Clarifying a Pro-choice argument

Great Debates
21

Well, TQMshirt, after many years of long and careful deliberation, I’ve reached the conclusion that abortion prior to cerberal cortex and lung development is not murder. This is because the embryo or fetus, if removed intact, would not begin absorbing oxygen through the lungs, could not ingest nutrition through a feeding tube, and unless placed into another uterus, never will. It’s not on ‘life support’ as this ‘coma patient’ that keeps coming up is, because the coma patient does process oxygen through the lungs and nutrients through the stomach via a feeding tube. The coma patient does not require a uterus in which to implant, therefore keeping the coma patient alive by artificial means does not interfere with anyone else’s human rights. However, requiring the owner of the uterus in which a fetus or embryo is implanted to keep that embryo or fetus alive does interfere with the human rights of the uterus owner.

So, an embryo or fetus cannot perform any of the activities of life without being biologically attached by placenta and umbilicus to a woman. The ‘life’ of said embryo or fetus is dependent entirely on this attachment and is not independent of the life of the woman (if the woman dies, the embryo or fetus does not live). Thus an embryo or fetus cannot be deemed a ‘person’ because it is in no way autonomous. Terminating a non-autonomous embryo or fetus is the termination of human tissue, however it is not the termination of an independent human being. Therefore it is not murder.

So, if someone else wants into my doctor’s office to decide what I can and can’t remove from my body, they’re going to have to prove that it is murder. Proving that it’s murder begins with proving that an embryo or fetus is a human being… which in my thinking carries the requirement that it be able to survive without the umbilical cord, placenta, amniotic sac and uterus.

22

Huh? Which central point did I avoid? The central point that you avoided, and in fact repeated, was in not answering this question:

What would one need to do to prove to you that abortion is ethical?

You fail to distinguish between people and nations - a distinction I made clear. And all of your historical analogies suffer because of this. Under your theory, Thomas Jefferson was an unethical person because he owned slaves. Ethics of a nation are represented, imperfectly, by their system of laws. You have offered no better solution.

I find that hard to believe since fluiddruid’s post was before yours. Her point wasn’t that society doesn’t have the right to impose standards, it was the she doesn’t have the right to impose her standards on society.

Why? Is capital punishment murder? Is murder in self defense “wrong”? Doesn’t society make contextual value judgements, based on the costs and benefits to society?

If you drop the financial criteria, yes. And we do so today in the case of capital punishment and murder in self defense.

Did I really? Your choice of language and issues exposes your position. Have you ever met someone that was “pro-abortion”? Certainly not fluiddruid, at least based on her post.

But they are not the opinions of some arbitrary set of people, but rather the general consensus of society. And thank goodness laws aren’t based on objective standards, then they couldn’t reflect the changing ethics of the general consensus. But laws are objective, or at least intended to be, albeit imperfect. So I ask again: Do you have a better solution?

Unethical to whom? To the general consensus of society? Or to you?

No. And if you only answer one of my questions, answer this one. How could one do so, to your satisfaction?

23

TQMshirt hasn’t dodged this at all, he/she has addressed it repeatedly, some of you just seem to be missing the point.

No one has the “right” to murder. A mother does not have the right to murder her ten your old son because he is a leach and a parasite on her lifestyle. The “right” to survival supercedes any other right. The core issue is whether or not the unborn can be considered equivalent to the born. Re read the OP, TQMshirt seems to be the only one foregoing rhetoric and addressing the issue with logic.

As for myself, I am pro-choice (though I despise the label “choice” because of this very issue). Everybody needs to take a breath and RE-READ THE OP

24

You are quite correct. It is basically impossible to do this since in basically every case the definition given is arbitrary (viability, thought, etc…). On the other hand what I can do is analyze abortion in relation to what else we consider to be ethical and unethical. For example the fellow in the coma. What factors do we use in determining whether a person can be protected from termination? Is the standard the same for all individuals or are we making special allowances for political purposes? Is there an evident hypocrisy which seems to be based on ulterior motives?

What I mean to say is that the OP had a question. How do we distinguish between the fact that we prohibit the murder of a fellow in a coma and the termination of a fetus? It is a good question. To answer it with cost benefit analysis is not relevant.

Fine and according to your definition a nazi SS officer was ethical too since he followed the laws and ethics of his time and place. The point here is that one cannot say that something is ethical because society allows it.

Society is made up of lots of individuals. Each individual in that society contributes to the majority view. If we were to assume your position, then society itself would have no ethical position because each individual in that society has no right to contribute their view to the societal consensus.

These are excellent points, and I would argue that in each case the argument would need to be compelling. In the case of self-defense the argument can be made that the value that we are protecting is life - thus it is perfectly justifiable to say that one can protect one’s life from he who attempts to take it. Either way a life will be taken, and justifiably it ought to be the one who created the situation, not the victim. Personally, I feel the same should apply to a fetus that endangers the mother.

On the other hand, you will never find that we permit murder due to simple financial concerns. The real debate here is not whether society will be better off, but whether the act itself is a form of murder.

As far as I can see, the stated justification for those is that they protect life (self defense in the short-term and death penalty in the long term). Its the value of life that is the ethical standard in both cases. You too would admit that it is not ethical to permit the killing of a person simply based on financial concerns. Thus, the question becomes - how does one differentiate between abortion and murder given the question of the OP, and if one cannot - what do we do next - do we simply look at the cost benfit analysis?

Quite right. At this point it seems that democracy is the best solution. Now that this is the case, within a democracy it is the right and obligation of those who believe that they see an injustice in the system to try (through legal means) to state their point and perhaps sway the standard.

Either way, no-one would argue that since something is the law that it is automatically ethical.

As I said above - this is the thorniest part of the problem. The best way to approach this is to compare it to things which we agree are murder and then try to find the distinction (if any). In the end you are correct that it cannot be determined objectively, but we are stuck with a situation in which a living being is terminated. This living being, if left alone, will be a fully formed human. This does not prove anything, but it gives us reason to give consideration to whether it ought to be ethical to terminate it and under which circumstances.

I think the point of the OP, however, was that there seems to be an rather hypocritical standard.

25

If left inside a uterus - which fails to take into account the impact on the uterus owner. So which counts more, the fetus or the woman? You keep talking about balance, but you have to recognize that in some situations there is no balance.

If an embryo or a fetus is inside a woman’s uterus and she doesn’t want it there, then one way or another, one of them over-rules the other. Either the woman terminates the fetus/embryo and over-rules it’s development, or because the fetus/embryo is there, an arbitrary law forces her to remain pregnant and over-rules her self determination.

One of them gets an ‘unequal say’, and IMO, the one whose word carries more weight is the one who can actually make decisions, contemplate medical issues, invest money and time, and make sacrifices in order to accomodate the other. An embryo or fetus in my body makes no concession , no sacrifice and no investment. It cannot comprehend medical issues, cannot make decisions, cannot provide for my survival - on the contrary the ‘pro-life’ argument is that I’d be obligated to do all of those things for it.

Since there is no balance, I’m asking you why the sentient woman should be forced to make sacrifices for an embryo/fetus she doesn’t want. Where’s the premise for making the embryo/fetus the over-ruling party?

26

Catsix.

Re-read your post with the following revisions:

Instead of ‘uterus’ read ‘life-support’

Instead of ‘fetus’ read ‘coma patient’

Instead of ‘woman’ read ‘hospital’

The argument is precisely the same and gets us nowhere.

27

Has anyone got any more to say about the whole coma victim thing? Just curious.

28

Sorry, I should’ve previewed. TQMshirt’s latest post wasn’t visible when I posted my latest.

29

The premise is the question asked in the OP. The embryo/fetus isn’t “overuling” anymore than a severely retarded five year old child or a deep coma patient; both of whom can’t make decisions, contemplate medical issues, invest money and time, etc. Both of whom are wholly dependent on others for their very survival. However, the coma patient and the retarded child are not euthanized because they are a burden to others. The OP asks why, logically, do the unborn differ? It is not a question of comparative sentience - It is a question of any sentience whatsoever.

Gomez, I just caught your post on preview. I have been giving you OP some thought, and I agree that the pro-life retort alluded to in the OP is almost unassailable. The only possible thing I can come up with is to argue that deep coma patients shouldn’t necesarily be kept alive. This would obviously fling the debate into euthanasia, Kervorkian, etc. and may open too many worm cans - though it does take the analogy away from the pro-life camp.

30

(hijack. I think I’m using the term correctly- forgive me, I’m a newbie)
This discussion occasionally goes back to the pro-choice “it’s my body and I should choose what to do with it” rhetoric. Forgive, I am not saying that the pro-lifers (of which I am one) don’t also use catchphrases…
Anway, that laguage usually seems to imply conscious malevolance- or at least conscious decision- on the part of the fetus. As far as I know, most (at least 90%) of the women who have abortions are neither rape or incest victims. This implies that most of them agreed to have sex. Amazingly enough, pregnancy is a possible consequence of male/female sexual intercourse. It seems to me using that kind of language vilifies and scapegoats the fetus and removes the responsibility of choice from the woman. She (and he) chose to have sex. It makes women sound kind of dumb to assume that most of them didn’t know they might get pregnant… or aren’t mature enough to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Also, even before the legalization of abortion, most abortions weren’t performed by butchers in filthy back rooms. They were performed (illegally) by licensed physicians, who got paid quite a bit to do it.

31

Beelebrox, Gomez, I do not believe it has been established that the brain functionality and activty of a three-month fetus and a coma patient is reasonably comparable. Therefore I cannot agree that the analogy and argument is in any way “unassailiable”. For one thing, a coma patient has a fully developed complex cerebral cortex, and I believe some brain activity in it. A fetus does not, prior to about the 5th-6th month, have a functioning cerebral cortex at all. Without a functioning cerebral cortex, sentience is considered absolutely impossible.

I believe you must address this (preferable with cites showing that the capacity and functioning of a fetus’ brain is the same as a coma patients), before we can even move on to the issue as to whether a human prior to sentience is a person, and whether a person once sentient and currently unconscious is still a person.

32

As AZCowboy responded admirably to the ‘hit and run’ on my post, I’ll just respond briefly.

The main argument seems to be that abortion is murder, and that murder is never justifiable (despite advantages to society), making my post seem irrelevant.

Murder is a highly inflammatory term when used in the abortion debate. First of all, murder is unlawful killing. Abortion is not unlawful, hence it is not technically murder. Now, I could see extending murder to mean ‘unjustified killing’. This I believe is what you mean. It is still a highly subjective term. In this country, we have capital punishment (which I am against, for the record). We also allow lawful killing in war, lethal force is permitted for law enforcement officers, and in other circumstances. Using the word ‘murder’ for these circumstances is obviously not appropriate. I do not find it appropriate for abortion either. It assumes that abortion is ethically wrong (which is obviously a point of contention) and that embryos and fetuses are persons (another point of contention). Thus, saying “abortion is murder and should be illegal” is a non sequitur.

Additionally, I find the idea that abortion is comparable to killing Jews offensive and, as above, inflammatory. It is also an irrelevant comparison. As I said, the main point for me is that pregnancy is unique – two individuals intertwined and it is impossible for both to have full human rights – making it completely incomparable to Nazism.

Let me be blunt. I have a choice between:

1.) Giving the full human rights to the mother, an individual who is sentient and a legal person. There are no back-alley botched abortions, no removal of rights from people who had them previously, no problems of women’s rights being rescinded, and so on.

2.) Giving the full human rights to an embryo or fetus, whose sentience is subject to argument, who is not a legal person, who is essentially parasitic, and who has not had rights in our society. If this is so, women who are raped will suffer not only sexual assault but losing time at work, and serious possible health effects as well, as the fetus is a person regardless of how it came into existence. We also must decide when a fetus or embryo becomes a person – if at conception, the birth control pill also becomes illegal as it involves a fertilized egg. What are the legal rights of women who are potentially pregnant (heterosexual, sexually active women who are pre-menopause)?
What are the legal penalties for abortion? How do we deal with suspect miscarriages?

My answer, personally, is pretty clear here for society.

As for ethics being imposed – I disagree that murder is illegal simply because your morals say so. By that same criteria, laws against homosexuality or eating pork are completely acceptable. I disagree. We protect the rights of individuals’ life, liberty, and property. Murder clearly violates this. So does an abortion ban.

33

These worm cans have already been opened and examined. Three landmark cases to consider are Helga Wanglie, Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. A brief overview of their cases can be found here . The whole coma thing and what to do with patients in a persistent vegetative state still seems a bit up in the air but the courts have allowed people in this state to be denied life-support care so it does seem as if this analogy could be taken away from the pro-life camp.

If you wish to continue the analogy there are a few points of particular interest. From the same site I just linked they mention the Harvard Brain Death Criteria . In short, if you have no brain functions sufficient to maintain autonomous biological functions (breathing, heartbeat, etc.) you are already legally dead…even if machines are keeping the body alive. If you can respirate on your own and maintain heart functions then it seems as if you cannot be killed even if you are a burden in some fashion to others. In short, medical staff have been allowed to refuse extreme care to keep someone alive (respirators, heart/lung machines, whatever). However, if that person manages to survive on their own then lesser care such as feeding, removing body waste, etc., is considered reasonable.

As I mentioned in my previous post this is what happened to Karen Ann Quinlan. A drug overdose placed her in a permanent vegatative state and her family fought to have her removed from life support and won. However, when the life support was removed Karen continued to breathe on her own. She survived that way for 8+ years till she died on her own.

So, to continue the analogy of coma patients vs. the unborn it would seem as if the pendulum swings to the pro-choice side. The mother constitutes life support for the unborn child. As long as the embryo/fetus cannot survive of its own accord (short of being fed and similar basic care) the mother would seem to have the right to remove the life support she provides. From what I’ve seen the earliest a fetus can survive outside the womb is at around six months (and then with a lot of hospital care but it can breathe on its own).

34

Gaudere, the OP did not ask us to prove an argument, but rather to disprove or refute a particular pro-life counter argument. Therefore, the burden of proof is on the pro-choice side instead of the pro-life.

The challenge is to argue that it doesn’t matter, which I think Whack-a-Mole has done a fine job of.

However, to make you happy, http://www.medstudents.com.br/neuro/neuro5.htm The site gives the standards for the determination of brain death developed by the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, in 1981. It also defines brain death in a nutshell:

. In short, the brain dead do not have any brain activity. Sentience is impossible in both the brain dead and a fetus. Therefore the two are comparable in terms of sentience level and the analogy is valid.

ermmm…but there is a problem with this.

All this assumes that the fetus does not possess brain activity. An unbiased 1999 article in Developmental Review (http://www.brain-mind.com/FetalBrainDevelopment.html ) states that a functioning brain stem develops in the seventh week of gestation, and the fetus displays spontaneous movement in the ninth. Either of these would prevent a comatose patient from being declared brain dead. This means that even a baby in the first trimester can be argued to be more sentient than the brain dead comatose, regardless of not having a functioning cerebral cortex. This means that the feus could not be declared “brain dead” and legally euthanized under the precedents Whack-a-Mole cited.

The comatose-fetus coparison may not fit pefectly, but its flaws give more credence to the pro-life viewpoint than the pro-choice.
Which brings us back to where we started: Why are the severly brain damaged afforded more respect than the unborn? Should the pro-choice camp avoid the sentience argument altogether?

35

You have missed a crucial point.

Imagine that the doctor walks into the room with your coma patient who has no brain function and announces: “Due to new advances in medical science we can say with certitude that this patient will be fully healed in about 9 months”

This coma patient also cannot function without life support. Are you then arguing that it would be perfectly ok for me to kill him given that these two criteria (cant live without life support and has no brain function) are met, in spite of the fact that he will be fully healed in 9 months?

Fluiddruid -

You have entirely missed the point and I do not get paid to make sure that you get it…

36

as has been noted, the embryo will not develop into anything w/o the cooperation of the host body. at that stage, the embryo is non-sensient human tissue. The coma patient has (as was noted by Gaudere ) some measurable brain activity (as does the child w/handicaps etc.). This brings the status of the being out of the ‘nonsensient human/nonhuman’ category and into the category of ‘sensient human’.

without brain activity, the body can be physically forced (in some cases) to continue to function at at minimal level, but is not considered alive. In addition, some one who has sensient powers can make the decision “no heroic measures” , so that even with brain wave activity etc. no intervention would be done to maintain life. “But it’s the person themselves making that decision!” you say? well, yes, but not always - certainly in the case of a newborn, parents are afforded the option to deny medical treatment of heroic proportions (including resusitation, etc.). So, again, even with sensience, next of kin are allowed to make medical decisions resulting in death.

We routinely allow the next of kin of coma patients to ‘pull the plug’ when they feel there is no hope of recovery. but the choice is limited to the next of kin.

Try this one, please:

There was a case recently of conjoined twins, where only one of the two had any potential to live if seperated, but if left together, they both would die. My position was that only the parents had the right to decide what to do, and absolutely had the right to decide (ie should not have been forced to consent to the operation).

what say the RTL on that? The case where at best, only one will survive, does the parent have the right to terminate the life (already established, living, breathing, sensient human being, outside the womb), of one to attempt to save the other?

37

Just to jump in here with a note of support…

Not to trivialize but, the difference between a coma patient and a foetus is the same as the difference between a guy who’s had his car stolen and a guy who’s seen a car that he wants on the dealer’s lot. Neither one of them has a car right now but the one whose car was stolen has a right to it. The one who has only seen the car on the lot (even if in the normal course of events he would go on to buy said car) has no right to it yet.

TQMshirt, I took your chalenge and replaced the words in catsix’s post. In rebuttal:
A hospital is not a sentient being with the attendant rights and privileges.
Hospitals contract with third parties (the patient’s family, insurer, or government) to perform the life sustaining services, the mother has no such contract.
Hospitals can always transfer patients that they feel they are unable to provide adequate care for, pregnant women do not have this option.

Furthermore, I think asking whether or not abortion is a type of murder is jumping the gun. First you have to determine whether abortion is killing. If you can first establish that it is indeed killing, then you can ask whether it falls under the category of justifiable homicide, murder, manslaughter, or something else (being careful to define each term).

On preview, I see that some of this has already been covered (damn slow fingers).

Oh, and kudos on a good job of playing devil’s advocate TQM.

38

Beeblebrox:

I think your analysis of what constitutes brain death, as defined by the President’s Commission, is too restrictive. You contend that all brain activity must be absent for brain death to be valid. While it is true that constitutes brain death I believe the bar is set a bit higher than that. Again, this link has the following analysis (bolding mine):

This analysis does not stipulate that NO brain activity is present but rather that brain activity sufficient to continue autonomous functions have ceased. Given that autonomous functions are a supremely basic level of brain function it is hard to see how a patient could have any conscious or subconscious higher brain activity while the lower levels were absent but I’m not a doctor so I won’t say it is impossible.

So, we are back to my original take on the coma vs. unborn analogy. Coma patients are, under US law, unplugged and allowed to die in certain circumstances. Additionally, I would add that I wouldn’t put too much weight behind the argument that a fetus shows brain activity in the ninth week sufficient to have spontaneous movement. You can chop off a chicken’s head and stomp on the brain such that brain death is assured yet the body will continue to run around awhile after that is done. Basically, nerve twitches don’t necessarily count towards high level brain functions.
TQMshirt:
I haven’t missed a crucial point. Gomez was anxious in an earlier post that his (her?) initial OP equating coma victims to the unborn wasn’t getting addressed and this thread was moving far afield. I agree with Beeblebrox that this analogy is weak in many respects some of which you just pointed out. There are a great many issues and concerns that need to be looked at in the abortion debate and one quick-n-dirty analogy to coma patients can’t account for the multitudes of concerns surrounding this issue.

To answer your question directly I think people have been taking a stab at it all along this thread (you’ve made that point before). As happens too often in abortion debates the two-sides devolve into issues that neither side ever sees as effectively answered. Since they feel they have now found an unassailable point for their argument they keep flinging them at the other side and decide their points have been made. In the end no one wins in this state of affairs and the best that can be hoped for is that both sides agree to disagree (although sometimes not even that).

39

Sorry, Homey don’t play dat. You cannot state an argument (In this case, setting forth an analogy that coma patients and fetuses are comparable in brain activity and functionality) and demand other people attempt to disprove it; the burden of proof is on the person advancing the argument. If I start a thread arguing that coma patients cannot be compared to fetuses, you may ask me to post some medical facts to support it; but if someone else starts an OP arguing the opposite the burden is upon them. Otherwise it seems to be a disingenuous OP, if we are not allowed to establish whether the analogy is appropriate without it being clearly stated as only a hypothetical.

Children are sometimes born with only a brain stem, without a complex cerebral cortex. These children are often euthanized at the wishes of the parents, though their heart beats, and they can often breathe and take nourishment–in other words, they don’t qualify as brain dead by the criteria listed either. The lack of a functioning complex cerebral cortex does appear to negate true personhood. In the case of a coma patient, the cerebral cortex exists, simply damaged to an uncertain degree or quiescent–but it is undoubtably there and we knew the human could use it to think at one point, neither of which is true of a fetus. If a human had their cerebral cortex removed, removing beyond a doubt any consciousness/memory/thought/higher brain functions, should we preserve this life even if s/he can still twitch once in a while and so is not considered “brain-dead” by the criteria listed above?

40

TQM, juvenile attacks like your ‘response’ to my post reflect poorly on the poster, not the person being attacked.

In any case: I do not see what your point is supposed to be. Using a completely irrelevant comparison, you show that we treat fetuses differently than coma victims. Ok, I’ll give you that. The real question is, ‘so what’? Pro-choice individuals don’t say “let’s kill embryos and fetuses, because they aren’t sentient”. They point out the fact that the fetus is wholly supported by the mother’s body, and that control over your body is a basic civil right.

If you are arguing that fetuses that are viable outside the womb should not be aborted, I would agree with you. However, your argument leaves the mother out of the equation entirely. Of course, doing so reflects poorly on the pro-choice side, because you are leaving out their central argument for abortion legality.

In short, you can argue sentience until you are blue in the face, but ultimately, you will not prove your side in doing so. There are a great many legal persons in the world who are quite sentient and who are legally killed in a variety of circumstances.

However, if you wish to keep chewing this bone, you’re free to do so. I simply hope that you will do so keeping in mind that your ethics are indeed personal and not public.