Author’s Note: This post at Feministe–about the Catholic Church’s excommunication of the mother of a nine-year-old girl who became pregnant with twins, apparently after having been raped by her step-father, and the doctors who performed the abortion that ended the girl’s pregnancy–has been roiling me since I read it. It did, though, put me in mind of a post of my own, “Know Thine Enemy: Fetal Personhood as Metaphorical Thinking,” that seems relevant to me in thinking about the religious (implicit and explicit) opposition to legalized abortion. I want to say up front something that I also say very late in the post, i.e. that I am aware that there are progressive Catholics working very hard and with real integrity against the sexism and misogyny in the Church, and my purpose in this piece is not to trash Catholics or Catholicism. Rather, I am trying to tease out one strand of thinking that seems to me quite present in much anti-abortion thinking and activism, as it relates to Christianity. I posted this originally in 2006 and so some of the legislative news that it refers to is dated. I have not edited the piece much, however–except to correct a confusion in the original between the immaculate conception and the virgin birth (and I hope I got it right this time)–because, while the introduction is long, I think it is still important to work through before getting to my main argument.
I have wanted to write about this for a while, now, ever since I read through the thread called (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion over at Alas. Since then, though, a number of things have happened: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case concerning so-called “partial-birth abortions,” South Dakota has passed the most restrictive law in the country against abortion, Utah has a proposed law that would eliminate incest exceptions in its parental notification law, and I have been in another conversation, What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice, on Alas, the initial post of which concerned a common strategy used by people who are anti-choice to try to silence those of us who are pro-choice: what would have happened if your mother had chosen to have an abortion instead of giving birth to you?
At one point the thread became a conversation about whether the virgin birth was an instance of divine rape or not (start reading here). This was relevant because it went to the question of what it means for women to have real choice in terms of pregnancy and childbirth—which also means in terms of when and whether and under what conditions to have sex—and, though I don’t remember that this point was brought out explicitly, to the question of what we model our understanding of women’s reproductive choice on. (I have italicized this because it will become important later on, towards the end of what I want to say.) What I want to do here is to try to tie all these various things together under the title I have given this post because I think it goes to the heart of understanding a rarely articulated aspect of what is at stake in the anti-choice position, whether it is articulated in explicitly religious terms or not, and because, under the general strategy of “know thine enemy,” I think this is an important understanding to reach. It’s going to take a while, and I’m going to have to make a number of leaps, to get where I want to go in this, so I hope you will bear with me.
The (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion thread concerns the question of how most effectively to reduce the number of abortions, by passing laws which permit the practice or those which restrict it. Inevitably, however, the discussion devolved into one about sexual morality, the question of whether and how to teach abstinence as part of sex education, the differences between religious and other approaches to sexual morality and so on. The simple fact that the discussion evolved in this way, motivated largely by two contributors RonF and gengwall, at least one of whom (gengwall) is unambiguously anti-abortion, demonstrates that there is a great deal more at stake for the anti-abortion position than simply whether or not abortion is legal. One can assume, I think, that even if abortion were rendered completely unnecessary starting tomorrow, the debate would then shift quite seamlessly and without losing any of its heat, to questions of sexual morality, because on this level the debate is not only about whether abortion ends pregnancies or murders unborn children, it is also, and in some ways primarily, about whether the sex that resulted in those pregnancies happened under “legitimate” and “morally approvable” circumstances.
The part of this thread that really caught my eye, however, was when people started talking about the definition of personhood. As part of that discussion, gengwall wrote the following (towards the end of the comment):
As far as the personhod argument in general, it has nothing to do with patriarchy either. It has everything to do with biology. I’m afraid you are stuck with this one as the objective biological facts don’t change depending on which country you go to.
and he offered these dictionary definitions as a thumbnail sketch of his overall position:
- Person – A Living (biological state) Human (biological classification). The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
- Human – A member of the genus Homo and especially of the species H. sapiens. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Others in the conversation take on gengwall’s use of the dictionary and other aspects of his argument that are troubling, intellectually and otherwise (see comments 61, 63, 64, 71; I also should point out that the parenthetical comments in the definition of “person” are his), and so I am not going to repeat what they have said. What interests me is the way in which gengwall’s definition of the fetus fits the description of metaphorical thinking in George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, which I happen to be teaching in freshman English this semester. Basically, Lakoff and Johnson argue that we give structure to the world through metaphor, in terms of both understanding and experience. They point out, for example, that we understand argument in terms of war. Consider these expressions:
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms are right on target.
I demolished his argument. (4)
Lakoff and Johnson then point out, however, that we don’t just talk about argument like war; we actually experience it that way. Arguments, like wars for example, are won or lost; the people on either side of an argument behave in some ways as if they are at war, taking different lines of attack, for example, or surrendering some points in the hopes of gaining others that will lead to victory. To make this point by way of contrast, Lakoff and Johnson ask us to
imagine a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, the participantsare seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)
The next point from Metaphors We Live By that is relevant to the question of fetal personhood is the way that metaphorical thinking, precisely because it “allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another (e.g., comprehending an aspect of arguing in terms of battle), will necessarily hide other aspects of that concept.” Lakoff and Johnson continue:
In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […] a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent’s position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the cooperative aspects of arguing. Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity [especially in an individualistic, capitalist society like the US], in an effort at mutual understanding. (10)
So, let’s return to gengwall’s definition fo the fetus as a person, which was also, apparently, the definition endorsed by the South Dakota legislature when it passed what the Washington Post and just about every other paper I looked at called “the nation’s most far-reaching ban on abortion.” Here are the relevant section of the law:
Section 1. The Legislature finds that the State of South Dakota has a compelling and paramount interest in the preservation and protection of all human life and finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the South Dakota Bill of Rights applies equally to born and unborn human beings.
Section 2. The Legislature finds that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm. The Legislature finds that the explosion of knowledge derived from new recombinant DNA technologies over the past twenty-five years has reinforced the validity of the finding of this scientific fact.
There is a lot that one can say about this law, and most of it has probably been said already. The Washington Post counts 97 blogs that have had something say about its article (here are a few worth reading that I didn’t find on the Post’s list), and I have no doubt there are lots more bloggers, both for and against the measure, who have either posted since I began writing this or will post in the near future. What I want to point out is that to call a fetus or zygote or an embryo a human being, a person, an entity identical in its essence to you sitting here reading this or me as I sit (sat) writing it is to engage not in scientific analysis, but rather in precisely the kind of metaphorical thinking that Lakoff and Johnson’s book is about: Because to decide that “the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm” (as if it could be fertilized by female sperm?) is to decide that there is a basis of comparison by which something that is radically not like me or you is, in fact, just like me or you.
According to those who support the South Dakota bill, in other words, if you strip away each and every one of the characterstics that make up someone’s humanity/personhood, at least as humanity/personhood has conventionally been understood, with all its messy character traits, for example, (this is what Lakoff and Johnson mean when they say that metaphorical thinking “can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor), you are still left with a set of objective biological traits that make whoever possesses them a person. These traits, as I understand the argument, boil down to the fact that a zygote, from the moment of conception onward, is “genetically whole,” which is not the term gengwall and others would use, but it’s my catchphrase for the notion that the moment a zygote forms, it possesses all the DNA it needs not only to be recognizably human at any stage of its development, but also to guide its development into a human being ready to be born.
There are a number of important things to point out about this very frightening argument: For starters, it dresses up the old biology-is-destiny argument in some very fancy, shmancy new clothes. After all, if a zygote is already a fully fledged member of the human race, which means it possesses an inalienable right-to-life, and if a woman’s body is the only place where that particular human being can grow, then the fact of a woman’s body, not her desires or her choice, is the determining factor of her fate if she becomes pregnant. There is, of course, a long tradition of this kind of thinking running all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who believed in the one-seed theory of reproduction. According to this theory, men ejaculated tiny little people—I think the Greeks called them homonculii, but I am not sure—and when a woman became pregnant, it meant that her womb was warm and moist enough (the Greeks were believers in the four humors) for one of these tiny little people to lodge itself there and begin the process of growing into the child that would be born.
The other old saw touched on by this reduction of our humanity to the genetic material of which we are made is the mind-body (or body/soul) split. It used to be that what made us human, what separated us from “the animals of the forest,” to use an old-fashioned expression to express an old-fashioned idea, was our minds and/or our souls. It was because we could think rationally and/or because we were capable of spiritual awareness, that we were better than dogs and cats, lions and bears, fireflies and cockroaches. To this way of thinking, our bodies were shells we inhabited, and we used them well or not well, morally and ethically or immorally and unethically, and then left them behind when we died. If, however, our humanity inheres in the material fact of our bodies, then neither the rational mind nor the soul can play the role it once did in the spirit-flesh duality. The humanity of the body must be able to make its claims as well, and here is where I think the question of whether Mary was raped by the Holy Spirit and what it means for her to have conceived a child with the god of the Christian Bible becomes important.
Here are the relevant verses from Luke:
26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
Rather than start with the question of whether Mary consented or could have meaningfully consented to bear God’s child, given the disparity of power between them, I want to start by thinking about the nature of the fetus that grew in her body. I know that there is some difference of opinion, and even controversy, between and among the various Christian denominations over whether Jesus was human or divine or both, whether he was conscious of his dual status (if it was dual), or of his divine status (if he was divine), but this is an internal debate that is not relevant here. What is relevant is that the source of this debate, as far as I know (I am not Christian) is the very anxiety producing fact—for people who believe in a disembodied god—that the male half of the genetic material which produced Jesus had to have come from God’s body or it was a piece of human DNA divinely manufactured inside Mary’s womb; in either case, the material itself, coming directly from God, is divine in a way that, say, my own sperm, which is at least once removed from God, cannot be. In other words, it is not simply the soul that entered the zygote-that-would-become-Jesus at the moment of conception that made the zygote holy; the zygote itself, in its material essence, was holy too.
Replace “God’s touch” with DNA and you have the rationale for life-begins-at-conception by which the South Dakota legislature justified its anti-abortion measure. The DNA, in other words, is a metaphor for inviolate divinity, which means that every normal conception that takes place is, in fact, a metaphor for the conception of Jesus, and every woman who becomes pregnant is a metaphor for Mary pregnant with Jesus, and every act of heterosexual intercourse is a metaphor for the act by which God entered Mary, and every man who engages in heterosexual intercourse is therefore a metaphor for God, and, most importantly, every conceived child, from the moment of conception through the rest of its life, is a metaphor for Jesus himself.
Now, play this out a little further. If I, in my body, in my desire for children, am somehow a metaphor for God of the Christian Bible and his desire for a child, then, metaphorically speaking, I have the same right to conceive that child as God did with Mary. Or to put it another way, to the degree that I am a metaphor for God in my heterosexual relationships, then—again, metaphorically speaking—I have the same power in relation to the women in my life as God did to Mary. Now, please, let me be clear about what I am not saying: I am not saying that men as a class consciously think this way—though I know there are more than a few who do. What I am saying is that if you play the logic of this metaphor out, the description I have just given of the sexual power dynamic between men and women is the conclusion you will inevitably arrive at, and the description I have just given, it seems to me, is no different than an entirely secular description of heterosexual relationships under patriarchy.
Here is where the question of Mary’s consent comes in. Or, to be more accurate, the nature of her consent. Look at these verses again:
28 And [Gabriel] came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her that God favors her, and this disturbs Mary. She wonders what kind of a greeting this is—not unlike the way a woman might wonder why a man who has never taken notice of her before is suddenly being so nice to her—and then the angel tells her, he does not ask her, he tells her that she will bear God’s child. Mary says, basically, “I am your servant; I will do as you wish,” a sentiment that you can read either as a statement of fact or as consent. Here’s the thing, though: even if you read it as consent, even if you read it that Mary was absolutely thrilled and eager to bear God’s child, the question of whether, once she was confronted with the omniscient and omnipotent God, she could have felt it possible meaningfully to say no is an open one at the very least. As Barbara put it in the “What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice Thread” on Alas:
It seems to me that the disparity in power between God and Mary (even if it is just Gabriel speaking) is at least as great as that between the average high school student and her male teacher.
Or, if you happen to live in Utah these days, between a father and his daughter. “Utah lawmakers,” wrote Rebecca Walsh in the Salt Lake Tribune, “refused Monday [February 27, 2006] to make an exception for incest victims in a proposed law that would require parental consent and notification before a girl’s abortion.” Think about what that means: A girl is pregnant because her father raped her; she does not want to have the child; but in order for her to obtain the abortion she wants, and that most people would agree she needs and ought to have, she has to take the risk that her father will be the parent whom either the doctor she goes to or the courts–because she can go to court to override the doctor’s responsibility under the law–will tell what she is planning to do. (And if you take in account the possibility of either domestic violence or her mother’s complicity in the incest, this situation becomes even more complex.) One of the supporters of this legislation had this to say:
Abortion isn’t about women’s rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex […] This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents.
In other words, because a woman should not be able to choose to have an abortion, because the life that supposedly begins at conception trumps her life and her autonomy, no matter what the circumstances were when it was conceived, she is held by default to have consented to the act of intercourse during which conception took place.
Now, go back to Mary and God. I don’t think that anyone will disagree that to imagine there was anything like a level playing field between Mary and God is to perform a profound act of denial; more to the point, I also think people will generally agree that to suppose that disparity of power between Mary and God had nothing to do with how Mary thought about what was going on and what was going to happen to her would be, in its own way, delusional. These facts, however, do not mean that one has to read the Biblical passage I quoted above to mean that God raped Mary in the sense that Mary was unwilling and God forced himself on her, but it does mean that one has to take into account the possibility that Mary, because she was God’s servant, would never even have conceived, and might not even have been able to conceive, of the possibility of saying no and that her unwillingness or inability to entertain the possibility of saying no to God would raise questions about whether her consent was fully informed or not. In the logic of the anti-choice movement, however, once she becomes pregnant, the nature of Mary’s consent is irrelevant, because once she becomes pregnant what matters–just like what matters in the case of the girl in the Utah-bill-scenario above–is the child-to-be growing inside her. Taken to its logical conclusion, in other words, the anti-choice logic licenses rape, and it licenses rape, or at least those rapes that result in pregnancy, at least in part because it draws on the metaphorical link between the zygote growing inside a raped woman who becomes pregnant and the zygote-that-would-become-Jesus growing inside Mary in such a way that it erases the significance of the circumstances of the conception.
Read this way, the whole process of the virgin birth, from conception to birth, becomes what Tim Beneke calls, in Men On Rape, a rape sign, an image or narrative through which rape is normalized largely because its rape-related content is so well hidden that people aren’t even aware that it’s there. The example Beneke gives in his book—which, unfortunately, is in storage and so I can only paraphrase—is the image of the caveman dragging “his” woman home by the hair. The humor of the image both hides its violence and establishes the stance towards that violence that is considered culturally appropriate. In the case of the immaculate conception, the holiness of the image both hides whatever questions one might raise about consent and establishes the stance towards sex and conception that is considered culturally appropriate—at least by the anti-choice movement.
It is important to acknowledge that there many other ways to read the virgin birth, especially because there are seriously progressive, feminist Christian people engaged in the process of rereading their tradition in light of progressive, feminist values. My goal in offering the reading I have outlined here is not to invalidate theirs, or to trash Christianity, but rather to highlight the metaphorical and therefore ideological infrastructure of the anti-choice movement, not only in its misogyny, which would hardly have required this many words to demonstrate, but also in its undestanding of what it means to be human—because if our humanity, all our individual personhoods, has nothing to do with the myriad intangible things that make up the content of our character (and for the purposes of this argument, I do not care whether that content is good, bad or indifferent), but is rather a consequence of the fact of DNA; if I am, in other words, essentially no different from the bundles of cells that result from the coming together of egg and sperm, then protecting the children-to-be growing in the wombs of pregnant women from the “capricious” choices of free-willed women is a kind of retroactive self-preservation; it is a way of making sure that people are born not simply because parents want them, but because they have a right to be born.
The difference is important: In the second, anti-choice scenario, we were, all of us, potential antagonists against our own pregnant mothers, and they were, all of them, potential antagonists against us. On the other hand, if one is not fully human until after one has been born, this pre-birth antagonism doesn’t exist (unless you’re talking about medical issues where the life of the mother and/or the fetus is at stake.) And so to be human, as the anti-choice movement has defined humanity, is on some level to have been at war with free will even before you were born, not so much your own free will, but rather the free will of others, especially of women, and this war, if you accept the anti-choice logic, is one we are all in together, because we all came from the bodies of women, which means that to win the war it is the bodies of women that we need to control. Humanity, in other words, according to this logic, demands the subjugation of women because women hold the power to end humanity. More to the point, this logic implies that to have survived the pregnancy during which you grew to be born is on some level to have escaped women’s power.
The power of a male God, of course, is one sure fire method of ensuring that we keep on escaping, and so is the power of government. Giving the government the kind of power the South Dakota law does, however, can have unexpected consequences. Look again at the first section of the law:
Section 1. The Legislature finds that the State of South Dakota has a compelling and paramount interest in the preservation and protection of all human life and finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the South Dakota Bill of Rights applies equally to born and unborn human beings.
Essentially, it seems to me that this opens the door to all kinds of government interference in our personal and family lives, kinds of interference that I don’t think the anti-choice movement would appreciate. If a zygote is a human being, for example, couldn’t this section of the law be expanded to include the government’s interest in how my behavior effects the health of my sperm, which is, after all, half a human being? (Okay, this may be pushing things too far, but then I thought declaring a zygote a human being would be pushing things too far.) Couldn’t it be expanded to criminalize behaviors a woman might engage in that could harm her child-to-be, like, say, going skiing in the early months of pregnancy? In other words, doesn’t the state’s interest in the preservation and protection of all human life give it the authority legally to regulate the treatment of that life from start to finish?
I think it’s time for me to stop writing and put this up. I do want to say this, though: A guy named John O’Neill wrote a remarkable book called Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society, that addresses the kinds of questions I’ve been talking about here, though not from an explicitly feminist perspective. Nonetheless, it is very worth reading. The book was originally published in 1985, which is the edition that I read. It has, apparently, been republished in a revised edition. It is worth taking a look at.
Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.
The entire abortion debate is null and void once people apply critical thinking:
1) All memories, thoughts and mental processes are stored in the brain. Neuroscience proves this – brain damage to certain sectors of the brain prevent some thought process or result in memory loss. Thus, the conclusion is that memories and thought-process are in the brain
2) Things without brains are not important. A body without a brain is worth nothing. What makes people, well, people is the brain. They are their brains. You are your brain. I am my brain. My body is nothing more than a shell to support my brain. Which is me. Your body and everyone else’s body is a shell to support their brains.
3) Embryos and early fetuses have no brains. None at all. Thus, they cannot be self-aware, have thoughts, feelings, emotions – in short, an early embro without a brain is worthless. Worth nothing at all – merely a collection of a few dozen cells.
4) A human being becomes a human being only when they form a brain, of some sorts. Once this happens, consciousness, self-awareness and emotions become possible. Early fetuses and embroys have no brains, and thus, are not human. They cannot be called human – they are merely proto-humans, which isn’t the same thing. An acorn seed is not an acorn tree – and so on and so on.
5) Thus, stem cell research and early to mid-term abortions should be made absolutely legal. There are no moral problems, as long as the fetus hasn’t fully developed its brain (and if it did, it would become human and hence untouchable).
Little of what I say will influence the right-winger christian bible thumpers. They believe in such things as the soul – to which I say, show me a picture of the soul! Show me any scientific evidence of its existence! They cannot and will not. However, I can show them a CAT scan of a brain in the process of thinking. I can show them paper after paper published in the finest neurological journals, proving that all our emotions, all our thoughts, our entire sense of self, is in the brain.
Anti-abortionist’s argument depends on a thing they call the soul, a thing they cannot prove or give any evidence for. Rational people believe in the brain – and a fetus, in its early stages DOES NOT HAVE A BRAIN.
Of course, extremely late-term abortions are not permissable – at that stage, the brain has developed enough for the fetus to survive, and hence, it becomes a person. And we cannot ever kill people.
So the current laws are fine – early to mid-term abortions should be allowed. Extremely late term abortions should not be. I cannot fathom why people cannot grasp these simple, simple ideas.
Hi Richard,
Your essay is very interesting and I have a number of items I agree and disagree with. To start with the idea of even having the ability to give consent to God is lacking in many bible stories so I do not see this as unusual. For instance Job’s ordeal was done without his consent, but was in fact just kind like a bet between Satan and God without Job knowing. In one story about David, it says that God made him take a census and then killed ten of thousands of people for that act (in another book it describes the same event that Satan caused David to take a census). Either which way, the people who died did not have any choice. Sometimes it appears that debating with God can change God’s mind in a very limited manner like Moses and Ezekiel did, but that’s about it. Besides, punishments from going against God, God can even sort of force you to carry out God’s will, like in the book of Jonah.
I do agree with you that using just male descriptions of God is very problematic because it gives a false idea that God is male whereas God in the bible just describes God as “I shall be what I shall be” although usually the translation is “I am who I am”, which gives the opposite idea. Using exclusively male descriptions for God gives the impression that a man is nearer to God and henceforth is more valuable than a woman. Second, people who take a more literal view of the bible may promote ideas that it is the literally will of God (for everyone) to be fruitful and multiply and that man should be the head/master of woman.
Four, as I can infer from your post the conception/birth of Christ is predestined; therefore, given that all human life should be considered predestined and must be valued. One thing I should point out though is that predestination is alluded through out both the old and New Testament for instance God telling Jeremiah that God foreknew Jeremiah before he was made. Pharaoh is described as raised up by God to serve/fulfill God’s Purpose and Paul is called a chosen vessel or Instrument for God’s purpose. The question is, of course, if you ultimately believe in an absolute predestination, a limited for of predestination, or no predestination.
Finally, I believe that many people believe in God to help give them meaning and direction. The idea of predestination is comforting for many people in the sense the reason why I was put here on earth was for a reason or God’s will. In addition, the literal view emphasizes human beings special relationship with God e.g. animals are not comparable. Given the fact that abortion is a choice and, in some people mind goes against the idea of human life being special and predestined, and that men are traditional consider closer so they should make the decisions, you can see why abortion would be believed/inferred/interpreted against God’s will.
Depends on what you consider “mid-term abortions” — fetuses develop full-blown neurons, dendrites, axons and connecting synapses at 20 weeks, i.e. less than 5 months. Admittedly, that’s only a week more than the current limit of viability (21 weeks and a few days), and viability already is a permitted under Casey to be the point at which abortions can be banned (with life and health of the mother exceptions). I think the viability line is a good one, because at that point if the woman does not want to carry the pregnancy any longer, she can deliver the baby. Prior to that, delivery would be pointless as the fetus couldn’t survive. Then again, I frame the right to abortion as a right to be free of unwanted pregnancy.
re: metaphorical thinking, a long time ago I read a collection of feminist analysis and one was about the “Starchild” fetus image at the end of 2001 Space Odyssey.The writer whose name I can’t remember talked about how the creation of the fertilized egg could be seen to represent Creation in which case the space surrounding it would represent God. The Starchild then represents The Human in God’s womb . The writer pointed out how the tendency is to look at the “Starchild” and that even if the “space” surrounding i.e.the Female can be perceived as “God” or The Womb of God” the eye is still drawn to the fetus because it is more anthropomorphic. In a sense this parallels the pro-lifer way of seeing things, their eyes (and mind’s eye) are fixed on the fertilized egg/ fetus. Hence they can call themselves “pro-life” and totally ignore women who die of illegal abortions or in childbirth because from their perspective woman is literally invisible . Whereas a pro-woman perspective sees the fertilized egg/fetus and also sees That Which Surrounds It. In addition a pro-woman perspective looks at the looking and sees that the ubiquitous image of the fetus is quite literally a picture of : The Looking Through Woman as if She Were Invisible. So, much of what pro-choice people try to do is to get the eye focused on the woman first and foremost, whereas the pro-lifers are always trying to draw the eye back to the unborn thereby invisiblizing woman. Also if the egg/fetus represents Creation/Human and the space surrounding it The Womb of God, then the motto “life begins at conception” is in a sense an esoteric version of man (as in human) declaring himself and his universe “equal” to God, (who the anti-women people no doubt see as metaphorically male but NOT metaphorically female). The Jewish perspective (and hopefully other perspectives as well) sees not only the woman’s life as taking precedence over the unborn child’s but also her mental and spiritual anguish. In other words mentally torturing women and girls in the name of being pro-life is definitely not kosher, although sadly there are probably some Jewish ” rightwinger” types who might disagree on that.
Given iamefromiami’s comment, people might be interested in this post on my blog, which talk a bit about Jewish law and abortion: Abortion and Jewish Law
PG, I’m very interested in seeing that concept examined in further detail—the viability tradeoff wherein the instant the right to abortion disappears, the right to delivery appears (which is still technically an abortion, ie the termination of a pregnancy, but nevermind).
The pro-life position holds that the survival of the fetus justifies the commandeering of the mother’s body, and their intense hatred of late-term abortions makes much of the idea that it is capable of living outside of the mother’s body at that point—but this rings strongly of “I’m not addicted, I can quit whenever I want”: their goals and arguments boil down to “it can live without your support so you have to support it,” which is ridiculous.
So it would be very interesting to examine fetal viability as a practical option rather than merely a theoretical one.
What would happen if proponents of the viability argument were called on this—if it were proposed or required that sufficient viability to prevent an abortion also be sufficient viability to electively give birth?
How would the pro-lifers react to early births? Would they welcome it as a strong incentive toward choosing life, or vilify it as women’s selfishness in depriving “their” babies of a full-term pregnancy. Would they judge it better than abortion, or just as bad? Would the praise of a woman for “choosing life” vanish once she can’t have an abortion anymore, and she be held to a new standard based on whether or not she gives the baby the rest of pregnancy?
Would the official point of viability change? The cutoff points for abortion under viability concerns are lower, at present, than most infants could realistically survive at. Would the health problems caused by very early premature births drive it up, or would it remain low based on the chances of survival being still a tiny improvement over abortion? Would there be a time period of a few weeks during which a woman could do either? Or a few weeks when she could do neither?
Would there be public support for it being available by choice, or would medical conditions necessitating it be a prerequisite? Would that depend on the gestational time, with birth being available on demand at 30 weeks? 32? 28?
What would people make of the medical costs/effort needed to support a premature baby? What statement would that make about the idea and value of “women’s work?” Some people would be outraged at the “wastefulness” or “pointlessness” of doctors and nurses and medical equipment all working to support less-gestated babies when “their mothers could/should be doing it,” and others would point out the hypocrisy and sexism involved in expecting women to do (unpaid!) what they find a waste of effort for paid professionals (or even machinery) to do.
Would it significantly affect the abortion rate, if pregnancy was less of a burden or time commitment? Would this make it easier for women to stay competitive in their jobs, require less in the way of maternity leave due to reduced stress? Would births be significantly easier?
And how would this play out in the “Mommy Wars?” Would women be shamed for not being “good mothers” if they delivered early? Would some people consider it child neglect?
What changes/revolutions might be made in premature-baby care? Would there be fluid tanks? Blood oxygenation/dialysis by machine done through the umbilical cord? Other things?
None of this has ever really been discussed, because as of now it really hasn’t been made an available option to deliver early by choice, especially very early like the pro-lifers are defining viability for the purpose of restricting abortions.
ooh cool I’m going to read that tomorrow, one more thing I wanted to mention, I think that not only do some of the pro-lifer people see “god” as metaphorically male and not metaphorically female, but also as metaphorically white and not metaphorically black or Hispanic or Asian and so on. I think Alice Walker talked about getting that old white man out of your head, so in terms of breaking that toxic spiritual binary opposition I find it helpful to picture God metaphorically as an old woman of every race which is also fine in Judaism as long as it is metaphorical
I mentioned this over at Feministe, but it seems even more relevant to this post. A few years back, there was a telenovela (soap opera) out of Peru that was funded by and produced by a Catholic organization. For the life of me, I can’t recall the title, but it was quite a phenomenon and aired in a lot of countries.
Anyway, this was the plot: The “protagonist” of the story is a woman who becomes pregnant from a rape. The rapist had targeted her because he had a fight with and was humiliated by the woman’s boyfriend, so to get revenge, of course he rapes his opponent’s girlfriend. The woman very nearly has an (illegal) abortion, but at the last minute she changes her mind. She is rejected by her boyfriend and her family. The rapist, filled with remorse and love for the unborn child, seeks out the woman and stalks her until she finally agrees to marry him. They fall in love, and they have the big fairy-tale wedding that is the climax of most telenovelas. With various aunts and grandmothers serving as a kind of Greek chorus, it is made clear that the child that will be born from the rape redeems both the rapist and the victim.
Well here something that maybe interesting. I was trying quickly look up a country with the non-restrictive abortion laws and I assumed it would be Norway or Sweden, but I found out Canada, which I live in, has one of them. Here is the info…
This not to say that abortion is not an issue in Canada, infact the article indicates that a bill was written up, but not enacted to put on some restrictions. But, as you can see for the vast majority of Canadians it is considered essentially not an important issue to bring up e.g. its not really dicussed that much in our politics. I am pretty sure that our prime minister would like to restrict abortion, but he is aware that he would go under major fire, if he tries something deemed to strong. I guess what I saying in Canada it is mostly a small number of people who mostly happen to be Christian that considers this a important issue.
In addition, the majority of Canadians identify as Christian with Catholics being the majority
What this means, I guess is the premise that Christians are generally antibortion is highly flawed (Note: I know that the post was written in terms of the US, but it often get conflated). Indeed, culturally IMO there is not a lot that separates Canada from the US so question is what is the difference? From what I gather there are more fundamentalists portionedly, and cultural Canada is probably closer to the northen states that the south, but is that the only difference? Is what gets taught in Sunday school different in Canada from the States? To tell you the truth I am baffled as to why, there is such as big difference. BTW, I do not bring this up to brag or say “Canadians are wonderful”, in fact your right to priacy is seems to similar to ours, I think we may have stole it:), it just there must be a reason(s) for the difference.
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Historically (especially pre Row v. Wade), has the Christian population been pro choice or pro life?
Assuming Christian population has shifted, why the shift?
Student, there’s a rather nice summary of Christian views on abortion throughout the ages, complete with quotations from primary sources, here.
The same website also has a historical survey specific to Catholicism here.
Well, mice have brains, too, and most people don’t have a problem with putting out mousetraps to kill mice that inconvenience humans. It is also legal to euthanize pets such as dogs and cats, which have brains that are even more elaborate than those of mice – and don’t get me started on what we (legally) do to pigs.
It takes a little more than a brain to be a person – it has to be a specific kind of brain. One can even make a reasonable case that newborn infants aren’t yet people – they’re probably dumber than most dogs, although they do develop rapidly.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_marginal_cases and remember that one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
Of course, extremely late-term abortions are not permissable – at that stage, the brain has developed enough for the fetus to survive,
Several points:
1. Most truly late (>21 weeks) abortions occur because of fetal abnormalities inconsistent with life. Frequently, they occur in ancephalic fetuses. So the vast majority of the time if an abortion is planned at greater than 21 weeks, it’s on a fetus without enough brain to worry about. Or with.
2. Unless you consider self-defense to not be permissable, abortion for elevated risk to the mother’s life must be legal at any stage, including during labor. A very rare event, fortunately, but by no means impossible. For example…no, on second thought, I’m not going to share that example, it’s gross.
3. The premise that the fetal cortex is active is a highly questionable one. The partial pressure of oxygen in the uterus is quite low. An adult or child under those circumstances would be unconscious. It’s vaguely possible that the presence of fetal hemoglobin with its higher affinity for oxygen may alter that balance, but not necessarily in favor of consciousness: the higher affinity for O2 means that it’s harder for the tissues to extract the oxygen. So a 8 month 29 day abortion may be more the equivalent of building an AI that could pass the Turing test and never turning it on than killing a living, aware person or even animal.
There’s an interesting Talmudic quibbling that centers on that very point.
In Jewish law, the fetus is not considered fully human until the head exits the mother’s body. In the case of a birth where the fetus isn’t coming out head first, then it is considered fully human once the majority of its body is out of the woman’s body.
The rule is therefore that, until that time, abortion is not only appropriate but mandated to preserve the woman’s health, because human life always trumps the mere potential for human life.
Once the fetus is either half-way out or head-out of the mother’s body, however, their needs are held as equal, and so the fetus can no longer be killed to preserve the woman’s life.
However, Jewish law also holds that it’s okay to kill another person in self-defense. Furthermore, there’s something called the “law of the persuer,” which states that it is acceptable to kill a hostile persuer in order to save the life of the persuer’s would-be victim.
So the question then becomes: why isn’t it okay to sacrifice the infant’s life to save the mother even after it has crossed the line from fetus to infant? Isn’t the infant acting the role of a rodef, a pursuer?
The Talmudic answer is that the infant is not a persuer, as it is innocent of any ill-intent towards the mother. Rather, “heaven is the persuer,” which is just a cutsy way of saying that the struggle here is a natural event and therefore not subject to the same rules as events driven by human will.
So the usual summary is that while it’s not okay for a third party to kill an emerging fetus to protect the mother, it is okay for the mother herself to kill the emerging fetus in protection of her own life. The mother still has the right of self-defense. But a third party does not have the right to invoke the law of the persuer in defense of the killing.
Of course, it’s rather a frustrating argument, to my mind, because it seems obvious to me that in most situations in which the mother’s life is endangered during labour, she’s hardly likely to be in any condition to reach down there and kill the emerging fetus herself! I mean, it’s rather hard to imagine, isn’t it? And it does seem rather unfair to state that in that situation, the mother cannot appoint another as her proxy in destroying the infant to save her own life, especially when the Talmud accepts the validity of the appointment of proxy actors for so many other situations.
Anyway, perhaps only a tangential point, but I thought it might be of some interest here.
And, to touch on another thread in which people were discussing what sorts of things they discussed or were taught in their respective Sunday Schools?
Yeah, well. Now you know what sorts of things we
argued furiously overdiscussed in mine.So, most of what you wrote up there is stuff that I knew, but I did not know this. And it surprises me because it seems like one of those set-ups where the rabbis say such and such is permissible but only under such narrow circumstances/conditions that you couldn’t actually do it. And that was never my impression of the Jewish position on abortion to save the life of the mother. Basically we’re talking craniotomy here, and one reason you see so much back in forth in the Catholic position on craniotomy is because it was pretty much the only means available to get out a baby that was completely, 100 percent stuck, and most midwives throughout history would try to save the mother (though in many cases of craniotomy, the baby had already died, making the ethical balance pretty clear – however, I’m not sure how well they could tell whether or not the baby was still alive prior to birth back in the day). Do you know what the general practice was, as opposed to the theory? That is, would Jewish midwives and doctors take actions to preserve the life of the mother or wouldn’t they?
(And thanks for the links on the evolution of the Catholic position. I had come across that some time ago and found it very interesting, but I couldn’t recall where.)
For a bit more about abortion in Jewish law, including the idea that forced pregnancy is “cruel and unusual punishment” and is therefore against halacha, see this post on my blog.
Kyra,
I think this could be very interesting on a state-by-state level, because that’s where abortion regulations are supposed to be. (Justice Thomas has a snarky concurrence in Gonzales v. Carhart — the “it’s OK to ban a safer late-term abortion procedure because Justice Kennedy needs to save the wimminfolk from their own regrets” decision — where he says that if the federal law had been challenged for its insufficient nexus to interstate commerce, he might have voted to overturn it…) So if Kansas, for example, bans post-viability abortions except as necessary to save the life of the mother, and women start having deliveries of 21-week-old fetuses and abandoning them to the state’s care, then Kansas will have to pay the millions of dollars a year to try to keep alive an infant that barely has working lungs (never mind the costs of educating and assisting that person through life if he survives). I suspect that more socially moderate voters will revolt against the sudden demand on their pocketbooks, and the fetal age at which abortion will be prohibited will be moved to one more compatible with a limited state budget.
I have to say that I find it unimaginable that a woman who plans to raise the baby herself would choose to deliver any earlier than she had to do so, and I might even be one of the people considering it a species of child neglect. Whatever short term benefits might be provided by fewer weeks of maternity leave would be far outweighed by the massive costs of caring for a baby that hadn’t had the opportunity to mature in utero.
I see early delivery as an option for women who would have an abortion if it were legally available to them. In other words, these are women who do not consider themselves the mothers of the children except in the barest biological sense, and therefore do not owe them a duty of care; in the absence of such a duty, it’s meaningless to accuse them of child neglect.
Admittedly, there are more complex cases for why women have late-term abortions. In a sense, Dianne gives the easy example by pointing to fetuses that failed to develop a brain — they’re basically dead on arrival. More difficult are late-discovered anomalies like harlequin type ichthyosis, in which the vast majority of babies die before adulthood but a few (few = can be counted on a single person’s fingers and toes) have survived and even thrived; or Tay Sachs, in which every known patient has died before his 6th birthday.
In such cases, women may have wanted the baby very much and will feel emotionally incapable of abandoning the child after birth, but don’t want to give birth to this specific baby with this specific problem. Forbidding them to have an abortion because the fetus is viable outside the uterus if given great care, but offering them the option of an early delivery, doesn’t address the reason they want an abortion in the first place. They don’t want to be free of pregnancy in a general sense; they want to be free of this particular pregnancy that very likely will end in watching their baby die slowly.
They don’t want to be free of pregnancy in a general sense; they want to be free of this particular pregnancy that very likely will end in watching their baby die slowly.
At one point, I was thought to be a Tay-Sachs carrier. It turns out I’m not or not of a carrier of THE Tay-Sachs mutation, although possibly of another mutation or maybe the PCR just flaked that day. (The joys of modern medicine and molecular diagnosis.) In any case, the moment I heard it was even a remote possibility I decided that I would NEVER carry a pregnancy more than 12 weeks unless I had access to an ob/gyn who would perform an abortion at any stage should the fetus turn out to have T-S. I can’t imagine continuing a pregnancy knowing it might lead to the kind of horrific death that a child with Tay-Sachs undergoes, muchless knowing that it would and being unable to do anything about it. Talk about punishment…not just for sex but for wanting children: because you wanted to have a baby, you must have a baby and then watch it die slowly and painfully in front of you, being unable to do anything about it. Ugh.
For what it’s worth, while I don’t see the state’s interest in banning abortions, I DO do see the state’s interest in the health of future citizens.
Basically, I regard kids as an externality, like pollution – a choice made by private actors that is foisted upon the rest of the world, for which the private actors cannot be made to bear the full cost. I have kids, and all of mankind will have to cope with the consequences of their behavior long after I’m gone. Now, before my little ankle-biters start gnawing on your ankles, I think you — and the state as your agent — have an interest in heading this problem off at the pass. We impose on parents the obligation to educate their kids, whether or not the parents like it. I don’t see why we couldn’t impose on parents the obligation to ensure, insofar as practicable, that the kids are born with the mental capacity to receive an education.
Admittedly, I can anticipate practical difficulties in the state actually defending its interest in promoting the health of the next generation in urtero. But that’s a different matter than saying that the state has no such interest.
Korolev: the fact that one cannot scientifically prove the existence of the soul does not mean that it does not exist and that the law cannot nor should not take it into account. Also, your line of thinking only accounts for allowing one to determine if it is immoral or not to abort a fetus once it establishes certain criteria that you are using to define what is human. However, many people (myself included) think it is immoral to destroy what will become human if left undisturbed.
PG:
If a mother views pregnancy as an inconvenience and wishes to be delivered of it as soon as it is viable, the resultant birth would be high-risk and would cost a great deal of money. Presuming that a) the woman is indigent and b) she can find a doctor who’ll do it, does the same “right to be free of an unwanted pregnancy” apply and does this “right” mean that the taxpayers would have to come up with the money to pay for it?
RonF,
the resultant birth would be high-risk and would cost a great deal of money
I don’t see why a C-section at 21 weeks is higher risk for the woman than a C-section at full term (or when my mom had me yanked out, three weeks past full term) would be for her, or cost any more money either. It probably would be lower risk, since the fetus would be significantly smaller, and thus the incision smaller too.
What you probably mean is that keeping the baby alive, not the birth itself, would be high-risk and cost a great deal of money, a fact that I noted above in saying that I doubt the state would be keeping a “no abortions after 20 weeks — deliver instead” policy once it saw the impact on its hospitals. The woman has no obligation to the fetus; the state already is imposing on her to make her deliver instead of abort, but it’s an acceptable imposition due to the state’s interest in preserving life. Now the state can damn well pay for the preservation.
I realize this is all theoretical, and I’d object to it on a number of levels if we were talking about a real proposal. But for now, I’ll just note that a C-section is higher risk for the woman than an abortion, though I can’t think of a reason why an early C-section would be higher risk than a term C-section. And 20 or 21 weeks isn’t viable anyway. I think there has been one 22-weeker who survived, but generally speaking you need at least a few more weeks to be talking seriously about viability.
James Elgin Gill (born on May 20, 1987 in Ottawa, Canada, at 21 weeks and 5 days gestational age) and Amillia Taylor (born on October 24, 2006 in Miami, Florida, at 21 weeks and 6 days gestational age) apparently are both still alive. Gill in particular doesn’t seem to suffer from any debilitating disabilities now that he’s an adult: he plays sports, did above average in school, has sufficient motor skills to do wood working and welding.
Of course, I know these names because they were unusual; most infants that premature don’t survive. But as with the harlequin babies, what once was an automatic death sentence no longer is, and that complicates the debate.
My bad, then. I believe, though, that women who go into premature labor in that window on the cusp of viability also have the right to request only palliative care because the chance of survival is so slim that not subjecting the infant to IVs, shots, breathing tubes, and the like is seen as a completely ethical choice.
Edit: By saying “I believe,” I don’t mean I think they ought to have that right. I mean I think they do, but I don’t have time to find a citation right now. I know I have read about birth plans that include this directive and births of very premature infants in which that was the parents’ wishes and the hospitals complied with that.
chingona,
Sure, but so far as I know, parents have pretty broad rights to refuse care so long as such a refusal is within the realm of reason (i.e. the suggested treatment doesn’t have a high probability of fixing the problem), because you can’t accuse them of neglect if they have sought medical treatment and made a decision that the costs are higher than the benefits. A woman who is delivering in lieu of an abortion (with an exception for women who hadn’t wanted an abortion until they found out about the fetus’s poor condition) doesn’t want the responsibility of the baby in the first place, so it doesn’t seem quite right to give her direction over how it is to be treated.
It’s like those semi-spurious* “infant born alive” laws that say if a fetus survives being removed from the uterus during an abortion, the medical professionals have a duty of care toward it. No one wants to say that the woman who had the abortion is in charge of the fetus and should make the decisions on its care or lack thereof, because that’s almost a conflict of interest; she came for an abortion and now has … given birth? She just wanted to be pregnancy-free and doesn’t have any malice toward the fetus she was carrying, but she probably also doesn’t consider herself to have a high duty of care toward the fetus either.
* I say semi-spurious because the most recent furor over such laws, in connection with Obama’s refusal to vote for them in IL, was essentially a political ploy with precious little connection to caring for viable infants. The existing law in IL already had required medical professionals to provide care for fetuses that were sufficiently developed that they could survive outside the uterus; the new law would just force abortion clinics to be converted into neonatal units capable of keeping a 20 week old fetus alive for a few days.
I brought it up to say that the notion of “viability” at 21 or 22 weeks is really a stretch. You will have the occasional extraordinary exception, but the vast majority of babies delivered at this gestational age will die.
But just as a woman might choose to have an abortion rather than give birth to a child that faces the high probability of a short and painful life, so too a woman might much rather have an abortion than give birth to a child that will spend a few weeks hooked up to IVs and a ventilator and then die. I think your notion of “indifference” is a little too abstract, and I think it comes close to the same type of thinking that asks why abortion should be legal when women can just give the baby up for adoption. (Edit) Many women obviously prefer abortion to adoption for a variety of reasons, not all of which can be summed up as “don’t want to be pregnant,” and some women find giving up a baby more psychologically difficult than having an abortion would be.
I don’t have a huge problem with using the idea of viability as a factor in developing a cut-off for purely elective abortion (which is basically what we have now – I think 24 weeks in New York state is the latest you can have an abortion for a non-medical reason). I do think 20 or 21 weeks is too early for that cut-off, especially when people may be making decisions off of an amnio done at 20 weeks. But I also think it’s unnecessary. The main non-medical reason for second trimester abortions in the United States today is inability to get the money together for a first trimester abortion, not women changing their mind on a whim after being pregnant for five months. So if you want to reduce later-term abortions, the simplest, most cost effective and most humane option is to lift barriers to first-term abortion and restore Medicaid funding.
Are you putting this idea forward as a serious proposal or just as a way to make a point to the pro-life side about putting their money where their mouth is? I had assumed it was the latter, and I’m not too keen to get into a big debate about the merits of it. But if you’re serious, then I think it’s quite coercive.
The main non-medical reason for second trimester abortions in the United States today is inability to get the money together for a first trimester abortion
What do you consider “non-medical”? Is aborting a Down’s Syndrome fetus a medical abortion or an elective one? (On the one hand, it’s for a medical reason; on the other hand, it’s not a medical reason that’s actually damaging anyone’s health.)
Are you putting this idea forward as a serious proposal or just as a way to make a point to the pro-life side about putting their money where their mouth is? I had assumed it was the latter, and I’m not too keen to get into a big debate about the merits of it. But if you’re serious, then I think it’s quite coercive.
I put it forward as a compromise I would consider Constitutional (which most “moderate” positions on abortion, like banning particular procedures, are not), and that is, oddly enough, where I think where most of the country might end up if we lose the Constitutional guarantee to second-trimester abortions. (With the advent of RU-486, it will be even harder to ban first-trimester abortions effectively than it was pre-Roe.) I agree that first trimester abortions ought to be freely accessible, and mentioned that in the thread a couple months ago about abortifacient home remedies’ popularity in NYC. I don’t think anyone ought to be stuck with a pregnancy simply because she can’t afford an abortion (and even worse, if she couldn’t afford reliable birth control).
But I don’t think there’s as strong of a liberty/ privacy of the body argument (which is basically the argument under-girding the Constitutional right to choose abortion) for those reasons that can’t be “summed up as ‘don’t want to be pregnant.'” We certainly wouldn’t allow someone who had been delivered of a baby while unconscious (even if it were a rape victim who’d been so brutally assaulted that she didn’t wake up for 9 months) to have the baby killed once it left her body, regardless of how unhappy she felt about either raising the baby herself or giving it up for adoption.
There has to be a good reason why we draw a very big, bold, bright line between women’s being able to kill the fetus in the course of an abortion, and women’s NOT being able to kill the fetus once it is out of her body. The quasi-rabbinical rationale that women have the right to defend themselves against an unwanted pregnancy and liberate their bodies from a literal burden provides that bright line in a way that the nebulous “psychologically difficult” choice between adoption and abortion doesn’t.
Constitutional rights don’t exist to spare people hard choices, but to ensure that people maintain their autonomy against encroachments by a state, even — especially? — a democratic one. I think it was Justice O’Connor who pointed out that the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy is often a target of unfree societies, whether it’s the abortion bans of Ceauşescu’s Romania or the abortion mandates of China.
And at the point that you’re not locating the right to abortion in the Constitution, you’ve thrown it back to those democratic states, many of which as I’ve noted are likely to come to the earliest-possible-viability position I’ve outlined as a first compromise, and then shift to majority-plausible-viability once they’ve felt the pain in their budgets.
I’m not a lawyer, so my idea of what is right or correct might not meet Constitutional muster. Just for some context about where I’m coming from: I don’t think the state should be able to order women to have C-sections, even if it results in the death of the unborn baby, and I don’t think women should be prosecuted for declining C-sections against medical advice or for having home births against medical indication (and this has happened, though not that often). I don’t think women should be prosecuted for child abuse because they take drugs while they’re pregnant. In my own sense of where and how the state deploys its power, I am very concerned about the lengths to which this could go if we privilege fetal personhood this way. I consider bodily autonomy pretty close to absolute, and the reason you can’t kill a fetus after it’s born and it’s a baby, is because it now has its own bodily autonomy. If you go down the path that late-term viable fetuses have all the rights of a woman, you end up with every woman ordered by the state to have a C-section at 38 weeks. I don’t want to go there, and I’m willing to accept that some women will make decisions I find very troubling or even morally unacceptable in order not to go there.
Given that we already have some of these types of situations occurring (prosecutions of women for their actions while pregnant), I don’t really see what you’re proposing as being the way it would play out in our culture. I don’t think they’re going to make first-trimester abortion more accessible anytime soon, not while the state legislatures control it and the courts won’t intervene in any really meaningful way, and I also don’t think they would “let” women be induced or have a C-section at 20 or 21 or 22 weeks. It would be child endangerment! So that’s influencing me in how I think about this.
But that said, if I look at the circumstances under which women have elective later-term abortions (and in my earlier comment, I included Down’s syndrome and other non-lethal disabilities in the “medical” category, though that’s not actually how I view these and I’ll talk a little more about this in a postscript just so I can get through this point here), your work-around just seems really coercive to me. And I’m thinking about this in the actual cultural and legal climate we have around abortion and contraception and sexuality in general, not some theoretical climate that would be more realistic and more humane. So … you couldn’t scrape together the money for the bus ticket AND the abortion until you were 20 weeks, or your periods are really irregular and you didn’t realize you were pregnant until you were already pretty far along, or you are 15 and don’t even have a job and neither does your boyfriend and you just couldn’t even bring yourself to tell your parents until you were several months in, so now you should undergo something – either induced labor or a C-section – that carries significantly more risks to your own health and future fertility than an abortion does only in order to hand the baby over to the state, knowing there is a high probability of the baby dying after a fairly arduous ordeal in the NICU and also knowing the child has a higher risk of having special needs that make your baby less likely to find a permanent home and more likely to end up in a series of foster homes … this seems to me a situation in which a lot of women will essentially feel coerced to carry to term, even though the reasons for them not getting an abortion earlier may have been out of their control to some extent. It also just strikes me as really wrong from a moral or ethical perspective. If you say the Constitution doesn’t care about those kinds of things, I’m not really equipped to argue that, but I can’t exactly get behind this as some sort of just compromise. Perhaps it is what we’ll end up with. I won’t be thrilled about it.
So, about finding out your child likely will have Down’s Syndrome in an amnio at 20 weeks … when I use the term elective or non-medical, I’m talking about wanting an abortion because you don’t want to be pregnant or have a baby. I’m lumping in any kind of disability or birth defect that might lead parents to choose abortion with “medical” because that seems to be how this gets discussed – generally speaking. Personally, I draw my own lines somewhere else. I declined any pre-natal testing for reasons that are very personal and particular to me. I decided that having decided to have a child, I would take what I got. But I would never, ever, ever impose my own decisions on anyone else, in either an ethical sense or a legal sense, and if I were to have another child/be pregnant again, I would have to go through that decision-making process all over again. The ethics of it are very muddy to me. So I, personally, would consider the termination of a fetus with Trisomy 21 essentially elective – it’s not an anomaly inconsistent with life – but in my earlier comment, I lumped those types of terminations in with medical, as opposed to elective. In my statement that the main reason for non-medical, late-term abortion was money, I was thinking of this from the Guttmacher Institute:
PG:
The state’s interest – which is actually an obligation – in preserving life is not independent of the individuals comprising the state. Those individuals are each obligated to support the state in that effort in accordance with their ability and resources. No individuals can do more in that regard and thus are obliged to do more in that regard than the people who took the action to create that fetus.
chingona:
The fact that you do not want responsibility for the consequences of your actions doesn’t mean that you are thus free of it.
I’m lumping in any kind of disability or birth defect that might lead parents to choose abortion with “medical” because that seems to be how this gets discussed – generally speaking.
OK, but then “medical” can’t be used as a synonym for “impacts pregnant woman’s health,” because so far as I know, there’s no difference to the pregnant body in whether it’s carrying and delivery a Down’s baby or a non-Down’s baby. And this is the kind of thing that drives even moderate pro-lifers nuts, because they feel like various rationales for choosing abortion all get smuggled in under “health.”
I don’t think the state should be able to order women to have C-sections, even if it results in the death of the unborn baby, and I don’t think women should be prosecuted for declining C-sections against medical advice or for having home births against medical indication
I agree, and I think this comports with the conflict between viable fetus and pregnant woman: there’s a difference between a choice that may be less-than-ideal for the viable fetus (natural birth, home birth, even substance abuse during pregnancy), and actually killing the viable fetus.
I consider bodily autonomy pretty close to absolute, and the reason you can’t kill a fetus after it’s born and it’s a baby, is because it now has its own bodily autonomy.
Exactly. But if bodily autonomy is the issue here, then arguments about “hard choices” and the emotional impact of adoption versus abortion are pretty irrelevant. My whole point in the prior comment was to highlight bodily autonomy as the best argument and one that both preserves the pregnant woman’s rights and recognizes the distinction between a fetus and a baby that many moderate pro-lifers worry will get lost on a slippery slope. You have to be able to articulate why killing a 35-week-old fetus that’s in utero and poses no threat to the mother’s health is 100% legal, but killing a 35-week-old fetus that’s just emerged from the uterus is at least manslaughter.
Viability is important because it marks a point at which the fetus is capable of bodily autonomy itself; the woman’s bodily autonomy no longer is the only one in the equation. Prior to viability, the fetus’s bodily autonomy is meaningless because it can’t be exercised; so long as the fetus depends on the goodwill of one other person for survival, it can’t be autonomous at all. Viability is where Judith Jarvis Thompson’s violinist no longer works as an analogy, because the fetus doesn’t depend on the woman for life anymore and could survive independently if given the chance. I think the state reasonably could take an interest in the fetus’s life and opportunity for bodily autonomy at that point.
I don’t really see what you’re proposing as being the way it would play out in our culture.
I think good faith opponents of abortion, particularly the more moderate ones, would help make what I’ve laid out the compromise position. I say this based on discussing the issue with many moderate pro-lifers who seemed frankly astonished that a pro-choice person possibly could think that a viable fetus might have some claim to life. A lot of the draconian local prosecutions of women for refusing C-sections or abusing substances during pregnancy are coming from the pro-life movement’s conviction that pro-choicers are just utterly indifferent to fetal life and see no problem with killing a fetus right up until it’s fully emerged from the uterus. They’re pushing back wherever they can because the concept of bodily autonomy has become a total enemy to their cause, instead of being a value that also has meaning for them.
I think it’s very toxic in the public debate for the pro-choice movement to be plausibly depicted as wanting women to have the choice of killing their fetuses, as opposed to wanting women to have bodily autonomy. Removing this toxic element by saying that fetuses currently capable of independent survival may have some claim to the state’s interest could do a lot to make the debate saner.
Ron, you’re quoting me quoting PG, not quoting actual me.
RonF,
The state’s interest – which is actually an obligation – in preserving life is not independent of the individuals comprising the state.
What kind of obligation do you think the state has? I’m betting you don’t believe that there’s a Constitutional right to demand food, shelter, health care or anything else from the state. Why does the newborn get to impose an obligation on the state if no one else can?
Those individuals are each obligated to support the state in that effort in accordance with their ability and resources.
Again, where do you get this free-floating “obligation”? The American tradition has resisted Good Samaritan laws that obligate one to take even minimal actions on behalf of persons to whom one owes no legal duty otherwise because such laws impinge on our liberties.
No individuals can do more in that regard and thus are obliged to do more in that regard than the people who took the action to create that fetus.
Since when were obligations created by one’s ability to fulfill an obligation? Hello, from each according to his ability…
chingona & PG:
I wish I had time to comment in more detail, but I would like to point that the arguments you are making regarding bodily autonomy (and more) are very close to what it says in Jewish law. One reason, within halacha, that you are not allowed to choose the mother over the baby once the baby’s has come a certain amount out of the mother’s is that the baby, at that point, is considered to be individuated, an autonomous body. Up until that point, the mother’s bodily autonomy trumps all other considerations. It is true that Judaism does not have abortion on demand, but a liberal reading–and there are some rabbis who give this–of the passages from the Talmud in the link to my blog that I posted above in comment 17 suggests that when a pregnancy can be understood as causing a woman undue pain and suffering (including for reasons, say, of wondering whether she can afford the child she is carrying), abortion would be a legitimate response. I am saying that this current practice among observant Jews or that the rabbis who adjudicate Jewish law would ever sanction such a broad liberal reading; I am merely pointing out that the privileging of the woman’s bodily autonomy in Jewish law leads to conclusions that are very close to some of the arguments you are making; it also makes an interesting counterpoint to the explicitly and implicitly Christian nature of the debate over abortion as it is usually framed in this country.
It needs to be a triumverate:
Free abortions and full abortion rights up until the moment of successful delivery.
Free c-sections and simple, quick, adoption procedures for any woman who doesn’t want to either deliver or raise a child.
Free BC and sterilizations for any woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant at all.
Yes, the thought of a late abortion squicks me out a bit. But it is the best thing and is also the most logically consistent option. I also think that the number of people who would opt to abort a baby at 9 months is negligible.
In an earlier version of the comment that started this off, I didn’t even use the distinction medical and non-medical. I actually spelled out each type of reason. That comment was much, much longer, and I went with a shorthand I don’t personally care for in an attempt to be succinct. Clearly that was a mistake. (And see how long my comments are now?)
But while we’re on the topic, even moderate pro-lifers drive me absolutely nuts when they remain deliberately ignorant of the types of life-threatening complications that can arise in pregnancy. And women aren’t aborting 35-week Down’s Syndrom babies anyway, so it’s a red herring. People aren’t having abortions at 35 weeks, period. They just aren’t.
Most of the women who have been prosecuted for home birth or refusal of a C-section are pro-life themselves, very conservative, and deeply religious. I understand you are talking about the motivations of the people doing the prosecuting, not the women, but I think that needs to be understood. The women in question are most certainly not indifferent to fetal life, but they do have a very different set of priorities. That they are prosecuted (or more commonly, that doctors and hospitals go to court to order a C-section – in one case sheriff’s deputies were sent to a woman’s home, and she was forcibly taken the hospital with her legs strapped together) demonstrates to me just how much this is about control of women’s bodies.
But anyway, we’re agreeing bodily autonomy is pretty important. I just wanted to point out that out.
I don’t really understand the distinction you’re making here. Lots of women who have abortions would be perfectly capable, at least physically, of carrying to term. Many of them would be perfectly capable of caring for a child, should it be born. They get to make the decision – based on their emotions and feelings and thoughts and “hard choices” and personal priorities – because they have bodily autonomy. I don’t understand how you are separating the emotional impact of different decisions from bodily autonomy. My brain is inside my body. I have a hard choice to make – perhaps I would like another kid, but I think if I have this baby right now, I’ll never finish school – so I exercise my bodily autonomy to end the pregnancy. I don’t really see how this is qualitatively different than a woman who does not want to be pregnant, does not want to leave the hospital knowing her baby is likely to die a slow death, and wants to exercise her bodily autonomy to not go through that.
(And I want to say that if you weren’t talking about 21 or 22 weeks – or even 20 – as viable, I wouldn’t have gotten into this discussion at all. You want to start with a “generous” position that will prove your sincerity to the pro-life folks, then adjust it upward once the cost becomes clear. But in the meantime, these are real lives you are talking about and real babies that will die slowly rather than quickly. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that this bothers me and apparently doesn’t bother you – or maybe it does bother you but you’re willing to accept it, the same way I’m willing to accept that every now and then a woman will have an abortion at 24 weeks for no other reason than she couldn’t get around to making up her mind before then, even though that does bother me. Like I said before, I don’t have a huge problem with using viability as a factor in setting a cut-off, but I would have a huge problem with setting viability where you want to set it.)
I have not seen much evidence that good faith, moderate opponents of abortion are running the show. If they were, our policy choices would look a lot different.
I agree. It’s why I’m not overly concerned with either using viability to determine a cut-off (very few people would be affected) or with not having a cut-off (very few fetuses would be affected).
I am extremely concerned about using viability to determine a cutoff.
Generally speaking, in my opinion this type of law functions best when there is a clear known indicator that doesn’t have a lot of factual determination or (worse) discretion involved. Viability is a factual issue, as is “medical need.” That means that when you base things on viability or need, you introduce another layer of requirement: FIRST you have to prove nonviability (or need) and THEN you have to actually get the abortion.
You can get around viability proof to some degree, by simply defining it through the legislature: “viability is defined as 24 weeks.” but you still can’t escape the implications that you’re looking at something which really varies by person, age, location, access to medical care, etc etc.
You can’t ever predefine medical need, because medicine is inherently personal and variable.
Also, viability targets are (in my view) a concession to the concept that the unborn fetus “wins”–that you can’t abort it if it’s viable. I don’t agree with that.
I read that “virgin”as it was originally written meant “young woman” in that tongue. As in, while Mary was not married, it doesn’t mean she was sexually virgin. So I think the “soul from God” thing is a lot more plausible than the “sperm from God” theory…
To clarify my position, throughout my comments, I’ve been referring to viability as a factor in determining cut-off, not “viability,” and that’s basically for the reason you have up there. If you just say “viability,” that would be really bad law (in my completely non-professional opinion). If you look at the medical evidence, treatment options, survival rates, diagnostic abilities, and determine that 24 weeks or 26 weeks or 28 weeks should be the cut-off for an abortion that is not to preserve the health or life of the mother, I would have less of a problem with that.
This is basically the system we have now, and the problem with getting a late-term abortion is that hardly anyone does them and the safest procedure for doing them is illegal in many states, not that lots of women who actually need them are legally barred from terminating at all. At least, that’s my understanding. I’ll humbly accept any evidence that I’m wrong or ignorant on this point. Also, once you get around 26 weeks and beyond, if the baby is wanted, most doctors are going to deliver you if you have a really serious health problem that requires the end of the pregnancy.
But my understanding is that Canada doesn’t have any restrictions at all, and it’s not like they have tons of women getting abortions at seven or eight months. I think their rate of late-term abortion might even be lower than ours on a per capita basis.
I don’t think we need a cut-off at all to accomplish some public policy goal, but I also feel like my close-to-absolute view of bodily autonomy is a loser in the realm of public opinion, so a cut-off like what I described above, provided it allows for abortion to preserve life or health at the discretion of a patient and doctor, not of the state, is a concession I’m willing to make, especially given that it’s already been made for all intents and purposes.
This is a bit off-topic, but I’ve seen this in a debate before. It was about consensual slavery within TPE (total power exchange) where one consents to not having to consent. One point that kept coming back through the debate was that if a slave was brought to that point, would hir earlier consent still be meaningful? Would zie still entertain the possibility of saying no? I don’t practice TPE and don’t know enough about it to really form an opinion on the matter. I know though, that it’s not something to thread lightly.
My use of neutral pronouns to denote slave (which is considered a “higher” form of submission than submissive) is because on that site, most submissives are male, most members are male, period. This causes a situation where women are favored both as submissive (ratio 2 dominant men for 1 submissive woman) and as dominant (ratio 8 submissive men for 1 dominant woman), because of supply and demand. In essence, it changes little from the dynamic of a vanilla scenario, where the female is courted and the male is courting (whatever their identified role may be). I don’t know the proportion of submissives who identify as slaves, but I know TPE is considered rare, and sometimes extreme – even on that site.
Also, viability targets are (in my view) a concession to the concept that the unborn fetus “wins”–that you can’t abort it if it’s viable. I don’t agree with that.
It’s not that the fetus “wins” in some absolute sense where you can’t abort after viability no matter what the consequences; the right of self-defense of one’s health and life are still in play. It’s that the fetus now matters at all. Prior to viability, the fetus has no claim on any right to life whatsoever because it’s incapable of bodily autonomy. If the woman exercises her own bodily autonomy and refuses to carry the nonviable fetus, it can’t live no matter how many medical resources are poured into its survival, and she can refuse at any time because she has an absolute right to be free of pregnancy as part of her fundamental liberties. So long as the woman is volunteering to carry the fetus, the state cannot punish her for harms to the fetus arising from her medical preferences or even substance abuse. What I’m suggesting is that the method of becoming free of pregnancy may be regulated by the state at the point that the fetus is capable of bodily autonomy.
It’s why I’m not overly concerned with either using viability to determine a cut-off (very few people would be affected) or with not having a cut-off (very few fetuses would be affected).
Except you seem to prefer a viability of the majority (i.e. the point at which most fetuses would be able to survive) rather than viability being medically possible (the furthest point to which medical technology can finish the development of a fetus that failed to develop in utero, which is almost 22 weeks), and believe that there’s a big difference between the number of people affected at 21 weeks versus 24 weeks. I don’t think that the viability of the majority is the most likely point for a moderately pro-life state to place the line once that becomes a democratic choice; I think it’s most likely to be placed where viability is at all possible (the prior cases indicating 21 weeks plus a few days). However, I think the costs of dealing with extreme preemies would cause the line to be moved to the viability of the majority point.
And even a “viability of the majority” break point would be hugely altered if science can create an effective substitute uterus in which a fetus could form lungs (working lungs being much of the reason that viability is stuck at 21 weeks). If C-sections became even safer through further medical advances, it would be difficult to make the case that abortion is necessary for regaining bodily autonomy without significantly risking one’s health.
But my understanding is that Canada doesn’t have any restrictions at all, and it’s not like they have tons of women getting abortions at seven or eight months. I think their rate of late-term abortion might even be lower than ours on a per capita basis.
I’m pretty sure Canada has an overall rate of unintended pregnancy and of first-term abortion lower than ours on a per capita basis (due in part to government-funded abortions). So drawing a causal conclusion about the relationship between abortion restrictions and rates of late term abortions doesn’t work unless you account for those lower rates.
I wasn’t drawing a causal relationship. I am saying there are other ways to achieve a lower abortion rate than just banning (late-term) abortion. Which I think is self-evident to everyone participating in this discussion.
I am saying there are other ways to achieve a lower abortion rate than just banning (late-term) abortion.
Well, sure. If we put an IUD in every girl at 15, we’d probably have really low abortion rates (although slightly higher rates of infertility and probably also of STDs due to decreased condom use). I’m just saying it’s reasonable to be more troubled by later than earlier abortions due to the fetus’s being more like a person late in its development.
If that were all you were saying, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You’re putting forward a policy proposal that would represent something I view as a significant imposition on women’s rights with very few “lives” saved and at tremendous cost. I’ve tried to be clear on what my objections are, and we may have reached the limit of where this discussion can take us. I just don’t have an interest in imposing on women this way. I see your argument as disturbingly similar to the argument against partial-birth abortion – you won’t actually save many babies, you’ll just make it more onerous and dangerous for a woman to exercise her rights.
To be clear, I object to your proposal, period. But I weighed in on the 21 week thing because I mistakenly thought you were under the impression that many fetuses are viable at this point (you understand most of them aren’t, but that’s not a concern to you), and I think it would be worse from a cost-benefit perspective and I think setting the cut-off that early represents a greater imposition on women because that window between 20 or 21 weeks and 24 weeks is when the majority of later-term abortions occur and it’s the window people are operating in when they make decisions based on amnio results.
I think your proposal is very unlikely to come to pass, and we already ban third trimester abortions except in the most extreme situations. That’s why I wouldn’t have been debating it at all if I hadn’t thought you were mistaken on the issue of viability – not because there is something magic about 24 weeks or any other date, but because I’m not actually sure there is any point to debating this as much as we have.
Purely for informational purposes, not to advance any point, here’s the survival rates for various gestational ages:
* 21 weeks or less: 0% survival rate
* 22 weeks: 0-10% survival rate
* 23 weeks: 10-35% survival rate
* 24 weeks: 40-70% survival rate
* 25 weeks: 50-80% survival rate
* 26 weeks: 80-90% survival rate
* 27 weeks: greater than 90% survival rate
Hi Schala just stealing the following quote you cited from Richard to add a bit more commentary…
I not going to discuss the idea about consent and God because it is difficult to argue to what extent it could exist. However, one thing that it is important to point out is that, if we going to use bible passages in the literal sense to describe Mary’s attitude about being the mother of Christ it can be seen from her song in Luke 1:46-55.
http://www.worldprayers.org/frameit.cgi?/archive/prayers/adorations/my_soul_proclaims_the.html
In it, she both Praises God and says from all ages she will be called blessed.
I think it maybe be more useful to look at common antiabortion arguments from the scripture and I use Wikipedia in this case because I do believe that may people who are antiabortion would contribute to that discussion and provide there best textual evidence. The strongest ones implicitly indicated are… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-life#Christianity
Two of the above quotes can be possibly interpreted as predestination and/or life is predetermined e.g. in a way, if you take them literally you could argue life beings even before conception. The one for Luke imo is actually much weaker of an argument because it is only using the description babe (baby) for fetus and that when is Elizabeth was already six months pregnant. The rest of the passages they cite are much weaker and they seem to all come from the Old Testament and especially psalms.
There is a movement within the intersex community against telling mothers to abort when the fetus is detected in-utero as being intersex. It’s plain and simple eugenics. If they ever found a gay gene, or a trans gene, pretty sure doctors would be overjoyed to “save these children” by having them never be born.
Speaking of this, J Michael Bailey made a paper sometimes in the 2000s about how it was morally alright to abort gay fetuses because preferring straight children to gay children doesn’t affect the unborn gay ones.
chingona,
I see your argument as disturbingly similar to the argument against partial-birth abortion – you won’t actually save many babies, you’ll just make it more onerous and dangerous for a woman to exercise her rights.
Except there is no purpose in the “partial birth” abortion ban of saving any babies at all, because it’s a prohibition of a particular procedure, not of having abortion at a particular state of development. The partial birth bans are effectively an expression of aesthetic disgust — as Judge Posner put it, “From the standpoint of the fetus . . . it makes no difference whether, when the skull is crushed, the fetus is entirely within the uterus or ifs feet are outside the uterus.” Enough people were grossed out by descriptions of the procedure, and fooled by the terminology, to create a majority preference for a ban.
we already ban third trimester abortions except in the most extreme situations
1) Abortion regulation in the third trimester is left to the discretion of the states, with requirements that exceptions be made for the health and life of the mother. There’s no nationwide ban on abortion at any time.
2) I’m not sure what you consider “extreme.” Are you saying that it’s only where the mother’s health would be affected and the fetus has a terminal condition, or would this include aborting Down’s fetuses? Some women have amnio done as late as 22 weeks, which with the two week lag for lab results puts them at 24 weeks when they find out their fetus’s condition.
Schala,
Sure, giving women autonomy not only over whether they want to be pregnant, but what type of fetuses they want to be pregnant with — and saying the state can’t challenge that preference until the fetus is at least 24 weeks old — inevitably leads to people making those decisions on bases others will disapprove. You disapprove making the decision based on whether the fetus is intersex or gay; the government of India disapproves of making the decision based on whether the fetus is female (and has outlawed sex-selective abortion with the same delightful effectiveness with which they outlawed caste discrimination and dowry payments); a disability advocate disapproves of making the decision based on whether the fetus has a non-lethal disability. When you give people choices, they will make choices of which you disapprove.
In my opinion, mothers never should be told to abort for any reason having to do with the fetus’s condition, but they also have a right to sound information and to make a decision based on that information. If physicians are fear mongering about intersex conditions, that’s a problem, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate for the physician to lecture a patient on how she is obliged to welcome her intersex baby if the mother is unwilling to raise an intersex child.
From the standpoint of the 90 percent of 22-week fetus who will die if delivered at that point, does it make a difference whether it is killed by a saline injection or dies after several weeks of intensive intervention in the NICU? The first one sounds more humane to me.
In this context, mother’s health or fetus has terminal condition. I’m aware it’s state-by-state. I had thought no state permitted abortion after 24 weeks. It looks like I’m wrong on that. With all stats coming from Guttmacher, 36 states ban abortion after a certain gestational age (with health/life exception), and only 8 percent of all abortion providers do abortions even up to the 24-week mark. Only 1.1 percent of all abortions occur at 21 weeks or later. Cobbling that together, though, we do not have an epidemic of third-trimester abortions for fetuses with Down’s Syndrome or an epidemic of third-trimester abortions period.
By the way, 24 weeks is six months, late second trimester, not third trimester.
What happens with pre-natal testing, is that at 16 weeks, you’re offered a blood test, the name of which I forget, and it looks for certain indicators – if this is high, you have an elevated risk of X syndrome, and if that is low, you have an elevated risk of Y syndrome. If anything suspicious or, in that lovely medical turn of phrase, “non-reassuring,” shows up, you get counseling and can decide whether to have amnio. They also do ultrasound at 20 weeks, which can pick up a number of things that are indicators of Down’s. So even if lab results come back as late as 24 weeks, people have had time to think about what they’ll do. I don’t think you’re getting a lot of cases where someone doesn’t get results until 24 weeks but needs another month to decide what they want to do because it was a complete and total shock to learn the results.
That article you linked about Down’s Syndrome? The new tests, which are already common in several countries and slowly becoming standard procedure here, allow you to test for Down’s at 12 weeks. Increasingly, this is not going to be an issue that gets resolved at the window of viability. People will get the information earlier and make their decisions earlier, which I think is a good thing.
At the end of the day, I can’t decide for someone else whether they should have a particular child. I don’t know what resources – economic, family, emotional, etc. – that person has to draw on, and I don’t know their circumstances and whatever other obligations they have.
I don’t see the case of a fetus with Down’s Syndrome as falling into a different category that changes how I feel or think about what you proposed.
As I said before, to me it seems like an expensive, unethical and convoluted state intervention to solve something that isn’t much of a problem, when other, simpler interventions (better access to contraception and early abortion) would have the same result.
Well there definitely is fear-mongering, forget the sound information unless people like Milton Diamond himself make the delivery and counsel you. It was widely believed that it was “in the best interest of the child” not to reveal to them that they had an intersex condition, to deny it til death, operate very close to birth to normalize genitals, push hormones if they’re needed (and that’s often), hide details like calling it a gonadectomy when your daughter gets a orchiectomy – or saying “You’re really a guy” to a CAIS girl (this was on House, the TV show). Shame the child into believing they’re irremediably alien, and that it’s all their fault.
It causes gender issues often, especially when the gender the child was raised as doesn’t quite fit. Parents used to be counseled to be especially gender rigid, as in, push the child *more* than others towards the box that was assigned. The child being gay or lesbian is often seen as a sign of failure, even if the child has no gender issues.
While this has generally changed at the theoretical level in the US and Canada, its still far too prevalent elsewhere, and in practice here.
In reality, the majority of intersex children have no need of normalizing surgery. If they seek it, it’s always better to do so in adulthood, when the tissue is mature, less damage is done, results are aesthetically and sensately better, plus you have the consent of the one involved. Hormones *are* often needed, but contra-hormones are pretty shunned upon. That is, someone with XXY will have testosterone pushed on him, and god forbid he wants estrogen instead, he’d need a diagnosis of being transsexual for that in many places – in that the physician pushing testosterone would refuse to present estrogen as an option.
Hormones are not simply needed for development purposes, but mostly for health reasons. Stuff like osteoporosis. You need a certain level of estrogen, or of testosterone (not both at once), to regulate this. For someone who had their gonads removed (streaks, raised female with male gonads, vice-versa), the need for hormones is present at a pretty young age (around puberty). Obtaining their consent and presenting clear options, to both parents and child, is the best.
This may involve some counseling and heart-to-heart talk with the child, but it’s not the huge thing doctors sometimes paint it to be like “will never be accepted, why bother”.
Schala, I know I am going to sound like a total asshole for saying this, but why is it that in pretty much every thread you post in, it all comes back to talking about intersex, trans, etc. people? Can’t we have a discussion about abortion politics without making it about you? I mean, what does the need or lack thereof for normalizing surgery have to do with this post at all?
that window between 20 or 21 weeks and 24 weeks is when the majority of later-term abortions occur and it’s the window people are operating in when they make decisions based on amnio results.
Er…amnios are typically performed at 14-15 weeks. Some problems can be found later, i.e. on later ultrasounds, but surely most people don’t take 10 weeks to decide what to do with their amnio results.
Everything I looked at said 16-20 weeks. When I was pregnant (2005), I was offered the quad screen (that’s the test I couldn’t remember the name of before) at 16 weeks and told that if the results were non-reassuring, I could have an amnio to get more detailed information. It may be different for older women, who probably are more strongly recommended to get an amnio, but I would not have been offered the opportunity to even schedule one until after I got the results of the quad screen, which I don’t think can be done earlier than 15 weeks.
This here is from March of Dimes:
And the main ultrasound to screen for abnormalities is the 20-week ultrasound.
I went straight to amnio and thought it was performed at 14 weeks. I may have been counting gestational age rather than date from LMP however. Early in the 2nd trimester, in any case. It might be later if you wait for quad screen results. Be that as it may, according to the Guttmacher Institute less then 5% of abortions occur after the 16th week. (Also remember that these are dates after last menstrual period so that greater than 95% of abortions occur by the 14th gestational week.)
I know. I cited similar numbers (only 1.1 percent 21 weeks or later) higher in the thread. I’m not sure if you’re arguing with me or not. You picked one sentence out of context. I explained why I used the numbers I did.
Reading with numerous distractions so probably not picking up the thread of the argument very well. Undoubtedly a bad idea.
Does “fetal personhood” change as pregnancy progresses?
Because this angle of the discussion simply isn’t discussed anywhere I know of. I mean I could google it and maybe find an article written in 2003 by someone…but an active discussion about amnio and how intersex conditions are all considered “something bad”? Nope, haven’t seen it much.
98% of Turner Syndrome fetuses don’t make it to term. I don’t know the ratio of abortions there. But yeah, defining people out of existence has me pissed off.
You have to be able to articulate why killing a 35-week-old fetus that’s in utero and poses no threat to the mother’s health is 100% legal, but killing a 35-week-old fetus that’s just emerged from the uterus is at least manslaughter.
ANY fetus in utero poses a threat to the mother’s life and health. A perfectly normal pregnancy in a perfectly healthy young woman with no risk factors and delivering in an ideal setting with no mistakes made by anyone (patient, medical personnel or family members) can result in the death of the mother or the baby. It’s rare for this to happen, but possible.
This discussion seems to be lacking any sort of disability analysis. Are there not structural problems which sway women/couples in the direction of aborting a fetus thought to have a disability? Why is abortion with regards to fetal diagnosis so often represented as “personal choice” when many pro-choicers (including most commentators on this thread) recognize that structural factors influence abortion rates? Yet when the subject is about abortion and fetal disability, suddenly it’s all about “personal choice”–as if social prejudices and institutions are not operating.
Additionally, I think we need to be careful when discussing the viability issue. I haven’t seen it here yet, but pro-choice arguments about fetal viability do sometimes veer into suggesting that pre-term fetuses are not “really” people or worth saving because of the perception that they’ll probably be disabled, anyway.
Sarah, I’ve been aware in the back of my mind that the discussion keeps raising disability and we’re not really addressing it head on. One reason for that, I think, is the discussion (at least my understanding of the one I’m having with PG) is centered around whether or not women lose their right to bodily autonomy at a certain point in the pregnancy and whether the fetus starts to have rights of bodily autonomy at some point that the state could act to protect. To me, that right exists in something close to an absolute state and isn’t changed by the reasons for wanting the abortion and whether I think they’re “good” or “bad” reasons for having an abortion.
I haven’t really seen anyone on this thread making an argument grounded in “personal choice” in the sense of choice that occurs independent of our political, cultural and economic climate. I certainly wouldn’t argue that the decision to abort a fetus that will be disabled isn’t influenced by structural issues – general prejudice against the people with disabilities, beliefs about what constitutes “quality of life,” lack of information, lack of support, concern about maintaining health insurance and paying ongoing medical expenses, concerns about who will provide care for a disabled child if something happens to you.
But being troubled that 90 percent of fetuses with Down’s Syndrome are aborted doesn’t lead me to the conclusion the state should set limits on how late in pregnancy a woman can have an abortion based on ensuring women/couples won’t be able to react to what they learn from amnios or ultrasounds.
Basically, I agree with the argument PG made at #50. My own belief is that we can work to educate people and we can work to create a better society to address some of those structural issues, but we can’t tell women they can’t have abortions because we disagree with the values that are motivating them to have an abortion.
Student: I wonder if you could say more about your question.
Assuming personhood is an factor in the abortion question, rewording of the prior question may help.
Does society think the prenatal is more of a person the closer pregnancy gets to birth?
student,
I’m not sure what society as a whole necessarily thinks, but there are several reasons why some people are inclined to see fetal personhood as a somewhat accumulated status rather than one created immediately upon the fetus’s completed exit from the mother’s body:
1) as the fetus approaches full term, it looks more and more like a human being instead of a rather ugly sea creature, which appeals to our aesthetic recognition of what a “person” is;
2) the older a fetus is, the more human-like traits it has, including a nervous system capable of feeling pain;
3) and the most important for the discussion in this thread, the older a fetus is, the more capable it is of survival outside the uterus (though obviously it will require another person’s help to meet its needs for food, etc., and if it is born distressed may need help even with breathing and other basic bodily functions, but providing this assistance no longer has to fall solely on one person who may be unwilling to do this work).
I think society definitely does, and I personally do as well. I have a lot of worries, though, about the consequences of establishing fetal personhood in law, even late in pregnancy. Most of those concerns aren’t directly related to abortion, but clearly, those concerns are influencing me in why and how I differ from PG in this discussion of abortion.
Chingona- I pretty much agree with what you’ve said. I just think it’s problematic for the pro-choice movement to use pre-natal diagnosis as justification for later-term abortions. It really just feeds into the whole Good vs. Bad abortion perception, which is ableist as well as sexist. Many of the arguments on this thread about the absolute right of women to remove the fetus, through whatever means, at any point during pregnancy are actually more palatable to me in the sense that they don’t distinguish between reasons for the abortion. Whereas allowing legislators, or even doctors, the absolute power to determine Good and Bad late-term abortions is highly problematic.
Sarah,
Many of the arguments on this thread about the absolute right of women to remove the fetus, through whatever means, at any point during pregnancy are actually more palatable to me in the sense that they don’t distinguish between reasons for the abortion.
Do you think it’s wrong for India (and other nations with high rates of sex-selective abortions) to prohibit these because they infringe on the pregnant woman’s right to decide what kind of fetus she is willing to carry and birth?
Do you think it’s wrong for India (and other nations with high rates of sex-selective abortions) to prohibit these because they infringe on the pregnant woman’s right to decide what kind of fetus she is willing to carry and birth?
I do, for two main reasons.
First, if a woman wants to end her pregnancy, why are her motives anyone else’s business. Unless we really are talking about the “abortion when the contractions are five minutes apart” situation, what right does anyone else have to say that a woman is wrong to not want to carry any particular pregnancy to term.
Second, it’s attacking the wrong end of the problem. If the majority of families want boys not girls then something is wrong in the society, such as that women are being oppressed and mistreated. Taking even more rights away from women is hardly going to help that situation.
Neither is forcing women to bear more daughters to be abused. The only way to solve this problem is to improve the rights of women in India. If the genders are equal then occasionally someone may prefer one gender to another for one reason or another (i.e. they have five sons and want a daughter already or vice versa), but it’ll be random. Sex selctive abortion is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. And treating the symptom will, in this case, only make the disease worse.
Assuming personhood is an factor in the abortion question
But should it be a factor? If one assumes that the fetus is a person–or that the embryo and blastulocyst are people–then outlawing abortion is still giving them privileges far beyond those of people who have been born. No person is allowed to force another person to allow him* to use her body, even if he will die if she does not allow it. You can’t force someone to donate her kidney or bone marrow to you, even if she is the only donor who could save you from dying. So why should a fetus, even if human, be allowed to force his mother to allow him to continue to use her body to gestate? Why shouldn’t she be allowed to get terminate the relationship in the way that is safest for her? If someone invaded your home and you shot them you would be within your rights. Why shouldn’t you then be allowed to kill someone who invades your body without permission?
The only real argument I can see for banning very late elective abortions is that by not obtaining an abortion earlier, the woman who is pregnant gave implied consent to the fetus to occupy her uterus. I’m not sure that the argument makes that much legal or ethical sense–you can back out of a transplant agreement at any stage, for example–but it might be used as a compromise because most people don’t like the idea of a late stage abortion being done for no medical reason.
*Pronoun selection is simply to make the sentence readable. I in no way mean to imply that men are more likely than women to want to appropriate another person’s body by force.
PG:
What kind of obligation do you think the state has?
From the Declaration of Independence:
Our country was founded on the idea that the right to live comes from life’s Creator, that no one has the right to take your life away from you, and that it is the obligation of the state to secure that right. The legalization of abortion grants a woman, in the name of her right to control her own body, the right to take life from someone else’s body.
I’m betting you don’t believe that there’s a Constitutional right to demand food, shelter, health care or anything else from the state. Why does the newborn get to impose an obligation on the state if no one else can?
Because the right to life itself is far different from those. For one thing, unlike what you list, the preservation of the right to life is called out in the document that defines why we created this country in the first place. What you DO with your life is up to you – whether or not you choose to be productive. The DoI talks about the right to pursue happiness, not a right to achieve it. But you can’t pursue happiness if you’re not alive.
Besides which, I’m not suggesting that the State has an obligation to provide health care, food, shelter, and all the other necessities for preservation of life to a newborn. That’s the obligation of the parents. The fact that the pregnancy may be unintended, unwanted, inconvenient, etc. does not dissolve or change that obligation.
A newborn is in a vulnerable state. It has no resources to draw upon to preserve it’s own life and no means or opportunity to obtain such resources. It has a far greater call on us and the state than someone who has had an opportunity to make effort and choices (such as the choice to engage in behavior that carries the chance of getting pregnant).
Again, where do you get this free-floating “obligation”? The American tradition has resisted Good Samaritan laws that obligate one to take even minimal actions on behalf of persons to whom one owes no legal duty otherwise because such laws impinge on our liberties.
Well, first from my understanding of morality. If someone wants to be a self-absorbed slug they are entirely free to do so. I would resist laws (such as a draft law) that would require people to give service.
Having said that, there are plenty of laws that seem to be based on the concept that we have an obligation to the State. On what other basis can the law compel people to serve on juries? And what moral justification is there for taxes other than that we are all obliged to support the state?
Since when were obligations created by one’s ability to fulfill an obligation? Hello, from each according to his ability…
Sounds like a progressive income tax to me. At least the “from each according to his ability” part. Not so much the “to each according to his need”. I suppose that’s the welfare system.
Dianne:
Sex selective abortion is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.
I would say that the incidence of a significant number of sex selective abortions (say, enough to skew the number of live births of one sex or another two standard deviations from what would otherwise be expected in their absence) is evidence of a cultural pathology. There’s something seriously wrong with a culture that produces such a thing.
The sexes legally are equal in India — indeed, mandatory affirmative action (or “reservations” as they’re termed in India) in politics arguably makes them more legally equal than in the U.S. The only exceptions are in the family law rules for specific religious communities (where the Hindu majority has equal rights of inheritance, divorce etc., but the Muslim, Christian and other minorities may not depending on their religious tradition), and even those have been forced to change to be nondiscriminatory. (See the case of Mary Roy — the mother of the author of “The God of Small Things” — for an example of a Christian successfully challenging that male-favoring inheritance tradition.)
Banning dowry gifts and sex-selective abortion is part of the government’s attempt to legislate social sex equality even if it infringes on individuals’ freedom of choice. In a country where the vast majority of people have an agrarian, low-tech, labor-intensive lifestyle, women can have the same rights as men and still be disfavored by parents who are hoping for a physically stronger child (even though women on average work more hours than men because they work both in the fields and in the home).
1. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t actually state any enforceable rights.
that it is the obligation of the state to secure that right
2. It’s only the state’s obligation to secure that right from being infringed by your fellows (e.g. by their murdering you). It is not the state’s obligation to sustain your life, either by providing the sustenance itself or by forcing others to provide it.
Having said that, there are plenty of laws that seem to be based on the concept that we have an obligation to the State. On what other basis can the law compel people to serve on juries? And what moral justification is there for taxes other than that we are all obliged to support the state?
Juries exist only so long as we want the right of trial by jury (which any person called upon to be a juror may need at some time in his life if he is, justly or unjustly, charged with a crime), and the burden falls equally on all citizens. That is, my right to a jury trial necessitates the responsibility of serving on a jury. Taxes similarly exist only so long as we want the government to provide services that have to be funded; mandatory taxes avoid the free-rider problem.
In contrast, mandating that someone with an unwanted pregnancy pay the cost of the state’s forbidding her to abort the fetus by footing the bill for having an early delivery is a deeply unequal burden (falling only on women) that provides no corresponding right.
So would RonF be a “moderate” pro-lifer?
RonF:
There’s the rub, though. You start from the assumption that, from the moment of conception, and if not from them moment of conception then certainly starting from some point before a the fetus begins to be born, there is a “someone else” within the woman’s body whose status is equal to that of the woman. I don’t, and neither do a lot of other people, and neither do all the religious traditions connected to the Creator mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. To decide that the fetus is ensouled and therefore equal to a born person–or just equal to a born person because it possesses certain biological characteristics that a born person has–is an act of faith more than reason; it requires a leap of logic, a metaphorical leap. It is not a fact.
I am NOT NOT NOT defending infanticide, but I would also note that there are many traditional cultures that do not accord even newborns full human status. I tend to see this as a sort of emotional protection against high infant mortality rates. I am not saying parents in those cultures don’t feel grief, even grief beyond what would be deemed socially appropriate, but that the loss of a newborn is treated socially in a way that is similar to how we treat miscarriages – very sad, but not the same as the loss of an “actual” child. We, in contrast, can afford to get attached much earlier on because we assume our children will live.
there are many traditional cultures
Don’t pretty much all cultures have traditions?
/snark.
RonF doesn’t sound like a moderate pro-lifer because he seems to presume that the fetus has a right to life equal to the woman’s right to life. Moderates can distinguish between the moral and legal status of a fetus and that of a woman.
Don’t pretty much all cultures have traditions?
Fair enough. Pre-modern? In Paraguay, when I was there about five years ago, this was very nearly gone. Vaccines and other innovations have made a big dent in the infant mortality rate, though it’s still higher than here. However, there were still families that would not name a child until its first birthday, and late-term miscarriages, term stillbirths and babies who died in the first few months of life still were treated in a similar way in terms of mourning/funeral rites. But that’s “traditional” and is fading away.
There also were hunter-gatherer groups in the Western part of the country, which has an exceedingly harsh climate, that practiced infanticide as child-spacing. Their existence was so marginal that they simply could not maintain more than a certain number of children in the group at a given time. They clearly placed higher human value on the older children than on the newborn. That was their “tradition,” and they don’t do that anymore because they live in shanty towns and do odd jobs for the Mennonites.
So I actually meant something when I said “traditional.” It wasn’t just my colonial, imperialist mindset peaking through.
Edit: And I’m not trying to do some ultra-relativist kind of thinking here and say that just because people have done something, who are we to say what’s right and wrong. I bring it up to challenge the idea that people have somehow always believed life begins at conception and acceptability of abortion is essentially a modern thing.
I bring it up to challenge the idea that people have somehow always believed life begins at conception and acceptability of abortion is essentially a modern thing.
Did someone assert that people always have believed this? My understanding is that way back in the day, people didn’t even realize there was a pregnancy until quickening (i.e. fetal movement that could be felt by the pregnant woman). When women spent so much time being pregnant that their periods weren’t constant, I doubt they could tell the difference between a late, heavy period and an early miscarriage.
So far as I can tell, “life begins at conception” got going as a Christian belief.
No one on this thread said it directly. I was mostly adding on to Richard’s response to RonF at #77. I have heard people in real life treat “life begins at conception” as quite self-evident and “traditional” and abortion as a result of a very modern lack of concern for human life, whereas people have had a lot of different ideas about this throughout history.
As for this:
Even today, it’s hard to tell the difference between a late, heavy period and an early miscarriage unless you peed on a stick. If I had to generalize, I’d guess the woman who wants to be pregnant is a lot more likely to realize she had a miscarriage. The woman with everything crossed, hoping she’s not pregnant and not buying the pregnancy test as a form of magical thinking, will just assume she finally got her period.
But as for not knowing about pregnancy until quickening, I’m a little skeptical of that. A lot of women, even without morning sickness, feel distinctly different even very early in a pregnancy. I know I did. There’s a ton of hormonal stuff that goes on around implantation and early development of the embryo into a fetus, and it produces a lot of symptoms. And quickening is generally between 16 and 20 weeks, so four months-ish. A prima gravida might not be showing much at four months, but in subsequent pregnancies most women show a lot earlier.
I’d suspect that you’d have to go pretty far back into prehistory find people that didn’t realize something was up before quickening. How they thought about that “something,” though, I don’t know.
Richard, are you aware of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary? This is to say, Mary HERSELF was conceived without sin. The dogma is that Mary was sinless.
Technically, this dogma raises Mary to the level of what some Catholics call Co-Redemptrix. Thus, it was downplayed significantly when immigrant Catholics sought to assimilate into Protestant America. But it’s still on the books and it is official. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception (of Mary) is December 8th.
Therefore, the question is, could a sinless person give “consent”?
Diane, thanks for this.
“Assuming personhood is an factor in the abortion question
But should it be a factor? If one assumes that the fetus is a person–or that the embryo and blastulocyst are people–then outlawing abortion is still giving them privileges far beyond those of people who have been born. No person is allowed to force another person to allow him* to use her body, even if he will die if she does not allow it. You can’t force someone to donate her kidney or bone marrow to you, even if she is the only donor who could save you from dying. So why should a fetus, even if human, be allowed to force his mother to allow him to continue to use her body to gestate? Why shouldn’t she be allowed to get terminate the relationship in the way that is safest for her? If someone invaded your home and you shot them you would be within your rights. Why shouldn’t you then be allowed to kill someone who invades your body without permission?”
I’ve been wanting a way to articulate that idea for a long while. The underlying assumption that a fetus has an automatic right to use a woman’s body is so normalised that you almost forget that it’s possible not to frame things that way. Even though that framing pretty much defines women as un-persons.
If you invite a stranger into your house, are you allowed to kill the stranger if the stranger will not voluntarily leave when you ask?
You’re certainly allowed to call the police to have him forcibly evicted. Even if he complains that he has no place to live and will die outside in the cold, the police will still remove him from your house.
But the entire analogy is rather offensive, don’t you think? A woman’s body is rather more than just her “house.” And comparing a fetus to an adult stranger quickly runs into all manner of difficulties – such are the perils of life in Analogyville.
I’d add that seeking an abortion, in this analogy, would be “asking the stranger to leave.” And “invited in” might be more like, accidentally left the door unlocked and found someone sitting in your living room. And the question around late-term abortion is, does the stranger develop some sort of squatter’s rights if you don’t kick him out right away?
But really, I don’t think this analogy is very useful. The right to bodily autonomy, even if you think it starts and ends somewhere very different than I do, is not truly analogous to property rights. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.
If you invite a stranger into your house
I’m having a hard time figuring out how a 9 year old who was raped by her step-father can be said to have “invited” the fetus.
Apart from that, though, what if the stranger begins to act in a manner that is dangerous or destuctive and threatens or attacks you when you ask him/her to leave? (Though I agree the analogy is imperfect.)
Even if the analogy seems to fail, thank you for playing along.
Though the invitation seems to fail the raped nine year old, does the invitation seem more fitting for the pregnant who consented to sex?
Is consensual sex and pregnancy too attenuated for causation?
student,
I don’t think you can see an “invitation” unless the person clearly sought to get pregnant (e.g. got artificially inseminated). At most, you can, as chingona says, say that a person who has sex without using any contraception “left the door unlocked” for pregnancy to occur.
The causation between sex and pregnancy has nothing to do with whether the sex was consensual.
If the pregnancy was not intentional, who should be punished?
I don’t think analogies are useful for discussion of abortion (or any extremely nuanced issue) full stop.
Abortion is abortion. It is not anything else.
Is abortion killing?
student: I have to say that I find your questions to be both coy and leading in ways that make me wonder about your position and motivations regarding this issue; and for this reason I have no desire to engage you (which obviously does not mean that others will not engage you). You have yet to reveal your own stake in the questions at hand, and that, frankly, troubles me; even someone who is “just interested in learning” has a stake. What’s yours?
Can ulterior motive change what is fact or truth about abortion?
Student, if you search this blog, you’ll find plenty of posts in our archives which are more suitable to pro-choice vs pro-life debate than this one. If you want to continue in your present line of (war metaphor) attack, please find one of those threads to revive.
If you continue posting in this thread as you’ve been doing — which is not respecting the spirit of this discussion at all — you’ll be asked to leave the blog.
Is this blog censored to protect pro choice from probing the truth?
Probing the truth is censored by pro choice?
Is probing the truth feared by pro choice?
Is truth not a choice to consider?
Bwahahahah. Will the folks on the farthest reaches of both left and right ever figure out the difference between “good manners to one’s host and fellow commenters” and being “censored”? It’s always particularly funny when those people are directed specifically to an appropriate place for their discussion, but insist that if they don’t get to talk about it wherever they want, no matter how inappropriate, they’re being “censored.” I’ve never figured out how this sort of behavior comports with conservatism. At least people on the left can have the excuse that they don’t believe in boundaries and blahblahblah.
EDITED TO ADD: Also, the idea that student is bringing us poor ignorant pro-choicers The Truth is particularly hilarious. Unless student actually is Mary Ann Glendon in pseudonymous disguise, I doubt s/he has anything to say on this topic that most Alas commenters haven’t already discussed online, or that I haven’t read and debated in the course of getting enough credits in bioethics for a degree (if my school had permitted triple-majoring). Rehearsing Philippa Foot’s response to Judith Jarvis Thompson’s analogies adds nothing to the conversation.
Oh, student, poor student. Will no one realize that he is in fact the teacher?
What does bioethics say about prenatal personhood?