Abortion, part deux

Great Debates
41

Gaudere, this response may be familiar to you (I won’t presume that you’ll remember our prior exchange). Your points are familiar to me, in any event, which is undoubtedly the reason that I will respond as I did before.

Here goes: Any entity with the potential for sentience is “alive”–meaning, deserving of protection and possessing the right to live. If this potential exists, it trumps all other rights (except, perhaps, the right of another entity to live).

We determine this as best we can–through medical measurement, if possible–though our determination is often unavoidably shaky. I would hold no one “guilty” who tried their best to make this determination in good faith, though a crystal-clear conclusion may be an objective lost at the start.

This category of human beings includes most pre-born children, regardless of their stage of development, as well as adults who are deemed brain-dead in an EEG but who ultimately recover. (An admittedly extremely rare ocurrence that I have NOT researched extensively. Here’s one cite that references “600 comatose patients with flat EEG reported in a preliminary study by the American EEG Society, supplied to Henry K. Beecher by Robert Schwab” for anyone who supposes this is hypothetical. This cite also mentions hypothermia as a condition that could create a flat-line–i.e., non-sentience–without creating irreversible brain death. Again, I am no expert.) I believe we could kill neither without raising moral concerns over the right of a human being to live.

If current sentience is a sacred attribute, one that by itself defines personhood, we could easily permit the death of the brain-dead adult, even if we were certain of his recovery (this is, currently, completely a hypothetical, in that we don’t have the technology to make that determination conclusively; certainly an extremely large majority of EEG flat-liners will NOT recover, but the moral point retains its validity just the same, IMO).

The category would exclude children born without brain stems (I think–I am not sure I know exactly what this means, but I take it to mean that these children will never be capable of sentience).

You may counter by saying this is axiomatic and compelling only from my point of view. My response to that would be to agree that it is at least that, but also to point out that it is no less axiomatic than “sentience = personhood” and that there is virtually no law or moral rule in existence that cannot ultimately be traced to an axiom.

42

**Ray, it amounts to the same thing, unless you believe that anyone who actually installed the “child abuse” laws must necessarily have been willing to assume responsibility for all the abused children who were removed from their homes, that to do otherwise would be immoral. That would be silly, don’t you agree? Their willingness to help out needy people is a separate moral question, and a valid one, but it does not invalidate the argument that a given act is wrong. That argument stands or falls on its own.

**
Ray, I don’t objective to your terminology. Using the word “fetus” is not begging the question. Offering as a given that because an entity is a fetus, it does not have rights is begging the question. And then when you continue to revert to various forms of “but it is a fetus,” or “but unborn children don’t have rights,” you are using as evidence a conclusion you have yet to argue. See what I mean?

43

Um, that should read, “…no more axiomatic…”

Carry on…

44

And maybe I can stop this silly tangent–but yes, I am planning on looking into adoption once I want children. I don’t feel that this position gives me any more right to oppose abortion, i.e., even if I were not willing to adopt, I could still feel abortion is wrong.

But, as Bob Cos and JTC have pointed out, like, seventeen times by now, it’s moot. Try reading their points before you simply restate yours. I know, it’s asking a lot, but try.

45

Like quixotic78, I would like to adopt a child someday – however, I would never suggest that only adoptive parents have the right to protest abortion.

Bioethicist Scott Klusendorf addresses this point in great detail. Check it out.

Ray, you insinuated that unless quixotic78 was willing to adopt the child, he has no business protesting the abortion. In fact, your exact words included, “Are you willing to adopt the child? Are you willing to pay for upkeep of the child?”

Nobody contests that we should help these mothers in need – and in fact, I’ve been actively doing so for over ten years now. However, even if someone fails to take such measures, common sense dictates that this doesn’t invalidate his objection to abortion itself.

46

I never said that his right to object or his objection itself should be contested. Let me put it another way.

Pro-lifers, if they got their way, would outlaw abortion. This would mean that tens of millions of women would give birth against their will regardless of whether or not they could afford it. If abortion was made illegal and tens of millions of women were robbed of the right to choose and they had babies they couldn’t afford then the people who put them in that position (ie. the pro-lifers) should help them. All of them. They should be prepared to clean up the mess they leave. In this debate we’ve lost sight of the actual people who are going to suffer here, the women. What about them?

47

One of the reasons why so few regulars participate in the abortion threads on this messageboard anymore is because the OPs are often so inflammatory that the people here who oppose the viewpoints expressed in the OP have participated in far more reasoned debates in the past, and those who support the opposite side would prefer to distance themselves from such inflammatory statements rather than risk being perceived as supporting them. You’ll often hear it said by both pro-life and pro-choice people alike on this messageboard that we want to have meaningful dialogues with each other, not ones which have as their sole purpose proving the “other side” wrong.

Thankfully, there’ve been many civil respectful discussions of this issue here and a quick search will lead people to most of them.

48

Just a few questions about your latest gem.

(1) What percentage of women do you think opt for an abortion because they’re too poor to raise a child? I’m sure it’s a decent percentage, but I don’t think that you can use “tens of millions.” But that’s just a nitpick.

(2) Are pro-choicers absolved of responsibility, because they felt that the fetuses should have been terminated in the first place?

(3) You seem to be insinuating that pro-lifers are all talk and no action, WRT supporting abortion alternatives. Am I misinterpreting you? If not, umm–cite?

(4) Aren’t the mother and the father the two people who should be prepared to clean up the “mess”? One position of many pro-lifers (not necessarily myself) is that you shouldn’t have sex, even with the best precautions, unless you’re willing to accept all of the consequences. IOW, unless you’re able to make sacrificies and care for a child that might arise from sex, you shouldn’t have sex. I guess I’m rambling here, but I just think it’s interesting to see the “take responsibility” argument from a pro-choicer!

Quix

49

Ray, someone’s lost sight of something here, that’s true.

I believe it’s you, and the missing articles seem to be the points raised in response to your ongoing nonsense. You can’t continue to offer opinions, have people respond reasonably to them, and then respond in turn by running off on an unrelated tangent, ignoring the opposing argument.

I am not going to point out yet again why your point is not valid, since it is still silly for all the same reasons, and it still conveniently ignores the prior responses to said silliness. And your self-righteous “what about the poor victims?” tone does not disguise the fact that you will not meaningfully engage in real debate.

Neither does it do anything to support the notion that pro-lifers are opposed to supporting women in need, an argument you seem very affectionately attached to at the moment, despite the fact that the pro-life side obstinately refuses to take the “all women can go to hell” side of the debate. I’m sure later this evening you’ll regale us with the “pro-lifers are just dead wrong to say houseplants have the same rights as sentient adults” school of thought, or some other startling line of reasoning that utterly destroys some other pro-life tenet none of us realized we held dearly.

Unfortunately, I’ve had enough for one day. See ya in the funny papers.

50

I plan to get around to some of the additional responses later, but in the meantime…

A recent radio broadcast from Stand To Reason may prove helpful. It features a talk by Scott Klusendorf, one of the most prominent debaters in the pro-life movement.

The broadcast has been recorded at http://www.strradio.org and is dated November 11th, 2001. Direct links to the radio program itself can be found at http://www.strradio.org/current/111101.rm and http://www.strradio.org/current/111101.ram.

51

I’ll need to reserve some of your commments for another time, as it’s already 1:00 a.m. here and the work week is about to commence. However, the following excerpt from Duck Duck Goose’s earlier post is illuminating:

Additionally, it’s well-known that newborns do not have any grasp of language, or even such concepts as object permanence. So while we might not have absolute, incontrovertible proof that newborns possess no conscious thought, there’s really no good reason to believe that they have.

A similar point can be made regarding coma victims. While some of them possess brain waves that suggest conscious thought, that’s not the same as proving that they do – much less that they all do. It is certainly common for coma victims to awake without ever realizing that they were comatose, which suggests a lack of conscious thought during that time.

Ditto for retardates. Many retardates do possess conscious thought, but a severely retarded person might not. It’s certainly reasonable to suggest that a severely retarded newborn wouldn’t, yet the thought of killing such an individual remains abhorrent.

As for infants without a brain stem surviving for months… I think you’re making an irrelevant point here. Such infants can survive for a time without support far beyond what nature provides, but not for very long. Additionally, even if society does not regard such individuals as persons, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t. (I’m not sure what degree of protection the law provides to such individuals, but if it permits the overt killing of such infants, then I would have vehement objections to such.) And most importantly, such cases pertain to individuals which are already in the process of dying, even in its natural environment. In constrast, a fetus is typically not dying, provided that it remains in its natural habitat.

52

Quixotic78

  1. I’m sure they’ll add up over time. Maybe in 20-30 years the amount will approach that figure.

  2. Since pro-choicers want to keep things the way they are now and wouldn’t have any part in changing the law to illegalise abortion then they shouldn’t be faced with the responsibility of looking after the results of a change in the law.

  3. (WRT?? What is that?) I find it hard to believe that, when push comes to shove, pro-life can be anything but all talk and no action. I believe that the anti-abortion position is fundamentally hypcoritical and immoral. It depends upon imposing one set of rules upon pregnant women and another upon everybody else. it demands the abject servitude of women in order to save the lives of fetuses while everybody else remains free to let people die by the tens, hundreds, and thousands. If pro-lifers are really all talk and no action then why aren’t they helping actual people who need their help who are dying right now? Why aren’t they all manning suicide hotlines to save the lives or real people.

  4. The mother and father would, if the choice had been up to them, have had the abortion. Since the choice has been robbed of them and they have no choice but to have the child regardless of whether or not they can afford to, the responsibility should be left up to those who actually did make the choice on their behalf. The pro-lifers.

53

If pro-lifer’s aren’t really all talk and no action.

54

Well, how do you know they aren’t?

55

Hmmm. Sounds to me like you don’t have any evidence to support your accusation. Your choice of verbiage is rather revealing.

IF you DO have evidence to support your case, then please post it soon, because I guarantee that the pro-lifers in this thread are ready to present evidence to the contrary.

In fact, if you read some of the many previoous threads on abortion, you’ll see that the pro-lifers have done just that. Nevertheless, I’d like to see if you can present any evidence to show that they are “all talk and no action.”

56

Gotta know when to fold 'em. At first, I thought Ray Heller was… well, if not quite logical, at least he had some veneer of rationality, and wasn’t just foaming at the mouth at all the pro-lifers. Then I read the original thread where he WAS foaming at the mouth, and had my doubts. I intrepidly continued, and felt like I was a test subject in a Turing Experiment, i.e., a computer was replying by re-arranging certain words and phrasings, using no new thought.

Now, I see that Ray is quite happy with his weltanschauung, content in believing that pro-lifers are all bluster, all talk, and secretly despise women and want them relegated to second-class citizens. Nothing’s going to dissuade him, I don’t think, and I don’t have the desire to piss into the wind.

At least it was good to see a pro-choice troll for a change! Sorry Gaudere, reprise, and all you other level-headed pro-choicers out there–he’s on your side. :wink:

Quix

57

Shhhh…don’t fuck with the karma…'cause you KNOW we’re gonna get another Wildest Bill any day now :wink:

58

Bob Cos

I disagree, not with the definition of person, but with the capability of harm. If a “me” once was, it can be injured, could have been injured, and if the “me” can be “returned” the injury can be ameliorated; but if a “me” has yet to exist, you cannot hurt it. You cannot hurt something that was never there. You can say that a person was harmed when you end its life forever, but you can’t say a person was hurt if that person never existed. A thing has to at one time to have existed in order to suffer harm; I do not think there is any philosophy which holds that nonexistent things can be hurt. If a sentience never existed, it cannot be harmed. Once it has existed, it can suffer harm. Therefore, the minimal amount of harm would preserve or reinstate the life of a sentience that once existed (if it existed, it can be harmed by not being allowed to exist). So that’s why I consider it moral to reinstate the life of a person who has died, but do not feel a similar moral obligation to create new life.

And of course I remember you, Bob. :wink: I was just reiterating my previous statements because I did not want Ray to be the sole representative of pro-choice in this thread.

JubilationTCornpone

Have you even read what I posted regarding the development of the brain and EEG readings, and why I take that as evidence for the strong potential for consciousness, or are you too busy trying to pigeonhole me into a definition of consciousness that I have never ascribed to so you can claim I condone the murder of newborns? I have said again and again that I err on the side of caution, but until a cerebral cortex is developed there is no evidence that thought is even possible. Either show some evidence that severely retarded or comotose humans lack a functioning cerebral cortex or have EEG readings that are contradindicative of thought, or quit claiming that they are at the same level of brain development as a fetus prior to complex cerebral cortex functionality.

So if a human would not survive for long without medical care, it’s OK to kill them?

We’re all in the process of dying. If I was ill, yet I might live a couple more years with occasional medical care, is it acceptable to kill me? (IIRC, anencephelitic infants require occasional resesucitation, but the medical bill for the infant that survived until two and a half was about half that for a couple month’s of my father’s care in the ICU, so I can’t consider thet amount of care so extreme that allowing the death of a human would be preferable, considering the bill for two and a half years is far less than the bills my Dad racked up in just a month or two.)

59

Well, seeing as you COMPLETELY FUCKING IGNORED my last lengthy post to you without even a courtesy acknowledgement, you’re hardly one to be judging the behavior of others.

60

Yes I did, as I explicitly acknowledged. In response, I pointed out that the EEG readings suggest conscious thought, but don’t prove it – and I posted other reasons to believe that they have not such thought. This included an excerpt from the article cited by Duck Duck Goose earlier in this thread.

First of all, nobody said that they lack a functioning cerebral cortex. I merely claimed that they don’t have conscious thought, which is entirely different (i.e. the lack of conscious thought does not necessarily imply that the cortex is what’s malfunctioning).

Second, I already posted evidence to that effect, which you seem to have ignored. While I won’t claim that this evidence absolutely proves the lack of conscious thought, beyond any room for doubt, it’s certainly untrue that I haven’t provided any evidence.

Third, nobody says that they’re at the same level of development as a fetus. Nobody even hinted at that. The point is merely that the lack of conscious thought does not qualify someone as a non-person.

And fourth, there’s still the question of why one should take the lack of conscious thought to be evidence of non-personhood.

So if a human would not survive for long without medical care, it’s OK to kill them?

Not at all. As I explicitly, explicitly, EXPLICITLY said, I don’t believe we should kill such infants. In fact, my exact words were:

JTC:"(I’m not sure what degree of protection the law provides to such individuals, but if it permits the overt killing of such infants, then I would have vehement objections to such.)"

Besides which, the point was that even if one DOES condone killing infants that have no brain stem, it still doesn’t follow that we should treat the unborn in the same way. There is a critical difference in the nature of their requirements – that is, most unborn can be expected to live in their natural environment, whereas anencephalic infants are ultimately doomed to die.

Only in the most general of senses – not in any clinical sense. There is an obvious difference between someone who is in the process of dying, and an otherwise healthy individual who is ultimately fated to die.

Some would deny such a distinction. In response, I suggest that such people learn about the fallacy of the beard.