The Unborn vs. The Bald Eagle, Round 1

Great Debates
21

  1. The fetus vs. bald eagle death match is cracking me up.

  2. There’s a joke I rarely tell, because it’s too obscure, but it goes something like this:
    Q. How did the prolifers serve the chicken at their dinner fundraiser?
    A. Sunny side up.
    The point isn’t that egg-eating is MORALLY equivalent to an abortion; rather, the point is that prolifers often seem unable to distinguish between potentiality and actuality. A fetus is no more a person than an egg is a chicken.

  3. If you want a political Supreme Court ruling, look to late 2000. Roe v. Wade was exactly the sort of issue that the Supreme Court ought to be deciding.

Daniel

22

BlackKnight wrote:

True … the bald eagle wouldn’t have very much maneuvering room inside a woman’s womb.

And, even worse, if the bald eagle were inside a womb:

Maybe we have to move the fight to some neutral territory – say, one of those life-support incubators for premature births. (No, wait … if we did that, then the kid wouldn’t be “unborn” anymore! Hmmm, setting up this fight is going to be more difficult than I thought.)

23

All right, why not move the fetus into the bald eagle’s egg? We got two options:

  1. The bald eagle is also a fetus
  2. The bald eagle is the mom.

Fair enough?
Daniel

24

I don’t see a big difference between the death penalty and abortion (they both end life just for different reasons). While I don’t think aborting to avoid pain and discomfort (which I don’t think is the reason most people have abortions but I could be wrong) is right. I do believe its ok in such situations where say the girl is in her teens, and is raped. If the child is born and she’s in poor economic status chances are both lives will go down the drain. Or if she’s again raped, and if she has the baby it will kill her.

25

Oh please. “Personhood” is a philosophical, not a biological concept. (There have been plenty of threads here about what constitutes “personhood”.) The difference between an egg and a chicken is a biological difference. Even many “pro choice” folks would apparently fail your test, especially if they oppose abortion at “some” point in a pregnancy.
Is the “egg” right before it hatches, a chicken?

(Of course you have still ignored the fact that we typically eat unfertilized eggs…so your analogy seems even more specious)

26

Correct. Not to mention that this specious argument assumes that the potentiality and actuality of a chicken is somehow comparable to that of a human being. As I said, if one is to criticize pro-lifers for eating eggs based on that rationale, then what of pro-choicers who eat chicken?

27

Well by that logic, there’s not much difference between first-degree murder and killing in self-defense. After all, both acts end life, just for different reasons.

As any ethicist can tell you, the reason behind an act can make a world of difference. That’s why professional boxers aren’t prosecuted the way wife-beaters would be.

28

My right to swing my arm ends at your nose, unless you are a woman, in which case it continues up through your vagina, and into your uterus.

Tris

29

You’re correct, but you forgot to mention that chickens are avian, whereas humans are mammalian. Another flaw in my analogy?

Thing is, I’m pointing out that some folks confuse a potential state with an actual state. You can plug in different states there (chickenhood, personhood, etc.), and the statement still makes sense. That’s how analogies work. The fact that one potentiality involves a philosophical state, and the other involves a biological state, is not germane.

As for the fact that we usually don’t eat fertilized eggs, c’mon. So change the punchline:
A. Sunny side up (but see, they’re fertilized eggs! Get it? Get it?)

Daniel

30

No, Tris, your right to swing your arm is still terminated where any portion of my body exists.

And, I believe if you strike me in such a way as to cause a miscarriage I can charge you with…well, assault, at the very least. Presumably I’d get emotional damages also, but I dunno, the law being an area I generally avoid.

However, if I invite you to continue up through my vagina & so forth, then there’s a difference. Particularly where a pregnancy is involved, or the termination thereof.

SisterC

[/endpost]

[sub]
Two things.

  1. I don’t know how you get “up” into the vagina through the nose, unless I’m sitting on my own head.
  2. I’ve never tried fisting, and don’t know if the cervix will open for a hand.
    [/sub]
31

Oh.

Thanks for the correction.

Tris

32

Sure it’s germane. You’re assuming that there is a state of personhood that occurs in fetal development. You have not backed that assumption up with any kind of evidence. You have not proven potentiality of personhood (or that it is a seperate “thing” from being human), and yet you accuse pro lifers of not understanding that there is such a thing as potentiality of personhood. I can demonstrate “potentiality” of a myriad of biological processes (puberty, for example).

33

Memo to Sister Coyote: I suspect Tris was attempting to engage in irony. You know that strange sound like wind you heard a few minutes ago? …

34

Okay, beagle, if you thought my joke was intended as a carefully-formulated argument, then you’re right: it’s lacking.

It was intended to illustrate a point with humor, though. It doesn’t prove anything. Sorry I misunderstood the nature of your objection.

To reiterate: joke != comprehensive argument.

Daniel

35

Heh. It seems like this

is more of a point that you were trying to make about the intelligence of pro lifers. You were using the joke, I guess, to buttress your argument. My response is to your assumption about pro lifers “not getting it” when it comes to the notion of potentiality. Or was your description of pro life intelliegence a “joke” as well?

36

Poly -

Although I confess to being partially whooshed, as I realized upon seeing Tris’s reply, I also wanted to head off at the pass someone taking him seriously and dragging the discussion off in that direction.

Really. :wink:

37

First of all, calling a pregnant woman a mother without an explative behind it is assuming she has the responsibility wich Roe vs Wade cites she does not. But I won’t quible over semantics.

Second, what “CONSTITUTIONAL right to privacy” are you talking about? The 4th Amendment and 14th Amendment (wich many people point to) Says nothing about the right to privacy. As Justice Rehnquist presents in his opinion, “Nor is the ‘privacy’ that the Court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from searches and seizures protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which the Court has referred to as embodying a right to privacy.” The privileges wich the 14th Amendment points to seem to be granted by the SCOTUS, wich as the judicial branch has no legal right to make laws(or privileges), but only enterpret them as I am sure you well know.

Ok then lets assume that they interpret those as a right to privacy, they then go so far as to dictate that the right to privacy begets the right to an abortion based upon principles that a fetus does not have any rights. And at the same time the Court says it ‘need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins’. So therefore it takes away the 14th Amendment rights of the unborn. Yet they make laws when the potential is evident with things like Affirmative Action.

This is also in reply to tracer

The Constitution does not give the judicial branch the right to make laws, but leaves that duty to the legislature. So why did they create three trimesters of pregnancy and then dictate that each state can set laws against abortion, when by their interpretation abortion is a right to privacy protected by the Constitution. That is blatant abortion legislation. Wich I remind you again is illegal.

And maybe the anti-slavery people should have minded their own business and left matters to people that knew better. And maybe the liberal left wing of “whatever” should know their place and read the laws and shut up about gun control.

As far as your last two examples that also is proof of political interpretation but I will not hijack this thread with a debate on the seperation of church and state issue. All I will say is that NOWHERE in the constitution does even the hint of SOCS exhist. As a matter of fact the banning of any religious expression is expressly prohibited by the Constitution.

No you have not confused me, but set me straight on your biase towards the “conservative christian wing of whatever”. If my head is in the pooper it would seem the “pooper” has much better reading material than wherever your head is.

And one last thing. If potential is not a reason then why is it illegal to mess with the eggs of your sacred birds?

38

Hmm – beagledave, I’m not sure I wanna get dragged into this, but I guess I have only myself to blame if I do. Fair warning, though – I may back out suddenly. I’ve spent far too many hours of my life arguing abortion online, and the discussions usually end badly.

That said, drive-by mocking isn’t fair. So I’ll give a little bit of elaboration on my position:

-Often when I’m arguing with prolifers, it comes down to their agreeing that while a blastocyte doesn’t qualify as a person by relevant secular and philosophical measurements, a blastocyte will, if not stopped, become a person. And that killing it is killing a potential person, which is unethical.

I’m pretty sure that’s a fair representation of the position of many prolifers.

Whereas I believe that potential beings and actual beings have entirely different rights. Potential beings aren’t completely rightsless, the way I see it: if a potential being is really likely to become a real being, then actions which would harm it as a real being are, all things being equal, unethical. If it’s not going to be a real being, however, then it doesn’t have rights.

Thus, a pregnant woman who takes thalidomide all during her pregnancy would, IMO, be more ethical to abort the fetus than to carry it to term. If she aborts it, there’s no actual being (read “person” in this case) whose rights are violated. If she carries it to term, however, then there’s a baby who’s likely to start off with serious health problems; the mother caused those health problems by using thalidomide.

(FWIW, I started the example with a cracksmoking mother, but dropped it for obvious reasons. The thalidomide example is taken from the human rights protocol of a thalidomide study that I shuffled paperwork for one summer).

Now, I’m guessing that this concept of potentiality vs. actuality has been discussed to death here, and that the question of when a fetus attains personhood has also been discussed ad infinitum here. And I’ve discussed both issues until my nose bled. Is my position anything you haven’t heard before? If so, I can elaborate; but I’m guessing I’m nothing new to you in this matter. I just wanted to explain my background for the joke.

Daniel

39

The ultimate irony of irony is the inevitablility that it will approximate another persons sincerity.

Ah, well, out of such differences, a world is made.

Tris

40

I’ll field this one.

The ESA does not work with individual rights: we don’t presume that an endangered Eastern Wood Duck* has more intrinsic worth than a Rhode Island Red.

Rather, the ESA protects ecosystems, on the belief that humanity is better served by solid ecosystems.

Protecting the eggs of an endangered species helps to preserve an ecosystem. It has nothing to do with protecting the individual rights of the bird that the egg might hatch into.

That, assuredly, is a canard.

heh heh heh

Daniel

*I just made up the Endangered Eastern Wood duck, because I wanted to work in the final pun. If it bothers you, use a real endangered bird here.