Ok. You claim to be atheist. Are you a vegan as well?
The fact is, an early stage abortion, the fetus is very small, gummy bear sized or so. We kill and eat for food far more sophisticated animals every day. A fetus is less complex than those animals, is not in any way as aware of it’s existence as livestock is (at least to an extent, a cow or chicken has some level of perception and planning and emotions). It’s just a small piece of tissue.
Your “well it would grow into a conscious person” statement is based on what, exactly? What if someone had a sperm sample and some eggs in a petri dish, right now. They are about to combine them, but get a phone call that the fertility clinic order is cancelled. The sperm and egg sitting next to each other could become a person, right? We can’t be incinerating them, or your beliefs are not being consistent.
The basis of your “belief” is that some magical divine spark happens at the moment of conception. If you are really atheist, you must know there is no evidence for such a spark, and therefore, if you can kill livestock…or a plant…you can kill an early term fetus.
Later term, as the fetus develops some serious brain capacity and becomes immensely more complicated, sure, I’d agree with you, we can’t be killing it then.
It doesn’t matter how the conception happened, I’m just trying to weigh the suffering of a rape victim carrying an unwanted child of the rapist with abortion. Of course it’s not the fault of the baby/embryo, and if I had to weigh the survival of the embryo to the terrible suffering of the woman carrying, I’d have to go with the survival of the embryo as the timeless right thing to do.
The later scenario, I was referring to the baby being unhealthy, severely, to where survival outside the womb was near impossible. For the mother to be forced to carry and give birth and be responsible for the child’s needs regardless of the ability to do so, puts me into that gray area where I don’t really know what the right thing to do would be.
It doesn’t matter to me how unhuman-like the early fetus is, its path is still to become a conscious person. It DOES matter to me how hypocritical it is for me to eat meat if I care about conscious suffering and I don’t know how to reconcile that. One is preventable and the other is ingrained by hundreds of thousands of generations of humans. We do live in a natural world where we eat other species to survive, but the decision to have an abortion, to end a potential life, is not ingrained.
And no, I don’t think there is some sort of divine spark at conception. It’s just that’s the point in time when a new human being begins.
And? This argument implies that if I were to fertilize a million eggs in a test tube I now have a moral resposibility to get all those eggs into women and through to term.
I know in some ways it’s easier to just say “Here’s a convenient line in the process, so we’ll call the foetus at this point a ‘person’”, but it’s *not *really a person, is it? It’s just a cell at that point, no more complex than any other cell in my body.
One day we might have the technology to clone an adult from one of their cells. But the fact that any one of a person’s cells is now a potential human at some future time doesn’t oblige them to make a clone, and the situation is the same with the current way of making new humans. Potential human =/= human.
Strictly speaking, it’s not a fetus until approximately 9 weeks. Immediately after conception it’s called a zygote.
It is not so simple to just declare zygotes to be human life. For one thing, it is not uncommon for an egg, once fertilized, to fail to implant in the womb. Even after successful implantation, it is not uncommon for a woman to have a miscarriage before she’s even aware of being pregnant.
Regardless of whether the woman is aware of the pregnancy or whether it has reached the fetal stage, outside of abortion discussions nobody treats a miscarriage as an event equivalent to the death of a human being.
Whole lotta “they think” in this thread. Not so much “we think,” is there? The thread is addressed to Pro-life atheists. Why anyone else is replying, I don’t know.
The difference between a fertilized human egg and another random cell is just a few switches set inside the cell’s control mechanism.
Recent experiments have found ways to manipulate those switches. From what I read, it’s possible to take any random cell and tell it to be an embryo again. Just by injecting a few growth factors, you’ve created something that with a lot of luck and careful care, might become a person eventually.
Strictly speaking, whatever we call it at the various stages is a human construct, and not something that in and of itself tells us anything about personhood. Since becoming human is a process and not an event, it’s not so simple to declare any bright lines in the development process as definitely a person on one side and not a person on the other. As is so common in these types of discussions, people assume that there are only two sides: pro-life and pro-choice (to use their preferred terminology.) But very few pro-choice people are pro-choice for 3rd trimester pregnancies, and plenty of pro-life folks are OK with abortion in the case of rape, or even incest. The latter because, icky, since the former covers forced incest.
No to mention the “someone breaks into your house” is a bad analogy, except in cases of rape. Every time we have sex, we potentially invite someone into our home.
A broader policy would be to simply support abortions in cases of serious genetic or growth deformities. Vastly easier to just terminate the fetus than spend millions of dollars to end up with a person who is mentally and physically disabled. Advanced hospitals have tried things like in the womb surgery, but that’s a terrible idea.
To reuse nate’s proposed policy : an embryo that had things go badly wrong is not going to become a very functional person.
I object to the term “pro-life” being used for those that are anti-abortion. Plenty of people who are pro-choice are also pro-life and it seems to me a clumsy attempt to poison the well.
That said. I’m an atheist who thinks that abortion is the least worst option in certain circumstances and even though I don’t like the idea I cannot issue a blanket condemnation of it.
In an ideal world it should be legal, optional, early, free and rare. My own line in the sand for an elective termination would be commonly agreed term limit of viability (currently 24 weeks in the UK).
That sounds like a fudge because it is. The line has to be arbitrary and fluid because I don’t think there is a single defining point of when a fertilised egg becomes “human”. Being able to survive outside the womb seems like reasonable line to me.
For those that think life begins at conception, I ask you. In one hand I have a test-tube with hundred fertilised eggs, in my other I have one single 35 week fetus. If I were only able to save one, which would it be and why?
To comment on the situation of the test tube fertilized eggs, my thoughts are that while growing humans in an artificial environment could enter the territory of being unethical, I don’t relate it to the situation on an implanted fertilized egg inside a womb. If sometime in the future we have created artificial wombs that can grow a baby to viability, I would equate that to pregnancy. If a fertility clinic implants 10 fertilized eggs into a woman hoping at least one will “take”, the ones that do “take” should be treated as persons, the others, including the ones left in the test tubes, are non-potentials.
So to Novelty Bobble’s question, you should definitely save the 35 week old fetus.
It isn’t though is it? “choice” means that someone is free to choose not to do it, no certainty about it.
I suggest not. “pro-life” is chosen as a label deliberately in order to automatically label anyone on the other side as “anti-life”, which is a ludicrous and unnecessarily binary distinction. One can, at the same time, be against abortion as a concept and yet still be “pro-life” and “pro-choice”. I should know because I occupy that ground.
Most labels are problematic, so it just seems easier to go with the labels the sides choose for themselves. Your objection seems odd since you claim to be pro-choice but object to the choice of label used by those who are anti-abortion.
I’d be happy with pro-abortion and anti-abortion, but it seems like pro-choice folks largely don’t like the former. (I’m pro-choice myself, and would have no problem with it.)
ISTM that the problem here is that you’re insisting that we should envision human personhood as having a single, well-defined, incontrovertible “start” moment. Feel free to think of it that way if that’s what seems “logical” to you, but it isn’t particularly meaningful biologically.
In particular, it doesn’t really make biological sense to assign individual human personhood to a human ovum before you even know how many individual persons it’s ultimately going to be.
So are many other moments in fetal development, such as implantation of the embryo, division of the zygote in the case of monozygotic births (identical twins, etc.), the onset of brain waves as suggested by Trinopus, etc.
Thinking of fetal development as having a unique “on-off switch moment” that instantaneously establishes full human personhood may seem attractively neat and tidy as a concept. But as John Mace pointed out, any such “on-off switch moment” is an artificial distinction that we arbitrarily impose on what is actually a complicated continuous process.
