PPH is the largest provider of reproductive health services in the country with over 4 million visits each year for things like Kolga and Zsofia mentioned. Their primary business activity is contraception and STD testing, not terminations.
There are over 1.3 million elective abortions per year.
PPH only does about 300,00 of them, maybe less. That means about one million of them are done somewhere else.
Obviously, these 1.3 million elective terminations are done by women who do not want to be pregnant and, as the news story shows, these women are willing to take some pretty big risks to terminate their pregnancies.
There are about half a million kids in foster care and only about 50,000-100,000 kids get adopted every year.
Beniamino, once abortions are outlawed, what plans do you have for the 1.25 million (1,250,000!- that’s a city the size of Pheonix or Austin, every year!) unwanted kids born every year?
Maybe we can develop some “baby cities” and build a bunch of orphanages and hire whole cities of people to care for them?
It has been shown that making abortion illegal doesn’t decrease the incidence of abortion, it just makes it more likely the the abortion will be unsafe and result in maternal death or morbidity.
So, no baby cities, maybe a few more cemeteries though.
Normally I stay out of these discussions, as they are rarely based on anything but emotion, and it’s impossible to argue with how someone feels about something.
But you are demonstratively wrong. Every scientist in existence believes that life begins at conception. Maybe not personhood, but definitely life. It’s in Cecil’s article about the subject, where he actually tries to deal with the subject rationally.
I’ll also point out Cecil was a heck of a lot more convincing than any thread I’ve seen on the subject. I used to be pro-life, and he convinced me otherwise. All hearing pro-choicers yell at me did was make me more staunchly pro-life. Cecil may not actually be the smartest human in the world, but his second article illustrates that he does understand how to actually convince people.
Life- as in the creation of life- begining at conception. You, me and Cecil are on the same page.
Life- as in the point at which there is a “right to life” and “personhood” beginning at conception- no.
Beniamino comments seemed to say that a “baby” had rights from it’s conception, having crossed the “bright line” and that is what I was disagreeing with.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear, I was trying to give example where ascribing rights from conception are…well, stupid.
Hey, uncombined gametes are alive, too. Every sperm is alive, but “every sperm is sacred” can only be a joke.
Fertilization and recombination are certainly interesting and significant, but saying that event itself begins an individual personhood is like saying that the inception of a malignant tumor ends one. In each case, the microscopic biological event can bring about the beginning or end of a human life, if unchecked by other forces–but it hasn’t happened yet. And it might not.
It just doesn’t make sense to treat a new iteration of DNA as, itself, a person.
Indeed. Monozygotic twins, by definition, start out with identical DNA. It used to be thought that they stayed that way, and we never had any trouble recognizing them as two people.
There is now evidence that, much later in life, identical twins can sometimes be found to have tiny genetic differences. These differences may be caused by environmental conditions in utero (but long after conception) or even long after birth–effects of diet or smoking, for example. Are we then to say that twins are sometimes born as one “person” in two bodies but can become two people?
No, DNA is hugely important for life on Earth, including us–but it ultimately just doesn’t mesh with anyone’s common sense to treat the iteration of the genetic code itself as defining separate personhood. And that’s what “a human life begins at conception” really means.
Logic and science demand that personhood be defined by macroscopic features. We more-or-less acknowledge “brain death” as the end of a human life; it makes sense to investigate indicators of “brain birth” for the beginning.
No, we don’t, not if by “brain death” you mean the absence of all brain activity. There are people who temporarily flat-line, whether through some trauma (some cases of severe hypothermia) or deliberately (induced for certain operations). While that person on the operating table is flat-lined, would you assess this individual as “not a person”? Could someone kill that individual without having destroyed a “person”?
My point being, your unassailable logical line is blurred as well. If the guy on the operating table is a person, deserving protection, then the absence of brain activity is not, by itself, the prerequisite for “personhood.”
Well, I’m not sure that our present monitors register all relevant brain activity. But that aside, I mean permanent, unrecoverable brain death. As long as anybody thinks that brain activity can be recovered, sure, let’s err on the side of caution and keep the body going.
I think it’s still unassailable that there is a considerable period between conception and the first beginning of anything that could be called “brain life” in this context.
Well, I’m afraid I’m not going to donate to Planned Parenthood, but if ihere was a sum of foolishness that required me to do so, this post surely would qualify.
If nothing else, this doctor’s actions were criminal, literally, as opposed to the ru-of-the-mill abortionist, whose actions are legal.
It pisses me off to see this kind of idiotic crap from the left, especially when others who know better fail to criticize the idiotic spewer because he’s “on their side.”
It pisses me off ten times worse when it’s “my side” acting like an idiot. Nothing wrong with taking the position that abortion is a moral wrong. I agree that it is. But to argue that this position is as cut-and-dried obvious as the wrong perpetuated by this “doctor” is absolutely indefensible.
I missed that part of your claim earlier. It seems that very deep anaesthesia can produce a virtually flat EEG. However, I also find plenty of material (such as here) on the limits of EEG, so “flat-lining” is not “the absence of all brain activity.”
Fixing the precise end of a brain’s life–like its beginning–seems to be a little beyond our ability.
The caution around diagnosing brain death is generally related to a “rush to judgment” based on incomplete facts–i.e., basing it solely on the absence of brain activity. That’s why protocols generally include determining if other functions (e.g., unassisted breathing) exist, determining the cause of the current condition (e.g., was hypothermia involved?), etc. Barbiturates during surgery can create this state–or at times something approaching it, which I think is your point. Could there be a virtually undetectable level of brain activity, something that exists within the range of electrical noise? I’m sure.
It’s a range, with one end where the patient has no brain function and another where brain function clearly exists. The fact that there are points where that line may not be bright doesn’t change the philosophical question though. We need only know that there are people who have no brain function (even if there are instances where our measurements can’t be absolutely, beyond all doubt, certain) who regain that function to ask the question I posed. Are they “persons” when in that state? Does the absence of brain activity mean they are the equivalent–in that regard–to a fetus early in his development? (And considering the people who have only a flicker of brain activity, it raises another interesting question, which I think is yours as well–does that flicker assign a right to life?)
But to clarify, I was referring less to deep anesthesia and more to operations that employ hypothermic cardiac arrest (sometimes called standstill operations). They’re used for certain complex procedures and it “requires keeping the patient in a state of hibernation at 15 degrees Celsius with no breathing, heartbeat, or brain activity for up to one hour. Blood is drained from the body to eliminate blood pressure. The patient is considered clinically dead during the operation.” (Same cite, emphasis added.) This effect has also been detected in people who experienced severe hypothermia through some accidental circumstance. They have no detectable brain activity, but it returns. But while in that state, they lack all brain function, as confirmed through EEGs, but also through other diagnostics (e.g., no reaction to pain). They are simply masses of cells, incapable of any type of thought, emotion or consciousness.