Abortion: This Should Be Fun

[Truthordeal]

what im saying is that the rights of a woman should be more than the rights of an unborn child, who may or may not even make it outside the womb for natural causes. theyre potential life. should we value the potential over the actual? thats the question.

I'm probably on your side of this, but what the hell, I'll play Devil's Advocate and ask why shouldn't we keep both?

[Uboa]

What I find ironic is that this wholly worldly definition of human life is not only embraced by religion, but it is fought for tooth and nail, shouted on street corners, and otherwise... revered.  I'm not trying to bring religion to far into this, but I do find that to be more than a tad contradictory with what most religions otherwise hold, or at least should hold, in high regard given their choices of teachers.

You've touched on the concept of ensoulment. When does this guise of biological matter become endowed with that which is eternal? If we are dualists and say that the body is merely a device and we are the controllers in it, then the mind becomes a tantalizing place to define as the cockpit. If the cockpit is functioning, then the soul might well be there. If we are not dualists, we might well claim that the soul develops alongside the physical form. Or we might say that it occurs at birth, other at some other largely arbitrary date.

If we are not dualists, we might claim that the soul develops alongside the physical form... hmm... Doesn't that still imply a dual existence?  And how much sense does dualism make anyway?  How does it work out that at some point or another a soul is tacked on to the body, or that a soul develops over time to accompany the body?  For what purpose does this soul develop with the body?  And how does it develop?  And... what is it?  

At any rate, this "ensoulment" event seems to me to be merely the acquisition of the soul that will screw you over if you ever do something one of any number of large institutions which shall remain nameless don't appreciate.

For me, I find it not only sad but dangerously misleading to want to call outright "human life" that which is so utterly lacking in the capacity to live as a human.

The problem there is that there is little difference between a child that is a day old and a child that is a month till due. Indeed, there is even less difference between a child born a month premature and a child that is two months till due. If a child is outside of the mother and still alive, as a society we say that it is wrong to kill it. So it would seem that there is a line somewhere that on one side of which there is not a human and on the other side there is. Where that line is is difficult to determine. That is one of the very interesting things about the A Defense of Abortion essay Faust was talking about earlier; it takes it as a premise that a fetus is human and has a right to life but then goes on to argue what that doesn't preclude the possibility of an abortion.

Admittedly I need to read that essay.  I've been putting it off all day because of school, and work.  I also need to think over my position on mid-late term abortions.  What I was addressing in that post were the early term abortions in which the fetus nonetheless had a beating heart and showed some brain activity.  

If I hit an impasse in coding I'll take some time out to read the essay.

[GenesisOne]

Uboa, I like your mentioning of mind/body dualism on this social issue.  As for those questions, let's see if we can't open up some room for answers to them.

As you might know, dualism is a minority view amongst secular scientists. Scientifically speaking, if the soul was a tangible element, then it would be located in the brain.  This leads to the question:

Is the mind purely a function of the brain?

Dualism proposes that human beings are more than just a physical entity, but possess a soul.

Naturalism proposes that humans are purely physical beings and that all manifestations of human beings are a function of an advanced brain—i.e. the mind is the brain.

If the mind is completely a product of the material function of the brain (courtesy of Dr. Steve Novella) then:

- There will be no mental phenomena without brain function.
- As brain function is altered, the mind will be altered.
- If the brain is damaged, then mental function will be damaged.
- Brain development will correlate with mental development.
- We will be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity – no matter how we choose to look at it.

Check out this article for the full gist of it:
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=189

On the other hand, if the mind is partly a product of the material function of the brain, then:

- There will be some mental phenomena without brain function.
- As brain function is altered, the mind will not necessarily be altered.
- If the brain is damaged, then mental function will not necessarily be damaged.
- Brain development will not necessarily correlate with mental development.
- We will not always be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity – no matter how we choose to look at it.

Note the similarities and the differences in the predictions. Dualism and materialism both predict that mental function will often correlate with brain function. Strict materialism takes it a step further; mental function will always correlate with brain function, because mental function is brain function. Dualism predicts that mental function and brain function won’t always correlate, because mental function isn’t the same thing as brain function.

What do you think? Personally, my money's on dualism.

[Thought]

Doesn't that still imply a dual existence?

Not necessarily, though it could. A dualist would say that the element that makes us human (often defined modernly as a mind, though traditionally as a soul, but not necessarily with the religious connotations; even atheists might be dualists) is separate from the material world (and thus in turn body). We ride around in our bodies as our bodies might ride around in a car.

But instead of saying that the two are separate, we might claim that both exists and are closely interconnected. The soul or mind is not separate from the material world and might be understood to be essentially the same. The soul might develop alongside the body, just as a hand develops along with the arm. They are separate things, yet the same.

To give a little history (I will try to be short so as not to bore too much) some individuals actually believed that a person had three souls. First there was the animus soul, that which gives an object the ability to live. Even plants (and bacteria, if they had known of it) had these. Then there was a locomotive soul, which animals had but plants did not. This allows movement. And finally there was a "logical" soul, that which only humans have and gives us our comparatively unique abilities. Because of this, there were some individuals who argued that the fetus only had the animus soul, an infant had the locomotive soul, and the final aspect was added later in life.

But history and even mechanics aside, even though people might not know the terminology, people still believe in some form of "ensoulment;" that is, most people believe that humans are different than animals in that we have unique rights. We afford all adults humans the right to vote, but not all dolphins, or even some, for example. Even if we discard the concept of a soul or the dualistic perception of the mind, we are still left with what we might call "enrightment," to attempt something more palatable to the non-religious among us. When does it become wrong to kill a person, for example? A dualist might say that enrightment occurs at some arbitrary point; but the "monist" would generally say that enrightment occurs as the body is developing and is inseparable from that body.

On a side note, there are a few experiments that are in the very early stages that are trying to test for a “soul” through the use of near death experiences. Many individuals who claim to have such experiences describe looking down at themselves and the medical practitioners around them. These experiments will place images in operating rooms that can only be seen from above; neither the patient on the table nor the surgeons will be able to see it. If anyone has a near death experience in such an environment and can successfully describe the image, that would imply that they indeed had a point of view different from any physical being in the room.

[ZeaLitY]

A simple cut-off is that once a baby's born or outside of the body, its dependency on the female host is terminated and it's afforded full human rights. Until then, the baby is a mass of unawakened cells allowed to grow with the permission and grace of its parents. There is no identity; there are no memories. When I was a religious idiot, even I wondered why God didn't simply sort out the entire soul problem by waiting until birth to inject a soul into a baby. Problem solved.

Anyway, it's much simpler to say "we aren't sure, but it seems to be a synergistic effect of constituent brain parts" about consciousness than postulate the existence of a soul, which we're only really talking about because it was an ancient convenience for explanation of certain phenomena and the establishment of religions. Really, now.

I'll take this moment to plug Wang Chung, my favorite Chinese philosopher who shares the name with my favorite 80s group:

He was equally scathing about the popular belief in ghosts. Why should only human beings have ghosts, he asked, not other animals? We are all living creatures, animated by the same vital principle. Besides, so many people have died that their ghosts would vastly outnumber living people; the world would be swamped by them.

    People say that spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have souls as well as men. (Lunheng)

Wang was just as rational and uncompromising about knowledge. Beliefs require evidence, just as actions require results. Anyone can prattle nonsense, and they'll always be able to find people to believe it, especially if they can dress it up in superstitious flummery. Careful reasoning and experience of the world are needed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Chong

[Thought]

While that might indeed be a simple cut-off -- and perhaps even a proper one -- it is also rather arbitrary. If we are being arbitrary, why say that enrightment occurs at birth and not a month later, or a year later? Etc.
 
J.J. Thomson's stance is quite similar to yours, in end result but not in support, so it would be advisable to seriously consider it. She has the advantage of not necessitating the arbitrary and external bestowment of rights. Under her arguments, rights remain "inalienable." She grants the fetus full human status, but notes that the fetus' right to life does not constitute an obligation on the woman's part to allow her body to be used by it. Even though a fetus has the right to life, an abortion does not constitute an infringement upon that right. To say that rights are magically sprinkled on the child as it leaves the female body is BS.

But to specifically address the reasons you provided as justification for your arbitrary cut-off, that an unborn child lacks an identity does not significantly distinguish it from a born child. As noted previously, there is no mechanism involved in the birthing process that bestows identity. A day old baby is largely identical to itself from two days prior. The primary difference is location, not identity. Thus there is no rational explanation as to why the biological functions of one can be legally terminated and not so with the other.

Regarding memory, it should be noted that infant memory is still a very poorly understood field, as illustrated by the concept of childhood amnesia. Certainly, most two month old infants are incapable of forming autobiographical memories. They can "remember" things, but at this point it would be imprudent to label this as the result of "memories" in the vernacular sense of the word. Self-defining memories are lacking, all that is there is relatively impartial information storage.

Which is all just to say, a child that is a month old is just as devoid of a personality, identity, and memories as a fetus that is a month til due. Those are not valid criteria for justifying any stance on rights at the time of birth.

More relevant is the supposition that rights might be dependent on the fetus' parasitical nature towards the female host. Without nourishment from the mother's body, the fetus could not independently "live." Remove a child from the mother's body through non-abortion processes and that dependency ceases, allowing for rights to become manifest. However, a child is still greatly dependent on the mother's (and in general, parent’s) physical body for survival through the form of food (often breast milk, in developing countries).

If society can maintain that a child outside the womb has a right to life and yet is still dependent on a parental figure, then denying it to a child inside the womb because it is dependent on a parental host is again an issue of location.

Can simple location determine the rights of any individual? Does a woman's body somehow emanate a metaphysical field that suppresses the development of the rights of others? Without a logical and reasonable explanation of this, it must be rejected by any individual looking for a rational solution.

Which leaves us with Thomson’s stance: A Defense of Abortion

[ZeaLitY]

http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/5575775.html

Fuck them. An unborn baby is a fucking template biomass. There are no memories; there is no identity; and there certainly isn't a fucking "soul". I fucking hate it when an "unborn child" is sentimentalized into a person. They aren't; they're just a potential, with non-existent sentience and the privileged chance to come into the world at the discretion of the parents. That is fucking it.

[Thought]

Query: At what point and through what mechanism does this "template biomass" obtain personhood?

[ZeaLitY]

Birth. In certain criminal acts, it may be advantageous for harsher sentencing to make personhood a legal fiction before birth, but this fiction should only be limited to those situations.

[Thought]

And what is the mechanism through which this occurs? Surely this isn't just an arbitrary point that you've selected because it happens to mesh with your pre-established world-view, right? I’m sure you’ll soon lay down an irrefutable logical argument, based in science, as to why birth is when a person, well, becomes a person.

Stand back everyone. Zeality’s next post will be epic, in his customary fashion, no doubt.

[ZeaLitY]

What's this? Crossing into trolling?

[Lord J Esq]

The key distinction, Thought, is that birth is the point at which a baby passes from the care of the mother to the care of the society. Those are two different worlds.

[Thought]

Exactly, Josh. Personhood has nothing to do with it; it is a red herring. There is no difference between Zeality pretending that personhood magically starts at birth than those pro-lifers who say it starts at conception. This is particularly disappointing as this topic has come up before and Faustwolf (in response to some excellent insight by Uboa) provided a link to a very informative article arguing why a discussion of personhood is pointless. Concede the point and two things happen: 1) the pro-choice side gets bonus points for not engaging in wishful thinking, 2) pro-choice is actually stronger because then we are allowed to define the arguments and we can define them as something valid, rather than the fallacy of personhood.

Though Z's intentions might have been good, every time he posts something so ridiculous he is damaging the rights of women everywhere. He is pinning their rights on the state of the child/biomass template. He is divorcing a woman's rights from the woman herself and placing it in that which she caries. The pro-lifers have half the victory right there!

Conceding personhood does not harm the pro-choice movement in the least, while holding such ground as this is harmful.

But, now I do find it odd that the issue of the personhood of the fetus seems to trump the freedom of the mother in the majority of debates.  How morally beholden is a woman to a fetus, and why overlook the mother entirely in the debate?

I wonder if the focus on the fetus comes from the fact that it's mostly men who debate the issue of abortion in public or in legislatures, or shape college curricula, and not women? Again, when you don't have a womb and have no chance of bearing a child yourself, all you can do is abstract and try to figure out baseline principles of justice. This is precisely why abortion laws fashioned by a highly male legislature, influenced by religious and social traditions largely shaped by men, are patently ludicrous. Men should simply not be the deciders of abortion rights, one way or another. It's like the State of Wyoming trying to make law for Timbuktu. Does not compute.

I just found this on Wikipedia, and it makes me ponder:

An argument first presented by Judith Jarvis Thomson states that even if the fetus has a right to life, abortion is morally permissible because a woman has a right to control her own body. The best known variant of this argument draws an analogy between forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy and forcing a person's body to be used as a dialysis machine for another person suffering from kidney failure. It is argued that just as it would be permissible to "unplug" and thereby cause the death of the person who is using one's kidneys, so it is permissible to abort the fetus (who similarly, it is said, has no right to use one's body against one's will).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Bodily_rights

Here is a link to Dr. Thompson’s article itself: http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm

[Lord J Esq]

I am sympathetic to the point you are trying to make, Thought, which is why I myself divide my support for reproductive rights into two categories, but your attempt to completely discredit the validity of one of those categories, the nature of the unborn child, is thoroughly unconvincing. The nature of the unborn child is important. If, in some artistic swoop of the cosmos, humans were possessed of a sentient will and the crux of an identity while still within the womb, it would complicate the ethics of abortion. But that's not how humans are; human babies even after they are born will not develop and exhibit many of the cognitive qualities by which we commonly perceive personhood, for months to come! And the fact that it's this way rather than that way, simplifies the ethics. Does it justify abortion all by itself? Yes, in the complete absence of the pillar of reproductive rights belonging to the mother, I do judge that this alone would justify abortion (at least in humans and all the sapient species I know). But, as it is, the question of the mother's rights also justifies abortion, all by itself and quite easily, thus relieving this concept of the nature of the unborn child from having to bear the full weight of the justification. However, the nature of the unborn child still greatly supports abortion, because it identifies a whole area of potential ethical murk as empty. If there were an alternate species where this point were the other way around, and babies were quoting Shakespeare in the womb, then supporting unrestricted reproductive rights would be that much more troublesome (though far from impossible and perhaps not even significantly more difficult than now, depending on what weight is assigned to the mother's rights). It is therefore significant that identity comes into operation after birth and not before it, and your idea that this whole thing should be ceded is pointless. It certainly doesn't hurt the case for choice, as you claim, unless you are also willing to go to the length of claiming that no individual or group has the right to set the rights of anyone but themselves, in which case you would have uphill battles to fight on practically every issue in politics.

You also should take care not to speak with such pointed concern for the success of "the pro-choice movement" unless you yourself are a member of that movement, because, while I would accept it on your word that for you this issue is little more than an academic curiosity, you've already got ZeaLitY suspicious that you are trolling him, and if a respectable exchange with him is really your goal, then you are undermining yourself with that language. Many other pro-choicers would see it exactly the same way, and I would sympathize with their suspicion. In politics, concern trolling is a huge problem.

Lastly: If Z did not mention the rights of the mother, that does not imply that he doesn't justify reproductive rights on those grounds as well as on these of the status of the child. Z was talking about legal personhood, which is by no means a trivial issue, and which as a binary can only exist or not exist; grays are impossible without serious social consequences the likes of which you know so well. Legal personhood is a control status whose only relation to a human being's physical condition is arbitrary. It makes sense to base the onset of this status upon the transition from "not born" to "born" not because of the baby itself but because of the baby's context, as it is more straightforward to speak of the legal standing of someone whose life does not, absent outside medical intervention, require the immediate and constant physical sustenance of its mother, and whose body and mind cannot receive direct succor from the instruments of society without having passed through the mother first, notwithstanding the occasional Beethoven recording.

[Thought]

As you noted, Josh, many of the characteristics that we'd define as personhood come months after the child is born. Surely you can see the problem this presents? If we can terminate a biomass's (and I do like that word) existence because it is not yet a person, then why not a child that is not yet a person? Do we not do this because it is closer to developing a personhood? If so, then a child born premature should surely be allowed to be terminated, yes?

Of course not. I doubt any prochoice individual would argue such an interpretation. But you and Z are engaging in what is essentially a "god of the gaps" argument (only, you know, not about god). We don't currently know when a person becomes "human" and so you are saying we should claim this is at birth. Give it ten, twenty, maybe even fifty or a hundred years, and we'll have a better idea of when humans become humans. Given the data we have now, this is likely to be well after birth. The peg on which the argument hangs is removed and thus the argument falls. If abortion is acceptable because the biomass becomes human at birth, but it is then discovered that humanity is developed well after birth, and presuming people aren't willing to apply the same logic to infants between birth and humanity, then the justification for allowing abortion is gone. In such a scenario, abortion could no longer rest on saying that the biomass isn't human because such justification wouldn't be good enough anymore.

I object to the argument as well because the very act of making it is detrimental to the health of the prochoice movement. As noted, there is no objective reason for labeling birth as the point at which a biomass becomes human. I have searched for such a reason and found none, but perhaps I merely missed it? I have asked Z for this, twice, and it has yet to be provided. Do you have such an answer?

The problem of this seems so obvious that I am reluctant to state it: claiming that personhood is bestowed at birth, in the absent of a mechanism to explain this, is against logic and reason. Such a statement comes not from a search for truth but from a pre-held position. You cannot reach it from a null position. As such it will convince no one except those who already agree with the position. Unfortunately these are not reliable individuals; they are prochoice by a random roll of the dice. When next the die is rolled, fortune can just as easily set them up against the prochoice movement. It is those few earnest seekers, then, that one aught court, as they will remain despite fortune's fickle favor. While there are many good arguments for being prochoice, if this is what such an individual first sees, it will not leave a desirable impression. To propagate such sentiment, then, works against the staying power of the movement.

Perhaps this is indeed “concern trolling;” as I suspect you know by now, I care greatly about not just correct conclusions but also correct processes. If in this case my sentiments crossed over the line, I am both amused and also sorry. Indeed, I will offer a formal apology to Zeality, assuming that is the case.