy.”
71% responded “did not recognize that she was pregnant or misjudged gestation,” (note: happens all the time, happened to my cousin…happened on the episode of ER room reality show I was watching last night)
48% said “found it hard to make arrangements,” (understandable when in many states there is just one clinic open only on every other tuesday and you can only get an abortion with a note from your mommy while jumping on one leg)
and 33% said “was afraid to tell her partner or parents.” (again understandable when domestic abuse is so prevalent…)
The responses of 420 women almost 20 years ago is not exactly a good sampling…but none of those responses say anything like “I suddenly changed my mind because it’s bathing suit season.”
Also, I don’t think mental health is hard to prove. Don’t they do it in courts of law all the time?
I’m currently 7 months pregnant and also working on my degree, so I understand your parents predicament more than you realize. But I also understand that it’s *my* choice, and I do not have the right to force anyone to be pregnant. And congrats to you on being celibate, you have excellent self control. But to assume that most people, especially Americans, would be able to excercise the same is beyond naive.
Look, I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’m going to change your mind. And I don’t care that you’re against abortion, so I don’t care *to* change your mind. (It’s called pro-choice for a reason…no one who is pro-choice wants to force abortions on anyone.)
But I’d thank you kindly to keep your personal beliefs *out* of the choices I make for me and my family.
Pascal: You have made a claim of fact.
I do not believe your claim of fact.
Present a neutral source for your claim, or I will be compelled to assume you are a deliberate liar.
Specifically, prove that taxpayers EVER pay for abortions (I find this exceptionally improbable), prove that it happens in the MAJORITY of cases (over 50%, say), and prove that the majority (again, over 50%) of abortions are “due to convinience”. I’ll even give you a little bit of leeway and assume that, say, 15-year-old girls get abortions due to convinience, and not because raising this fetus would prevent them from being in a position to rase children with the actual care and love they deserve.
Just show that at least 50% of abortions are elective (ie, not due to hydrocephaly or other health-related issues), and that taxpayers pay for at least 50% of abortions.
If, of course, you’re not lying.
While I am an atheist, atheism isn’t my belief; it just comes from trying to take a rational stance on the world. I think this attempt at rationality is right, morally right. Giving up on rationality is immoral in my view, and it leads to all kinds of serious problems in the world.
That’s why I take atheism, evolution, and similar topics seriously. Not so much because I think the world hinges on what people think on these issue, but because it hinges on how people think about them, whether they really think.
PZ, as an atheist evolutionist with a craving for biology, let me first say that I love your blog and I read it every day. However, I find your point of view on this contemptable and infuriating, to put it mildly. I’ll try to hold back on my anger as I explain why.
As an atheist, I certainly don’t believe in any kind of ensoulment. I don’t look at a clump of unspecialized cells, for example, and ascribe any particular value to it. I’ve read somewhere that about 78% of such clumps of cells perish at this stage. I don’t hold a funeral, nor even a memorial. I’d be a hypocrite if I said it had the same value as an adult human.
On the other hand, I don’t necessarily view a 30-week-old fetus as a valueless mass of organs that can be discarded, like an appendix, at its mother’s whim. Is it so hard to see the difference?
My only child was born after 32 weeks of development, at 3 lbs. 15 oz. Her lungs were a little under-developed and so she needed to be placed in an oxygen chamber for a few weeks, and she needed to be fed through a tube for a while. Other than that, she was a perfectly normal baby.
I’ve tried very, VERY hard to understand the point of view that the value of a child this developed is only in the eyes of the mother. I simply can’t do it. From the moment I saw my daughter, I knew she had a value that was all her own, that no one, not even I or my wife, could take away.
How did I “know” this? Well, it’s very complicated. Because I am not a theist, I don’t have the luxury of having an ancient book or prophet telling me exactly what to do. I have to actually to put some *thought* into my morality. As a moral atheist yourself, PZ, I’m sure you know the feeling.
Somewhere between the “clump of cells stage” and the “fully-developed human” stage, we have to draw a line, and that line basically describes the point at which the human in question has an intrinsic value of its own, rather than a value that is ascribed to it (or not) by its mother. Where do we draw that line?
On what basis do we draw a line at all? Some people like to use viability as their basis, or perhaps sentience, or perhaps the ability to perceive pain. All of these seem to make sense, because much of what makes us human is our ability to think, feel, live independently, breathe, grow, etc.
But these development-based standards are difficult to work with because, as you said, development happens gradually, and so there is often no single moment that you can decide upon.
Some people use other standards, like “the moment that the umbilical cord is cut” or “the moment that the baby takes its first breath”. The nice thing about these is that it is very easy to draw a line at a specific moment. However, the problem with these standards is that they seem arbitrary to most people. Is a full-term baby that is inside the womb during labor really all that different from a full-term baby that just took its first breath? If you can define the difference between “life” and “human life” using such insignificant events, then you must not ascribe much value to human life in the first place.
This is in no way meant to be my treatise on the morality of abortion. If you’d notice, I never specifically mentioned where I personally draw the line, and that’s because that’s not the point. I have no intention of convincing you of my point of view.
My only point with this post is to make the point that this is a very complicated issue, involving many conflicting interests (such as the right of a baby to live versus the right of a woman to have control over her body), and many different value judgements (such as the value of viability, the value of sentience, the value of a child’s first breath, and so on). I think it should be ESPECIALLY difficult for atheists like you and me, who actually have to think these things through because we don’t have an ancient book or prophet to prescribe our morals with one-sentence commandments. I personally have a very difficult time deciding what values are important, and how to prioritize those that are.
So I don’t really appreciate it when, after spending so much time pondering these things and approaching the topic with care and sensitivity, to be considered an unhinged member of the Cult of the Fetus. I know you didn’t call me this directly, but as someone who believes it’s not such a great idea to abort third-trimester babies (huge understatement), I feel the sting of your remarks.
PZ, it seems to me that, even if you don’t agree with me and the other atheists who have expressed pro-life views here, you ought to AT LEAST understand where we are coming from. I find that most pro-choice people do, and so in most debates like this I usually take on the “I respectfully disagree” attitude.
But here, I called your views abhorrent and contemptable, not because you simply disagree, but because you don’t even seem to possess an ability to see where people like me are coming from, and you even go as far as to denigrate us, and that’s just fucking pathetic.
I guess, one thing we can both agree on is that atheism is not necessarily correlated with a lack of pig-headedness.
which is why I’ve changed my stance on early abortions. But, as I said, there comes a time in a pregnancy when the ‘not a baby’ stance becomes no longer tenable.
Fortunately, it appears that very very few abortions happen at that point. So it sounds like we should just legislate em away. And then I’d just shut up, wouldn’t I? I just see no reason why we can’t move to a European model. Which I find more logical and rational than either my old stance or yalls. It’s about the only case I can think of where I find something to laud about European legal and political philosophy.
Also, your stats harmonize pretty well with what I remember.
and as for the celibacy, it really ain’t no thing. it’s the attitude that people can’t have self-control that makes us not have self control. I have a friend who won’t have sex with a girl unless he’s willing to raise a child with her, which even though he’s had more partners than he can count on both hands, means he’s functionally and morally equivalent to me.
I hold by the belief that man is the creator of his own destiny and not subject merely to the whims of his hormones and desires. If we’re to allow him license in one area, why not all?
But that’s a huge digression, so it’d be better for the discussion if we ignored it.
Indian: The issue with laws banning late-term abortions is that they’ve tended to ban the *necessary* ones.
IC: One could make that arguement regarding alimony. Child support isn’t about the woman getting money, it’s about the child. Most men seem to forget that fact when they whine about it. Of course, so do some women receiving the money.
I think PZ’s point on infanticide was not an endorsement, but an understanding. He said it wouldn’t be necessary in modern America (unless the Religious Wrong keeps up their antics). He also wasn’t willing to condemn the countless generations before us that may have chosen to kill a baby that could not be fed to save a whole family. No one should have to make such a choice. In our land of plenty, it’s hard to understand such a necessity.
Having grown up in a family with parents who fostered kids with multiple disabilities I kind of don’t like the word ‘tard. That and fat are pretty much the only real swear words at my house.
If medical economics is used as a reason to abort, then just maybe the economic policy is a bit skewed and should be evaluated if that is what people want. If there are ways to prevent things like spina bifida (folic acid) and we can jigger genes to avoid other anomolies in fetuses, then why are these not being done more, since there are economic repercussions faced by parents of kids with disabilities?
I have met people who are passionate about both sides of the debate. I have met pro life women who have opened their homes to teen mothers who have been abandoned by their own families when they get pregnant. I have friends who have had abortions and are adamant that it is the best decision they could have made at the time. Faced with my own unplanned pregnancy I chose to have my kid. As an adopted kid with a congenital heart defect I probably cost the system a bit when I was born, but I have paid that debt back by raising good citizens and working and paying taxes.
I am not sure what the best solution is, but I do know that the vagina police in El Salvador are not a future I want for my children. Please read the NY Times Pro Life Nation if it is still up. It was heartbreaking, and stupid, and sick and wrong. And full of religious “good intentions” that have criminalized choice for all but the very rich.
I would be sick if my daughter was raped and she was pregnant and she begged me not to carry the child to term, but I could not help her. I would not know what to do if a child I carried had no brain. I have had friends that this happened to, and for months their lives were on hold while they awaited the inevitable.
Some would say that our morality is based on how we treat the least of these. Others who purport to follow this philosophy don’t seem to care much for the least of anyone – unless they believe like them or have the possibility of doing so.
I have a hard time with heroic medical intervention at the end of life. I have also seen the consequences of heroic medical intervention at the beginning of life. Sometimes it is not pretty. Cerebral Palsy, seizures and even worse- what is the right thing to do? Is technology partly to blame for our situation?
As for the Culture of Life- the Catholic Church is at this moment fairly consistent in its message- they are against the death penalty very firmly and have spoken up against unjust wars. The traditional religious right in America are not so even keel. While they rally behind babies and Terry Schiavo they also want criminals to die and support the war in Iraq. This is a bit schizophrenic.
Maybe we ought to discuss technology as it relates to pre term babies. Is it right or fair to play god in this circumstance? Is it right or fair to keep grandma chained to a bunch of life support machines because we can’t bear the thought of her leaving- even though many of those who fight the hardest are supposedly the most assured they will meet their loved one in Heaven.
With genetics and all of that- are we trying to avoid imperfection? Are disabilities imperfections? What disabilities are imperfections?
And why is this post and thread so damned hard to read? I have more questions now than when I started.
IndianCowboy: if you were to change “late-term abortion” (a non-medical term which is too vague and can include 16 week pregnancies as well at 32 week pregnancies) to some sort of reliable definition of viability that can’t be manipulated by the fundies, and then provide some sort of governmental program to care for the unwanted children (in my state, there is IIRC a law that allows women to leave children at hospitals or some other such place without fear of prosecution…i think it’s called a safe haven law? someone correct me…) that is better funded and monitored than the foster care programs in this country, then I’d probably agree with you.
But since I live in a country run by irrational fundamentalists I think it is too dangerous to ‘legislate them away.’ ESPECIALLY if the legislation does not include exceptions for the life or health (mental or otherwise) of the mother, or for rape/incest.
Also, I’ll ignore your hormone digression, except for the brief statement that I don’t necessarily disagree with you (i guess), but I don’t expect EVERYBODY, especially, say, horny teenagers, to live up to these high standards.
Personal beliefs of the citizenry are often very welcome in regard to the choices we make about our families.
We believe that people who create children should be financially responsible, so we legislate and enforce – whether those people choose to make such commitments or not.
We believe that dependent spouses (or not) should be taken care of financially in the case of divorce.
We also believe that children should be fed, clothed, educated and cared for and we are willing to enforce those beliefs when they conflict with the way people choose to raise their families.
Adam Ierymenko:
…”They aren’t pro-life, except in some strange disassociative sense. They love potential life, or some abstract concept of it that has nothing to do with reality. They hate real *actualized* human life.”…
I agree with this, though from a slightly different tack. What fetusfetishists seem to love is not so much potential life as pre-humanity, an unformed and thus ‘uncorrupted’ human. As a soon as a person is enough of a person to make choices of which the fetusfetishist/fundamentalist disapproves, this ideal of inborn innocence vanishes.
To paint with an incredibly broad brush– and the braindead are perfectly illustrative of this point– the fetusfetishist/fundamentalist’s degree of love for any segment of humanity is directly proportional to the fetusfetishist/fundamentalist’s ability to put words into the mouths of that segment of ‘humanity’ combined with the degree to which they can do so unhindered, unchecked, and unchallenged.
They are defending the honor of an innocence that doesn’t exist. That never, in fact, existed.
If Freud wasn’t a gacked-up dilettante freak I would say that FF/F’s are manifesting some sort of Eden Complex, the behavioral residue of a story buried so deep in their identities that to challenge any aspect of said story’s projection onto their quotidian social reality is to challenge their entire existence. And thus here come the biblical literalists, the Answers-in-Genesiseneticists, t=all these people blind with divinity and mad to defend the root of their collective delusion
-and i’d like to reiterate at this point that this is what I’d say if Freud weren’t a gacked-up dilettante freak– If he wasn’t, and were I Freud, and were an Eden-Complexed FF/F supine on my soft leather couch, and had I indulged in a nice little toot from a slim golden spoon and let my freaky thoughts ride flaming tigers through Broca’s and Wernicke’s both, I would turn to the Fetusfetishist/Fundamentalist on my couch and offer this:
What is non-being? What is non-humanity but the absence of choice and the denial of experience?
Who are you defending?
The living or the dead?
Sheesh,
anti-abortion atheists and anti-abortion god-botherers both:
Just keep your snouts out of other people’s uteruses and go snuffle some truffles! Go and weep for your “dead womb-babies” all you want. Just don’t expect the rest of us to care.
Frank Sullivan: I don’t think you’re being fair to PZ. He can of course speak for himself and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he and I come from similar positions. When he refers to the ‘cult of the fetus’ he is clearly thinking of the life-begins-at-conception people who attribute a magical sanctity to a blob of cells because they have imbued it with a symbolic importance that is central to their conception of the world. You are coming from a different angle, one which at least recognizes some of the complications, and while he still disagrees with you I don’t see him slandering your character in doing so.
As for your stance on the issue itself. You seem to realize that there is no mystical point at which a fetus suddenly becomes human/deserves legal protection. Any line we draw is necessarily arbitrary. Birth seems like a reasonable line to me. I’m sympathetic to the err on the side of caution argument but this can obviously be carried too far. I’d say birth (for example) is being cautious. Let’s put it this way: at what point in my life would I have cared about being aborted/killed? Hard to say but it was well after birth. In your language: there is no intrinsic value in the child/fetus, what I care about is when the child values itself.
Sotek. ‘It’s only a couple hundred’.
If the fact that only a few hundred 100% viable fetuses are aborted each year can be used as an excuse not to ban their abortion, then the fact that only a few hundred ‘medically necessary’ abortions would be prevented from happening can be used as an excuse to do so.
If life started at conception, we’d know the exact minute of getting pregnant and wouldn’t need to worry about whether we had an X ray or an extra drink at the wrong moment and use tests to see if there’s pregnancy etc. I think six month babies can survive but five month can’t. I’m not sure about it, but it seems that there’s a time for a baby to be considered a human being, even unborn, but not before it reaches that certain time.
“As for the Culture of Life- the Catholic Church is at this moment fairly consistent in its message- they are against the death penalty very firmly and have spoken up against unjust wars.”
Not really. Officially the church is anti-death penalty but the Catholic right, including the Inquisitor in the highest drag, have been damned eager to let Catholics know that while they are required to agree with the Pope about abortion, the death penalty is no big deal.
Josh, what Frank’s trying to point out is the fact that birth is as unreasonable in its own way as conception. There’s arbitrary, and there’s arbitrary is Frank’s point, and that because of the reality of the variation in gestation and how much earlier a fetus is viable than when it is born, birth is no less dogmatic than conception.
I also want to point out that you (a general, non-specific you) continue to make the most weird if/then statements about what pro-life people should also support if they want to ban abortion:
The belief that abortion is murder does not have any logical correlation to the belief that government must now subsidize the child’s family.
Their argument is that abortion is murder, ergo abortion should be banned, because murder is wrong.
Responding that if they want to ban abortion they have to pay for the resultant child makes no sense, unless you believe that murder isn’t wrong.
If you believe that homicide and manslaughter are indeed criems, then you must explain to them why abortion isn’t murder.
In general The Left makes the mistake of thinking personal correlates to political, something I disproved for 3 straight years of The Nick Challenge.
I could go on at this point, but let’s just say that based on my resume and life story (and not my blog), you guys would think from my actions that I’m a bleeding heart, tree-hugging lefty (and many acquaintances have assumed that). But instead i’m a classical liberal. One’s personal morality and sense of duty need not correlate with their political ideology.
Yet I continue to hear from leftists that I must hate the poor, willfully dump toxic waste into the mississippi, and actively piss in the faces of various nations’ ambassadors…and I’m racist, just because i don’t support rabid government interventionism. Which, as i’ve implied conflicts pretty heavily with the way I’ve lived thus far.
Sorry for that, despite the shotgun approach don’t think I’m tarring everyone of my opponents in this discussion with an overly broad brush. It applies to some, does’nt apply to others, and I’m too lazy and see no point in naming names. Just something to think about next time you’re having a political discussion and are tempted to judge your opponent’s personal morality based on their politics.
It seems to me that the critical issue here is whether or not a woman has the right to control her own body, i.e. what is under her skin. A fetus is genetically different from the woman, but it’s still a parasite on her body until birth. Late term abortions may be immoral, but I think it’s certainly immoral to use force to prevent a woman from having one. In law, it seems to me that the rights of a woman have to overrule the supposed rights of a fetus. Otherwise women are not truly free.
IndianCowboy, can you give us one example of a late abortion (say past 24 weeks) that was medically necessary? We keep hearing about these cases, but I have yet to hear of a doctor in the US that would be willing to make such an abortion.
I’m not saying that such a case would make your stance valid, but lack of such cases certainly makes your arguments invalid.
Also, I have a general message for people who have a problem with people having abortions for economical reasons. Remove those reasons!
Make sure there is economical support of parents that can’t raise their children and that there is universal health care. That will reduce the level of abortion faster than anything else.
Of course, that’s not going to happen, because we know that anti-choice people are really anti-sex.
Mark, you are exactly right. That’s what it comes down to.
Ian H Spedding wrote:
To some of them, we say “You are growing inside your own twin” or “you are stuck in the fallopian tube and will kill your mother” or “you don’t have a brain”.
These don’t represent most abortions, sure, but do you lament the loss of a person in such cases? If not, why?
Well said, Mark. I think that it is the refusal to engage the argument in this way, that a woman has the right to control her body, is another sign that the anti-abortion position rests on a cultish devotion to the fetus above all else. It is a metaphysical drama that they are interested in, not the real-life world of adults making decisions in sometimes complex circumstances.
wow, the name calling in here.. all you have to do is mention abortion. I know this is an emotional subject but maybe people could cool down a bit.
Oh, and I can’t speak for PZ, but reading the opinions expressed in his blog, I hazzard a guess that talking about your own birth or that of your own children is a bad idea. It’s a complicated enough issue without having to get deeply personal. If getting personal about anything is the only way you can see things, well, I see a lot of stress in your future.
Hm, I should clarify that. If you make an example of what your opinion is using your own birth or that of your child or someone close to you, then anyone who disagrees with your opinion is also making a value judgement on that person’s specific personal circumstance as well that of their life. The only way that’s headed is indignity and smoldering rage against other commenters.
heath, I only use my own birth because it’s such a clear and unassailable example of the ambiguity of ‘birth’ as the defining point.
Kristjan, go visit Cornell and ask around at their chapter of NOW, or NARAL, or whatever. I met and debated several that had had abortions at that late point for medically unneccessary reasons. Considering they were formally debating someone opposed to all abortion, I seriously doubt they’d admit to having done such a thing unless they actually had.
you also seemingly missed the last half of my last comment. To the pro-lifer, murder is murder. There is no way to logically connect believing abortion is murder to necessary support of the welfare state in order to be internally consistent. That isn’t valid, it doesn’t make sense, and if I were to present the same argument at a formal debate or in a philosophy paper, I’d have been ripped to shreds.
to all:
I find it both sad and ironic that the ‘parasite argument’ comes up here, on a blog devoted to biology and evolution. As people interested in evolution I should think that we, more than others, would be able to see that from an evolutionary perspective, the very purpose of the individual animal, human or not, is to reproduce. Indeed, if that weren’t the case, many of the science bloggers on here wouldn’t have jobs. Neither would I.
Furthermore. If the fetus is viable outside the womb, even clinging to your parasite argument, most abortion methods are just as invasive as actually delivering the fetus would be. Thus no more parasite, no dead baby. But of course it’s morally superior to stick a pair of scissors in the back of the baby’s skull.
Referring to a fetus the same way one would a tapeworm reveals just how clouded one’s anti-life stance is by personal ideology and how uninformed their stance is by science. Especially here of all places.
I’ll give PZ credit for never stooping that low.
lol, Timothy. The whole point is that pro-lifers think the ‘woman’s right to control her own body’ is an invalid point. Prove to them why it is a valid point.
When two people disagree over a basic assumption of the debate, you have to argue about those assumptions instead of just saying ‘they’re wrong they’re wrong they’re wrong, i’m going to stick my fingers in my ears and go NANANANANANA’
I take classical liberals in the life, liberty, property group to task on this all the time. I made this point to Cornell Coalition of Life members everytime we met before a demonstration or a debate.
If you don’t address your differences, all you’ll do is continue to preach to the choir, which is the effect the ‘parasite’ and the ‘woman’s right to control her own body’ arguments have. If you actually want to present an argument instead of cheerleading, challenge their assumptions and logically defend your own.
The fetus is a baby! The fetus is a parasite! Well, no, it’s a fetus.
Calling the fetus a parasite just seems like syntactical wrangling. It’s an interesting way to think about pregnancy, providing some insight, but it isn’t parasitism in a classical sense – it’s reproduction.
There’s a moral argument here that people need to be honest about. A lot of the people on this thread are, which is really just amazing for a this topic. (The Godless score again!)
Indian cowboy :
“But no matter how poor I was, I couldn’t abort a healthy fetus. When I was born, know how much my parents made? 6000 dollars a year. We lived like that for a while before Dad finished his PhD and got a real job. 6000 dollars a year with a newborn (which in today’s dollars is about 10k, IIRC). Not a whole lot.”
Maybe not in your opinion not a whole lot but let’s consider the moderately poor – say $ 60 p.a.
i.e. 1% of your “not a whole lot” – if the choice is that you give your infant the food for the day, your elder child or yourself will , in all liklelihood die what do you choose ?
If you die your two children will also die !
What choice do you make ?
What morals do you use in condemming the person in this situation for making whatever choice is made ?
we are talking about the US right? where we spend 10,000 dollars a year in social welfare per person (that’s not 10k per person on welfare, that’s 10k x 300 million)?
2nd, there’s nothing better than using dollars to refer to people living in coutnries and conditions where using the dollar is a gross piece of disinformation. One dollar can buy you a can of coke in the US. Or it could feed a 210lb athlete for an entire day in India.
It is naive at best to believe that abortion politics in the country is a debate about issues. That is why I think it is apt to call the anti-abortion activists a cult of the fetus. From a social science perspective, the term applies. It is a closed group that demonizes the opposition in metaphysical terms — i.e., godless baby-killers.
Cult believes are especially resistant to critical reflection. I think there is a serious moral issue here, as chuko says, but I don’t think the public discourse (including most of the blog discussions) about abortion engages the issue.
In fact, I am not terribly interested in that debate. I think that arguments need to be made in policy forums in order to prevent the religious right from taking away important rights and giving the state authority in matters of intimate relations. I don’t really care if some people fetishize the fetus as long as they don’t have the opportunity to impose their version of morality on the rest of us.
mirrors are good things. Unless you’re ugly, in which case they’re bad. Nonetheless, anytime one labels a group with an opposing viewpoint dogmatic, one should examine his beliefs very closely.
Timothy, there are several atheistic/agnostic people espousing at least a partial limitation on abortions, yet you continue to trot out the Cult of the Fetus as if 100% of anti-abortion folks fall into that category.
Just to draw a parallel in everything you say, why should you guys get to impose your belief system of positive liberty on the rest of us?
IndianCowboy, you are the only one narrowing it down to the US, but if you want to do that, I think you should look up the number of US citizens living below the proverty line, especially children. It’s frightening.
PZ never narrowed it down to the US (atually, he made clear that his arguments were global in nature), so trying to argue against his broader points by US statistics is meaningless.
You know not of what you speak. It’s true that there is a difference in buying power in different countries, like there is a difference in buying power in different US states, however the difference is not as great as you want to make it seem. When WHO and UNICEF talks about the problem with the big percentage of sub-Sahara population living for less than a dollar per day, it’s not because a dollar per day can keep those people fed.
On top of that, there is also the fact that in some countries (or parts of countries) there is a food shortage, so unless you are very rich and influental, there is a major problem getting enough to eat.
On top of that, there might be a war going on, or you might be under some kind of brutal dictatorship.
All of these are factors you need to take into consideration when you consider abortion. It’s not relevant in the US at the moment, however if you want to make a consistent stance on the issue, you don’t just narrowly focus on the one country that you happen to live in.
Regarding the amount used on social welfare, according to The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, the totla spending in 2000 was 1,617.6 billion $, of which 1,309 was non-social welfare, leaving 308,6 billion $, which is one tenth of your claim with your claim. So in other words, the US only uses $1000 per person per year. And this even includes operational payments for public employees in the sphere of public welfare. (source).
A hint, don’t just throw out numbers – they will be checked.
We don’t impose it. That’s the only thing about being pro-choice. We leave it up the individual to make the decision. Which the anti-choice doesn’t want to do.
umm, i was making a parallel to the broader issue of the role of the state in maintaining liberty. Social welfare, universal healthcare, ‘right to edcuation’, any of that crap, as part of ‘freedom’. Which is imposed on those who don’t believe it.
Kristjan, I used the number Charles Murray quoted in an interview, which apparently was in error. my bad. Although a number that I have verified (instead of using a secondary source) is that last year, 23% of the federal government budget went toward medicaid (11) and welfare (12). Social Security was a further 20.5%. That’s a lot of money on social welfare.
According to department of health and human services, it comes out to roughly 10k spending per person in the programs. Which, interestingly enough, brings them to triple the level I was born at after correcting for inflation. I don’t even want to think about what a multiple it was of the situation my grandma grew up in.
Also, since I did feed myself on a dollar per day in India, I do know of what I speak. I still stand by my statement that the 60 dollars makes it sound worse than it is. I’m not denying it’s horrible, not for a second, but given how horrible it is, there’s no reason to embellish by converting into a measurement which just begs us to misinterpret the actual value of 60 dollars to them.
Of course, there are lots of people who are against abortion, some of whom are pro-choice. I was describing anti-abortion activists as a cult. In fact, the term really only applies to religious anti-abortion activists or those who share their metaphysical justifications. PZ’s post, after all, was about how he was accused of being a godless babykiller for suggesting that the argument about life beginning at conception is weak from the perspective of science. I was commenting on the reaction he got from the wingnuts at Uncommon Descent and in general how the public face of anti-abortion politics is the extremists on the religious right.
As Kristjan said, there is a difference between arguing for choice and arguing against it. To be pro-choice is not to force others to have abortions. In fact, to be pro-sex is not to suggest that others should abandon abstinence. (Even if that would make them happier and healthier.)
The cultists, on the other hand, want to make the choice for everyone.
understood. Your comments were more general in nature and I was making the mistake of applying them to this specific discussion (which has had more atheist/agnostic ‘anti-choice’ people than Cult of Fetus people).
Also, since I did feed myself on a dollar per day in India, I do know of what I speak.
Did that dollar also cover your health care? Could you feed yourself and a severely disabled baby plus get treatment for the latter on a dollar per day in India?
“Also, since I did feed myself on a dollar per day in India, I do know of what I speak. I still stand by my statement that the 60 dollars makes it sound worse than it is.”
$60 per year isn’t $1/day, it’s more like $0.20/day. Can you feed yourself, a disabled baby, and your 5 other children on $0.20 per day, in India, the US, or anywhere? And if so, do you want to?
lol, windy, look at what I said and in the context I said it. I simply said that a dollar could buy you a can of coke in the US, or feed a 210lb athlete for an entire day in India. The point of the comment wasn’t to imply that 365 dollars a year is enough to live on, but merely show that ‘dollar’ is not a good way to measure a person’s income outside of the developed world. The implication was solely that while a dollar can get you about 100-200 calories of nourishment here, it can get you 3000 in India. Because of things like that, it’s a poor way to measure ‘real’ income.
And I see the debate has descended into nitpicking. Which means I’m off to bed. Was one of the better abortion discussions I’ve had, ever. So thanks for that yall, but remember, its not about ‘issues’, it’s about principles. Don’t argue this detail or that detail, argue the fundamental differences: they see life at conception, you see it at birth. That is the difference. THat is what the debate is about. Nothing more, nothing less.
And remember the lesson of WW2 germany, no two front war. No trying to tell us that the need for aborting healthy babies will disappear when your utopian/marxist goal of universal healthcare and social welfare for all is realized. I told the same things to the folks at CCFL when they’d try to argue the pro-life standpoint from a theological perspective. One thing at a time, folks.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I WAS MAKING A POINT ABOUT THE BUYING POWER OF A DOLLAR BEING VARIABLE IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD. Jeez.
yeah, i’m getting crabby. I’m out of here. for real this time. I’ve been arguing this for 7 freaking hours 15 minutes. Stupid Indian.
That DaveScot character reminds me of the astrologits we used to smack around on sci.skeptic.
-jcr
IndianCowboy,
The moral argument for abortion on demand doesn’t depend on the premise that a fetus is a parasite, nor does it depend on whether a fetus is or is not a “human being.” It follows from right of every person to their own body. If another person required a continuous blood transfusion from me to stay alive, that does not entitle that person to that transfusion if I do not choose to continue it, even if I volunteered to provide it in the first place.
If a woman may not terminate a pregnancy at will, then what is the justification for anyone declining to donate an organ to someone else who will die without it? Why are you entitled to keep your kidneys, your corneas, your skin, or even your heart?
-jcr
IndianCowboy, budgets are often something of a shell game, were numbers are somewhat meaningless without context, which is why secondary sources are actually some times better than the primary sources. For example:
The 2005 US federal spending was 2.582.889 million dollars, of which 591.529 millions dollars were used by the Department of Health and Human services. Included in those were 301.823 million dollars from trust funds, in other words money paid for the the purpose by the receipients (source).
Until you give me a source for your numbers, and a description of how you added them up, I won’t be completely willing to trust the numbers you use, and certainly not the context you try to use them in.
P Zed Myers wrote:
Those of us who have dealt with fanatical Ayn Rand followers are familiar with the fact that atheism is not a guarantee of rationality, and that in truth words like atheism and reason can easily be used as mantras to disguise a kind of lunatic, godless religion. Just as — and isn’t life funny? — the knuckle-dragging, morally deficient Powers That Be abuse words like charity and family, making tolerance a byword for oppression.
A few points:
1. Personal anecdotes are irrelevant. That you were a preemie and that you are now a fully actualized, cognitively active adult does not imply that you were a fully actualized, cognitively active human being at the instant of your birth.
2. This is about letting women choose what to do with their bodies. If every woman decides that they will not have an abortion under any circumstances, then I will be content: we’ll be a pro-choice nation in which no abortions occur. And we’ll all also have ponies.
3. I don’t take a hard line on precisely where the fetus goes from being a blob of cells to a human being requiring full civil protection. It’s ridiculous to claim it occurs at conception, I personally think it occurs sometime after birth, but everything in between is shades of gray. That’s what I said at the Raving Atheist, and I also said it was a social and economic decision. He rejected that because it wasn’t “scientific”.
4. People who want to abstain from sex are a little weird, but go ahead — no one compels you to do it. However, advocating abstinence for everyone else because you think it might lead to someone having an icky abortion somewhere sometime is denying an important part of humanity. I’ll also remind you that every one of your parents had sex. Sex is more of a human universal than just about any activity we usually associate with the specialness of mankind: art, making tools, thinking.
5. Yes, I am a positive atheist. Go ahead and show me any evidence for the other side of the argument and I might just change. Isn’t it amazing how millennia of striving by billions of people in this one domain has led to absolutely no evidence for a common belief? You might say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it’s pretty damn ridiculous to see this much absence and not come to the only reasonable conclusion.
argh, one last one. I’m goign to quote myself.
see point 1. The stuff in brackets I just added. Sex leads to babies. You are attempting to say that just because we have ways to prevent a baby coming after conception (abortion), that such an ability is right. Is
P Zed Myers also wrote:
…or that anyone else born prematurely grew up to be a fully actualized adult capable of cognition.
“No trying to tell us that the need for aborting healthy babies will disappear when your utopian/marxist goal of universal healthcare and social welfare for all is realized.”
Disappear, probably not. Decrease drastically, yes. See the Netherlands. Or Sweden. Neither of which is either Marxist or Utopia, but both of which have decent health care and social welfare systems (and relatively sane views of sex) and both of which have much lower abortion rates than the US.
now maybe one last one. God I suck at cutting myself off.
It is not a matter of personal anecdote, and my argument was solely against the ‘life begins at birth’ perspective. Yours is a wholly different one requiring a totally different argument, since you claim that it comes sometimes after birth at a certain stage of cognitive development, which is not arbitrary. Your argument also has more merit to it than the ‘life begins at birth’ crowd. I wasn’t arguing against you.
It is not personal anecdote to say that there is very little to no difference between an infant born at 40 weeks and one born at 35-39 weeks. Therefore, claiming that there is a difference between an infant born at 35 weeks and a fetus still in the womb at 35 weeks is arbitrary and illogical. I merely use myself as an illustrative case. I could replace ‘me’ with ‘Baby A’, and call the 35 week fetus ‘Baby B’. Which would then not be a personal anecdote. I wasn’t some freak of nature with no statistical and empirical validity but merely an example of a very common situation.
kristjan, add in the 290 or so for medicaid, which is social welfare in fact if not in name.
then go see http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/social-welfare-spending04/summary.htm
Exhibit 4, specifically. Add up those numbers on the bottom set of graphs, comes darn close to 10k doesn’t it? Done nitpicking? Cool.
Today’s New York Times magazine is about “Pro-Life Nation”, El Salvador, where
*women are jailed for abortion as murder,
*there is actually a category called “forensic vagina specialists”,
*women with ectopic pregnancies are admitted to hospitals to await the inevitable and dangerous rupture of fallopian tubes. The “baby” is lost, of course, but, you see, nature was allowed to run its course.
This is sheer madness. And it is the logical result of such consistency as vociferous anti-abortionists claim is needed. Alternet has an audio of an interview with the author of the piece.
Happy Easter.
Sex does not necessarily lead to babies, and even without contraception the frequency of a successful pregnancy are fairly low…and we now have the ability to control reproduction so that the only babies born are ones that were planned and desired. That’s a good thing.
Resorting to the fate or inevitability argument is a bad idea. We could just as well say that because certain occupations, like logging or fishing, are particularly hazardous, we should simply disband OSHA, accept the fact that people die at these jobs, and tell people that you shouldn’t fish or cut down lumber unless you’re willing to die for it.
IndianCowboy, you have just show that you don’t udnerstand that set of graphs. Yes, it’s true that the riches quatile uses close to $10,000 per poor person, but it’s equally tue that the poorest quatile uses something in the region of $4,500 per poor person. So in other words, it doesn’t prove your point at all. Especially since there is not too great a difference between the spending per captia in the different states, which means that more people make by with the lower amount than with the higher amount.
Exactly. I agree. There is no difference. If we can kill one, there should be no ethical dilemma about killing the other.
“1. The two parties involved in the process of copulation are both willing participants in a mutually agreed upon activity [and by extension, accept the risk of a pregnancy]”
Not by any means always, unless you’re arguing that rape doesn’t exist. Even if the sex is consentual, one party might have lied about their reproductive status (ie claimed to be post-vasectomy, tubal ligation, or menopause). And incredible accidents do happen occasionally. There is, IIRC, one case of a conception occuring between a man with a vasectomy and a woman with a tubal ligation. I don’t think one can really argue that they didn’t take reasonable precautions against conception.
“2. At some point in pregnancy there is no difference between an infant and a fetus; therefore at that point either the fetus must be treated as an infant under the law, or infants must continue to be treated as fetuses (i.e. abortable).”
Again, not true. A fetus is always distinguishable from an infant by location, if nothing else. An infant is an independent living being whereas a fetus is, in principle, a parasite living off of another person. There are also numerous physiologic changes that occur at or about birth. The ductus arteriosis and the umbilical vessels close. The hemoglobin starts to convert from fetal to adult form. The brain is exposed to higher levels of oxygen, possibly activating the cortex for the first time, certainly increasing its functional ability drastically.
“3). The infant/fetus/whatever is capable of attaining a state of adult independence, majority, and treatement under the law.”
Again, not necessarily. In fact, mostly not. As many as 80% of fertilized eggs fail to implant. Some, but not all, of these have chromosomal anomolies. Nor is every implanted embryo capable of development to the point of completing gestation, much less adulthood. In another way, the statement is too limited. Some embryos (or, more properly, blastulocytes) divide into two or occasionally more embryos. AFAIK, every embryo is capable of doing so. So one could claim that every embryo is capable of attaining majority twic e or more over and we should be working on ways to induce twinning more frequently, because to not do so is “killing” the other twin.
Prof. Myers, Well done. I’m a regular (daily) reader of both your blog and the Raving Atheist’s (actually, I don’t always read his posts — I’m there for the discussion forums). But thank you for articulating your views; I’m not a biologist but I’ve arrived at the same conclusions about abortion (and infanticide). Anyway, thanks again.
Dianne are you even capable of reading an entire post of mine? Seriously. This is the second time in this discussion you’ve selectively quoted me to make it seem like I said something I didn’t. It’s starting to seem intentional. If that’s how you work, you’re guilty of everything PZ has accused the others of in his post. If English isn’t your first language or your dyslexic or something, my apologies.
this would be the ensuing sentence that you failed to read or acknowledge:
In other words, only when those three conditions are satisfied is abortion immoral. Therefore, if the sex isn’t consentual I have no problem with abortion. Therefore, it only applies to those fetuses that can attain majority and full cognitive abilities
On point 2. I’ve got a handful of bio degrees and almost a year of med school under my belt. I’m pretty sure I know what happens during birth. And i stand by the fetus/infant of equal gestational age being an arbitrary distinction. You could deliver that fetus instead of abort it, and within 15 minutes it would become an infant according to your definition.
Quick question:
If a family can no longer support a child that is 10 years old, would you (PZ) approve if they decide to end his/her life?
kristjan, alright I yield. It’s not 10,000, it’s somewhere between 10,000 and 4500. Ok?
So, in other words your statement:
was wrong in every aspect, yes?
Can I again point out that there if people want to stop abortions for economical reasons, the economical reasons should be removed. The US has a long way to go before that happens.
That won’t remove all the other reasons for abortions, and it certainly isn’t relevant to PZ’s stance on the change between being a fetus and a child.
At the point at which a fetus could resonably be expected to survive outside the body with a high chance of a good outcome, it’s not really a parasite. It doesn’t *have to* live on inside the womb, though it may (of course) receive an advantage by doing so.
Simply put, a woman can excercise her right to withdraw life support at that point, and the fetus could still survive. Even though it is not independant as long as it is in the womb, it is capable of being so, and should be able to expect the support of its society.
As humans living in a civilisation of other humans, we should expect the support of our society. I can’t see how infanticide is ever justified simply because the infant can be given to the care of others – and as a member of the society it should have that right.
“I’ve got a handful of bio degrees and almost a year of med school under my belt. I’m pretty sure I know what happens during birth.”
Oh, do you? Then perhaps you could tell me the average pO2 and oxygen saturation in the umbilical artery and vein and for a newborn? Perhaps you would explain what you would do in a case of twin gestation with fetal demise of twin A at 20 weeks GA? Can you describe the stages of fertilization? What dosage of pitocin do you think most appropriate for induction of labor? Would you suggest trying to deliver a molar pregnancy? (These are very easy questions, BTW, in case anyone who hasn’t been to med school is wondering. Except for the pitocin dosage question, which is really a third year med school question, but can be googled in about 10 seconds.)
“You could deliver that fetus instead of abort it, and within 15 minutes it would become an infant according to your definition.”
Again, not necessarily. A 35 week fetus, certainly. That’s the point. Things are different after delivery: real physiologic changes happen at that time. Not to mention that once it’s born it is no longer acting as a parasite off the mother and endangering her life. (Bonus question: what’s the average maternal mortality in the US? How does the risk of completing a pregnancy compare with the risk of flying on 9/11/01?) Of course, an embryo (you do know the difference between a fetus and an embryo, don’t you?) wouldn’t become an infant because it isn’t developed enough. It’s ridiculous to talk about the DA closing if it hasn’t formed yet. Plus an embryo doesn’t have fetal hemoglobin, it has embryonic. Again, there are major differences between an embryo, a 40 week fetus, and an infant.
“If any of those three conditions are violated, then my argument no longer stands and there is no moral issue WRT abortion.”
IC: This sentence is not included in your post of 4/16/06, 7:40AM, nor did you include a link to the original post, although you say you are quoting yourself. I didn’t read the original post, but I assume that this sentence is there. I don’t suppose you consider it a very important part of your position if you didn’t feel it worth quoting in the repeat post. However, if it is important to you that all the conditions you listed be met, then do you disapprove of laws such as the South Dakota law that forbids abortion in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the mother’s health (but not life)?
Just for the record I’m one of those people who thinks twice before crushing a wayward insect that may have inadvertently found it’s way into my home. Often I will take it outside and release it. Though I do draw the line at cockroaches, I seem to have no problem killing them, fascinating though they may be. So I guess that I can honestly call myself pro life. I also think that abortion is a lousy form of birth control but there are many cases where it is justified and that is why it is a legal procedure in most of this country (for now at least)
Whenever I hear a someone professing to have a pro life stance I can’t help but think of this little short story.
This is an interesting short story in an of itself:
The Soul of Mark III Beast
“The Soul of Anna Klane” (Chapter 23), by Terrel Miedaner
Also to be found in Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett’s The Mind’s I
BTW does anyone out there know at what age a human baby is able to pass the mirror test? Is self awareness considered a necessary criterion for being considered fully human? How does the answer to this question impact the ethics of the treatment of animals and the entire abortion debate?
For example Is it ok to kill a living animal and eat it because it is not self aware?
PZ will you forgive me if I admit to eating calamari and octopus? GRIN.
How about infecting a self aware primate such as a chimpanzee with an immune deficiency virus in the name of research?
On that note I suggest reading another short story by Terrel Miedaner.
The Soul Of Martha a Beast.
BTW as an Atheist I don’t subscribe to the notion of “Soul” per se, but I am acutely aware of self awareness in myself in other humans and possibly in other animals as well. Which is why in general I have a problem with killing as in war, the death penalty, genocide by economic sanctions etc..Though I do understand the need for self preservation and self defense.
Dianne, absolutely I disagree with the SD law.
I guess I could go around quoting myself in full on a page where the original comment already appears, but that seems kind of worthless. Seems to me if you want to challenge someone’s line of argument, you should read the entire of argument.
Kristjan, yes, it is wrong, amend it to say 4500-10000 per peson on welfare. I yielded. WOuld you like me to yield again? Perhaps polish your shoes with my tongue while I’m down there?
“BTW does anyone out there know at what age a human baby is able to pass the mirror test?”
15-18 months, in general.
“I guess I could go around quoting myself in full on a page where the original comment already appears,”
Or you could add a link if you don’t assume that your words are so important that people will read 100+ posts to find the original quote on the off chance that it says something that contradicts what you said in your quote. Incidently, if you’re quoting yourself you should probably try to not quote yourself out of context quite so badly. I notice that you don’t seem to be able to answer the questions I asked about basic embryology and obstetrics. Interesting.
Define “people” and explain how the “people” stage can be reached without passing through all the preceding “non-people” stages.
Assuming that you’ve never met PZ Meyers, how did you decide that he (the entity writing this blog) was a person? While you may not have thought about it in these terms, you performed a Turing Test. You observed his blog communications and concluded that they did not appear to be those of the increasingly common computer-generated splogs. The Turing Test offers us a good operational definition of person.
Of course, a person becomes a person in a gradual fashion from material that once was not a person. However, why should we privilege the stage of embryo over the stage of egg and sperm just prior to joining or over the stage of carbon atoms in the environment that will be consumed to build an egg or sperm?
Bah! Death to all absolutists! :-)
Let’s start with PZs’s acknowledgment of “traditional” infanticide: How many of the commenters here have ever been in serious danger of starving to death? How many have seen their kids in serious danger of starving to death? What would you do to make sure you have enough food to raise your kids? This is *exactly* the “traditional” scenario for infanticide, and also the “original” economic argument for abortion.
In fact, people historically, and currently, are willing to kill their babies for much lesser reasons… China recently rediscovered this point, when their “one child per family” rule ran up against some more traditional rules, such as “a son carries on the family name”, and “sons support their parents, daughters support their children”. Result: a massive gender imbalance, which is likely to have geopolitical implications in another decade or so. Also their population might dip a little further than they expected….
The “modern” argument from economics extends the issue from mere survival to “thriving in society”. In case you didn’t notice, it’s kind of hard to get anywhere in America without a high-school degree. It’s also pretty hard to finish high school while raising a baby. Yes, there are some people who manage each of those, usually with massive external support — but it’s not usual. When you tell a high-school girl she can’t get an abortion, much less that she’s expelled for “immorality” (yes, it still happens), then as a matter of social policy, you are throwing that girl, *and* her baby, *and* any other kids she may have in future, into the big trashcan we call “the underclass”. Maybe she’ll manage to climb out eventually, but if so it’ll be in spite of “you”. And the fundies wonder why they can’t get any traction with the “educated classes”?
The discussion of flatly non-viable fetuses shows the difference between those who are actually pro-life and those who are in fact anti-choice: The former recognize that some fetuses are never going to turn into cute little rugrats no matter what laws you pass, or how much you punish the mother for her “sinful nature”.
The inclusion of “dubiously viable” fetuses confuses that point, but it also highlights the aforesaid distinction: the anti-choice crew can be identified by their assumption/declaration that if aborting such fetuses is not to be utterly forbidden, then it must be mandatory (insert ooga-booga about Nazis et al).
Likewise, anyone who deserves the label “pro-life” will admit that a woman has at least as much right to live as does a fetus inside her. The real nutjobs, however, simply can’t face a choice between the mother’s life or the fetus’s. Indeed, they can’t grasp that even letting the mother die won’t necessarily save that sacred fetus. As far as I’m concerned, that qualifies as “unable to deal constructively with reality”, a.k.a. “insane”.
Enough for now, I have some “ur-family” to visit….
Ermm.. But what about this?
Hey, I think I just saw a bunny covered in Sherwin-Williams..
Incedentally, right after this bit, Jesus goes on to say that he and his teachings will divide families:
etc. etc.
.
There’s a better example of this than TRA: Gene Ray, of time cube fame, is an atheist.
BTW, when I am asked “what if you had been aborted?” by antiabortionists, I tell them “I’m glad I exist, and I’m pleased that my parents felt they had the necessary resources to care for me. But I don’t fault the people in situations where they could not do so.” Like many here I do not understand if one’s position is genuinely about reducing abortions why so many of these people do not work to develop the other, social, means to do so. In my debates on this issue over many years I have only ever encountered one person who was antiabortion and seemed to sincerely improve conditions so that they were minimized.
As for the “don’t want a child, don’t have sex”, oh please. Is one responsible always for the outcomes of one’s action, no matter how unlikely? There’s a chance that if I open the outerdoor today a neighbour will have just come around at that moment and opening it will smash the door into his face and cut his skull open and he’ll bleed to death on the porch. Am I responsible for that? (Assume that it occurs in seconds.)
One thing that hasn’t been examined in detail is the role of soceity and the State. We’ve all agreed to a social contract in which we promise not kill or rob each other, and to behave in certain ways. We do this becuase we’re social animals, and what benefits our society ultimately benefits us as individuals. The primary reason for the existence of the State is to enforce this contract, and part of that is deciding at what point this social contract applies to an individual.
Do we break the contract by allowing late-term abortions and infanticide? I would argue that allowing abortion and infanticide implies that infants are not afforded the same protection as the rest of us–that “some citizens are more equal than others”–and that it also potentially deprives society of future resources, to its detriment.
For these reasons, I think it’s permissible for the State, as the enforcer of our social contract, to regulate things like abortion and infanticide. However, since we’re doing this for the benefit of the entire society, then the State needs to step up and provide the resources required to raise these individuals – proper education, health care, etc.
That is an interesting point. I’d argue that fetuses and infants are not social animals at all. Maybe we should wait on giving them the privileges of the contract until they are capable of accepting the obligations, as well.
I find analogy useful when puzzling out what’s right and wrong or sensible and silly. These ideas are not particularly original but they bear repeating:
A person can’t live comfortably sheltered by a blueprint, nor saw up an acorn and build a house. Each of them is the specification for a future product that could be used in those ways. But to use them thus takes time, energy, and materials. To equate them is silly.
A well-designed, unique blueprint costs about 10% as much as the resulting house. An acorn is worth much less than a pile of seasoned oak lumber or even a standing oak tree, because it has much less chance of becoming an oak than a blueprint has of “becoming” a house.
Similarly, we do not mourn an early miscarriage or a late menstrual period with the intensity that accompanies the death of a child. Rationality and logic lead to the conclusion that a fertilized egg is not yet a person, although it has the potential to become one. Therefore, the Raving Atheist’s logic has been contaminated by a prior belief and the Raving Atheist is indeed raving.
Do we break the contract by allowing late-term abortions and infanticide? I would argue that allowing abortion and infanticide implies that infants are not afforded the same protection as the rest of us–that “some citizens are more equal than others”–and that it also potentially deprives society of future resources, to its detriment.
The problem with your argument is that you’re skipping over the question of whether a fetus can agree to such a contract. A fetus can’t pass a Turing Test, much less have the more complex intellectual capability to agree to enter into a contract.
First, about the one dollar per day comment, you think of a different dollar, IndianCowboy. You can live on 1 nominal dollar per day in India, because its actual worth is about 6 real dollars. Hell, here in Singapore, a first-world country, you can feed yourself for about 2-3 real US dollars a day. But you’ll still be dirt poor, because you have to live somewhere, get some health care, and often feed children.
If you want, you can use counter-anecdotes. One of your blog’s regular commenters was born because of an abortion – his mother wanted a child and got pregnant, thought she wasn’t yet ready and aborted her fetus, and then decided she was after all ready and got pregnant again. Different people make different choices – some think it’s abhorrent to terminate a pregnancy, whereas others think it’s no big deal. I don’t endorse China’s policy of forced abortions; rather, I trust every woman to make her own choice about it. There’s certainly not enough evidence for fetal personhood that justifies governmental restrictions.
Four, but there are several criteria in addition to the mirror test. For example, you can measure response to pain: human fetuses as old as 30 weeks have recurrently failed to respond to pain, although many animals nobody thinks of as intelligent respond to pain. A while ago, PZ posted about how zebrafish can feel pain and how he therefore needs to be humane when experimenting on them or killing them.
Alternatively, you can indirectly measure intelligence by looking at brain complexity. Although neurons finish developing in the middle of the pregnancy (I don’t remember when, but I’m sure PZ does), what matters most is the synapses, which continue developing until death, and which give the brain enough complexity for self-awareness to be possible only a few weeks after birth.
Dude, IndianCowboy…did you sleep at all?
Then again, I did stay up way too late on this thread and hopped right back as soon as I woke up.
*stepping away from computer*
Sorry guys, I’m not sure how to quote, so here is my quasi-quote:
Posted by Mark:
“It seems to me that the critical issue here is whether or not a woman has the right to control her own body”
Actually, I think that attitude is exactly why there is so much useless fighting and contention on this issue. As much as YOU would like to make this issue entirely about women so that you can’t paint your opponents as misogynistic assholes who needn’t be listened to, there are actually a myriad of conflicting interests and factors involved in the abortion rights issue. The critical issue is not JUST whether or not a woman has the right to control her own body, but also whether or not a child who is, for all intents and purposes, fully-developed, albeit attached to its mother via umbilical cord, has a right to live.
Because if it does, then that right would certainly conflict with the mothers’ right to choose, and you then have to decide who’s rights are more important. This can involve all sorts of value judgements. This is a COMPLICATED ISSUE, and simplifying it down to one critical issue for the purpose of making your opponents look like assholes is only going to take the level of discourse down a notch.
Those that think that human life has an innate value that is precious (like me) have a hard time defining it in terms of some arbitrary cord-snipping event, and as much as we sympathize with the mother carrying the baby (and I honestly do), we do not believe it gives her the right kill the child. So it is not out of some misogynistic desire to control women for no good reason, but out of overwhelming compassion for the child, and if you can’t even UNDERSTAND where we’re coming from on that, then I don’t know what else to say.
plucky, yes yes I did. Normally I go to bed at 3-4 on weekends, but this thread sucked me in, and then I had to write a 3k word blogpost (who the hell reads a 3k word blogpost…who the hell writes one), and then I had to write an actual science post because I feel guilty about the excess of political posts on a blog that was supposed to be half/half
IndianCowboy: Please do not put words in my mouth.
I never said “It’s only a couple hundred”, or anything resembling that.
I implied that the majority of abortions are early, yes – because I’m pretty sure they are.
If you have read what I typed, you would know that I would be in favor of a law banning “late-term” abortions (although yes, the term needs to be defined clearly), as long as it does not ban medically necessary abortions.
I would not think such a law would need exceptions for rape or incest – if you wait six months before getting the abortion in those cases, there’s something wierd going on.
Michael, incest is rather problematic, and it can be hard for the girl in those cases to actually get away and get the abortion.
Those that think that human life has an innate value that is precious (like me) have a hard time defining it in terms of some arbitrary cord-snipping event,
While the rest of us have a hard time defining it in terms of an arbitrary merging event, especially when most such entities aren’t carried to term.
Kristjan: Point.
That said, I think elective abortion in the first half of the pregnancy should have no barriers whatsoever – at that point, the fetus is clearly not independantly viable, and thus, to my mind, lacks moral value.
After that point, although I’d be willing to delay things, I’d think about some sort of “induced delivery” criterion for ‘elective’ abortions. In other words, if delivery were to be induced, the fetus would have a reasonable chance of ‘intact’ survival, and the risks to the woman would be minimal… then an abortion is probably a bad idea.
Of course, for that to really be true, the foster care situation would have to be fixed as well.
When I was pregnant, I thought of the embryoes/fetuses only as potential babies right up to the time of delivery. There is too much that can go wrong with a pregnancy, and I didn’t want that much emotional investment until I could be fairly certain that I would have a live baby. I believe it helped me cope when I miscarried one.
a child who is, for all intents and purposes, fully-developed
If you’re talking about late third trimester abortions only, just ignore the rest of this post, it’s not relevant. Except to say that third trimester abortions are rare and I’ve never even heard of one done for reasons other than fetal anomoly or maternal health. Most, if not all doctors, would turn away a patient who presented for abortion after 24 weeks without one of those criteria.
However, before the third trimester–arguably, well into the third trimester, an embryo/fetus is nothing like an infant in development. A blastulocyte starts out as a single cell. A three week old human embryo looks more like an embryo of a similar stage of another species than it does a human baby. Organogenesis isn’t even completed until the eight week (and the majority, albeit a small majority, of abortions are performed in the first eight weeks of pregnancy). A 14 week old fetus is about the size of a mouse and has a brain that is similar to a mouse’s in terms of cortical size and lack of cortical folds. It isn’t, however, as active and well organized as that of an adult mouse. A twenty week old fetus at least looks human but it isn’t a fully developed child. Its lungs aren’t ready to breathe air. Its brain isn’t ready to moniter even its most basic life functions. One cause of death in premies is bradycardia-apnea sydnrome: the brainstem is so poorly developed that the baby “forgets” to breathe and its heartbeat slows, possibly because of not enough oxygen, possibly because of poor regulation of an immature cardiovascular system, leading to death if there is no intervention. Although babies as young as 20 weeks gestational age have survived, none have survived without major mental retardation. Nor have, AFAIKA, any babies under about 28 weeks GA survived without major medical intervention, including intubation and artificial respiration. So, thanks to technology, they may no longer be dependent on the mother entirely, but they are dependent on outside aid to regulate their basic bodily functions.
Let’s even the field a bit. I see no one really took up the question early on in the thread about whether men should even have a stake in this.
Thousands of people in the US die every year for lack of organ transplants, many of them for liver or kidney. People can donate part of their livers or one kidney and still live well. Since life is worth so much, shouldn’t we require all healthy men to donate a kidney and/or part of their livers sometime during their lives? Why not? It’s a simple surgical procedure, with minimal risks, and doing so ACTIVELY saves the life of another human being, and all life is sacred.
Still no? That’s exactly what happens to a woman who is forced to carry a baby to term – pregnancy is hazardous, often involves a surgical procedure, and being forced to finish the pregnancy saves that fetus that by some people’s reckoning is a human.
So, what’s the difference? I want to see all anti-abortion extremists donating part of their bodies to save others who are already alive. The idea that the government can force a woman to do something specific with her body to save the “life” of another is the same argument that the government can force a man to do something specific with his to save the life of another.
Couldn’t be more OT if I tried, but I’d like to thank IndianCowboy for being civil, even when disagreeing with most of the commenters here. It’s a rare thing. Though I disagree with most of his points as well, it’s good to have an oppositional interlocuter who doesn’t spew hate screeds all over the place. Back to lurking…
Sorry jcr – I was skimming too quickly and didn’t see that you made the same argument.
PZ Myers wrote:
“5. Yes, I am a positive atheist. Go ahead and show me any evidence for the other side of the argument and I might just change.”
Well, there are these cosmic coinsidences (a.k.a. finely tuned universe), and they havn’t been explained away, have they?
Sustaining atheism inspite of these peculiar discoveries is just plain irrational. Agnosticism is the way out.
Well, there are these cosmic coinsidences (a.k.a. finely tuned universe), and they havn’t been explained away, have they?
Could you give an example? I’m not sure what you mean by cosmic coincidences.
Dianne: He means things that are assumed to be improbable therefore god!!
(I don’t particularly like “active athiesm”, myself, but it’s really hard to disprove it until/unless you can prove some brand of theism in a specific sense, so … yeeeeah.)
The “cosmic coincidences” I’ve heard about go something like the following:
Our current understanding of the fundamental laws of nature has a set of “knobs” which must be adjusted before our equations accurately describe the universe we see. For example, we must feed in the masses of the fundamental particles (six quarks, six leptons, etc.). See this page for an overview of open questions in physics and this page for a list of such “knobs”, both pages brought to you by the physicist John Baez.
Most physicists hope that our next great theory — which might be superstring theory or maybe something else — will at least cut down the number of free parameters, from the twenty-six or so “knobs” we must adjust today to a more manageable handful. This would certainly narrow the gap in which a God-of-the-gaps would get to play. . . and therein lies at least one big problem with using the “finely tuned universe” as an argument for theism. Not only do you have to keep revising your position, but what we already know has pushed the God-of-the-gaps far away from any Judeo-Christian conception. In Isaac Newton’s day, it was legit to think the fact that the planets all orbited the Sun in the same direction in a flat plane required the Hand of God as explanation; today, we have perfectly reasonable arguments based on natural law which explain this fact. What was once a “cosmic coincidence” became a mechanical phenomenon, and the Deity’s Gap just got narrower.
Consider just how small that gap has become! The only role which your working cosmologists leave open for a creator is to set the fundamental constants. We no longer have a Divine Watchmaker; now we’ve got the Celestial Knob-Twiddler. Does this sound anything like the Yahweh Adonai of the Old Testament? Can there even be an emotional reward for praying to a being who lives entirely outside our conception of time?
To quote Alan Sokal,
(from “Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?“, p. 67)
Is anyone else wondering why IndianCowboy seems to be under the impression that third-trimester abortions are readily available? In fact, almost every state puts pretty harsh restrictions on them and says they can only be done to preserve the life or health of the mother, or if the fetus has a birth defect so severe that it cannot survive outside of the womb.
These mythical frivolous third-trimester abortions not only don’t exist, they are forbidden by law. That’s why PZ was positing them as a theoretical notion.
Please learn something about abortion law before you spout off about it. Thank you.
There’s sick and there sicker…
Next he’ ll tell you we came from apes but if you ask him (as the pro that he is of course) how come there’s still apes he will gulp and go into one of his theories…
Keep it up bozo we all need comedians!
A
RE positive atheism. (Similar to the point regarding Santa Claus.) It is very hard to make yourself believe something that you find unbelievable. I don’t believe in fairies, for instance. That’s a pretty positive belief. But I think the crucial thing is that I don’t attach any emotional significance to my inability to believe in fairles.
I realize it may be hard for many religious people to credit, but I don’t attach a lot of emotional significance to my lack of belief in god, either. I see no need to call myself an agnostic.
But I try to be polite about it.
Mnemosyne, that was why I was asking about examples of late abortion done for non-health reasons. I should probably have made that more clear.
“5. Yes, I am a positive atheist. Go ahead and show me any evidence for the other side of the argument and I might just change.”
Well, there are these cosmic coinsidences (a.k.a. finely tuned universe), and they havn’t been explained away, have they?
Sustaining atheism inspite of these peculiar discoveries is just plain irrational. Agnosticism is the way out.
He is an atheist not due to logic; but because he hates Christianity. Perhaps it is due to some of Christianity’s loon messengers (Falwell, Robertson et al), or perhaps he is in rebellion against a childhood in which he was raised Christian.
Doubt that hatred? Re-read his original post, or his rants against Easter. Hatred shining like a gas lamp in a swamp.
You are correct. Agnosticism is really the way to go in terms of logical argument, unless you are going to argue against the existence of God due to evil.
And Myers never makes that argument. I suspect because for him, evil does not exist.
Compass, your post might have some connection to reality, but not any that I can see.
Alon, compass’ post can be used as an example of what reality is not. That’s its connection to reality.
I don’t want to roam too far afield topicwise, but regarding cosmic coincidences and fine tuning: These are in no way evidence for god. They simply refer to numbers we don’t yet have a good explanation for. Generally they involve us (physicists) making a naive prediction or one based on a theory we like for other reasons and finding that it doesn’t match the measured value by orders of magnitude. But this just means we need a better theory, which we already knew. If two numbers cancel to a ‘miraculous’ order this means that such a cancellation has a low probability if we were to randomly pick the numbers, but if they can be explained at all they are not random. If we assume randomness then there are no more questions to ask. The number simply is and it’s not clear what meaning ‘random’ even has for a single observable universe. Otherwise we must seek an explanation which either predicts the numbers or provides a framework where anthropic principles dictate that we as observers are likely to observe such a number. God is a poor explanation, it makes no predictions, it assumes the question cannot be solved by other means, and it complicates (understatement) rather than simplifies the theory.
I always find this “cosmic coincidence” argument completely stupid…
compass: quick, think of a number, ANY number, between zero and one.
Ok, what was the probability you would come up with that number? Let’s see… there are uncountably many numbers between zero and one… so… the probability was zero!
Not 1 in 10^23095437058637509685340
ZERO
which of course, proves you are God…
I’d like to say, first, I’ve really enjoyed reading this thread as it’s been a while since I saw a discussion of abortion that didn’t devolve (completely) into hate-filled rants and petty accusations within five minutes. For the most part, the participants here seem to be able to restrain themselves. And, I suppose a little vitriol is to be expected, even when discussing such a hot button issue with reasonable people.
For the purposes of this post, let’s assume that the embryo/fetus being aborted is a human being with rights. Outside of the thought experiment in this post, I disagree with this premise for reasons others have gone into, but for argument’s sake, consider this a given: the unborn “baby” is a human being with rights.
Now, others in this thread have brought up the “woman’s rights” angle, so I’m not saying I’m doing anything new. I just want to give you my treatment of it. Every human being has certain rights, including the right to live and the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom and property and all those other things that liberty requires. These rights should, in principle, be absolute and unabridged until the moment that the exercise of them would infringe upon another individual’s exercise of their rights. I’m sure everyone’s heard this before.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible that one’s free exercise of their liberty will never conflict with another’s free exercise. Laws, in one sense, are a set of guidelines by which we, as a society, have agreed to settle such disputes when they arise. For instance, if I steal PZ’s car, I can’t whine about society infringing on my right to property when it takes the car back and puts me in jail. The laws we have made have, in this circumstance, said that his right to property trumps mine. Similarly, if someone is attacked and they kill their attacker in self-defense, after an investigation to make sure of the circumstances, the law says the right of Person A to defend themselves trumps the right of Person B to do whatever they want (in this case, to kill Person A).
Wow, this post is much longer than I originally intended. Sorry. I’ll get to the point now.
So, if we take as a given that the “baby” has rights, then we have, as Frank pointed out, a conflict between the rights of the baby and the rights of the mother. I would assert, however, that contrary to Frank’s conclusion, that in such a case the mother’s right to self-determination trumps the baby’s right to continue to live off her body.
The woman’s right to self-determination was pre-existing before the pregnancy. Also, since the Supreme Court has ruled in numerous areas that basic rights cannot be given up, even voluntarily, by the people that hold them (e.g. you can’t hold a slave in bondage, even if you show that the slave signed a contract giving up their freedom), the argument that “she gave up that right when she got pregnant” holds little water.
So, even if we were all able to get over the (considerable) hurdles keeping us from agreeing on when the quality “personhood” is bestowed upon an embryo/fetus, and even if that agreement were in favor of those who are pro-life, I still don’t see how one can justify the stripping of the woman’s liberty from her.
I say that humanity is something that emerges gradually and is far more complex than having the right number of chromosomes and a certain set of genes: information is added continuously during development, and it’s a serious mistake to think everything that defines you is already present at conception.i
I have a two-pronged question: At what point are we human, and why did you come to that conclusion?
I’d argue that fetuses and infants are not social animals at all. Maybe we should wait on giving them the privileges of the contract until they are capable of accepting the obligations, as well.
Absolutely monstrous. You are growing more evil by the day.
Baka, fine and good, but a few things.
1. children have never been held to the same standard as adults. In good societies, they’re given extra privileges; furthermore, their infringement upon the rights of others is either treated with reduced penalties or none at all.
2. my argument is that by *choosing* to engage in an activity that may result in reproduction, the woman accepts the risk and responsibility of pregnancy. Note that because I use the word *choice*, I see no problem with abortion in the case of rape or other coercion. And, because neither the ‘at birth’ nor the ‘at conception’ argument are very rational, I use the point of capabality of survival outside the womb as the point of no return.
In other words, my argument isn’t all that different from PZ’s in structure; he simply places the point of no return at some point after birth rather than before. I did like the structure of his argument in that he based it around the fetus/infant rather than the woman. I love women, I was raised by women in a matrilineal family. But the fundamental issue here is whether or not a fetus is worthy of certain rights. So even though he takes a stance different from mine, I can respect the rational process by which he makes his argument.
Now, not necessarily in response to Baka, I’ll try to say a few other things.
One thing that may have confused people is that I’ve been arguing from a general ‘life begins at conception’ pro-life stance, not because that’s my personal argument, but because I’m simply trying to present their argument for them Since I used to be one of them, I know it pretty well.
My personal argument proceeds as follows.
These conditions must be fulfilled:
1. The two parties involved in the process of copulation are both willing participants in a mutually agreed upon activity.
2. At some point in pregnancy there is no difference between an infant and a fetus; therefore at that point either the fetus must be treated as an infant under the law, or infants must continue to be treated as fetuses (i.e. abortable).
3). The infant/fetus/whatever is capable of attaining a state of adult independence, majority, and treatement under the law.
4.(i forgot to put this one in earlier)Neither the life of the mother nor the life of the child is in jeopardy
Under these conditions, abortion is morally wrong and should be legislated against. Two people engaged in an activity knowing the risks. They created a zygote. This zygote developed to a point at which the difference between fetus and infant is negligible and is in fact merely a matter of location. The infant will live to adulthood and achieve complete personhood. And the heartbreaking choice between wehther the mother or the child lives need not be made.
That is the extent of my argument.
If one is to argue that an infant cannot be killed, but a fetus of equal gestational age can be, one is making an irrational argument. I’m sorry but I don’t consider the closing of portal veins and the production of adult hemoglobin to be that key to anything. Especially since the potentiality is there in that fetus of the same gestational age as the infant. If one holds that an infant shouldn’t be considered worthy of basic human rights(as PZ does), then one must justify why that can’t be extensible all the way until legal majority.
As I see it, there are essentially two places one can say abortion/infanticide is no longer tenable.
This is at the viability of the fetus stage (which is my stance) or at the self-awareness stage (which seems to be PZ’s stance). Either fulfillment of biological autonomy, or fulfillment of cognitive autonomy.
I don’t like PZ’s view, but philosophically and rationally it’s more valid than the other anti-life stuff I’ve seen here.
A couple of questions:
1) For PZ; If the information that makes one a human is not all present at conception, and is being added continuously, from where is it being added?
2) For Indian Cowboy; If viability is a consideration doesn’t that make this an argument of improving technologies? Viability in 2006 is not at all what it was in 1906 and there is nothing about the humanity of the fetus that has changed in those 100 years of increasingly earlier viability.
(This question given all of your previous conditions).
Sanctum,
1) (was for PZ, but I can answer) There is a lot of evidence that the womb environment is a major determinant of phenotype and behavior in offspring. Birth order studies and personality, physcial fitness, and intelligence, for one thing. Testosterone levels in the womb tend to drop with each subsequent pregnancy with male offspring (some contend this is why younger siblings are more likely to be gay). YOu may have heard of hte ‘thrifty phenotype’ in which a person’s body type , appetite, and metabolism are dependent on the nutrition of the mother during pregnancy. THere are a lot of things about you that are determined after conception (not genetic) but before birth.
2) Sanctum, my personal view is that medical intervention counts toward viability, so long as the infant will, as per my conditions, have a reasonable likelihood of making it to adulthood free of major physical and cognitive abnormality.
Some countries who use this logic define the point of no return when an infant has a 50% chance of surviving with medical intervention AND side effects, some a 50% chance with intervention but no side effects, some a 50% chance without intervention. That’s a matter of quibbling I don’t really feel like getting into at this point in time.
Thanks for your responses IndianCowboy.
Quoth IndianCowboy:
Legal majority is also a completely arbitrary line. (Really, what geniuses decided that I was incapable of entering into a contract when 6,574 days removed from birth, and capable the next?) Different rights are given to people at different times. Where I live, one can put others’ lives at risk by driving a car at 16, choose to leave high school at 17, have sex with most anyone and gamble their way to ruin at 18, but can’t have a beer until 21. With the exception of driving (barely), none of those have anything in particular to do with whether those individuals are ready for such activities, but all are strictly enforced in nearly all cases. Your apparent underlying assumption is that everything has to happen at once, which just isn’t the case in any society I know of.
Given societies’ propensities for not wanting judgment calls, I’d say birth is the most reasonable arbitrary line to be drawn, though I agree more with PZ’s views. (My personal views over the years have changed from fertilization to viability to birth to self-awareness.) Heck, at least there are some changes at birth, so that arbitrary line makes more sense than any of the specific numbers that governments like to throw at people. (More-difficult-to-define lines like viability or self-awareness are likely logically superior, but suffer from practicality issues, which may or may not be surmountable.)
Was there a point to all of this? Oh yeah, if an explanation is required for adding an additional line where a right is granted, well most every government has a lot of explaining to do for a lot of arbitrary lines. Are you fighting those as well?
“Note that because I use the word *choice*, I see no problem with abortion in the case of rape or other coercion.”
Why not? Does the fetus resulting from rape somehow not meet your criteria in the way that other fetuses do? In that case, you’re not concerned with the condition of the fetus as much as making sure that the woman in question “pays” for the consequences of her actions. If your concern is for the fetus, then it’s illogical to make any exceptions at all.
Like Carlie, I don’t follow the reasoning for the distinction between how a fetus is created & the determination of its “abortability.”
What difference does it make? Why introduce another gray area that’s open to manipulation? If abotrtion is legal up to a certain (to be yet determined?) point in the pregnancy, then why should anyone care how the pregnancy started? Unless, of course, the “agendas” start rushing to the fore.
Seems to me, abortion’s an “off – on” switch. When we try to have it partially on or off, we introduce needless complications.
IndianCowboy wrote:
As far as I am aware, there is no principle in either British or American law which allows for the innocent to be punished for the actions of the guilty. A child conceived during an act of rape is in no way responsible for that crime and should not suffer as a result of it. The only exception should be where continuing the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the mother’s health.
I notice in passing that many of our legal and moral decisionmaking was developed assuming dicotomies rather than degrees of something. Why cannot we have degrees of responsibility, say?
Carlie and ROF – That’s a good point. Let me give a stab at it.
If a person thinks that there’s an ethical or moral obligation to the fetus (at whatever point in its development) they still might not see it as important as (or, perhaps, any more important than) the life of the pregnant woman, including the extreme emotional duress of undergoing a pregnancy in the case of rape or incest, coupled with the damage to the baby’s life, emotional and physical.
Obviously, you could make similar arguments for fetuses with genetic/developmental problems, or for the inherent dangers to the mother in giving birth. I’m pro-choice because I think these ethical issues are important and complicated, too complicated and personal for some simple-minded law to encapsulate. But I do think there is an ethical issue here, and I don’t like people denying that you can have an empathetic connection to a fetus.
Infanticide isn’t such a big issue today because the conditions in which the issue comes up are more rare. I hope that also becomes the case for abortion.
I took Raving Atheist off my Favorites list months ago, shocked and disappointed, since his blog originally was one of my favorites.
IC: Condition 2 is never fulfilled, as you know perfectly well if you didn’t sleep through embryology. A fetus is never exactly like a baby, there are physiologic changes that happen at or shortly after birth. However, you could reasonably say, as you do in the next paragraph, that these changes are negligible after a certain point. One could argue a little about when that point is, but realistically, few if any premies who are born prior to the 23rd week survive without major disabilities, including severe mental retardation such that they are not capable of attaining independence as adults. See for example here So, realistically, a fetus less than 24 weeks old does not meet your criteria. So you favor restriction of abortion in the third trimester to cases in which there is severe fetal malformation inconsistent with life or danger to the life of the mother? If this is correct, then you’re in luck: you support the current laws. I know of no state or country in which third trimester abortion for purely elective grounds is legal.
In Canada, elective abortion is legal and state-funded at all stages of the pregnancy up until birth.
Well, there are these cosmic coinsidences (a.k.a. finely tuned universe), and they havn’t been explained away, have they?
In what way is this actual evidence for the existence of any sort of god?
The only thing it is evidence of, is the fact that we don’t yet know everything there is to know about the universe. How this is supposed to prove that God *must* exist, I can’t fathom.
I don’t like PZ’s view, but philosophically and rationally it’s more valid than the other anti-life stuff I’ve seen here.
Your credibility is gone. Thank you for playing.
Well, there are these cosmic coinsidences (a.k.a. finely tuned universe), and they havn’t been explained away, have they?
According to the latest (admittedly, highly unproven) theories of cosmology, there may be more than one universe, possibly an infinite number of universes. So the fact that one of them is able to support life and conciousness becomes very unsuprising–vary the variables enough and you should be able to get just about any result. So it’s probably not that the universe was made to fit us but rather that we were “made” to fit the universe.
IIRC, there are three different ways in which it seems likely that there are lots of universes.
(1) Our universe seems to have inflated out of a bubble universe, according to the theory of inflation.
(2) Our universe may be the inside of a black hole that basically fell out of another black hole. A universe may be what a black hole looks like from the inside, and black hole formation may be the creation of a universe.
(3) On the “many worlds” and similar interpretations of quantum mechanics, the universe splits at possible quantum events into a universe where the event did happen, and another where it didn’t. (As opposed to the Copenhagen and similar intepretations, in which superimposed possibilities disappear and only one possibility becomes “real” in the normal sense.) On these interpretations of quantum mechanics, observing the outcome of a “random” quantum event is not really finding out whether the event happened, but which “daughter” universe you are in. It’s only subjectively random—and there’s another you in the other universe, observing the other outcome.
#2 is particularly interesting. Many physicists and cosmologists do think that the apparent “fine-tuning” of a variety of physical constants is a real phenomenon requiring a serious explanation; still, most of them don’t think the religious explanations really explain much.
For example, Lee Smolin’s theory in his excellent The Life of the Universe accounts for fine-tuning by the evolution of universes by natural selection.
Our universe isn’t just “fine-tuned” to create us. It’s fine-tuned to create black holes, and thus more universes that will do the same. In the long run, most universes will be of the sort that create more universes of the same sort.
It turns out that much of the alleged “fine tuning” of physical constants is about the effect of various physical constants on the existence and behavior of carbon atoms, and in particular their ability to stick together to make chain molecules. This is of course important for life as we know it, but it’s equally important for increasing the rate of star formation, especially stars in a certain size range that will collapse into black holes. Interstellar clouds of carbon compounds are dark and absorb stellar winds, shielding other clouds of mostly hydrogen from being dispersed, so that they can coalesce to form stars and then black holes.
From a cosmological point of view, this suggests that if the universe is fine-tuned, it’s not fine-tuned to create us. It’s fine-tuned to create more universes, by a process akin to Darwinian selection.
IMHO, Smolin may not be right, but it’s a far better theory than that God simply chose to do things in such a bizarre way. (Apparently God is very fond of black holes, as he is of parasites and beetles. Go figure.)
actually Dianne, in many states elective abortion is legal in the 3rd trimester. Furthermore, the ‘mental health’ provision in most of these laws can be used the same way leftists use the Commerce and General Welfare clauses of the constitution.
in many states elective abortion is legal in the 3rd trimester
Can you give cites? I’ll admit that I probably overstepped my knowledge of the law…I could quickly confirm Alon Levy’s statement about Canada, for example. But I’m having a harder time getting data for the US. Do you have a readily available source to confirm your statement?
If you’re going to contest someone’s factual statements, source it. You’ve got an internet connection…
According to this site, 40 states and the District of Columbia restrict abortion after viability (although they do not define viability.) According to the MMWR, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin report having more than 1% of the abortions performed in that state occur at >21 weeks. Of these, NY, GA, KS, OH, OK, PA, LA, and WI have post-viablity restrictions, so the only places that signifcant numbers of third trimester abortions might be occuring are Hawaii, Colorado, and New Jersey. I’ll see if I can come up with any info about these states.
Ok, I can’t find any evidence that there are laws restricting late abortion in NJ, Hawaii, or CO. I see no problem with enacting them, as long as two protections are met. 1. Exception for the mother’s life and health or severe fetal anomolies are preserved. 2. There is ready access to abortion during the first trimester.
However, I seriously doubt that such a law would make much of a difference. Some studies of the reasons for third trimester abortion have been done, though the majority were done outside the US. Convenience is not one of the more frequent indications…in fact, it isn’t ever mentioned as an indication. Fetal abnormalities are. See, for example,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=6837828&query_hl=20&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10426234&query_hl=20&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10456307&query_hl=9&itool=pubmed_DocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9141586&query_hl=9&itool=pubmed_DocSum
Dianne, you’re like my hero. But I’ll bet your internet connection is faster than mine.
But what about the EYE BABIES? (not to mention PYGMIES + DWARVES…)
Forgive me, for I am guilty of the sin of false pride. I’m wont to judge Christians by the worst of them, and in contrast, to regard atheism as the refuge of the more worthy. I am chastised by the existence of The Raving Atheist, however, who shows me that godlessness is not necessarily correlated with rationality. He’s a useful reminder that a reasonable philosophy is not a guarantor that one is on the path to a truth.
As if Marx, Lenin and Stalin weren’t enough?
In what universe is communism a reasonable philosophy? That, I’m guessing, is why PZ nailed The Raving Atheist and not Marx or Ayn Rand.
“I’d argue that fetuses and infants are not social animals at all. Maybe we should wait on giving them the privileges of the contract until they are capable of accepting the obligations, as well.”
Absolutely monstrous. You are growing more evil by the day.
Posted by: compass | April 17, 2006 12:10 AM
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Aw, aren’t you the cutest little…under a rock type o’creature.
Personal anecdotes are irrelevant because they can be used to argue on *both* sides. Here’s proof, in the form of a personal anecdote. :)
I’m a preemie (born at 25 weeks), and my identical twin was, in an obscure theoretical sense, a victim of infanticide (i.e., near-stillborn, he’d have been nearly brain-dead if revivable, so everyone agreed not to bother; this sort of thing happens quite often, twinhood is risky). We originated as a single fertilized egg cell, and if ensoulment at conception were true would thus in some bizarre way share the same soul (?!); but I *still* think that that decision was right, and I *still* think that allowing a near-stillborn premature baby to die doesn’t automatically mean that I (with the same DNA) am therefore hated, or indeed that anyone involved *wanted* anyone else to die at all. After all, the same person who made the ultimate decision to allow my twin to die subsequently spent immense amounts of time and love on me over a period decades.
But of course she’s an atheist too so that was probably done out of some sort of obscure crawling evil or something.
And it’s an anecdote anyway, therefore meaningless.
It’s brave and generous of you to share your story with us in such a public place, Nix–thank you.
Sod the `brave and generous’; when you’ve appeared in the Lancet aged zero it’s not much of a secret anymore. ;)
I was just trying to prove by example the uselessness of anecdote in this area. (What was that line: `The plural of anecdote is not data’?)
I agree with basically everything you’ve said, PZ, which is perhaps not that strange.
I found this post by following a link from http://scienceblogs.com/cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi/27593
I think Dawkins would say that TRA is a victim of the tyranny of the discontinuous mind, or essentialism (philosophy). These types of people are not “wired” to understand the gradiations of complex issues. PZ, just be thankful that you do not suffer his affliction.