I’ve been debating abortion over at Ethics Alarms. Here’s one of my comments (the person I’m quoting and replying to is “Texxagg04”):
Sure the anti-abortion crowd can oppose [free birth control], because the anti-abortion crowd doesn’t feel the government’s or the people at large ought to pay for other people’s leisure activities and their effects.
1) Let’s be clear: Based on actual evidence, we know that free birth control can reduce abortion by 60%. ((See Preventing Unintended Pregnancies by
Providing No-Cost Contraception.)) In the US, there are about 1.2 million abortions a year. So making free, high-quality birth control universally available can prevent over 700,000 abortions every year. In a decade, that would be around eight million abortions prevented.
Pro-lifers say they consider each abortion to be the murder of an innocent human child. So what’s at stake here is a practical method, that has been proven to be effective both in other countries and in US test studies, which will prevent eight million children (in the pro-life view) from being murdered.
Are you honestly arguing that your philosophical preference that the government not pay for birth control, should count for more with pro-lifers than preventing eight million child murders?
If we’re really talking about the murders of eight million innocent children, then you should be willing to accept almost anything to prevent those murders.
When push comes to shove, you would rather have the government coerce the people at large into paying for a sub-set of the people’s leisure activities.
This argument doesn’t work, because we don’t have to tax people more in order to provide free birth control. As I wrote earlier, “a $235 million investment in birth control would save taxpayers $1.32 billion.” Taxes are coercive, I agree, but they’re also necessary. But in this case, the program would actually SAVE taxpayers money overall, not cost them money.
That said, yes. If it would prevent eight million child murders, of COURSE I’d rather tax the people at large a relatively minor amount than just sit there and not do what I can to prevent eight million child murders. Without any doubt.
Finally, I don’t think pro-lifers should be freed of all responsibility for their freely chosen positions. And the conclusion that pro-lifers are more interested in using government coercion on women who choose to have sex, then in preventing abortion, is a logical conclusion from the actual positions taken by pro-life groups and politicians.
The very common pro-life position, which you can see in dozens of examples of actual pro-life legislation, that raped women should be free to abort, but other women shouldn’t be, makes no logical sense at all if pro-lifers believe that a fetus is morally an innocent human child. No one would say that it’s okay to kill a five-year-old if her father was a rapist. The rape exemption is absurd if the goal of the pro-life movement is to save innocent fetuses; but the rape exemption makes perfect sense if their goal is to target women who choose to have sex.
Birth control, as we’ve seen in this thread, is another example. Free, high-quality birth control has been proven, in both studies and in real-world examples, to massively reduce abortion. If pro-lifers real goal was to prevent as many abortions as possible, and if they really believe that the 1.2 million abortions every year are 1.2 million child murders, then they should be willing to compromise on their opposition to birth control in order to prevent millions of child murders. To say otherwise is to say that being uncompromising on birth control is more important than preventing child murder.
But in real life, pro-lifers oppose doing all they can to prevent abortion. It is only using government coercion against pregnant women that interests them; they oppose much more effective techniques for abortion reduction, when those techniques don’t include government coercion against pregnant women.
If we really have two groups with the policy goals “reproductive freedom for women” and “preventing abortion,” then a real and effective policy compromise is possible, which will allow both sides to get most of what they want.
However, if what we have is two sides, one of which has the policy goal “reproductive freedom for women,’ the other of which has the policy goal “women shouldn’t ever choose to have sex, but if they do they should be forced to give birth,” then there is no possible compromise.
Myca, I’m pro-choice. Dial back your assumptions a bit, they’re blocking your cognition.
No, the question isn’t “is abortion murder”. The question is “is a fetus a person”. If you assume that the fetus is not a person, then “is abortion murder” and “is a fetus a person” are very distinct questions. If you assume that the fetus is a person, then the two questions are almost the same.
If you say that “these two questions are obviously distinct, and that’s the neutral position” then you are revealing what you believe, but not making a good argument for the neutrality of the view.
There isn’t a neutral position here.
Maybe THIS will help.
Assume position 3. Everyone has freedom of conscience.
Now assume that, for whatever contingent reason, every person competent to perform an abortion decides that they don’t want to. So theoretically, abortion is legal, but practically, it is totally and utterly unattainable.
Is the regime neutral now?
The government’s position there would be neutral, yes. Why wouldn’t it be?
I know you’re having trouble with this, but ‘neutral’ and ‘fair’ and ‘good’ are all different things. None of them are automatically equivalent to ‘agreeing with me.’
And, like I said earlier, sometimes we don’t want the government to be neutral. Sometimes neutrality is bad.
—Myca
…ok. So sometimes neutrality is bad. So are you saying that position 3 is neutral, or that it is non-neutral, but takes the correct side?
I am aware that neutrality and good and agreeing with me are all highly distinct concepts.
Come on!
It’s quite clear most feminist and pro-choice activists think (1) abortion should be legal because it is a good thing. There’s no shame in that, it is a perfectly respectable argument that abortion is better for some women than the toll pregnancy would on their lives, bodies, emotions and future wellbeing. As Robert says that’s why they campaign for access to abortion, support planned parenthood etc.
However, not enough people agree. So we get a stalking horse argument that (2) abortion should be legal, because personhood is a matter of religious conscience and the state should remain neutral on matters of morality. That’s good enough to get neutrals on side, get rowe v wade and legal abortion. But it’s not an argument that inspires anyone.
I guess. But that argument exists because the anti-abortion side claims that abortion is wrong because abortion is murder leading into the discussion of personhood. W/o the argument that a fetus (or zygote or whatever) is a person with all attendant rights, we would have no reason to state our reasons for not attributing personhood to a fetus/zygote/what have you. I feel like you’re complaining about a counter-argument to an argument that originates on your side of the disagreement.
I’m saying that allowing people to act in accord with the dictates of their own conscience (as opposed to the government choosing a moral position to endorse) is a neutral position, and that position 3, because it does this, is a neutral position.
Neutral positions may lead to bad results.
If you’re pro-life, you can reasonably perceive “people aren’t bothered by abortions and it makes the mythical baby Jesus cry” as a bad result.
If you’re pro-choice, you can reasonably perceive “I want to get an abortion, but every person competent to perform an abortion decides that they don’t want to,” as a bad result.
Either might result from government neutrality.
Neither would mean that the position is non-neutral.
—Myca
And I’d like to point out that the solution to both of these theoretical ‘bad results’ is the same:
Convince People
Government neutrality and absence of government coercion doesn’t stop you from convincing people that abortion is [suckass|awesome] and that people should [cut it out|totally perform abortions all the time].
—Myca
I think part of whether you define “neither restricting abortion nor encouraging it” and/or “not taking a position on whether an embryo/fetus is a person or has a soul” as “neutral” is how you see the role of government and whether you lean more towards the libertarian or authoritarian side. (Traditionally, libertarians are pro-choice, although there have been a lot of prominent pro-life libertarians lately.)
I’m not sure how you can justify using the philosophy of “let’s not take any chances about killing things that might have souls/be persons” to restrict abortion unless you’re willing to also accept that people’s concerns about chickens having souls mean that we must make killing chickens illegal. Or for that matter, since we’re including things with no brain, what about plants? Must we all become fruitarians?
One reason the “unique DNA=person” argument isn’t particularly convincing to me is something that Hector alluded to, non-diploid organisms. There are plenty of organisms where either the gamete part of the life cycle is diploid and the “main” part of the life cycle is haploid (e.g. ferns) or where one sex is diploid and one is haploid (e.g. ants, bees, wasps). Clearly human eggs and sperm are human, they have their own (human) DNA, sperm even move around independently. Should we treat sperm and unfertilized eggs as people simply because they have their own unique, human DNA?
“I’m saying that allowing people to act in accord with the dictates of their own conscience (as opposed to the government choosing a moral position to endorse) is a neutral position, and that position 3, because it does this, is a neutral position.”
So if we make slavery laws a matter of conscience, that’s a neutral position.
And. “allowing people to act in accord with the dictates of their own conscience” is *the government endorsing a moral position*, TO WIT, “the dictates of people’s conscience is more important than [external moral force or argument goes here]”.
A matter of who’s conscience?
If we’re saying that it’s up to the slaves to choose to be enslaved or not to any willing master they can find, and they can also choose to walk away, then I’d say that’s a neutral position, yes.
If we’re saying that we’re going to use government force to override what the slaves want and just enforce the master’s preference, then that’s not neutral; that’s taking the side of the masters.
OK. That’s kind of exactly my point.
A fetus at 35 weeks can’t formulate “hey, I’d rather live” because they aren’t verbal yet – but like other nonverbal but more or less sapient life forms, they can show a preference for life, whether instinctual or chosen.
So if we’re going to use government force and just override that preference that isnt us being neutral. It’s us taking a side. And “but they aren’t a real side” is itself taking a position.
I don’t think anyone here is discussing 35 week abortions – for one thing, by 35 weeks a lot of babies have already been born.
I actually could see a lot of strong arguments for banning 35 week abortions, except for when they’re medically necessary for the health of the mother, or when the fetus is already dead.
However, my interest in 35 week abortions is limited by the fact that such abortions virtually never take place. The overwhelming majority of abortions take place before 20 weeks – well before there is a functioning cortex, and well before the fetus could be described as being at all sapient.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of abortions are performed on embryos who are incapable of having any “preference for life” at all. They don’t prefer to live, or to die. They don’t prefer, period.
I would say that the federal government, pre-Civil War was (roughly) neutral on the issue of slavery. It was not a tenable or moral position, certainly … but it was also distinct from the position of the government of the Confederacy or the post-Civil War federal government.
—Myca
You know, I was going to put in a “yes, I know very few abortions are done at 35 weeks” disclaimer, but then I thought “nobody is going to go off track with that technicality”. Sigh. :)
Let me make it simpler, then.
What do you mean, it’s neutral if the slaves choose it?
Slaves don’t have the ability to choose. They’re just fleshy robots, not human.
“I would say that the federal government, pre-Civil War was (roughly) neutral on the issue of slavery. ”
Putting on my slaves-were-people-hat:
Hi, I’m a slave. I’m sorry, but you’re saying that the laws that make it legal for other people to use me as property, are neutral on the question of whether people can be used as property? Maybe it’s just my relative lack of formal education, but that seems like a really stupid position to me. You’re saying I can be a slave; that’s not neutrality, that’s you saying slavery is OK. Oh, but it’s not OK if my master changes his mind? If he changes his mind, he has to free me. Well, that’s a relief! Whew! Thank goodness for neutrality!
Oh, you’re saying neutrality isn’t the same thing as good and that the law isn’t morally right. OK. I guess I understand that. I’m just glad that the Federal government isn’t doing something non-neutral, like taking a position on whether it’s ok for there to be laws that say slavery is allowed.
Seems to me, Myca, that you’re falling into the trap you warned against: of attributing neutrality to the middle position.
Jake wants to kill everyone with a vowel as the last letter in their online handle. Amp wants no killing whatsoever.
“Let’s kill the a, i, and o people” is a compromise, maybe, but it isn’t neutral ground. Neither is “everyone can kill whoever their conscience tells them its ok to kill.”
Re: So if we’re going to use government force and just override that preference that isnt us being neutral. It’s us taking a side. And “but they aren’t a real side” is itself taking a position.
Yes, exactly.
“Letting the mother choose” is only a ‘neutral’ position if you don’t think the embryo is a person, but that’s precisely the question about which we disagree. In the slave analogy, I would put the embryo in the place of the slave, and the mother in the place of the master. ‘Leaving it up to the mother’ is pretty closely analogous to ‘leaving it up to the master to choose how to treat their slaves.’
I’m actually agreeing with Robert and against Myca, regarding comments 214, 216 and 217. The federal laws were not as strongly pro-slavery as the Confederate laws, but they were still facilitating slavery.
Leaving the abortion question to individual consciences is “neutral” in the sense that it’s not elevating one religion into law above all other religions (and above atheism). So in that frame, it is “neutral.” Which matters, since the Constitution forbids using the law to force Christianity, or any other religion, on Americans.
But it’s not “neutral” if we look at it in a pro-choice vs pro-life frame. In that frame, if we do nothing but leave it up to people to decide individually, that’s pretty close to a pure pro-choice position.
Regarding the slavery and abortion comparison, I’m going to request that anyone who wants to continue with that discussion, first read these two posts by Ta-Nihisi Coates:
Personhood – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
The Unbearable Whiteness of Pro-Lifers and Pundits – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic
Re: I’m not sure how you can justify using the philosophy of “let’s not take any chances about killing things that might have souls/be persons” to restrict abortion unless you’re willing to also accept that people’s concerns about chickens having souls mean that we must make killing chickens illegal.
It’s amazing how some people would like to dehumanize the unborn child by comparing them to a chicken. But OK, I’ll concede that the pure argument from ‘playing it safe’ may not really work, since it’s theoretically possible that chickens, or chimpanzees, might have souls. None of that works to convince me that the embryo and/or fetus *is not* a person though, and if they are a person then I want the laws to protect them, even if we need to mildly infringe religious neutrality to do so. Religious neutrality may be a good thing, in its way, but it’s surely a lesser good than protecting innocent human life.
Re: Which matters, since the Constitution forbids using the law to force Christianity, or any other religion, on Americans.
It’s not forcing Christianity on anyone: it’s forcing people to abide by a particular moral code that Christians historically have held, but that plenty of non-Christians have held as well, and that you don’t need to be a Christian (or any other religion) to hold. People opposed slavery (sometimes) for religious reason too, that doesn’t mean that they had no right to try and further their moral view through the legal arena.
Abortion is different from other ‘cultural’ issues like gay marriage, birth control, divorce etc. because in this case there is a very clear *victim*, and it’s literally an issue of life and death.
And to me, it’s amazing how some people trivialize the sentience of blacks and Jews by comparing them to embryos. Every single Jew who died in the holocaust was worth a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand embryos; and when people talk about them like they’re equivalent… Ugh!
But I don’t think commenting on it like that – or the way you just did – is likely to bring the conversation anywhere fruitful. So I usually refrain.
What may be clear to you may not be clear to others. As far as I am concerned, the only victims in the abortion discussion are women who are prevented from having abortions. Embryos are not in any way, shape or form humans until quite late in the pregnancy.
You realise there’s always a massive fuss over government abortion funding? Pro-choicers normally want more of it and oppose funding bans – this principled and consistent neutrality might be interesting to talk about but doesn’t exist in the real world.
Come on, that’s not some random coincidence. The reason for the time distribution is because pro-choicers have won up to the point of viability at c22 weeks and pro-lifers have been successful at clamping down after that point. If pro-choicers had been more successful the limit would be higher and we’d have more late term abortions, if pro-lifers had been more successful the limit would be lower.
alex, no, it’s not a ‘random coincidence’. It’s a function of the fact that pregnancy tends to announce itself in most women well before 20 weeks, and so a significant number of women who don’t want to be pregnant will learn they are pregnant and seek an abortion by then.
Hector:
So, in other words, you want the law to enforce a hypothetical–in the sense that the faith you have placed in fetal personhood might, in fact, be misplaced.
Does anybody know the history here? I know it is true that people who are not Christian hold something very similar to Hector’s anti-abortion position, but I am wondering if that position, as a developed moral code, actually does predate Christianity or the change in the Christian position on abortion, which–it is my understanding (which might be wrong)–did not always see ensoulment as happening at the same time as conception.
“Leaving the abortion question to individual consciences is “neutral” in the sense that it’s not elevating one religion into law above all other religions (and above atheism).”
I worship Moloch. He demands the sacrifice of at least 100,000 fetuses per year. (He’d PREFER immolation, but He is a god who moves with the times. Dismemberment is fine.) Voluntary abortion is acceptable. My religious preference is, accordingly, enshrined in your law.
Your religiously-neutral position, in other words, is only neutral because there does not happen to be a currently-popular faith that takes that position as its preference. (And I’m sure there are a few Molochites out there; the world is full of loons.) It is therefore religiously-neutral only in a contingent, not in any inherent or fundamental, way.
(All the religions TODAY are anti-slavery. Is anti-slavery law religiously neutral?)
Re: So, in other words, you want the law to enforce a hypothetical–in the sense that the faith you have placed in fetal personhood might, in fact, be misplaced.
Do you think that all your political positions are provable by reason?
Christianity is not a monolith, but the Catholic church (which isn’t one either) used to follow the Judaic tradition, which was trimester based, roughly speaking, and assigned the fetus (if I am remembering rightly) the status of water, the status of the woman’s thigh, and the approximate status of a person in the three trimesters.
From what I gather, it was actually advances in anatomical understanding, and the democratization of that knowledge, that has hardened Christian thought against abortion. If you think a 4-month fetus is basically a gob, and then find out that in fact it looks like a rough sketch of a tiny human, your attitude has a tendency to shift.
The power of the visual image and the psychology of the individual is striking. I have a framed photo of my daughter in utero; people who see it generally squee. I uploaded the same image here in a previous abortion conversation; Amp couldn’t see a human figure in it.
Hector, if an abortion pill were invented that did nothing but withhold the women’s body’s support for the embryo, which would lead to the embryo’s death but not through direct action, only through withholding aid, do you honestly believe that would change anything?
Also, if there is a soul, and that soul is immortal, then isn’t abortion not really a matter of life and death?
Robert, it’s logically irrelevant how much an embryo looks like a human. Some people don’t have the recognizable features that pro-lifers focus on; there are people without fingers and toes, people without noses, etc. They are nonetheless people. I’ve seen in-womb pictures that looked adorable, but I don’t accept the premise that personhood is based on cuteness.
I didn’t say it was logically relevant, Sheldon, I said it was powerful. You don’t live on the android planet of pure reason, you live on the human planet.
Robert,
The trimester scheme, delayed ensoulment thing was a medieval innovation derived from Aristotle, and never dogmatized. the position of the early church was to broadly condemn abortion without pinning down the exact moment of ensoulment. the one early authority to address early term abortion was one, Basil of Ancyra who said ‘we make no distinction whether the fetus be formed or unformed’, and his views were accepted by the Sixth Ecumenical Council (I think, 692 CE) which infallibly condemned abortion.
I’m a bad Catholic, so I only accept the infallibility of the first seven ecumenical councils on specifically Christological questions.
(Catholic fight!)
Less snarkowittily, yes, it was condemned, but after the fall of Rome and Byzantium, the medical knowledge for “managed” (i.e., physician-mediated) abortion was largely lost. So if you were a peasant girl who happened to know which herbs to take…you could abort, and the parish priest would be none the wiser. It wasn’t a Big Hairy Social Deal, in other words; you either didn’t know how to do it or you did, and in either event you were likely more interested in keeping pregnancies viable than in terminating unwanted ones because you needed the hands for labor. If you asked 99.9% of the medieval population “should women have the right to choose?” or “do fetuses have a right to live?”, first they would stab you for being a demon in weird clothes gabbering in an incomprehensible babble, and then after a painful translation (not made easier by your festering stab wound(s)) they would say “you’re an idiot and we have crops to get in. someone stab him again.”
It didn’t become socially relevant again until, I dunno, probably colonial times or a bit later. Printing press era, anyway. Anatomical drawings reproduced and smuggled around, and the re-acquisition of the classical medical canon by doctors.
I would certainly hope so. If not, they should be. Science and reason should be the order of the day.
The doctrines of a possibly nonexistent and empirically unprovable God (and one must admit that in this country at least almost all pro-lifers base their positions on religious doctrine) should have no place in our government.
“The doctrines of a possibly nonexistent and empirically unprovable God (and one must admit that in this country at least almost all pro-lifers base their positions on religious doctrine) should have no place in our government.”
I agree! No more laws against murder, theft, or usury!
Since the doctrines of various faiths have also allowed those things at times, then no more laws permitting murder, theft, or usury, either. The law must remain silent, once the scriptures or the vedas or the revelations have said anything.
Can you prove from reason that ‘every adult should be allowed to vote?’
Instead of for example, ‘only members of the Party should be allowed to vote?’
So are you saying that a group of atheists and agnostics couldn’t come up with laws prohibiting those things on ethical grounds, without basing it on religion?
If so, I heartily disagree with you, and I’m a person of faith. The atheists I know are just as ethical and moral as religious people–they just don’t base their morality on what they call “superstition.”
In this country, the ‘reason’ would be the Constitution. It’s the law, but I daresay it’s also reasonable.
RHF – You didn’t say anything about people justifying the laws on other grounds. You just said that if it was a religious doctrine, it had no place in law.
I’m inclined to agree with a much less ambitious version of that…a law that is in violation of the spirit or letter of the Constitution, and which has no other backing than that it is a doctrine of a religion and the people of the country want that doctrine in law, is a bad law.
Perhaps a much less ambitious version is what you meant, but it isn’t what you said…and its been my finding that people who say what you said actually mean “people with religious motivations for the laws they want to see should just hush, they don’t get to do that”. Which is just flatly wrong. “Murder should be illegal” isn’t unconstitutional and if I want that to be the law, whether it’s because my rabbi taught me that at age two or because I like to really piss people off but want it to be illegal for them to kill me because of it, makes no practical difference. Religious sentiment is a perfectly valid motivation for law; we don’t look to the motivation of a law’s supporters to know whether the law is OK or not OK. We have to look at the law itself.
The Constitution didn’t provide for universal adult suffrage when it was written, and – although it implicitly supports a right to vote – it doesn’t provide for it now, either.
Red Headed Femme,
You do realize, right, that usury is legal in America? Western societies legalized usury back in the 18th century’s, on the grounds that a modern society didn’t need to listen to Christian churches and their outmoded ideals and natural law theories. I think we can all see how well that worked out.
As for me, the idea that ‘all adult citizens should have equal political rights’ seems at least as faith based, and substantially sillier on the merits, than ‘personhood begins at conception.’
There are, of course, secular societies that banned usury (the communist countries come to mind) but America isn’t one of them.
Robert:
While my memory says that this is a pretty accurate rendering of the legal status of the embryo/fetus within Jewish tradition, it’s important to note that the Jewish stance on abortion doesn’t derive primarily from the question of whether or not the embryo/fetus is a “person.” Indeed, even from the moment of conception, an embryo is understood within Judaism–as I understand it–to have something like the value a fully human life, though Judaism still does not see abortion as murder. The former is derived from the fact that one is not only permitted, but required to violate the Sabbath in order to save an embryo/fetus, and saving someone’s life is one of the few rabbinically sanctioned reasons for such a violation. The latter–that abortion is not murder–however, is derived more from the principle that forced pregnancy is a cruel and unusual punishment for the woman. I wrote about this a while back here, though the full treatment of the Jewish position on abortion that is given in the two books I reference in that post is far more nuanced and complex, and is well worth reading in its own right.
Re: (All the religions TODAY are anti-slavery.
That’s true of all mainstream religions, fortunately, but interestingly enough there are few Salafi Muslim clerics who are calling for bringing back slavery. And, of course, child sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced by one of the main Liberian rebel armies within the last two decades (and possibly elsewhere in Africa as well).
Re: The power of the visual image and the psychology of the individual is striking. I have a framed photo of my daughter in utero; people who see it generally squee. I uploaded the same image here in a previous abortion conversation; Amp couldn’t see a human figure in it.
I’m definitely on the ‘squee’ side (though I would also go further and say that the embryo is a human being even if it doesn’t look like one). It’s interesting how people’s psychology can be so different. (And yes, there is a deep underlying psychological component here: attitude towards abortion is about 30% explainable by genetics, if I remember rightly).
Thanks be to the gods for that! Usury is what allowed me to buy my house, allowed the business I work for to build a new facility, allows me to make large purchases without going to the bank to withdraw bags of cash that I then have to carry through the city. Without usury, we don’t become the greatest nation on Earth. Credit is important. The idea that we’d have the vast credit system we have without legalizing usury is ridiculous.
Question: Are there any limits imposed upon usury in Western societies?
Oh wow, it’s more than that. Attitudes towards the preservation of life (which highly correlate with opinions about abortion) are 66% heritable.
Which makes me wonder, since pro-life people generally have somewhat more children than pro-choice ones, how opinions about abortion are going to change.
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp806845.pdf
Why? I don’t understand that position at all. What possible reason could there be for denying a competent adult his/her right to vote? (Besides being a convicted felon, which is the law in some states.)
A few points:
1. That article gives heritability numbers directly for “abortion on demand”, which was one of the questions they asked. The heritability coefficient there was 56%, not 66%.
2. The “preservation of life” attitude was defined as a combination of the answers for abortion on demand, easy access to contraception, euthanasia, and organized religion. So of course it’s correlated with attitudes towards abortion.
3. In light of your previous comment, I should point out that “heritability” is not the same as “genetic”. This is discussed for most of the first column of the second page in the paper you linked, but basically: heritability is a measure of how much people are like their parents or siblings. It can be due to shared environmental factors, although using twin studies like this can help reduce that component; still, in the rural US, ZIP codes are heritable, because families usually live near each other. While that doesn’t necessarily cancel your point that demographic shifts could change societal attitudes towards abortion, it also doesn’t mean that these attitudes are unchangeable by debate or experience because they’re genetic. And, of course, the researchers were asking for an overall attitude, which is very different from a policy position; I know lots of people who are personally opposed to abortion but wouldn’t choose to have the government restrict it in the first trimester, for example.
4.
Citation, please.
Re: This is discussed for most of the first column of the second page in the paper you linked, but basically: heritability is a measure of how much people are like their parents or siblings.
Not exactly. Heritability is a measure of the proportion of variation observed in a trait, that’s explainable by genetic variation. There are other things that can ‘look like’ heritability (maternal effects, most importantly, and epigenetics) but ideally you would want to sort out those effects. The design of a twin study is supposed to filter out the effects of prenatal environment, etc. since fraternal twins share the same prenatal environment, as do identical twins.
Under the conditions of current North American society, about 66% of the variation in the Preservation-of-Life component (and, as you note, about 56% of variation in abortion attitudes) seem to be explainable by genetic variation. Of course, as we all know, ‘genetically influenced’ =/= ‘unchangeable’. People make free choices all the time, including choices that override their biological predispositions. Other things being equal, though, and assuming both pro-life and pro-choice sides are trying as hard as they can to get their message out, I’d be surprised if differential fertility rates had *no* effect.
Re: Citation, please.
The claim was made (about abortion opinion) in a conference paper presented last year. They drew their information on abortion opinion and fertility rate directly from the General Social Survey though, so anyone who wants to check whether it’s true can look at the GSS itself. I think it’s publicly available. They find that pro-life people have around 50% more children than pro-choice ones. That may not be due to abortion attitudes per se, however. It might just be that highly educated people are more likely to be pro-choice, and that highly-educated women have many fewer children than less educated ones.
http://paa2012.princeton.edu/papers/122289
Re: Without usury, we don’t become the greatest nation on Earth.
You could say, with just about equal justification, that civilization would never have advanced without slavery. That might be true, but also irrelevant.
It’s certainly possible to become a major world power without private lending at interest (or without capitalism, for that matter). Russia did it. Of course they paid a tremendous cost in other ways, and had plenty of injustice of their own, but I don’t think it’s true that industrialization requires capitalism.
If you are against usury in all forms, your moral/philosophical/ethical code is so different from mine that we have no basis for productive conversation. I probably should have guessed this earlier.
Re: If you are against usury in all forms,
I’m not particularly fond of *capitalism*: I think there are ways you could have state-owned or socially-owned banks, credit, etc. that don’t fit the classical definition of usury.
Perhaps what’s lacking, then, is a commonly understood definition of the term. Not particularly surprising since it can vary considerably and I just interpreted your definition based on your comment. What is your definition of usury?
“What possible reason could there be for denying a competent adult his/her right to vote?”
He didn’t say deny competent adults their rights to vote; he said equal political rights. Charles spends 12 hours a day studying political issues, makes it a point to personally meet every member of Congress, has an IQ of 230, and is a profoundly decent human being. I spend 12 hours a day looking for jello-related pornography, think Roe v. Wade refers to two different methods of crossing a shallow river, and am just barely intelligent enough to fulfill my duties at my job, which is listing black, Jewish, or mixed families that move into neighborhoods so that my Klan friends can terrorize them later.
We each have one vote.
Justify that in terms of pure reason.
I wonder if you realize how revealing that sentence is. I can be fairly confident that the following things are true about you, none of which are true of me:
1. You believe it is fairly obvious that a human embryo or fetus is a person
A) to the point that anyone who does not share your opinion is doing some sort of logical contortion.
2. You believe it is equally obvious that chickens do not have souls and their lives are not worthy of protection.
A) You consider “chickens’ lives are worthy of protection” to be a ridiculous position.
B) You probably do not have any vegetarian or vegan friends or acquaintances (that you know are vegetarian/vegan).
C) You have never experienced any real doubt about whether killing and eating chickens is morally wrong.
And that is why you think that I’m taking a ridiculous or insulting position, while from my perspective it is neither. If you don’t believe most of those things, then I don’t see how the comparison could still be “amazing”. (Ta-Nehisi Coates also does it in one of Ampersand’s links, though I didn’t read that before writing my first post.) (Of course, from my perspective, comparing a human embryo to a chicken is not “dehumanizing an unborn child”, because I don’t see fetuses or embryos as morally equivalent to children. Chickens at least have personalities and thoughts to some degree, but since I’m a materialist/physicalist, I don’t believe that embryos do.)
I admit that I (somewhat intentionally) made the position that innocent chicken life deserves protection more distasteful to you (hoping that you would then repudiate the “play it safe” position) by choosing an animal that most people do not consider aesthetically pleasing (neither cute [the cuteness argument strikes again!], beautiful, nor majestic), intelligent, or good-natured, and by choosing an animal that many people eat.
“It is wrong to kill chickens for the purpose of eating them” is not a position I believe in, but I don’t think it’s ridiculous. It is something I have thought carefully about, and I have had friends who are/were vegetarian or vegan. I assure you that they are dead serious. My vegan friend would not even eat honey because it meant exploiting another living creature. It might interest you to know that she also believed that fetuses had moral value–she would not choose abortion for herself, but did not believe that abortion should be illegal. (She is no longer a vegan but still respects the vegan philosophy.)
My friends’ vegetarianism and veganism was not motivated by religion, but there are religious traditions that advocate vegetarianism on religious grounds. (Religious veganism is much less common.)
Re: We each have one vote. Justify that in terms of pure reason.
Right, Robert says it all right there. You can’t reason your way *to* the axioms of liberal democracy, you can only accept the axioms (or not) and then reason *from* them (or not). The vast majority of people in past ages, probably about half the world up until 1989, and a significant number of people in the world today *don’t* accept them, so there’s nothing intuitively obvious about them (Russia and its satellites are substantially less democratic than they were in 1995, for example, as well as substantially better functioning). You believe in the ideals of liberal democracy, that every (adult) ought to be allowed to participate in politics under free and fair conditions. But that’s not grounded in reason, it’s an axiom, as much as ’embryos are full persons’ is an axiom.
Re: C) You have never experienced any real doubt about whether killing and eating chickens is morally wrong.
Not really, I’ve experienced some doubt about it. On balance, I don’t think it is. I don’t think chickens are moral agents with souls, and even if they were, the way chickens behave to each other (in my view) means if they are moral agents, they aren’t *innocent* moral agents. But it’s certainly possible I’m wrong about chickens, and if I was I’d stop eating them. I’m more sure that an embryo has the ‘right’ to life, than I’m sure a chicken is not. And yes, I’m aware that many Hindus and others practice religious vegetarianism (though in reality the majority of Hindus are not vegetarians). I just don’t agree with them.
Re: What is your definition of usury?
In the strict sense, I guess, something like ‘lending money at interest in excess of inflation rate, for the purpose of private profit’. State owned banks, of course, put their money into the common treasury rather than private profit. In practice, I know that private lending is never going to be entirely done away with, but I’d like to see a world in which it was minimized.
I don’t think chickens are moral agents with souls, and even if they were, the way chickens behave to each other (in my view) means if they are moral agents, they aren’t *innocent* moral agents
A request for clarification: What people, if any, qualify as innocent moral agents? Are we therefore justified in killing and eating those who are not?
You appear to be saying that, even if chickens had souls, their behavior puts them outside the group that we consider to be protected against being used for food.
N.B: I have never seen any evidence for the existence of a soul; I am asking for clarification of a view based on a philosophy that assumes the existence of such.
No, he’s not saying that they would be outside the food group. He’s saying that if they are moral agents, they aren’t innocent moral agents. Innocence is not the quality that gets you an exemption from the morally-eaten population.
To clarify your question, according to Catholic theology, infants and the unborn are effectively innocent. (They carry original sin, but this is not peculiar to their character, and the sacrament of baptism clears it.) After that, while innocence is a highly unusual and laudable state, saintly even, it is achievable through good behavior, along with penitence and penance for sins that a person does commit. Technically a person is innocent after a thorough confession and forgiveness, which state for most of us lasts about three seconds.
Hector says:
And pregnancy doesn’t?
Jesus fucking Christ, you really are a callous asshole, you know that?“Oh, we can’t mandate that people donate organs because organ donation can cause health problems, but we can force women to be incubators for 9+ months despite the fact that the risk of permanent health problems resulting from pregnancy and birth is a fuck of a lot higher than the risk of issues from donating a kidney. After all, (almost) none of the people being used as incubators are men!”[Sentence deleted by moderator. I think you made a really good point, but please attack arguments, not posters. Thanks.]
Also, it’s really fucking horrible to say/think, “You consented to sex! Therefore you consented to hyperemesis gravidarum, pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, seizures, hemorrhage, vaginal fistulas, permanent bladder damage, and/or death!” Fuck no.
In the USA, maternal mortality is 21/100,000 births as of 2010. A woman’s risk of dying from an abortion? Less than 1/100,000. That means that abortion is more than twenty times safer than carrying a pregnancy to term and giving birth. Maternal morbidity is 1,580/100,000. That means that 1,580 women out of every 100,000 who give birth will be hospitalized with severe and possibly permanent health problems.
So in summary, you’re apparently totally okay with condemning hundreds of thousands of actual living, breathing women to suffering and death in order to save blastocysts and embryos. (Some of those precious little blastocysts and embryos might be boys, after all! Can’t have them terminated by a mere woman who thinks she gets to choose not to be an incubator!)
Also, it’s really fucking horrible to say/think, “You consented to sex! Therefore you consented to hyperemesis gravidarum, pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, seizures, hemorrhage, vaginal fistulas, permanent bladder damage, and/or death!” Fuck no.
When you consent to X, you may not explicitly consent to [all logical possible consequences of X], but it seems axiomatic that you consented to [some possible consequences of X] in the general sense.
If you didn’t want to go to North Carolina, why did you get on the train for North Carolina? “Because riding trains is fun!” – OK, but in that case, if you must avoid North Carolina for reasons of bench warrants, allergies to Duke sporting events, or simple distaste, then it’s your responsibility to get off before you get there. If you fall asleep and wake up in Durham, and then say “it’s cruel and horrible to say that I’m here in Durham through my own choices, and that the risk of being in Durham is something I consented to when I bought my ticket for Durham and boarded the train!”…well, I’ll still be sympathetic that you didn’t want to be there, but I’ll think you a bit of a whiner who doesn’t understand logical consequences, too.
Trains wreck. It’s not horrible to say “you knew there was a risk of the train wrecking” if, after the wreck, you’re caterwauling about “who knew that trains could wreck!?!?!?”
Because you did know, or should have. These are not dark arcana known only to the Illuminati.
I think, Robert, you’re not being quite fair. It’s one thing to say that once a woman consents to pregnancy she has on some level “consented”–though that seems to me a strange word to use in this circumstance–to all the possible dangers and discomforts that can accompany a pregnancy. It’s something else to contemplate a world in which abortions are banned, etc. and have one’s consent to sex be implicitly and explicitly understood as a “consent” to all those other things.
“You shouldn’t have gotten in the car if you weren’t willing to take the chance of a wreck.”
“Well, okay, but I did want to have an airbag. Why did you take my airbag out?”
“I outlawed airbags, because God told me that airbags have souls.’
Sex without the option of legal abortion is riskier because people have made the deliberate choice to outlaw legal abortion, not because it’s a risk inherent to having sex. (Not that sex doesn’t carry some risks regardless; I’m talking specifically about the greater net risk caused by outlawing abortion.) Comparing that risk to risks that are genuinely implicit and unavoidable distorts the situation, and hides the responsibility of pro-lifers for the harm their legislation causes.
Richard, consequences are consequences. If you consent to X, and know that Y is a possible outcome, then – even if your plan to avoid Y does not work out – you may not reasonably claim that Y is some shocking, dismaying thing which no reasonable person could have foreseen. It said “North Carolina” right there on the ticket. If you think I’m unfair, try Mother Nature out.
Amp, the relative risks and removals of airbags and theistic three-point restraint placements are details. Important details, especially if one is planning one’s own life. But the existence, and the placement, of details do not obscure the nature of causality or make it unreasonable to expect people to know how that causality flows. “You wouldn’t let me have e-cigarettes!” is not a defense to “nicotine causes cancer, so what were you thinking?” It makes you a dick for banning e-cigs, possibly, but that’s a separate question.
Oh look, we’re back to the title of the post. If you get on the train from DC to NC, ending up in NC is the right and proper consequence, so there must be something wrong with getting off in Arlington (and even more so in Richmond). Not because train tickets have souls, but just because you deserve it if you get on the damn train.
If you choose to carry a pregnancy to term, there are risks you incur. If you don’t choose to carry a pregnancy to term, you don’t incur those risks. Trying to attach the risks of carrying a pregnancy to term anywhere in the process besides carrying a pregnancy to term is just about coercing women.
I didn’t say it was wrong to get off in Arlington or Richmond; I said that if you get on a train to North Carolina and you end up in North Carolina, there is no grounds for shock or dismay or surprise. Fine, you had a plan to get off earlier. Your plan didn’t work. Now you’re in the place that it says, right there on the ticket, that you bought a ticket for.
As the Greeks used to say, if you would like to amuse the gods in Olympus, make a plan.
Hey, you know how you can get to Richmond and have a much, much, much reduced risk of ending up in Durham? Walk there. Or take a Greyhound. Or a cab. “Oh, but we really like the train.” OK, then take the train and plan to leap out when it slows down to cross the bridge in Richmond – but don’t bitch about how unjust it is that you wound up in North Carolina when you forgot, or fell asleep, or didn’t pay attention. I’m not saying “you DESERVE to be in North Carolina, you filthy train-riding sleep-monger.”
I’m saying it isn’t a fucking surprise outcome.
Re: And to me, it’s amazing how some people trivialize the sentience of blacks and Jews by comparing them to embryos. Every single Jew who died in the holocaust was worth a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand embryos; and when people talk about them like they’re equivalent… Ugh!
Not really. They were the equivalent of one embryo, no more, and no less. I’m not particularly impressed by the argument ‘this comparison makes me uncomfortable, so I’m going to request that you stop using it.’
Re: It’s something else to contemplate a world in which abortions are banned, etc. and have one’s consent to sex be implicitly and explicitly understood as a “consent” to all those other things.
It isn’t a consent to them, necessarily, it’s a voluntary assumption of the *risk* of all these things happening. In cases where there are serious medical threats to the mother, I think abortions should be legally allowed. No one should be able to kill an unborn child for reasons of convenience though (and most abortions don’t happen for medical reasons). Especially not when they voluntarily assume the risks associated with sex. Our choices have consequences.
Re: not because it’s a risk inherent to having sex.
Uh, pregnancy is a risk inherent to having sex (during the fertile period, at least). This is, sort of, basic biology.
And, gosh, no one said pregnancy was a surprise outcome, so your point was…?
Carrying a pregnancy to term is a preventable outcome of getting pregnant. Your extended metaphor casts abortion as a dangerous and reckless course (jumping from a train, etc), which is simply wrong, and pushes your metaphor into the “you DESERVE to be in North Carolina, you filthy train-riding sleep-monger.”
[edited]
Robert:
Neither did King’s Rook, and that’s the point. Your response misses the point King’s Rook was trying to make.
“Your extended metaphor casts abortion as a dangerous and reckless course (jumping from a train, etc)”
I read that as a metaphor for, ahem, pulling out, not for abortion. But Robert’s metaphor does seem to be about women being shocked by getting pregnant as a result of having sex, which, to me, doesn’t really tell us much about the morality of choosing not to carry that pregnancy to term.
Also i point out that abortions have been happening for (at least) thousands of years. There is a plant that we know of, called silphium, that grew extensively in the ancient near- and middle-east. It’s attested in about a zillion contemporary sources. And we have no idea what it looks like, because it was harvested to extinction sometime before the birth of Jesus. Why? Because it was renowned as a safe and effective abortifacient.
Abortions (and infanticides) were certainly not “rare” before the advent of the birth control pill. They were, at various times, more and less legal, and more and less dangerous, but they have *always* been a thing that women do, and almost certainly always much less rare than men want to think about.
Thanks for the citation much earlier in the thread, Hector_St_Clare. Though I’ll note that the difference in fertility rates from the GSS was 27%, according to the paper–still, 5 kids of pro-life folks for every 4 of pro-choice folks could make a large demographic difference over the long term.
Re: So in summary, you’re apparently totally okay with condemning hundreds of thousands of actual living, breathing women to suffering and death in order to save blastocysts and embryos.
I think I already made it clear I do support a limited right to abortion when there are *genuine medical threats* to the mother. This is not generally the case though: most abortions are elective abortions, abortions of convenience. So it wouldn’t be correct to say I weight the life of the embryo as more important than the *deaths* of their mothers. Most of the time, the issues involved are things like the woman’s ‘autonomy’, ‘liberty’, ‘right to privacy’, and other fashionable buzzwords of our time. I do consider those things, while not unimportant in themselves, to be fairly trivial compared to the life of the embryo. And so I would certainly weight the life of the embryo as much more important than the so-called liberty of the mother.
It’s also strange to me that you consider this an issue of ‘men’ vs. ‘women’. You do realise, don’t you, that women are about as likely to favour legal restrictions on abortion as men? (Women are a bit more likely to be strongly pro-life or strongly pro-choice, a bit less likely to be moderate on the issue). Properly understood, abortion is not an issue of ‘women’s rights’ or whatever, but rather an issue of under what circumstances killing should be lawful. It’s my position that direct killing of innocent people, except in self defence, should generally not be allowed.
Lastly, you surely do recognize the active/passive distinction, right? The failure to donate an organ- which is, of course, an artificial medical intervention on the body- is not morally the same as actively intervening to end a natural and predictable process, at the cost of another person’s life.
Harlequin,
27% integrated over all the cohorts they looked at. Among the cohort born in 1980, the most recent one they looked at, pro life women have about 50% more kids. And since the differential has grown over time, I would suspect it’s at least as big among women who are in their teens and twenties now.
There is always a genuine medical threat to the woman carrying a pregnancy. Always.
Now, obviously, there is more of a threat for certain women under certain circumstances than there is for others. Just in my small circle of friends, I know one woman who would have a significant chance of dying from a pregnancy; one woman who has medical conditions that would likely be greatly exacerbated by pregnancy (and who is pretty much an obligatory C-section in any case, which carries a greater – not hugely greater, but greater – risk than vaginal birth); me, whose mental issues are affected by pregnancy. But even for the woman with no risk factors whatsoever pregnancy has a risk. There’s always a risk.
So what I want to know is, what level of risk do you consider adequate for an abortion to be allowable?
That is a very fair question.
I’m pro-choice, in legal terms, so I’m not the best equipped to answer the question from the POV who wants abortion to be generally illegal, but allowed under certain exceptions.
But I can provide a little numeric context that might help. First, it’s worth knowing that the instance of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the United States, overall, is 14.5 for the period of 1998 – 2005. That compares to a low point of 7.6 per 100,000 in 1986.
Has it become more dangerous to give birth? Probably not. Direct causes of death due to complications, disastrous delivery scenarios, etc., seems to be rather significantly down from 1986. The actual delivery process itself is safer than ever, though not without risk. The increase is mostly attributed by epidemiologists to deaths that occur because of other medical conditions (heart disease is the big one) that are exacerbated by pregnancy, and partially attributed to improvements in the data collection methodology. (I guess in 1986 if you got pregnant and then had a heart attack, they often didn’t put your death in the pregnancy bucket, they put it in the heart attack bucket; they understand the overall causal relationship better now.) But the overall increase is not thought to be a purely statistical artifact; there are more deaths. Just not directly due to going into the birthing center.
There is a huge racial gap in the numbers; black women die at a rate in the high 30s, white women die at around 10 per 100k, other ethicities are about 13 per 100k. I assume that mostly reflects worse access to health care but I don’t know for sure.
Source for above: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/02/us-pregnancy-deaths-idUSTRE6B15P220101202
Now, for comparison, maternal deaths from abortion. These figures are controversial because they are a political football; I’m trying to do just do honest math and reporting here. Unsafe abortion is pretty dangerous; globally, about half of abortions (20 million or so) are unsafe, and there are tens of thousands of maternal deaths from those unsafe abortions every year (68,000 direct deaths, and a good 150,000 from complications). It’s about 13% of the global maternal mortality rate. A 2009 paper (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709326/) says that about 3% of abortions in Western nations are unsafe.
Some pro-life folks who nonetheless focus on providing straight-up governemnt data acknowledge that hardly anyone dies from legal abortion. They say that in 2008, 12 women died from legal abortion. That wouldn’t even show up on the overall maternal mortality number. They also say that in 1979 (the year of Roe) there were only 39 maternal deaths from illegal abortion and 24 from legal.
I can believe the 24; surgical abortion done by medical professionals in a sterile environment is not hugely risky for the mother. I think the 39 is a load of shit, and I imagine that most analysts actually looking at it think so too (the figure is “known” deaths, not total deaths). OK, an illegal abortion in America in 1978 is not going to be the same thing as a dangerous abortion in a third-world back alley done by someone with minimal training. Globally today unsafe abortions are about 1% lethal. Interestingly enough, pro-lifers tend to claim that illegal abortion pre-Roe didn’t kill many women, and pro-choicers tend to claim that it killed everyone and their dog. This is fairly obvious rhetorical posturing; “illegal abortion killed millions” is a good line if you want there to be legal abortion, and vice-versa. Pro-choicers appear to claim that pre-Roe, there were 5000 maternal deaths per year. Pro-lifers appear to claim it was more like 200.
Honestly, 200 seems plausible to me – 2000 at the outside. If there were a million abortions (there weren’t) and a 1% mortality rate, we’d have seen 10,000 maternal deaths annually. But in 1978, the back-alley abortionist *in America* generally had sterile equipment and was most likely a nurse or doctor who thought abortion should be allowed but lived in a place where it was strictly controlled, or had gotten fairly good training from such a professional. In addition, for those doing it as a for-profit business, maternal death would be horrible for their profits. Word got around about which back-alley people knew what they were doing, and antibiotics were cheap and easy to get. I would say that a rate of 1/10th the rate found in the worst parts of the world today, would not be a crazy guess. That would come down down somewhere in the hundreds to very low thousands. Since that’s in-between what the ideologues say, I’m even more inclined towards it as an estimate. Let’s say 1000 for numerical convenience; there were 3.3 million live births in 1978, which means that the addition to maternal deaths per 100k births from illegal abortion would be 3.
That’s a lot of rigamarole, sorry; the purpose is to get an estimate of, if abortion was illegal today and other things were similar to 1978, how would it compre to the maternal death rate for women not seeking an abortion. Very approximately – though I think my arithmetic is right and I’m trying for neutrality and fidelity to hard numbers – the ratio would be about 5:1; giving birth is about 5 times more dangerous, that is, than having a (dangerous, illegal, unlicensed) abortion. There’s no real comparison to legal abortion; Gosnell horror stories aside, that procedure just doesn’t kill adult women. (And again, it would be a disproportionate number of black women dying from the illegal abortions, in all likelihood.)
Pro-life but apparently honest source: http://www.abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/
For comparison purposes, the death rate from undergoing surgery with general anesthesia – just from the anesthesia, not from dying because the surgeon cut off your head or because the cancer was just too far gone or what have you – is 5 or 6 per million, which would be 0.5 or 0.6 per 100,000. Giving birth is ~30 times riskier than going under general anesthesia.
If I am wrong about any of these numbers, I welcome correction; my intent is not to lecture or to expound, but merely to provide data to people who may not know it and whose opinions may sway to some degree on what the numbers on the ground are. Basically, giving birth is pretty dangerous overall (and of course, as noted by the previous commenter, some women run a much much higher personal risk because they have known risk factors) though it is a long way from a guaranteed death sentence; illegal/unregistered abortion, if we returned to those bad days, would be less dangerous but would still show up on the statistics. 15 out of 100,000 is about one chance in 6,667. Roll a 20 sided die, if you roll a 20 roll it again; if you roll another 20 roll it again; if you roll another 19 or 20, you’ll die from the pregnancy. Long odds, but far from zero too.
How much worse should those odds be before it justifies an abortion? As I say above, I’m not the guy to answer because I’m pro-choice; autonomy doesn’t depend on numbers. But I will say that 1% is a nice round number that I would accept as common-sensical in other contexts; if someone perceives correctly that Joe the Villain has a 1% chance of shooting the someone dead, then I think the someone is entitled to take vigorous action in self-defense at least in principle. Add a zero to that, and I’m going to be forgiving of the self-defender’s actions.
(If any admin wants to boil this entire post down to: realistically, the chance of dying in childbirth is around 1 in 6000 or 7000 and delete the whole damn rest of it, that’s fine with me, but then you have to have the arguments with whoever comes along and disputes it.)
Hector, you’ve used the phrase “abortions of convenience” a couple times now.
I think the phrase “abortions of convenience” is problematic when used to mean, “any abortion where the life or health of the mother is not at stake”*. Doesn’t that imply that pregnancy is merely an inconvenience?
Being on hold for half an hour is an inconvenience. Rush hour traffic is an inconvenience. Having to go to the doctor for some bloodwork is an inconvenience. An illness that leads you to miss a day or two of work is an inconvenience. Even complication-free pregnancies are much more than an inconvenience. Just the labor process takes more time than what I would label as a mere “inconvenience”, even if it were only as unpleasant as waiting in a line.
Most people who use that phrase would probably say they don’t “really” see pregnancy as a mere inconvenience. I see it as squeamishness, shying away from what asking someone to go through an unwanted pregnancy really means. And I think it minimizes the sacrifice and strength of character needed by a pro-life woman who’s unhappily pregnant to stick to her beliefs. I may not share those beliefs, but I have a certain admiration for people willing to undergo hardship to follow their moral code.
*I think I’ve also seen it used to mean “abortions when someone was too lazy to use birth control”. In that case, birth control, not pregnancy, is what’s implied to be the “inconvenience”. But that doesn’t seem to be the way “abortions of convenience” is being used here by Hector.
Closet Puritan,
Very well, I’ll drop ‘abortions of convenience’. How about ‘elective abortions’ instead?
Robert,
Thanks for that eloquent post, and for looking up the data. It’s worth noting that the two European countries with the most restrictive abortion laws, Ireland and Poland, have much lower maternal mortality than we do (and, maybe more meaningfully, lower than white American women do).
I think medical professionals should make the decisions, but I think your ‘1%’ threshold seems like a decent one. Also, it’s probably fairly unusual that someone drops dead all of a sudden while pregnant: more common would be that the pregnancy develops complications more gradually, and at some point the risk crosses a particular threshold, at which point medical intervention would be warranted. In general, I’d be fine erring on the side of a somewhat ‘liberal’ interpretation of what a ‘serious threat to the mother’s health’ would be, as opposed to a more conservative one.
The problem with that, of course, is that it’s not like the health problems caused by pregnancy disappear as soon as the woman’s not pregnant. Enjoy your permanent kidney damage!
There’s also the subtler effects; my cycle changed significantly after each pregnancy, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Also, a number of cases of mastitis (I lost track); admittedly, mostly while nursing, but once each on weaning as well. Also, one case long after; apparently having had it once means you can get it years later. Also, being exhausted during second full pregnancy and not really able to care for older son.
Also, the fun bits during labor; I know two woman who came close to bleeding out after or during delivery, one who had an episiotomy without anaesthesia.
This is not a minor thing, pregnancy. It can have permanent effects even in what is called a normal pregnancy.
I’m making an argument here for the sake of hashing out the logic of the health/life exception, because I have no problems with abortion for any reason whatsoever if it’s what the woman wants. It’s not a baby. I mean, I’ve had an early miscarriage, which incidentally produced more pain and risk than either of my full-term pregnancies; I’ve also had a baby who required considerable assistance right after birth (initial APGAR of 1. He turned out fine.). There is really no similarity in the degree of anxiety there. Really. I mean, I had an ultrasound with the miscarriage while there was still a heartbeat; it’s still not the same as worrying about an actual baby.
Yes, I think ‘elective abortions’ is better, as well as clearer.