The Abortion Issue

[Smurfette Principle]

See, I really don't like abortion under most circumstances. In that regard, I guess you could say I lean a bit closer to pro-life than most people on the forum (though maybe I'm just mistaken on that). I believe that under most circumstances, if there aren't life-threatening issues to be dealt with, adoption should ideally be preferable to abortion. I say ideally, because I know damn well that thousands of children go unadopted in today's society, even in the U.S., so I can understand if someone simply wants to abort a baby because they can't take care of one and don't want to contribute to world hunger. It still makes me... uncomfortable. Obviously, the circumstances I'd always be sympathetic to abortion is in the case of rape, incest, accidental pregnancy (attempts to use birth control failed), and teen pregnancy, as I believe teens should be allowed to make mistakes, even huge ones, and live well/long enough to learn from them.

It makes me uncomfortable, too, but I'm still pro-choice. Give me a world where every adopted child grows up in a loving family, or where there isn't rape or incest, or where everyone has access to birth control and knows how to use it properly, or where everyone is rich enough that they can afford children, or where pregnancy and childbirth isn't so traumatically damaging to someone's body, or where there isn't anencephaly or other fatal birth defects, and then I'd say we can outlaw abortion because we won't need it. But as long as we need abortion, I'm going to support it, even if that means being uncomfortable.

[sandman]

I am deeply uncomfortable with abortion as well, and it has nothing to do with religion. I simply don't know when that moment is that a potential human becomes a person. All I know is that it's sometime between conception and physical birth. When? I have no idea. I am 99% certain that the moment is far closer to birth than conception, but I just don't know, and the thought of the possibility of ending a child's life is utterly abhorrent to me. My wife and I have never been able to have children, so I guess I bring some extra emotional baggage to the table myself.

From a legal point of view I am definitely pro-choice for the simple reason that I am old enough and educated enough to know that making something illegal doesn't make it go away. It just drives it underground and turns a woman already in great distress into a victim of a shadow economy of unregulated medicine. Innocent women end up dead that way, and it wouldn't do a thing to eliminate abortion if that was the intent.

From a moral/philosophical point of view I just don't know. I will not abide the harming of a child, and if a fetus is a child, well then, that answers all the mysteries I need to know about the matter philosophically. But.....what if a fetus is not a child? What if it is merely a potential child? Is the elimination of potential the same degree offense as the elimination of reality? (It reminds me of the old Christian chestnut that the thought of a sin is the same as the commission of a sin, an approach I am sure was adopted by the early church as a means of ensuring that all men are convinced that they are utterly damned and therefore dependent on the Church for salvation no matter how virtuous they may be.) That logical path leads to all sorts of horrendous conclusions and complications and is utterly indefensible from a practical standpoint. Equating potential with reality would quite literally make life unlivable.

From a social point of view, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that I should be dictating how other mentally competent adults are to behave with their bodies. Just as what I do with my prostate is no one's business in the end but mine, what a woman does with her womb is a matter between her and whatever deity or deities she may or may not believe in. Body autonomy seems like it should be a no-brainer for an enlightened society.

But in the end I have to admit that, while I do support the pro-choice position, I am deeply uncomfortable with abortion.

[nickiknack]

Most people are uncomfortable about the subject of abortion, but those who are pro-choice know how mind their business. The thing that gets me is that we call the sides in the debate "pro-life" & "pro-choice". Most of the so called "pro-lifers" aren't really "pro-life", I call them "anti- choice" because that's what they are. Most of them don't give two shits for kid after its born, they just happen to be control freaks. Most don't even want to prevent unwanted pregnacy to begin with, they feel if you don't teach sex ed, then the problem won't exist.

[Yla]

Huh. Been called a lot of things in my life. Jock. Slag. Socialist. Commie. Pig. British Lickspittle. They range all over the map from pretty much true to not even close. Never been called "naive" before, though. That's a new one.

Please don't mistake oversimplification of a statement for effect as being naive. But is it really that? Wouldn't coming to a mutually-agreed upon definition of the point of personhood solve it? If we knew, scientifically and philosophically, that at a specific point in development a fetus became a child, and therefore a person, wouldn't it solve the issue? If the pro-lifers accepted that before a certain point it is not a human, therefore it would not be "murder" to terminate the pregnancy at that point. If the pro-choicers agreed that after a certain point it was a child, then no one would support termination at this point because it would be "murder."

The problem is that this is an emotional, not a scientific, problem. The pro-lifers will inevitably insist that the moment of "personhood" is conception, and the pro-choicers will insist that moment is far, far closer to (if not actually at) physical birth. And neither side will budge because it's not about science or proof or logic, it's about emotion, even on the pro-choice side, not matter how the pro-choicers insist otherwise.

Me calling you naive, Sandman, was not to be taken seriously, and if you understood it as such, I apologize. It was a cynical commentary that I do not believe that even if we find a rational answer to this problem (and as I pointed out in my first post, I don't believe we ever will), the entire dispute will evaporate instantly. As you noted, part of the issue is emotional, and although putting it in terms of personhood describes the issue better, it does not describe it perfectly. There are other aspects of abortion that solving person/not person does not also solve.
Example: Abortion in case of medical risk. Let there be a fœtus past the holy stage of developement where we consider it a person. Let there be complications. There is a certain risk that the mother's life is in danger. Let's be generous and even say this risk is quantifiable, say 50%. Are we justified in aborting? On one hand, it is an emergency, and most people(!) would prioritize the life of the mother. On the other hand, that risk is not a certainity and acting on this risk would entail killing a person(as we established, at this point the fœtus is considered a person).

[DasFuchs]

I don't think "personhood" would solve anything. Pro lifers tend to argue that life begins at conception and will still argue it even if you pass some law pertaining to personhood, same as they do now against abortion.

Anything shy of "Don't do anything to harm the thing once she's been screwed" isn't gonna do anything to the crowd putting up the fight

[Cataclysm]

But if we do define personhood,it is likely that less people will be pro-lifers

[TheL]

I think "personhood" starts at viability, though with incubators it's a little harder. Usually by that time it actually looks like a baby and is big enough and formed enough that you can understand that it's a loss of life.

I mean, there's an obvious difference between this, this, this, and this, and the latter two, I can understand not wanting to kill.

That first one is an eight-week fetus?  The pro-life propaganda I read growing up told us it was a four-week!

I hate being lied to.

[Osama bin Bambi]

IMHO, there is no Constitutional grounds for banning abortion. Even if a fetus is scientifically a person, it can't legally steal from another person's property. In actual medical situations, nobody is required to give blood, organs, or other tissue to another person, even if that person is a relative, a child, or a celebrity. There's no reason why a woman should be forced to give her body to another person, even if that person is her fetus.

Also, defining a fetus as a person with legal protections means that the state must intervene on behalf of the child. This opens up nasty legal scenarios such as:

1) If a woman doesn't want to be pregnant, but is, and she has a miscarriage, do the police have grounds to get a warrant and investigate her for murder?

2) If a woman is pregnant and she cannot kick a drug habit, is she guilty of assault or manslaughter if it harms her fetus?

3) If a woman has a illness and the only medications that work are teratogenic (deformation-causing), will she have to discontinue her medication (and thus endanger her health) for the sake of the "person" growing inside her?

4) If a state takes an official medical position on the best way for pregnant women to maintain the health of their babies, can they force pregnant women to adopt certain health habits that she may not agree with? If she has a job that poses a health risk to developing fetuses, can the government force her to quit her job and deny her a source of income?

[Sigmaleph]

I sort-of agree with the views many have expressed, that personhood begins around the same time as consciousness. The problem is, I don't have even a reasonable guess at when that happens. It's after conception, yes. It's after the development of the nervous system, sure. But when?

David Chalmers, as ridiculous as his philosophy often is, was right about calling it "the hard problem of consciousness". We don't even know how a physical process can result in human-style self awareness, much less the mechanisms that do so. If/when neurobiology gives us some sort of answer for that, we might be able to actually know when a human goes from being a clump of cells to a self-aware clump of cells.

Whether self-awareness should be the defining limit for when you get the legal right not to be killed is a more philosophical problem. But my stab at it is: Imagine a parallel universe where the nervous system develops much, much later than in the real world. Say, that at birth the brain is entirely indistinguishable from that of a rat, and over the first two years postpartum it develops towards human level. In this world, where a newborn is most definitely not self-aware, I would still be against a law allowing parents to kill newborns at will, because they have the potential to become actual persons. Which makes me think that the real cutoff point (for me) has more to do with when foetus no longer needs the mother's body to survive.

The problem of consciousness, I think, matters a lot when wondering about the ethics of killing. If a mother can, with no serious harm to herself, sustain the foetus, then I think it would be the right thing for her to do so; and how serious the harm must be to make an abortion ethically justified depends a lot on whether the foetus is a person or only a potential person. But that's miles away from saying that she should be legally forced to do so in any scenario. The laws sometimes have to allow things that would be wrong, because a general law that would ban it would be even worse.


Blah, blah blah, TL;DR, the legal limit should be when the foetus can survive without the mother, the ethical limit is a whole lot trickier and requires information I don't have regarding the specific mechanisms of consciousness.

[Osama bin Bambi]

The problem with defining personhood as being able to live without assistance is that some babies are born alive but very premature, and need to be put on incubators. Some situations obviously cannot provide incubators for premature babies, so in that situation the baby cannot exist without the mother's body. Therefore, if the mother can not access an incubator or medical help, it is okay to kill a seriously premature infant. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding that.

I think that personhood should be defined as the point when the fetus can make decisions - basically, the rise of free will.

[TheL]

I vote that we educate so-called "conservatives" on what the situation used to be, since so many insist on wanting to take us back to "the way things were."  Before we knew what conception was, a woman was not considered pregnant until she felt the baby kick.  This was called "quickening."  Until that point, you weren't pregnant, even though you'd missed several periods already.  As a result, simple contraceptives* and the herbal equivalent of the "morning-after pill" were fairly common among those who knew about them.

And most women didn't name their kids until they were several years old either, because infant mortality rates were high enough that there was no point in getting attached to the kid before you knew it wouldn't die in the cradle.

Even in the pre-Roe V. Wade days in the US, abortion wasn't banned everywhere--there were quite a few states that allowed it, at least before 1910.  That's when the bans actually became an issue for most women.

* A cleaned sheep's bladder, tied off and slipped over your dick.  And it was often washed and re-used, too.

[DasFuchs]

But if we do define personhood,it is likely that less people will be pro-lifers

Doubtful, because what they say and what they believe are completely separate. It's not an issue of personhood, that's just their excuse. It's an issue of what they see as right and wrong, mainly that it's wrong to end something that is to become human if not already.

Think on it, if it really was about personhood, would they be railing against all abortion anyways?

[Sylvana]

I agree that defining person-hood is an important issue. (while we are at it I would also require that things like businesses be excluded from being people) I also agree that is it not a black and white issue. I lean towards consciousness and self awareness being prerequisites, but I also feel that in cases like with Terri Schiavo she is no longer a person because all that made her one is gone. Unfortunately this issue is very grey, I see self awareness and consciousness in my pet dogs, while I wonder if the same can be said for small children or people suffering from severe brain damage, retardation and altzimers.

There is no doubt that a fetus is alive, but then the egg cell and the sperm were alive too, both were human DNA as well. Based on purely DNA even stem cells are alive have distinct DNA and are just about a fetus in every way but it would be unthinkable to call them persons. DNA and life are also very obtuse issues by which to try and define person-hood.

My personal leaning is that humans are really nothing special, we are ugly bags of mostly water. We live, we die, and mot of the time have little control over that life or death. We are no more or less important than the fly on the wall. We just like to think that we are.

On last note, the problem with the pro-life stance is that it is not about the child, person-hood, health, murder or religion. It is purely about being anti-women. Pro-lifers don't give a damn about the fetus, they sure as hell don't give a damn after its born and they care even less about the woman. They would rather both die than one be saved, even if that one is the fetus. It is all about control and punishing women. What is more, if they find themselves inconveniently pregnant, they will be the first in line at the clinic for an abortion (normally so they don't get seen by their fellow protestors.)
Also, a lot of people call themselves pro-life except in certain cases. There is no such thing. The minute you allow an abortion to happen under any circumstances you are actually pro-choice. Pro-life is about control, pro-choice is about the option existing for women.

[Eniliad]

If I can stray off-topic for just a moment, I fucking HATED the Terri Schaivo case. Not because they decided to let her die, but because of the horrific way they killed her. We, as a nation, watched her starve to death for, what, a week and a half? ON NATIONAL FUCKING TELEVISION.

I was, and am, sickened by the affair. Euthanasia would have been far more humane under the circumstances.

[Witchyjoshy]

To be honest, Terri Schaivo was already dead.  All that was left was her living corpse.  If souls exist, hers was long gone.

However, I agree, euthanasia would have been more humane.  However, one must be careful with precedents... you never know how they could be misused.  (Not that I'm saying we shouldn't have that right, but that it must be approached very carefully)