[O]pponents of abortion have split over South Dakota's approach, a fact that [Governor Michael] Rounds acknowledged in recent weeks as he weighed whether to sign the legislation.I think Rounds and others sense that they are making a terrible misstep. The very harshness of this law will remind ordinary people why they have quietly, over the years, accepted the individual's right to make a private decision about whether to continue a pregnancy. More modest efforts at constraining the right may have been tolerated. But this remorseless intrusion on the individual should backfire on abortion opponents. Even if they manage to get the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade -- and I don't think they will -- the political support for abortion rights should make that victory Pyrrhic.
Some, including those who led efforts to pass the ban in South Dakota, said they considered this the ideal time to return the central question of Roe to the Supreme Court. State Representative Roger Hunt, who sponsored the bill in South Dakota, pointed to the appointments of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both conservatives, and what he described as the "strong possibility" of the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in the near future and the naming of a conservative as his successor.
"This is our time," Mr. Hunt said on Monday.
Other national anti-abortion groups, though, have quietly disagreed with the timing, pressing instead to cut down on abortions by creating restrictions that may be more palatable to a wider audience, restrictions like parental and spousal notification laws and clinic regulations. If the Supreme Court upholds Roe, they have argued, the damage for those opposed to abortion rights will be grave.
"As much as this isn't the best strategic thing to do, it's there and it's the law of South Dakota now," said Daniel S. McConchie, vice president of Americans United for Life, another group. "We'll defend our position now — which is to oppose abortion."
Cristina Minniti, a spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee, said no one from her organization was available to be interviewed on the South Dakota law. Instead, she issued a one paragraph statement which stated, in part: "Currently there are at least five votes, a majority, on the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade."
Mr. Rounds, who became governor in 2003 after serving in the South Dakota Senate for a decade, declined to speak with reporters after the signing. In an earlier interview, he said that he personally felt uncertain about the timing of a challenge to Roe, but that he was leaning toward signing the bill, in part because he did not wish to divide the people who, like him, oppose abortion.
IN THE COMMENTS: I'm happy to say there is civil conversation among readers with very different views.
Posts
46 comments:
Stevens should retire now...this bonehead move by SD would guarantee that his successor is not a conservative.
- the banners are unfurled, the advance begins with murderers like Dave well in front of his camp...sorry, I couldn't resist that. I don't expect the SD Law will stand. I don't have a penis or a fetus in the fight so I will not be advancing with either camp. If I could work my will, women and women only would vote every 4 years to either allow by simple majority vote any and all forms of abortion or none at all.
I think Rounds and others sense that they are making a terrible misstep.
I think they do -- and I do too -- but I don't think this has anything at all to do with the harshness of the law. It is because if this comes before the Supreme Court as it is currently constituted (and it must be their intention to argue it up to the Supreme Court, because any Federal Court below the Supreme Court is going to strike it down), they will lose, and get another flat affirmation of the abortion precedent right before they potentially reach the five votes they need to overturn Roe.
I think their best outcome, now, is for the Supreme Court to deny certiorari.
Maybe if we had a ruling on the abortion issue one way or another, the nation could have some closure on this issue.
Maybe they really want to have the court uphold Roe. I suspect that GOP strategists like the status quo. When Roe is overturned, all hell breaks loose.
"the political support for abortion rights should make that victory Pyrrhic."
In a perfect, or better, world, both sides would get together and craft a law that would satisfy the vast majority of people who agree about the necessity for safe abortions and the necessity to get government out of our personal lives.
However, I think probably both sides will hammer away at each other in the courts. Each side will score a victory of sorts, which then will energize their opponents to do the same. And so it goes.
...the Act's assertion that life begins at the moment egg & sperm meet
I've never understood this assertion with respect to identical twins. If life begins when the sperm breaks through the ovum wall -- when does life begin for the 2nd twin?
And as far as the implicit allowance of emergency contraception: I don't buy it, and it smells of Republicans who have gone too far in trying to ban abortions coming back to sugarcoat very poor legislation.
How does the morning after pill work for a young girl, who may not understand what has happened to her or is too frightened, perhaps overpowered by a father or brother, to tell anyone until she is conspicuously pregnant?
Maybe they really want to have the court uphold Roe. I suspect that GOP strategists like the status quo. When Roe is overturned, all hell breaks loose.
The SD bill is radioactive.
If Roe v. Wade should happen to be overturned before 2008, we Conservatives can kiss the presidency goodbye for many terms.
This may be why Ann mentioned that perhaps the President chose Harriet Miers (however much of a born-again Christian she was) because she was a total unknown on paper on Roe v. Wade -- an appointment which implied a certain nervousness about this overturning.
That's the practical side.
The moral side is without question: abortion is convenient murder.
So the question is, will the majority of Conservatives have the gumption of our convictions to carry this through, and possibly damage our political landscape, or not?
These next two years will be an griddle of anxiety...
Cheers,
Victoria
(Word verification: dzpwr! Dizzy with power is a good way to describe this)
I don't understand the theory that there will be a political backlash if Roe is overturned. That would only happen if state legislators started voting their consciences rather than doing the popular, politically useful thing. When was the last time a state legislator did that?
Of course, there may be some states (including perhaps South Dakota) where a total abortion ban is the popular, politically useful thing. If the theory is that Park Avenue matrons who support lower taxes will abandon the Republicans because abortion has become illegal in South Dakota, I simply don't believe it. As to what female law professors who sometimes vote Republican because of their concerns about national security will do, I must note that there aren't more than two or three of those in the entire country, so they can't produce a backlash.
I don't know what the actual number is--I just meant that it is a very small percentage of abortions. I don't mean to sound dismissive about this, I know it is a very serious and difficult siuation--I'm just unsure how legislation should deal with situations on the maargins like this.
The answer is with compassion for the victim. Compassion that the legislation in South Dakota sorely lacks.
I'm reminded of the famous headline: Ford to City: Drop Dead. Instead it can read: South Dakota to incest victims: Tough luck.
I hesitate to post a comment, since the consensus seems to be pretty strong here... but I really think someone should offer a few of the common rebuttals to a few of the common arguments that appear in this thread.
Conception as origin point: Any mainstream embryologist will tell you that there is no other logical moment to regard as the origin of a distinct human organism. The twins quibble doesn't work because the early embryonic human simply is a distinct organism which has the potential to divide into two distinct organisms. That doesn't change its nature -- it is a natural potential of human individuals at that stage of development. The division doesn't negate the existence of the prior individual. Think of asexual reproduction among single-celled organisms. That quibble is only a stumbling block when we falsely assume that human organisms must always have the same abilities and characteristics at all stages of development.
About abortion for rape and incest: the position that abortion should be available for victims of rape and incest is only "harsh" or "barbaric" or uncompassionate if one does not consider an embryo or fetus to be human. If one does consider them to be human, the exception no longer makes any sense. Killing an innocent human does not seem like a genuinely compassionate way of responding to the tragic violations that have already occurred. Tragically enough, all the compassion in the world won't make the suffering of the mother a good enough reason to kill her innocent progeny. Two wrongs don't make a right.
One more about spontaneous abortion: This quibble doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when one recognizes the difference between allowing something over which one has no control to happen and actively causing it oneself. We would not try to argue that murder should be legal just because everyone will die some day, would we? An artificial abortion is a deliberate act which prematurely ends the life of a human, and so is qualitatively different from spontaneous abortions.
I hope this will reflect the saner side of the anti-abortion movement.
I'm no fan of the Bush administration, and I certainly have big doubts about the legal project underway in SD, casting your opponents as wicked, irrational, barbaric, or crazy doesn't do much to advance the debate or foster compromise.
By the way, the great majority of pro-life activists are female. If you are really interested in a more nuanced discussion, you might be want to take a look at www.feministsforlife.org.
I think that my point about spontaneous abortion also applies to me's contention about infant mortality.
I can see why some might feel that the fact that women will obtain dangerous illegal abortions anyway is a reason to keep them legal, but if that is so, why limit them to the first trimester? Won't that force some women to obtain dangerous illegal abortions in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters?
I guess I just don't find the claim that people will endanger themselves by doing illegal things strong enough on its own to justify legalizing those things. It would need to be accompanied by the claim that the illegal thing doesn't cause any substantial harm to other humans, a claim that me doesn't seem to be making. Or maybe we would need to separate humanity from personhood to make the trimester argument more consistent.
Me, would you want to bolster your case by making an argument about the difference between humanity and legally-protected personhood? Though I would not be persuaded by it, that seems like a more secure argument.
An artificial abortion is a deliberate act which prematurely ends the life of a human, and so is qualitatively different from spontaneous abortions.
Well, yes, but I believe you missed the point. If a woman drinks tansy tea, or pennyroyal (Don't try this at home!) and thereby induces an abortion -- should she be tried? Exactly how far should the government intrude?
And while I agree that calling opponents crazy, you must agree that the comments of Legislator Napoli are really beyond the pale! It reads like a bad Saturday Night Live! skit.
Madison Man: pro-lifers wouldn't have a problem with your twins question. They'd still say life begins. Only it turns out to be two lives instead of one.
Just watch -- if JP Stevens falls into ill health (God forbid) and has to retire before this case gets to the Supreme Court, some Christian is going to say it's a sign from God that he wants us to outlaw abortion.
Yeah, Napoli is eiter really silly, a terrible communicator, or a real nut job. I'll give you that. But he's a straw man.
I would rather take on the best representation of my opposition than the nut job wing of the pro-choice cause. Wouldn't you prefer to do the same?
Marghlar:
That is a more consistent point. Peter Singer makes a similar argument about self-consciousness, memory, and ability to plan for the future being the correct determinants of protected personhood.
However, a newborn doesn't differ in these respects from a late-term fetus. Newborns are neither truly self-aware nor capable of meaningful communication. Adult dogs are more able to do these things than human infants.
If you make this case, are you willing to bite the bullet and admit that infanticide in at least the first several months should be legal? Singer admits that this would be a necessary consequence of that way of defining personhood.
Viability is also an interesting factor. But no infant who is left on her own outside of the womb will survive either. She will still need nourishment and protection from her parents or from some other adult (or kindly wolves at least!). The main difference is that her location has changed.
Again, if we go with viability, we will have to extend the boundary of personhood pretty far beyond the womb. Really, how many of us would survive if left totally on our own in the wilderness? Seems to me that most of us are pretty socially dependent all the time. I don't think that diminishes our personhood.
Honestly, I'm not sure what to do about the location question. I can't really see how being located inside of someone necessarily gives that person total dominion over you. We don't usually say that having a part of someone else's body inside of us gives us total dominion over that part, so I'm not sure how one would make the argument for the whole body. Any suggestions about this? I'd really like to stay abreast of the very best arguments for the pro-choice cause.
Thanks all for responding without rancor.
Sorry for all the posts. I'll shut up and listen after this.
Madisonman:
I don't think I missed the point. I was responding to a point that I considered more fundamental.
It is only an "intrusion" if we choose to assign total dominion to the adult, or if we do not recognize the personhood of the fetus. Protecting people from those who wish to kill them isn't usually thought of as excessively intrusive. Courts constantly deal with domestic abuse, neglect and murder cases like the one you describe.
How would we deal with a husband who says, "Oops, I didn't know that X would be fatal for my wife!", or a mother who said "Oops, I didn't know that leaving my kids locked in the car in a closed garage would be fatal!"? Same would go for infanticide, if we chose to define self-induced abortions in that way. That question is addressed by precedent once we have figured out the more fundamental questions.
Am I understanding your objection right?
I would rather take on the best representation of my opposition than the nut job wing of the pro-choice cause. Wouldn't you prefer to do the same?
I do wonder exactly how Mr. Napoli came to be quoted. Was he a principle author of the bill? Its most outspoken advocate? Someone picked by the Main Stream Media 'cause they knew he'd make an outrageous comment that casts "his side" in an unfavorable light? All of the above?
Well, yes, but I believe you missed the point. If a woman drinks tansy tea, or pennyroyal (Don't try this at home!) and thereby induces an abortion -- should she be tried? Exactly how far should the government intrude?
I think when you ask "should she be tried," you touch on something we shouldn't lose sight of -- prosecutorial discretion. Traditionally, abortion statutes have targeted the abortion-provider, rather than the woman herself. And I expect that even in South Dakota, abortion prosecutions against the woman herself are going to be rather uncommon. It's almost certainly just going to be prosecutions of a bunch of people from Planned Parenthood, not a bunch of women getting abortions.
And even after that, there's always jury nullification. I don't think a jury is likely to go nullifying any laws when Planned Parenthood is on the line, but if it's a sympathetic female defendant -- say, a virginal young woman saving herself for marriage, but brutally raped by a close blood-relative or, uh, something like that -- then the jury may just decline to find beyond reasonable doubt that she acted with the requisite scienter.
Sorry for all the posts. I'll shut up and listen after this.
Ditto.
My point re: self-induced herbal abortions. If a doctor cannot easily distinguish between a spontaneous abortion and an herbally-induced one, (Can one? I have no idea) should all miscarrying women be tested for the presence of toxic herbs in their blood stream? Are tansy and pennyroyal to be outlawed because they are potential abortifacients?
If the government bans abortions, how far does it intrude when an abortion/miscarriage occurs if it's difficult to distinguish between the two?
This is a very different thread than the one I expected
I think we had the thread you expected some time in the last week or two. I forget exactly where, and I cannot find it now. I suppose we could hash out the same arguments as before, but I think the participants are all basically the same as before, so there's no particular reason to. Different issues are coming up in the discussion this time, and that makes it more interesting. That's also one of the benefits, I think, of having a regular (but fairly small) set of commenters too.
What's "hot button" as seen through the Althouse comments sections today: abortion, Rudy Giuliani.
What's not hot: what constitutes art, Dana Reeve.
Mark Daniels
Mark: Thanks for noticing that. I notice that kind of thing too. Often, the posts that interest me the most are the ones that get the least comments, like the art one today.
What surprises me here is that so many people are operating under the assumption that the day after pill is easy to obtain. It is not. Especially not in South Dakota.
There are logistical difficulties in obtaining the day after pill that most men and a lot of economically sound women fail to notice.
Many women in South Dakota face pharmacists who refuse to give them the pill because South Dakota allows its pharmacists to withold medication if the medication conflicts with their moral beliefs.
Furthermore, this law assumes that a woman who has been raped has, at a minimum, the transportation and the financial means to make it to a doctor within 24 hours. This is an "economic sanction" of epic proportions.
Should only people with access to a doctor, and reliable transportation, and that live in a town with a pharmacist who will prescribe the day after pill be allowed to prevent a pregnancy? That is what South Dakota is saying. And I think it's wrong.
Effectively, this puts the fates of those women into the hands of their local pharmacist.
I believe that neither I nor any other woman should be forced to be an incubator against her will.
But what I fail to see pro-choice advocates acknowledge, ever, is that a right not to be an incubator is not synonymous with a right to a dead fetus.
When the overall health risk of a medical abortion were similar to (or worse than) the health risk of delivering a live child, society would have a right to demand the live child.
It would, of course, be the province of doctors and medical researchers to determine what those two risks were for any particular woman, and doctors can always be found to take coin for a favorable opinion.
You know, we have potassium iodide pills here at home in New York in case of a dirty bomb or, God forbid, nuclear attack (that we should be unfortunate enought to survive).
Women ought to be acquiring and stockpiling either Plan B or the equivalent supply of the right kind of birth control pills in case of an emergency.
It's hard to imagine there won't be a lively black market in them.
Here's my life-begins-at-implantation argument, which is very pro-Plan B as part of a plan to move abortion towards obsolescence.
From the link: "'In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society,' the governor said."
This strikes me as a platitude strongly tinged with moralizing demagoguery. But it sounds good, doesn't it?--whether you're left or right on abortion choice.
When has anyone ever had a serious conversation about a historical civilization's treatment of its most helpless members? By this standard, every human society will always fail the test of civilization. The vulnerable and helpless never do well, do they?
So why use this standard when it fundamentally undercuts achievements made in every era of mankind's history? I shouldn't have to provide examples to historically literate Althouse readers.
I would not be inclined to invest much consideration on this claim from the governor.
So why use this standard when it fundamentally undercuts achievements made in every era of mankind's history?
Because it is an aspirational metric. It indicates the direction he wants society to progress. We may fall short today (of course we do), but we can work to remedy the defects we see today (e.g. abortion, in his view), and remedy the defects we find tomorrow as well.
"The very harshness of this law will remind ordinary people why they have quietly, over the years, accepted the individual's right to make a private decision about whether to continue a pregnancy. More modest efforts at constraining the right may have been tolerated."
However, it seems that modest efforts aren't tolerated. Not even a little bit. Efforts to require minors, who need a parents permission for *aspirin*, to need a parent's permission for an abortion make the front pages and raise an all out effort against them. When has the pro-choice side of the argument *ever* said, "Well, I suppose that sounds reasonable... or, partial birth abortions *should* be banned"?
If the harshness of this law is a response to anything it's the absolute way the issue is polarized. If it's all or nothing, then that's what it is. Pro-life activists have been pushing for those small moderations for years. But any limit at all is seen as entirely unacceptable. Small moderations haven't worked.
Birth isn't a reasonable point to decide that a fetus/baby has rights. Common sense tells us there isn't any meaningful difference other than the location of the child.
Surely, there is some point between "mass of cells" and "baby" that is logical and makes sense?
Several people here are arguing for the rape situation or other event... would a less drastic ban be acceptable to you? Or is it a case of my body, at any point, my choice?
The pro-life side of the argument isn't the only side that may regret taking an extreme position.
"Because it is an aspirational metric. It indicates the direction he wants society to progress. We may fall short today (of course we do), but we can work to remedy the defects we see today (e.g. abortion, in his view), and remedy the defects we find tomorrow as well."
Indeed--and what a fine aspiration to be very concerned with remedying the "defects" besetting all the "vulnerable" and "helpless".
So let's imagine a world where we score really high on remedying the situations of the vulnerable and helpless. Would vulnerability and helplessness even exist in such a world? More importantly, what sacrifices did society make in other spheres of civilization in order to get the high score on vulnerable and helpless? Was it worth it?
else they'd be picketing IVF facilities -- think how many frozen embryos get discarded there all the time!
They don't picket them as much, probably because consciousness of the frozen embryos being discarded is not as widespread. However, there are a fair number of people in the pro-life movement who are quite concerned about this, and who do protest IVF facilities, and who have been attempting to adopt these embryos until they can be implanted in a willing host. There's a piece in Slate about this that I linked to in another thread.
So let's imagine a world where we score really high on remedying the situations of the vulnerable and helpless. Would vulnerability and helplessness even exist in such a world? More importantly, what sacrifices did society make in other spheres of civilization in order to get the high score on vulnerable and helpless? Was it worth it?
Uh, okay. Well, if you're a libertarian, and that's our sole criterion, then almost certainly no, it was not worth it, because you are probably living in a Communist nightmare. But if you're a particular kind of communitarian, it looks like you've reached the final perfect form of civilisation.
Is it somehow shocking to you that there are fundamental disagreements about values and the good society?
My own view is that future civilisation will not consider much of what we have spent the 20th century obsessing over (whether social justice, economic equality, personal liberty, or whatever else) particularly important, and may even find them a touch childish and quaint, the way we think of Victorian notions about duty. Or they might see them as naive and ennervating, as I suspect the Romans would have found them.
But however future generations judge us, the yardstick by which we measure past societies is, more often than not, their treatment of the most vulnerable -- of slaves, of women, of the poor, of children, of the untouchables, etc. And we judge them wanting, for having employed child labour, practiced infanticide, confined women behind screens, tortured their slaves, starved their poor, and treated their untouchables shabbily all around. And the fellow there is just taking that yardstick and applying it a bit further.
So, you really think forced birth groups who believe an embryo is a human being would have as much passion in picketing IVF clinics as they do abortion clinics
Yes, actually. They're pretty vehement about stem cell research, which is roughly as abstract. There are also well established protest groups and structures for abortion already, because they've been developing and gathering their power since the mid-70s. Not so for IVF, yet.
On the other hand, they may be making a reasonable judgment that women going for an abortion are far more susceptible to protest pressure than workers at an IVF facility, since the women are genetically related to their embryo, and may already have moral qualms about the procedure. This is almost certainly not true for people working at an IVF facility -- it would be like protesting the Planned Parenthood staff. It might make the protesters feel good, I suppose -- protesters engage in dumb protests all the time -- but it's unlikely to lead to any productive result.
What about the old question: If a fertility clinic is burning down, who do you save -- a two y/o child or the freezer with the embryos (assuming you can only save one)? Say there's 100 embryos in the freezer -- maybe 25 of them would be born if they were all implanted in women. That's 1 two year old/100 embryopeople, or 1 two year old/25 possible babies depending on how you view it. Personally I'd go with the two year old.
Fair enough. Presented with the immediate choice, most of us would probably find ourselves acting on the more narrow conception of valuable human life our prejudices incline us to, rather than the broader conceptions we may have reached by more philosophic reflection. That doesn't mean that choice is right, though; nor does it mean that the outcome of our reasoning is wrong. It means only that, in the hue and cry of the event, we are human, and thus, the flawed, narrow creatures you might expect.
That said, I suspect there are any number of fervent anti-abortionists who would go for the embryos in an flash.
In either case, though, because I'm an atheist who thinks abortion is a barbaric procedure, I'm probably not the best person to go to for a representative meditation on this kind of question.
Thanks all for the interesting discussion. I really admire the moderate and rational tone of most of the post-ers. Sorry for another long post, but there is so much to respond to.
I have to agree that viability will probably be the best ground for compromise. From the polls I've looked at, it seems that most people would vote for that limit if there were a referendum. Several European countries have adopted that as the standard, without the super-broad interpretations of "health" legitimized by Casey.
Reaching way back, I want to defend the introduction of Singer into the debate. Singer is one of the most influential living philosophers in America. He is hardly a straw man -- his arguments are among the most logical advanced by the pro-choice side. He in no way resembles the gibbering foolishness of our man from South Dakota. Just because one may be uncomfortable with the fact that he actually draws the pro-choice arguments out to their real logical conclusions is no reason to consider his arguments to be straw men, easily blown away. I brought him in because he seems to me to be one of the most rational advocates of abortion rights out there. He avoids most of the logical pitfalls that open up in the more common arguments for abortion rights while pursuing a nearly perfectly consistent logical argument of his own. If one accepts his materialist premises and his definition of personhood, his arguments seem logically irrefutable.
I'm really not sure how to respond to tcd's posts, since their vehemence is not matched by their rational consistency. Do you really want to legitimize infanticide? Do you really see no broader social interest in the lives of fetuses? Our society actually does regulate who can and can't get heart surgery, by the way.
So, when we talk about being FORCED to carry a child, are we talking about rape? If not, I'm not sure that we've considered the whole equation. There is a difference between requiring someone to do something about which they had no choice and requiring someone to deal with the consequences of a choice that they made.
Except in cases of rape, a woman does have a choice about whether to engage in an activity which tends to lead to the creation of a new human organism. Once that organism is created, it seems to me that the question is really whether or not a woman should have to suffer the normal consequences of an activity in which she chose to engage.
I'm all for taking choices seriously, but I think we shouldn't forget the choice that led to the creation of a new human in the first place. If one doesn't want a new human to be generated, one can choose not to do the things that will lead to the generation of that human. I know this is far from a conclusive argument, but I think it is really important to keep in mind.
As for viability, well, I can see how there is a significant change at that point (a point which gets earlier and earlier all the time). At that point, the other people who have an interest in the life of the fetus can take over if the mother doesn't want to bring the fetus to term. But then, what compelling reason is there to not require women to host the fetus up to the point of viability? Is it a serious threat to health? Even though this would be an exception rather than the regular situation, I would be willing to accept an exception in cases where the mother's life is in danger.
(A tangent: Since when was "host" considered a necessarily negative word? We host unwanted visitors all the time in this country, don't we? Hospitality is not dehumanizing, and the women who host unused IVF embryos count it to be a mark of honor to be hospitable to those lives).
Can someone explain to me the logical case for why, aside from a direct threat to the woman's life, a woman shouldn't be required to deal with the serious discomfort and social disadvantages which result from her choice to engage in "risky" behaviors? Is it something to do with the unfairness involved in men not having to carry the same burden? Why not make laws requiring the men to bear some requisite burden, financial or otherwise, up to the point of viability? I'm all for forcing men to take more responsibility for their sexual decisions. I think it would improve lots of things in our society, including the culture of our inner cities.
I'll stop for the moment and see what I've missed.
Oh, regulation and all the nasty fantasies of totalitarian police. We have fairly functional ways of working out, over time, reasonable measures of enforcing whatever laws we determine to be just. This argument seems like a bit of a red herring to me.
I think we should enforce abortion regulations in whatever way seems most just, but that is a rather different question from whether or not abortion regulations themselves are just.
Since when was "host" considered a necessarily negative word?
In all honesty, I've been chosing the word "host" consciously because I get a bit of a frisson from the transgressive dirty-Tleilaxu / Aliens / Bodysnatchers vibe it gives off when you say "find a willing host." And that's probably exactly why people think it's creepy and wrong. And negative.
Oh wait "implanted in a willing host" is what I said. Even creepier! Doesn't that just conjure up images of men in white coats performing unspeakable experiments in violation of all the laws of man and nature?
About outlawing abortion not actually lowering the rate of abortions:
I'm not sure what the logic of this argument looks like. Nobody seriously imagines that outlawing abortions will suddenly make abortion disappear, any more than a person trying to establish laws against hate crimes actually expects to eradicate hatred.
At the same time, making something illegal has a powerful effect on many people's attitudes toward it. Many of the post-abortive women with whom I've spoken say that they figured abortion couldn't possibly be that bad because it is legal. Laws have a pedagogical function.
Yes, sadly, there will still be people who try to obtain illegal abortions and put themselves at risk doing it. This is one reason why a just society can't simply regulate abortions without doing its best to provide real alternatives to women in desperate situations. Again, I'll refer you to www.feministsforlife.org for a group that is working hard to open new paths to real choices.
As another poster said, it is likely that the main focus of enforcement will be more on those performing abortions than on the women who come to them for help. In the case of RU-486, this could mean that the focus will be on dealers, not on users.
me, I'm really not sure what hypocrisy sickens you so much. Not everyone is a consistent thinker, but any consistent pro-life advocate will be as much opposed to IVF as to embryonic stem cell research and abortion. Keep in mind, though, that currently abortion ends about 1 million human lives per year, while the other two do not. Pro-life advocates tend to see all of them as connected to each other, but abortion as the most serious priority.
I mean, try to put yourself into the shoes of someone who thinks that one's body and one's personhood are inextricably linked. That number of 1 million persons killed per year looms pretty large. A pro-lifer might compare it to World War II. When we went to war against the Axiz powers, we had to focus on that for a while. That doesn't mean we weren't also against the totalitarianism in other parts of the world. Choosing priorities doesn't necessarily make one a hypocrite.
OK, I see what you mean about "host". But to me that just goes to show how odd our thinking about fertility can be. Don't you think it is strange to immediately think of nasty aliens and parasites when one thinks of unborn humans? But then, I guess these days we find lots of things about our bodies to be "creepy".
One more thing:
Marghlar, I'd like to see your documentation for the claim that the Catholic Church ever tolerated abortions. Many influential people in the Church did accept the idea that quickening didn't occur until a while after conception, but as far as I know the Church still condemned abortions before quickening.
I have heard that idea tossed out as fact before, but I have never seen any actual evidence supporting the claim that the Catholic Church has ever permitted abortions at any stage for any reason other than things like tubal implantation (which would inevitably kill both woman and fetus if left alone).
By the way, in response to the descoveries of modern fetology and embryology, the Catholic Church has taken the opportunity to sharpen up its teachings about the relationship between conception and the soul. The Church has always taught that a person is both body and soul, and that the two are fundamentally intertwined. At the end, the dead will be rejoined with their bodies for eternity. The Church sees a real harmony between this and the findings of modern embryology. While the old idea of 'ensoulment' left some odd gaps between body and soul, the idea that a distinct, living begins as soon as conception is complete fits much better with the idea of a human as body and soul utterly fundamentally intertwined with each other.
Does that answer your earlier questions about how a person who believes in souls might understand their relationship to bodies?
OK, I'll shut up and listen again. Thanks for your patience all. I suppose this thread will be dead soon, but I appreciate the dialogue.
Don't you think it is strange to immediately think of nasty aliens and parasites when one thinks of unborn humans? But then, I guess these days we find lots of things about our bodies to be "creepy".
It's actually just a trick of language. If you Google implant with the phrase "willing host", about half the results are from Stargate, apparently discussing some kind of alien symbiote that implants in you and takes control. Sort of the way "pale horse" doesn't mean "Death" outright, but does suggest it pretty strongly. It's an unusual phrase (the usual would be "white horse" or "light-coloured horse") that appears prominently in connexion with Death. So when the words appear together, we think of Death.
Balfegor: I am particularly interested in why you, as an atheist, find abortion repugnant. (Note -- I am not saying that you shouldn't think that -- I am just curious as to why you think it). Are you a materialist? If so, on what basis do you object to abortion? I'm really curious...
I'm at most some sort of quasi-materialist, I suppose, as I do think there are transcendant values, and believe in a species of "natural law," which I think can be derived by "right reason," as it were, from the patterns of human existence. Mostly, I'm a materialist who thinks that because of the finitude of human knowledge and understanding, tradition must be carefully preserved, seeing as it contains the only long-term empirically tested insights human civilisation is yet capable of.
That doesn't really have much to do with my conclusion on abortion though, which derives from a simpler thought that when in real doubt as to what is meaningfully human life for the purposes of our moral calculus, we ought to err on the side of a broader conception of humanity, rather than privileging one particular theoretical criterion (e.g. genetic likeness, sentience, reasoning ability, etc.) above all others. So when presented with the question of when a fetus "becomes" human (as we know it eventually will, if it lives), I just push that point back to the earliest plausible starting point, which would be conception. This doesn't mean that life of the fetus necessarily bears the same moral weight as any other life -- forced to choose between the embryo and the mother, for example, I'd go for the mother, even at an early stage where there is only an amorphous but substantial likelihood that the birth process will result in significant danger to the mother's life, say -- but it does mean that the vast majority of abortions strike me as flatly wrong.
After all, the only thing that separates a human embryo from a chicken embryo is its DNA. Why should a biochemical difference determine what forms of life get legal rights, and what forms of life do not?
We're coming up on the end of the useful life of this thread, so possibly this discussion would be better postponed to the next time abortion comes up here (as it surely will). But that aside --
The distinction between the human embryo and the chicken embryo is that the human embryo is human. To consider them as essentially the same is to adopt a perspective that considers things only as they are at that particular moment, without taking into account the totality of their distinct existence throughout time. That's a perfectly valid perspective to hold, but are we certain it is the correct perspective to hold? I think there is arguable and nontrivial doubt here -- the nontriviality of that doubt is the bare minimal "mindedness" I hope is adequately incorporated into my approach.
To sketch an argument -- we make judgements on the basis of just such an apprehension of the full distinct existence of a being through time all the time. To bring back the embryo/baby burning building problem, suppose it is instead a Nobel prizewinner in middle-age, and a 2-year old infant. In determining which one to save (in this highly artificial circumstance), we'll likely be moved by the infant's youth and future potential, and also by the prizewinner's past achievements. We don't weigh their immediate worth as organisms or personalities existing now, but take into account much, much more. Now, you can say that this approach is inappropriate with the embryo -- that there is some cutoff before which such an approach is no longer proper. But it seems to me there really is meaningful doubt on this point. We know the human embryo, as a human embryo, will, if things go right, develop into what we commonly think of as human. The chicken embryo will not. And that seems to me a pretty significant difference.
To push the point further: a human being born with only a brain stem could be kept alive for some time, but there would be no meaningful criterion other than its chemistry and shape by which we could distinguish it from lots of types of life which we feel like we can freely kill when it serves our purposes.
Yes . . . and? The argument is incomplete here -- you need to argue that genes and form (and public perception) are incorrect as bases for delineating the boundaries of what is and is not meaningfully human in our moral calculus. Put within the hazy framework I've sketched out here, you need to remove our doubts.
In other words, I'm worried that your approach, although seeking to avoid making arbitrary choices between definitions of personhood, in fact makes the most arbitrary choice I can envision.
In some sense, yes. I see your point. But I view it as more of a meta thing, like shifting an evidentiary burden, and in that sense, arbitrariness is almost built in, since it does not, of itself, lead to a firm conclusion -- doubt is subjective, after all.
Consider democracy, though, just as a comparison. Democracy gives us a few starting principles, but the actual conclusions we reach are not determined at all; they're subject to the arbitrary whims of a large and diverse population, after all. That's a criticism often made of democracy (that because it is arbitrary, the population get it wrong) but democracy, as a system, is trying to maximise other values.
For my part, my notion about adopting expansive definitions of humanity when in doubt arises not so much out of the fear of making arbitrary definitional choices, as from the sense (the fear) of a terrible moral cost involved should we make those choices wrong.
Where it matters, I want the law to make minded choices, even if we have to puzzle through some conundrums in order to do so.
I have a secondary reason for thinking abortion is wrong -- an affirmative reason engaging with the "conundrum," as you put it, directly -- but the argument is much weaker, and less strongly felt (by me), in this particular context. But I've already said I think you can extract normative "natural law"-type conclusions from the structure and pattern of human existence, so you can probably see the basic outline of the argument (and the basic weaknesses of the argument) without my plodding through it.
Another question for you: do you generally support affirmative duties to aid in the law?
Not arbitrary duties to strangers. I do support parents' affirmative duties to aid, rescue, etc. their children, though, and I think that's about all you need to dispose of the affirmative duty for the abortion question.
Abortion prohibitions, in my mind, can be easily seen as forcing one person to aid another against their will. What do you think about such laws in the larger sense?
In a larger sense, though, outside of particular relations -- mostly kinship, if I think about it (though not restricted to parent-child) -- I don't think there should be such affirmative duties.
Well, such affirmative duties to rescue, that is. As far as generalised duties of due care to foreseeable whatsits, to ensure that you don't take a course of action that is going to negatively impact other people, and also to ensure that you bear the costs if and when you do, I think that particular extremely general affirmative duty is proper.
Marghlar,
Sorry to be so late in answering your question about my "People Seeds"post, which for the record was about frozen embryos for IVF as well as about Plan B.
The point of the post was that embryos can be frozen and their development suspended up to the blastocyst stage, when the embryo is ready to implant; but not after. It is also believed that in nature, many (no one knows how many, but estimates range as high as 50%) blastocysts fail to implant, either because there is something wrong with the embryo or because the mother's body is in some way unreceptive.
Therefore, the pre-implantation embryo, whether in the fallopian tube or the test tube, can be regarded as a "people seed," not all of which, in the normal course of things, get planted. Taking Plan B, which might, among other things, cause the uterus to be unreceptive to implantation, would then be one more of a number of possible factors preventing any possible "seed" from implanting.
The strict Catholic position is that human will or choice or judgment of unreadiness should never be a factor in determining who gets here and who doesn't: that should be entirely up to God. If you believe that, then you should not use birth control or Plan B, but to prevent others from using them is fanatical. (The South Dakota law, as has been widely noted, is ambiguous on this point, saying that life begins at conception but also that a woman cannot be forbidden to use any "contraceptive" agent before pregnancy can be medically detected.)
To answer your question, finally, Marghlar, my proposition about when life begins has nothing to do with a soul, which is an unprovable article of faith. It has to do with a relationship. The embryo's "handshake signal," if you will, has to be met by one from the mother, or there is no life. This is an embodied metaphor for the fact that there is no such thing as human life outside of relationship. (We get our name, our language, our sustenance, our culture from other people.)
At this crucial moment, it takes two. Withhold the "handshake signal," and life doesn't happen. But once mother's body and embryo have "shaken hands," a relationship has begun (though the mother may not be consciously aware of it) and with it, a life. That's why we have a sense of two-edged violation even about early abortion, though that feeling may be weak and gets stronger with every day that the embryo develops further into a fetus.
That's why I think preventing conception (by abstinence and/or contraception) and then implantation is the way to go, with legal early abortion as a rare backup.
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