Imagining for the moment that there were no abortion laws and assuming that the woman’s own life was not in danger and that it was simply a lifestyle choice to abort very late – say 35 weeks or so – it’d be hard to see it as anything other than murder for one's own gain, arguably the most severe and permanent infringement of an individual's liberty that there is. However, at the other end of the process – around the time a morning after pill is used, for instance – it may be no more preventing a small number of undifferentiated cells from plugging themselves into the uterine wall in about a week's time.This is the point where my views begin to diverge from his. I agree that late stage abortion has no real difference from killing a newborn, but I seriously question the assertion that the fertilised ovum is anything other than a unique human being with their own life that cannot be justly brought to an end.
At one end there is definitely a someone, and like any other someone objectively his or her life has value. At the other end is a something, and while it’s something I’d value almost as much I can’t deny that that’s subjective. In between those two extremes is a large area that's increasingly grey around the middle.This grey area is almost at the heart of the matter. The real problem here is continuity. Where is the point between embryo and baby where you can definitely say that is where the transition occurred? Is it when the first brain cell develops? The first heartbeat? Something that is "looking human"? I have come to the conclusion that this question has no meaning. There is no definable point between embryo and baby where you can say, right, from this moment forward we have a human being. Do you want a simple and categorical change in the nature of the being? Well, I can point to one: conception. At conception we go from being two haploid cells with no innate ability to divide and live to a single diploid cell with utterly unique DNA and, assuming conception did not occur in vitro and notwithstanding unlucky circumstance, the potential to grow into an adult human.
And here we run into another problem - most become nothing at all. Though I first learned this at school I’m not sure it’s widely known, but the majority of pregnancies fail and the majority of those that fail will fail early, i.e. in the first trimester. ... So it seems hard to assume that very early embryos/pre-embryos have rights to the uterus because of what they may become when sadly it's quite likely that they'll become a slightly heavier than normal menstrual flow and perhaps worse than usual cramps.This is informative but it doesn't really affect the issue. Percentage chance of continuing life is no measure of the value of a life. In earlier centruries it was common for more than 50% of your children to die before adulthood. I don't think any sane person would venture to suggest that gave the parents decisional right to whether to raise them or not.
We can go further still and consider that those cells are almost entirely the woman’s own material except for the tiny component which is the single sperm that got into the ovum, and anyone who’s ever finished off a round of horizontal tango and found that the condom broke will know that that sperm cell may not necessarily have had an invite.Once again, I have to say this does not fundamentally affect the issue. Any human is home to far more bacteria than their own cells, as is every full grown foetus no match for the number of cells of the woman carrying it. For these reasons I don't consider the situation of the newly fertilised egg to have any bearing on its uniqueness or life.
... do those cells get rights because the woman willingly took part in an enjoyable activity which admitted other cells into her body, one of which resulted in her becoming pregnant? It's tempting to think active participation makes it so ...Very tempting - in fact I believe it does. Any sexual encounter is associated with a probability of pregnancy occurring as a result, except of course for those who are infertile for any reason. No matter how many measures of contraception are used they may all fail. Everyone who consents to intercourse knows this, and therefore accepts that pregnancy is a possible outcome. I'm not sure many people know this but that is the fundamental reason for laws regarding consent. I don't mean to discount the psychological damage that can happen when there is no consent (rape, in case you missed it), but at their heart the laws of consent recognise that both parties have a responsibility for the results of their actions, and one possible result is pregnancy. To accept the possibility of pregnancy at first and then turn and claim that the pregnancy is unwanted is foolhardy. If pregnancy is to be avoided, sex must be avoided.
Libertarianism, at least the way I see it, is both freedom and responsibility. The choice to end a pregnancy, whatever my personal feelings on the matter, is about a woman’s freedom and ownership of her own body to begin with and, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant, about her responsibility to exercise her choice long before the stage at which she’s also responsible for a human life within her.Libertarians are fond of returning responsibility to the individual. I am taking that to its logical end - if two people consent to having sex they must both be willing to accept and care for a child that may result. That means abortion is not an option, at the very least not as after-the-fact contraception.
That's all I want to say for now about the reasons why I believe that in general abortion is not to be considered as after-the-fact contraception. I am going to venture from the sure foundation of logic and reason into the trecherous territory of morality and ethics.
Consider a hypothetical situation: let's say a woman has a loving husband, has the means to support a child, and wants to have a child. Would she get an abortion? I ask because it seems obvious but I don't know whether people recognise that if all women who were "sexually active" were in that situation, abortion would not be necessary. From what I've gathered over the years most women who resort to abortion are not just ice queens who have no regard for the life of their own children. It is typically the type of action to which one is driven by circumstance - like stealing food if you are about to starve. Shame, avoiding an "honour killing", the will of the father, these things are real and serious social issues and I can well understand the mind of someone who is driven to abort a child because they would suffer great persecution, even death, if people found out.
So I am not saying that I don't have sympathy for women who have ended up in these very difficult situations. In nearly all cases though, if abortion is the cure, the disease is preferable.
Not that I am calling pregnancy a disease, you understand. In fact, the acceptance of abortion in our culture is, I strongly believe, in part resultant from the change in how children are seen. In the past children were seen as a blessing, a gift. In modern times it seems a lot of people view them as a financial burden that restricts your own freedom to travel or do whatever. The very concept of an unwanted pregnancy is partially resultant from this view which is tremendously damaging to society. Think of my hypothetical situation before: the woman wants a child and has the means to bring one into the world, so why would she even consider aborting?
Another reason for the prevalence of abortion in our society is the prevalence of those conditions that will put women in these very difficult situations. "Casual" sex, particularly, can be blamed here, but so can all sex that happens outside marriage generally. Would a woman have shame for getting pregnant when she's married to the father? Would her male partner demand an abortion if they are financially stable and they both want a child?
Those extremely difficult situations that lead a woman to consider abortion are nearly all avoidable. You cannot get pregnant if you do not have sex (don't comment about IVF - I know and so do you, and you know I know). Abstinence is simple and obvious, but it's not easy. I may write further on that topic in the future.
5 comments:
Some good points, and you shouldn't be surprised to hear that part of me very much wants to agree. But it just feels like we're rationalising away someone's property rights over their body, and if we can do that where do we draw the line?
We agree on a lot I think: no abortions would be ideal (though I think we're kidding ourselves if we think that abortion will ever go away); in the third trimester and probably some or maybe all of the second the foetus is it's own being; and that grey area is a central point to the whole debate. Where we differ seems to be where to draw the line, though I'd say that with my approach no distinct line is drawn at all. Just a wide and very fuzzy band with a person on one side and some cells on the other, and thus a need to justify actions taken against the cells in that fuzzy band because in there they might be a person.
The real problem here is continuity. Where is the point between embryo and baby where you can definitely say that is where the transition occurred? ... I have come to the conclusion that this question has no meaning. There is no definable point between embryo and baby where you can say, right, from this moment forward we have a human being.
I came to the same conclusion. It's a form of Sorites Paradox, isn't it? One cell is not a being any more than one grain of sand is a heap, but when do the cells become a being and the grains become a heap? Impossible to define and therefore I think the wrong question and approach. But it is possible to look at the sand at different stages and say that a hundred million grains is a heap and hundred is not, while accepting that, say, a hundred thousand grains may be a heap to some and if you want to call it a pile you'd need to justify it.
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Damn character limits, I'm sure they include HTML tags.
But you believe there is a defining line and that one cell is a being.
At conception we go from being two haploid cells with no innate ability to divide and live to a single diploid cell...
No surprise, again I find this persuasive but I know I'm rationalising it. What's special about a diploid cell when almost all cells are diploid? Among nucleated cells haploid is the exception, so why not treat those as special? OK, difficult with sperm which biologically are disposable but why don't we venerate the ovum? It's special because it's haploid and they're all there teed up and waiting before a woman is even born. If my wife and I have a daughter she'll be formed from an ovum that came into existence inside my wife inside my mother-in-law and the ova that will create her own children will form while she's still in my wife, and so on and so on across the generations in both directions - how's that for continuity? I learned that 20 years ago and it still astounds me, but an ovum is just an ovum and despite their longevity relative to male gametes they're just as disposable.
Instead we don't worry until it fuses and becomes diploid, like the trillions of others we all have that are no more individuals than a strand of hair. Even the other difference...
... utterly unique DNA...
... isn't as big a difference as it first appears since that also applies to the placenta, or at least the foetal component, which is not only not a being but is treated as biological waste. Before that single diploid cell begins to cleave it's as true to say that it is destined to be placental as it is to say it's going to be embryonic, and that applies until after differentiation is under way and we're back to the Sorites Paradox again.
So I'm afraid I just can't buy it. It feels right and fits my own views but playing Devil's Advocate I can't simply can't sell the idea and demand that everyone accepts that a grain of sand becomes a heap when you add a second grain.
On the topic of those cells having rights.
"It's tempting to think active participation makes it so ..."
Very tempting - in fact I believe it does.
And if my wife and I decide to risk a bit of whahey while one of us has a tickly cough we'd know that the other might get strep throat as well as there being a pregnancy, yet that willing act grants the strep nothing at all since it's not a being. Therefore the issue of whether the fertilised ovum has rights comes back again to whether or not it's a being. Saying that we all know sex can lead to pregnancy is just projecting our morality, which isn't usually thought libertarian. It's true that saying people are responsible for their pregnancies is libertarian but infringing property rights over someone's body is not... not unless there's another person in there with their own property rights, which takes us back to square one.
And being pragmatic abortion isn't going to go away if we accept your argument for conception being the moment. You and I don't have to like it but the reality is it's going to carry on, and that being so the best case scenario is, in the words of Bill Clinton, that abortion is safe, legal and rare.
On the morality side I tend to agree but as I said above, insisting others live by one particular person's moral code is not libertarian. I'd try to persuade people that what you say is a good idea but I can't find grounds to use force to make them.
Oh, and a PS that's 100% tangential. You write some interesting stuff. Eclectic perhaps, but if you saw what's on my iPod you'd see that I like eclectic. Things I never knew I needed to know about helium I could have found here four years ago (instead of Cracked! a couple of months back), though I disagree about the worst TV show in the world. Family Guy I can take or leave but Big Brother really is smashing through the bottom of the barrel of soul-shrivelling mediocrity and beginning to mine for cultural brain death. Anyway, the point is I had no idea you even had a blog or that so many of what's a fairly small number of posts would be so interesting. Now I know I'll add you to RSS.
It's a form of Sorites Paradox, isn't it? One cell is not a being any more than one grain of sand is a heap, but when do the cells become a being and the grains become a heap? Impossible to define and therefore I think the wrong question and approach. But it is possible to look at the sand at different stages and say that a hundred million grains is a heap and hundred is not, while accepting that, say, a hundred thousand grains may be a heap to some and if you want to call it a pile you'd need to justify it.
That is one reason why I reject the idea of making the "heap" the distinguishing characteristic. The idea of viewing the later product as a foetus and human and the earlier product as not human forces one to ask, is there a heap? y/n Instead I ask, is there any sand? y/n
I do not claim there is anything particularly special about a diploid cell in general, but one that holds unique DNA and represents the beginning of a new life commands greater respect than a skin cell I may lose when I get carpet burn. The other thing is that at fertilisation that one cell represents that person's entire body.
Before that single diploid cell begins to cleave it's as true to say that it is destined to be placental as it is to say it's going to be embryonic, and that applies until after differentiation is under way and we're back to the Sorites Paradox again.
The placenta and umbilical are made of the same DNA of the foetus, so they are in effect part of its body. After birth they are disposed of but the person endures despite this loss, so it may be viewed as no different than the constant shedding of cells from within your gut. The placenta etc. are part of the new person's body, but once they are separated and no longer needed they are not part of its body. The non aggression principle includes all those parts of a person's body which cannot be disposed of without loss of life, health or welfare. The placenta does not, after birth, fall into this category so it is not to be regarded as part of the person any more. Conversely the embryo, as I have previously stated, represents the entire body of said person so destruction of it represents similar action to killing the baby and throwing away the placenta.
I feel like I am just restating the consequence of my assertion that the embryo is a human, so let me outline briefly why I believe it is. Firstly, it is the only living human cell that has that DNA. Secondly, it is the beginning of life, with the potential to grow into an adult (this distinguishes it from, say, the last living heart cell of an otherwise dead body). Thirdly, conception is the only bona fide state change that occurs at the beginning of life - everything between it and death is cell division.
I do agree that it is hard to be definitive, though. For instance, twinning occurs sometimes, and evidently each identical twin has the same DNA and conception is not the point at which their personal initial cell was first created. Once twinning has occurred, however, you can still say that each cell represents the entire body of an individual who may grow to adulthood, barring unhappy circumstance.
And being pragmatic abortion isn't going to go away if we accept your argument for conception being the moment. You and I don't have to like it but the reality is it's going to carry on, and that being so the best case scenario is, in the words of Bill Clinton, that abortion is safe, legal and rare.
On the morality side I tend to agree but as I said above, insisting others live by one particular person's moral code is not libertarian. I'd try to persuade people that what you say is a good idea but I can't find grounds to use force to make them.
This is one thing I find really hard about the whole thing. Making abortion illegal would make a statement that this kind of murder is not acceptable, but would also cause more serious issues for those who then seek illegal abortions. Ultimately I suppose it has to be acknowledged that because the world is imperfect some laws will have an element of pragmatism.
One the topic of morality, libertarianism informs my views but does not subsume them. I am Christian and I accept any and all philosophies that align with my understanding of the Bible. It so happens that libertarianism contains almost purely views which are compatible with it. One important difference, though, is that we do not view morality as being our own, but rather being God's, and as such when we propound it that is not arrogance or conceit in believing our views are better. It is belief that His views are better and that the world needs to know about them.
I understand that you are a non-theist and as such this will still seem like conceit in thinking our deity knows better than all the others, and thinking that our God actually exists and all the others do not and are products of the imagination. This is, however, what genuine Christians believe, myself included. Any Christian who says otherwise effectively renounces their faith, because the Bible is extremely clear on these points.
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