A Case Against Broadly Legalized Abortion: The Follow-Up Discussion (compliments of Kat's journal)
Just in case anyone missed the extended discussion that Kat, Larry Turner, and I carried on in Kat's journal, I give you the rest here in its entirety:
Kat kicked us off with this reply to my original argument:
2005-02-07 11:17 AM
Fetal Viability
I often read The Foul Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart's journal and since he (I think?) doesn't have comments on his journal I wanted to mull over his most recent entry here. Abortion is a topic which is very important to me. I really think this a topic men cannot understand because pregnancy is something they can never experience. Someone forcing you to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term isn't a treat to them. Abortion is such a complex topic because pregnancy and childbirth are also complex.
Childbirth is brutal. The only way to get through it emotionally and physically intact is to see it as a right of passage. Whatever the method, the baby isn't coming out without a great deal of pain, and that pain doesn't end with the birth. To a woman who wants to be a mother and wants the baby inside her, it's worth it. It's something she has to go through to get what she wants. To a woman who doesn't want that child, forcing her to go through it is tantamout to torture.
This is why there is such a difference in the status of an embryo based on whether or not the mother wants it. Yes, a miscarriage at even 4 weeks is mourned. But I believe that even a woman who has had multiple miscarriages would agree that losing an early pregnancy is not the same a losing a living child.
Even though I don't believe that this early it is a life, as a mother I know that what it is is potential for a life. You know that, unless something goes wrong, you will be holding a beautiful baby in 9 months. You plan for it, and think of names, imagine what the terrible two's will be like and wonder what that child will be whey they grow up. But you still know it's not that baby yet.
I don't think abortion is a good option. It would be far better to prevent the pregnancy than to end it once it's begun. In the journal I mentioned, he discusses where viability actually lies. He discusses whether we should determine viability based on lung development or brain activity. To me, it's simple. If taking the fetus from the mother's body would produce a living person that has to be killed, that's murder. If the fetus could not survive outside the mother's body, it's not yet an individual. I honestly don't know at how many weeks this change occurs, but that's my definition of viability.
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15 Comments:
1 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:44 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
Glad to see you posting on this, Kat.
First, I'm a woman. And, I'm a woman who has endured what was labeled by my perinatologist as an "extreme, high-risk" pregnancy. Both I and my child almost died at various points. The pregnancy, moreover, was unplanned. And, my husband lost his job during the pregnancy, and my insurance went haywire, was revoked, then reinstated. His former employer even stole our Cobra check. My coworkers had to throw us a baby shower because we couldn't afford to set up a nursery. I cried because we didn't have the money to make it pretty or even to put it in a separate room in the dinky, nasty, rented house. Oh, and my parents disowned me after the baby was born becuase I wouldn't let them unload their emotional baggage on him. So, I did it all without family support -- even after an emergency c-section that went into a post-operative infection and has left me with permanent damage to my left leg. So, I do understand what you are talking about when you speak of the demands of pregnancy.
Even if I had known I was in for that kind of life-threatening, depression-instilling ride (I had to be treated for major depressive disorder after -- nearly hospitalized for it), I would still say that the life of my child, potential child though he was, was worth my sacrifice. That, even if I had not known how incredible he would turn out (I risked my life to save his before we'd "met"); fortunately, I've had the luxury and luck to know him.
Second, however, I don't think we can decide about abortion on an emotional basis like this. We must decide based on ethical principles that we use to make decisions for the social good.
You've said that you agree, effectively, with viability at 23 weeks if machine support doesn't muddy your definition of the child's ability to live independently and 28 weeks if it does (that's the earliest we can hope for that level of lung development). Now that's a rational standard we can discuss.
You judge the mother's mental welfare and physical condition during pregnancy as so primary that before the developing life can survive on its own its potential for indepdent life is less valuable / important/ granted by right. There, I think we will continue to disagree. I think the potential life, which is not part of her and yet not entirely separate, should take precedence. Her mental discomfort, even suffering, cannot matter more than its right to live. If it is not alive, it's on its way to living. That ought to be respected, honored, supported. It ought to matter, if human life matters, that this potential being is trying to survive, working to get born.
Again, if it were a matter of the mother's right to LIFE against the potential life, then the mother's (which is already assured) might take precedence. However, in most cases, we are talking instead about her emotional and physical sacrifice. If the woman were to become a suicide risk if required to carry to term, that would be a matter for individual exception, based on expert assessment.
But, otherwise, I have to ask you: What kind of person denies life to a potential human being, one made of their own flesh, and almost always present as a result of their own choices because they find bearing it would burden them and require sacrifice? On what ethical basis? And on what do we give them the okay for that?
2 Kat (mail) (web)
2:17 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
On your first point, I agree. Anything I would have had to go through or sacrifice to have my son here and more was worth it, and I knew that throughout my pregnancy. Even though yours was an unplanned pregnancy, do don't say whether it was unwanted.
"You judge the mother's mental welfare and physical condition during pregnancy as so primary that before the developing life can survive on its own its potential for indepdent life is less valuable / important/ granted by right. There, I think we will continue to disagree. I think the potential life, which is not part of her and yet not entirely separate, should take precedence. Her mental discomfort, even suffering, cannot matter more than its right to live. If it is not alive, it's on its way to living. That ought to be respected, honored, supported. It ought to matter, if human life matters, that this potential being is trying to survive, working to get born."
I guess this is where we just disagree. This is something that there is no science behind, it's simply a moral issue. I believe it's not yet alive, though I agree it's on it's way to living. Since it's not yet alive, to me it has no right to life. It is essentially a parasite. Of course, emotionally, I didn't feel that way about my son when he was at that fetus, but that is how I see it objectively.
"But, otherwise, I have to ask you: What kind of person denies life to a potential human being, one made of their own flesh, and almost always present as a result of their own choices because they find bearing it would burden them and require sacrifice? On what ethical basis? And on what do we give them the okay for that?"
On this I too agree, at least to some extent. I think it's terrible that some women use abortion as birth control. The only way I could even see myself considering abortion would be if prenatal tests showed significant birth defects, and even then I don't think I'd do it.
However, while I don't agree with their decision and even think they're wrong, I don't think I have the right to force them to carry the pregnancy to term just because they've made bad choices. I also have to stop and think - do we really want someone who is selfish enough to want an abortion just to save them the burden to be a parent?
3 Larry Turner (mail)
3:12 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart & kat:
It's clear that the issue of abortion is the most highly charged polical/ethical/social/religious issue anyone could currently discuss.
While I agree men cannot fully grasp the dimensions of motherhood, I think it would be unrealistic and unproductive to seek to exclude them from the debate on those kinds of grounds.
As to the question of fetal viability, I would suggest reading the bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton University. Singer points out that viability is an extremely indeterminate state - that modern medicine has been "pushing back" on the point of viabilty for over half a century. As a consequence, we could argue about THAT issue alone and never be able to make conclusive determinations that could not be immediately overturned by the next medical advance.
So the maturity of lung tissue or brain function seems to me to be beside the point.
As a matter of public policy, should parenthood be legally forced on any adult, male or female? Should sexually active human beings decide to procreate based on the dictates of the state?
As a practical issue, will making abortion illegal change very much except making it harder and more dangerous for women to obtain?
The issue becomes even more complex if we consider that an effective hormonal MALE contraceptive could, in the not too distant future, further disentangle human sexual behavior from procreation.
And here is where I think we get to the heart of the matter - that any form of effective "contra - ception" (literally "against conception") changes the dynamics of procreation, human sexual and gender roles, and a vast array of religious, cultural and traditional beleifs about male/female relationships, human sexuality and procreation.
Clinical abortion is but one method human beings can, have and will use to limit thier population. As modern science gives us more different ways to plan parenthood - perhaps the debate will center more on how best to make parenthood a desired outcome for men and women - (and ultimately their children too) - and how to make abortion "safe, legal and very, very rare."
4 Kat (mail) (web)
3:26 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
Larry:
I don't think that men should be excluded from debate about the subject at all. It just seems to me that most of the legistlation on the subject comes from men and that shouldn't be.
"As a matter of public policy, should parenthood be legally forced on any adult, male or female? Should sexually active human beings decide to procreate based on the dictates of the state?"
Parenthood should not be legally forced on anyone. Some will always argue that making abortion illegal wouldn't do that because adoption is available, but that doesn't hold water for me. In a perfect world though, sexually active human beings would be responsible for their actions and prevent unwanted conception.
...make abortion "safe, legal and very, very rare."
We can always hope, can't we. :)
5 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
2:21 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Both of you, Larry and Kat, are approaching this matter with sense and reason, qualities often in short supply in discussions of this highly charged issue.
Like Larry, I also believe that men have an equal right to participate in this social debate and the policies that follow from it, since, although they don't carry children to term, are ours and our baby's fathers, uncles, brothers etc. as well as fellow citizens. Majority opinion must in this, as in other matters, determine the legislative course.
I point out my own gender and experience late in this conversation to show that I do understand the demands placed on women in pregnancy, especially tough pregnancies due to emotional, physical, and circumstantial pressures. Too often the charge is made that those who are against broadly legalized abortion don't understand the suffering pregnant women undergo, or women with unplanned pregnancies, or women who are pregnant when poorly circumstanced. This is not a matter of a lack of sympathy for those women. I have been friends with two women (that I know of) who have had abortions. It is a matter of public policy -- and the thinking that I believe should inform it.
Was my child wanted? Yes, as a human being. In that particular moment in my life? I wouldn't be entirely honest if I said yes. I was having significant marital problems. I was mentally exhausted and physically unwell. But, what mattered was that I was pregnant. I didn't choose the moment especially (I was using two forms of birthcontrol which I'd used effectively for years), but I did have sex. So -- I accept the consequences. Ultimately, my life's better for it.
As for viability, Larry is right that the timetable was pushed back for a number of years due to advances in medical science. 23 weeks has been a hard number for some time (this, btw, from Planned Parenthood). Debates concerning viability are beside the point only in the sense that that number isn't likely to change again for some time (this is, again, mainly due to breathing difficulties). My suggestion about considering brain development instead doesn't speak to viability but how we define what seems legitimately "human" to us.
When Kat writes that a living child is of more value than a forming one, I grow concerned at what I perceive as a delusive split between the two. My living, independent son is the same entity that I carried in me for 37 weeks. They are one continuous organism. If he had died at 10 weeks, my son, the one I now treasure, would not have existed. His loss then would have been easier to bear (I acknowlege Kat's emotional realism there), because I could have only imagined who he would become and how attached to him I would grow. However, to deny that he was as deserving of my sympathy and care at ten weeks as he is now is disturbing -- and I think casuistry.
Should we only accord humanity, and therefore human rights, to those we know? What about those human beings on the other side of the world, dying innocents in Iraq or victims of warlords in Sierra Leone? Should I care about them less because I have never met them? To me, they are nearly as conceptual as an unborn child, their photographs and video impressions as devoid of explanation or inner life as the sonogram images of the baby I saw through my pregnancy.
I want to add that we are not talking, when we talk about rendering most abortion illegal, about unwanted _parenting_. Those women who carry unwanted children to term are not also forced to keep them. We're talking about women carrying unwanted children to term so that those children may have the opportunity to live. If women's thinking about the nature of abortion and their responsibility to their unborn children changed, so too might their emotional responses to carrying unwanted children to term and giving them up for adoption. It might be possible now for women who do so to be perceived as heros rather than as whores (which was unfortunately, historically, too often the case).
I don't pretend that adoption is any magical solution. It carries a significant social burden and very muddy, often unsatisfactory outcomes for the children involved. However, I ask again, is that better than death? Yes.
I have heard women with an unwanted pregnancy say, in life and in television interviews, that they would rather have an abortion than know that their child is out there being raised by strangers. It may be a natural emotional response, but is it a legtimate ground for ending a life in development? Is it the sort of parental thinking -- the unconditional love and concern for the child -- that motivates such a response -- or is it the mother wanting to remove this burden, so that she can get on with her life with no loose ends? By this, I do not mean to suggest that the decision to abort is an easy one for the women who make it. But, I have talked with women who have had abortions, and many of these otherwise good-hearted, feeling women have learned to live with their decision not only through telling themselves they removed tissue rather than a forming child but also through the feeling that they could not have had the life they desired in any other way.
Kat has said that a developing child, embryo or fetus, is a "parasite." That is an all too common and disturbing modern figuration. A parasite simply feeds off its host. It is an invading foreign body. A developing child is conjoined with its mother; it develops from and as a part of her body -- as well as, increasingly, from those introduced elements combined with hers (i.e., father's genetic material), to establish a body of its own. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with its mother. The forming child's presence triggers hormonal changes in the mother, some of which give her lifelong health benefits. It is a healthy, natural process (barring illness or accident), one that women's bodies are designed to do. It is not a disease.
The parasitic analogy brings to mind the epistemological view modern women have been taught about their own social identity and its ontological determination of their bodies. If they inhabit an asexual, equally competitive vehicle for social and career advancement, then any physical force that invades that body must be a parasite. They presume, at some level of the political unconscious, a genderless physical self. This is, I argue, a culturally-induced dysmorphia.
I am not arguing, btw, that women are born reproduction machines in the sense that they must or should produce. Not at all. I am claiming, however, that reproduction is a natural and healthy part of women's physical natures. To represent it as a pathology is distortion, a way of legitimating abortion through semantic manipulation when the fact is that it is a mother chosing to end the life of her developing child (in most cases for emotional rasons) rather than killing an invading foreign body (for plainly reasons of health).
6 Larry Turner (mail)
6:37 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
I can only surmise that the feeling a fetus would be viewed as a parasite would be that the child is unwanted.
What courses should be open to women who have become pregnant - and for whatever reasons of their own - would rather not become a parent?
With an added twist of complexity, the same argument could be made for a male in this situation.
I have shared thoughts with thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart before on sex differences. I cringe at the notion that philosophy could become so twisted in this post-modern world that we could be discussing 1) whether or not women might naturally, probably biologically, long for children and feel fulfilled in the role of a mother; and 2) that abortion is the removal of a "foreign body" from a mothers womb.
I don't want to appear to be like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss and say we live in the best of all possible worlds. What I do want to emphasize is that women will get abortions in great numbers worldwide whether it is readily available and legal or very difficult to obtain and illegal.
I think the humane course is not to try to decide for women in this predicament a priori with intrusive laws and strictures that try to decide what the "ethical" choice for them should be.
Legal, illegal, readily available or scarce, women will decide to abort fetuses worldwide and in great number - especially where other forms of deprevation are rampant for the prospective mothers.
It is only in the last century or so that foodstuffs have become so readily available in the industrialized world that we can suffer from an epidemic of obesity.
Ultimately, the question of how best to limit abortion becomes one of asking if, at some point, human civilization will provide minimum humane economic conditions for the vast majority of human beings? - and perhaps we might then enjoy "an epidemic" of more ethical behavior.
7 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
9:00 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Larry,
I agree with you that we need to pursue the most humane course. An important factor you raise here is what will happen if women are denied the ability to receive safe abortions, those undeniably enabled by legalized abortion. The answer is that women will continue to seek abortions -- in fewer numbers perhaps, but those who do will expose themselves to potential maiming, suffering, and death.
Given improvements in birth control, we might hope that these numbers would be down somewhat from historical highs. Yet, we cannot ignore that this would be a consequence of eliminating the broad legalization of abortion.
Nor can we ignore the fact that already much of the world's population is poorly cared for in terms of basic needs, education, medicine, and so forth. You suggest we ought to focus our attentions there -- before concerning ourselves with adding to the numbers of the underserved is the implication.
I'll address these two last points separately.
As for women suffering from illegal abortions -- it's abominable. The history of it sickens me, to think women suffered in the US and still do suffer in much of the rest of the world (barring the current and former Communist block) those ways. Yes, there will always be otherwise healthy women driven to do something desperate, rather than carry a child to term and face the social consequences. And, there will always be underground activists and profiteers who will provide an equally desperate "solution." So, we come to a difficult dilemma. The potential physical welfare of an already formed life hangs in the balance with the certain death of a forming life. Is it clear who is the most vulnerable member of this equation, the one that a civilized society has the greatest obligation to protect? Only if we deny the potential humanity of the forming life does this become a simple moral equation, with a ready answer. Believe me, I don't want to see women harmed through illegal abortions -- and I know some will be. However, I also don't want to see forming lives ended -- and I'm certain that more of them will die than women will be harmed by illegal abortions.
Now, as for putting our focus on the world populations current needs, you are, of course, correct that our emphasis ought to be there. But how far are you willing to carry this argument?
I have already addressed elsewhere the sinister character of a related argument, one that suggests we ought not add to the already strained public burden by allowing unwanted children to live. Currently, the World Health Organization estimates that 26% of all pregnancies over the world end in abortion, whether legal or illegal. Do we really want our global population to increase by an additional 26% each year -- at what is an estimated 46 million? That is, if all of those pregnancies were viable, brought to term, and the infants survived into later childhood (such figures are likely to significantly erode in developing nations). Now, this sort of reasoning, as I've said before, strikes me as an argument akin to euthanasia or selective breeding. It is a colder calculation than those done by the insurance industry in figuring mortality tables against profit margins.
Of course, your sense of urgency for the living is much kindlier meant. You don't argue against increasing the social burden. You argue for where our energy ought better to be spent. But, if you consider that the "convinced" -- as I am -- believe that a terrible mistake is being made, that millions of forming human beings are being killed with ethical justifications that cannot bear the weight of what is being carried out in their name -- you understand why I do not grant that ground. This is a matter of life and death. It is not simply a question of shifting our emphasis from funding schools over welfare benefits or choosing between endorsing public education or school vouchers. It is not a quiet public policy question. It is as palpable as genocide, even if its target's lack of specific racial, religious, ethnic, or other collective identity renders the use of that term inexact.
Yes, the world had more pressing matters, more concerns for the local and the living and the profitable causes, when Rwanda went down, and Sierra Leone, and Bosnia, and the Sudan, and etc. Believe me, you don't need to advocate for a renewed focus of invested self-interest; we're already inclined toward it.
And, if we are to turn from international to domestic focus, which I believe is more in line with your feeling, then what? We ought to give our resources, our advocacy, our care to the welfare of the children already born who, granted, need so much more than we are already offering. Because -- we have only so much compassion in us? Given a limited amount of public attention and concern, we ought to point it where it can do the most important good? Such an argument has been made about the division of media resources to equally good causes: breast cancer competing with heart disease competing with Tsunami victims, etc. Yet, people who feel the importance of those causes continue to scrabble to be heard, to be answered, by members of the public who are concerned for the local, national, world, human, and animal communities. We don't argue that the breast cancer people should stop whining about women dying in the US because so many millions are dying of AIDS in Africa. Yet, here you are suggesting that we shift our attention from the planned death of children in development, approximately a million or so in the US each year. No, we ought to save our concern for the living children alone. Because we treasure children. After they are out of the uterus, beyond 23 weeks or 28 or whatever your line for viability is. Before that, they are something altogether different -- empty potential, unwanted tissue, inedible meat, perhaps with some added research value.
If we want to get to such a basic level of support for abortion rights, we might as well resort to arguments of nature: studies of rats or mice or wolves that destroy their own young when resources are scarce and territory is contested (whether the mother devours the newborns or an invasive male slays them and / or consumes their remains). Perhaps such an argument could convince those who argue in abortion's favor for the third world (and that makes the human rights advocate in me sick -- I say offer it in the Swiftian sense), but what about in the first world, where the competition for resources is rarely about literal survival?
8 Larry Turner (mail)
9:55 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart
We might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Although I must say it is a pleasure to be able to correspond directly - having enjoyed your postings very much on other sites.
You raise the added issue of infanticide or sheer abandonment - and taken together, doesn't it seem that humans will control fertility by horribly drastic measures - extreme for the fetus, of course, but also VERY extreme for the mothers?
9 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
9:55 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Just as an aside -- Larry wrote, "I can only surmise that the feeling a fetus would be viewed as a parasite would be that the child is unwanted."
Yes, of course. The question is why so many women have adopted this particular way of representing the unwanted child growing inside them. I have suggested it has to do with a particular contemporary understanding women have -- cum second wave feminism -- of the nature of their bodies as an androgynous or perhaps even masculine-identified cypher that is invaded by an outside organism when an unwanted pregnancy occurs. They don't conceive of it as a natural process of their womanly bodies.
Men have a different set of figurations for the experience of unwanted biological fatherhood.
The techniques I'm using here are standard Cultural Studies practice -- humanities stuff.
10 Kat (mail) (web)
11:56 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
The reason I used the term parasite is because by definition, that's basically what a fetus is.
From wikipedia: A parasite is an organism that lives in or on the living tissue of a host organism at the expense of it.
Of course I didn't emotionally feel that my son was a parasite as a fetus! But the fetus develops at the expense of the mother. I'm pretty sure that it isn't until the birth and breastfeeding that the mother reaps benefits (i.e. reduced chance of getting breast cancer).
I do "conceive of it as a natural process of their womanly bodies". This is why I also chose natural childbirth - pregnancy and labor are things that our bodies are made to do.
When it comes down to it, what I'm really trying to say is that in giving rights to a fetus that is not yet a living person, you are taking away the basic rights of the woman. The place that I personally draw the line is when removing the fetus isn't enough to end the pregnancy. When removing the fetus produces a baby that moves on its own, breathes (or tries to) on its own, etc and that baby has to be injured separate from the removal, that's too far.
I am not saying that a fetus before this point is nothing more than a bit of meat - I am simply saying that because it isn't alive yet it shouldn't be given rights that trump the living mother's.
11 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:23 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Yes, we'll all three have to leave the discussion continuing to disagree. But, it's been enjoyable and enlightening.
I do see Kat's literal point about the fetus being conceived of as a parasite. However, the term is often also defined with the qualifying phrase "to the detriment," "to the disadvantage," or "causing it [the host] harm." The parasite is also universally conceived of -- in technical circles -- as an organism foreign to the host, not one derived from part of its tissue. An embryo or fetus is, quite literally, comprised in part of maternal tissue. (I've also suggested fetal development gives women some continuing health benefits, to shore up my sense that there is conjoined or symbiotic relationship between the two and that the relationship is healthy and not pathological, as parasitism always is.)
And, when you say, Kat, that the forming child's rights don't weigh as heavily in the balance as the already born and independent mothers, then I say that you need to assign different weights to different kinds of rights. The right to privacy and property cannot supercede the right to life. Unless you suppose that by life, we mean some special status of life -- life with a certain degree of quality or independence -- and therefore assume such a status of life cannot be granted to something that is quite literally living even if we will not call it human yet. And then I wonder how far we can apply that to the disabled who cannot care for themselves or live on their own without mechanical assistance.
The rub for you is a feminist one, as it is for many women. We don't want anyone telling us what to do with our bodies. That happened for too long historically -- and we don't want to give any ground, especially over our physical self-determination.
We are so concerned with our rights as fully formed adults that we are willing to sacrifice those of others who have not yet had the chance to gain that status. And about half of them would have been women, too. In some parts of the world (India, for example, and China), even more than half of abortions are female (gender settles in around 12 weeks, btw) -- because, you know, daughters are just not as desirable as sons. Shame those aborted girls won't get to practice these hard-won rights we have.
And as to Larry's point that I've raised "the added issue of infanticide or sheer abandonment - and taken together, doesn't it seem that humans will control fertility by horribly drastic measures - extreme for the fetus, of course, but also VERY extreme for the mothers?" -- I say, certainly. I consider women seeking illegal abortions to have been driven to an extreme, drastic measure. And there's no question that women historically went to such lengths to rid themselves of unwanted children. Medical science has enabled women to shift what used to be post-birth exposure, infanticide, abandonment, and so on (when primitive herbal and mechanical practices failed) to a quiet death pre-birth. Yet, I don't deny that there's an emotional cost to participating in that quiet moment when, as Hemingway described it in "Hills Like White Elephants," the doctor lets "the air in."
Just one qualification to the correspondence between modern abortion and previous eliminations of unwanted children Larry draws: In my experience as a textual historian, I've found such practices were largely regarded, in Europe at least -- which is my domain of expertise (esp. the UK), with horror and by the nineteenth century seemed the very stuff of nightmares. You know, historically, people loved their children just as we do -- even given hard times and different understandings of children, childhood, and parenting practices. Thomas Hardy (in _Jude the Obsure_) has the little boy Father Time kill his tiny siblings to show how crazed he's become by his exposure to the cruel, hard world that doesn't seem to want them anyway. Perhaps the willful murder of infants then was more of a surprise, granted how many died anyway from accident and disease, medical science being what it was. Poverty was so grinding and conditions so awful that it took care of children well enough on its own, without human assistance.
But, back to this issue of women's suffering in their effort to control fertility Larry raises. Granted that effective birth control exists to prevent most unwanted pregnancies (not all to be sure, my own experience as case in point), we don't want to grant that abortion is actually a regular technology for women to control their fertility, do we? That's awfully close to the slurring rhetoric (which I don't condone) that women use abortion as a method of birth control. Because abortion, as many pro-choice advocates will say, is meant as an unfortunate last resort. The control of fertility may now largely be a matter of prevention rather than "cure," especially when that cure means the ending of a life already under construction.
12 Larry Turner (mail)
12:33 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
My fellow bloggers:
In Kat's defense - I don't think she meant parasite in a strict, biologically defined way - but as an extended circumstance of the definition of a fetus - which she cites.
In a very real sense, the rights of people who are "already here" will always trump the rights of "people" who aren't - we can debate the ethics and pass as many laws as we want.
13 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:47 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
I agree, Larry. When I take apart Kat's definition of a parasite, it doesn't hold up. She means it, I think, more as a way of saying the developing organism is living off the woman and so should be hers to dispose of as she will. It isn't an entity in its own right, one that merits the protection of our society. (One problem with this, as I've said earlier, is that it's dangerously close to Social Darwinist thinking, in which the definition of parasite may be applied to the social, as well as the maternal, body.)
As I've argued earlier, I find the argument that those who are here trump those who aren't questionable.
If by those "who aren't here" we meant -- as in more conventional conversation -- our not-yet-conceived future generations, well, even then I think we've got an obligation to give them an eco-system that's inhabitable and a world politic that isn't crazy mad impoverished and at war and a homeland whatever it is that's not sunk into a depression and affords no kind of living or any civil liberties or human rights. Well, you get the drift. We've a responsibility to future generations -- even though they aren't here, yet. Only in a time of genuine crisis do I believe we can legitimately push that charge aside to do what's best for us, the presently living, alone.
In this case, I do believe these developing humans are more here than in the sense either Larry or Kat will accept. And even though they are also not quite here, they are our most immediate future generation. When they inherit the earth, they are inheriting it much too literally for my conscience to accept.
14 Larry Turner (mail)
4:21 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Well - I commend my fellow bloggers -
On the most heated of topics we could have chosen - much more light than heat.
15 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
4:24 am, Feb 9, 2005 PST (edit) (delete)
I second that (e)motion, Larry :).
Kat kicked us off with this reply to my original argument:
2005-02-07 11:17 AM
Fetal Viability
I often read The Foul Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart's journal and since he (I think?) doesn't have comments on his journal I wanted to mull over his most recent entry here. Abortion is a topic which is very important to me. I really think this a topic men cannot understand because pregnancy is something they can never experience. Someone forcing you to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term isn't a treat to them. Abortion is such a complex topic because pregnancy and childbirth are also complex.
Childbirth is brutal. The only way to get through it emotionally and physically intact is to see it as a right of passage. Whatever the method, the baby isn't coming out without a great deal of pain, and that pain doesn't end with the birth. To a woman who wants to be a mother and wants the baby inside her, it's worth it. It's something she has to go through to get what she wants. To a woman who doesn't want that child, forcing her to go through it is tantamout to torture.
This is why there is such a difference in the status of an embryo based on whether or not the mother wants it. Yes, a miscarriage at even 4 weeks is mourned. But I believe that even a woman who has had multiple miscarriages would agree that losing an early pregnancy is not the same a losing a living child.
Even though I don't believe that this early it is a life, as a mother I know that what it is is potential for a life. You know that, unless something goes wrong, you will be holding a beautiful baby in 9 months. You plan for it, and think of names, imagine what the terrible two's will be like and wonder what that child will be whey they grow up. But you still know it's not that baby yet.
I don't think abortion is a good option. It would be far better to prevent the pregnancy than to end it once it's begun. In the journal I mentioned, he discusses where viability actually lies. He discusses whether we should determine viability based on lung development or brain activity. To me, it's simple. If taking the fetus from the mother's body would produce a living person that has to be killed, that's murder. If the fetus could not survive outside the mother's body, it's not yet an individual. I honestly don't know at how many weeks this change occurs, but that's my definition of viability.
_____________
15 Comments:
1 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:44 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
Glad to see you posting on this, Kat.
First, I'm a woman. And, I'm a woman who has endured what was labeled by my perinatologist as an "extreme, high-risk" pregnancy. Both I and my child almost died at various points. The pregnancy, moreover, was unplanned. And, my husband lost his job during the pregnancy, and my insurance went haywire, was revoked, then reinstated. His former employer even stole our Cobra check. My coworkers had to throw us a baby shower because we couldn't afford to set up a nursery. I cried because we didn't have the money to make it pretty or even to put it in a separate room in the dinky, nasty, rented house. Oh, and my parents disowned me after the baby was born becuase I wouldn't let them unload their emotional baggage on him. So, I did it all without family support -- even after an emergency c-section that went into a post-operative infection and has left me with permanent damage to my left leg. So, I do understand what you are talking about when you speak of the demands of pregnancy.
Even if I had known I was in for that kind of life-threatening, depression-instilling ride (I had to be treated for major depressive disorder after -- nearly hospitalized for it), I would still say that the life of my child, potential child though he was, was worth my sacrifice. That, even if I had not known how incredible he would turn out (I risked my life to save his before we'd "met"); fortunately, I've had the luxury and luck to know him.
Second, however, I don't think we can decide about abortion on an emotional basis like this. We must decide based on ethical principles that we use to make decisions for the social good.
You've said that you agree, effectively, with viability at 23 weeks if machine support doesn't muddy your definition of the child's ability to live independently and 28 weeks if it does (that's the earliest we can hope for that level of lung development). Now that's a rational standard we can discuss.
You judge the mother's mental welfare and physical condition during pregnancy as so primary that before the developing life can survive on its own its potential for indepdent life is less valuable / important/ granted by right. There, I think we will continue to disagree. I think the potential life, which is not part of her and yet not entirely separate, should take precedence. Her mental discomfort, even suffering, cannot matter more than its right to live. If it is not alive, it's on its way to living. That ought to be respected, honored, supported. It ought to matter, if human life matters, that this potential being is trying to survive, working to get born.
Again, if it were a matter of the mother's right to LIFE against the potential life, then the mother's (which is already assured) might take precedence. However, in most cases, we are talking instead about her emotional and physical sacrifice. If the woman were to become a suicide risk if required to carry to term, that would be a matter for individual exception, based on expert assessment.
But, otherwise, I have to ask you: What kind of person denies life to a potential human being, one made of their own flesh, and almost always present as a result of their own choices because they find bearing it would burden them and require sacrifice? On what ethical basis? And on what do we give them the okay for that?
2 Kat (mail) (web)
2:17 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
On your first point, I agree. Anything I would have had to go through or sacrifice to have my son here and more was worth it, and I knew that throughout my pregnancy. Even though yours was an unplanned pregnancy, do don't say whether it was unwanted.
"You judge the mother's mental welfare and physical condition during pregnancy as so primary that before the developing life can survive on its own its potential for indepdent life is less valuable / important/ granted by right. There, I think we will continue to disagree. I think the potential life, which is not part of her and yet not entirely separate, should take precedence. Her mental discomfort, even suffering, cannot matter more than its right to live. If it is not alive, it's on its way to living. That ought to be respected, honored, supported. It ought to matter, if human life matters, that this potential being is trying to survive, working to get born."
I guess this is where we just disagree. This is something that there is no science behind, it's simply a moral issue. I believe it's not yet alive, though I agree it's on it's way to living. Since it's not yet alive, to me it has no right to life. It is essentially a parasite. Of course, emotionally, I didn't feel that way about my son when he was at that fetus, but that is how I see it objectively.
"But, otherwise, I have to ask you: What kind of person denies life to a potential human being, one made of their own flesh, and almost always present as a result of their own choices because they find bearing it would burden them and require sacrifice? On what ethical basis? And on what do we give them the okay for that?"
On this I too agree, at least to some extent. I think it's terrible that some women use abortion as birth control. The only way I could even see myself considering abortion would be if prenatal tests showed significant birth defects, and even then I don't think I'd do it.
However, while I don't agree with their decision and even think they're wrong, I don't think I have the right to force them to carry the pregnancy to term just because they've made bad choices. I also have to stop and think - do we really want someone who is selfish enough to want an abortion just to save them the burden to be a parent?
3 Larry Turner (mail)
3:12 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart & kat:
It's clear that the issue of abortion is the most highly charged polical/ethical/social/religious issue anyone could currently discuss.
While I agree men cannot fully grasp the dimensions of motherhood, I think it would be unrealistic and unproductive to seek to exclude them from the debate on those kinds of grounds.
As to the question of fetal viability, I would suggest reading the bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton University. Singer points out that viability is an extremely indeterminate state - that modern medicine has been "pushing back" on the point of viabilty for over half a century. As a consequence, we could argue about THAT issue alone and never be able to make conclusive determinations that could not be immediately overturned by the next medical advance.
So the maturity of lung tissue or brain function seems to me to be beside the point.
As a matter of public policy, should parenthood be legally forced on any adult, male or female? Should sexually active human beings decide to procreate based on the dictates of the state?
As a practical issue, will making abortion illegal change very much except making it harder and more dangerous for women to obtain?
The issue becomes even more complex if we consider that an effective hormonal MALE contraceptive could, in the not too distant future, further disentangle human sexual behavior from procreation.
And here is where I think we get to the heart of the matter - that any form of effective "contra - ception" (literally "against conception") changes the dynamics of procreation, human sexual and gender roles, and a vast array of religious, cultural and traditional beleifs about male/female relationships, human sexuality and procreation.
Clinical abortion is but one method human beings can, have and will use to limit thier population. As modern science gives us more different ways to plan parenthood - perhaps the debate will center more on how best to make parenthood a desired outcome for men and women - (and ultimately their children too) - and how to make abortion "safe, legal and very, very rare."
4 Kat (mail) (web)
3:26 pm, Feb 7, 2005 PST
Larry:
I don't think that men should be excluded from debate about the subject at all. It just seems to me that most of the legistlation on the subject comes from men and that shouldn't be.
"As a matter of public policy, should parenthood be legally forced on any adult, male or female? Should sexually active human beings decide to procreate based on the dictates of the state?"
Parenthood should not be legally forced on anyone. Some will always argue that making abortion illegal wouldn't do that because adoption is available, but that doesn't hold water for me. In a perfect world though, sexually active human beings would be responsible for their actions and prevent unwanted conception.
...make abortion "safe, legal and very, very rare."
We can always hope, can't we. :)
5 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
2:21 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Both of you, Larry and Kat, are approaching this matter with sense and reason, qualities often in short supply in discussions of this highly charged issue.
Like Larry, I also believe that men have an equal right to participate in this social debate and the policies that follow from it, since, although they don't carry children to term, are ours and our baby's fathers, uncles, brothers etc. as well as fellow citizens. Majority opinion must in this, as in other matters, determine the legislative course.
I point out my own gender and experience late in this conversation to show that I do understand the demands placed on women in pregnancy, especially tough pregnancies due to emotional, physical, and circumstantial pressures. Too often the charge is made that those who are against broadly legalized abortion don't understand the suffering pregnant women undergo, or women with unplanned pregnancies, or women who are pregnant when poorly circumstanced. This is not a matter of a lack of sympathy for those women. I have been friends with two women (that I know of) who have had abortions. It is a matter of public policy -- and the thinking that I believe should inform it.
Was my child wanted? Yes, as a human being. In that particular moment in my life? I wouldn't be entirely honest if I said yes. I was having significant marital problems. I was mentally exhausted and physically unwell. But, what mattered was that I was pregnant. I didn't choose the moment especially (I was using two forms of birthcontrol which I'd used effectively for years), but I did have sex. So -- I accept the consequences. Ultimately, my life's better for it.
As for viability, Larry is right that the timetable was pushed back for a number of years due to advances in medical science. 23 weeks has been a hard number for some time (this, btw, from Planned Parenthood). Debates concerning viability are beside the point only in the sense that that number isn't likely to change again for some time (this is, again, mainly due to breathing difficulties). My suggestion about considering brain development instead doesn't speak to viability but how we define what seems legitimately "human" to us.
When Kat writes that a living child is of more value than a forming one, I grow concerned at what I perceive as a delusive split between the two. My living, independent son is the same entity that I carried in me for 37 weeks. They are one continuous organism. If he had died at 10 weeks, my son, the one I now treasure, would not have existed. His loss then would have been easier to bear (I acknowlege Kat's emotional realism there), because I could have only imagined who he would become and how attached to him I would grow. However, to deny that he was as deserving of my sympathy and care at ten weeks as he is now is disturbing -- and I think casuistry.
Should we only accord humanity, and therefore human rights, to those we know? What about those human beings on the other side of the world, dying innocents in Iraq or victims of warlords in Sierra Leone? Should I care about them less because I have never met them? To me, they are nearly as conceptual as an unborn child, their photographs and video impressions as devoid of explanation or inner life as the sonogram images of the baby I saw through my pregnancy.
I want to add that we are not talking, when we talk about rendering most abortion illegal, about unwanted _parenting_. Those women who carry unwanted children to term are not also forced to keep them. We're talking about women carrying unwanted children to term so that those children may have the opportunity to live. If women's thinking about the nature of abortion and their responsibility to their unborn children changed, so too might their emotional responses to carrying unwanted children to term and giving them up for adoption. It might be possible now for women who do so to be perceived as heros rather than as whores (which was unfortunately, historically, too often the case).
I don't pretend that adoption is any magical solution. It carries a significant social burden and very muddy, often unsatisfactory outcomes for the children involved. However, I ask again, is that better than death? Yes.
I have heard women with an unwanted pregnancy say, in life and in television interviews, that they would rather have an abortion than know that their child is out there being raised by strangers. It may be a natural emotional response, but is it a legtimate ground for ending a life in development? Is it the sort of parental thinking -- the unconditional love and concern for the child -- that motivates such a response -- or is it the mother wanting to remove this burden, so that she can get on with her life with no loose ends? By this, I do not mean to suggest that the decision to abort is an easy one for the women who make it. But, I have talked with women who have had abortions, and many of these otherwise good-hearted, feeling women have learned to live with their decision not only through telling themselves they removed tissue rather than a forming child but also through the feeling that they could not have had the life they desired in any other way.
Kat has said that a developing child, embryo or fetus, is a "parasite." That is an all too common and disturbing modern figuration. A parasite simply feeds off its host. It is an invading foreign body. A developing child is conjoined with its mother; it develops from and as a part of her body -- as well as, increasingly, from those introduced elements combined with hers (i.e., father's genetic material), to establish a body of its own. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with its mother. The forming child's presence triggers hormonal changes in the mother, some of which give her lifelong health benefits. It is a healthy, natural process (barring illness or accident), one that women's bodies are designed to do. It is not a disease.
The parasitic analogy brings to mind the epistemological view modern women have been taught about their own social identity and its ontological determination of their bodies. If they inhabit an asexual, equally competitive vehicle for social and career advancement, then any physical force that invades that body must be a parasite. They presume, at some level of the political unconscious, a genderless physical self. This is, I argue, a culturally-induced dysmorphia.
I am not arguing, btw, that women are born reproduction machines in the sense that they must or should produce. Not at all. I am claiming, however, that reproduction is a natural and healthy part of women's physical natures. To represent it as a pathology is distortion, a way of legitimating abortion through semantic manipulation when the fact is that it is a mother chosing to end the life of her developing child (in most cases for emotional rasons) rather than killing an invading foreign body (for plainly reasons of health).
6 Larry Turner (mail)
6:37 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
I can only surmise that the feeling a fetus would be viewed as a parasite would be that the child is unwanted.
What courses should be open to women who have become pregnant - and for whatever reasons of their own - would rather not become a parent?
With an added twist of complexity, the same argument could be made for a male in this situation.
I have shared thoughts with thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart before on sex differences. I cringe at the notion that philosophy could become so twisted in this post-modern world that we could be discussing 1) whether or not women might naturally, probably biologically, long for children and feel fulfilled in the role of a mother; and 2) that abortion is the removal of a "foreign body" from a mothers womb.
I don't want to appear to be like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss and say we live in the best of all possible worlds. What I do want to emphasize is that women will get abortions in great numbers worldwide whether it is readily available and legal or very difficult to obtain and illegal.
I think the humane course is not to try to decide for women in this predicament a priori with intrusive laws and strictures that try to decide what the "ethical" choice for them should be.
Legal, illegal, readily available or scarce, women will decide to abort fetuses worldwide and in great number - especially where other forms of deprevation are rampant for the prospective mothers.
It is only in the last century or so that foodstuffs have become so readily available in the industrialized world that we can suffer from an epidemic of obesity.
Ultimately, the question of how best to limit abortion becomes one of asking if, at some point, human civilization will provide minimum humane economic conditions for the vast majority of human beings? - and perhaps we might then enjoy "an epidemic" of more ethical behavior.
7 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
9:00 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Larry,
I agree with you that we need to pursue the most humane course. An important factor you raise here is what will happen if women are denied the ability to receive safe abortions, those undeniably enabled by legalized abortion. The answer is that women will continue to seek abortions -- in fewer numbers perhaps, but those who do will expose themselves to potential maiming, suffering, and death.
Given improvements in birth control, we might hope that these numbers would be down somewhat from historical highs. Yet, we cannot ignore that this would be a consequence of eliminating the broad legalization of abortion.
Nor can we ignore the fact that already much of the world's population is poorly cared for in terms of basic needs, education, medicine, and so forth. You suggest we ought to focus our attentions there -- before concerning ourselves with adding to the numbers of the underserved is the implication.
I'll address these two last points separately.
As for women suffering from illegal abortions -- it's abominable. The history of it sickens me, to think women suffered in the US and still do suffer in much of the rest of the world (barring the current and former Communist block) those ways. Yes, there will always be otherwise healthy women driven to do something desperate, rather than carry a child to term and face the social consequences. And, there will always be underground activists and profiteers who will provide an equally desperate "solution." So, we come to a difficult dilemma. The potential physical welfare of an already formed life hangs in the balance with the certain death of a forming life. Is it clear who is the most vulnerable member of this equation, the one that a civilized society has the greatest obligation to protect? Only if we deny the potential humanity of the forming life does this become a simple moral equation, with a ready answer. Believe me, I don't want to see women harmed through illegal abortions -- and I know some will be. However, I also don't want to see forming lives ended -- and I'm certain that more of them will die than women will be harmed by illegal abortions.
Now, as for putting our focus on the world populations current needs, you are, of course, correct that our emphasis ought to be there. But how far are you willing to carry this argument?
I have already addressed elsewhere the sinister character of a related argument, one that suggests we ought not add to the already strained public burden by allowing unwanted children to live. Currently, the World Health Organization estimates that 26% of all pregnancies over the world end in abortion, whether legal or illegal. Do we really want our global population to increase by an additional 26% each year -- at what is an estimated 46 million? That is, if all of those pregnancies were viable, brought to term, and the infants survived into later childhood (such figures are likely to significantly erode in developing nations). Now, this sort of reasoning, as I've said before, strikes me as an argument akin to euthanasia or selective breeding. It is a colder calculation than those done by the insurance industry in figuring mortality tables against profit margins.
Of course, your sense of urgency for the living is much kindlier meant. You don't argue against increasing the social burden. You argue for where our energy ought better to be spent. But, if you consider that the "convinced" -- as I am -- believe that a terrible mistake is being made, that millions of forming human beings are being killed with ethical justifications that cannot bear the weight of what is being carried out in their name -- you understand why I do not grant that ground. This is a matter of life and death. It is not simply a question of shifting our emphasis from funding schools over welfare benefits or choosing between endorsing public education or school vouchers. It is not a quiet public policy question. It is as palpable as genocide, even if its target's lack of specific racial, religious, ethnic, or other collective identity renders the use of that term inexact.
Yes, the world had more pressing matters, more concerns for the local and the living and the profitable causes, when Rwanda went down, and Sierra Leone, and Bosnia, and the Sudan, and etc. Believe me, you don't need to advocate for a renewed focus of invested self-interest; we're already inclined toward it.
And, if we are to turn from international to domestic focus, which I believe is more in line with your feeling, then what? We ought to give our resources, our advocacy, our care to the welfare of the children already born who, granted, need so much more than we are already offering. Because -- we have only so much compassion in us? Given a limited amount of public attention and concern, we ought to point it where it can do the most important good? Such an argument has been made about the division of media resources to equally good causes: breast cancer competing with heart disease competing with Tsunami victims, etc. Yet, people who feel the importance of those causes continue to scrabble to be heard, to be answered, by members of the public who are concerned for the local, national, world, human, and animal communities. We don't argue that the breast cancer people should stop whining about women dying in the US because so many millions are dying of AIDS in Africa. Yet, here you are suggesting that we shift our attention from the planned death of children in development, approximately a million or so in the US each year. No, we ought to save our concern for the living children alone. Because we treasure children. After they are out of the uterus, beyond 23 weeks or 28 or whatever your line for viability is. Before that, they are something altogether different -- empty potential, unwanted tissue, inedible meat, perhaps with some added research value.
If we want to get to such a basic level of support for abortion rights, we might as well resort to arguments of nature: studies of rats or mice or wolves that destroy their own young when resources are scarce and territory is contested (whether the mother devours the newborns or an invasive male slays them and / or consumes their remains). Perhaps such an argument could convince those who argue in abortion's favor for the third world (and that makes the human rights advocate in me sick -- I say offer it in the Swiftian sense), but what about in the first world, where the competition for resources is rarely about literal survival?
8 Larry Turner (mail)
9:55 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart
We might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Although I must say it is a pleasure to be able to correspond directly - having enjoyed your postings very much on other sites.
You raise the added issue of infanticide or sheer abandonment - and taken together, doesn't it seem that humans will control fertility by horribly drastic measures - extreme for the fetus, of course, but also VERY extreme for the mothers?
9 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
9:55 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Just as an aside -- Larry wrote, "I can only surmise that the feeling a fetus would be viewed as a parasite would be that the child is unwanted."
Yes, of course. The question is why so many women have adopted this particular way of representing the unwanted child growing inside them. I have suggested it has to do with a particular contemporary understanding women have -- cum second wave feminism -- of the nature of their bodies as an androgynous or perhaps even masculine-identified cypher that is invaded by an outside organism when an unwanted pregnancy occurs. They don't conceive of it as a natural process of their womanly bodies.
Men have a different set of figurations for the experience of unwanted biological fatherhood.
The techniques I'm using here are standard Cultural Studies practice -- humanities stuff.
10 Kat (mail) (web)
11:56 am, Feb 8, 2005 PST
The reason I used the term parasite is because by definition, that's basically what a fetus is.
From wikipedia: A parasite is an organism that lives in or on the living tissue of a host organism at the expense of it.
Of course I didn't emotionally feel that my son was a parasite as a fetus! But the fetus develops at the expense of the mother. I'm pretty sure that it isn't until the birth and breastfeeding that the mother reaps benefits (i.e. reduced chance of getting breast cancer).
I do "conceive of it as a natural process of their womanly bodies". This is why I also chose natural childbirth - pregnancy and labor are things that our bodies are made to do.
When it comes down to it, what I'm really trying to say is that in giving rights to a fetus that is not yet a living person, you are taking away the basic rights of the woman. The place that I personally draw the line is when removing the fetus isn't enough to end the pregnancy. When removing the fetus produces a baby that moves on its own, breathes (or tries to) on its own, etc and that baby has to be injured separate from the removal, that's too far.
I am not saying that a fetus before this point is nothing more than a bit of meat - I am simply saying that because it isn't alive yet it shouldn't be given rights that trump the living mother's.
11 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:23 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Yes, we'll all three have to leave the discussion continuing to disagree. But, it's been enjoyable and enlightening.
I do see Kat's literal point about the fetus being conceived of as a parasite. However, the term is often also defined with the qualifying phrase "to the detriment," "to the disadvantage," or "causing it [the host] harm." The parasite is also universally conceived of -- in technical circles -- as an organism foreign to the host, not one derived from part of its tissue. An embryo or fetus is, quite literally, comprised in part of maternal tissue. (I've also suggested fetal development gives women some continuing health benefits, to shore up my sense that there is conjoined or symbiotic relationship between the two and that the relationship is healthy and not pathological, as parasitism always is.)
And, when you say, Kat, that the forming child's rights don't weigh as heavily in the balance as the already born and independent mothers, then I say that you need to assign different weights to different kinds of rights. The right to privacy and property cannot supercede the right to life. Unless you suppose that by life, we mean some special status of life -- life with a certain degree of quality or independence -- and therefore assume such a status of life cannot be granted to something that is quite literally living even if we will not call it human yet. And then I wonder how far we can apply that to the disabled who cannot care for themselves or live on their own without mechanical assistance.
The rub for you is a feminist one, as it is for many women. We don't want anyone telling us what to do with our bodies. That happened for too long historically -- and we don't want to give any ground, especially over our physical self-determination.
We are so concerned with our rights as fully formed adults that we are willing to sacrifice those of others who have not yet had the chance to gain that status. And about half of them would have been women, too. In some parts of the world (India, for example, and China), even more than half of abortions are female (gender settles in around 12 weeks, btw) -- because, you know, daughters are just not as desirable as sons. Shame those aborted girls won't get to practice these hard-won rights we have.
And as to Larry's point that I've raised "the added issue of infanticide or sheer abandonment - and taken together, doesn't it seem that humans will control fertility by horribly drastic measures - extreme for the fetus, of course, but also VERY extreme for the mothers?" -- I say, certainly. I consider women seeking illegal abortions to have been driven to an extreme, drastic measure. And there's no question that women historically went to such lengths to rid themselves of unwanted children. Medical science has enabled women to shift what used to be post-birth exposure, infanticide, abandonment, and so on (when primitive herbal and mechanical practices failed) to a quiet death pre-birth. Yet, I don't deny that there's an emotional cost to participating in that quiet moment when, as Hemingway described it in "Hills Like White Elephants," the doctor lets "the air in."
Just one qualification to the correspondence between modern abortion and previous eliminations of unwanted children Larry draws: In my experience as a textual historian, I've found such practices were largely regarded, in Europe at least -- which is my domain of expertise (esp. the UK), with horror and by the nineteenth century seemed the very stuff of nightmares. You know, historically, people loved their children just as we do -- even given hard times and different understandings of children, childhood, and parenting practices. Thomas Hardy (in _Jude the Obsure_) has the little boy Father Time kill his tiny siblings to show how crazed he's become by his exposure to the cruel, hard world that doesn't seem to want them anyway. Perhaps the willful murder of infants then was more of a surprise, granted how many died anyway from accident and disease, medical science being what it was. Poverty was so grinding and conditions so awful that it took care of children well enough on its own, without human assistance.
But, back to this issue of women's suffering in their effort to control fertility Larry raises. Granted that effective birth control exists to prevent most unwanted pregnancies (not all to be sure, my own experience as case in point), we don't want to grant that abortion is actually a regular technology for women to control their fertility, do we? That's awfully close to the slurring rhetoric (which I don't condone) that women use abortion as a method of birth control. Because abortion, as many pro-choice advocates will say, is meant as an unfortunate last resort. The control of fertility may now largely be a matter of prevention rather than "cure," especially when that cure means the ending of a life already under construction.
12 Larry Turner (mail)
12:33 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
My fellow bloggers:
In Kat's defense - I don't think she meant parasite in a strict, biologically defined way - but as an extended circumstance of the definition of a fetus - which she cites.
In a very real sense, the rights of people who are "already here" will always trump the rights of "people" who aren't - we can debate the ethics and pass as many laws as we want.
13 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
12:47 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
I agree, Larry. When I take apart Kat's definition of a parasite, it doesn't hold up. She means it, I think, more as a way of saying the developing organism is living off the woman and so should be hers to dispose of as she will. It isn't an entity in its own right, one that merits the protection of our society. (One problem with this, as I've said earlier, is that it's dangerously close to Social Darwinist thinking, in which the definition of parasite may be applied to the social, as well as the maternal, body.)
As I've argued earlier, I find the argument that those who are here trump those who aren't questionable.
If by those "who aren't here" we meant -- as in more conventional conversation -- our not-yet-conceived future generations, well, even then I think we've got an obligation to give them an eco-system that's inhabitable and a world politic that isn't crazy mad impoverished and at war and a homeland whatever it is that's not sunk into a depression and affords no kind of living or any civil liberties or human rights. Well, you get the drift. We've a responsibility to future generations -- even though they aren't here, yet. Only in a time of genuine crisis do I believe we can legitimately push that charge aside to do what's best for us, the presently living, alone.
In this case, I do believe these developing humans are more here than in the sense either Larry or Kat will accept. And even though they are also not quite here, they are our most immediate future generation. When they inherit the earth, they are inheriting it much too literally for my conscience to accept.
14 Larry Turner (mail)
4:21 pm, Feb 8, 2005 PST
Well - I commend my fellow bloggers -
On the most heated of topics we could have chosen - much more light than heat.
15 thefoulragandboneshopoftheheart (mail) (web)
4:24 am, Feb 9, 2005 PST (edit) (delete)
I second that (e)motion, Larry :).
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