Of course the pro-life movement is not pro-life!
The term ‘pro-life’ is a euphemism for religious oppression. The catholic church is at the centre of the “pro-life” movement, but it is not alone in taking a supposedly pro-life stance. Evangelical Christians, fundamentalists of most religions, Muslims and others are also “pro-life” in this euphemistic sense. There are some atheists, like Christopher Hitchens, who are also anti-abortion, and a few, like Nat Hentoff, who are opposed to assisted dying, but their number is few and the ground on which they stand is shaky. Wikipedia’s entry under ”Pro-Life” includes one reference — in the footnotes — to the Athiest and Agnostic Pro-Life League, but its numbers are small, and, having read a few of the “articles” in its Library section, the reasons they give are weak, and are almost word for word a mirror image of the arguments of the religious, whose culture they share.
Hitchens, however, is a prominent non-believer, and presumably he has had some impact. To some extent what Hitchens succeeds in doing, I think, is to confuse the issue. Here is a brief video where he expresses his views regarding abortion:
However, even though we might agree with Hitchens, here, that the issue of viability is important in determining when an ordinary abortion may or may not take place, he surely is not claiming that, at that point, a human person exists whose right to life is equal to that of the woman who would be its mother should it be born. If he is claiming this, then I think he would meet with a great deal of opposition from those who feel (rightly in my view) that the woman’s life is primary. She is a person who already has a life of values and purposes and plans, the kind of thing that a foetus is not capable of having until some period of time following birth. In law, life is taken to begin at the point when the baby is completely extruded from the body of the mother, and is no longer dependent on the mother for sustenance. The value of her life trumps that of her foetus.
The diminished capacity of the infant for what might be called “narrative life” is the reason why, in law, the killing of an infant by its mother has not been taken as seriously in common law, as the murder of an adult. According to Glanville Williams (The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law):
Infanticide appears to our generation to be a crime less heinous than ordinary murder. Even if there is no social justification for the act, the killing of babies who are not old enough to experience fear is different from the murder of adults. [17]
The other point is that infanticide by the mother may indeed by the outcome postpartum depression. In any event, the diminished value of newborns, or something like it, is the ground on which the contemporary justification for letting severely ill newborns die is based, though there are very few jurisdictions where, in cases where letting die is thought to be appropriate, more positive acts of euthanasia are also accepted as legitimate. This is clearly an area which is in need of clarification, and, possibly, of change.
This is not something that is within the particular remit of this weblog, since I am more concerned with death that involves adult human beings or legally competent minors who have reached a point in their lives where death seems preferable to continuing to remain alive, and where the choice would be made, if available, to receive assistance to die under carefully defined circumstances.
I thought it important, however, to begin by pointing out that support for either abortion or assistance in dying is not unanimous amongst unbelievers. Of course, opposition to abortion and assistance in dying is not unanimous amongst believers either; but support for assisted dying, abortion and reproductive choice for women is much more common, and more nearly universal, I believe, amongst unbelievers. I do not know any statistical studies that have been done in this area, so if readers know of any, I would appreciate the information.
The “pro-life” stand, in both the case of abortion and that of assisted dying, is based almost entirely on religious grounds, with a few exceptions as noted. But the real issue here is not a question of pro- or anti-life, but whether the best interests of the living are at the forefront of moral concern. It seems obvious, considering cases like that of Baby Joseph, or Terry Schiavo, or the case in Phoenix where saving the life of the woman by providing abortion services instead of letting her die got the hospital stricken from the list of catholic hospitals, that the interests of the living are not really at the forefront of religious concern.
As the Phoenix case makes painfully clear, what is of greatest importance, from the standpoint of the church, is maintaining control over individuals and institutions so that the church’s stand, however morally repugnant, is honoured. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a declaration in response to the Phoenix case in which they support Bishop Olmstead’s position that (in the words of John Paul II):
… these reasons and others like them, however serious and tragic, can never justify the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
In other words, the woman should have been left to die, even though, in the event, it is almost certain that both the woman and the unborn foetus would have died. And notice that, in the case of Baby Joseph, no matter how hugged his father might feel by the catholic hospital in the United States, the overwhelming consensus by at least 8 doctors in London, Ontario, was that he suffered from an irreversible degenerative brain disorder, and that all that could be preserved was merely the prolongation of suffering, not of life that would have been of any value to the baby himself.
Prolonging suffering is not being “pro-life,” no matter how many people are duped by catholic mythology about the infinite value of every breath that is taken. What this does, however, is to maintain the mystique of the priesthood and the doctrines of the church, which continue to cocoon the dying in a web of what amounts to a kind of religious hysteria. Father Pavone, despite the ridiculously inflated language of “covert rescue”, did not really “rescue” anyone. The baby is dying — and he’s still dying – and all that Pavone has done is to make sure that the baby will take a few more tormented breaths. What purpose is being served by this? Why, obviously, Pavone and his ghouls are using this baby as a headline grabber for consumption by all those who are being tragically misled by religious hyperbole about the dogma of the value of so-called “innocent life.” Take a look at the Priests for Life website. There is nothing there that values human life. What it exemplifies is religious emotionalism, pure and simple. It is designed to arouse religious passions, not to provide care. One of the headlines reads:
Stop putting a price tag on human life.
Nearby is a blurb about a prayer of remembrance for Terry Schiavo, the brain-dead Florida woman whose life-support was terminated in 2005, and these are the words that accompany the blurb:
On March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died after being deliberately dehydrated, with the consent of the courts. Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life was at her side and presented the truth about her death, and about the value of her life, to the national and international media
Pavone ”presented the truth about her death.” What truth? That she was brain-dead, and no longer had a life that was of any value to her, since there was no person there any longer to value it? Or, simply that there was a breathing body on the bed?
In order to play this theological game, it is necessary to make very fine distinctions. What usually comes into play at this point is the so-called Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), first clearly enunciated by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica. According to the DDE, what really matters is intention. If you intend to do one thing, and another (harmful) thing is an unintended outcome, then, so long as what you intend to do is a good that outweighs the bad, then the badness of the unintended outcome can be ignored. So, if your intention is to relieve pain, and the drug used to relieve pain has the unintended side-effect of hastening death, the use of the drug would be justified, notwithstanding the unintended harm (death) that was caused by its use.
The doctors at the hospital in London had obtained a court order which would have allowed them to remove Baby Joseph from the ventilator. Alex Schadenberg, over at his blog, claims that removing life support from Baby Joseph would not have been a case of euthanasia. Here is what he says:
Some people have suggested that to withdraw the ventilator from baby Joseph would constitute an act of euthanasia.
Euthanasia is an action or omission of an act that directly and intentionally causes the death of another person with the intention of relieving suffering. Euthanasia is a form of homicide.
For Alex Schadenberg it is important to be able to make this distinction, because he is opposed to euthanasia. But it is not at all clear that the distinction between intentional and unintentional outcomes is as obvious as he would like it to be. In this case, the intention of the removal of the ventilator was almost certainly to allow the baby to die. Schadenberg, of course, needs to deny this, since the courts said that the hospital would have been justified in removing the ventilator, and since, as he says, euthanasia is homicide, he cannot admit that removing the ventilator would have been euthanasia. Nevertheless, it would have been euthanasia, because it was known that the ventilator was necessary in order to keep the baby alive.
The truth is that the Doctrine of Double Effect itself is widely believed not to be sustainable in many cases having to do with the terminally ill. To remove life support from a dying person may be to accede to the wishes of the patient, and acceding to the patient’s wishes may be the primary intention, but it is clearly, also, a primary causative factor in the death of the person. And where the patient cannot have wishes — as in Baby Joseph’s case — the link between removing life support and death is even more obvious. Just saying, as Schadenberg does, that the baby might have lived, despite removal of life support, really doesn’t do the trick.
I will look at the Doctrine of Double Effect in a later post, since it is crucial to the “pro-life” stance. In the case of Baby Joseph, however, it is clear that removing the ventilator would have been equivalent to a choice to let the baby die. This would have been best for all concerned, but especially for the baby. In what way is keeping a dying baby alive for a few more hours or days an affirmation of life? Clearly, there is a serious misunderstanding here about how and why we value life. This will deserve a closer look in a later post.
There is an objection that can be made about second and third trimester abortions, from a purely utilitarian perspective:
In some nations such as China and India, there is a gender imbalance with men outnumbering women. In these nations where for cultural as well as economical reasons, boys are preferred. Abortion of female fetuses (detected by ultrasound) is one factor making this problem worse, others being negelect of baby girls and infanticide. So I think a case can be made against late term abortions.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s “The Secret Daughter” is a neat look at this problem in the Indian (particularly rural) context. Horrifying, really.
I think this is less an argument against late term abortions — that a policy allowing late term abortion would allow for abortions for dubious reasons is not an argument against late term abortion — and more a practical issue for policy-makers, etc. to be aware of and to overcome as much as possible. (I say this knowing that in some contexts overcoming those issues is next to impossible.)
Insightful –
Demographics/Population control as a reason for or against abortion seems grotesque to me. Also, manifestly impractical, and grossly inefficatious, as the Chinese experience seems to have exemplified.
You seem to be approaching a position in which you want the “authorities” (civil and/or religious and/or societal) to codify situations in which a woman can exercise her so-called “voluntary” right to an abortion. Just as “self defense” is an excuse for murder but “he called me a name” is not, you seem to want, contra Eric’s argument, to impose values and restrictions from outside the pregnant woman on her choice, that is to grant some kind of latent person-hood to the fetus.
In that way, I see little in your assertion about abortions after the first trimester to distinguish you from any other “pro-lifer.”
So, I’m anti-abortion, pro-choice, pro-women’s reproductive rights.
I think there is a line (not a very bright one, hence the issue) where a developing fetus does gain some inherent right to give life a try. And while it does appear that babies seem to have fewer legal rights to not be murdered than adults, that doesn’t make it OK to do so.
Because where, then, does one draw the line? 1 month? 1 year? 5 years? 18? Until a child turns 18 in the US, there is something called “parental rights”. Which basically means that the parents own the child. I don’t think anyone would argue that a 17-year-old should be murdered by his father, even though parental rights are still very much in place.
So, I guess I’m using a slippery slope fallacy to defend my view. But I don’t see the logical, rational approach. A viable human fetus/baby/toddler/child/tween/teen is by no means an independent entity. The needs are different at each of those stages, for sure. But how do you then judge when the value of the potential of that person outweighs the inconvenience of providing for that person until it becomes independent?
Sticky issue.
In the US at least, the Supreme Court’s decision on the matter also seemed to try to square that circle. Third trimester pregnancies can be prohibited/severely limited precisely because by that time, there is more potential for an independent life form.
As an atheist, my ethics demand that I personally oppose abortion based purely on economic decision-making. When is it ever the “right time” to have a baby? I know that the decisions are not made lightly, yet I still can’t bring myself to say “jettison the bun from the oven at any time for any reason.”
Yet, I fully acknowledge the decision is ultimately not mine to make. It’s not my body that’s being held parasitized for 9 months. And I think that the decision is one of the toughest ones any woman has to face.
In my limited experience, I don’t know of any woman who thinks of fetuses as being as disposable as today’s newspaper.
A friend’s sister recently was faced with a “Baby Joseph” question. Prenatal testing had showed the baby would be born anencephalic. No hope whatsoever of anything more than a few days of life, if that. The decision, looked at rationally from a distance, was easy. Terminate the pregnancy. And yet she agonized over the decision, and grieved for her loss once the procedure was complete.
What isn’t helping is the insistence of the religious that there is such a thing as a “soul” that needs to be considered in the equation. Not only is there no evidence for such a thing, there’s not even agreement as to when this thing becomes evident in humans. It’s a needless fairy story that only complicates and exacerbates an already difficult dilemma.
Not at all. I despise the phrase “prolifer”. People who have adopted that name clearly have no regard for lives of women dying from back alley abortions or ruined lives of teem age mothers.
I am only concerned with the consequences. Gender imbalance is a very serious problem in those nations and is getting worse. I am also the first to emphasize that abortion is only part of the issue. Societal attitudes, plus lax law enforcement tolerating child neglect and infanticide, are perhaps the bigger reason.
Maybe Eric himself would tell us what he thinks?
Gender imbalance results from gender injustice, plain and simple. It’s not so much a result of abortion in places like India or China, since before gender identification was possible before birth girl babies would not always be given the care needed to survive. Even now in India, the cost of a girl to a family is often so great that there are families which are willing to sell girl children to brothels, rather than provide them with a dowry. The only way to achieve parity for male and female children is to have equality of men and women, and drop the invidious practice of dowries. So, my own sense is that it’s not so much a matter of abortion as social practice.
I am reluctant to extend “rights” to foetuses, for a very simple reason. Religious people accord equal rights to foetuses, children and adults. The result of extending rights to the “preborn” is hopelessly to confuse the idea of rights, which pertains, in general, to those who have lives to live. If we extend rights to foetuses, then why do we not accord rights to living animals, since dogs, cats, pigs, cows, horses, etc., already have independent lives to live, they are more sensitively aware of their environments, they experience fear, pain, anxiety, even, in some cases, grief. In fact, they have much more of a mental life than foetuses.
I believe that, before viability, in general, the matter of termination should a decision for the woman, first of all, and only secondarily for the father, but only if he is in some way related to the woman, and is prepared to provide support. Viability cannot be a decisive criterion either, since there are no doubt situations where the woman should still have a choice, if, by way of example, for reasons beyond her control, she had been abused or raped, and had been unable to obtain a termination earlier. No woman should be under an obligation to bring a pregnancy to live birth, though, clearly, the earlier the termination the better.
None of the this, of course, takes into consideration the very sensitive nature of this decision for most women, who do not think of it as a morally negligible matter. Indeed, what is wrong with most religious condemnations of abortion or assistance in dying (as, for example, the draft statement on euthanasia by the Anglican Church of Canada), is that they use the language of carelessness. Life is precious and should not be “discarded” (to take an example from the ACC draft). But no one simply discards life. These are agonising decisions, but they are decisions which should be left to individuals to make. Since they are life decisions, they need to be made by the persons whose lives they are, and therefore are not appropriately regulated by law.
While the Priests for Life website says, “Stop putting a price tag on human life,” Pavone makes it very clear how much it costs to care for Baby Joseph. In one of his “Alerts” he says “now that Baby Joseph is in a U.S. hospital, we’ve been told that it could cost as much as $150,000 for his stay in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit . . . But we committed ourselves to paying the bills, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
A more recent post “Give Now To Priests for Life” says “All donations to the Baby Joseph Fund will be used to cover all the expenses related to Baby Joseph’s care and transportation including, medical expenses, ambulance, travel, food and lodging for the family, and any long-term care as needed.”
Pavone’s statements are full of contradictions: first he says that the air ambulance was “generously donated,” and now he wants money to pay for it. Second, he says Priests for Life will pay all the bills; then, he asks for donations. Unfortunately, gullible Catholics and others will fall for his crap and send so much money that the amount will exceed the cost of Joseph’s care. It’s a win situation for huckster Pavone and Priests for Life.
Auditing required…and probably not forthcoming.
I have never understood the concept of a dowry…
Let’s see….
We value an individual female so little that we will compel her family to pay someone a fairly hefty sum in order that he be allowed to take possession of her. She’s not just worth less than a man, but a positive financial burden. And so the only way to compensate another man for taking her off the family’s hands is to pay that man a substantial sum of money. So that he will own her; but at least he’s being compensated for owning her.
Does that about cover it? How does that even make sense?
Yup, that’s about the size of it, Kevin. But it can be even worse than that. Very common in India is the practice of trying to get more of a dowry by threatening bodily harm to the daughter, now the wife. And many women are, in fact, killed, usually by fire — kitchen “accidents” with paraffin (kerosine) — if additional dowry is not paid. Until this kind of thing is brought to an end, there’s no point trying to change the law regarding selective abortion. The additional girls will be disposed of in some other way.
It is quite disingenuous of them to claim “they” will be covering the costs. The funds come from donors, and the donations are tax exempt. Which means, in the end, the burden is shared by all US tax payers, including me.
And all of it for someone who will never, ever have any meaningful life. Thanks, assholes.
The principle of ‘Double Effect’ is an example of double think, IMO, in which neither part of the process can stand up to scrutiny. The convoluted rationale is meant to obfuscate rather than illuminate, hoping that the laity will simply leave the ‘thinking’ to the clergy, always a bad idea.
Kevin, your acknowledgment that slippery slope arguments are indeed fallacious is important, but you’ve missed an obvious transition point in your discussion of “where to draw the line,” a big boulder on the slope that ought to prevent further logical slippage, at least with regard to any argument involving abortion: Once an infant has been born, the possibility exists for others to care for the child. When a fetus is developing in utero, the burden is necessarily and entirely the mother’s — and so, therefore, should the choice whether or not to terminate the pregnancy be the mother’s.
In every attempt to provide some sort of secular argument against abortion, there are only two potential sources for placing overriding value on the preservation of the life of the fetus: Because claims about magically endowed inherent value simply don’t hold up in a secular argument (and since such claims wind up ignoring everything that actually gives life value, as Eric has argued very clearly in several different post), the overriding value of the fetus’ life must have its source either in the fetus itself in some way, or the fetus’ life and welfare must be valuable to others.
However, it is very difficult to make any clear secular case for the source of value being in the fetus. Cognizant humans transparently do value their own lives for the most part, but that sort of value is all about decisions, desires, and the other trappings of conscious self-determination: First and foremost, every human life is valuable insofar as (and to the extent that) its possessor actually does value it.* Fetuses don’t have the capacities such value is based on, period. The as-yet-unrealized potential for the fetus to develop those characteristics later — that is, the fetus’ some day, future capacity for self-determination and valuing its own life at some point — does not provide any remotely plausible (let alone actually justified) basis for ignoring or overriding the actual, already realized self-determination of women. (And yes, infants also lack that capacity, and it develops in stages over the course of a child’s life with few or no clear dividing lines… But see below.)
If the overriding value of the fetus does not rest in the fetus itself, its source must be that the fetus is valuable to others. Obviously, most fetuses are valued most of all by their mothers. Even unwanted pregnancies are experienced by women in very ambiguous ways, for the sensation (or simply the idea) of a life — a future human being — growing inside one’s own body is powerful. This, transparently, is why abortion is so often a difficult or even tragic choice for women. But to say that a woman who does not want a child — or worse, that a woman whose pregnancy is killing her — is somehow making a mistake by not valuing that fetus more is again simply ignoring one of the primary sources if not the the source of value in life, conscious self-determination.
Moreover, in those cases where the mother does not value the fetus more than she values not carrying a pregnancy to term for any reason, arguing that the fetus still has value sufficient to override the mother’s self-determination is logically equivalent to arguing that the value of the fetus’ life overrides the value of the mother’s life: Even in pregnancies with no specific medical problem identified early in pregnancy, carrying a pregnancy to term is as a matter of medical fact far riskier than abortion** — so rejecting the mother’s right to choose abortion is in effect forcing her to risk her life for the life of another against her will. Where can such great value come from? Having argued that the overriding value of the fetus cannot plausibly rest in the fetus itself, and having limited our discussion to those cases where the mother does not value the fetus more than she values terminating the pregnancy, all that is left in a secular argument is to argue that the value of the life of the fetus to someone else — to the father, perhaps, or to society at large for some reason (as might be argued with regards to the situations cited by Insightful Ape in the first comment) — is sufficient to override the value of the mother’s life.
Here, I think, is where that boulder on the slippery slope is crucial. When a child is born, someone else who places value on the life of that child — the father, childless couples who want to adopt, society at large — can take responsibility for the child’s care and health and welfare, and in doing so they are not trampling on the self-determination of the mother in any way (keeping in mind that we’ve already limited discussion to cases where the mother does not value and want the child), nor forcing her to risk her life any further against her will. But before birth, anyone who might value the fetus — ditto the previous list — cannot take the responsibility for the maintenance and welfare of the fetus from its mother: Thus, for the value they place on the fetus to be respected or realized in any way, the mother’s self-determination must be denied — she must be forced to risk her life without regard for whether she chooses to do so willingly. I think the latter is transparently unjustifiable***, and no opponent of abortion rights I’ve ever read has come even close to making a plausible argument in its favor.
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* The connection between self-determination and the value of life ties back to the primary topic of Eric’s blog, of course. Opponents of euthanasia insist that we ought to value our lives even when our lives have become intolerable to us and we desire nothing more than to exit life on our own terms, which insistence ignores the very substance of what makes life valuable: That is, the substance of life’s value surely includes as a primary component our ability to live it as we wish, to pursue what we decide is important to us and otherwise determine the narrative of our own lives.
** I learned a few hours ago that the wife of a grad school friend of mine just died from medical complications that arose during the birth of their first child. Childbirth is, tragically, a risky proposition — and anyone who says otherwise is a hateful lying asshole who I want to punch in the face today.
*** I can see how there could be situations where it may be justifiable to force someone to take on some small risk against their will: For example, there is a very small but non-zero incidence of adverse reactions to vaccination. However, the protection of the lives of many, many people — fully conscious self-determining beings who transparently do value their own lives, unlike fetuses — through herd immunity does seem to justify requiring people to be vaccinated even if they are unwilling to take that tiny risk. Note, however, that none of the factors which make it justifiable to require vaccination are applicable to any argument requiring women to carry pregnancies to term.
This post is a piece of perfect timing Eric! I have been discussing many and varied things at other forums and being told that there are numerous secularists and/or atheists who are “pro-life” and also that there are numerous secular arguments against abortion. And I keep asking, well, where are they?
You’ve certainly supplied a couple of links, which I am currently having a read through, but as you say “the “pro-life” stand, in both the case of abortion and that of assisted dying, is based almost entirely on religious grounds.”
(The discussion I’ve been having is whether attacking religion is getting at the root cause of important issues, or if it’s taking your eye of the ball. Loosely, I’m being told that the prime mover in many and various politcal and social issues is money, or power, or greed, or control or whatever, and that singling out religion misses the mark.)
Certainly in the case of abortion and euthenasia (and bioethics in general), religion is front and centre, surely?
Meanwhile @kevin: I share a lot of your unncertainty. There’s just a whole lot of about the subject that makes me uncomfortable. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in other posts on this very forum on this very subject.
My girlfriend did rightfully pull me up when I was discusssing it elsewhere on the web a few weeks ago, because I was, however unwittingly, underplaying the woman’s perspective on the situation in my concerns. (The risk of posting on a male dominated forum, one suspects. Absolute sausage fest sometimes.)
TPP, I’m sure it was you who pulled me up on a slippery slope in an earlier thread too. It’s deja vu all over again. Excellent post, which I am going to have to digest over a few readings.
As Christopher Hitchens said about Mother Teresa, “MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
In the same sense the “pro life” group is no friend of the dying, they are obsessed with control over the living.
Any philosophy which espouses reason, ethics, and justice, while rejecting supernatural and religious dogma as a basis of morality and decision-making is of course anathema to this group and given the irrationality and vileness of their position, every attempt will be made to suppress those who want control over their life choices.
Do you mean to tell me that this “Catholic” hospital puts a price tag on this child’s life, and is charging Priests for Life to care for him? How crass of them! How unspiritual! Putting a price tag on life, indeed! Do they not know that the value of life is infinite?! And that means that every moment, every second, that that child remains alive is of infinite value (that’s one of the costs of infinity!)! And they are charging $150,000! Shame!
I was going to add an addendum regarding in vs ex utero.
PZ Myers, among others, thinks this an artificial distinction.
An 8-months-developed fetus that is still in the womb is fundamentally different from a 4-weeks developed fetus. And is far less different from a 1-day-old baby than that 4-week fetus.
The date of birth as the bright line doesn’t work.
And I think to claim that until and unless the fetus expels itself alive and kicking that it has not one shred of right to its own life is clearly wrong. That I’m on the side of medical and legal precedent doesn’t mean that I’m correct, of course; only that I have other fellow-travelers who have thought about this issue and have come down on the side of the same basic premise.
So, the issue then becomes “when”. And all of my previous arguments remain.
The Supreme Court decision wraps around “viability”. If you’ve carried the baby down the road far enough that it *could* survive on its own without you; then you’ve functionally abrogated your right to terminate with impunity. Because otherwise, that means one can just change one’s mind whenever they feel like it; and then there’s that darn slippery slope that says it’s then OK after the baby is born to drown it in the tub until it’s old enough and strong enough to fight back.
BTW: I’ll take the analogy even further in order to cement what I think is an important point.
By advocating for the unrestricted primacy of the woman to deal with the developing fetus as she wants, you are effectively saying this:
A woman enters the hospital because her labor pains have started. Before she delivers, she decides she does not want the baby anymore, and orders the hospital to terminate the pregnancy. Under your scenario, the hospital would be obligated to kill the fetus even as it was being expelled from the birth canal.
The issue is clear; at some point in the process of pregnancy, BEFORE the woman gives birth, the fetus/child gains some additional ethical-legal-moral status that it did not have previously.
The day of birth as the bright line is an artificial distinction.
One more thing, then I’ll shut up…
Under the concept of unlimited primacy of the mother’s right to terminate, you’d also have to outlaw induced labor and caesarian section.
Because those two procedures artificially accelerate when the baby is born and therefore gains its rights as a human.
And therefore interferes with the woman’s right to decide to terminate the pregnancy whenever she chooses.
Unless, of course, you go right back to the same slippery slope that it’s OK to terminate the pregnancy AFTER the birth has occurred.
If it’s not OK to terminate a 1-hour-old infant, why is it OK to terminate an about-to-be-born-in-1-hour infant? And if that’s not OK, then you have conceded that the moment of birth does not matter in terms of the infant’s human rights.
Trying to make the birth date the bright line for the inception of human rights makes little sense.
Sorry, can’t let this go…
The minus-1 vs plus-1 hour scenario also makes your point about the medical risks of pregnancy a red herring.
The risks to the woman of delivering vs terminating are exactly the same at some point.
Under your unlimited right to terminate scenario, the baby’s head could be just about crowning, and the doctor would then have to ask “OK, Mrs. Jones. We’re almost ready. Kill or keep?”
And would be obliged to follow whatever instructions came out of her mouth.
No “let’s wait another minute; you might change your mind.” No “put it up for adoption”.
Kill or keep.
I agree that as a male, my thinking is colored by the fact that I will never be faced with the decision.
But even if I were a woman, I don’t think my fundamental position would change…it’s the decision of the woman to make as an individual, not as a member of a set of humans that has a specific sex.
That I as an individual would not terminate my pregnancy (were that possible) due to primarily economic considerations is born out of my personal ethics. Not my gender ethics.
I can’t tell you how sad/angry that makes me.
Priests for Life (Canada) has a new posts entitled ‘ELECTION READINESS: “voting with a conscience”‘ with advice for the Catholic faithful:
Sorry HTML fail; try this
http://www.priestsforlifecanada.com/English/The_Facts/election_readiness.php
Is there anything in the Elections Act which prohibits this kind of religious involvement in the process of elections? It’s very troubling to see this kind of involvement of churches in detailed question to put to candidates. As I recall, when I was active as a priest in the Anglican Church it was absolutely forbidden for clergy to be involved in election campaigns. Churches are not subject to taxes, and therefore have no right to be involved actively in campaigns.
Terri Schiavo was not brain dead.
http://justiceforterrischiavo.com/terri_schiavo.htm
Well, Janice, pointing to a webpage will not settle this question. All the evidence that I have ever seen about Terry Schaivo’s condition points to the fact that she was in a persistent vegetative state. Why would you think differently? After all, the brain scans seem pretty conclusive, don’t they? What evidence can you give that Terry Schaivo had any brain activity in the cerebral cortex, the area most engaged in thought, language, and self-awareness? She certainly suffered massive brain damage, and there was no sign of consciousness for many years. Are you not involved in a kind of conspiracy theory here? What is the point, now that she is undoubtedly dead, rehashing old stories about her state when there is no way now to confirm anything?
I would think, one would at least want to know the truth in the Terri Schiavo case. But apparently some prefer not to know.The Schiavo case won’t go away, thanks to those like Ronald Cranford[God rest his soul] and George Felos. All I can do is keep the REAL Truth available for those seeking it.
Sorry Janice, that won’t do. The REAL Truth must be provided with evidence. What is the evidence that Terry Schaivo was not in a permanent vegetative state? She collapsed in 1990 and she died in 2005. In the intervening period what evidence was there that she was conscious, perceived and responded to the world around here, and had any prospect of recovery? You can’t make your position more compelling by capitalising the word ‘real’. I am certainly open to evidence, but I have seen none, notwithstanding the letter from Jeb Bush that you display on your website.
The autopsy proves that Felos and Cranford were deceiving the public with the brain scan they released. One can’t get more REAL than a copy of the flipped brain scan[released by Cranford and Felos] and the autopsy.
So far I don’t see the evidence. What is the point of talking about a “flipped brain scan” unless this is evidence for something? Where is the evidence that it was flipped? Where is the evidence that the scan was not of Terry Schaivo? What is the point of all this? A copy of a scan proves nothing unless you have an hypothesis in which this proves something, and explains why it proves that, and the claim that is it flipped (what does that mean?) actually does confirm the hypothesis.
The un-flipped version is on the site with the flipped version….along with link to Terri Schiavo’s autopsy….But of course…… you haven’t visited my site or you would know that….
Well, actually, Janice, I have visited your site. But I don’t see what the supposed flip signifies. I can see the large area of dead tissue in the centre of the scan. Doesn’t this show just what you seem to be denying, that Terry Shaivo’s brain was badly, even irreversibly, damaged, and that she was, effectively, in a vegetative state. It seems to me that you are grasping at straws, and I wonder why you are doing it. It seems a pointless exercise at this time, and will change nothing.
The unflipped scan released by Cranford and Felos show the medal object as being in the left thalamus ….The autopsy shows the medal tipping in the right thalamus …I am sorry if you have a reading problem