Christopher O. Tollefsen argues that accepting the “liberal” definition on pregnancy can actually help clarify the morality of contraception, abortion, and embryo adoption:
Liberals and conservatives sometimes spar over the definition of pregnancy. Some liberals define the term as meaning the period from implantation of an embryo in a mother’s womb forward. Conservatives often define it as beginning at the point of conception. Quite a lot can seem to depend on the definition, since it can seem natural to think that a contraceptive, for example, works by preventing pregnancy, and an abortion by disrupting it. Thus, if pregnancy is not initiated until implantation, and an abortion disrupts pregnancy, then drugs that prevent implantation would be considered contraceptive, and not abortifacient. Conservatives rightly resist this claim, and do so by contesting the meaning of pregnancy.
But a better strategy might be to accept the liberal definition of pregnancy, but reject the conclusions that purportedly follow from it. On three issues—contraception, abortion, and embryo-adoption—I’ll argue that the liberal definition of pregnancy can actually help clarify what sound morality demands.
October 1st, 2010 | 11:27 am
He’s thinking about it way too much: 1) Don’t accept a ‘liberal’ definition of anything; they’re inherently Orwellian; 2) any way you slice it, it’s murder. That’s all it has ever been and all it will ever be.
October 1st, 2010 | 11:29 am
Arguing with them on their own terms is the first mistake.
October 1st, 2010 | 12:22 pm
The problem with ANY concession on the standard pro-life understanding is that it moves the ground from life being a natural human right purely on the basis of humanity, to some humans being able to decide that other biologically identifiable humans either are, or are not, worthy of human rights.
October 1st, 2010 | 1:33 pm
We do our cause no favours by refusing to think through the difficult questions that our opponents are bound to seize on. To take only two examples:
1) Fertiliozation is not an event, but a process that can take up to 20 hours.
2) The vexed question of twinning; As Miss Anscombe, an eminent Catholic philosopher and anti-abortion campaigner puts it “Neither of the two humans that eventually develop can be identified as the same human as the zygote, because they can’t both be so, as they are different humans from one another.” – Something that obviously follows from the transivity of identity.
Of course, Christians, from Tertullian on, have condemned any and every obstruction of the life-giving process as damnable.
October 4th, 2010 | 12:40 pm
Twinning only raises the issue that an embryo may give rise to *more* than one human. It does not provide any information that would make us consider that it might be *less.*
I don’t believe anyone’s suggesting that we refuse to interact with the “hard questions;” the point is that progressives’ distaste for the answers we’ve already developed to them is not a reason to alter those answers or find new ones.
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