As a 2am exercise, can you defend against my position that the mother would a priori be doing the fetus a favor by abortting it? And without invoking the catagorical imperative or some form of pascal's wager.
do these vaguely described entities of moral significance exist in a different spatial relation to the fucking body than that of the fetus, for example, are these entities of moral significance all external to the fucking body whereas the fetus is until birth internal to the fucking body?
Can these entities of moral significance exist without the fucking body in question without any great effort on the part of the fucking body, for example if the fucking body stops feeding the moral entity but someone else comes along and feeds the moral entity? Whereas in the case where the moral entity is internal to the fucking body the moral entity cannot exist without the fucking body unless the fucking body undergoes a good deal of effort, via perhaps a caesarean, so that the internal moral entity is no longer internal and becomes thenceforth external?
The point of yelling about the "fucking" body is that the body is a body, not an abstract construct; the problem with philosophical/legalistic arguments about abortion is that they tend to forget that. Pregnancy is not quite the same level of obligation as child support, and refraining from abortion is not quite the same thing as refraining from adversely affecting another human being (because, as you admit, the fetus isn't another human being, though it is human--that the argument "it's my body" begs the question the opponent is asking is irrelevant, except perhaps rhetorically, because the question the opponent is asking is a bad question).
At the risk of self-promoting and seeming awfully masculine, did you ever read this? It was the best thing I could say on the subject. I honestly think that the way to "win" this argument isn't to concede to the anti-abortion forces' rhetoric, which consistently denies the moral agency of women; it's to insist on that moral agency, and on the fact that decisions of that nature are always made in very specific contexts that elude broad generalizations.
Yes, it's easier to be absolutist about abortion if you've never been a parent. I've got a seven-year-old boy and am about three weeks away from kid #2 now, and when you watch them scramble around inside your wife or suck their thumb in an ultrasound or you poke at their feet through her stomach and they kick back at you, it's pretty hard to say that isn't a human being.
I've always been resolutely pro-choice, but I completely understand where the other side is coming from. If you start with the assumption that the fetus is indeed a human life and that life is sacred, then invoking the "it's my fucking body" argument in defense of abortion is as meaningless as invoking it in defense of cannibalism. Don't like eating people? Then don't eat one.
Luckily for my own internal consistency, I don't think life is sacred, but instead, utterly mundane. So there.
I am troubled by your use of "a priori," Michael. Surely some children born into trying circumstances live worthwhile lives? Indeed, I bet if you asked some, they'd agree!
Of course, a professor of mine used to argue that any reproduction was a priori immoral. Her reasoning: life inevitably involves being harmed, it is immoral to inflict harm on someone without their consent, and one cannot gain consent in this instance.
Addendum 1: If you care, the problem with this argument derives from the exceptionally powerful "trumping" role it ascribes to explicit consent: no expected benefit/harm tradeoff merits non-consensual harm. Cases which feature large expected benefit and small expected harm, however, seem like the situations that doctrines of implied/hypothetical consent were made for.
Addendum 2: FL is *exactly* right about the stupid-making properties of the abortion debate, and about the correct grounds on which it must be argued. As to how the pro-choice side should argue (the topic of his earlier post), the question is really what their goal is, and what they believe. I do think he is right that the "there's nothing to see hear folks, move along" view of the moral status of fetus/unborn child/blastocyst/potential life seems to be held by almost no one.
baa,
Don't worry, I wasn't picking a position I'd actually (the vast majority of the time) support, but sometimes I just feel like advocating nihilism. In the spirit of HLA Hart, who wrote that a philosopher is someone who challenges the most blindlingly of the obvious, I think nihilism needs to be defended against. But I recognize that it doesn't have any real relevance, as this thread has explicit political connotations, and just not that many people advocate the kind of nihilism that would make anti-abortion arguments difficult. *sigh*
Apos, at the risk of seeming like an awful person, I'm going to contradict you. I have a couple neighbors who just had a baby a bit less than 2 weeks ago. I went to the hospitol to see the kid when he was just a day old, andwhile there it strongly struck me that, as far as I'm concerned, the baby wasn't a human. It was cute, and certainly I knew it had the potential to take on more human qualities, yet aside from interior biology, I couldn't see anything 'human' about it. Even its level of cognizance seemed below some animals. It seemed to me that an action which resulted in killing the baby would have been only a) the act of destruction of a potential, and b) the act of desctruction of the work of the parents. But I would not include the act of murder. Of course, I wasn't one of the parents.
I kinda think nihilism makes all arguments difficult, Michael!
And hey, while we all love the social institution of infanticide for its utility in enabling tragic fulfillment of prophecy, I think your moral intuitions place you in the vaaaaast minority in modern, democratic societies (and heck, even in the philosophy departments of major research univeristies, which is saying something).
probably. but we treat the killing of a pig different than the killing of a pet dog, too.
Well, of course. Dogs aren't constructed totally from delicious, juicy pork. If they were, I'd happily club them myself.
See, apostropher, becoming a parent made me *more* pro-choice, not less. Why? Because I look at it from the point of view of a *pregnant woman*, not a child. The abortion debate always ends up being from the child's point of view (which is happening even in this thread). The "fucking body" rhetoric is an angry attempt to reframe the debate from the point of view of the people who happen to get pregnant and make the decision.
Admittedly, angry rhetoric can be alienating. But it's equally alienating to be politely erased from the discussion.
This IA post from way back is relevant (and we even get an appearance from Chun, and a discussion of intentional vs. incidental killing).
the state gets to limit what you do with your (fucking) body in all sorts of cases.
I really can't think of another case in which the state insists on something as intrusive as insisting that a woman carry a baby to term and undergo childbirth. The state prohibits you from ingesting heroin or trading sex for money, and it's important that both of these prohibitions are regarded as illegitimate by large swathes of the citizenry. Yet neither of them goes nearly as far as a positive insistence on gestation.
The closest analogy to enforced childbirth is conscription, which is also quite controversial even in cases of genuine national emergency, let alone under ordinary circumstances. So I don't believe your statement is correct, at least in the sense that the state does things that are widely regarded as legitimate, that are remotely as intrusive as enforced childbirth.
See Fontana's (b), sv. "Enforced childbirth" isn't "forcible impregnation," so the analogy with conscription is (very) tenuous.
Ok, how about the analogy of organ donation? What if the state required everyone who has two functioning kidneys to donate one of them to save people who need kidneys? After all, the "inconvenience" is minor, the possibility of dying as a result (from surgery or if your own remaining kidney goes bad eventually) is small but still there, and you can save an innocent life.
The idea that having sex imposes this responsibility on women, which will undoubtedly be the response of some people, smacks of "punishing" people for having sex. After all, one could argue that simply being part of society imposes a responsibility on all of us to donate kidneys to those in need.
Hell, we don't even require people to donate blood.
I'm also much less comfortable with the practice of abortion since having kids. The entity destroyed in abortion may not be fully human, but oh the potential.
I can't rule out that as birth control options improve, abortion will be seen as a barbaric practice situated at a transitional moment in time.
On the other hand, I find convincing Michael Kinsley's arguments that stem cells will fundamentally weaken the position that human life begins at conception.
IA's post on the first trimester seems like a humane middle ground.
Parenthood didn't make me less pro-choice. It did, however, help me to understand where the other side was coming from. I still believe their prescription is wrong, but I see why they believe it.
Watching friends who, for one reason or another, made ill-advised decisions not to terminate ill-advised pregnancies, makes me incredibly pro-choice. In most of those cases, if those kids grow up to be normal functioning adults, it will be a triumph over enormous odds.
I've been responsible for 5 pregnancies: two carried to term (assuming nothing tragic happens in the next month), one miscarriage, and two abortions. Both of the terminations were clearly in the best interests of everybody involved, including the terminees.
having sex imposes this responsibility on women
Getting pregnant imposes responsibility, and is a more affirmatively obligatory than having sex, or being part of society.
Just to get a sense of where people stand on this, do we all admit to some discomfort with abortion as birth control (eg, "Don't worry about a condom, I'll just have an abortion," or, "This'll be my fourteenth abortion....")?
I'm not quite sure what the argument is about anymore.
for my part, I wasn't even saying that the intrusiveness of enforced childbirth (after voluntarily sex, as if that matters) was an unassailable argument for allowing abortions. I was only pointing out that, far from FL's insistence that the state routinely regulates people's bodies in a way analogous to prohibiting abortion, the state in fact does nothing of the sort.
"Don't worry, I've got RU-486 in my purse" doesn't bother me in the slightest; "don't worry, I'll have an abortion when I get around to it, maybe in the 8th month" would give me the creeps, if there is really someone who would actually say that.
Ogged, yeah, getting pregnant imposes responsibility. A huge one. Which is one reason why some women responsibly decide that they are not up to that responsibility, and terminate the pregnancy.
Do I admit with discomfort with abortion as birth control? Sure. But my discomfort comes, not from the hypothetical irresponsible woman who says, "don't worry about the pill, I'll just have an abortion" (have you ever had one? They're painful, and intrusive. I doubt many women blithely say things like that), and more from the fact that we place obstacles in the way of sex education and birth control (including RU-486), which is one major reason why abortion may be sometimes used to replace those things.
What if RU-486 was available OTC (I don't think it is now) but Roe was reversed... does that hypo help us draw lines a little more clearly?
"Don't worry about a condom, I'll just have an abortion," or, "This'll be my fourteenth abortion...."
While unarmed with any evidence to bolster my case, I suspect that these utterances are so rare as to qualify this line of argumentation as a 1st degree strawman. I mean, I'm plenty uncomfortable with this woman's behavior, but it doesn't much impact my view of C-sections.
Federalist, if RU-486 was available otc, it would doubtless cut down on the # of abortions. But there would still be women on the pill who got pregnant (a friend of mine got pg with twins while on bcp), women whose circumstances were so fucked-up that they just weren't paying attention to it/thinking about it, women, including young women, who preferred to live in denial until they couldn't any more, and so forth. The fact is, you can't make blanket rules and assume they'll cover everyone: I honestly think that the only thing we can do is make all that shit available and trust that women know what they are doing.
After all, if a woman is too stupid/irresponsible/careless to make a decision about abortion, she's not likely to be a very good mother.
(Oh, and also, no one has an 8th month abortion for any reason other than medical necessity. That, too, is a strawwoman argument.)
I don't believe I made reference to 8th month abortions. Further, there isn't much we disagree on. My hypo was designed to see if one would peel away in an RU-486 / Anti-Roe regime. I think such a regime is quite possible, and it startles me a little. Essentially it will be the "abortions for the privileged only" lifestyle and I can see it happening quite easily. The privacy interest days after conception far outweighs the state's interest in protection of life. So the court will just slide Roe back in time, as it were, to effectively eliminate abortions, and allow RU-486 and other types of "morning after" pills only. What you have done in your response is something a fellow contributor to Amend IX did, to some effect. Focus the debate on the woman, not the choice. I find it a very effective strategy because its concrete, real, not abstract. This seems to me the preferred way of discussing. Not choice, but women. Right?
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at.
The 8th month thing was an added-on response to a different comment.
Ok, I'm off now. Must turn in grades. Whoo!
Those hypothetical statements were just a way of asking whether people admit that terminating a pregnancy isn't quite the same as, say, killing the bacteria on your teeth when you brush.
I'm still not sure where the disagreement is here. I like the IA's post because it acknowledges that the fundamental abortion question: "Is it a person/life?" is politically, if not fundamentally, unanswerable.
The interesting thing to note is how much our political debates depend on fundamental agreement, and how ineffective "politics" is when that agreement is absent.
It's difficult to engage in discussions like these without pissing eveyone off. But let me try. I'll focus on two comments here:
"Which is one reason why some women responsibly decide that they are not up to that responsibility, and terminate the pregnancy"
"Both of the terminations were clearly in the best interests of everybody involved, including the terminees."
I would hope we all agree that the interests and experiences of woman shouldn't be politely erased from discussions of abortion. But am I wrong in hearing an different erasing in these comments?
Forget what's legal. Forget about what we want to do politically. Forget about how we'd rather structure our society's thinking about sex. Ogged's question is basically a heuristic -- do we think there is some moral value in a potential life/fetus/blastocyst/unborn child? If the answer is yes, it suggests that there will be some circumstances (maybe very few, maybe many) where we think the decision to have an abortion is a bad decision. I am still not sure where people in this thread stand on this question.
well, my point (posts #12 & #18) was mainly technical; I'm mostly pro-choice, not an absolutist, and don't have original or interesting reasons for my POV.
As I said, I get the creeps from the thought of a careless late-term abortion, but have no similar empathy toward zygotes. I don't claim that the distinction is entirely reasonable; were I more hard-nosed, I'd probably resolve the dilemma in favor of demystifying late-term fetuses, rather than spiritualizing zygotes.
Of course the blythe unconcern for the fate of frozen embryos makes one suspicious that many pro-lifers are unserious, as the Dean of Pundits points out.
Ogged, I'm a little confused right now. Sorry but I've been in and out of this thread. What are the two hypos? Are you referring to mine? Or some others?
Baa, I agree, this is a hard topic to discuss responsibly, but it seems people here are doing a rather good job of it. I think I can answer your question about moral value in life's potentiality in the affirmative, however, I need a little more clarification on what you mean by "moral value". Can you elaborate on that a little?
Fed X, my statements weren't meant (at all) to disparage the thread -- rather to preempt a mob forming and comnig to my castle with torches and pitchforks.
On the substantive point, I should have just said "value" -- whatever a 30 year old has that you we shouldn't kill him, or a dog has that we shouldn't torture it -- some counter-balance against viewing an entity as a means only.
I think you guys may be confusing RU-486 and the morning after pill.
I agree with FL though.
What we know about the fetus is that it's closer to becoming a live person every day-every minute really. I don't think there's a single moment when you can say "aha, you weren't a life before but now you are, or close enough, and you get legal protection starting NOW!" Not fertilization, not implantation, not when the heart begins, not when brain waves start, not at the end of the first trimester, or the end of the second trimester, or at viability (since that's not one moment at all, and changes with medical technology), or at birth.
Saying that there's not one moment you can point to is NOT the same thing as saying you can't rule out certain moments as too soon, and others as too late. In my mind, fertilization is clearly too soon for the state to draw the line. The birth control pill should be legal, as should the morning after pill, as should stem cell research. Also in my mind, birth is clearly too late. Abortion after
viability should be illegal. The other thing clear in my mind is that if a pregnancy is going to be ended, the sooner it happens the better.
It's not that I can't draw a conclusion about other stuff--I'm pro-choice, I would probably have an abortion if I was raped and impregnanted or if it could do serious damage to my health, I don't know what I'd do about a debilitating but not fatal birth defect in the fetus, I would not do so for an ordinary unplanned pregnancy but that says as much about my situation as my moral beliefs--it's that I can't do so with the same degree of certainty.
I would like the Democrats to really push "safe, legal, and rare" and add in "as early as possible." I think we should make a strong stand for access to contraception, and OTC availability of the morning after pill, as well as general health & economic & education policies that have been shown to reduce the number of abortions.
There's another piece that I left out of my first post on this, that really fits with what b is saying.
As a father, I damn well want my daughter to have a choice. She should become a mother if and when she's ready, and not before. I want her to shape the trajectory of her life, not some absolute law laid down by those who feel the bible offers reasonable guidance for modern courts.
Baa, I understand your point. I take what you mean by value is not too disimilar than what the Greeks called psuxei (soul). As we see, the question of a fetus is unique because on the one hand, the supporters of abortion abolition believe the fetus is an individual, in every American sense of the word, from the moment of conception. On the other hand, supporters of pro-choice are not ready to say that from the moment of conception, an individual is born. In effect, what we are truly debating is the custom of individualism (individualism, a post-formalist construct, still predefines a great deal of the current public discourse). That is, when is it that most people feel an individual is born? Aristotle would say when its capable of exhibiting all four characteristics of soul which humans are. This is a pretty nasty way of looking at because according to this view, humans without locomotion (i.e., the severely handicapped or bed-ridden) are sub-human. But that is nevertheless the analysis one is forced to accept if one believes, as do I, that while a fetus is most certainly a potential human life, its present "value" as you put it, is by no means equivalent to that of a fully functioning, fully participating, individual human. A fetus incapable of being born alive (as the old court might say) does not yet exhibit any of the characterisitcs necessary to be judged fully human. So when I hear "its a child, not a choice", I concur. It is not a choice, indeed, because most having abortions have no other choice. Moreover though, I assert it is no child either. Not yet at least. So, in a very long response, I answer your question negatively insofar as the fetus you described is incapable of exhibiting all of the characteristics of human soul.
Federlist X, if the criteria for individuality is to be a "fully functioning, fully participating, individual human," how would a child be different than a fetus? Children and babies are as dependent on adults for life as fetuses, except for respiration. That dependence, however, is transferrable after birth -- that is, someone else can take over care of the baby.
If we used the birth of the individual to determine protection under law, then why should we choose to protect babies and children? More specifically, what is the difference between a baby right before birth and right after birth?
Julie O: I think my words may be over-emphasized here, I apologize. A child, in my view (I have two so I know only a little about this) does not exist for the sake of another. You are right of course that children are unable to fully participate in humanity, which is why they have parents to assist them. A fetus however is simply precluded by logical and physical necessity from participation. As soon as the fetus is born alive, it is no longer a fetus but a child. We don't say we should protect living fetuses because a living fetus is a baby. That linguistic recognition is a sign for us that a baby is potentially an adult in a way a fetus is not. What's more, that linguistic recognition is repeated throughout time, by almost every civilization on earth.
A child, in my view [...] does not exist for the sake of another.
Bzzzt. Wrong. My children exist so that one day I will not have to mow the lawn.
Apostropher: that was hilarious. You're right of course, my children believe they exist so that I may humiliate them in front of their friends.
FL, I'm not ignoring you, but my brain isn't working--I'll get back to this at some point, probably....