2014-02-24T11:05:26-08:00

This is part 3 of a series of posts exploring pro-life arguments. Read Part 1 here.

11. But a fetus has a soul!

Does it? If the zygote has a soul and then it splits into twins, does each twin have half a soul or do they get another one as needed or did they get two to begin with? What happens if one of those twins is later absorbed? What about conjoined twins—do they share a single soul like a shared body part? What about babies with terrible birth defects that leave them with very little brain function? What about a person cloned from a skin cell—would they have a soul? And if the story for the soul has a happy ending for the 50% of pregnancies that end in spontaneous (natural) abortion, why not for an artificial abortion?

This mess vanishes if we don’t insist on a soul. As Daniel Dennett said, “What isn’t there doesn’t have to be explained.”

12. “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent.”

These are the words of an archbishop from Brazil. He was outraged at the abortion done on a nine-year-old girl, raped and impregnated by her stepfather. In response to the abortion, the church excommunicated the family of the girl and the doctors who performed the abortion.

Wow. Let’s leave this example of how religion makes you do crazy things and focus on the claim. First, a fetus is not a child. Second, the spectrum argument defeats this claim.

Variations on this argument are popular, and they all have pretty much the same response. Here are a few.

12a. Abortion kills a human life (at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy) to help with another human’s self-actualization (higher on the hierarchy). That’s the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work.

The two “human lives” are not comparable. This ignores the spectrum of development from single cell to trillion-cell newborn.

Killing a blastocyst with fewer cells than the brain of the fly troubles me less than killing a civilian in another country due to war or killing a criminal on death row.

12b. Don’t we normally go out of our way to defend the defenseless?

Again, this ignores the spectrum. Defenseless people are more important than defenseless cells.

12c. Haven’t we been through this with racial minorities? Declaring that single cells aren’t human is like declaring that African-Americans aren’t human.

Nice try. Spectrum argument.

12d. In response to your abortion clinic example: you argue that, if given a choice between saving a child and ten frozen embryos, you’d save the child. Okay, and if given the choice between your wife and a stranger, you’d save your wife, but that doesn’t mean that you can kill strangers.

Spectrum argument.

13. Haven’t you heard of adoption? That’s the answer to an unplanned pregnancy.

No, it’s clearly not the answer. Two percent of all births to unmarried women in the U.S. are placed for adoption. “Just have the baby and release it for adoption” is a pat on the head. It might make you feel good, but it doesn’t work.

Adoption can also be psychologically difficult, both for mother and child.

14. You say that a trillion cells is definitely a person. Okay, how about a trillion minus one—is that a person? And if so, how about a trillion minus two? And so on.

This is the sorites paradox: if you can take a grain of sand from a heap and it’s still a heap, can you continue to do so and get a “heap” of one grain?

This same game could be played with the blue/green spectrum. If this color is “green,” what about just a touch more blue—isn’t that green as well? We still can’t get around the fact that the two ends of the spectrum are very different—green is not blue! Similarly, a single cell is not a newborn with arms, legs, brain, and so on.

15. The woman who got pregnant knew what she was doing. Let’s encourage people to take responsibility for their actions.

Did she know what she was doing? Not necessarily. Sex education is so poor in the United States that many teens become sexually mature without understanding what causes what.

But let’s assume that the woman knew what she was doing and was careless or stupid. What do we do with this? When someone shoots himself accidentally, that was stupid, but we all pay for the medical and insurance system that puts them back together. Let’s educate people, demand responsibility, and have a harm-reduction approach where we find the best resolution of problem. For a woman whose life would be overturned with a pregnancy, that resolution might be abortion.

Having sex with imperfect contraception is no more a willingness to accept pregnancy than eating a sandwich is a willingness to accept choking. When someone is choking, we do our best to take care of the problem; let’s continue to do the same for an unwanted pregnancy.

Continue to Part 4

The self-proclaimed “pro-life” crowd is entirely too obsessive
about the imaginary people they claim to be concerned about.
They need to calm down,
switch off their circuit diagrams,
get out of their blueprints,
sit in the shade of their acorns,
listen to the pleasant songs of the eggs,
and stop to smell the pollen.
— Richard Russell

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/27/12.)

Photo credit

2013-10-17T12:18:19-07:00

This is part 2 of a series of posts exploring pro-life arguments. Read Part 1 here.

6. What’s the big deal about traveling down the birth canal? 

The big deal is that before that process, only the mother could support the baby. Afterwards, it breathes and eats on its own. The baby could then be taken away and never see its mother again and grow up quite healthy. Before, the mother was mandatory; after, she’s unnecessary.

I’m not arguing that abortion should be legal up until delivery, though others do, and that has created this argument. I’m simply arguing that birth is a big deal. I’m not arguing for any definition of when abortion should become illegal. My main point has simply been that the personhood of the fetus increases from single cell through newborn, which makes abortion arguable.

7. It’s a human from conception through adulthood! The DNA doesn’t change. What else would that single cell be—a sponge? A zebra? (OK, if you don’t like “human,” let’s use “person.”) No—person means the same thing as human!

This name game is a common way to avoid the issue. I don’t care what you call the spectrum as long as we use names that make clear what the newborn has that the single cell doesn’t.

The only thing that connects the two ends of the spectrum is the Homo sapiens DNA. This pro-life argument devolves into an argument from potential. Sure, the single cell will be a baby in nine months. Get back to me then, and we’ll have something to celebrate. At the other end of the spectrum, however, it ain’t a baby.

Yes, a single cell has the potential to make a baby. So does the lustful idea that pops into a guy’s head. Neither is a baby.

I wonder at the pro-life advocate getting misty-eyed at the thought of that single microscopic cell. A eukaryotic cell with one strand of Homo sapiens DNA—wow. They wouldn’t get excited if it were the cell of a slug or a banana, but because it’s human, somehow that’s so fabulous that not only do they get choked up about it, but they demand that the rest of us do the same.

Sorry—not convincing.

8. What if the mother wanted to abort because the fetus had green eyes or was female or would likely be gay? 

This is a red herring. How many cases are we talking about? Abortion to increase the fraction of male babies is done in India and China, but this isn’t a meaningful issue in the U.S. (And in the third world, ask yourself if infanticide would be the alternative if abortion was denied.)

Abortions for capricious or shallow reasons also aren’t the issue. Mothers-to-be have plenty of noble instincts to judge what is appropriate so that society can rest assured that the right thing will usually be done. (If you balk at the “usually,” remember that that’s how society’s laws work. They’re not perfect, and we can only hope that they’re usually on target.) We can certainly talk about the few special cases where a woman’s actions seem petty, but don’t let that change abortion rights for the majority.

The woman who aborts for some trivial reason would likely be a terrible mother. Let’s let a woman who isn’t mature enough to take care of a baby opt out.

Consider how society treats parents. There is a wide variety of parenting styles, but most parents are decent and loving. We have the laws, police, and social services to remove children from abusive households, but the parents get the benefit of the doubt. Similarly, the instincts of the pregnant woman are on target in most cases. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt as well. In the domain of parenting, we start with, “You are a good parent.” That’s the null hypothesis. And the null hypothesis in the abortion debate is, “You know what’s best for you and your fetus.”

9. Abortions are dangerous! 

Not really. The chance of maternal death from delivering a baby is 14 times higher than through abortion. This is what you’d expect, since the fetus only gets bigger (and more dangerous to deliver) with time. Of course, this statistic will change if abortion is made illegal and more dangerous. Does Kermit Gosnell scare you? That’s what an America with illegal abortion would look like.

There is no indication that abortion is a risk factor for cancer or women’s mental health.

10. Murder is wrong because it takes away a future like mine. If we found intelligent humanoids like us on another planet, killing them for sport would be wrong for this reason. And this is why abortion is wrong—it takes away a future like mine. (This is Glenn Peoples’ “Argument from the Future.”)

Why focus on the future? Assuming these humanoids are largely unchanging month to month, like people, killing them for sport takes away a present like mine. I assume Peoples focuses on the future only because he has no argument otherwise. A two-week-old fetus doesn’t have much of a life (yet).

But let’s take the path that Peoples points us to. Killing a fetus would deprive it of a future like mine, but so would killing a single skin cell, once they are clonable into humans. Would it then a crime to scratch your skin? Or, let’s take it further back. Suppose I have two kids. Was it criminal to not have three? Or four? Or fifteen? I’ve deprived those people-to-be of life.

Extrapolating back to the twinkle in my eye, saying that we have a person deserving of life at every step is ridiculous. But the facts fit neatly and logically into the spectrum argument.

Continue with Part 3.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) believes that
the mother has an overwhelming stake in her own pregnancy,
and to be forced to give birth to a child against her will
is a peculiarly personal violation of her freedom . …
— Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) source

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/20/12.)

Photo credit: Slate

2017-12-05T16:22:27-08:00

Seventy percent of Americans are in favor of letting Roe v. Wade stand, a new high. Nevertheless, pro-life advocates remain vocal.

I’ve heard a lot of arguments against abortion. Here are many of them, with my rebuttals.

1. The Bible says that abortion is wrong. 

For starters, in the U.S., our secular constitution trumps the Bible. “The Bible says so” is irrelevant when the First Amendment forbids government from enacting laws guided by religious dogma.

And, as I’ve argued before, the Bible doesn’t say that abortion is wrong. Indeed, God has no problem killing people, including children. The Bible demands that women suspected of adultery be given a poison that will miscarry any illegitimate fetus (Num. 5:16–29). Babies begin to count as persons only after they are a month old (Lev. 27:6 and Num. 3:15–16). In the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII said that an embryo of less than 40 days was not yet human.

The heels-dug-in pro-life position within some Protestant churches is a new thing. A summary of a 1978 analysis of abortion shows a surprisingly pro-choice attitude. The names of pro-choice churches are a Who’s Who of American Protestantism: American Baptist Churches, American Lutheran Church, Disciples of Christ, Church of the Brethren, Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist Church, and United Presbyterian Church.

Maybe if politicians let Christians figure this out on their own, the pro-choice stand would be even more a majority position.

I apologize for piling on, but the Catholic Church’s loud voice demands a response. The Catholic priest pedophilia scandal was a moral test. The church’s cover-up—its focus on the well-being of the church over that of the flock—shows that it failed that test. The Catholic Church has vacated its place at the table on the question of abortion.

2. Abortion tinkers with the natural order. 

We have cheerfully adopted medicine and technology that “tinker with the natural order”—antibiotics, vaccines, and anesthesia, for example—to which we don’t give a second thought. We prolong life beyond what the “natural order” would permit and allow it to happen where it otherwise wouldn’t (in vitro fertilization, for example). Abortion might be bad, but that it changes the natural order is no argument.

3. You argue that a newborn has more cells than the zygote that it started from. Is this just a size thing? What about someone who’s lost a limb? Or had tonsils, appendix, or gall bladder removed? Are they less of a person? 

The difference between an amputee and a newborn is trivial compared to that between the newborn and the single cell. In the long list of organs, limbs, and systems, this amputee merely has one fewer. Compare that with a single cell, which not only has none of those body parts but doesn’t even have a single cell of any body part.

We can push this thinking to the ridiculous. Imagine technology that provides life support so that a human head could survive. Is this less of a person?

Well, yeah. Obviously. Someone who’s been reduced to just a head isn’t as much of a person as they were. Or consider Terry Shiavo, who was allowed to die after 15 years in a vegetative state. Was she less of a person? Her severe brain damage certainly made her less of something, and you can label this whatever you want.

4. Imagine if you’d been aborted! 

I wouldn’t care, would I? But how about you, Mr. Pro-life? How do you feel about the fact that you took the opportunity for life that was denied to uncountably many other combinations of egg and sperm? If you think that it’s a silly hypothetical question, you can understand my similar reaction.

There are also voices who confront that challenge directly. Here’s someone who said that her mother’s life was clearly worse for having her and that she wished her mother had aborted her.

This thinking isn’t far removed from the Quiverfull movement, which encourages no restraint on birth and childishly “lets God decide” how many children to have. Where do you draw the line? If we are morally obliged to bring to term a 2-week-old embryo, are we also morally obliged to bring to term the thought, “Gee, I wonder if we should have another baby …”?

Seeing life as a spectrum is the only way to make sense of this. Yes, that leaves unanswered the question of where to draw the line for abortion, but let’s first agree that a spectrum exists.

5. Imagine that you had two planned kids, and then you had a child after an unplanned pregnancy. You wouldn’t want to give that child up. But if you’d aborted it, your life would be emptier. 

Of course I’d love my unplanned child as much as my other ones. But what do we conclude from this? That I should have not had two kids but rather three? Or five? Or fifteen? Should I expect some tsk-ing behind my back as neighbors wonder why my wife and I could have been so callous to have not had as many as biology would permit?

(The Quiverfull Movement goes down this path, and I explore that here.)

By similar logic, is a woman’s menstrual cycle a cause for lamentation because that was a missed opportunity for a child? It is a sign of a potential life, lost. But in any life, there are millions of paths not taken. C’est la vie.

I don’t think it’s immoral to limit the number of children you have, and I don’t see much difference between zero cells and one cell—it’s all part of the spectrum. I’ll agree that the thought “Let’s have a baby” isn’t a baby … but then neither is a single cell.

Continue to Part 2.

A single cell is simply that: a single cell.
It’s no more a human
than the first brush stroke of a painting is a picture
or the first word of a book is a novel.
— Dave Gardner

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/20/12.)

Photo credit: EHD

 

2013-10-04T10:55:59-07:00

The Old Testament patriarchs would scratch their heads at the problem conservative Christians have invented and seized upon. “That’s not what ‘Thou shalt not murder’ means!” they’d say. “It means that you shouldn’t take a stick and beat someone over the head until he’s dead! We kill people around here at the drop of a hat—both our own people when they transgress the Law and people of other tribes when we get into border squabbles. And God has no hesitation in killing people. To simply make someone not pregnant is vastly different. People try lots of folk remedies to bring about that very thing, and our only complaint is that they’re not effective.”

All this hand-wringing about the safety of a single cell, less than one trillionth the size of an infant, would baffle them. God is happy to slaughter (or order slaughtered) lots ’n lots of humans—men, women, and children.

If the Big Man doesn’t care, why should we? That’s a rhetorical question—of course we should care. It’s just that we shouldn’t imagine an argument against abortion based on what the Bible says.

About Babylon, it says, “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Ps. 137:9). And: “Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished” (Is. 13:15–16). Whether God uses genocide against the other guys, poisonous snakes against his own people, or an old-fashioned global flood against everyone, God has a broad palette of options when it comes to death, and he makes no special provision for children, infants, or fetuses.

The Bible even describes a potion to deliberately induce a miscarriage, used by the priest when a woman is suspected of adultery.

God himself has a hand in abortions. Roughly half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, a far greater rate than that of clinical abortions. If God exists, he’s the biggest abortionist of all.

Why imagine that the Bible is against abortion? Maybe it’s that whole “thou shalt not murder” thing.

But you do know that “thou shalt not murder” isn’t in the Ten Commandments, right? Let’s review the story. Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) and then smashes them when he sees the golden calf. He goes back up for another set (Ex. 34), but God must’ve been stoned when he dictated them the second time because it’s quite a different set of rules. Note that these rules aren’t just an addendum of some sort; these are the replacement Ten Commandments. Exodus 34:28 makes this clear: “[Moses] wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.” In other words, if you’d been able to peek inside the Ark of the Covenant to see this Ten Commandments 2.0, nowhere would it have said, “Thou shalt not murder.”

But let’s ignore that and assume that the scriptures say not to murder. What is “murder”? Is capital punishment murder? It’s illegal in Europe, and many people think it’s murder in the U.S., and yet it’s legal in 32 U.S. states. What about killing in wartime? Or killing in self-defense? Or killing accidentally? Or killing animals? Or euthanasia? Murder is undefined, so “Thou shalt not murder” is meaningless.

You’d think that this vaguely supported legal opinion that God is against abortion would give Christians pause, but I guess the hearts of pro-life Christian soldiers are resolute. They’re quick to argue that God’s actions are beyond our understanding when it suits them—when confronted with the Problem of Evil or the justice of hell, for example—but at other times they acknowledge no vagueness and know for certain what God wants. In particular, they know that God is against abortion!

Why is abortion that big a deal from the Christian standpoint when abortions send souls to heaven without the risk of doing the wrong thing in adulthood? That murdered babies go straight to heaven was one way William Lane Craig tried to wriggle out of the moral consequences of God ordering the Canaanite genocide.

Using Craig’s logic, abortion clinics may save more souls than churches!

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.
If you have that awareness, you have good manners,
no matter what fork you use.
— Emily Post

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/16/12.))

Photo credit: Wikimedia

2013-03-16T19:41:56-07:00

Abortion and gay marriageSenator Rob Portman (R-OH) now supports same-sex marriage, a reversal he recently made public. What caused the turnaround was his son coming out as gay two years ago.

Portman’s record against homosexual issues was pretty consistent. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, he supported the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and he voted to prohibit gay couples in Washington, DC from adopting.

He said about his change of heart:

What happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.

Dick Cheney had been a closet supporter of gay marriage for years because of his lesbian daughter but in 2009 he also came out on the issue.

Why the delay? Republicans are hesitant to do the right thing on gay marriage because it’s politically inconvenient? Since when do you put what’s best for the party in front of what’s best? Still, they have company. I’m sure that was behind the Catholic Church pedophilia cover up—doing what’s right for individuals took a back seat to what was best for the Church. But that’s a side issue. It’s a step forward, and let’s celebrate politicians who take a potentially unpopular stand.

Imagining it vs. living it.

Here’s my question. I see that having a relative makes the issue one you can’t just push away, but why does it take that? Isn’t one of humanity’s super powers the ability to imagine themselves in new situations? Why couldn’t Portman or Cheney speculate, “Gee, what if this issue hit me directly? What if my own child was homosexual? Would I still not budge on ‘traditional marriage’?”

The tide has turned, and many conservative legislators who are now against same-sex marriage will change their minds in the next decade, but why must it take so long? Why can’t they mentally put themselves in Portman’s position and change their minds next week? (And when they finally do change, will they think back on Portman’s example and wonder why it took them so long?)

I guess it’s harder than it looks. Speculating about something must be a poor substitute for it actually happening, and Portman and Cheney would probably still hold their old positions if not for the push from their children.

How does this apply to abortion?

Let’s broaden this observation. One of my recent posts on abortion received nearly 1000 comments, and I argued there with several pro-life advocates. I’m guessing they were older men (related post: Why is it always men advancing the pro-life position?). Their positions were pretty simple: a fetus is a human life, and it’s just wrong to kill a human. That’s it—no nuance, no exceptions, no consideration for the harm of not having an abortion. And why should there be? It’s murder—end of story.

It seems to me that these antagonists are like the pre-enlightenment Portman or Cheney. They’re smart, and they can marshal arguments to support their position. And their position isn’t insane—abortion does kill a fetus.

It’s the tunnel vision that’s the problem. Let’s broaden the view, Senator Portman, and imagine that your own son were gay. Let’s broaden the view, Mr. Pro-Life, and imagine that your own 15-year-old daughter had an unwanted pregnancy. All the plans that you and your wife have for your daughter—graduating from high school, then college, and then a satisfying career and a family—are in jeopardy. How much school will she miss? What teams or clubs must she withdraw from? What commitments will she have to cancel for decorum or out of embarrassment?

It will be an enormous bump in the road if she places the child for adoption. But girls in that situation almost never do—just two percent of premarital births in the U.S. are placed for adoption. Now we’re talking about, not a bump in the road, but a fork to a completely different life, a life with her as a 16-year-old single mom living at home trying to make a life from the constrained options available.

Problem one is that Mr. Pro-Life can’t put himself in this situation, or at least can’t do it successfully. Imagining it is a poor substitute for actually hearing his daughter sobbing in her room and finding out what the problem is.

Problem two is where the lesson from Sen. Portman fails. Portman understands that he can’t make his son un-gay, but Mr. Pro-Life can encourage his daughter to become un-pregnant. He could cite extenuating circumstances in his situation, take care of the problem, and then return to his pro-life dogmatism.

We see this situation in the stories of women picketers of abortion clinics who, being human, have their own unwanted pregnancies. Or their daughters do. They’ll slip in the back door, have the abortion, and then be back on the picket lines days later. When asked about the hypocrisy, they say that other women are sluts. They, by contrast, had a good excuse.

For this reason, pro-lifers may never be able to understand the difficulty facing the nearly one million American women who choose abortion each year. And perhaps we will never have a reasoned conversation on this divisive issue.

I was always looking outside myself
for strength and confidence,
but it comes from within.
It is there all the time.
— Anna Freud

Photo credit: Cafepress

2013-01-24T11:05:46-08:00

More on the abortion questionIn my recent pro-choice post, I argued that personhood during gestation is a spectrum—a newborn is a person, but the single cell at the other end of the spectrum is not. (Feel free to substitute a different word for “person.”)

This seems to be an obvious argument, but there are many who insist (1) that there is no meaningful difference and that the spectrum doesn’t exist and (2) their interpretation should be imposed on the rest of the country by law.

I got a prompt rebuttal by fellow Patheos blogger Tara Edelschick at the Homeschool Chronicles blog, and I’d like to go through Tara’s points. She begins with, “I’m an evangelical, homeschooling, anti-choice woman” and then adds, “I’m also a feminist who is against the death penalty, voted for Ralph Nader every time that was an option, and supported Obama in each of the last two elections.”

Looks like Tara doesn’t fit into the typical evangelical box—in fact, her post was titled “The Constraining Abortion Box.” Let a thousand flowers bloom!

I didn’t have much to object to in her first point, so we’re off to a good start.

When Does Life Begin?

In point two, she responds to my saying that, as a father who has helped raise two children from babies to adults, I’m an expert on “babies” and reject that idea that a single invisible cell is one. She said:

Is he really claiming to be an expert on when life begins because he is a father?

Perhaps we’re talking past each other. First, I said that I’m an expert just on what a “baby” is, and something you need a microscope to see isn’t a baby. In other words, if you want to see both ends of the spectrum as a baby, that’s fine, but don’t impose that conclusion on the rest of us.

Second, when life begins was never the subject, but I doubt that we have much disagreement here. The new life with its unique DNA obviously begins at conception, though you could argue that, since fertilization isn’t abiogenesis, it isn’t a beginning but a continuation of life.

Freedom to Choose

She said, “I want to hear the voice of God. I understand that many fellow citizens have no such desire. I respect that….” And I respect that she wants to hear the voice of God. The United States Constitution establishes many important freedoms, and she has the right to that. Back to the topic, she can choose whether an abortion is right or wrong for her, and she can encourage her opinion on others. Where I object is when she wants to impose her conclusion that abortion is wrong on all of us. (It seems that she wants Roe overturned because in her subsequent post she says, “In general, women should not be able to choose to end their pregnancies.”)

Back to the subject of what “baby” means, she says, “Even a clear scientific definition of what constitutes a baby will not bring us to consensus.” It may well be that nothing will bring us to consensus, but as for what “baby” means, the relevant Merriam-Webster definition is pretty straightforward: “an extremely young child; especially: infant.”

Given this definition, you can see why I object to the spectrum-collapsing approach of calling the single cell a baby.

Back to the Spectrum Argument

On to point three. In my post, I listed a number of familiar before-and-after situations and culminated with “[and] a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.” Her response:

Yup. That’s true. And I don’t know a single person who disagrees.

She should read the comments at my blog! Accepting the significant differences between the two ends of the spectrum is impossible to most of my Christian commenters.

Acknowledging that there is a spectrum of meaning between zygote and college graduate does not mean, as Bob suggests, that one would need to be pro-choice.

Let me back up and note that the goal of my spectrum argument is modest. I simply want to attack the argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is wrong to kill a human life; therefore (3) abortion is wrong. We need to think of a word (“person,” for example) that can be applied to the newborn but can’t be applied to the single cell.

It sounds like Tara and I are on the same page, which is a point of agreement worth celebrating, and yet she still thinks that killing that single cell is wrong. Fair enough—that she consider my argument is all I can ask. What I have a problem with is her wanting to impose her conclusions on the rest of us.

So We Agree on the Spectrum—What’s Next?

She moves on to the question of where pro-choicers would draw the line.

Is [the line] at birth? Why? Why not a day before birth? Or three months before birth? What about after birth but before the umbilical cord is cut? Why not a couple weeks after birth? What’s the difference? And who are you to decide?

I sense that Tara sees these questions as some sort of show stopper, but how does society decide any tough moral issue? For example: what should the prison term be for robbery? For attempted robbery where nothing was stolen? For robbery with a gun? For robbery with an injury? For robbery with a death? Is the death penalty a possibility? Are extenuating circumstances relevant and, if so, how are they factored in? And on and on.

We have law-making bodies at various levels through the country, and one hopes that the relevant laws are decided with expert input and measured deliberation. Law making does its imperfect best to answer questions like these and thousands more.

Indeed, Tara’s questions have already been answered many times. In each state, a combination of state law and federal law defines when an abortion is legal and the various exceptions that might apply.

Who’s to Decide?

The most insightful comment I’ve gotten on my many posts in support of abortion was this one:

Have no illusions, if abortion really were murder, it would come as an instinctive reaction from women. It would come with such force that men would be confused by the average woman’s revulsion towards abortion.

In the same way that society trusts parents to raise their children properly, stepping in only when it’s clear that something has gone wrong, I want to trust the instincts of the pregnant woman. These instincts come from the front lines of the issue, from the person who understands both the importance of the potential person inside her as well as any reasons why a new life many not be a good idea.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion
will legislate its creed into law
if it acquires the political power to do so.
— Robert A. Heinlein

Photo credit: Wikimedia

2013-01-22T09:37:52-08:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade. In honor of this important support for fundamental rights, here is a reposting of my primary pro-choice argument.

abortion and the spectrum of personhoodThe pro-life position is often stated this way: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.

We’ll return to that idea shortly, but first let’s look more closely at human life. I argue that there is a spectrum of personhood during gestation.

Consider a continuous spectrum from blue to green. Where’s the dividing line? Where does blue end and green begin? We can argue about this, but we agree that blue is not green. The two ends are very different.

What age is the dividing line between child and adult? Twelve years? Eighteen? Twenty-one? It’s a spectrum, and there is no objectively correct line. Again, the line is debatable but no one doubts that a child and an adult are quite different.

An acorn is not a tree, a silkworm is not a dress, a water molecule is not a whirlpool, a piece of hay is not a haystack, and 20 chicken eggs are not a henhouse of chickens. Similarly, a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.

But the vast difference in the number of cells only begins to define the vast difference between the two ends of the spectrum. At one end, we have arms and legs, fingers and fingernails, liver and pancreas, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, stomach and digestive system—in fact, every body part that a healthy person has. And at the other, we have none of this. We have … a single cell. In between is a smooth progression over time, with individual components developing and maturing. That’s the spectrum we’re talking about.

Let’s approach this another way. Consider a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron. The single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast. It doesn’t think at all. The differentiation of the cells into different cell types and their interconnections in the newborn may count for even more than the enormous difference in the number of cells.

Note also that the difference between a newborn and an adult is trivial compared to the difference between the cell and the 1,000,000,000,000-cell newborn.

Some pro-life advocates argue that the humans at either end of this spectrum are identical in every meaningful way and use the term “baby” for every point along the spectrum. I’ve raised babies (with help, of course), and that makes me something of an expert in identifying babies. As an expert, let me assure you that a single invisible cell isn’t a baby.

If eager expectant parents want to use the term “baby,” not a problem. It’s when pro-lifers want to impose that term on others to constrain their rights that we have a problem.

This inept attempt to collapse the spectrum by using the term “baby” for both ends is like the slogan used by the animal rights group PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” In other words, there is no spectrum here: vermin are the same as livestock, which are the same as pets, which are the same as people.

No, a rat is not a boy, blue is not green, and a single cell is not a newborn baby.

A lot revolves around what we call this spectrum. Do we call it Homo sapiens? With this term, there is no spectrum, because the species is the same—the single cell is Homo sapiens, as is the newborn baby.

What about “human”? That seems a good name for the spectrum—that is, we would call the newborn human but not the cell. Or, we might call the cell human but not a human. Keep in mind that live tissue samples are cells with human DNA and they’re not “humans.” Would they suddenly become humans if, through technological magic, they were made totipotent so that they could grow into a fetus? Pro-lifers would likely insist on using “human” for both ends of the spectrum.

All right, can we all agree on “person”? No, I’ve heard pro-lifers reject this as well.

This game where pro-lifers deny names to the spectrum quickly gets tiring. I really don’t care what the spectrum is called—humanity, personhood, human development, like-me-ness, whatever—call it what you want as long as the naming acknowledges the stark difference between the newborn (with arms and legs and a circulatory system and a nervous system and eyes and ears and so on) and the single fertilized human egg cell.

Speaking of games, the pro-life argument does seem a bit like a game, despite the serious consequences. The Slactivist blog and Valerie Tarico’s blog have shown that today’s foaming-at-the-mouth pro-life stance by evangelicals was not held by their predecessors 30 years ago.

Now, back to the original pro-life argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral. This argument fails because it is oblivious to the spectrum.

Pro-lifers claim to be celebrating life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell and demanding that everyone else be bound by their beliefs doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

To be forced to give birth to a child against her will
is a peculiarly personal violation of [a woman’s] freedom.
— Disciples of Christ, 1978

Human life develops on a continuum from conception to birth.
— United Church of Christ, 1978

The fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
— Bruce Waltke, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1968

(source of quotes)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

2013-01-21T21:23:04-08:00

There’s a reality disconnect within the pro-life community. They reject abortion while they also reject the solution to abortion, sex education. Is abortion an American Holocaust, as Ray Comfort says? If so, then join forces with the pro-choice camp and teach teens how to avoid it!

Being against abortion but rejecting sex education is like being against deaths through unclean water but rejecting sewer systems.

Here’s an excellent infographic on sex education from PublicHealthDegree.com. Pass it on.

Reproductive Health Education
Created by: PublicHealthDegree.com

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2013-01-21T21:25:04-08:00

Novel explores Christianity atheism apologetics themesThanks to the Prime Directive blog, I belatedly came across a long list of “Questions for Pro-Choice People” by Prof. Michael Pakaluk. I’ve already responded to most of them with the spectrum argument, but here are three extra questions taken from this list that explore new ground and are worth highlighting.

17. Imagine a woman seeing an ultrasound of her unborn baby. Sometimes the hands and feet are visible, and the baby is sometimes sucking its thumb. Why aren’t such images shown to women considering abortions as part of informed consent? Works for me. But let’s add conditions to make this practical.

  • This should be an option rather than part of a mandatory gauntlet forced on women considering abortion.
  • This should not be the first time the woman has seen this information. That is, education should teach about the stages of fetal development as part of comprehensive sex education that would minimize the chances of her having this unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
  • The woman’s choices should be made available as soon as possible. Putting obstacles in her way—by closing down nearby clinics, encouraging pharmacists to refuse to offer morning-after pills, and so on—increases the age of the fetus she must consider aborting. If an abortion is to happen, let’s make it early so that the woman doesn’t see a fetus sucking its thumb.

18. “Does anyone wish that his mother had chosen abortion for him? And, if not, then how can he consistently wish that any mother choose abortion for anyone else?” This is a more eloquent version of my question 4, in an earlier post.

In the first place, if I’d been aborted, I wouldn’t be here to care. In the second, this thinking isn’t far removed from the Quiverfull movement (my thoughts on that here), which encourages no restraint on birth and childishly “lets God decide” how many children to have.

Where do you draw the line? If we are morally obliged to bring to term a 2-week-old fetus, are we also morally obliged to bring to term the thought, “Gee, I wonder if we should have another baby …”?

Seeing life as a spectrum is the only way to make sense of this. Yes, that leaves unanswered the question of where to draw the line for abortion, but let’s first agree that a spectrum exists.

19. Let’s suppose that we’re doubtful that the unborn child is a human being with human rights (there is no doubt, but let’s imagine there is). Given this uncertainty, shouldn’t we err on the side of the child? I agree that there’s no doubt, but I’m sure my confidence is the opposite of yours.

A fetus is not a person. Play games with the name all you want (“The fetus is a Homo sapiens, ‘human being’ is simply a synonym, and if a fetus is a human being, it must have human rights!”), but there’s no ambiguity here. Despite your word games, a newborn baby is still not the same thing as a single cell. There is a spectrum.

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  • The text of the opinion in Roe v. Wade is available here. Though written in 1973, it gives a thorough analysis of both sides of the issue. Anyone who objects to this decision should probably know what this decision actually says.
  • William Saletan, “The Pro-life Case for Planned Parenthood,” Slate, 12/11/08.
2013-01-21T21:27:04-08:00

Was Jesus the son of God?“A shocking, award-winning documentary!” “Changing the heart of a nation.” “33 minutes that will rock your world.” Ray Comfort lavishes his work with superlatives, but does it hold up?

I watched 180 so that you won’t have to. Spoiler alert: didn’t rock my world.

Motives are immediately suspect when the video opens with Hitler and Nazi rallies. Right out of the gate, Godwin’s Law is in force, and Comfort makes clear that you’re either on his side or giving Hitler back rubs.

With that dichotomy clear, Comfort interviews people hanging out on a sunny day at some Los Angeles beach. He begins by asking, “Who was Hitler?” The snippets introducing us to the (typically) 20-somethings who we’ll see throughout the video all show them clueless in response. If it was unclear before, it’s now obvious that he cherry picked only those interviews that gave him what he wanted. This is a poor foundation on which to show us a half-dozen people at the end who are convinced by his message. (Okay, Ray, but out of how many?)

We connect the present with Hitler through a long interview with a young American neo-Nazi with a tall blue Mohawk and a dashed “Cut here” tattoo across his throat. And then, videos of concentration camp aftermath.

Comfort primes his interviewees with moral puzzles such as “Would you shoot Hitler if you could go back in time and do so?” or “Would you kill Jews if told that, if you didn’t, you would be killed and someone else would do the job?”

About a third of the way in, the conversation finally turns to abortion. The use of Hitler and the Holocaust is justified when Comfort declares abortion to be the American holocaust, with killing fetuses equivalent to killing Jews. His arguments are nothing new to many of us, but they were to this crowd:

  • Finish this sentence: “It’s okay to kill a baby in the womb when …”
  • What if a construction worker was about to blow up a building but wasn’t sure if there was a person in there or not. If we’re not sure, we should always err on the side of life, right?
  • What if someone had aborted you?

I’ve already discussed these and other arguments.

Next, he brings up the sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” In the first place, he’s done nothing to show that there is a god behind these commandments and that it has any more supernatural warrant than “Use the Force, Luke!” Additionally, the commandment is usually translated as “thou shalt not murder.” If the correct word is “kill,” I need to see Comfort walking the walk by campaigning against capital punishment and war. And if it’s an undefined “murder,” what is murder? The commandment becomes a tautology: Thou shalt not do what is forbidden.

Granted, but how is this helpful?

Our interviewees seem a little off balance with a camera in their faces and are apparently not that sharp to begin with given their widespread ignorance of Hitler. Ray picks snippets that give him what he wants to hear, that killing fetuses is equivalent to killing Jews.

The lesson is that you can make an effective emotional pro-life argument to people who haven’t thought much about the issue. But people who change their minds so easily (Comfort brags about how quickly they changed) aren’t well established in their new position. How many of these, after thinking about these ideas at leisure and discussing it with friends, are still in Comfort’s camp today?

There’s a fundamental confusion in his interviewees, and Comfort is not motivated to correct it. There’s a big difference between “Abortion is wrong for me” and “Abortion is wrong for everyone, and we must impose that on society.” People give him the former, but he hopes we’ll take away the latter.

We’re two thirds through the video now and are just hoping to get out with our sanity intact, but Comfort has saved the best for last. The anti-abortion argument is dropped, and he falls back to his old favorite, the Ten Commandments challenge. (One reviewer suggested that Comfort’s compulsive use of this argument is his personal form of Tourette’s.) This is where Comfort ticks off the commandments: Have you ever lied? Stolen? Looked on someone with lust?

He concludes: “By your own admission, you’re a lying, thieving, blaspheming fornicator and must face God on Judgment Day™. How do you think God should judge you?” Again, of course, he ignores that we haven’t established the existence of God or the afterlife.

I did applaud one aspect of the movie, the text at the end that read, “We strongly condemn the use of any violence in connection with protesting abortion.” At least, I applauded this until I realized that this was probably a legal demand since Comfort had pushed his interviewees to consider shooting Hitler early in the documentary.

Given Ray Comfort’s easy success with emotional appeals, what if someone did a rebuttal video? It could open with stories of illegal and dangerous back-alley abortion clinics. Then talk about Americans rejecting oppressive government—“the land of the free,” “no taxation without representation,” and all that. Paint a picture of medieval Europe with the heavy hand of the church on every aspect of life for the poor peasant. Overlay some stirring patriotic music on waving flags and eagles.

The interviews would focus on intuitive arguments like those I’ve discussed in Five Emotional Pro-Choice Arguments. Here are several brief examples.

  • Suppose a building were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos. Which would you pick? If you picked the child, what does that say about the argument that equates embryos with babies?
  • If you’ve seen anti-abortion videos or posters, you may have seen the bloody results of late-term abortions. Why do you suppose they showed you that rather than a woman swallowing an emergency contraceptive (“morning after”) pill? Do you suppose they really think that it’s a “baby” all the way back to that single cell?
  • Given that half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, do you suppose that God has much of a concern about abortion?
  • A week-old human blastocyst has fewer cells than the brain of a fly. Does it make sense to equate that with a one trillion-cell newborn? The newborn has eyes, ears, legs, arms, a brain and a nervous system, a heart and a circulatory system—in fact, all the components of the human body that you do—while the blastocyst has just 100 undifferentiated cells. Does it make sense to equate them?
  • Who better to weigh the impact of a child than the mother herself?

Do you think we’d get similar results with this video?

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