You: Abortion must me illegal!
Me: Why?
You: Because its murder, the killing of a person!
Me: It is? What, exactly, is a “person”?
You: That’s your problem!
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
And if I had said, “It’s murder, the killing of a person,” then you would have a point. However, I was not the one who brought up the subject of personhood. You folks did. Instead, I emphasized its humanity, whereas you are the ones who insisted that personhood was the relevant deciding factor.
Get it yet?
Here we go again. Since we have established that you define personhood by pulling figures out of your ass, and making up criteria for personhood out of thin air, then it would be just as reasonable for someone “assign” personhood to only US citizens, or those eligible to vote, or those with blue eyes. As long as you understand that your definition of personhood has no basis in law, proper definition of the word, or social understanding, then I think we can agree to strongly disagree and that your personal opinions really have no more weight to the discussion than the Google ad below.
And I had actually mentioned human DNA, you would have a point. Rather, I argued based on our humanity, which is by no means limited to physical matters such as DNA. Rather, it encompasses non-physical matters as well — such as the capacity (whether latent or existent) for conscious though, moral decision making and so forht. (Note that I emphasize that these capabilities can be latent, since newborns are likewise human.)
You said that we can kill fetuses because they are non-sapient, and that you “assign personhood to a body that is currently conscious and sapient” – the idea being that fetuses are non-persons. You also argued that newborns don’t become sapient until 3 to 6 months. Ergo, your statements would permit the killing of newborns – even though you might not want to state that in bold terms.
That is the inescapable conclusion that proceeds from your words. If sapience is the relevant deciding factor, then both fetuses and newborns are fair game to be killed. If it is not… well then, you have just contradicted your earlier statements.
The issue here is still abortion, the right of a woman to decide if she wants to spend 9 months of her life in hormonal, emotional and physical turmoil or not. When we discuss sapience in this context, we argue that there is nothing present in the womb that is separate from the mother until the point of viability, and that there is nothing that has any of the basic human capacities (=sapience) for suffering that deserves protection in spite of the mother.
If the consequence is that a newborn for a while even after birth does not meet the criteria for ‘personhood’, that does not mean automatically that therefore the newborn are ‘fair game’. Right now, once born, a child is considered a person and deserving of rights. We are not saying that such rights should be repealed. What we are saying is that there is no reason to extend those rights into the uterus.
Excuse me. I’ve been having a good, but busy weekend and haven’t been able to give this thread the response it deserves.
Walloon, you have repeatedly said that, if a woman doesn’t want to become pregnant, all she has to do is not allow a man to ejaculate insider her vagina. The withdrawal method is a method of birth control in which the man withdraws before ejaculating, which is why I brought it up. You also said I was wrong when I said some hormonal methods have lower failure rates than sterilization.
Here’s the FDA’s website with failure rates for various methods of birth control, including the withdrawal method. Female sterilization has a both a typical and lowest expected failure rate of 0.5%. Depo-Provera has a both a typical and lowest expected failure rate of 0.03%; the “Combined Pill”, one including Estrogen and Progestin, has a typical failure rate of 5% and a lowest expected failure rate of 0.1%; the progestin only birth control Pill has a typical failure rate of 5% and a lowest expected failure rate of 0.5%. The reason for the difference between “typical failure rate” and “lowest expected failure rate” is "typical failure rate allows for things such as forgetting to take a pill, etc. The typical failure rate for the withdrawal method is 19%, which is, I admit, better than the rythm method, aka “Natural Family Planning”, and the lowest expected failure rate is 4%. I will grant that this isn’t bad – it puts it in the same league as most barrier methods. I would think, however, that achieving that 4% failure rate requires a man with quite a bit of self control. Now, I realize that there is no one website which will satisfy everyone when it comes to this all too rancorous subject, but I figure the FDA is good enough for me and doesn’t have any obvious bias.
The thing is, when you say that all a woman has to do to avoid an unwanted pregnancy is not have a man ejaculate inside her, you’re spreading exactly the kind of myth which results in unwanted pregnancies which is something I think we’re both out to avoid. Seminal fluid contains sperm and men produce it before ejaculation. That’s simple, observable fact.
As for your doubts about whether illegal abortions were performed, let me tell you about a woman I met a few months ago and who’s fast turning into a friend. Her mother aborted her when she was 8 months pregnant. That’s not a typo. This woman was extracted from her mother’s body and placed in a morgue. She still has the toe tag and the forceps marks on her head. After she’d been in the morgue for several hours, a morgue techinician noticed she was breathing. If you think about it, it’s not so surprising – babies do make the transition to breathing air at birth. Abortion was illegal at the time, and the doctor had done all he could to discourage her mother from having an abortion, but her mother insisted. Unfortunately, when the morgue tech realized she was alive, he returned her to her mother. Needless to say, she did not have happy childhood. The range of people I know in real life isn’t all that broad; I know more eccentric types than most people, including this woman, but that’s to be expected, since I’m an eccentric type myself. Still, I do know one person who survived an illegal abortion.
I won’t try to use an anecdote as a cite; among other things, the sample sizes are too small. I have read what the abortion rates are in countries such as Mexico and Ireland, where abortion is illegal. My on-line cite for these statistics has expired, and I’m afraid I don’t remember what the figures are. I could look for one of the articles which had the statistics, but it would be from Ms. Magazine, which I know some people on the pro-life side do not regard as a reliable cite. Look, if I thought making abortion illegal would mean no child would be aborted, I’d be all in favor of it. This however, is where I run into the old, classic impasse. If people on the pro-life side believe that even one abortion is one too many, I believe that the death or maiming of even one woman from an illegal abortion is one too many.
By the way, I left male sterilization out earlier because it’s one form of birth control a woman has very little control over. If anyone’s wondering, it has a typical failure rate of 0.15% and an lowest expected failure rate of 0.1%, making it the most reliable form of birth control. It’s also a lower risk surgical procedure than female sterilization, since it doesn’t involve cutting into the abdomen.
Respectfully,
CJ
Nope. We have only established that I guessed at the ages when sapience begins, because I am not a doctor. In fact, I “established” this myself in the very post where I gave those ages. Feel free to provide a scientific basis for establishing the onset of sapience.
Nope, I believe my criteria are pretty standard.
In that case, we hardly disagree at all. My definition is quite similar, except I don’t care about “latent” capacities that have yet to show themselves, or, frankly, DNA.
You are mistaken. I’ve never stated that we can kill everything that isn’t sapient. I have only stated that a person’s rights take precedence over a non-person’s. The woman’s right to control the contents of her body take precedence over any right the fetus may have to stay alive, when they conflict.
No, I’ve only contradicted your strawman. I’ve never said sapience is the only relevant deciding factor; that’s an argument you made up.
Not so. The California fetal-homicide laws in the Peterson case applied because the fetus in question was at a late stage of development (eight months, in fact). It would have been just as illegal for Laci Peterson to abort her fetus at that stage (except to preserve her own life or health) as it was for Scott Peterson to kill it by murdering his wife.
Some states’ fetal-homicide laws do allow for murder charges at any stage of fetal development. But this in itself doesn’t mean that the fetus at any stage of development has the full rights of a person, nor that its right to life always outweighs the woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
You’re right that the question of what personhood is, and to what extent fetuses are persons, and whether and when fetuses should be considered to have full rights of individual personhood, is very controversial, and that different laws have somewhat different implied answers to it. But that just reinforces my point that we don’t have any obvious scientific “bright line” for settling these issues consistently, because personhood is not a biological concept.
(Anybody who claims that full legal personhood is obviously a biological concept, and that it coincides with conception, needs to figure out how they would legally implement that viewpoint in a consistent way. Do conceptions need to be reported to the governmental authorities in the same way as births do? If not, why not, since fetuses are allegedly full legal persons? Do miscarriages need to be reported as accidental deaths? If not, why not, since fetuses are allegedly full legal persons? And so on.)
Except that “health” is defined so broadly as to encompass even mere emotional distress – and any unwanted pregnancy is bound to cause emotional trouble. In effect then, you have abortion on demand even up to the final moment of pregnancy.
Which, once again, is your problem, not mine. You folks are the ones who claim that personhood is the relevant criterion, and that it is different from humanity. Just as the burden of proof would rest on any slaveowner who claims that blacks are less than persons, the burden of proof rests on pro-choicers who claim that the unborn is anything less than a person.
Nope. As I said above, if you’re okay with laws that don’t require conceptions to be reported to the government as soon as they occur, and don’t require miscarriages to be reported as accidental deaths, and don’t assign fetuses separate legal identities and Social Security numbers and so forth, then you are accepting that fetuses don’t need to be regarded as full legal persons.
And you have to explain how that can be logically reconciled with your idea that full personhood is an obvious biological fact that coincides with conception.
Oh please. Your own example disproves your notion.
Is a 40 week in utero fetus a “person” for purposes of this discussion?
Is the same organism now outside of the body because of birth a “person” for purposes of this discussion?
I think most folks would agree that in both above cases, both organisms would be considered “persons” by most pro choice folks for purposes of this kind of discussion. (There are a few folks that have no trouble with infanticide…but they are a minority in the pro choice camp)
Amazingly enough though…the first organism does NOT have a separate legal identity or Social Security number…so I guess it’s not a “person”, even though it is EXACTLY the same kind of organism (developmentally) as one that has exited a birth canal?
No, because there are practical reasons for not reporting those events – such as the fact that mothers don’t typically know when they have conceived. Similarly, the assigment of SS numbers can wait until after birth, to avoid unnecessary paperwork in the event of fetal death. Because these are practical considerations, and because there is typically no wrongdoing in such circumstances, they do not invalidate the cases wherein the unborn IS treated as a fully human person.
JThunder your argument is weakened IMO, with this constant reference to slavery and burden of proof. All it means is that those who are in charge get to make the rules and it sucks when you’re the one out of power.
However you have it reversed, the burden of proof was on those who believed that blacks were as equal as whites, not the status quo. It had to be proven that everything we believed about race was wrong. Slavery was legal and the burden to prove it was wrong, was on those who wanted to change it.
The status quo is now that fertilized eggs are not granted protections under the law, it is up to YOU to prove differently. Make no mistake this where we’re headed; if I terminate my pregnancy with 6-20 days, I’m not doing more than washing away a few cells…unique though they may be. The burden is on you, to convince me that I’m doing more than that.
But this is an extremely arbitrary and idiosyncratic way of defining “personhood”. You’re claiming, in effect, that a fetus at any stage of development is a person, because you say so, and that the only important feature of its “personhood” before birth is that it shouldn’t be legally killed.
Lack of separate legal identity? Merely a “practical” matter, unnecessary for legal personhood. Lack of official recognition of its existence? Merely a “practical” matter, unnecessary for legal personhood. Unexplained death not recognized and not investigated? Merely a “practical” matter, unnecessary for legal personhood. But it’s still a person—just because you say so.
This line of argument is unconvincing. If you’re willing to accept that the nebulous status of an early-stage fetus invalidates so many of what we consider normal and necessary requirements for a full legal person, then claiming that it can’t invalidate the fetus’s right to life is merely arbitrary.
There’s not that much difference between stating “A fetus lacks most of the characteristics of full personhood, except you can’t ever deliberately kill it” and stating “A fetus lacks most of the characteristics of full personhood, except you can’t deliberately kill it after it’s viable.” Both of them are depending on fluid, socially-determined notions of fetal “personhood” that don’t have much in common with how we define and recognize the “personhood” of born persons.
No, I have made no claims about personhood – apart from pointing out that the hitherto proposed definitions would exclude newborns, that is. In fact, I have repeatedly pointed out that you folks are the ones who insist on making it a relevant distinction.
If you’re going to claim that personhood is the relevant criterion, then you folks need to provide a previously accepted and established definition of personhood (as opposed to one which was concocted after the fact, to justify abortion). Furthermore, this must be a definition with both excludes the fetus and includes the newborn – unless, of course, one wants to justify infanticide too, as Peter Singer was forced to do.
If you make the claim, then the burden of proof is yours. You say that the unborn is not a person, but the newborn is? Then prove it.
One might not like the slavery example, but that’s simply beside the point. The example of slavery shows that somebody may declare a class of humans to be non-persons, but that doesn’t make their claim valid. The concept of personhood must proceed from previously established criteria. Just as the definition of personhood should not be selected to as to justify slavery, a definition should not be concocted with the specific intent of justifying abortion either.
You didn’t address my point I made above. The gubmint ALREADY adopts this kind of attitude about organisms that most pro choice folks would consider “persons” (I put that term in quotes…because it’s not a line of demarcation that has much value for me in this kind of debate, but it does for many pro choice folks).
A 40 week old in utero fetus would be considered a “person”, right?
Yet it doesn’t give them a separate identity or any “official” recognition.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make that claim.
You’re not serious.
Unless you’re trying to tell me that personhood is ENTIRELY dependent on location, most pro choice folks have assigned sentience (or viability or some other criterium) to be the line of demarcation for “personhood”, a line that exists before the organism exits the birth canal.
Hell THAT’s why many (most?) are willing to accept “some” restrictions for late term abortions. You’ve never seen a pro choice person make that kind of statement?
Huh.
Couldn’t agree more, Kimstu. What also strikes me is the eagerness to assign a zygote or fetus the status of a person as defined in law, rather than full-citizenship. There are no separate arguments, and certainly not in JThunder’s discussion, unless you’re willing to argue that a zygote has the same status as me when I would be walking around in the U.S. as a tourist, for some odd reason, that totally clashes with the fundamentalistic approach of anti-choicers.
Is that perhaps because citizenship is awarded at birth, very specifically, in federal law Amendment XIV Section 1? (unless you have some odd pre-birth naturalization ritual hidden somewhere, that is).
Amendment XIV
Section 1.** All persons born ** or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.