Ronald Bailey, at Reason Online, writes:
John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women’s normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we’re talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. In fact, according to Opitz, embryologists estimate that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for seven days or more is 60 percent. The total rate of natural loss of human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the moment of conception. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.
So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is “already a human being.” Does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?
“If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined…”
It seems to me that pro-lifers have gotten more extreme about this in recent years. At one time, most pro-lifers seemed to acknowledge that there was some sort of difference between a newly fertilized egg and, say, Julia Roberts; nowadays it seems few would make that concession. Bailey asks:
A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?
I would rescue the child. I assume most of my readers would, as well. But I bet there are some pro-lifers who would say that they’d have no moral choice but to rescue the Petri dish and let the three-year-old burn.
Bailey goes on:
Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being, including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryos…presuming, for the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soul…that would still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.
Heaven must be an odd place.
This is actually a real debate among some pro-lifers – do aborted embryos go to Heaven?
As far as I can tell, most say that they do – which begs the question, what’s so terrible about abortion? When you kill a born person – even a child – there’s the possibility that the victim will burn in Hell as a result, a horrible outcome. But if “babies” aborted before birth go straight to Heaven, then they haven’t been harmed so much as they’ve been relocated. Some pro-lifers argue that saying aborted “babies” go to Heaven is a pro-choice lie intended to make abortion seem less terrible. Other pro-lifers disagree. (Hat tip: After Abortion.)
I was under the impression that unbaptised babies don’t go to heaven. Or is that just a Catholic thing?
Neverborn.
the dogma used to place the unbaptized in one of the outer regions of hell, at least if i remember my Divine Comedy correctly. i wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to hear it’s changed since, though. nor that different sects disagree on the matter, either. i have my own opinion on the reasons for the discrepancies, but i’ll keep them to myself.
Well I would certainly rescue the three year old child. In any event, you can’t rescue the embryos, which would die in a matter of hours or less once they are pulled from the freezer. It takes careful handling to keep an embryo alive. In that sense it is not “fully human.” Doctrine in this area has boxed pro-life proponents into a corner where “the principle of the thing,” which is essentially a unique DNA sequence, is elevated above lived experienced — very few women mourn a miscarriage as they would the loss of a child born alive.
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Unbaptized babies went to limbo, I believe.
If I recall correctly, even the Bible defines the “quickening” (the soul is developed/placed into the being) of a fetus to be within several months of gestation when the pregnant woman can feel the fetus move inside of her, not at the embryonic stage of development.
However, this debate is moot for people like me who do not follow or believe in the Christian religion. If this debate boils down to religion and souls and such, then it tells me that abortion is a personal matter much like religion is. What one choses to do or believe in either area is no concern of mine; pushing one’s choices and beliefs on me, however, is.
The reasoning at hand is weird:
Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined…”?
Say what? No pro-lifer (or anyone else) believes that one’s moral priorities are wholly determined by what would supposedly prevent the most deaths of the most entities, no matter why those deaths are occurring. Natural embryo loss is not a “more urgent moral cause” to the pro-life view, because natural embryo loss is not deliberately caused. To the contrary, pro-lifers believe that preventing deliberate killing is a more “urgent moral cause” than preventing accidental deaths. Do you or anyone else really think otherwise as to born humans (whose lives you have to admit are worth protecting)?
However, this debate is moot for people like me who do not follow or believe in the Christian religion. If this debate boils down to religion and souls and such, then it tells me that abortion is a personal matter much like religion is.
Well said, Sheelzebub. Which is why I believe that if the anti-choice proponents really want people to pay more attention to their argument, then they need to come up more than just religious dogma and superstition to push their argument. They would have to use factual medical science to prove whether or not an embryo/fetus is a “life”, not a religious text. But instead when it comes down to it, it’s all about promoting a particular religious teaching when it comes to most anti-choice arguments, and not medical science. Most anti-choice arguments are based on personal theological views, and not science.
Jack V. said: “pro-lifers believe that preventing deliberate killing is a more “urgent moral cause”? than preventing accidental deaths.”
Really? Then why do so called pro-lifers not protest fertility clinics? Those clinics destroy thousands of embryos every year. Those “deaths” are certainly deliberate. In that case, why not try to get in vitro banned?
I have never had a pro-lifer respond to that question, though I’ve asked it many times.
Gosh, yes. We put so much more emphasis on preventing deliberate death than accidental death. That’s why no improvements or advances in safety have been made available in the automobile industry over the course of the last 80 years.
Jack V., nonsense. If a fetus is to be treated as morally equivalent to a human being, then it follows that the accidental death of a fetus is just as terrible as the accidental death of a human being. If they are morally equivalent, then there’s just as much compulsion to prevent the spontaneous abortion of a fetus as to prevent the accidental death of human beings in natural disasters. It’s usually considered a lesser failing to fail to act to prevent a death than to deliberately cause one, but it’s still considered a moral failing.
Just to be clear, I can’t see regarding something unconscious of its own existence as a human being.
My impression was that, courtesy the doctrine of original sin, the original theory was that unbabtized infants who died were damned. However, people found that idea too upsetting, so the Church invented the concept of Limbo.
pro-lifers believe that preventing deliberate killing is a more “urgent moral cause”? than preventing accidental deaths. Do you or anyone else really think otherwise as to born humans (whose lives you have to admit are worth protecting)?
Of course. If more people die from accidents or natural causes, and if we can prevent those deaths from happening, of course I’d make that my first priority. Why do you think we fund science?
Kip Manley linked to: “Neverborn”
Goodness gracious, that site is one of the nuttiest, most deluded personal visions ever commited to the web! Thanks for sharing that, I understand the other side a little better now.
(Off Topic:
Barry, you seem to have inadvertantly pasted Wampum’s URI in the hyperlink to Mythago’s blog, in the “Some Lefty Blogs” section of the sidebar.)
[Whoops! I’ve corrected the error. Thanks! -Amp]
As I’ve said before, if religious pro-life women who think that every fertilized egg is a baby, they need to hold funerals for all their tampons to be on the safe side. Think of how much you could make selling little tampon caskets for this purpose!
Yeah, as others have said, Limbo is where unbaptized babies go. Presumably embryos would end up there, too. (The whole thing gets easier for Christians who are universalists—we believe we’ll all end up in Heaven, if there is such a thing.)
I’ve been blogging about this topic a lot in the last two weeks, it seems, and one of the commenters on my blog produced some interesting quotes from Scripture on this topic here. The first seems to suggest that post-birth abortions should be just fine with God (babies aren’t valued as full human beings until one month old)—when will pro-life Christians stop picking and choosing from Scripture?! ;-)
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OK, so four people dared to disagree with me on the morality of preventing deliberate deaths vs. preventing accidental deaths. I don’t think anyone really believes what they are saying.
Consider an analogy involving born children. Imagine this: Really bad parents (a la these) have been killing their children. Rate of killing: 1,000 per year. What’s more, lots of advocacy groups exist around the country to say that child-killing is a Constitutional Right.
On the other hand, 10,000 children die per year in auto accidents. By hypothesis, no one knows of anything that can be done to prevent these accidental deaths, short of banning all automobiles. (Just as no one knows how to prevent or even detect all the 2-day-old embryos that are supposedly perishing.)
Why on earth would it be a greater moral imperative to engage in a completely pointless and useless struggle to ban all automobiles, instead of trying to do something about the deliberate child-killing going on? PLEASE: Remember that this whole discussion is supposed to be about what pro-lifers should do from their own perspective. Not from your perspective on fetal life. From theirs.
Actually, there’s lots you could do to ensure safer driving conditions for children, other than simply banning automobiles. Just go spend an hour here:
http://www.autosafety.org/
It’s very illuminating.
Likewise, there’s lots you could do to bring down the number of abortions rather than obsessing about frozen embryos or trying to reduce alread-limited abortion access.
If it were truly impossible to prevent accidental deaths of children in cars, then banning cars *would* be the right thing to do, even if it was difficult.
What I believe abortion opponents should do is change their position on abortion and stop opposing it. I point out absurdities and contradictions in their positions because I believe they demonstrate that their positions are absurd and contradictory and should be abandoned.
I have no more interest in helping them shore up their anti-abortion arguments than I have in helping racists shore up their racist arguments.
Alsis — you are completely missing the point of my hypothetical. In the hypo, there is nothing that anyone knows how to do to reduce accidental auto deaths, just as there is nothing anyone knows how to do to detect or prevent 2-day embryos from dying in the natural course of events. I already spelled that out in my post. The point is that if — or especially if — no one knows how to prevent accidental deaths, there’s no way that this would be a moral imperative remotely akin to prevent deliberate killings.
Think of another example: Let’s say that 100 farmers per year deliberately kill the endangered tree rat. (Hypothetical animal, by the way, don’t try to respond as if there really is such a thing.) And suppose that just as in humans, some 70% of endangered tree rat embryos die undetected and without anyone being able to prevent it. Now suppose someone says, “I oppose the deliberate killing of the endangered tree rat.” It is transparently silly to respond to such a person, “Aha! But you are NOT saying that we should spend billions on a fruitless and quixotic quest to somehow prevent endangered tree rat embryos from perishing naturally, in the wild. No one has any idea how to prevent such deaths, but you should figure it out! You hypocrite!”
So too, it is transparently silly to accuse pro-lifers of being hypocrites simply they focus their moral efforts on what they perceive as the infinitely greater moral harm of deliberate killing, rather than wasting all of their time trying to prevent accidental deaths that no one knows how to prevent.
That last sentence should say, “simply because.”
Boil it down to this: From the pro-life point of view, deliberate killing is a moral wrong that deserves to be righted. But when accidental deaths are merely an unavoidable part of nature, such deaths are NOT a moral wrong by anyone’s lights.
Again, that is why pro-lifers are not on that point being inconsistent with themselves.
Really? Then why do so called pro-lifers not protest fertility clinics? Those clinics destroy thousands of embryos every year. Those “deaths”? are certainly deliberate. In that case, why not try to get in vitro banned?
I’ve asked that too, and never received a satisfactory answer. All I got was “in vitro lets you create a life and give it a chance.” I pointed out all the “full human lives” (i.e. unused embryos) that are destroyed after in vitro and that was shrugged off.
Pro-lifers used to oppose these technologies, IIRC, but apparently not so much now.
It’s stuff like this that makes me really impatient with the “we pro-lifers don’t want to control women, no really we don’t” argument.
Jack V.,
I have no more interest in helping them shore up their anti-abortion arguments than I have in helping racists shore up their racist arguments.
FoolishOwl should change her name to SeriouslyUnfoolishOwl.
Your hypothetical avoids a critical issue: Pro-lifers who want to save embryos and fetuses in general want to do so over the objections of the women that contributed an egg to the embryos or whom carry the fetuses.
OTOH, when a woman has a normal menstrual cycle, she doesn’t know whether or not an egg has been fertilized and then expelled for some reason. Remember what the original study at the top said: The women and the partners didn’t even know that they had an embryo in the works. Maybe they’d be disappointed if they knew they’d missed a chance to make a baby, maybe not. Pro-lifers in general make no bones about working toward a world in which lack of desire to have and raise a child is, at best, of secondary importance to the potential for there BEING a child in the first place. So the question of these “ejected” embryos is quite relevant: It invites pro-lifers to imagine if they’d take their lack of concern for the feelings of adults to a new and improved level– if only they could.
So I think your hypothetical needs some tinkering before I can even think about taking your parallel seriously. Also it needs some tinkering for the simple reason that humans are not tree rats. Good luck.
Jack, since you’re using hypothetical examples, surely you must agree that it’s not unfair to ask a pro-lifer which they’d rescue from a burning building, a petri dish with 10 seven-day embryos (for purposes of the example, assume a nearby building with all technology needed to keep rescued embryos alive) and a three-year-old child.
The point of that hypothetical is not to point out hypocrisy, but to point out how completely alien to common sense – and morality – the pro-life position has become.
As for naturally killed, non-implanted embryos, since so much (although not all) objection to abortion is rooting in religion, I think it’s fair to point out absurd results of assuming that embryos have souls and are in all ways the moral equals of three-year-olds. If every embryo death is the equivalent of the tragedy of a three-year-old dying, then why did God design the human birth mechanism to produce 40%-70% tragedy?
Finally, you keep saying that nothing can be done about embryonic death. But assuming that is unfair and unjustified. How can you be so sure? No one has put any serious effort or research dollars into solving the problem (since most people don’t see it as a problem at all). But if pro-lifers are serious about considering embryos the same as three-year-olds, then I am a little confused as to why research into reducing the embryonic fatality rate (for example, by creating drugs which would reduce the number of embryos created and not implanted) isn’t a priority for them at all.
I am not suggesting that pro-lifers should drop all attempts to outlaw abortion and concentrate solely on the problem of naturally killed embryos. But if they’re serious about considering the petri dish the equal of ten three-year-olds, then they should be supporting long-term scientific research for reducing the death rate. Just as, in your example, I’d damn well want scientists – even if they can’t do anything about the child automobile death rate currently – to be working on long-term research to someday make cars safer for kids.
I’ll play with you, Jack. By your reckoning, children who die on accident don’t get funerals, then. After all, we don’t honor tampons with funerals, even though the potential embryos died “accidental” deaths. Is it because they died “accidentally” that we do not bury them properly? Or is it because we know damn well that they weren’t children?
I’m also willing to bet that, at least in this crowd, that “deliberate death” thing doesn’t matter.
set up a hypothetical choice: a button that ends murder forever, and a button that ends world hunger.
I bet everyone here would pick world hunger, as we understand that the one that causes more deaths would be the greater evil, deliberate or not.
for the stupid tree rat analogy, it isn’t quixotic to try to save the ones who aren’t physically killed by humans. If it is discovered most are killed when ducks provide extra competition for food, we’d start making control efforts to keep the damn cannards out of the tree rat groves
Let me make a few brief nitpicks. First off, limbo was never actually Catholic dogma–it was more a hypothesis offered by theologians. These days the RCC believes less in limbo than that unbaptized babies go to heaven.
Calvinist Protestants as a rule were generally pretty strong believers in infant damnation. In the late 19th century, the Presbyterian Church removed infant damnation from its catechism. These days some Calvinists believe that unbaptized babies go to hell, some believe that they go to heaven. Arminian Protestants generally (but not always) believe that unbaptized babies go to heaven.
Finally, I should make a remark on the nature of souls, bodies, and babies. The Catholic Church’s beliefs on the soul have traditionally *not* been of the “ghost in the machine” sort. Rather, the classical Thomist position is not that a person is a soul who has a body, but that a person is a unity of soul and body. If you take a strongly Thomist position on the psychosomatic unity of the human being, then you don’t have the question of when an embryo is “ensouled,” since the soul is created as a part of the body. If there were still Origenists, I suspect that they would not be terribly worried about abortion since they believed in the pre-existence of souls.
While it’s easy to poo-poo these questions with, “Fuck, I sure am smarter than Christians!”, if you believe that God (and more specifically the Holy Trinity) there are some real issues that need to be addressed.
No offense, Alsis38, but I think you are still failing to understand the whole concept of an analogy.
Mr. Ampersand:
Jack, since you’re using hypothetical examples, surely you must agree that it’s not unfair to ask a pro-lifer which they’d rescue from a burning building, a petri dish with 10 seven-day embryos (for purposes of the example, assume a nearby building with all technology needed to keep rescued embryos alive) and a three-year-old child.
I’d save the 3 year old child. Why? The child can feel pain. The child has developed relationships and will be missed. You know the reasons.
But that does NOT mean that the embryos are so utterly worthless that it is ethical to use them for human experimentation, to take one example that is very much salient in the news.
As for naturally killed, non-implanted embryos, since so much (although not all) objection to abortion is rooting in religion, I think it’s fair to point out absurd results of assuming that embryos have souls and are in all ways the moral equals of three-year-olds. If every embryo death is the equivalent of the tragedy of a three-year-old dying, then why did God design the human birth mechanism to produce 40%-70% tragedy?
You might as well ask why we prohibit any form of murder, given that 100% of us die eventually. That sort of reasoning doesn’t get us anywhere. Yes, people die of natural causes. That says nothing about the validity of deliberate killing.
And I’d also focus on that phrase “moral equals.” Who says that embryos have to be the complete moral equals of three-year-olds in order for us to say that there is something highly unethical about the deliberate cultivation of human beings for the sole purpose of experimentation on their bodies?
Amanda: By your reckoning, children who die on accident don’t get funerals, then.
This is even more wildly missing the point than Alsis38 above. I never said that accidental deaths are not sad and mournful. But sad and mournful is not the same as a grievous moral wrong. From the pro-lifers’ point of view, deliberate killing is a grievous moral wrong, and what’s more, it is actually defended and rooted in constitutional law thanks to the Supreme Court’s innovations. It should be no surprise that from the pro-life point of view, this grievous moral wrong deserves infinitely more attention than an unknown number of undetected and non-deliberate embryonic deaths.
It’s an entirely fair question. I’ll take a crack at it.
I rescue the three-year old child. She is an actual, fully-realized, human being. Preserving her life is more critical than preserving the lives of the embryos. It’s a hard, and sometimes contradictory, moral calculus. See Whitman for the answer to that one. All human life has value; circumstance usually requires us to prioritize one over the other, but they’re all valuable. I can feed my baby girl, or I can feed 10 poor Central American children; I cannot do both; I choose to feed my baby girl, and as many of the Central Americans as I can swing (one, at the moment).
Moral decisionmaking usually involves some sort of prioritization, allocation, or other economic/pseudo-economic reasoning. The world of the ideal is inhabited only by philosophers; most of us have mud on our boots and have to make finite choices from a list of often unpalatable alternatives. Maybe my decision would be different if it was a thousand embryos, or a million; maybe it would be the same regardless of how many embryos if the three year old in question was my own child.
The pro-life and pro-choice positions, it seems to me, can be summed up with a variant of your thought experiment. An embryo has implanted itself in a woman’s uterus and is on track to develop into a healthy human being. Everyone outside of the lunatic its-not-a-baby-its-not-its-not fringe, and the every-sperm-is-sacred fringe on the other side, agrees that there are two sets of competing rights. The child has a right to live, and the mother has a right to control her own body. Whose right is more important, the embryo’s or the complete human’s?
Which of these rights you prioritize higher seems to pretty much define where you fall on the pro-life/pro-choice axis.
Jack V., you didn’t answer my question. I asked why you do not protest the destruction of thousands of embryos done by fertility clinics. Those “deaths” are deliberate, not accidental. How is that different from abortion? (Be careful with your answer, especially if you oppose emergency contraception).
Thanks, fromaway, for your comments.
Cancer kills millions of people. We don’t know exactly what causes cancer or how to prevent it, and we have many doctors and scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to addressing those questions. We don’t know how to predict earthquakes, but scientists and engineers study the problem. There are many examples of massively destructive natural events, outside of human control, that we earnestly seek to bring under control.
Did anyone say that we should ignore the victims of the recent tsunami in southeast Asia, because the genocide in Sudan was more important? Does anyone actually call for us to ignore massive numbers of deaths, just because the cause of those deaths is a natural cause, that we don’t know how to prevent?
How many tens or hundreds of millions of embryos are spontaneously aborted every year? Is there anyone calling for research into how to save them?
This is the point that keeps getting ducked. No one actually cares about those spontaneous abortions. No one *really* believes a fertilized ovum is a human being. If anyone did, they’d be demanding we find ways to save them.
It’s not about embryos and fetuses at all. It’s about denying women their freedom to control their own bodies and their own lives.
I absolutely oppose in vitro fertilization, if that’s what you’re asking, to the extent that such activities involve the deliberate creation and then destruction of human life. Indeed, I’m more against in vitro than against abortion. With abortion, you can at least make the argument that someone else’s bodily rights are involved too. That isn’t the case with in vitro. The embryos that are created and then destroyed aren’t in anyone’s body. The clinics are just making a business decision.
While I’m at it, I’ll expand upon my earlier analogy involving animals. (NOTE: This is an analogy. Don’t be confused.)
I’ll bet there are a trillion ways that various animals of every species die naturally. Animals are constantly eating each other: Insects get eaten by birds, birds get eaten by cats, zebras get eaten by lions, etc., etc. Embryos probably die naturally. Animals get diseases of various sorts. A deer falls off a cliff and dies. An armadillo or a squirrel gets run over on the road.
Now, here’s an argument that is exactly the equivalent of the anti-pro-life argument made in Mr. Ampersand’s original post: “Who are you to pretend that you care about the killing of endangered species? If you really cared, you recognize that it is a much greater problem that endangered rodents, for example, get eaten by birds every day. Why aren’t you out there trying to train all the world’s animals to be herbivores? Why aren’t you erecting steel barriers along every road in America so that squirrels never get run over? Who are you to say that this is all just part of nature and that no one knows how to train animals to be herbivores? You’re just a stinking hypocrite, and you have no right to oppose me when I support a constitutional right to kill any and all endangered species that appear on someone’s property.”
Does that sound like a convincing argument? Of course not. People have every right to be against DELIBERATE KILLING of endangered species without being tarred and feathered for failing in the supposed duty to prevent all other forms of animal deaths. Same here.
Jack, you’re using the same metaphor without EVER answering the question:
being accidental does not place it outside the realm of human influance. and if your stated goal is to minimize the harm and destruction, willfully ignoring the suffering because it isn’t voluntary is hypocritical.
Jack, thanks for responding. I realize you personally can’t control the pro-life movement. But it does bother me that they (in general) are silent about fertility treatments. Bush, in particular, SUPPORTS in vitro. That doesn’t make sense to me. This inconsistency makes me feel like *some* pro-lifers only want to control women; they don’t honestly care about life or potential life. Their stance on birth control also makes me feel this way.
I’m pro-choice now, but I used to be very, very anti-choice. I’m still not 100% comfortable with abortion on demand, but like Amp has said, banning it isn’t the way to prevent it. For me, I also draw a distinction between an embryo and a fetus. It’s hard for me to defend aborting a fetus, because it is so much more developed and has person-like qualities. But that’s my personal view; I’m not saying that should be the law. And most abortions actually occur in the embryonic stage. An embryo, to me, is not yet a person.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s views with my post. I think we’ve all decided where we stand. I’m just saying I can respect pro-lifers as long as they’re consistent and actually care about what they think is life, rather than just trying to control women.
Robert, you must feel besieged, with all the ‘lunatic fringers’ posting here — seems like hardly any of us think of brainless embryos as people with rights of their own. If you meant ’embryos that show signs of brain activity’, you may want to make that clear in the future.
Karpad — you say, your stated goal is to minimize the harm and destruction
That’s where you go wrong, right at the beginning. The point here is to determine whether pro-lifers are being inconsistent from their own point of view. Now, you characterize their whole position as “to minimize the harm.” But pro-lifers are much more likely to characterize their underlying aim as not merely minimizing all harm to all people, but minimizing a particular kind of deliberate harm that strikes them as particularly cruel, especially given that it is protected by law. Conversely, there is nothing in their own underlying beliefs that requires them to seek the impossible goal of “minimizing all harm” to human beings from any cause.
Same for my example. An anti-enviromentalist could just as easily say, “Hey, if your goal is to minimize the harm to animals, you should be out there training all animals to live as herbivores.” That’s just silly: Nobody knows how to train all animals to live as herbivores, and it is much more important (from the environmentalist view) to do something that CAN be done, i.e., prevent the deliberate killing of endangered species.
Everyone outside of the lunatic its-not-a-baby-its-not-its-not fringe, and the every-sperm-is-sacred fringe on the other side, agrees that there are two sets of competing rights. The child has a right to live, and the mother has a right to control her own body. Whose right is more important, the embryo’s or the complete human’s?
Outside of your insulting language, you have hit on a truth here. A lot of people are “pro-life” when it’s someone else who is being forced to bear an unwanted child, but if it’s themselves, all of a sudden the standard of when a woman should have to bear the “consequences” of sex become a lot slacker.
Amanda, you are exactly right. I also feel the same way about some of those “I’m sorry” people. Sure, some of them may honestly regret their decision and would change it if they could. However, many of them know it’s the easy way out (to say that they now regret it and abortion should be illegal). These people forget just how desperate they were at the time. Plus, they know they can’t go back and change the past. Therefore, they’ll never have to PROVE that they’re truly sorry. It’s pretty easy to put themselves on the moral high ground that way. I mean, they already had their abortions; screw the rest of the “sinners”!
You know, I bet most of them would make the same decision again. It’s pretty easy to say that you wouldn’t when you don’t have to struggle raising a kid for 18 years and deal with all the public shame that comes with being a young unwed mother.
Jack, any honest use of the word “pro-life” would mean “to be in favor of life and living things” or, in other words, to minimize harm.
It doesn’t mean “prevent ANY suffering of any kind” it means, when something is within your power, you prevent it.
If an enviromentalist running a wildlife preserve will typically provide raw meat for the local carnavores, because the enclosed habitat can’t support a healthy population of them.
If you have a habitat, you don’t scatter landmines for the animals to trip, but you also make sure the wolves don’t kill off all the deer to eat.
again, minimize does not mean permenantly end and remove suffering. it means doing what is within your power to prevent the damage, deliberate or not.
Found an interesting discussion of this topic here:
http://jeffreylloyd.blogs.com/weblog/2004/12/what_the_church.html
Check out this part in particular, quoting the great Augustine:
In this context, St. Augustine speaks about children dying without baptism and thinks that hell is their destiny, saying that they are subject to the flames of hell, although adding that they are “very mitigated flames.”
I love the idea of “very mitigated flames.”
C.S. Lewis did talk about how for certain people, Hell might be a quite congenial place, and they might find an eternity of happiness there (albeit at a level far less than they would have as a spirit in conformance to the will of God.)
Maybe Augustine had a similar vision for hell-bound infants; they’re happy enough that we don’t need to feel badly for them, and they don’t know that they missed out on something much better, so it’s all good.
Robert,
Where did C.S.Lewis say that some people would find an eternity of happiness in Hell? The only comment of his that I know of on the subject of happiness in Hell is this from ‘The Problem of Pain’:
“It is only to the damned that their fate could ever seem less than unendurable….Even if it were possible that the experience (if it can be called experience) of the lost contained no pain and much pleasure, still, that black pleasure would be such as to send any soul, not already damned, flying to its prayers in nightmare terror.”
That certainly does not sound like an eternity of happiness.
Augustine’s opinion on the fate of unbaptised babies was that they went to Hell where they suffered physical pain (but only mild physical pain) for ever. The view that they experienced perfect natural happiness in Limbo and were unaware of what they were missing is a later view, thought up by theologians who could not bear Augustine’s notion.
I have yet to come across any Catholic who is honest about the Church’s teaching on the fate of unbaptised babies. They will say, like Andrew Reeves above, that Limbo was an idea thought up by medieval theologians and that it was never official Church teaching. They will not add that it was thought up to keep unbaptised babies out of Hell, which was seen as the only alternative. The Catholic Church is quietly dropping the notion of Limbo now and suggesting that unbaptised babies go to Heaven. They do not tell people that the teaching of the Church from earliest times was that unbaptised babies could not go to Heaven. If there is no Limbo they must end up in Hell.
Perhaps not from your point of view, but as Lewis notes, it is the undamned who would find it horrific, not the damned. And please note the distinction between “might” and “would”.
You know Jack, there have been a lot of people who have responded to your hypotheticals. In each case you’ve demeaningly said the commenter missed the point. But for the life of me I don’t see the point you’re making. Before insulting those who have responded to you, have you considered that maybe the problem is that your failing to communicate what you mean, not a deliberate misreading on the part of apparently every single other commenter here?
If the religious stance is that there is a “psychosomatic unity” of soul and body, and not that the soul was pre-existent, why must the soul come into existence at the fusion of egg and sperm, rather than at some time when the new organism has a high enough level of neural development to permit consciousness? Can one have a soul without a cerebral cortex?
Katherine, from what I know of C.S. Lewis, I suspect he defines Hell as total separation from God. By (his) assumption, the damned do not want to feel the presence of God.
NancyP, you hit the nail on the head. Well, one might say ‘any brain activity’ instead of ‘a cerebral cortex’, but certainly the available evidence links “soul” with the brain. If the Bible said it appeared before brain development then we might have a problem, but in fact it says nothing of the kind.
Jack: It should be no surprise that from the pro-life point of view, this grievous moral wrong deserves infinitely more attention than an unknown number of undetected and non-deliberate embryonic deaths.
If you mean your morality places more importance on punishing the guilty than on protecting the innocent, we may have nothing further to discuss. If you mean that pro-lifers see those other deaths as part of God’s plan, well, that would seem perfectly logical coming from a Christian Scientist. Otherwise, it seems a tad inconsistent. Incidentally, my own environmentalism has more to do with protecting humans than with the goal you suggest.
Hugo: I love the idea of “very mitigated flames.”?
^_^
Raznor — if you can’t understand the topic of discussion, why admit it? A compulsion to be self-effacing?
Seriously, the original quote said that prolifers are inconsistent, because they are more interested in doing something about abortion than about somehow preventing all forms of embryonic death, even though no one knows how to do the latter. Environmentalists are more interested in doing something about people who kill endangered species than about somehow preventing all species from ever dying naturally (just as with human embryos, no one knows how to do the latter). In both cases, preventing deliberate killing is more important as a moral goal than pretending to be interested in preventing all death (which isn’t even conceivably possible). That should be perfectly simple and easy to understand.
Omar:
If you mean your morality places more importance on punishing the guilty than on protecting the innocent, we may have nothing further to discuss.
No. I’m saying that my “morality” places more importance on preventing gross moral wrongs than on preventing accidents that no one knows how to prevent anyway. Is that really so hard to understand?
“Environmentalists are more interested in doing something about people who kill endangered species than about somehow preventing all species from ever dying naturally”
How does a species “die naturally” if it isn’t already endangered in the first place? The natural deaths of individual *members* of a species is not the same as the death of the entire species, because (in the usual course of events) natural deaths are mostly replaced by the natural births, unless there has been some unnatural intervention.
How does a species “die naturally”? if it isn’t already endangered in the first place?
Meteors. Plagues. Geological events of unfortunate magnitude. Celine Dion.
One of the last big extinctions, I forget the name of it, something like a quarter of the species on the planet snuffed it more or less overnight. Some larger groupings of animal lost more than 90% of their species.
It’s not a safe place we live on. Armageddon was a stupid (but fun) movie with an entirely reasonable premise. Incoming! Pfft. No more monkey people!
The suggestion that heaven would fill up with zygotes is provocative, especially since only 144,000 people will go to heaven, total. See Revelations, chaps. 7 and 14; http://www.watchtower.org/library/w/2000/10/1/article_02.htm . I don’t think you’d be able to organize much of a card game up there!
(To be fair, the Jehovah’s Witnesses appear to believe that only 144,000 REALLY special – and sentient – people go to heaven, but that the rest of the godly live on a renovated Earth. Not a bad consolation prize, especially compared to hell and purgatory. But it does leave questions about how exactly a zygote would live on Earth. Ah, the wonders of divine mystery….)
Ampersand, I think you may be making a scientific error here. I’m not 100% confident, but am nonetheless pretty sure, that the embryos who fail to implant generally have something wrong with them (or the mother’s body does, and if you think women who can’t get healthy embryos to implant aren’t pretty $@#! upset, you need to spend more time talking to thirtysomething females). Likewise, most miscarried fetuses generally lack the genetic ability to turn into people, unlike implented, healthy fetuses that are aborted.
I agree with you that the pro-life intuitions about abortion are not what they proclaim–if they were, pro-lifers would want women who have abortions to be tried for murder, which most of them don’t. On the other hand, pro-choice intuitions about abortions aren’t what they proclaim either. Quick: you’re in a burning clinic, and you can save a petri dish full of embryos, or your car. Which do you choose? Most people would agree that the moral choice would be to save the embryos, even though it takes more time, effort, and government red tape to buy a car in this country than it does to get an abortion.
Jane:
According to the article I linked to, “About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.”
I would save the embryo dish, if it were a fertility clinic. It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to get embryos alive in a dish than it is to buy a car, from what I understand – and that, not “an abortion,” is the relevant and logical comparison.
What I am really rescuing in that case, though, is the enormous effort that hopeful parents have put into getting viable embryos ready for implantation, and their hopes bound up in the embryos.
Yeah but what if you were in a burning fertility clinic and you had a choice between saving your car or this awesome new computer? What then? Huh?
Jane Galt said:
“Quick: you’re in a burning clinic, and you can save a petri dish full of embryos, or your car. Which do you choose? Most people would agree that the moral choice would be to save the embryos, even though it takes more time, effort, and government red tape to buy a car in this country than it does to get an abortion. ”
What a charming universe you must live in. This is obviously a clash of opinions, but from my life experiences I seriously doubt that the vast majority of non-zealot people would even think about embryos when it comes to choosing what to leave a burning building with, especially when a major investment like a car can be safely rescued. They probably won’t lose a single night sleep over embryos either, unless you remind them that they’re supposed to feel guilty for some unfathomable reason.
Face it, average people naturally value embryos less, especially those that are not in a woman’s body.
And come to think about it, would the car be in the lab, or are we keeping embryos in the parking lot? But then I guess it’s no less plausible than keeping a nursery in a fertility clinic . . .
Petri dish full of embryos or my car? My car, absolutely. I’ve worked for it *and* it’s a little hard to put some distance between myelf and the blazing building without it. It’d never even cross my mind to transfer the embryos to a warm and sloppy death no matter whose they were or why they were in a Petri dish, not even if they were my own and I’d been told this was my last chance to get pregnant. I’d sooner save a mouse than those embryos.
Next strange question?
[PS to Ampersand: Thanks for making the spamblocker thing more obvious. Lost a post the other day due to not understanding why I had to add the numbers.]
I thought unbaptised people had to DO the Limbo?!?!
Since that is hard for a bunch of cells, I would say that would be unfair at its base, and so God would not have that happen. If so, then none of the other Catholic dogma is correct, and if so, then no God exists. End of Story.
Now, that doesn’t rule out that God might still be Jewish or Protestant –
This will help during the upcoming debate on which of the 6 versions of the Ten Commandments are we going to have in our Constitution?
I’ve been raising these issues at least since last year when I came across the hilarious site “mourning” the death of preconceived babies (unfertilized eggs). A few years ago, I suggested to the Christopher Reeve Foundation that anti-choicers would sanctimoniously rescue from a burning building petri dishes over all kinds of already born people. Last fall, an article on funeral services for aborted fetuses prompted me to call pro- and anti-choice people, demanding to know why anti-choice people don’t also hold baptisms, last rites and funeral masses for their own used napkins which might contain ejected embryos. I suggested anti-choice women wear special underwear that would help retrieve and preserve embryos for freezing and reimplantation. Pro-choicers chuckled with glee and anti-choicers exploded with fury. You know priests would rebel if they had to bless smelly, bloody pads! Such tasks would remind them why they rejected women and prefer already born altar boys! I have over the years also pestered anti-choice Catholic leaders on why the Church hasn’t banned coffee, alcohol, tobacco, ginger, and 450 other plants known to induce miscarriages. They ballistically refused to answer. Imagine hanging an abortion sign on the rectory coffee pot! Gynecology and Church history provide hidden answers in such gems as the discarded Catholic bans of sex on most days of the week and with post-menopausal wives. Women were told all birth defects were caused by sacriligious sex on Sundays. Moreover, Christ never condemned the Jerusalem RU-486-like weed harvested by his women followers because it spared them the humiliation of divorce for smelly childbirth fistula incontinence. Why hasn’t it occurred to anyone that the point of heretic birth control bans was to keep psuedo-celibate pedophiles supplied with fresh altar boys and Newt Gingriches supplied with fresh trophy wives? Bored husbands could skirt Christ’s divorce ban by counting on childbirth widowerhood. Also, anti-choicers need to be reminded that Human Vitae was written by a bonafide Nazi war criminal–Paul VI who, as Pius XII’s undersecretary of state, knowingly funded the gruesome Nazi Catholic Croatian slaughter of 500,000 Christian Serb “abortionists.” “Pro-lifers” don’t merely deliberately continue to serve and gulp abortificant drinks, they also support phony wars for Halliburton profit, and use fetuses instead of fists to kill unwanted wives. When did an adulterous Randall Terry or pedophile priest ever go to jail for the childbirth death of a mother? Why do only doctors get sued or jailed when mothers die? Why not also the fathers and clergy who coerce killer conceptions? My best friend was gruesomely killed by an estrogen-sensitive face cancer that turned lethal with pregnancy. Her husband was warned pregnancy would do this but he bullied her anyway. He should be in jail. Let’s save the already born and quit killing mothers on behalf of pedophiles and playboy Randall Terrys.
Just for a little background information, (much of which is still debated in the Church) the Bible speaks clearly in the Old Testament Psalms about the belief of God’s knowledge of and the sanctity of the unborn. These verses from a very beautiful 139th Psalm rich with imagery, speak to this belief that predates Christianity by many hundreds of years. (This belief is shared by Abrahamic religions.)
13 For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
Clearly in this belief life is not only present from the beginning, but the person of God is involved in the process also. Life is only begotten from life; it is passed from the living to the living. If death interrupts the process prior to passing it on, then it ceases to exist here in the world. It is this understanding that many believers find supportive in that it is not the number of cells or the complexity of the being at the moment, but that one is alive and innately human from the conception of the first person God filled with the Holy Spirit, and that this gift of life is the ongoing fulfillment of that original act of Creation. This is one reason many people of these faiths find it distressing.
Secondly, many believers see that an infant feeding from a mothers’ breast is as dependant on the support as one in the womb. Either one will depend solely on support for a long time or the child will surly perish. (Romulus and Remus accepted.) This is another reasoning that troubles many of faith.
The ideas of when a being returns to the creator or some other place are mostly derived from theological assumptions, and are often legalistic. (Much like many of the ideas of Satan are derived from Milton and not the Bible.) In many doctrines, the innocent are covered by Prevenient Grace that has nothing to do with age, but accountability. If one unknowingly “sins” than the Grace of God covers for that sin; Grace preceeds it. This concept is very old. One example is of City’s of Refuge. In Old Testament time’s people guilty of manslaughter could go live in cities that allowed for their living even after having killed another member of the community by accident. (The law called for the equal penalty for murder.) These are allowances for accidental death as opposed to homicide. Intentionality in this sense does count, so purposefully killing a living embryo is not the same as the totally unknown and uncontrolled loss of un-implanted embryos. Blessings.
The New Revised Standard Version, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers) 1989.
There’s no way I can overlook this statement by Robert.
“Whose right is more important, the embryo’s or the complete human’s?
Which of these rights you prioritize higher seems to pretty much define where you fall on the pro-life/pro-choice axis.
”
Thanks for spelling it out so clearly. In order to adhere to the pro-life position, you have to prioritise the rights of the embryo over the rights of the complete human woman. It does not seem very surprising that so many women (and men who actually care about women) find this position deeply disturbing.
This also illustrates why I personally think that any woman who marries a pro-life man is insane, or at least deeply psychologically disturbed. Why on earth would any woman choose to marry (or live with, or date) a man who cares less about her than he does about an embryo? Who considers her rights to be less important?
Jack,
I bet that all of the zoologists and wildlife veterinarians and researchers involved in breeding programs and habitat rehabilitation programs will be surprised to find out that they only ever concern themselves with the deliberate killing of endangered species. Really? While poaching and other forms of deliberate killing are important from an environmental activist perspective, the scientific community of environmentalists (which is hardly a fringe community) devotes entire careers and tremendous amounts of resources precisely to identify and combat other, non-deliberate variables that can cause or continue a species’ endangered status. But if you had told them that no one cares about that stuff, I’m sure they would never have wasted the effort that’s allowing cheetahs and bald eagles to breed more successfully.
Many of those factors that create an endangered status fall somewhere (to borrow Robert’s imagery) along an axis of “deliberately caused” and “natural”. But where they fall cannot be known without research and investigation (see: bald eagles and DDT, pandas and infertility). It’s probably safe to imagine that the loss of embryos in human couples falls somewhere on that axis as well. But it isn’t a question of our being unable to know that; it’s a question of people not really thinking that the loss of millions of embryos is a very big deal.
Why does one assume that the potential mother either has rights or the baby has rights? (Exclusively) Isn’t it possible that both have rights? Wouldn’t the better path be to see to it that life decisions are predicated on doing the least harm, and respect for all living things? The potential Mother, (Father also for that matter) obviously has rights and responsibilities. The unborn have rights also, and as yet are at the mercy of those that they are given to. How can we best go about turning the dialog to where both have a place in the discussion and an ethical construct made to where all life has value, and the decision making processes take each into account? Blessings.
How can we best go about turning the dialog to where both have a place in the discussion and an ethical construct made to where all life has value, and the decision making processes take each into account?
Excluding from the dialog the people on both extremes – who believe that women have no rights, or who believe that the unborn have no rights. Neither of those groups are able to contribute to a dialog that goes in the direction you are seeking.
Well, Rock, I can’t speak for every pro-choicer here. However, since I have zero interest in being a mother, my personal opinion is that I would do the least harm to society by not bearing children. As for maintaining respect for all living things, I can’t personally imagine why a woman raising a child she has no feelings for would benefit either society or the planet. In fact, I think that Americans consume way too many of the world’s resources, and that from an environmental perspective as well as a social one, it’s a good thing if I don’t reproduce. YMMV.
Robert,
That is a very well stated perspective; I am apt to agree with you.
Alsis39,
I fail to see the connection to the US consuming too much and you having a baby. Indonesia, China, and India have many hundreds of millions more children and consume lower amounts of goods per capita, so it cannot simply be a function of population, there are many other factors. (I agree our stewardship and consumption of world resources over all is shameful simply because of our wealth; why should wealth alone be the measure of who eats and who starves? Food is a right for all people like air and water… Sorry, found one of my soap boxes.)
Having said that I appreciate your not wanting to have a child and how that would be a negative for the person being raised by an unwilling parent. However that does not provide the recognition of basic human rights we are asking for. I am not for removing the option for people to have abortion. I am for changing the discussions foundation to where the new life is thought of at the level of those conceiving it. It is my belief that if we valued these people as ourselves we would be more careful of our actions. We would educate better. Our laws would change to protect women and children more (I hope), men would have to be more accountable. Options that are more just to those who find themselves pregnant will be more compassionate and supportive. Perhaps if you knew that you could be supported through your accidental pregnancy, with no discrimination, and security for you through delivery would motivate you to adoption instead? Maybe not, but it might for some. (It might bring an end to adoption as a business, wouldn’t that be nice?)
If we valued all lifes as much as we do ourselves, perhaps we wouldn’t throw it away in wars, and violence and self abuse? We can change the way we do all this business, simply by changing the way we value and see what life is. For me it is the rarest of creations in the universe, it is truly exceptional; however the seeming commonness of it makes it appear cheap. If we raise the value, perhaps we might cherish and protect all people more. Blessings.
If we valued all lifes as much as we do ourselves, perhaps we wouldn’t throw it away in wars, and violence and self abuse? We can change the way we do all this business, simply by changing the way we value and see what life is. For me it is the rarest of creations in the universe, it is truly exceptional; however the seeming commonness of it makes it appear cheap. If we raise the value, perhaps we might cherish and protect all people more.
I hate agreeing with hippies. Stupid Jesus, with his big tent.
Thanks Robert,
I did drive a red VW as a younger person with surfboard racks, beads, and an old army coat. Ironically I am now in a very conservative, Evangelical, Church. (There are a few progressive types, but not many.) We guess we were called to this “big tent” to help give some balance.
I enjoy your wit and perspectives. Blessings.