cellio's post here. In order to attempt to prove to me and all the rest of you that I have spent some thought on this and am not actually a kook, I write the following, which contains opinions um, significantly different than the ones in the previously mentioned entry. So, the Right To Life. Yeah. Spelled out, I interpret this as the inherent (rather than legally bestowed) property of any living thing that it ought to be let live until such time as it naturally expires. The exceptions to this are:
1) Humans may be killed if it is the only apparent method available to stop their active threat of death or severe harm to another human. (This is self defense. Also note the word "active"--Iraq is, to me, a passive threat at the moment, and I am therefore against war.)
2) Non-human animals may be killed to meet the needs of humans, such as food and clothing, as long as this is done with foresight and deliberation.
3) Insects, plants, and fungi may be killed to meet the needs or the conveniences of humans, such as trees for houses or weeds in lawns, as long as this is done with foresight and deliberation.
4) Bacteria, viri, cancers, and other inherently harmful invasive organisms may be killed arbitrarily, likewise with foresight, though little deliberation is probably merited.
This tiered system may not be to the liking of certain envirnmentalists, but it seems mostly reasonable to me, and a variation of it is in common use. As to why I think it exists at all---I'm not sure. Probably this is one of those subconscious religious beliefs based partly on the golden rule (I really don't want someone to kill me, so I feel obligated to denounce it in general) and partly on the generic belief that life and existence is better than the alternative. (I was depressed a month ago, and declaring that nonexistence was good/bad neutral. In my current frame of mind, I believe this to be incorrect--nonexistence is not neutral, it's nothing.)
So, what's a fetus?
A) It's definitely alive--at least it meets the classical requirements. It consumes nutrients, excretes waste, and carries on cellular division. Given enough time (say, 30 years) it will reproduce.
B) It's not part of the mother. Its DNA is different, and is half made up of patterns that cannot be found in the mother. (Note that above, I have classed cancers as separate organisms, merely for those of you who would point out that they also have DNA differences from their hosts. Also, I know that "half" is not quite correct in the case of incest.)
C) Evidence would seem to indicate that its species is human. Changing from a tadpole to a frog doesn't change that organism's species, anyway, and the fetus undergoes much less change than that (a mere location shift, to be exact) before it is undeniably human.
Okay, so it's a living human. 1) above applies, and it may only be killed should it actively threaten another human.
I realize I may have lost some of you at this point. I do know that a lot of it is merely opinions and the evidence that I used to make them.
What is abortion?
I) The mother finds herself in the unenviable position of being the food source for the parasitic fetus, which, similar to a baby or a stomach-surgery patient living off an IV during recovery, is completely dependent on being fed as it cannot forage for itself. Dissimiarly to those, however, it can only be fed by one person, to whom it is attached. Removing this person is morally equivalent to its analogues of tying down the surgery patient and then cutting his IV, or leaving the baby out in the woods--something that is not quite murder, but more than criminal neglect.
II) The other case, that the fetus must be killed before removal, is killing of a human and had better meet the conditions of 1) above in order to avoid being murder.
All this merely declares an abortion in the case of the mother's life not being threatened to be incorrect. But, as parent-offspring relations have almost never been a permissible object of outside intervention, it isn't so useful for why the government should legally intervene.
1:
- Right to work: Age 14, by law. (In NY. Not sure for other states.)
- Right to own a handgun: Age 18, by law
- Right to purchase alcohol: Age 21, by law.
- Right to vote: Age 18, by constitutional law.
- Right to hold a federal elected office: Age 25, by constitutional law.
- Right to life & safety: Age 0, by judicial fiat.
This seems to me to be a problem. At the least, it seems to be proper and consistent that the last of these should also be determined by law and the legislatures, rather than by a less directly representative body such as the supreme court. This is the legal point I feel most strongly on--I don't care as much about whether or not the right is pushed back to Age -3/4 as much as I wish that we were able to usefully argue about it.
2:
Each of the other right-granting laws is theoretically based on an inherent property of the person it is being given to, either physical (you need to not be blind to drive) or mental (At 18 you are theorized to have sufficient wisdom to properly direct your own life). The current position of the life-right granting decision places the condition on an attribute completely external to the fetus/child, that being their location. Analogously, this would be equivalent to declaring that beating one's spouse is illegal only if it happens to occur outside one's home because the right to be free from abuse does not extend inside. I would feel better about this if they declared even something like "a beating heart" to be the condition, though personally, I consider the egg's fertilization to be the most significant event, as it's the DNA-changing one that makes a new organism. Some of you may point out that some laws do have conditions about inside/outside the home, like minors' alcohol consumption and child labor laws. Okay, sure, but the reason I used abuse as the example is because safety laws seem to generally not have such conditionals, for fairly good reasons mentioned below.
3:
Should the right to life and safety be granted to a fetus, the government is justified in intervention at the expense of privacy by long precedent. It's not a matter of the fetus's rights being put over the mother's, only a matter of one right of its being weighed against one right of hers--safety vs privacy. In every other confrontation between these two, safety wins out. This is why search warrants and spouse/child abuse laws are permissible. This is why we all submit to airport, school, and government office building security checks, including some really invasive ones should a person be strongly believed to be concealing drugs or a weapon or something inside their person. Another person's safety wins out over most of the other rights too, including free speech--no shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre and all.
Please note that in the case of safety vs safety, as when the mother's life is threatened by her pregnancy, the rights become equally ranked and some solution respecting both of them must be reached. Trying to legislate this point seems futile--the decision of what to do must be made by the people close to the situation who know its details, primarily the mother and her doctor.
It is for these reasons that I believe laws should be made on this subject. Like I said, it irks me the most that the options of legislatures are limited to what I see as a small range of actions strongly favoring only one of the two persons in the abortion rights-conflict situtation. You may have noticed that I don't deal with the father's rights here--that's because they're unnecessary to this position, and only muck a lot of things up anyway. Hmm. I think that was the first time I used the word "person" to refer to the fetus, but I will have to admit that I consider it correct usage. Perhaps some will think I over-anthropomorphize here, but how can you further anthropomorphize a human?
As for why I think the fetus should be protected--that goes back to the golden rule thing. I was once a fetus, and wish that I not have been aborted. Fortunately I was not, though legal protection might have helped the chances of that. (Yes, my mother is pro-choice, so the possiblity definitely existed. This thought occaisionally causes me disturbance.)
It would be tragic to say that the father, the fetus, or society take precedence over the pregnant woman.
We're suppoedly an egalitarian country, and so no one should have legal precedence over any one else. But, you are over-generalizing, and it sounds as if you say the whims of the fetus dominate the will of the mother and can like make her move to Florida if it's too cold or something. The other point of view is that it is merely one, basic condition that is being guaranteed, that of continued life for the fetus, similarly to how the law does its best to guarantee continued life for the rest of us. The mother happens to be the person most in control of the fetus's welfare, so it seems like the law specifically targets her for subjugation, but it should logically target everyone--kicking a pregnant woman in the abdomen such that the fetus is mortally injured should be considered equivalently to abortion, with the extra charge of battery for its other victim, the mother.
And it would be tragic to revert to the way things were 30+ years ago, with women as second-class citizens and some of them dying from unsafe abortions or from unsafe pregnancies.
So, women still on average make what percent of a man's wages for the same work? Less than 100%, I'm sure, and the glass ceiling supposedly still exists. And why aren't 50% of governors and legislators women? Women may have been, and probably still are to some extent, second class citizens, but abortion seems to have little to do with it. The right of control over one's own body is the same for both men and women--you can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't infringe on someone else's rights. This is de jure equality. Whether it's de facto equality or not is unevaluatable because there are no cases of pregnant men.
Regarding unsafe pregnancies, they are certainly something to be avoided. I would merely prefer to leave abortion as a last-resort sort of thing rather than making it continually available as a first-line option to solve this problem.
Regarding unsafe abortions, perhaps an analogy can be drawn to drug use. People die from unsanitary needles, but while sanitary needle-distribution programs are arguably an act of mercy, the correct solution is not to use the drugs at all.
I know plenty of people who would never personally have an abortion but who maintain that it's their choice alone. The anti-choice people almost never seem to get this point.
That's because it's inconsistent. Either abortion is murder or it is not, and if it is, it should be prohibited. The only way this position works is if the person refusing to have an abortion does so for other reasons, which it is certainly possible to do. To consider abortion as killing a human yet deny that someone doing it is your concern is analogous to saying "My neighbor ritually executed his children on his front lawn yesterday, but I didn't call the police because it's really none of my business."
The vocal anti-choice folks seem to think that women, left to their own devices, will treat having abortions casually ... Abortion isn't birth control; it's a last resort when birth control didn't work (or wasn't permitted) and when pregnancy isn't acceptable.
Er. I consider it likely that there is exists some small set of women, who from their actions seem to be treating abortions as birth control. Certainly I would not support the idea that a majority of women would do so.
I am inclined to treat sex like getting drunk. If you get drunk and unintentionally smash up a china shop, you are required to deal with the consequences correctly. If you have sex and you or your partner unintentionally becomes pregnant, you are required to deal with the consequences correctly. The china shop has you paying to work off your debt. The pregnancy should ideally have the father supporting the mother during her incapacity, so as to have both people responsible, though physiology prevents completely equal distribution of work.
The government has no legitimate interest in this question, any more than they have an interest in which antibiotics I use to treat an infection or whether you use chemo or radiation to treat cancer. It's none of their business why, or whether, a woman chooses to have an abortion.
The government has a quite legitimate interest in your antibiotic if it happens to be opium. It has a quite legitimate interest if your doctor has conned you into accepting an experimental and highly dangerous form of cancer treatment. These privacy issues are not absolute when they infringe on other things, as abortion may or may not be considered to do depending on your political affiliation.
The anti-choice people...have succeeded in introducing the phrase "unborn child" into the lexicon. There is no such thing.
Um, what?
Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III Scene 3
| Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike Your children yet unborn and unbegot, That lift your vassal hands against my head, And threat the glory of my precious crown. |
The word "unborn" referring to children has been around forever. Admittedly it can refer to both a fetus and a child who has not yet been conceived, but it is still technically correct, though not as specific as "fetus".
who call themselves pro-life, but are not really that broadly defined
I will claim "pro-life" in the broad sense. Does it help if I declare that I'm also against the death penalty, euthanasia, and suicide? :)
It's not a person, a citizen, or an entity with rights equal to mine
It is not a citizen. It is not an entity with rights equal to yours, similarly to how a child has fewer legal rights than his parents. What is your definition of person? Is a fetus human?
Because I'm a software engineer, it sometimes helps to be able to think of pathological cases.
Case One:
I buy a fertilised chicken egg, and put it into an incubator. Some short amount of time before the egg is to hatch, I bind it up in saran wrap and rubber bands, and watch it wobble around as the chick inside struggles unsuccessfully to emerge, unable to even break the shell before it finally suffocates. Is this animal cruelty?
I'm sure you can see the analogue on this one without me pointing them out.
Case Two:
Assume some advances in technology for this one. A woman, seven to eight months pregnant, goes into the hospital with complications--the umbilical cord has wrapped around her fetus and would strangle it should she give birth in the normal manner. The doctor performs an operation, removing the baby and cutting the cord. Another doctor just coming in looks at it, and says "I don't think it's done yet." They untangle the cord, reattach it, and put the baby back in. Two weeks later, the mother wishes to have an abortion.
Man, that was long.
Oh, yeah, I went to the March for Life in D.C. on Wednesday. I was merely struck with the desire to explain a lot before mentioning that.
kamisamanogokagogaarimasuyouni