A reasonably good summation of the debate over when human life begins. However, unless I am mistaken, Roe v. Wade didn’t turn on when human life begins; it was based primarily on a woman’s right to control her own body and reproductive tract. In other words, it doesn’t matter (legally) whether the embryoe or fetus is human or not: a woman can decide to deny it life support.
I agree with cecil’s 2 points:
- Life begin at conception.
- It’s not a big deal. (or big deal?)
Values of humans’ life vary.
Look at it the other way. Think of creating life is like creating businesses. The value of a business can be computed 2 ways. You can measure the present value of expected cash flow. You can also measure the amount of capital and labor put on biz already.
The 2 value should meet. If the latter is smaller than the former, for example, people will keep creating new biz till it does.
The same way with kids. The value of kid can be measured in two ways. The amount of resources you put on the kids, and the expected value the kids provide. Now we have an issue. I don’t make kids so the kids generate money for me. But still, I make kids for some purpose, namely to reproduce and so my kid can make grand children. That’s after all, the purpose of life, reproduce. A concept that now have become foreign in modernized western civilization.
Anyway, if your purpose of life is not to reproduce, in the future, your kind will be gone. The kind of people that are around nowadays are those who successfully reproduced in the past and have strong emotional inclination to repeat their ancestors tendency.
As usual, the value of a kid life can be computed in those 2 ways. The 2 value, under free fair market mechanism should be the same. If I got more present value of expected cash flow equivalent out of the child than the resources I already put at the child then I would make more kids till the 2 value meet. Think of utility function and how making kids are just ways to maximize that.
Yes, it didn’t work out that way in modern civilization because Bill Gates stop making kids even though he can afford many more, thanks to various market distortion governments’ put reproductive economy, like monogamy, alimony, palimony, and child support costs that is set up proportional to a man’s wealth.
But still in free market, rich parents, especially males, will keep making kids till the cost of supporting another one will hurt his lifestyle so much that he’ll be happier to use the money to support his lifestyle instead of making another kids. Here, I presume that child support cost is constant irrelevant of daddy’s wealth for simplification purpose.
The value of an unborn kid of a welfare parasite is just not big. There isn’t much resources allocated to it. The amount of present value of expected cash flow that kid will bring will be like their parent… a negative amount.
In meritocratic society, right is assigned to ration resources based on productivity. Murder of a productive person is illegal because we don’t want to serve societies if we are not going to live long enough to enjoy the fruit of our labor. If such murder is not illegal, no body would want to be productive because it’s simply more lucrative to kill and rob instead.
We don’t want to cause precedents that can hurt all the way to us. Hence, we prohibited all murders irrelevant of the varying economic value of the person being murdered. Hence, we make the “fence” bigger than necessary and pretend that all lives are equally important.
Still, most of us agree that killing Gary Graham is not a big deal while killing Bill Gates would be a very big deal. Killing me would be somewhere between.
In ancient times when men pursues power rather than wealth, those who are “successful” can assert their life values more and we have the first world war happen because of a killing of one man.
However, abortion, didn’t misaligned people’s interest to productivity so much that it’s not going to hurt economy by much. So it should be okay.
And there is nothing wrong with punishing a child that has done nothing wrong. What’s selfish is not individuals but genes. If the parents are no good, we’re punishing the genes by killing the unborn child. So what?
Murder or not, abortion reduces crimes and promote better economy by eliminating genes that are most likely to be problematic anyway. So what’s the big deal? I am on it.
Now, here is another point of view to measure the value’s of life. Namely if we think that the value of anything is subjective. I may value the same apple differently with my friend. The same way I may value the same thing, namely, my life, differently than my friend. If we all value my life the same way then all of you would pay my medical bills right?
So another way to measure the value of life is to see the aggregate on how many people want you to live, and how much they’re willing to pay or kill to ensure that you live longer.
If many people want the kid to live then the kids’s life are valuable, just like animals’ right are valuable because there is PETA defending it. If no body want you to live or if too many people want you death than life, then your life is worthless.
I think a combination of democracy and free market will somehow do the right thing on measuring that value.
Human life began 200,000 years ago and has been going strong ever since!
To ask when an individual’s life begins, we have to ask not only when it has identifiably human biology, but also when it begins to individuate itself from the ongoing stream of human life. Cecil quite properly did this, and Roe vs. Wade does as well, by considering viability as a form of individuation.
One factor that was not mentioned is that of miscarriage. It is estimated that about 80% of fertilized ova spontaneously abort, usually in the first month. It has always bothered me that if you want to declare that a fertilized ovum has full human rights, then logically every miscarriage should be investigated as a potential homicide. And, of course, that would be crazy. But crazy doesn’t mean some ambitious DA somewhere wouldn’t try to make a name that way. And theologically, what does it mean that God would allow that sort of natural abortion rate to occur?
Life doesn’t begin; it continues.
Cecil-
Thanks for touching on, however briefly, one of the less-argued issues in the abortion debate. As you note, different religions choose different milestones for deciding when ensoulment happens, from the moment of conception until naming (or in the case of secular doctrines, never). Obviously, insisting that abortion at any stage is murder violates the freedom of religion of a significant number of Americans who belong to faiths that do not share that viewpoint.
That’s the impression certain US politicians want you to have. That way, they can pretend to argue against abortion till they’re blue in the face, and abortion will remain legal, just as the ruling class wants it (consider Paris Hilton for the reason why), because they know that no US court is ever going to rule that a woman does not have rights over her own body. In the meantime, their posturing keeps the suckers happy.
If they really wanted to make abortion illegal, they would take the approach of defining a fetus as a person, with all the rights of any other juvenile person. That would make it a question of the rights of one person versus the rights of another person. In the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade, it probably would have taken simple legislative action; it would be trickier now, but it could be done. If they really wanted to do it.
I agree with most of Teguh123’s points.
The concept of a woman choosing to deny an embryo/foetus life support (rather than actively killing it) is an interesting one. Does that make a distinction between a period of maternal anorexia (which could quite feasibly cause spontaneous miscarriage) and taking drugs that make the womb unreceptive to implantation or placental maintenance?
And if it is immoral to terminate a life at the morula stage by preventing implantation, why is it moral to terminate it by preventing ovum and spermatozoon coming into contact? (If one cites the argument that one is passive and one is active; why is it then immoral to terminate a life post-partum by failing to care for it?)
In other words, if you’re going to take conception as the point at which human life starts, realise that this too is a compromise. If you can’t save 'em all, does it really matter which one you save? And if it does, is it really better to save the one that came first rather than the one which would otherwise come ten years later?
Why on earth would you need to investigate every miscarriage? The authorities don’t routinely investigate all other deaths only deaths where there is something strange.
While I don’t think humans will ever know when a body is ensouled, we can know when brain waves begin, and to my way of thinking, that is the principal difference between a group of human cells, and a human being.
Hamiln’s 1964 “Life or Death by EEG” saw some movement at about 40 days, but as Cecil has observed, even Jell-o can produce results on an EEG. Bergstrom detected non-random EEG movement at 17 weeks. Anand and Hinkey found “Functional maturity of the cerebral cortex is suggested by fetal and neonatal electroencephalographic patterns…First, intermittent electroencephalograpic bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks.”
Now, it’s not practical to do some kind of brain scan on every fetus, but I think it’s clear that some time in the second trimester, a human brain begins thinking, and I have moral qualms about ending the life at that point. Aborting a pregnancy before brain activity begins, in my opinion, is no more an ethical or moral decision than contraception.
I believe that in most jurisdictions there has to be a coroner’s inquest for any unattended death - that is any death where a physician or other health professional was not present. Most are undoubtedly pro forma, but still. When my wife had an ectopic pregnancy, we had to switch hospitals, because the one we were at was Catholic and had to convene a panel to decide if it was okay to save her life by removing the ectopic fetus. We were not about to wait around for that silly exercise.
The “human life begins at conception” folks are often against stem cell research because of this thinking, too. But I’ve never understood why they don’t seem to oppose in-vitro fertility clinics, that fertilize many, many eggs and cull out a few to save while flushing the rest.
Of course often these folks are against sex education in schools and access to contraception, so who knows where their priorities are.
At least some of them do: My father, for one. Of course, those culled fertility clinic eggs are the primary source of the embryos used for stem cell research, so you really can’t separate the issues.
What’s really and truly baffling, though, are those folks like our illustrious president, who mandate that all of those surplus embryos must be destroyed, lest the fall into the hands of the evil Godless stem-cell researchers.
Well, yes, exactly. That’s why I separate - or compare - the two issues. The people who are against using embryos for stem cell research are fighting to make it illegal to use the excess embryos from fertility clinics for stem cell research. However they don’t seem to be fighting to stop the clinics from pouring the extra embryos down the drain.
There is a difference in when an individual began and when Life began, if there were no ancestors there would be no individual. Life is passed on it is necessary to have a live sperm fertilize the ova before an individual can happen. Life is also in the sperm that do not fertilize and egg so for one life to happen thousands of lives are lost, that is natures way.
Monavis
This is probably besides the point. But there are a few things I am really curious about.
- About womyn’s right to use her body. Why prostitution is not legal? It’s women’s body. So what if they want to be a porn star. I think the “my body -> my right” has a much stronger case here because we don’t have issue about baby’s right. At least more or less.
My educated guess is that prostitution is often so highly paid that for the same amount of beauty, a woman will earn more than being a housewife. Hence anti prostitution laws are really there to protect males that cannot give better offers, more or less. Just like anti polygamy laws are there to protect males from alpha males.
- Religions? Well, as far as I know, according to the bible and most other religions, most humans don’t have right to live. Losers in war doesn’t. Criminals doesn’t. Those who work on Sabath doesn’t. Slaves doesn’t. So it’s really funny when someone says that fetus have right to live and argue for that from religions.
However I do recoqnize a pattern from all the norms in the world, including religions. Your right to live depend on how many people want you to live and how politically powerful they are.
To me abortion is a controversial issue due to baby’s right thing. However, I think it’s not a big deal. It may be reasonable to think that murder of a 97 years old or a 1 year old is a “lesser” crime than murder of 25 year old. The 97 years old will die anyway whether she is murdered or not. The parents of the 1 year old can easily replace the death kid.
However, if we start making rules that a 1 year old or 97 years old has "less value of live, we are going through slippery slopes where we start valuing people’s live based on various condition. So we simply declare all murder to be equally wrong to be on the safe side.
Soon people would start arguing, what about if the 97 years old are billionaires that keep rejuvenating through stem cells technology? Then we start having issue whether the value of humans life depends on how rich he is. Well I think it’s true but the benefit of going through that slippery slope is much less than the potential gain. Not like I am going to murder my grandma because the penalty is lighter. It’s just that there are things we want people to simply not do, like murder, and that’s it.
That being said, we can declare abortion legal, even if it’s murder, without making huge mistakes. The life of a fetus is easily replaceable. If her own mom doesn’t value it, why should we? C’mon?
There comes another point. Humans’ life, unlike commodity, cannot be traded and hence have no objective value. My grandma’s life wouldn’t worth a lot to you, which can be shown by the fact that none of you would donate $1000 to pay his medical cost. However her life worth a lot to me, and would have worth much more money if I were richer. That is, I would be willing to spend more money for acts that would prolong her life had I been richer.
What do you guys think about it?
My argument that killing a 1 year old and a 97 years old is arguably “lesser” crime than killilng a 30 years old is very controversial.
This is what I mean.
Say you grow paddies or wheat. Say I damage your wheat. Of course, I would be obligated to pay more compensation if your wheat is “ripe” than if your wheat is newly planted or dying anyway.
A ripe wheat is more worthy than a young or dying wheat. The same way a ripe human is more worthy than the a young or dying ones. I caused more damage if I kill a college graduate than a 97 years gramps. Kind of cruel to say but, I mean it in that sense.
Also if your wheat is of high quality, of course I would have to pay even more. The same way the life of a rich person worth more than the live of a poor ones. A murderer of homeless guys causes less damage than a murderers of Bill Gates. In ancient time, the two would reasonably be punished differently.
However, a crime, especially a heinuous crime like murder, is not something that’s “okay” as long as you pay for the damage. Murder is something that we simply don’t want people to do. Hence death penalty for all premeditated murder is the cultural norm nowadays.
That being said, the damage caused does differ depending on who got pwnd.
That being said, without too much slipery slope, we can declare abortion legal without making too much trouble because, well, those fetus simply don’t worth a lot. Some rich guy with no heir may value their fetus a lot, but they’re not the kind of people doing abortion right?
Want less abortion? Legalize prostitution and allow women to pick rich males under any condition both sides agree (including, polygamy, one night stand, 5 months stand). Many rich males will be willing to mate with more women now that they’re not risking alimony proportional to their wealth. Many women will pick richer males. That means the kids have rich daddy and that would greatly reduce intensive to abort.
As I said, women’s right to sell her body and sexual service on ANY term has a much stronger case. The only “victim” is tax payer when that woman produce kids no body support. However, most laws against consensual sex doesn’t fix that problem anyway.
OK, I’m all for keeping abortion an option for family planning, and in theory legalizing/regulating prostitution would be in everybody’s best interest… but this argument fills me with the unquenchable need to call this poster horrible, demeaning names. Here’s what s/he says in a nutshell…
- Legal prostitution = Less Abortion
- Women: Rich Men > Poor Men
- Rich Men will pay for any and all children they father from X number of women (assumedly, because they can afford it)
Responses:
- What?? How do you figure this again???
- Love irregardless? Well played. I hope you’re not rich: by your own advice, you would remove yourself from the gene pool, taking the trouble out of it for me.
- … OK, have you ever argued against someone who kept insisting, “Well, I read it online” and just wouldn’t back down? Assertion 3 is so juvenile, I’m having trouble formulating my argument against it. Try this: Rich men want to stay rich. They won’t throw money at their babies JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE IT. They’ll deny paternity and sue for slander before they’ll hand 10 different women alimony / whatever-government-regulated-program-you’re-dreaming-up payments.
Please; you’re argument is the Dick Cheney to our RNC. A gigantic “Go Fuck Yourself” against people fighting for women’s reproductive rights. Don’t open your mouth again until you’ve thought these ideas of yours through.
What ever happened to love?? You’re basically telling me that women, deep down, are only interested in making the most buck per ounce of flesh, and only choose men based on their money?
Love is an option. Sure some women want love. Some men offer love and loyalty. Why not let women decide? Some prefer love. Some prefer money. Some prefer both. Why not legalize every option and every possible consensual deals and let women decide?
You are correct. I don’t know what all women want. If I knew, I wouldn’t get married and would have scored with scores and scores of chicks. So let’s forget about that point.
Let’s concentrate that women need to have a right to be prostitutes because, well, it’s her own body after all.
As for whether legalization of prostitution will decrease abortion, I do believe so. Many women commit abortion because they have no rich daddy willing to support their child. At least that’s the main issue in my country.
Rich males are often not available to women because well, you can lose half your wealth in allimony if you marry a woman and things go wrong. So allowing more flexible contract alternatives besides life long legally binding marriage will make rich males more promiscuous (that’s one thing for sure). Will some woman be attracted to that? Well, let the women decide.
One thing for sure is it should be legal. Women’s body-> women’s right.