There's an entry over at Feministing about whether the shift in the Democratic position on abortion is a good thing, by bringing more people into the party, or a bad thing, by turning the party into "Republican-lite", leaving the US without a liberal party. The answer to that is somewhat complicated by the nature of the American two-party system, but that's not really why I'm writing. In the comments of the Feministing entry, I saw:
it dawned on me that the pro-choice position is weirdly arbitrary (esp. in how in defines a "person") and downright creepy. And I've always thought of myself as quite liberal!
How a "person" is defined by anyone is weirdly arbitrary, and is very much at the heart of this matter. A clump of cells pre-implantation? A clump of cells post-implantation, but with no nerve growth? With nerve growth but no brain growth? With incomplete brain growth? With incomplete brain growth, but sufficient physical growth to survive in a lab setting without a mother's living body for support? With sufficient physical growth to survive without extensive, specialized equipment, but demonstrating only instinctive behaviour? Developed sufficiently to demonstrate curiosity and learning, but unable to pass a Turing test?
It doesn't matter at which of these points you choose to draw the line (and they all represent real, expressed opinions by various people as to where the line should stand); the choice will be arbitrary because there's absolutely no scientific basis for declaring someone a person before the reactions are present that allow us to recognize something as intelligent life. A baby, physically grown enough to live without an umbilical (technological or organic) makes a convenient marker, since it's something we've had hundreds of generations to get used to, and can (more or less) easily place into someone else's care should a mother wish to withhold it, but note that under the range of options I've presented, even natural, healthy birth doesn't even necessarily make you a person until you've developed enough to do something more than instinctively feed and cry (and in the most extreme of views, not even then).
If there's no scientific basis for such a decision, then a requirement that everyone agree on the standard that most severely risks the health and future of the prospective mother (that everyone will agree is a person) smacks of state-sponsored religion. It's a decision based solely on an unsupported faith on the nature of "person-ness", whether or not Judeo-Christian history is brought into it. In my mind, in a conflict of interest between something that might be a person, but for which the question is controversial, and someone that is definitely a person, the definite person wins every time. As I can understand that sort of reasoning might be unsatisfying, however, I also have a more thorough thought experiment, though I cannot claim credit for originality (a link I have commented briefly upon before):
Let us assume for the moment the existence of a technological uterine replicator (and for more speculation about the sociological repercussions of the invention of such a device, I recommend the fascinating fiction of Lois McMaster Bujold), capable of artificially inseminating an egg from individual egg and sperm cells alone, and growing them to fruition. Let us further speculate on a building housing a number of these devices, say 20 to make it a nice number for calculation later, bundled together on their rolling carts. If a disaster should break out at such a facility, leaving a 25 year old woman and her seven year old child trapped under some rubble in one room, with the 20 uterine replicators in another area, and a fire raging towards the fuel cannisters that provide power to the backup generators, which do you go to save? Will you save the two certain people, or will you save ten times as many potential people? Let's complicate it by adding in that you can hear the mother and child screaming in fear, while the uterine replicators merely beep warnings alarmingly. Will your answer change based on the stage of development of the contents of those replicators?
Let's complicate it again by asking the truly analogous question: at which point are you willing to put someone in jail for deciding to save the mother and her child, instead of the twenty replicators? When the contents are a pair of cells fertilized only minutes prior? A clump of cells starting to divide, but with no nerve growth? With nerve growth but no brain growth? With incomplete brain growth? With incomplete brain growth, but sufficient physical growth to survive in a lab setting without a mother's living body for support? With sufficient physical growth to survive without extensive, specialized equipment, but not yet completely ready for removal? What if an explosion is not imminent, so the mother and child are not facing certain death, but only possible death, and possible injury? Can you jail someone for preventing the mother and child from a risk, or preventing them from "merely" being burned or inhaling some smoke, at the cost of cooking twenty embryos?
Until the world can agree on the answer to that question, all the rhetoric about being "pro-life" when what is actually meant is "pro-birth" (children being much less important than embryos, it seems, in the minds of people who want to shut down abortion clinics without ever giving a thought to improving orphanages or the process of adoption) is ignoring the simple fact that many people believe that other lives, uncontested as the lives of people, are important, too.
Support of anti-abortion laws is nothing less than the intent of jailing others for having a difference of faith, and when some people express the opinion (as Sarah did in the Feministing comment that prompted Abby's response) that you cannot be truly liberal and oppose the pro-choice movement, this is part of the reason why.
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A blogger named Zed (I always think of that creepy scene in Pulp Fiction when I hear that name) at Resonant Information is blogging about the unborn and personhood.
Zed is pro-choice but interestingly admits that, "How a "person" is defined by any...
Personhood, etc
Zed, this is Abby. I appreciate your response, but this is what I cannot accept: that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it. I've heard tons of arguments that go along the lines of, "if stuck in a burning building with a three year old and a fetus in an artificial womb, which would you rather save?" This is based on the false assumption that a value of a person's life is equal to whether or not we would mourn if they died. One blogger puts it better than I can: "Terrorists have kidnapped you and your spouse. They bring you into a room with a television screen where they have a live feed of other terrorists in India who are pointing guns at the heads of ten innocent people. The terrorists tell you that you have to choose who will die - your spouse or the 10 people from India. What do you choose? If you choose to save your spouse, does that somehow mean that the people from India weren't really 'persons' or worthy of legal protection because you have a greater emotional attachment to your spouse?"
And another thing. You're saying that almost everyone will disagree about when a fetus becomes a person, so we should allow abortion anyway because it makes room for "differences of faith." The thing I don't get about this is that this can be applied to so many other things. If someone believes that, say, redheds aren't "persons" because there's something about their hair color that makes him think of witchcraft, and he goes on a murderous rampage, killing all the redheads he sees, we wouldn't say, "Well, he has a right to do this. We ought to allow differences of faith, after all." OK, this may seem like a hopelessly inadequate analogy, but it's much more similar to the abortion position than you think! And as for "jailing people for having differences of faith," isn't that the purpose of laws to begin with?
Second, you are exactly right that there's no scientific evidence for the beginning of "personhood." In my post on Feministing, I meant to point out that the concept of "personhood," is, in itself, vague and arbitrary. There *is* scientific evidence, however, about when a human life begins. And this is the ground on which I ultimately base my position. There's nothing even remotely "religious" about it. Human life exists in a continuum, and I believe that all human beings, regardless of stage of development, size, or certain attributes they happen to possess, have a right to live. Oh, and how is a fetus be a "potential human being"?
I really appreciate your response; I've never been quoted on a blog before!
Personhood, etc.
Hello Abby. Thanks for stopping by.
It's not that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it, but that many reasonable people can disagree over whether something has any significant value at all. If that is the case, then it is wholly inappropriate for half of the population to attempt to imprison the other half for choosing to preserve something that everyone agrees has value at the cost of something for which there is no such agreement, not even a significant majority.
The sets of situations I presented weren't chosen at random; they represent a gradient of risks. Forcing a woman to bear a child can place that woman's life at risk. Forcing a woman to raise an unwanted child is a painful experience for both, often harmful to their development, and harmful to the society around them.
There are three fundamental differences in your scenario. First and foremost, you've brought another free will into the equation: my decision to say anything does not prevent the terrorist from choosing not whether or not to kill anyone. Second, the (presumably adult) Indians are not in questionable status as to whether they are people (you might have a better analogy by having the terrorists forcing you to choose between gassing two boxes, one of which has your spouse, whom you can clearly see through a glass pane, or another completely sealed box, that might or might not have people in it, in sort of a twisted version of the Schrödinger's Cat experiment). Third, the truly important question isn't about whether or not the ten people from India are worthy of legal protection, but whether or not you are worthy of legal protection if you choose your spouse and let 10 people die. Are you willing to put someone in jail for choosing their spouse? If the answer is no, then you should be very wary of being willing to put someone in jail for choosing the mother over the embryo.
Actually, I don't think it's similar to the abortion position at all, because we already have a number of globally accepted standards about how to recognize people (they deliberately interact with their surroundings, have roughly human shape, communicate with us, contribute to society, etc.), and although nobody claims this list is complete, it is definitely sufficient. If you're walking, talking, and building it doesn't matter if you're a redhead (in fact, it doesn't matter if you're an embryo — if you show me an embryo deliberately manipulating its environment in more than an instinctive fashion and carrying a conversation, I'll change sides) because you have already met conditions that everyone can agree on.
The problem with an embryo is that it doesn't meet these conditions, and you would have been better off looking for other examples that are more marginal because they also don't meet those conditions, such as people who have taken brain damage and have been left in a vegetative state. These situations are controversial for almost exactly the same reasons, however, and are rife with arguments over when someone can override a Do Not Resuscitate directive, or can pull the plug on someone who isn't going to recover. The arguments over DNR have gotten so bad, in fact, that physicians and nurses have started getting DNR tattoos, to make sure that there is no dispute about their wishes.
No! Good heavens, no, absolutely not, at least not in the United States; the First Amendment explicitly forbids it, in fact. The purpose of laws is to prevent harm to contributing members of a society. This might be different in a religious state, such as Israel or Iran, but I am quite happy not to live in such places and am quite willing to concede them whatever insane laws they desire, as long as they keep them strictly within their own borders.
No. No there isn't. All you've done is switched out "personhood" for "human life", but it's exactly the same concept. I highly recommend you go through that link, as it covers most of the differing philosophies (and their history), inside the scientific communities and out, but inside or out they're still only philosophies. Science can only show us chemical or electrical behaviour, the rest we make up ourselves. I'm from the (admittedly somewhat extreme) school that believes that consciousness defines humanity, and thus human life; most people don't like that argument because conscious decisions don't become apparant usually for several months after birth. For the sake of peace, I am willing to bend over backwards to support extending protection to birth, the state at which care can (more or less) easily be given to another, or with a lot of argument perhaps as far as 7 months after conception, the point at which neural connections are formed. Few would claim that an adult with the brain completely scooped out and only the body kept alive by the miracle of modern life support technology was still a person, however, so I can only see the claim that a body with no brain at all developed is a person as ludicrous.
Even granting as far as I could possibly go, just for the sake of argument, the law already protects a fetus 7 months into development, however (well past the second trimester limit). This isn't what the anti-abortion crowd is looking for.
And this is the reason that many people find your position completely untenable. You say there's nothing religious about it, but all you've done is state completely unsupported beliefs. You are taking it on faith that a few cells constitute a human being, despite the fact that those cells can't do any of the things we expect human beings to do. They don't communicate. They don't even move. They don't laugh, cry, become curious, panic, or love. They can't. They don't have two neurons to click together, at least not at early stages of development. Treating them as human leads to absurd connections, as were pointed out so well in the Reason article I linked to in the main entry: 80% of fertilized embryos are lost naturally. Are we to reshuffle our priorities to try to save the millions (billions?) of zygotes lost to nature every year? If we are to accept fertilized cells as complete human beings, this is the leading cause of death in the world by a gigantic margin. Are we to do so at the cost of health for grown adults? Shall we arrest those who spend money on vitamins, but refuse to contribute to a fund for zygote rescue?
It's a potential human being because it isn't a human being yet, but if given the proper environment and support, might become one eventually. A seed may be a potential tree... but it is not a tree.
Stop by more often, and I might quote you again.
Losing personhood
I noticed that Alas, a Blog has a category devoted to Terri Schiavo, which covers some of these issues from the other direction: at what point you can stop considering a lump of flesh a person. From the scientific side, it appears to center around Mrs. Schiavo's loss of a cerebral cortex.