As you know, Tim Tebow — Florida Gators quarterback and the 2010 version of Eric Crouch — is going to star in a Super Bowl ad with his mom, in support of Focus on the Family. In the ad, Tebow and his mother, Pam, will evidently tell the tale of how Pam, pregnant with Tim and doing missionary work in the Philippines — fell ill, and how doctors in the Philippines urged her to have an abortion to save her life. She refused, and now America has had Tim Tebow inflicted on us, thus making the ultimate case for why abortion is a good thing. Kidding! Of course, it’s to argue that if only abortion was illegal, all of us would have kids like Tim Tebow.
Now, there are many directions one could go with this news. One could note that the United Church of Christ was not allowed to run an ad during the Super Bowl because one of its arguments — that homosexuals are human — was “too controversial.” One could note that anti-Bush ads were routinely rejected as “too political.” One could note the fact that the founder of Focus on the Family, James Dobson, has advocated that men shower with young boys to show off their penises. (I am not making this up.)
But the direction I choose to go is different. You see, while Pam Tebow may have been advised by doctors to seek an abortion, she’s leaving a very big background piece unstated: abortion is illegal in the Philippines.
“Well,” you say, “this is different. I mean, her life was in jeopardy, so obviously, that was legal.” Au contraire. The Philippine criminal code makes no exception for life or health of the mother. Had Pam Tebow had an abortion, she could have been jailed, as could her physician and anyone else who assisted her.
Now, that doesn’t mean Pam Tebow is lying. There are about 470,000 abortions performed annually in the Philippines, and about 80,000 women hospitalized for complications of abortion. 12 percent of all maternal deaths in 2000 were due to unsafe abortons, of course, because abortion is illegal — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. As anyone with a rudimentary understanding of abortion policy knows, outlawing abortion doesn’t stop abortion. It just makes it much less safe.
But this is an important part of the story that Pam and Tim Tebow are ignoring. Because the organization they’re supporting — Focus on the Family — is virulently anti-abortion, and supports making it illegal. But by Pam Tebow’s own admission, outlawing abortion didn’t stop her Filipino physician from recommending it. She had a choice — but one that was more dangerous than it had to be, one that could have had legal repercussions for her and her family.
Understand, I don’t begrudge Pam Tebow if she would have made that choice freely. The whole point of pro-choice is that it places the ultimate decision to continue or abort a pregnancy with the woman who is pregnant. Pam Tebow was willing to risk her life to bring her son into the world. That was her choice.
But doubtless, there are Filipinas who even today are in the same grave position Pam Tebow was in, who would like to make their own informed choice, but who are not American and lack the connections and relative wealth Tebow had. Some may choose to carry to term. Some may choose an abortion. But all of them deserve to make that choice based on the dictates of their own consciences, without fear of jail or death.
Ultimately, Pam and Tim Tebow want to limit the right of women to decide what happens in their own bodies. And to do so, they’re willing to fudge the truth about the circumstances surrounding her own choice — one that was not completely free, one that was not completely safe, one that she could not make based solely on her own conscience. She wants to argue that she had a choice when, frankly, she did not. I do believe the Bible has something to say about bearing false witness. But that, I suppose, isn’t important when you’ve got an anti-choice message to share.
I don’t support making abortion illegal, but doesn’t this factoid kind of support anti-choice persons’ point even more than if abortion had been legal in the Phillipines? Maybe if she could have easily had an abortion, without consequences or harm to her health, then she would aborted Tim Teboew. Personally, I don’t think that would have been a big deal, but people who care about the fact that he’s alive might think that that law did the world a favor.
If there are 470,000 abortions performed annually in the Phillipines then she had a choice to have an abortion. If the doctor in the hospital suggested it then it’s my guess that despite the law she had options not open to, say, being some perfectly healthy teenager with no particular involvement with a doctor, just like American women who had money and a cooperative doctor had options not open to some teenager with no connections back when abortion was illegal in the U.S. So I don’t see that she’s lying. She had a choice.
Of course, it’s to argue that if only abortion was illegal, all of us would have kids like Tim Tebow.
I don’t see how you get this conclusion. And I figure her argument is that an abortion destroys a potential human life, and that you never know what that potential is so it’s wrong to destroy it. Which goes to the basis of the “woman’s freedom to choose what goes on with their own body” argument. Once a fetus has been conceived there’s more than one body and more than one life that’s involved.
I haven’t followed the Rev. Dobson much. That’s an interesting statement by him. These days in the Scouts there are pretty stringent regulations about men and boys (or women and girls) showering together. The short version is you can’t do it. At all.
OTOH, when I was a kid we did it all the time. Between WWII and Korea just about all the adult males at that time had been in the armed forces, where gang showers (i.e., enclosed areas with shower heads lining the perimeter) are common. This was the population that a) were leaders and b) designed and built Scout camps. So they were also common at Scout camp and after a hike or whenever the entire Troop would troop into the showers, men and boys together. I can’t answer for whether or not (as the Rev. suggests) it has any influence on boys growing up gay or straight, but I can testify that it made certain parts of the sex education curricula redundant. Sex education in the schools just started up, with a great deal of controversy, somewhere around my 7th or 8th grade year. By then I had a pretty good idea of the physical aspects of what they showed us.
Now, the rules are the rules. I have given my word that I will follow them and I do. But I really don’t see what the big deal is, as long as what we are talking about is a group setting.
And I figure her argument is that an abortion destroys a potential human life, and that you never know what that potential is so it’s wrong to destroy it.
I’ve always found this one of the more inane anti-choice arguments. We don’t know what the potential human life destroyed in an abortion is. Fair enough, but we also don’t know what the potential of Ron and my’s hypothetical love child. So it’s wrong of Ron not to conceive it with me. We don’t know the potential of the child my partner and I might have conceived if I hadn’t been pregnant with my actual child. So that pregnancy was wrong. And so on. Glad things worked out for Ms. Tebow, obviously, but that doesn’t make her doctor wrong to suggest an abortion or her choice the best one for everyone.
I think Jeff was exaggerating, but the implication is clearly that if abortion were illegal, we’d have more fine, upstanding young persons like Tim running around making the world a better place. This is why pro-lifers never find a murderer and talk about how his or her mother struggled with choosing whether to give birth.
If abortion never happened, we’d simply have more people. More good people, more bad people, more poor people, more rich people, and more of every kind of in-between person. Maybe the person who can cure cancer would be born. And maybe the person who will be responsible for WW3 will be born, too. Who knows? Maybe these people are already born. Or maybe they were never born because their potential mom chose to carry a different pregnancy, one that merely resulted in a lab technician instead of a cancer curer, or a pee-wee football player who went on to major in English.
Or maybe they were never born because their potential mom chose to carry a different pregnancy, one that merely resulted in a lab technician instead of a cancer curer, or a pee-wee football player who went on to major in English.
Or maybe she chose not to carry any more pregnancies at all and is now in the process of curing cancer*, writing the great American (or Phillipino) novel, or training for the Olympics instead of struggling to raise a child or children she does not want. Why not talk about the life of the real woman as well as the life of the imaginary child?
*A single cure for cancer is about as likely as a single cure for all infectious disease, but it’s the standard example so I’ll go with it.
The counterpoint to this has to be “Every Sperm is Sacred” by Monty Python (link here)
If men could have children, abortion would be a standard medical procedure.
If abortion is such a concern, why isn’t there more funding for better contraception? You know, a real male contraception (that actually gets out of FDA testing) or a female version that doesn’t cause horrid side effects?
If the bottom line is ending abortions, then work towards that in whatever way is effective. In the meantime, a woman’s body is her own. If she chooses to have children, great. If she doesn’t, it’s her choice.
Yes, a woman’s body is her own, as a man’s body is his own, to do with as they choose. Occasionally the owners of those bodies choose to use them in a fashion that has a well-known risk of creating a third body, albeit dependent for a limited time on the body of one of the original two. It’s the assertion of the right of one of those two original bodies to unilaterally decide to end that third entity that is the crux of the issue. Some say they have no unqualified right to do so, regardless of whether the end of that third entity comes before or after the initial and relatively brief period of dependence. Others say that they do, and/or that in fact no third entity exists with rights worthy of respect until some deadline such as the start of the third trimester or birth is passed.
Me, I figure that the spectrum of possible outcomes of sex and the use of birth control are well known. While it’s legitimate to avoid conception with the use of birth control methods/drugs/devices, the fact that things didn’t work out the way you had hoped due to the failure of such (presuming that they were used at all or if there was even an original intent to avoid pregnancy in the first place) does not excuse or give justification for the decision to destroy life once conceived.
I’ve always found this one of the more inane anti-choice arguments.
Dianne, do you seriously not see a difference between the potential of a life once created and one that never came into existence in the first place?
Understand that when I’m talking about potential I’m not talking about the potential acts of that person once born and grown to maturity. I’m talking about the potential of the end result of a live-born human being. I don’t see any relevance or qualification on anyone’s part to judge the relative worth of someone who cures cancer vs. someone who creates web comics or someone who flips burgers at McD’s.
Ron, do you seriously not see a difference between a live acorn and an oak tree? They’re both “live,” after all, so in your view are they identical? Should laws aimed at preserving ancient oaks also apply to acorns planted a week ago, since they’re both the same species and both alive?
Do you think that parents should be legally forced to give kidneys to their own children who need kidneys? After all, this is a possible outcome that’s well known before the parents begin to have sex. Sure, parents should have the right to do what they want with their own bodies — but not to the point that their unilateral control of their own bodies means that their child dies. Right?
Finally, Ron, just to clarify: Do you think abortion should be illegal in most cases (which is a distinct question from whether you think it’s responsible or morally right)? How about in cases of rape?
do you seriously not see a difference between the potential of a life once created and one that never came into existence in the first place?
Lif e hasn’t been “created” since the precambrian. The sperm and egg (technically oocyte) that form the newly conceived blastulocyst were both alive before they merged. They are both living, human cells. Why should an unfertilized egg be a disposable nothing while a fertilized egg is a person? They are both human cells, both have the potential to become people (the unfertilized egg only needs one trivially easy additional step to put it on the same footing as that of the fertilized egg).
I don’t see how you can reasonably claim that a life springs into existence at conception. If all human cells (or all human cells capable of creating new humans–a growing subset) are “human life” then an unfertilized gamete should have the same value as a fertilized gamete (as should a number of pluripotent stem cells). If, on the other hand, life is defined in the same way death is then neither should be of any importance.
Finally, I really meant to address the “but you might have aborted Einstein” argument in isolation. A case can be made for claiming that fertilization is a special event or that ensoulement, if you believe in such, happens then. Not a good case in my opinion, but a case. However, the argument that aborting this particular zygote is awful because it might grow up to be someone “special” is one I find ridiculous. Why should this zygote, the one that happened, by chance to be conceived, be assumed to be the best one? Why not the one that you could have conceived with the guy/gal you didn’t go home with that night? Or the one that you could have conceived with your partner next month? Or you? Why shouldn’t you be ambitious to be that exceptional person yourself instead of pressuring your offspring (“you” as in “one” not as in Ron or any other reader in particular.)
RonF, you wrote:
I am not interested in getting into a debate with you about this, mostly because I don’t have a lot of time, but I do need to say that the assertion which follows your “and/or” is profoundly and insultingly reductive of the pro-choice position, at least as I understand it and as I have heard it articulated. It is also, by the way, similarly and insultingly reductive of the position of religious traditions, like Judaism, which do not see abortion as murder, which permit abortion under certain circumstances, not all of them “therapeutic” (meaning to save the life of the mother) and which absolutely privilege the life of the mother over the life of the fetus until it begins to emerge from the mother’s vagina. You are, for example, legally obligated within Judaism to violate the Sabbath in order to save a fetus, and violating the Sabbath is something, within orthodox Judaism anyway, that one is only supposed to do in a life or death situation.
If you want a very brief and really inadequate summary of the Jewish law concerning abortion, I wrote a little bit about it on my blog. (And you’ll have to excuse the somewhat screwy typography; I imported that post from an old blog and I haven’t cleaned it up yet.)
If I may be forgiven a slight digression from the thread topic, I have a question, mostly for the pro-life posters but really for anyone interested in answering:
There is a test called the “hamster egg assay” which is used to test fertility in men. Basically, sperm are put in a petri dish with some hamster eggs and you see if they can penetrate the egg and fuse pronuclei. Usually, the cell then dies. Occasionally, it divides instead and forms a blastula. Which of the following matches your opinion on these entities:
1. They’re little people, they must be allowed to live as long as possible, up to and including implantation and birth.
2. It’s a lab test, just dump them.
3. Eww!!! That’s disgusting! Ban the test NOW!
4. Other???
And why?
Dianne,
I’m not pro-life, but I’m between fascinated and horrified and amused. Little hybrid hamster people? I had no idea. It seems like … the plot of a South Park episode.
Ron, do you seriously not see a difference between a live acorn and an oak tree?
Sure I do. I also see a difference between a grain of oak pollen and the egg cell in the oak flower and the resultant zygote once the two have joined, which is the gist of my reply to Dianne’s #4. And, now that I go back and review it, her post #10.
Also – people aren’t acorns. Or oak trees. If I thought that an oak tree was sacred I might have a different opinion regarding acorns than, say, the squirrels that infest my yard do.
I think that abortion should be illegal in most cases. I accept the standard exceptions of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. I realize that there are some inconsistencies there between that and not wishing to destroy a unique human individual once formed. Certainly in the case of rape a woman did NOT have a choice. With regards to the life of the mother I think it’s reasonable that in the extremity of danger to the life of the mother (over and above the normal risks of childbirth) the mother’s life should be given priority. But I don’t extend that to the normal risks of childbirth and to other, lesser issues. There are no good compromises in the case of abortion when you start talking about exceptions, but those are the ones that I think are reasonable and acceptable.
Dianne, I don’t know what kind of life is created by the fertilization of a hamster egg with a human sperm, but I know it’s not human. And I sincerely doubt that it would develop into anything.
I simply can’t believe that this commercial is going to get air time during the Super Bowl. It really is amazing how in the “lean” times, and most people in this country are hurting financially right now, the hard core conservatives ban together to tell everyone else how they must live their lives. They take advantage of people’s fear and uncertainty and point fingers at a woman’s right to an abortion or at homosexuals existing at all let alone marriage equality.
Small minded people with lots of money have us all careened into one big pen and they push us any direction they feel like, and most people move for fear of being trampled.
Well, I say trample away – if you don’t stand up your freedoms they get taken away.
Here is an interview series that is empowering about professional women in online journalism. http://www.ourblook.com/Table/Gender-Studies-and-Media/
The interviews were conducted by the University of Iowa Gender and Mass Media class this past fall.
chingona: You would be going with option #3 then? Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure none of them make it past 2 or 3 cell divisions. It’s an obsolete test anyway. But shows how fragile a definition of “human” based on chromosomes alone is.
Ron: If the critical issue is development, ie that the product of the hamster egg assay can’t develop into anything, then why should a fertilized egg be of any particular importance? Again, it is only one step-and an easy step at that-further along in the long path that can, if all goes well, end in a person than an unfertilized egg.
What, BTW, is your definition of “human”? You seem to me to be using an “I know it when I see it” definition.
Dianne,
Not quite at “ban the test” territory. More just really surprised that human sperm can enter a non-human egg at all, much less DO anything, even if it is just a few cells. Kind of amazing but in a disturbing way and not something I realized was possible.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, you wrote:
I’m having trouble understanding what you mean here. Ron wrote, of the right of a biological mother and father to decide whether to terminate a feturs, which some consider a ‘third entity:’ “Others say that they do [have the right to terminate], and/or that in fact no third entity exists with rights worthy of respect until some deadline such as the start of the third trimester or birth is passed.”
First, Ron’s description seems to be worded in a reasonable manner, and, more importantly, it seems to be accurate. He doesn’t write, for example, “ALL others say that…” If anything, he seems to have written a fairly benign description of different viewpoints about the rights of a fetus.
Second, I don’t understand what it means to say that something is “insultingly reductive of the position of religious traditions.” Must a writer consider the implications of every possible religion in the history of the world when they are describing different schools of thought?
I’m not arguing with you, necessarily. I’m just not sure I understood what you wrote in the way that you meant it.
I accept the standard exceptions of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. I realize that there are some inconsistencies there between that and not wishing to destroy a unique human individual once formed. Certainly in the case of rape a woman did NOT have a choice. With regards to the life of the mother I think it’s reasonable that in the extremity of danger to the life of the mother (over and above the normal risks of childbirth) the mother’s life should be given priority.
First question: Why should rape and incest be exceptions? If a woman is raped that doesn’t give her the right to go out and kill a random relative of the rapist, does it? And if you truly believe that a zygote is a person then that’s what you’re proposing to allow.
Second question: How much danger is enough danger? Is any risk above the normal acceptable? Black women have a mortality rate of over 3X that of white women*. Should abortion be allowed for blacks but not for whites? Is the cutoff 10X usual danger? 100x? 1000X? Or, to look at it another way, should a woman with a 90% chance of surviving be allowed to have an abortion?
Also, are you willing to treat zygotes as people for other issues? Should tax breaks for parents start at conception rather than at birth? Should the NIH start a new institute for prevention of miscarriage? Somewhere between 25% and 80% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. If zygote=baby then that’s a massive public health problem. Should CPS get involved in pregnancies? And how are they going to take custody away if the mother persists in behavior that they don’t approve of?
One pro-life argument sometimes advanced is that conception is the simplest standard to use rather than worrying about the less clear thresholds such as trimesters. The problem is it’s not really when one considers all the consequences.
*Sorry about the crappy HTML version-I couldn’t get the PDF version to copy.
Ron wrote:
I just want to point out that this is, essentially, a pro-choice position; it’s just that the limits of choice in Ron’s case are far more stringent than the limits the position we usually understand as pro-choice would put on a pregnant woman. And there are limits to a typical pro-choice position. No one that I know who is pro-choice, for example, would argue that it’s okay for a woman whose child has begun to emerge to say, “Okay. Nope. I changed my mind. I don’t want this. Kill the thing.” And I imagine most, if not all, would say that the same limit would apply once labor had begun. And there may be people who draw the line even sooner than that. And I mean here situations where there is no risk to the mother’s life, etc.
Though I wonder, Ron: would it be okay with you for a woman whose life was threatened by her pregnancy to choose to die in order to save the fetus she was carrying? Would there be any circumstances in which it would not be okay?
Though I wonder, Ron: would it be okay with you for a woman whose life was threatened by her pregnancy to choose to die in order to save the fetus she was carrying? Would there be any circumstances in which it would not be okay?
I’m not the person asked, but I can think of two situations where that would not be ok: 1. She is being forced or coerced into doing so. 2. She is severely mentally ill or otherwise unable to understand the consequences of her choice. If she is competent and chosing freely, well, it’s her choice and no one else’s.
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As for those folks on this thread who want to outlaw abortion, it’s nice to talk about abortion on a philosophical level, but in my opinion, people need to understand the reality of what it’s like to live in a land where abortion is illegal. I recommend reading The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan. The book relates the experiences of a group of women who ran an underground abortion service before abortion was legalized in the US. It’s an excellent book and to put it lightly, it’s a scary, eyeopening read.
People can forget a lot of contemporary history in only a decade’s time. It has been 37 years since abortion was illegal in this country—long enough for many to lose touch with the history behind this issue. I was born in 1968. Without books like the one I mentioned, it would be impossible for me to wrap my mind around what it was like for women living through that time. There are some very good reasons why abortion was legalized in 1973. The book offers a small window into the social reality underlying that legal decision.
It’s strange to me that abortion is only focused on the act of abortion; pro-lifers argue that you’re killing a human being (as I understand the argument), pro-choicers argue (in some instances) that the biological matter that has the potential to be a human but hasn’t reached it’s potential yet so therefore the mother’s bodily autonomy is more important.
What about the fact that some people who get abortions don’t want to care for the child once it’s born? That they feel very strongly, for whatever reason, that they cannot support, nuture, change their lives to fit a child? It’s all well and good to say, “Well, that’s the responsibility they took on when they had sex” but life isn’t that simple. Contraceptions fail. Mistakes (including drunken ones) happen. Hell, sometimes it just happens in a loving marriage where the fetus is diagnosed with spina biffida in utero.
The point is that all this gets caught up in blame – and that’s not what’s practical. The complete utilitarian aspect of this is yes, people need access to abortion to prevent them from doing it on their own. They need access for when their children have congenital defects. Perhaps it’s controversial, but I have long believed that abortion prevents child abuse in some instances.
It’s the access that matters. It doesn’t matter if it’s morally right or wrong. I feel like it’s very hard for pro-lifers to see that there are good, moral people who would defend my right to a choice to the end, not because they feel abortion is right but because they feel that the choice is what matters.