Yesterday was Blog for Choice day. I didn’t get to participate, as I spent the whole day in meetings and airplanes. I had no choice! But at the end of the day, checking up on Bloglines from a hotel in Tucson, I found moving posts from Bitch Ph.D., Shakespeare’s Sister, Litbrit, and Lizardbreath from Unfogged, among numerous others.
Conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is that being anti-abortion has little to do with a desire to protect helpless little blastocysts, and is really about denying women control over their bodies and lives. I always had trouble believing this, as I went to a nice Catholic school in which joining the “For Life” group was just as respectable a public-service move as joining Amnesty International. My friends at Villanova (including a large number of women) really, honestly, and in good faith did believe that fetuses were people with souls, and they needed to be protected. This didn’t quite amount to a well-thought-out and consistent philosophical position, admittedly; you’ll find very few such people who really want to punish abortionists just like we punish murderers, or who would save a petri dish of fertilized eggs from a burning building before saving a breathing baby, or who believe that heaven is filled with the souls of embyos that failed to implant in the uterus. But they really were just trying to do the right thing, according to social justice as they understood it. And they weren’t necessarily overly dogmatic about it; I helped organize a panel discussion on abortion that featured priests, biologists, and philosophers, which ended up being quite interesting (although it somehow failed to solve the world’s problems).
Ultimately, free of my protective collegiate cocoon, I realized that the conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is completely correct! Although some people have anti-abortion feelings for straightforwardly moral reasons, for many more people (especially the most vocal), it really is about denying women their own agency. Curse those liberals and feminists, right again!
But I still remember my friends who were not like that, and I recognize that for many people abortion really is a clash of absolutes. You can say all you want that it’s the pregnant woman’s body, hands off, etc.; but if it were actually true that a fetus was a person with a soul who was entitled to all of the protections that any post-birth person was entitled to, none of that would matter. The heart of the matter is: people who believe that are wrong.
Which is why my favorite blog-for-choice post was Lindsay’s. She puts it pretty straightforwardly:
To me, it’s just obvious that fetuses aren’t people and that real-live people who have become hosts to unwanted pre-people should be able to take the necessary steps not to become the parents of actual people. Who the hell gave anyone the idea that this choice is a view that needs defending, as opposed to common sense? I don’t write posts explaining that you shouldn’t torture your dog, or steal from your employer. Shouldn’t it be obvious that you shouldn’t consign an innocent person to incubate a hunk of protoplasm until it becomes a baby?
It does seem pretty obvious, unless you really think that hunk of protoplasm is a person with all of the rights of any of the other people you meet on the street every day. Which, when you think about it, isn’t obvious at all. The only reason anyone thinks it’s true is because their definition of a “person” is completely divorced from common sense, and is instead informed by a supernatural notion of personhood in which a soul enters that single cell at the moment of conception. A notion that would seem completely absurd if it weren’t for religion.
Steven Weinberg famously said, “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion.” This is a little bit harsh, of course, and I’d rather not get into the tiresome argument over whether the net effect of religious belief is to make people do more good things than bad things. But when squishy-liberal religious people ask why atheists bother making noisy public proclamations against their supernatural beliefs, it’s worth pointing out that such beliefs often do have consequences in the real world.
The idea that religion is the sole source of morality is silly — morality is invented by human beings, who are trying to negotiate their conflicting and incompatible desires in a world that doesn’t always play fair. The reason why it’s important to make the case that religious beliefs are false, even if adherents can point to examples where those false beliefs led people to be nice to each other and do other good things, is that false beliefs can just as easily lead people to treat each other badly. Given untrue hypotheses, it’s trivial to reach all sorts of untrue conclusions. Abortion is the perfect example. My friends back in college, with all of the good intentions in the world, would happily condemn a young and unprepared woman to an unwanted eighteen-year commitment, all because of their own misguided beliefs about nature and the supernatural. If we really want to make the world a better place, telling the truth about how it works is a good place to start.
As a weakly pro-lifer who is quite agnostic (with strong atheistic tendencies), I’ve got to say that one can be pro-life without being religious or anti-woman. For me, it’s the reasonable doubt argument. Just as our legal system is based on the idea that you shouldn’t be able to execute (or even incarcerate) someone unless you’ve demonstrated their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, I don’t believe someone should have an abortion unless we can show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the fetus should have no more rights than an infant.
From this philosophy, I have no problem with sub 4-week abortions. At 8 weeks, however, I know that testes have developed in a male fetus to the point that they can already produce testosterone (I just read about this in an article on autism) and I presume that a female fetus has similar levels of development. Not that testes/ovaries are what define us as “persons” (in a legal sense), but it does begin to raise the level of doubt in my mind.
You are taking the easy example to make your point.
So let’s step away from the blastocyst position and consider the other end of the continuum.
Does it make sense for the law to treat one eight month old fetus essentially as property and another as a human being when the only difference between the two is that one has passed through the birth canal and another has not? I do not find that a reasonable basis for such a distinction.
Agreed that such late-term abortions are rare, but that is fundamentally beside the point. If the one should be treated as a human being in the eyes of the law, I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why the other should not (that it is inside the womb of the mother is an unpersuasive reason under these facts).
The problem with the abortion debate is that the folks who argue it most vocally take the position you just did — namely, that it’s all or nothing because it’s between people who favor women’s rights, on the one hand, and those who want to “enslave a woman’s uterus,” on the other. That’s perfect nonsense.
It’s my view that a fetus ought to be treated under the law as a human being as some point in the pregnancy. The only question is “when,” and after that critical point is past, a woman’s right to choose gives way to the human being’s right to live. Given the stakes, I’d be inclined to err on the side of caution in developing the “when.”
Accordingly, a reasonable policy might be as follows: a woman would have the right to an abortion for any reason or no reason during the first trimester. After that, abortion would be available only if the woman’s life were endangered by continuing the preganancy (rr if “serious medical consequences” were likely, with the statute defining what that term meant).
I’m afraid this can not be done. The “life function” is continuous and differentiable during entire 9 months and the differential — the soul — can be derived at any given moment.
Roman: I understand your dilemma, but is there a discontinuity in the “life function” caused by passing through the birth canal or the loss of the umbilical cord? I’m not pretending to have any good answers; just pointing out that it isn’t as simple a problem as people on both sides of the debate often like to pretend it is.
Ashlie said: “Not that testes/ovaries are what define us as “persons” (in a legal sense), but it does begin to raise the level of doubt in my mind.”
Well, for me, what raises the level of doubt in my mind is when the clump of cells start organizing themselves according to a “purpose”, ie., to form a human. The cells move around and reproduce and start forming things like limbs and organs. This tendency to organize according to the purpose of forming a functioning human being leads me to suspect that a growing human is formed at conception. Whether or not it is justifiable to terminate that process during the nine-month gestation period is another story.
That’s my take, anyhow.
The following is a little snarky and pissy, but has metaphoric merits. So it has being suggested that rather than calling a fetus a “fetus”, it needs to be identified as a in vitro “human being.” mmmm? Well then, who said it could invade another human being and act as a parasite preying upon the host? Indeed, these types of human beings have been known to assault their hosts, kicking and pounding against them. If i were to jump on your back and demand you to take complete care of me, i would be arrested and jailed. Yet so many have no problem accepting that human hosts must obey the tyranny of the parasitic human???? Pretty scary when we live in a culture that tells the human host it must subserviate itself to the dominating hand-sized dictatorial parasite. Protect the parasite at all costs!!!
Wait, how exactly is a fetus different than larvae in other species? Are we simply to assume that the woman is just a coccoon containing a pupa???? Protect the pupa and let the coccoon be destroyed later???
spyder: First of all, the metaphorical individual in question is inarguably not an adult, and could not be prosecuted as such. Secondly, the actions in question are also not deliberate. Therefore, I think we can sentence the individual to house arrest for nine months!
As for your second paragraph, who mentioned anything about the “cocoon” being destroyed? As Paul mentioned (and I agree), if the life (or health) of the woman is actually in jeopardy, then the reasonable doubt burden is undoubtedly shifted. As for your exact a question, a (human) fetus is different from larvae in other species to the same extent that a human is different from other animals (at least in a legal sense). One is legally allowed to kill an adult insect, but not an adult human.
If you want to think in terms of human “parasites”, consider the case of conjoined twins. What if one of the two twin’s life depended on the other, but not vice-versa? Imagine in this hypothetical situation that neither’s life is in danger. Could the second twin legally demand that the first twin be separated? Could the second twin ethically/morally make this demand?
Finally, I think your “snarkiness” detracts from your arguments rather than bolsters them.
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That’s disingenuous, unless your friends also happened to be against putting children up for adoption. If not, we’re talking nine months rather than eighteen years. Now, the amount of time involved does not really matter in regards to the principle of the thing, but you’ve no need to resort to straw men like that.
Ashlie, when you say it’s a matter of “reasonable doubt”, what is the factual question that you have reasonable doubt about? For me, the morality of killing a fetus depends on whether the fetus has any kind of experience or consciousness, and in this regard, as long as you believe in a purely neural basis for consciousness (which most religious people don’t, of course), there’s no reason to object to first or second trimester abortions, since the synapses connecting neurons in the brain don’t form until around the end of the second trimester. Without synapses there can be no passing of signals between neurons, and so no organized brain activity whatsoever. In the very rare case of third-trimester abortions which aren’t done for health reasons, I do find them morally troubling, although legally I think the mother’s right to control her body should overrule moral concerns (think of it this way–if I woke up to find my body hooked into a machine which was helping provide life support for a fully-sentient adult, should I be legally obligated to stay hooked up to it if I didn’t want to, assuming that disconnecting myself would kill the person the machine was helping?)
Jesse M.: I think that if it were clear that no brain synapses form until X, then that’s good enough for me. I’m a little suspicious of your claim that they don’t form until the end of the second trimester, however. Do you have any journal articles that back this up? (As I’m at a university – in a neurosurgery department – it’s easy for me to access most journals.)
As for your “life support machine” argument, let’s assume that rather than a machine, there were some biological “accident” (such as my conjoined twins argument). I think that in this case, yes, you would be morally (and legally) obligated to continue providing life support, rather than actively severing the biological connection that was keeping this other individual alive. (I avoid the “machine” argument because of the illogical, but human, negative feelings towards machines.)
Jesse M.,
I would answer no, you shouldn’t be obligated. You also shouldn’t be obligated to provide someone one of your kidneys even if yours is the only one that will work. But I think these two cases are somewhat analogous to the case of a woman who is pregnant, but they are different enough that a ‘no’ for one does not necessarily imply a ‘no’ for the other. Pregnancy is completely different but has something in common with the case you mentioned in #10. I’ll leave it as an exercise to think of ways in which these two cases are different enough.
Ashlie, I first read about the timing of synapse development in the article Abortion and Brain Waves which was reprinted in The Best American Science & Nature Writing of 2001, so I assume it was fact-checked (the editor was the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson). This article also mentions that “The process of synapse formation probably starts in the mid or late second trimester” (so I guess I was wrong about all second-trimester abortions being morally unproblematic, since late in the second trimester they might have formed already). There are also a number of papers from medical journals in the “References” section at the end of the wikipedia article on fetal pain which would probably discuss the subject, particularly the one titled Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence, whose summary mentions that: Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks.
I don’t have journal access so I can’t read the papers themselves, but if you do and you find anything particularly useful or interesting in them, please post it here if you get a chance.
Jesse M.: OK, so I did a little research and found an article by White and Wolf in Best Practice & Research Clinical Anaesthesiology Volume 18, Issue 2 that suggests that “hemodynamic and neurohumoral stress responses” are present by 18 weeks. I’m not sure if I’d call that “late” 2nd trimester, but it is 2nd trimester. The same article mentions that “spontaneous movement” begins as early as 6 weeks (Fig. 1), although this is no evidence of any brain development (and no, I don’t believe that movement=consciousness). A second study I found mentioned that they were using tissue from 17 week-old fetal brains (Kerkovich et al., 1999, International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience). So, I’d probably be more comfortable with limiting any abortions to first trimester only – with obvious exceptions for the health of the mother.
On the subject of “spontaneous movement”, a google search shows that the same paper “Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence” I linked to above contains the text “Sensory receptors and spinal cord synapses required for nociception develop earlier than the thalamocortical pathways required for conscious perception of pain”, although I can’t see any of the text surrounding it. But from this I’d guess the spinal cord is causing simple reactions before the brain is able to recieve any meaningful signals from it, like how your spinal cord can cause you to pull your hand away from a burning stove before the pain signal reaches your brain.
As for “hemodynamic and neurohumoral stress responses”, don’t those refer more to changes in hormone levels, which would be possible before the synaptic connections are in place? Assuming consciousness originates in the brain, it really doesn’t seem plausible that there could be any significant level of consciousness without the electrochemical impulses that are associated with brain function and learning in all animals. And of course a human’s personality and individuality and memories are thought to all be based on each brain’s unique pattern of synaptic strengths.
Jesse M.I’m taking the “neuro” in “neurohumoral” to imply that neurons are at least involved in the stress reactions being discussed. Also note that the 18 (and 17) week figures I gave are not inconsistent with the mid to late-term 2nd trimester figure you gave. I’m no obstetrician, but I assumed that 2nd trimester was approximately weeks 13-24. So, first trimester and early second trimester might be “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
But even if the neurons are involved, without those neurochemical impulses passing through synapses I don’t see how there could be any complex information-processing going on, at least no more so than what goes on in other parts of the body besides the nervous system, where cells are also capable of producing and reacting to hormones (I presume you’d agree we can be confident beyond a reasonable doubt that hormone-producing glands such as the thyroid don’t have any significant consciousness of their own, for example). I don’t believe there’s some mysterious property of individual nerve cells which causes them to be uniquely associated with consciousness while other body cells are not, I think it’s just the unique type of information-processing they are able to do thanks to their ability to pass along impulses to each other and adjust their synaptic strengths in response to which neurons they receive impulses from (using some kind of roughly Hebbian rule along the lines of ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’). This basic idea is held by virtually all scientists trying to understand the fundamental neural basis of learning and awareness, as far as I know.
Jesse M.: I’m assuming that these neurons have synaptic events associated with them, which is not at odds with your other statement about the mid 2nd trimester. I agree with your hypothesis that, beyond a reasonable doubt (to me, anyway), consciousness cannot exist without (active) synapses. FWIW, I run simulations of models of the mammalian CA3 region of the hippocampus, so I am quite familiar with Hebbian learning. 🙂 Unfortunately for this discussion, my models have never investigated fetal development.
I’d prefer to use behavioral criteria like a Turing Test than neural development. After all, we can find neural development in animals besides ourselves, and most of us would find little problem with removing one of them from inside ourselves if such an event occurred. The difference between persons and other animals is conscious intelligence, so we should use a measure of that. The Turing Test may not sufficiently strict to eliminate all non-persons, but I think that’s acceptable as it’s best to be conservative in these matters.
Ah, I misunderstood. OK, I think we’re in agreement about the point at which there begins to be a possibility of consciousness in the fetus. The question of whether the likely existence of some form of consciousness after that point is grounds for opposing later abortions is more of a moral question then a factual one, so it’d probably be harder for either of us to change the other’s mind. I have some weird perspectives on this anyway–I don’t think the morality of killing/hurting a being is based on its biological species, but on the complexity of its consciousness (as well as the suffering caused to others who care about it), so the issue of late-term abortions is closely connected to animal rights for me (but I recognize there are good reasons for having legal rights be somewhat separate from moral issues, so that you draw a line in the sand and say everyone past that deserves the same rights).
One problem with this issue is that it is (now) extraordinarily difficult to draw a line in the sand and say “Guaranteed viability starts here.” Not when the neonatologists are pushing the boundaries all the time. Extracorporeal oxygenation techniques make the immature foetus relatively independent of lungs which are still pretty useless for gas exchange. When I was born, twenty six weeks would have been considered a breakthrough if not actually impossible (1971); now we are keeping babes like that alive with some regularity.
If the pro-lifers are right, the abortionists will have to defend their actions before God on the Last Day. Let them. Ultimately I believe that abortion is not a nice thing to do, but sometimes not performing it is worse. If the Churches and the prolife crusaders want to do something about it, they should take steps to ensure that it is never necessary, not go to incredible lengths to ensure that it can never be performed. Sex education and contraception are the way to go, but blind stupidity and an automatic linking of sex with evil in their minds will ensure this never happens.
Relevant to this discussion is that a few million years of human evolution is involved during those 9 months of gestation. The formation of a baby not a step function.
Justin Moretti: One does not have to be Christian/Jewish/Muslim to be pro-life, any more than one has to be Adventist/Buddhist to be a vegetarian.
“conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is completely correct! ”
Natch. Who ever heard of a feminist being incorrect?
I only have one thing to add to the above insightful comments. Some of the posters imply that you can wake up one day and all of a sudden have a fetus developing in your uterus unbeknownst to you. Depending on who you ask, this has happened at most one time in all of recorded history. The fact that most pregnancies and consqueent abortions are a result of two consenting adults decision to have sex makes the situation much different than ‘waking up one day and finding yourself forced to support another grown human-being’. Except for the rare case of rape resulting in pregnancy, most all fetuses were created as a result of deliberate choices.
As a pro-lifer, I would whole-heartedly suport forcing any father to provide as much support as possible to the child and mother. Otherwise, women take on an unfair burden in accidental pregnancies.