Keep it to yourself! Better yet, DON'T DO IT!

Great Debates
61

RTFIREFLY says:

Of course there are. The analogy, which frankly I thought was fairly obvious, is that neither is independently alive, not that they are necessarily comparable in any other way.

Well, I disagree. A sperm cell will become a real, live, independent human being too, if all goes optimally. People don’t seem to go out of their way to conserve sperm cells, though. I personally have a real problem with putting the rights of a potential future human being (if all goes optimally) before the rights of a human being in existence now who just happens to be pregnant.

What if I went to the doctor and asked them to remove a mole or a benign tumor, or some other type of biological, spontaneously occurring cluster of cells that is likely to change my entire physical condition, may well endanger my health, and which I am opposed to hosting?

You are extrapolating wildly from an analogy only meant to make the point that certain things may be living (flesh and blood) and yet at the same time not indepentently alive. But, for what it’s worth, no one is proposing passing a law making it illegal to cut your own hand off if you want to, and if you could prove you weren’t nuts to want to. People seem to recognize that what others do with their own bodies is their own business – until we start talking about abortion.

Except that I didn’t make this argument. But even if I had, I don’t think your point holds up. If I want to cut my hand off but can’t find a doctor to help me, that’s my trouble luck, just like if I want to obtain a (legal) abortion but can’t find a doctor to help me, I’m SOL. This, in my mind, has more to do with the law of supply and demand, than it does with making the procedure illegal in all (or most) cases, which is what I personally am opposed to.

If there was a bona fide demand for drugs to assist people in cutting off their own arms, I’m confident such drugs would be developed and marketed.

PETER NORTH says:

Color me surprised.

Jodi

Fiat Justitia

62

I had a dream last week that my left arm got cut off. I could still make the fingers and joints move, but I couldn’t feel anything with it. No one around me seemed to think it was a big deal, but after a few days I thought it might be a good idea to go to a hospital to have them reattach it before it stopped working.

63

When did this become yet another abortion debate? I thought we pretty much answered the OP?

Esprix

Ask the Gay Guy! (or, if you prefer the Jesusfied version, Asketh the damn Priest Guy!)

64

The next time someone calls me a knee-jerk liberal, can someone please point them to this thread? Thanks. :slight_smile:

Hardly. There’s not a chance in hell that every sperm a man ejaculates during sex will bonk into an egg, resulting (ultimately) in a human being. That would involve more eggs than the woman is born with (by several orders of magnitude), and even then, it would be one hell of a pregnancy.

While I have sympathy for those who became pregnant due to having sex forced on them, the overwhelming majority of abortions apparently stem from sex that two people quite happily participated in.

What I’m tossing around in my mind is the nature of the obligation of such a couple to such a life, such a potential human being. (I don’t have any firm conclusions, btw. Whether I come across as pro-life or pro-choice usually depends on the aspect of the question being considered.) If they know all they’re prepared to do is end its existence, if it should come about, do they have an obligation to satisfy each other by some other means, perhaps? Or do they have a right to gratification specifically by sexual intercourse that supersedes any moral claim of this potential human being?

If the potential fetus has no claim, by what lights do we say they’re being irresponsible if they don’t use birth control? What’s irresponsible, then, about using abortion as a primary means of birth control?

But if the potential fetus has some claim, then how much? Is using birth control enough to satisfy it? Or are people morally obligated to know, before sex, that they have a better answer than abortion for any little sperm, fertilized egg, etc., that eludes the contraceptive mechanisms they throw in its path?

Or should the question be framed some other way? Should the question be one of, when has the fetus developed far enough that we have an obligation to consider it? At birth? At conception? At the point of viability? When its brain has formed?

Perhaps, but my counterpoint was that that, by itself, doesn’t say a whole lot. Maybe I shouldn’t have extrapolated as far as, say, the circular saw.

Italics mine. Sounds like something that, by anyone’s standards, shouldn’t be there. That’s why they help you get rid of it.

In theory, they say they do. But as I said earlier, in practice there seem to be some very real limits on that. And with all due respect to C3’s research, that’s still the exception that, by the fact that we know how exceptional it is, proves the rule holds almost invariably. (OK, I’m getting into trouble by attempting to straighten out Cecil on the fly, but what the hey.)

It just kinda happened, Esprix. Nobody’s fault, but no surprise, I guess. :rolleyes:

65

So, do you believe that masturbation is wrong?

“You don’t have insurance? Well, just have a seat and someone will be with you after you die.” --Yes, another quality sig custom created by Wally!

A Jesusfied sig: Next time I covet thine opinion, I’ll ask for it!

66

Of course not. What makes you think I would think that?

67

I said:

To which RTF replied:

Once again, you are extrapolating wildly from what I said. Did I say every sperm cell would become a baby? No, I did not. I said that using your language (“if everything goes optimally”), every sperm cell has the potential to become a baby – just as every egg cell does. My point, which you apparently missed, is that I am not personally much persuaded by an argument that every cell of cluster of cells that might eventually result in a baby is deserving of protection. If a sperm cell is not, why is a four-celled zygote? If a person is morally convinced that life begins at conception, fine – there’s the rationale right there. But I do not personally hold such a belief, and I resent those who do in their attempts to force their beliefs upon me.

So what? This, for me, almost crosses over into the “pregnancy as punishment” area, which I find morally repugnant for a whole 'nother slew of reasons.

Toss away; we are all entitled to our opinions and though I might not agree with yours, I will not question your right to hold them. I will, however, question your right to force them on me – not that you personally have attempted to, but that is my problem with most of the people I have met whom I would characterize as “pro-life.”

I’m not cutting-and-pasting the questions that followed, because I assume they are rhetorical.

I said:

To which RTF replied:

If it spontaneously occurs, who are you to say it “shouldn’t be there”? If I develop a mole on my arm, why “shouldn’t it be there”? The question, obviously, is not whether something “should” or should not be where it is but whether reasons exist to remove it. No one evaluates the mole’s right to exist, but they will evaluate the zygote’s – because it could eventually become a baby. I don’t find that reason enough to usurp the rights of a existing adult – and I don’t care if the adult was raped or, God forbid, voluntarily had sex. And a doctor will help a patient “get rid” of a mole or a tumor for any reasonably defensible reason – from cosmetic concerns to potential future medical complications. The doctors do not concern themselves with whether the growth “should” be where it is.

I’m not sure I’ll come back to this; debating abortion is tantamount to banging your head against the wall in terms of useful activities. You need to reach your own conclusions on how you feel on the issue, and I will leave you to it. And provided that you do not insist that I accede to your beliefs, I will have no quarrel with you.

Jodi

Fiat Justitia

68

evilbeth wrote:

Everybody sing!

Ev-e-ry sperm is sacred,
     Ev-e-ry sperm is good,
     Ev-e-ry sperm is needed
     In your neigh-bor-hood! (two, three, four)
     Ev-e-ry sperm is holy,
     Ev-e-ry sperm is great;
     If a sperm is wasted,
     God gets quite irate!

The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.

69

Thanks, tracer; I would have added that myself, but I couldn’t remember all the words.

Jodi:

I don’t think I’ve extrapolated at all. If a man and woman have sex, exactly how would it be optimal if each sperm cell involved grew into a person? Mom would explode, removing life-support for all the little sperm-clones. That’s not optimal, by any stretch of the imagination.

Besides, there’s a fundamental difference between the sperm (or the egg) and the fertilized egg. Neither the sperm nor the egg, without the other, will become a person. It takes the two to tango. Biologically speaking, at least, it’s when the sperm fertilizes the egg that a new creature begins.

Yes, that new creature is dependent on the mother, but so are kicking, screaming four year olds dependent on their parents.

Morally convinced? That’s fact. The question is, what are the moral implications? Dammit, you’re too smart for the ‘when does life begin’ BS.

OK, I take it back.

Speaking of extrapolating wildly.

No, I’m thinking that if, in step 7 you find yourself in a moral dilemma, then perhaps the answer is to be found in a different choice in steps 1 through 6. If a lot of people go through the same procedure a lot of times, maybe we should go to school off the previous instances, rather than hitting step 7 de novo every time.

And finally:

Spontaneous generation of children? OK, I’m out of here.

70

Just a friendly reminder: Two-thirds of fertilized eggs fail to implant in the uterine wall and are expelled as detrius in the next menses. (These are not “miscarriages” because the woman (A) is not aware that she has conceived, and (B) does not miss a period.) Plus, a surprisingly high percentage of the fertilized eggs that do successfully implant split off into identical twins; but in most cases one of the twins dies in early development before it’s large enough to be seen without a magnifying glass.

71

But, you know what, tracer? For these anti-choice folks to be consistent, what with their claim that the fetus is a human being with rights and all at conception, then the police department would be one quite busy outfit. After all, given the facts you cite just above, each and every menstrual discharge must be examined to determine if (a) there was a fertilized ovum & therefore a human being present, then (b) who’s at fault for terminating that pregnancy.

Or are the anti-choice folks now saying the following are not “real humans”

(a) Fertilized ovum, product of incest
(b) Fertilized ovum, product of rape
© Fertilized ovum, too small to see

Sheesh. And I get grief over my choice of religion. At least I’m logical with it.

72

This is actually kind of ironic, RTF, because I usually find myself agreeing with you, and it also is a lesson to me about not getting into these sorts of discussions, because they invariable piss me off.

I unequivocally deny that “life” begins at conception, because I do not define “life” in terms of eventual potential. Therefore, I deny that a one-day-old zygote has anymore “right to life” or, indeed, life at all, than a any other group of cells in my body. Might it become a human being eventually? Sure. And that makes no difference to me at that point, morally or rationally. Do not presume to tell me that what I believe is “bullshit” or denigrate my beliefs by strongly implying that I am stupid to hold them. If you want to discuss, fine, but you are dangerously close to embodying everything I loathe about people who are anti-choice.

Life begins at conception and that’s a “fact”? Let me fling your own terms back at you: Bullshit.

Jodi

Fiat Justitia

73

tracer: I was aware that a substantial fraction of fertilized eggs fail to attach to the uterine wall, but I didn’t realize the percentage (of failures) was that high.

A question to display my ignorance: how do they know? I’m trying to imagine the experiment one would have to do to obtain any ratio whatsoever, and I’m drawing a blank.

Nonetheless, this is neither here nor there, AFAIAC. I’m not defending a particular position in the abortion debate; I dropped in to point out that a position that Jodi had dismissed out of hand was, in fact, arguable. I think I’ve made my case there. But perhaps I should review the bidding through the lens of my own perspective, just to clarify what I’ve been trying to say:

Let’s posit that the moral value of the lives of any of us law-abiding adults is 1. By comparison, let’s place the moral value of property at 0: if it’s yours, you can destroy it at will without consulting anyone. Presumably, we can put everything else in between.

What I’ll call the ‘strong’ pro-life conjecture is that, from the point when the sperm bonks into the egg, the value of that life is 1. It’s a morally consistent position (at least, in between wars with Middle Eastern countries, executions of people who had basically no adequate representation, etc.), but it’s got serious commonsense problems (e.g. it’s hard to attribute the same value to the life of a cluster of dividing cells as to a walking, talking person) and I don’t buy it for a second.

What I’ll call the strong pro-choice position is that the moral value of the fertilized egg/embryo/fetus is zero from conception until delivery, at which point it becomes 1. The problems with that discontinuity are pretty obvious, too: what’s the moral value of the fetus in the womb, an hour before a delivery by C-section?

In between, you’ve got a potential range of positions, and somewhere in there, IMO, is the truth, assuming there is a ‘the truth’ here. I honestly don’t know that it’s discoverable; at best, we might be able to narrow it down a bit.

Obviously, if the strong pro-life position is true, then the developing fetus is more than just property, and the mother has no right to have it put to death at her discretion. But the same can potentially be said for a lot of those hypothetical in-between positions for varying portions of the gestation of the fetus.

What that might mean in practice, who knows? At this point, I’ve lost the pro-choice crowd; I lose the pro-lifers about thirty seconds later, when I point out that until the developing fetus has a brain, it’s got nowhere for a ‘soul’ to hang out, and its moral value has to be extremely close to zero. And I find that I can’t always advance the discussion very far when talking to myself.

But I imagine that, in some theoretically semi-rational universe, we’d be talking about some period within which a woman could choose to abort on a whim, and after which there’d be a legal balancing act between the wants and needs of the mother, and the interest of society in the rights of the fetus - which balance might be different depending on how far along the pregnancy was, the health of the fetus, and who knows what else.

Anyhow, the only positions that seems to deny society any right whatsoever to be nosy are the strong pro-choice position, and ‘in-between’ positions that are fairly close to the strong pro-choice extreme. The strong pro-life position, and a fair range of in-between positions, would in fact give society a right to be nosy, in various circumstances, if they proved to be true. I was arguing that it was arguable that it might be Homer’s business to some extent. Given how little we know of the underlying moral truths (if any) that might govern this issue, I think that’s the least that can be said.

74

Jodi, you’re confusing scientific fact with potential moral implication here, and incorrectly turning the former on its head in an attempt to make your point about the latter.

I apologize for my strong language; I guess I got a bit intemperate. I just have been so tired of the ‘when does life begin’ red herring for so long that I’m ready to borrow one of Freedom’s guns and shoot the damned thing on sight, the next time it appears.

But to put it simply, a fertilized egg is alive. It is not dead; it is not inanimate; it is not a virus. That is a biological fact. It is not a matter of belief or unbelief.

You appeared to be saying otherwise. This was what I got intemperate about. That you’re intensely pro-choice doesn’t bother me, but you’ve got to honor the few facts we have.

My unsureness of where truth lies on this issue seems to cause me to play devil’s advocate a lot; when I was teaching at an evangelical Christian college, I was always arguing a position that they couldn’t distinguish from pro-choice, just as, above, I wound up arguing a position that you found not very distinguishable from the pro-life position. I think I must be a Rorshach blot with respect to this issue.

Anyhow, if you’d accept my apology for using inappropriately strong language, I’d appreciate it. I agree with you on a great deal, and even where we disagree, I respect your views. I’m sorry our discussion got as heated as it did; it’s pretty lousy to be yelling back and forth at people you like. :frowning:

And maybe it’s time for me to abandon this debate as well, and see how the thread I started about gardening is doing.

75

RTF – Apology accepted. If you want to continue this as a discussion, fine with me. If you want to wrap it up, also fine with me.

No, I’m not. Your are defining “life” differently than I am, and differently than it is generally defined in abortion debates. You are defining “life” as synonymous with “alive,” which it certainly can be, but, in this context, the “life” referred to is that of an independent organism. Every cell of my body is alive; that doesn’t mean that it has a “life” independent of the rest of me that is somehow deserving of protection. Most people who are anti-choice speak of a fetus or even an embryo as if it has an separate life or existence worthy of respect and protection – separate, on a moral level from the life or existence of the mother. I disagree with this, at least for the first trimester. If you want to make the point that any cell in my body is “alive” as opposed to dead, fine, but that’s obviously not the context of “life” which usually spurs debate in this arena. The question of whether a fetus, embryo, or zygote has an independent right to a life of its own is hardly a red herring; it is, in fact, the heart of the abortion debate. The question of “when life begins” might, for your purposes, be better phrased as “when does a separate life begin;” frankly, however, I think most people who discuss this subject understand that is what’s meant by the question.

Jodi

Fiat Justitia

76

Oh my holy geez. This is ugly.

Call off the hounds. I drove by a “Wild Oats” grocery store the other day.

I still have the feeling that they were planning some sort of termination, though, because the one was visibly pregnant. I mean, I’m a sick guy who makes bad jokes, but rarely do I joke about abortion to someone who is visibly pregnant.

I’m wearing a really cool Superman shirt right now. The S is made of red felt, and the yellow has got sparkly bits in it.

–Tim

I’m not gay.

77

Here’s my two beans worth. RTF said:

I think this is the core of the discussion. Saying that a fetus is alive is true in the most basic sense, in that every cell in your body is alive. A better term might be “Human life” At what point does the fetus aquire the inalienable right that the rest of us enjoy. If everyone could agree on THAT, this whole arguement would be settled.( fat chance, I know) My feeling, personaly, is that this occurs when the fetus is capable of surviving outside the mother’s body. To me, that is the acid test. Once the fetus demonstrated the ability to live seperately from the mother,( even allowing advanced medical technology) then I feel that it is a de facto member of the human race with the same rights as all of us, including not being killed. Third trimester abortions really bother me. If you’ve gone that long, then you should have the baby. Before that point, all the fetus is is potential. I see no way it can reasonably be considered a seperity entity with inherent rights. If the mother chose to end the pregnancy then, that’s her choice. It’s not one I like, but I’m not gonna step in and say NO. I guess you could clasify me as pro-choice and anti-abortion. In many cases, I think abortion is not the best choice. I will not tell you that you can’t, though. It’s not my business. Once the baby is capable of surviving on it’s own, then I feel that society has compelling interest to protect that individuals life, just as it has the interest to protect yours or mine.

Cecil said it. I believe it. That settles it.

78

Jodi, how about ‘distinct’ rather than ‘independent’? I mean, the fetus, despite its dependence of the mother, has its own DNA and everything. To say that it’s a distinct living organism, despite its dependence on the mother, still strikes me as being fundamentally true from a biological standpoint. (I admit that, being a mathematician, I’m out of my field here, but still.)

(Boldface mine.) Absolutely - the question of when it starts taking on rights is the key question; it’s not a red herring at all. And it’s also phrased in a way that makes it clear what the discussion is about. In my experience, “When does life begin” isn’t well understood; it only muddies the waters and helps people talk past one another. (And Lord knows that the abortion debate has more of that behavior than most issues.)

In all fairness, Dave, some third-trimester abortions are of fetuses that are expected to not survive birth by more than hours, if at all. I’m not sure I see the logic in making a mother continue to carry a baby that’s going to be dead on arrival, so to speak.

79

I can hardly believe it, really. If she were visibly pregnant, some sort of herbal treatment would just cause a still birth (like I mentioned in a previous post.) Yikes! Risky and painful! Not that I’m an expert, but it seems to me that a woman that far along in her pregnancy would not be using an herbal “cure” to abort. It’s just too late for that. Really.

I believe you.

I am wearing a tattered grey printed long t-shirt with a psuedo-“Indian” design on it. Underneath, I am wearing fuscia sweatpants, with attractive holes in the legs.

I’m not a bag lady. :wink:

Polydactyl Cats Unlimited
“A Cat Cannot Have Too Many Toes”

80

Homer, it still seems to make a hell of a lot more sense that you misheard her.

Esprix

Ask the Gay Guy! (or, if you prefer the Jesusfied version, Asketh the damn Priest Guy!)

“Never assume a malicious intent when stupidity will explain just as well.”