Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Becky Garcia on December 30, 2008 at 3:29pm

I'm pro-choice. To clarify, pro-choice people believe that abortion should remain legal and pro-life people would like for it to be illegalized or heavily restricted. People who believe it is morally/ethically wrong or would not choose it themselves but who would not illegalize it are called "pro-life personal, pro-choice political."

I don't think that the rights of a fetus should ever outweigh the rights of a woman. A fetus in the early stages of pregnancy has no ability to think or feel. If it is killed it goes from feeling nothing to feeling nothing. It will not suffer. The vast majority of abortions are performed during this stage:

[Source]
Even if a fetus could feel physically, it's no different from any other animal. What sets us apart from other animals is our sentience. And even if a fetus had that, it would not justify taking away the right of the woman to bodily domain. No person has the right to use another person's body without their consent, even if their life depends on it. Otherwise organ and blood donation would be mandatory.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon recently made an excellent post about the apparent conversion of a well-known anti-abortion atheist blogger to Christianity:
Theocratic or pro-choice: Not much middle ground between them

She makes some excellent points, such as:
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"The definition of when a person is a person is when they have a unique consciousness, not unique DNA. It’s historically true, but it’s also the most rational approach, because people experience personhood as a form of consciousness. But it also means that a fetus doesn’t really become a person until it has a consciousness, so really the earliest point that the state should even care to protect it should be about 29 weeks. Even then, the pregnant woman deserves more protection, so health exceptions should apply to abortion restrictions. "

"'Abortion rights promote female promiscuity.' This is what people mean when they say they don’t like it to be used as birth control. It’s assumed that a woman who chooses abortion for the simple reason she doesn’t want to have a baby is somehow getting away with something, and that something is having sex. "
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I've been seeing a lot of what the second quote describes in this thread.

Anyway, Marcotte's main point is that there is no logical, secular reason to illegalize abortion. I'm with her, as I've yet to see one.

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Permalink Reply by Chiropteran on December 30, 2008 at 4:57pm

Becky-

I totally agree with you and your 'complications of pregnancy' post, in particular, is jaw-dropping...well done. Just one thing I would like to highlight. From my point of view, the terms pro-choice and anti-choice are really more accurate in the abortion discussion.

"Pro-life" people like to use that term to claim a moral high-ground through linguistics. Through innuendo and misrepresentation they cast the pro-choice people as its opposite, "anti-life" and this is a game I refuse to play.

They (pro-lifers) enjoy believing that "life" is as they define it and this mentality is on stage for all to see in legislation they try to pass. If any bill is written in such a way as to attribute "life" to a clump of cells they then can back-door legislation to make abortion illegal by granting rights to a fetus. And this is their major goal.

This is the very reason Obama voted against the late term abortion bill...not because he is "pro" late term abortions (as they tried to spin it) but rather, because he was "anti" giving fetuses civil rights (as would have been the case with the wording of this bill) that would then be used to over-turn Roe.

"Pro-life" is pure propaganda.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on December 30, 2008 at 6:57pm

Another way to describe a person who believes in the right of a woman to decide whether or not she has an abortion is to refer to her as a person who is "pro quality of life".

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Permalink Reply by Becky Garcia on December 31, 2008 at 2:05pm

While I agree with you entirely... I think it's better in debat to call people what they'd like to be called. Pro-choice and pro-life are the accepted terms, even though they may not be entirely accurate.

I've heard "pro-birth" and tha seems to fit as well as anti-choice. So does "pro-forced-birth" and "pro-fetus"... among other things...

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on December 31, 2008 at 2:59pm

The problem with that approach is that it buys into a value-laden framework which pre-judges the issues.

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Permalink Reply by BB on December 30, 2008 at 6:00pm

I have heard some great arguments for being pro-life from the atheist perspective. I am generally conflicted on the issue, but fall on the side of choice.

Some of the arguments I have heard take into account the fragility and value of human life. If we place value on our own lives, why would we not do the same for the life of a fetus? Is it not a human being(loaded question)? "... because life is all there is and all that matters, and
abortion destroys the life of an innocent human being."

Another argument I have seen deals with the methods of abortion. They are considered cruel, inhumane and painful to the fetus. If you are going to kill the fetus, do it in a humane fashion or don't do it at all.

I would recommend going to www.godlessprolifers.org for a non-theistic explanation. I am filtering some of the arguments I have heard, and in doing so, may not convey the full breadth of the arguments. A letter on that site mentions, "A woman should have the right to do with her own body what she wishes, but when she does what she wants to do, and as a result becomes pregnant, she has done what she wanted to do with her own body. However when she goes for an abortion, she is doing something to someone else's body."

The question comes down to the value you place on human life, and when you feel human life actually begins. It's a problem that is not easily resolved. I hope I give you something to consider though!

~BB

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on December 30, 2008 at 7:12pm

The anti-abortionists start with the faulty premise that all life with human genetic code both is and should be considered to be equivalent.

In medical triage situations it is acknowledged that all life with a human genetic code in it somewhere is NOT equal. There are a range of factors which are taken into account. Level of potential and actual sentience and consciousness is only one of them. There is absolutely no doubt that it is a horrid gut-wrenching task to decide where an entity fits on the hierarchy for the purposes of determining who is to live and who is to die.

The point is that this type of decision is made quite routinely by medical personnel dealing with accident victims and pregnancy complications. These people are in the business of saving lives, not of devaluing and torturing fully sentient creatures because they are deemed to be sub-human, worthless, "animals" or "enemies of the USA".

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on December 30, 2008 at 7:21pm

An easy way to avoid methods of fetal evacuation which are "painful to the fetus" is to encourage abortions to be done as early in the process as possible - well before the fetus is capable of feeling any significant level of pain. Those who try to make it difficult to have abortions are causing what they are complaining of here.

In considering the problem of fetal pain it is important to recall that none of us has any memory whatsoever of any pain we experienced before the age of (fill in the date of your first memory). Nor is there any indication that the body "remembers" the pain in some way prior to birth, or even during birth itself. How much pain does a baby feel as it is forced out of the vagina? How much distress does it feel before it takes its first breath - and cries. Does it cry in pain?

A better way to avoid the problem all together is to provide compulsary sex education in schools and easy access to effective methods of artificial birth control. Anti-abortiionists usually shoot themselves in the foot on this one, too.

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Permalink Reply by George Kane on December 30, 2008 at 8:02pm

BB wrote on December 30 I have heard some great arguments for being pro-life from the atheist perspective. I am generally conflicted on the issue, but fall on the side of choice.

Some of the arguments I have heard take into account the fragility and value of human life. If we place value on our own lives, why would we not do the same for the life of a fetus? Is it not a human being(loaded question)?"... because life is all there is and all that matters, and abortion destroys the life of an innocent human being."

Calling a fetus a human life is linguistic slight-of-hand. A fetus is not a human, but rather a potential human only. It is a familiar argument that we should value human life according to a principle of reciprocity. If I deny the value of another person’s life by killing him, then I am affirming that under certain circumstances, it would be acceptable for another person to kill me. But we cannot extend this rationalist justification for human life to fetal life, because there can be no reciprocity. The fetus is not a moral agent.

There was a participant on these boards a few months ago who claimed that the argument could indeed be extended to a fetus. I didn’t understand until a others pointed it out some while later that he was saying that if I abort a fetus, then it would have been morally acceptable for someone else to abort me, thinking that I would find this to be unacceptable. But it no more troubles me that I might have been aborted than it does that I might have been conceived by a different sperm, or a different month’s egg. Indeed, a child is very often much better off because the woman has an abortion when she is too young to afford or care for it, and gives birth instead years later when she has completed her education and can provide material, social and emotional security.

We have heard recently, on the large number of Atheist Nexus fora on this topic, that people don’t consider a fertilized cell to have any rights. Others have stated an equally obvious moral intuition that a conceptus has a right to life when it reaches a certain stage of physical development. So they say that there should be no abortions after brain activity begins, or responsiveness to pain, or viability. But I have pointed out on several of these discussions that this mistakes a condition of medical fact for an act of valuation. Personhood, which creates an entitlement to human rights, is not established by a physical exam. It is that time when society decides to designate it a person, and invests it with human rights. At some “magic moment,” the fetus acquires human rights. But since conditions of fact do not translate into values, the value attributed to the fetus is not an objective or universal fact. Instead it is each person’s individual, subjective moral taste.

The only objective basis for fetal value is to show that at some point, it benefits society to recognize it as person. Failing such a demonstration, no person’s rights should be constrained by the subjective moral tastes of others.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on December 30, 2008 at 11:55pm

NIce explanation.

You know, I have never had any difficulty telling the difference between a recently fertilized chicken egg (my aunt used to separate them out from those which sent to the Australian Egg Board) and a chicken. (One scrambles well while the other roasts better.)

I don't have any difficulty telling the difference between a recently fertilized human egg (saw lots of them in the Med Museum during my neuro-psych training years) and a recently born baby. Very different.

Nor did I have any difficulty telling the difference between the 11 week fetus I saw throbbing on the first ultra-sound of what was to become my son, and the baby who was delivered many weeks later. Mind you, there isn't much similarity between that funny looking premie and the taller-than-me young man he is now. Both were/are sentient and I wouldn't want to kill either of them.

OTOH if I had discovered that my potential child had a genetic defect which would prevent him living a normal life then I would have had little difficulty electing to terminate the growth of the fetus in order to prevent that outcome. The knowledge does not scare my son any more than the thought that he would not be in existence if another of his dad's sperm had reached the egg instead.

But if my freshly born son had died, as he nearly did, I would never have got over it. Even if he had been grossly malformed I would have had enormous difficulty deciding to let him die. The difference was that he was clearly sentient by then.

On a related note, I recall the time I elected to have my beloved cat put down. Although I believe it was the right and moral decision this did not stop me from spending the rest of the day in tears or from spending the rest of my life mourning my cat (as she used to be before her acquired brain damage). I am just grateful that I was not accosted outside the clinic by a group of right-to-animal-lifers who would have worsened the trauma for me by telling me that my decision to end my cat's distress was "murder". I can empathize with women who meet a similar fate outside an abortion clinic.

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Permalink Reply by Tedster on December 31, 2008 at 9:53pm

And the last paragraph is a good point. Because I am sympathetic to animals, but if an animal was in great pain or mystery, should we force it to live. This is something I wish we had more flexible options for humans.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on December 31, 2008 at 10:32pm

I believe it is sad that animals, presumably because they are not believed to have "souls", are often treated more humanely at this point of their existence than humans.

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