New legislation in Texas will add requirements before an abortion can be obtained:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is expected to sign a law soon requiring a woman seeking an abortion to have a sonogram and hear a description of the fetus, including whether it has developed fingers, toes or internal organs.
The goal, supporters say, is to improve medical care for women and encourage them to reconsider having abortions.
“We believe that when they see the miracle of life some will change their minds,” said Dan Patrick, a Republican state senator who represents part of Houston and who sponsored the legislation, which passed both houses of the state legislature last week.
Abortion-rights supporters say there is no evidence that sonograms, also known as ultrasounds, affect a woman’s decision on abortion, and say laws requiring doctors to perform the procedures and describe the results violate patients’ rights.
“It discounts women’s ability to make health decisions and interferes with the doctor-patient relationship,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York non-profit that opposes restrictions on legal abortion.
Unfortunately, the pro-abortion advocates have a point. Many women are perfectly aware that when they have an abortion they are killing a child.
May 11th, 2011 | 12:26 pm
” “It discounts women’s ability to make health decisions and interferes with the doctor-patient relationship,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York non-profit that opposes restrictions on legal abortion. ”
Boy, I sure am glad that Nancy Northup opposes any and all government involvement in the health-care system. Can someone point me to some information on how she’s helping the lawsuits against Obamacare? Because I’m sure, based on her sincere and principled position summed up in the quote above, that she’s spending most of her time on that, right?
May 11th, 2011 | 12:28 pm
If there’s no evidence that sonograms affect a woman’s decision, then why do they care?
May 11th, 2011 | 12:52 pm
Interestingly, rape victims, minors or women carrying fetuses with abnormalities are exempt from hearing the description.
May 11th, 2011 | 12:58 pm
Brian,
LOL
May 11th, 2011 | 1:08 pm
Mixed feelings. This is the equivalent of legislating that before you can have an abortion, you must sit in a waiting room in front of a large sign saying “Abortion is bad!” Not the most effective use of a governor’s time.
May 11th, 2011 | 1:11 pm
Brian,
This reminds me of Mark Steyn’s remark to the effect that all those women angrily lobbying the church to keep its rosaries off their ovaries don’t seem to have any problem with the government getting its bureaucratics all over their lymphatics.
May 11th, 2011 | 1:45 pm
Dblade:
“Mixed feelings. This is the equivalent of legislating that before you can have an abortion, you must sit in a waiting room in front of a large sign saying “Abortion is bad!” Not the most effective use of a governor’s time.”
Considering the fact that, should the law pass, Planned Parenthood will likely suddenly offer sonograms in their own facility, administered by their own doctors, It’s hard to envision the vibe being as you suggest during the viewing. I think they’re afraid of the pictures.
Frankly, I’d be perfectly happy if the woman viewed the sonogram – anywhere they want – and the attending doctor said not a word.
It’s telling that the “pro-choice” side is the one fighting tooth and nail against actually gathering information.
May 11th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
Re: “It discounts women’s ability to make health decisions and interferes with the doctor-patient relationship,” said Nancy Northup . . .”
I used to volunteer for a post-abortion hotline and help with post-abortion retreats. Providing information about fetal development could support the patient in making an informed decision. One retreatant indicated that she really didn’t understand that the “tissue” to be removed was a human fetus, but ultrasound is no magic bullet to stop abortion.
Many post-abortive women talk about dissociation as part of their pregnancy and abortion experience. It’s something like a cancer diagnosis. Often the patient shuts down psychologically and cannot take in the full reality of the situation. The capacity to make a truly informed decision is often compromised. We in the pro-life community must continue to use multiple vehicles to affirm support for women and their unborn children.
So I can concede that an ultrasound probably would not, statistically, make much difference in the number of women who abort. But it would make all the difference for those babies who are carried to term.
May 11th, 2011 | 2:04 pm
dblade,
there is a difference betweeen (1) an U/S (which yields data that are morally neutral) and (2) a sign reading “abortion is bad” (which is an ethical claim.)
those who favor the concept of “informed consent” (arguably most people working in health care) would most likely agree that women considering abortion deserve to have as much information as possible before consenting to undergo the procedure.
why make an exception in this case? methinks it’s politics mindlessly trumping beneficence toward the patient, which in turn is the ideal to which all physicians swear via the hippocratic oath.
the irony is that limiting information given to women as if they weren’t capable of “handling the truth” is sheer condescension — precisely the opposite of what northup wants to claim.
May 11th, 2011 | 2:46 pm
Nobody has answered my question yet. Why doesn’t the law apply to a woman who is pregnant because of rape or has a deformed fetus? Why shouldn’t the law apply to women with ectopic pregnancies?
May 11th, 2011 | 3:30 pm
there is a difference betweeen (1) an U/S (which yields data that are morally neutral) and (2) a sign reading “abortion is bad” (which is an ethical claim.)
What is essentially forced speech, though, is not morally neutral. A useful exercise I find is to imagine the gov’t enacting a similiar policy but from the opposite POV. For example, instead of parental consent laws to have an abortion, imagine parental concent to bear a child? Or consider teens who are pregnant being required to sit through a powerpoint detailing the average differences in expected life outcomes for having a child at 15 versus 25. Using the rough logic presented in these arguments, these policies from an alternative pro-abortion universe would all be well within gov’t bounds.
The counter typically is that pro-lifers feel abortion itself is wrong so policies encouraging abortion wouldn’t be just a ‘flip side’ of policies that discourage it. It would be like comparing ads the gov’t puts up to discourage drunk driving with hypothetical ads that encourage it. But the problem is that this doesn’t really address the ‘logic’ of the tit for tat laws the pro-lifers are pushing. Drunk driving is illegal, abortion is not. Does the gov’t have the right to essentially force speech into the marketplace of legal options and opinions? This is the idea that’s really being pushed here but I suspect most pro-lifers don’t really see the potential for mischief they are uncorking in the name of achieving a tactical victory.
May 11th, 2011 | 3:48 pm
@Boonton
Very fascinating comment. If you were a more frequent blogger I would have added you to my blog roll.
May 11th, 2011 | 4:24 pm
“Drunk driving is illegal, abortion is not.”
Of course, the root of the problem and of all this legal incrementalism is how these outcomes were achieved. There’s a uniform societal consensus about drunk driving that just does not exist in the same way about abortion. In a sane world, most states would probably have laws similar to most European nations, instead of the current lunacy where it is claimed by many (unseriously, but with a straight face all the same) that unless any abortionist can perform an abortion using any method he sees fit on any pregnant female (I won’t even say woman, since age limits are considered outrageous as well) at any stage of pregnancy, we’re Worse Than The Taliban. I maintain that some legislature somewhere should take the abortion law of France or the UK and propose it for their state, let the abortion lobby go ballistic over it, and then reveal where it came from and show them for the extreme lunatics they are.
May 11th, 2011 | 5:29 pm
“For example, instead of parental consent laws to have an abortion, imagine parental concent to bear a child? Or consider teens who are pregnant being required to sit through a powerpoint detailing the average differences in expected life outcomes for having a child at 15 versus 25. Using the rough logic presented in these arguments, these policies from an alternative pro-abortion universe would all be well within gov’t bounds.”
I suggest you and Jeremy get working on getting these laws passed as soon as possible.
May 11th, 2011 | 5:41 pm
A useful exercise I find is to imagine the gov’t enacting a similiar policy but from the opposite POV. For example, instead of parental consent laws to have an abortion, imagine parental concent to bear a child?
Why would anyone do it from the opposite POV?
Having a child is the natural response to pregnancy. Killing the child is the morally questionable response.
There’s nothing controversial about the idea that a pregnant woman should give birth to her child.
There’s something highly controversial about infanticide.
This rule is probably designed to get around the fact that the people selling abortion are known to rely heavily on encouraging the client to dehumanize the child, encouraging them to view it as something other than a fetus. This is a “hard sell” technique that is inappropriate, if the goal is “informed consent”. The person getting the abortion should know exactly what they are doing, and what they’re doing it to.
(And I agree, rape victims should not be exempt. Informed consent is about protecting the woman from doing something she’s going to regret, and rape victims need protection against being pushed into cognitive dissonance as much as anyone.)
May 11th, 2011 | 7:10 pm
As a Texan, I am proud of our legislature and our governor for providing us with a good law. A better law would be the ban of direct abortion, for that is the only law which would be consistent with the rest of the state’s laws against murder. But of course, at present that option is closed.
I work a bit with a local crisis pregnancy center. They began offering ultrasounds awhile back, and the staff knows that it makes a huge difference in the women’s attitude about abortion. It not only makes a difference, but a very dramatic difference in this center’s ability to save human lives.
The pro-abortion lobby knows very well what they are up against here, which is why they fight it so vehemently. They are fighting against the truth, which has the power to set people free, to quote a usually-reliable source.
May 11th, 2011 | 8:00 pm
I have never had an ectopic pregnancy, but would have thought sonograms would be part of the diagnosis and shown to the mother. Not to show them in this instance seems unlikely behavior in an OB/GYN, if my experience with high risk pregnancies is anything to go by. I think that ectopic pregnancies are a special case as far as abortion is concerned.
Once I had made it clear that i did not intend to abort my child, I can assure you that my treatment and handling by the doctors changed. I had many crises and had to make decisions regarding medication, etc. I was given options, sonograms pushed in front of me, and told to study it all and then tell them what treatment I wanted to pursue. Only after I told them my decision did they said “Good, that’s what i would do”.
I think of this every time the controversy arises vis a vis providing sonograms to women considering abortion. In fact, I think of it when given X-rays of impacted wisdom teeth or broken bones and told what our options are for treatment. so we can make an informed decision, you know. Why deprive pregnant women of this crucial information? We are capable of thinking and deciding, aren’t we?
I also agree that rape victims and mothers of abnormal fetuses should be shown sonograms so they can make informed decisions. Why treat them like ignorant children? why NOT give them as much information as possible?
I agree with Andrew. This failure to provide women with this information is condescending in the extreme.
May 11th, 2011 | 9:10 pm
“Drunk driving is illegal, abortion is not.”
Change the analogy to smoking, then.
May 11th, 2011 | 10:29 pm
Blake
For example, instead of parental consent laws to have an abortion, imagine parental concent to bear a child?
Why would anyone do it from the opposite POV?
Having a child is the natural response to pregnancy. Killing the child is the morally questionable response.
There’s nothing controversial about the idea that a pregnant woman should give birth to her child.
And how does that lead to a parental consent law? Unless you think parents can also grant their children permission to kill anyone they please?
if the goal is “informed consent”. The person getting the abortion should know exactly what they are doing, and what they’re doing it to.
No it’s not. A doctor has a professional obligation to provide his patient with all relevant medical information (including adjusting his presentation if she is unable to, say, understand medical terminology). If a doctor doesn’t do that then sue him for malpractice.
By your own terms, this is uninformed consent. How?
1. No doubt some here might say I feel this way because I’m an evil monster, but look 90% of sonograms I look at don’t look anything like a baby. Almost all of them seem like fuzzy black and white lines and nothing more. Maybe the image on the machine itself is sharper than it comes out on TV and in pictures, but I often see the tech’s having to point out to the parents some very basic facts like “that’s the head” so I don’t think I’m alone.
2. Given that many sonograms don’t look like babies, by your logic ‘informed consent’ is NOT looking at a sonogram. By your assertions all abortions are killing a baby, yet sonograms that don’t look like babies ‘inform’ that they aren’t babies…which is not true information. Likewise, of course, the logic being asserted here is ‘looking like’ a baby equals being a baby which basically works great for later term abortions but works well against you for very early abortions….let alone the ‘morning after pill’ from which a sonogram would reveal nothing.
As you pointed out, the rule is tactical….’how do we get fewer abortions’ but the idea of forced speech is a tactic that can be pushed beyond this one instance and it’s worth thinking about…if only for a moment.
pentamom
Change the analogy to smoking, then
Ouch good one ;) To be fair most of the smoking restrictions have been loosely based on the rights of 3rd parties….as in “why should I breath in this person’s smoke while I’m in a public library/police station/concert hall/diner/ etc”. The taxes on tobacco have also been somewhat loosely tied to the payments taxpayers have to incur down the line for smokers. The ‘forced speech’ is IMO a bit more stright forward. It’s basic truth in advertising. The pack says ‘tobacco causes cancer’ and it does. “You don’t want to get cancer” is a more philosophical conclusion. I suppose the speech may be a calling to a tiny few would like to get lung cancer…in that case the pack is simply detailing what it does…the way a diabetic who needs a rush of sugar will look at a candy bar label to make sure it’s loaded with plenty of it.
May 11th, 2011 | 11:38 pm
I completely agree with everyone who has suggested that we educate people more on abortion. I have no problem with a woman being shown what her fetus looks like at a given stage. I would just ask that she also be shown what a cat or monkey fetus looks like at the same stage.
Where I would really like to see more education is for teenage girls who are pregnant. For example, they should be required to know that less than 40 percent of women who have a child before the age of 18 will graduate from high school, compared to a high school graduate rate of 75 percent for those who delay parenthood until their early twenties. I would also like them to understand their future attachment with the father. 8 out of 10 fathers never marry them.
May 12th, 2011 | 7:44 am
In the interests of ‘full medical disclosure’, should women also be appraised of the research indicating that the ‘fetal wiring’ simply isn’t connected enough to experience even something as basic as pain before twenty weeks?
May 12th, 2011 | 8:14 am
“but I often see the tech’s having to point out to the parents some very basic facts like “that’s the head” so I don’t think I’m alone.”
So what? Providing the patient with information is precisely what informed consent is all about.
“Given that many sonograms don’t look like babies, by your logic ‘informed consent’ is NOT looking at a sonogram. By your assertions all abortions are killing a baby, yet sonograms that don’t look like babies ‘inform’ that they aren’t babies…which is not true information.”
The abortion types who are fighting this don’t agree with you.
May 12th, 2011 | 8:20 am
“I have no problem with a woman being shown what her fetus looks like at a given stage. I would just ask that she also be shown what a cat or monkey fetus looks like at the same stage.”
For what purpose?
“For example, they should be required to know that less than 40 percent of women who have a child before the age of 18 will graduate from high school, compared to a high school graduate rate of 75 percent for those who delay parenthood until their early twenties. I would also like them to understand their future attachment with the father. 8 out of 10 fathers never marry them.”
While I fail to see why you regard these as compelling reasons to kill an unborn child, do you actually believe abortion clinics don’t have this type of information readily available?
May 12th, 2011 | 9:15 am
Drunk driving is illegal, abortion is not. Does the gov’t have the right to essentially force speech into the marketplace of legal options and opinions?
Boonton, if the legal status quo is what matters to you: Roe v. Wade does say that governments have a legitimate interest in protecting fetal life. Abortion is legal, and consequently there are no criminal penalties for having one, and no one may use force to prevent someone else from getting one. That doesn’t mean that there can be no attempts – even by governments – to persuade people not to have abortions.
May 12th, 2011 | 9:49 am
How does the law work? Does the woman have to view the sonogram or can the doctor place it into a manila folder and let her choose whether to look at it? Can the doctor place another photo of an animal fetus into the folder to convince her that a fetus isn’t, in fact, a human baby? How about literature documenting the correlation of teen pregnancy with poverty?
Laws like this are easily circumvented by clever abortion providers. The additional costs of compliance might be offset by private donations from incensed program supporters.
May 12th, 2011 | 10:04 am
Can the doctor place another photo of an animal fetus into the folder to convince her that a fetus isn’t, in fact, a human baby?
Why on Earth would you imagine a doctor would want to put a photo of an animal fetus into the folder?
That’s like asking whether we should criminalize abortion because the doctor might take out a vital organ instead.
Regular fraud laws cover the situation.
How about literature documenting the correlation of teen pregnancy with poverty?
How about literature documenting the correlation of teen chastity with better mental health, better educational outcomes, etc.?
After all, chaste teens don’t get pregnant. If you really care about poverty /snark.
May 12th, 2011 | 10:06 am
“For example, they should be required to know that less than 40 percent of women who have a child before the age of 18 will graduate from high school, compared to a high school graduate rate of 75 percent for those who delay parenthood until their early twenties
There’s also a reverse correlation: women who put off childbearing are more likely to have problems conceiving, and are more likely to end up childless. Will you tell them that as well?
That maybe a choice is involved, instead of the now-discredited myth that you can “have it all” (and on your own preferred time schedule)?
May 12th, 2011 | 10:39 am
@Brian
I’m pro-choice, but I think often pro-choice liberals are afraid to say the truth. And the truth is teen parenthood is a disaster for the mother (and often the father and others). These pro-choicers act as if abortion and parenthood are equally good choices in this situation. A girl who has a baby in high school statistically has a bleak future, and she needs to be aware of this.
60% won’t even graduate high school, let alone college. So much for your economic future and career. As far as their relationship life goes, only 20% of the fathers marry them, and 60% of marriages that start in high school end in divorce. As far as other relationships go, something like 90% of men in college wouldn’t even consider dating a woman with children.
I’ll put this another way. If a girl is planning to have a child in high school and she’s not scared, then she ought to be. We do girls a huge disservice by lying to them and telling them everything is going to be okay if they have a kid in high school.
May 12th, 2011 | 10:50 am
“To be fair most of the smoking restrictions have been loosely based on the rights of 3rd parties….as in “why should I breath in this person’s smoke while I’m in a public library/police station/concert hall/diner/ etc”.”
But that’s changing the topic from overt restrictions, to government efforts to educate people against engaging in the behavior, whether publicly or privately, of which there are many.
May 12th, 2011 | 11:17 am
“We do girls a huge disservice by lying to them and telling them everything is going to be okay if they have a kid in high school.”
Who does that?
May 12th, 2011 | 11:27 am
“In the interests of ‘full medical disclosure’, should women also be appraised of the research indicating that the ‘fetal wiring’ simply isn’t connected enough to experience even something as basic as pain before twenty weeks?”
So if someone cannot feel pain, taking their life means nothing?
May 12th, 2011 | 11:54 am
“These pro-choicers act as if abortion and parenthood are equally good choices in this situation.”
Where have you found this extraordinarily rare creature?
“A girl who has a baby in high school statistically has a bleak future, and she needs to be aware of this.”
Your arguments are all very persuasive if we were discussing the issue of why kids should not be having sex in high school. But I think that once a girl has a new human life inside of her, other considerations come into play.
In any event, I think there are plenty of people out there willing to tell teenage girls why they should abort their babies.
May 12th, 2011 | 12:00 pm
Brian –
If someone lacks the capacity for even that basic awareness, are they actually “someone”?
May 12th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
“Maybe the image on the machine itself is sharper than it comes out on TV and in pictures, but I often see the tech’s having to point out to the parents some very basic facts like “that’s the head” so I don’t think I’m alone”.
And then they say, “that’s the heart beating”. That should make a difference to anyone, but I guess it does not. I saw my child on his back, resting his head in his hands as if he were in a hammock. We had a laugh at his laid-back pose. that was at 18-weeks gestation, over 20 years ago. I gather sonograms are better now, although why that would make any difference is something I cannot grasp. The denial is mind-boggling and frightening.
May 12th, 2011 | 2:03 pm
“If someone lacks the capacity for even that basic awareness, are they actually “someone”?”
Sure. Is someone under general anesthesia still a someone?
Maybe a better question is, were you a someone before you were able to feel pain?
May 12th, 2011 | 3:09 pm
i’m a surgeon. for what it’s worth, if i didn’t comprehensively explain to a patient the nature, indications, risks, benefits, and alternatives of a particular surgical procedure during the informed consent process, i’d have medicare and lawyers all over my back, not to mention my ever-vigilant office staff.
which means i have no problems with “forced speech” in the context of caring for my patients — i am, after all, “forced” by my profession and by malpractice laywers to tell a patient his or her correct diagnosis to the best of my ability.
finally, if U/S images are indeed fuzzy and unintelligible (which is patently false for most of gestation), of what exactly are people afraid? again, the U/S data are morally neutral. why be afraid of data?
May 12th, 2011 | 3:21 pm
Brian, a temporarily-interrupted (or, actually, temporarily-muted) capacity is different from one that doesn’t exist at all.
If you want to talk about a hypothetical state of suspended animation or something, we can start splitting philosophical hairs, I guess.
And yes, I’m afraid that before my brain was formed enough to support even basic awareness, “I” didn’t exist. The potential, sure, but it hadn’t manifested yet. (I figure I won’t exist after my brain falls apart, too.)
May 12th, 2011 | 3:53 pm
Brian –
So if someone cannot feel pain, taking their life means nothing?
If someone lacks the capacity for even that basic awareness, are they actually “someone”?
Let’s put it in terms of the Golden Rule.
Would stealing the remaining years of your life be okay, if you felt no pain?
If you were in a temporary state of lacking awareness, would you want people to take advantage of that to have your status as human taken away from you?
May 12th, 2011 | 4:17 pm
“Brian, a temporarily-interrupted (or, actually, temporarily-muted) capacity is different from one that doesn’t exist at all.”
Then one that inevitably will exist if not violently interrupted is probably a third distinct option, more similar to the former than the latter.
May 12th, 2011 | 4:20 pm
an anecdote that’s perhaps germane to the question at hand: an ENT physician in the midwest was recently convicted of fraud because he would show “stock” pictures of nasal polyps to patients who didn’t have any nasal polyps. after the patients consented to “surgery for polyp removal,” the said physician would then perform sham procedures and bill insurance companies fraudulently.
ergo: use of images prior to surgery is routine and often “forced” by stipulations governing informed consent. so what is the fuss all about?
May 12th, 2011 | 4:39 pm
@Pentamom
“Then one that inevitably will exist if not violently interrupted ”
If you want to talk about what will potentially become a person, you’re opening up a whole can of worms. Science has reaching a point where any somatic cell in your body can be cloned and be turned into another person. It’s not an exaggeration to say that by scratching your head you are aborting thousands of potential children.
May 12th, 2011 | 5:11 pm
“And yes, I’m afraid that before my brain was formed enough to support even basic awareness, “I” didn’t exist.”
How do you define “awareness?” And what is it about awareness that makes its absence or presence the key question in determining whether or not someone can be destroyed?
“The potential, sure, but it hadn’t manifested yet. (I figure I won’t exist after my brain falls apart, too.)”
But doesn’t that potential make all the difference? A developing human body is not the same thing as a dead one.
May 12th, 2011 | 5:20 pm
“How about literature documenting the correlation of teen chastity with better mental health, better educational outcomes, etc.?”
I will love to see that “literature”. Otherwise, I am still puzzled why conservatives are so convinced that the wombs of women are thems (and the state) to decide for them who has the right to occupy it and for how much time…
May 12th, 2011 | 5:22 pm
Sorry for the late reply.
About morally neutral, lets be honest. He’s pushing this because he thinks it will reduce abortions by letting people see the fetus is a baby. It’s not ideologically neutral at all. As for it being done in the PP offices, well conversion isn’t always amenable to being modified.
It just leaves a bad feeling to have proxy fights over this.
May 12th, 2011 | 5:37 pm
Brian
So what? Providing the patient with information is precisely what informed consent is all about.
Yes but providing only selected information (by mandate) designed to elicit a particular desired choice is not ‘informed consent’, it’s called ‘advertising’.
Michael
Abortion is legal, and consequently there are no criminal penalties for having one, and no one may use force to prevent someone else from getting one. That doesn’t mean that there can be no attempts – even by governments – to persuade people not to have abortions.
True, however this is not the gov’t persuading, this is gov’t forcing other people to persuade. Let’s take a hypothetical that has little moral charge for most people, beer drinking. Suppose the American Association of Beer Manufacturers convinced Congress to encourage domestic beer drinking by having the gov’t fund a series of commercials touting all the wonderful jobs created by companies that make American beers. Most would probably say ‘blah’. Suppose instead, though, they required each doctor who practised medicine to ask their patients if they drink beer and if they say yes to hand them a paper showing how the leading American beer brands had fewer calories than leading imported ones. Per people like Brian, this is just ‘informed consent’ letting Guiness drinkers know they may get fatter than Bud Lite drinkers.
Blake
There’s also a reverse correlation: women who put off childbearing are more likely to have problems conceiving, and are more likely to end up childless. Will you tell them that as well?
There’s really no issue of ‘informed consent’ here at all. It’s an issue of using the gov’t to force unwilling speakers to hawk an ideological stance that not everyone shares so let’s stop pretending. If, say, Sarah Palin, feels her doctor did not inform her of the risks of having a child in her 40′s, there’s already a mechanism to handle that….a malpractice suit. If pro-lifers feel that abortionists are not properly informing their patients, then find some women who had abortions (shouldn’t be that hard, many women had abortions) and find some lawyers to sue the doctors (again shouldn’t be that hard, many lawyers like to sue doctors).
AB
I gather sonograms are better now, although why that would make any difference is something I cannot grasp.
So you give away the lie that this is about ‘informed consent’. The sonogram doesn’t make a difference, if all honest viewers can’t honestly make out a baby in the fuzzy sonogram, no pro-lifer in the world would say “ok have the abortion then”. This is not ‘informed consent’ in the manner of, say, a law requiring a mortgage company to clearly put the monthly payments and interest rate in the closing papers.
So if the gov’t can mandate what is essentially advertising for one position, there’s nothing in principle that says it can’t do the same for the opposite.
Brian
Maybe a better question is, were you a someone before you were able to feel pain?
Zen Buddhists sit for years contemplating the question of who they were before they were. Glad to see all that was needed was a sensible gov’t to solve our philosophical questions for us by declaration.
May 12th, 2011 | 6:18 pm
“He’s pushing this because he thinks it will reduce abortions by letting people see the fetus is a baby.”
What an outrage!
May 12th, 2011 | 7:13 pm
Blake –
No, but I’m already a going concern, an actual human being – not a potential one.
No, but again, I’ve actually developed to the point of not just awareness but self-consciousness.
May 12th, 2011 | 7:17 pm
pentamom –
A sperm is on its way to an egg. Unless someone intervenes, a conception will happen. Is that a human being?
I’m fine with saying that blastula or early embryo is on its way to being a person and having rights. But actual rights do trump potential rights.
May 12th, 2011 | 7:28 pm
Brian English –
May 12th, 2011 | 7:56 pm
Then one that inevitably will exist if not violently interrupted is probably a third distinct option, more similar to the former than the latter.
pentamom,
It seems to me there are good arguments to be made against abortion on the basis of respecting an embryo as a potential person, but the argument so many “anti-aborts” make is that a potential person is a person.
When I was a kid, my father raised chickens, and my sister and I would watch when he decided one was going to be dinner that night and chopped its head off with an ax. I really don’t think I could bring myself to do that, but I have no problem cracking open and beating a fertilized egg. It’s a potential chicken, but it’s still an egg, not a chicken.
Now, if a spiritual soul is present from the moment of the conception of a human being, then I would say there is a true person present. But I don’t think legal arguments can be made against abortion based on a soul, and souls certainly don’t show up on sonograms.
South Dakota has had a law like the one under discussion for several years.
May 12th, 2011 | 8:09 pm
There are two competiting schools of thought here….one is the popular one that most people hold and the other is the formal pro-life school. The formal school says that full humanity begins at conception. The popular school says that humanity is gradually acquired over time in a process.
What’s interesting is many of these proposals being sold as ‘common sense’ pro-life ones actually argue against the actual school of thought. Late term abortions are of no importance in the formal pro-life school. An abortion one day before 9 months is no different than an abortion one hour after conception. To the popular school, though, the late term abortion is highly problematic because it’s either a person or ‘just about’ a person while the fertilized egg is whatever trillion number of cells and connections and whatever else makes a person short of a person.
So what’s ironic here is in the name of ‘truth’, proposals are being pushed that support a thesis that supporters assure us is untrue (namely that abortion’s immorality is an escalating scale that rises as the pregnancy progresses). What’s also ironic is that the tactics being pushed to play to the popular school here actually end up reinforcing the majority of actual abortions that happen. If the measure of an abortion’s wrongness is how close a sonogram looks like a real baby, then early abortions are much less wrong and most abortions that happen happen early, not late, in a pregnancy.
May 12th, 2011 | 8:09 pm
dblade,
who said anything about people’s intentions being neutral?
again, the anatomical images (whether taken via CT, MRI, U/S, or endoscopes) taken prior to any procedure and the anatomical models i use in my office to explain surgical details are as morally neutral as “1+1=2.” these are simply facts about reality — facts about patients’ medical conditions — that patients and their physicians can use to make informed decisions.
put simply, even if i were an ardently pro-abortion OB/GYN, why would i arbitrarily limit the amount of information given to my patients? the whole point of “informed consent” is that it should be “informed.”
May 12th, 2011 | 9:48 pm
Because awareness is what defines whether there’s someone there at all. So long as I own a rock, nobody can prevent me from slowly grinding it into dust. We have laws about doing that to animals, though – precisely because, unlike rocks, they are aware.
And humans are self-aware, and get more protection than that.
But no human being is aware all the time, therefore by this logic the question would be whether this person’s lack of self-awareness is temporary or permanent.
May 12th, 2011 | 9:49 pm
A sperm is on its way to an egg. Unless someone intervenes, a conception will happen. Is that a human being?
Does it have its own distinct DNA? Or does it have the DNA of the person who shed it?
May 12th, 2011 | 10:48 pm
“So you give away the lie that this is about ‘informed consent’. The sonogram doesn’t make a difference, if all honest viewers can’t honestly make out a baby in the fuzzy sonogram, no pro-lifer in the world would say “ok have the abortion then”. This is not ‘informed consent’ in the manner of, say, a law requiring a mortgage company to clearly put the monthly payments and interest rate in the closing papers.”
You have deliberately distorted my comment. Sonograms from 20+ yrs ago were clear enough for me to see my baby’s body, his beating heart, the position of his hands, head, legs, umbilical cord, and the amount of amniotic fluid. They are probably clearer today, but why should that make any difference? I could clearly see exactly what he was in the old “fuzzier” sonograms and I probably saw 20 of them through the course of the pregnancy. There was no denying what he was, at least for anyone who did not want to lie.
It might be pertinent to this discussion to add that the many sonograms were precisely to permit my informed consent to my treatment. i was taking drugs to stop premature labor, but they had the side effect of reducing the amniotic fluid. The risk/benefit limit was getting close after 2 months in the hospital, and a decision had to be made whether to continue with the meds or stop them and allow the premature birth. I was given a great deal of information from an entire team of doctors and neonatologists. I signed numerous documents signifying that I had been given this information, understood the risks and was making the decision.
The doctors did not keep upsetting information from me and believe me, they did not hide unsettling pictures from me. They treated me respectfully and decently, and I made an educated decision.
May 13th, 2011 | 1:58 am
Boonton,
True, however this is not the gov’t persuading, this is gov’t forcing other people to persuade. Let’s take a hypothetical that has little moral charge for most people, beer drinking. Suppose the American Association of Beer Manufacturers convinced Congress to encourage domestic beer drinking by having the gov’t fund a series of commercials touting all the wonderful jobs created by companies that make American beers. Most would probably say ‘blah’. Suppose instead, though, they required each doctor who practised medicine to ask their patients if they drink beer and if they say yes to hand them a paper showing how the leading American beer brands had fewer calories than leading imported ones. Per people like Brian, this is just ‘informed consent’ letting Guiness drinkers know they may get fatter than Bud Lite drinkers.
That’s kinda parallel, so long as the doctor in your anlaogy is free to say “by the way, this is absurd government propaganda: I believe Guiness has zero calories.”
But even if the parallel works, that doesn’t convince me that the Texas law is a bad idea. Is your position that we must say that “forced speech” is always bad or else say that it’s always okay? If I approve of the fetal picture law (or nutrition labeling, or tobacco warnings, or whatever) do I give up my right to be against other sort of “forced speech?”
May 13th, 2011 | 8:09 am
@Blake
“Does it have its own distinct DNA? Or does it have the DNA of the person who shed it?”
Identical twins have the same DNA. Cancer cells have different DNA.
May 13th, 2011 | 8:37 am
True the doctor could counter the forced speech with free speech of his own neutralizing it. Then again the gov’t could give him two items of forced speech, or three, or four or more. It’s easy to see how forced speech quickly becomes a blatent violation of free speech.
I think the key difference between the three examples you give (picture law, nutrition labeling, and tobacco warning) is that the latter two are really about informed consent while the first is about advertising a philosophical position.
Note I’m not saying that doctors shouldn’t show their patients sonograms. I imagine in many cases a doctor must in order to properly advise their patients. But the doctor is judged based on the case, not upon whether or not he read a gov’t script crafted by a legislature vieing for endorsements of lobbying groups.
May 13th, 2011 | 9:03 am
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that by scratching your head you are aborting thousands of potential children.”
That’s like saying that a tree is just as much a chair as a an existing chair is, because through the application of multiple forms of labor and technology and additional ingredients it *could become one.*
I hope you were previously informed on this, but a conceived embryo needs the application of no technology in order to become a sensate individual, barring biological accident or violent interruption of the process.
May 13th, 2011 | 10:10 am
@pentamom
You’re thinking cloning is this super complex process, but compared to the tranformations that a zygote will undergo in the next 9 months, cloning is an extremely trivial process. Any cell in your body is far more similar to any zygote, than a zygote is to even a 2 week embryo. If a non-biologist viewed a skin cell and a zygote under a microscope, he couldn’t tell the difference. But people have this ridiculous religious belief that zygotes have souls.
May 13th, 2011 | 10:25 am
Blake –
Well, actually, yes – unless you wish to bring up some hypothetical suspended animation tech – humans are aware all the time. There are widely varying degrees of awareness, certainly, but at no point short of death is it truly zero.
Brian asked me, “Is someone under general anesthesia still a someone?” And yes, we have many reports of people being aware of things going on in the operating room while being under. Even when deep asleep, our senses are muted but not switched off. (You’ve probably had a sound or touch incorporated into a dream of yours, no? It nearly universally happens to everyone at one point or another.)
May 13th, 2011 | 10:44 am
Jeremy:
You initiated the comparison between a growing embryo, and a scalp cell.
Take a growing embryo of detectable age in the womb of a living woman, do nothing other than continue the life functions of the living woman, and the odds are highly positive that it will, within a matter of weeks, become a sensate indvidual.
Take a scalp cell, do nothing, and it will never become a sensate individual, 100% of the time. It doesn’t matter whether it takes a “lot” of technology, labor, and additional ingredients, or a few. It requires all those things, which an embryo does not.
May 13th, 2011 | 10:47 am
“But people have this ridiculous religious belief that zygotes have souls.”
I also believe in the idea of love, even though even a biologist couldn’t tell the difference between someone who loves me and someone who does not by purely physical examination. The two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and we all accept many invisible realities. To ridicule the idea of the existence of unseen things as such is juvenile.
May 13th, 2011 | 11:43 am
Pentamom – My meditation on detecting love here.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:07 pm
“Zen Buddhists sit for years contemplating the question of who they were before they were. Glad to see all that was needed was a sensible gov’t to solve our philosophical questions for us by declaration.”
(1) Don’t they have jobs?
(2) This is not a philosophical issue. It is a matter of science that a new human life is created at conception. You may want to ignore that, but let’s face reality.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:14 pm
I think popular attitudes are on Penatmom’s side. The common French euphemism for an (illegal) abortionist is “la faiseuse d’anges” or “Angel-maker”
May 13th, 2011 | 12:16 pm
That wasn’t the point, Ray. I didn’t say there are no ways of detecting love outwardly. I was saying that Jeremy’s standard of “if an ordinary person can’t see it in a microscope, it’s ridiculous to believe in it” was absurd. I should think even most atheists and/or materialists would agree that this is a silly standard, which is why I called it “juvenile,” not merely wrong.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
“It seems to me there are good arguments to be made against abortion on the basis of respecting an embryo as a potential person, but the argument so many “anti-aborts” make is that a potential person is a person.”
Personhood is a legal concept. An embryo is a human life — period. Every human being who has lived, and is alive today, looked like that, in that stage of their development.
You are free to assert an embryo is not a person in the legal sense, because the law says so. However, a law could also be passed saying that people with the first name David are not persons for legal purposes. You would still be a human being, but not a person in a legal sense.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:22 pm
@pentamom
“It doesn’t matter whether it takes a “lot” of technology, labor, and additional ingredients, or a few. It requires all those things, which an embryo does not.”
So what? How does that privilege a zygote over a skin cell?
Also, the majority of zygotes don’t even implant in the female’s uterus. Clearly our creator doesn’t regard zygotes as highly as some do. And the miscarriage rate in the early pregnancy is very high — most women just attribute it to an untimely period. Are these really deserving of our moral concern? Should we really have a funeral when this happens? Or force women to go through the pregnancy?
May 13th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
“If a non-biologist viewed a skin cell and a zygote under a microscope, he couldn’t tell the difference.”
Since when do we make scientific determinations based on the observations of laymen?
“But people have this ridiculous religious belief that zygotes have souls.”
You know for a fact that they don’t? When do you get your soul?
And in any event, the critical issue here is that a zygote is a human life. That is why an atheist like Nat Hentoff can be pro-life.
May 13th, 2011 | 1:12 pm
boonton,
please explain: how is showing to the patient, for example, an endoscopic photo of a nasal polyp that i’m planning to remove — or not remove, depending on the patient’s consent — “advertising a philosophical position?”
and if i never showed my patients any MRI scans or CT scans prior to surgery, and if i never explained to them the exact nature of the procedures i thought i needed to perform, most juries would convict me in a second should a malpractice claim arise.
note that the above is true even if i think the fetus is a parasite.
May 13th, 2011 | 1:14 pm
Brian –
Human tissue is created at conception. Whether that’s a human life is a different question. A kidney cell has the same DNA as a conceptus, just a couple cellular switches flipped.
Did you ever answer my question about whether you’d accept a brain transplant? If so, I missed it. I had a point in asking that question – we replace all kinds of other body parts and don’t consider identity to be compromised. But remove someone’s brain and what’s left is, well… tissue. There’s ‘nobody home’ at that point.
A conceptus doesn’t have a brain. Before 20 weeks you have a fair amount of nervous system tissue, but it’s not really ‘connected up’ yet. Until you have an integrated brain, you don’t have a human being, so far as I can tell.
If you think a fertilized egg has a soul, you run into problems with actual biological reality. Zygotes can split up to two weeks after fertilization, leading to identical twins or triplets, or even quadruplets. Let’s keep things “simple” and consider just identical twins. Which twin has the soul? Or does each have half a soul? Or does God ‘supplement the soul supply’ in such cases with an extra? If so, when? At the moment of splitting? Or does it happen earlier – does God, at conception, infuse an extra soul in a zygote that It ‘knows’ will split later? Is there an objective way to detect zygotes that have an extra soul waiting for the split? Or if the extra soul comes later, is there an objective way to tell which twin had the original and which one got the ‘bonus soul’?
Then there’s the case of ‘chimeras‘. Sometimes two eggs get fertilized at the same time. If both manage to implant, you get fraternal twins. But (very rarely) sometimes those developing zygotes fuse, and give rise to a person that is composed of two different cell lines. This has resulted in puzzling cases where a child appears not to be genetically related to the mother that conceived and gave birth to them! Consider, if both zygotes got souls at the moment of conception, does a chimera have two souls? Or did one of them ‘die’ and the other one kept on living? (Which one? Did the one that died get a ‘free pass’ to heaven?)
Needless to say, I find this kind of argument to be a lot like the whole “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” argument. Some people like to point to conception as the ‘objective’ start of human life, and in some senses that’s even correct. But you just can’t use words like ‘soul’ and ‘objective’ in the same sentence. If you think so, provide some testable answers to the above questions. All I’ve ever heard from those who believe in souls boils down to, “Gee, I dunno.”
May 13th, 2011 | 1:19 pm
Brian –
If we can’t prove a religious belief false, we should compel everyone to comport themselves by it, even if they don’t share it? Interesting doctrine.
May 13th, 2011 | 2:08 pm
please explain: how is showing to the patient, for example, an endoscopic photo of a nasal polyp that i’m planning to remove — or not remove, depending on the patient’s consent — “advertising a philosophical position?”
It’s not, but you aren’t required to because some lobbying group on behalf of nasal polyps wants to discourage the operation. You do so because your professional judgement says you can’t properly inform your patient without using the photo. No doubt there are cases where you need to perform a procedure for which no photo exists, in those cases you have to use your judgement to properly inform your patient using whatever tools are available (diagrams, pictures you draw on a piece of paper, etc.). Your professional requirements are not that you simply read a pre-written speech (like a cop reading someone his rights) but that you assess your patient, compose the necessary information and then evaluate whether or not you can reasonably believe your patient understands the information you have provided. Should you fail to do that, you can be held accountable for for failing to fulfill your professional duties. Note that the forms you ask your patients to read and sign and so on are “required” only in the sense they serve as useful indications that you’ve done your job, they are not in themselves your job. If tomorrow you found yourself in a refugee clinic with non-English speaking patients you would ditch all those ‘tools’ that you use for informing your patients and employ the tools available to you. What tools are they? Don’t ask me, you’re the doctor, you have to use your judgement.
May 13th, 2011 | 2:11 pm
Andrew
and if i never showed my patients any MRI scans or CT scans prior to surgery, and if i never explained to them the exact nature of the procedures i thought i needed to perform, most juries would convict me in a second should a malpractice claim arise.
So what’s the problem? If you or a doctor performing abortions does this just sue them? End of story.
May 13th, 2011 | 2:15 pm
Take a growing embryo of detectable age in the womb of a living woman, do nothing other than continue the life functions of the living woman, and the odds are highly positive that it will, within a matter of weeks, become a sensate indvidual.
pentamom,
A woman’s body to an embryo/fetus is not like a pot of soil to a seed. Soil is utterly passive. A woman’s body is actively making the baby. There is a reason why science has come nowhere near creating an artificial human womb.
May 13th, 2011 | 2:41 pm
“Human tissue is created at conception. Whether that’s a human life is a different question. A kidney cell has the same DNA as a conceptus, just a couple cellular switches flipped.”
Embryology textbooks say you are wrong.
“But remove someone’s brain and what’s left is, well… tissue. There’s ‘nobody home’ at that point.”
The technical term for that is dead.
“If we can’t prove a religious belief false, we should compel everyone to comport themselves by it, even if they don’t share it? Interesting doctrine.”
Is it your usual practice to just read the first sentence of posts? Jeremy had brought up the concept of souls, by asserting a zygote does not have one. The ensoulment issue is irrelevant, and is usually brought up by pro-abortion types as a red herring.
As I pointed out, it is a matter of scientific fact that a human life is created at conception, which is why an atheist like Nat Hentoff can be pro-life.
May 13th, 2011 | 2:49 pm
@Blake
“Does it have its own distinct DNA? Or does it have the DNA of the person who shed it?”
Identical twins have the same DNA. Cancer cells have different DNA.
That’s irrelevant, since what we are determining is the point at which a baby stops being its parent.
My suggestion is that we use regular classification schemes, instead of coming up with special arbitrary definitions of “what it means to be -” ….since it is clear the only reason for the arbitrary nature of the classification is to avoid the ethically obvious ramifications of “all men are created equal”…
(….which is the basis from which our government derives its legitimacy….)
We don’t recognize whether a raccoon is a raccoon according to whether the raccoon is “self aware”.
Scientists honestly can’t even tell if someone is “self-aware”. The “scientific” conclusion that says that consciousness is only present in more complex organisms is in fact a faith-based belief, as there is no way to know whether anyone but yourself has consciousness.
And may I point out that science has already committed more than a few atrocities against people based on the erroneous assumption that people looking like they lack awareness = people lacking awareness? I am thinking of some of the horrible things done to autistic people…..
May 13th, 2011 | 3:28 pm
@Brian
You’re (deliberately?) misunderstanding Ray’s point. When you get a heart transplant, you get a new heart, but your still Brian. Same with a kidney. Imagine a brain transplant. If it would keep the rest of your body alive, would you ever get one? Of course not. You’d be a different person. You wouldn’t be “you”.
As far as the soul issue goes, I can’t imagine you truly believing this isn’t important. I think Ray has just asked some complicated questions that you’re having a difficult time with, and I can sense your frustration. You really think that it doesn’t matter if a zygote doesn’t have a soul? If a zygote doesn’t have a soul, how can it be murder?
May 13th, 2011 | 4:03 pm
Brian –
I will cop to a modicum of exaggeration in the sense that it’s more than “just a couple” switches that get flipped. But the DNA in a kidney cell, vs. the zygote it ultimately split from, is indeed identical. It’s just that some sections have been ‘switched off’ and suppressed.
If you have a textbook cite that counters this, I’m open to being corrected.
We can keep the body going for quite a while without a brain, actually. A pacemaker and respirator will do most of the job. Even if the rest of the body is ticking along, though, if the brain is destroyed the person is dead.
And the same applies before the brain forms, too. There can be a lot of tissue growing and developing, but no person there yet.
And I’ve been pointing out – rather pointedly – that that’s not a “scientific fact”. Rather, it’s an interpretation of other scientific facts of genetics and embryology. An eminently questionable one.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:12 pm
“So what? How does that privilege a zygote over a skin cell?”
Whether it does is a separate argument, which has actually been repeatedly addressed here and elsewhere. It’s always enjoyable to watch, however, when someone responds to their own argument being demolished for non-logic with, “So what?”
So apparently it doesn’t actually matter whether a skin cell is fundamentally different from or fundamentally biologically similar to a zygote, so it was rather a waste of time to assert that they’re fundamentally similar.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:17 pm
“A woman’s body to an embryo/fetus is not like a pot of soil to a seed. Soil is utterly passive. A woman’s body is actively making the baby. There is a reason why science has come nowhere near creating an artificial human womb.”
This is conflating “nothing happening” with “doing nothing.” I am not claiming nothing is happening. I am claiming that no human agency is actively intervening here, as opposed to a purely biological, undirected process. No purely biological, undirected process will ever turn one of my scalp cells, while it is sitting on my head, into a person. Only purely biological, undirected processes are needed to turn a three week old embryo into a sensate individual, whenever it is that that happens, under normal conditions. No one needs to “do anything,” though obviously things are “happening,” inside the woman’s body, locally in her womb, and through the placenta, as well as in the embryo itself.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:19 pm
“Also, the majority of zygotes don’t even implant in the female’s uterus. ”
Yes, this is why I started out with “detectable pregnancy,” to forestall this one. The vast majority of detected pregnancies go to term.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:21 pm
“Or force women to go through the pregnancy?”
We should force women to go through pregnancies that are already lost before they are even detected? Huh?
Well, at least that’s a good signal that this argument is past its sell-by date.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:24 pm
Blake –
That’s overstating a bit: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mirror_test
If “science” could be personified that way, then “religion” could, too – and rejecting “religion” would be equally justified.
‘Slippery slope’ arguments are usually bad ones. It’s rare that someone can point to clear, unquestionable cases of ‘slippery slopes’ where allowing even a little leeway results in major mistakes. However… the question of “who’s human” is definitely one of them. The Holocaust, innumerable war crimes, slavery, the subjugation of women… failing to extend full moral significance to others really does lead to tragedy. So I understand when people passionately object to abortion. If you believe that even a fertilized zygote is a human being with full moral significance, then abortion really is a massive tragedy.
And I don’t think I’m somehow automatically immune from dehumanizing others. It’s a sadly human trait. I have thought very seriously about this. It’s important to be very cautious about the definition of ‘human’; history shows all too clearly that if there’s doubt, better to be too broad than too narrow.
But just because there are difficult boundary cases doesn’t mean that there can be no certainties at all. Wherever you come down on the subject of twilight, high noon is definitely day and midnight is definitely night. If the Sun is on the other side of the Earth from you, then it’s night. And if there’s no brain, I don’t see how there could be a human person there. In the case of Anencephaly, I don’t think there ever was a person. And a fertilized egg, or even a blastula, does not have a brain. Unless they suffer from anencephaly, eventually a fetus does have a brain.
Even then, as I’ve noted, having the parts of a brain is not the same as having a brain, in the same way that a kit is not the fully-constructed product.
Based on what we know about cognition, I strongly doubt a 20-week fetus is actually aware. But I can’t rule it out, so – as I’ve noted before as well – I’m okay with laws restricting abortion after that point (so long as they have exceptions for danger to the life of the mother).
May 13th, 2011 | 4:25 pm
As I pointed out, it is a matter of scientific fact that a human life is created at conception, which is why an atheist like Nat Hentoff can be pro-life.
And I’ve been pointing out – rather pointedly – that that’s not a “scientific fact”. Rather, it’s an interpretation of other scientific facts of genetics and embryology. An eminently questionable one.
If you want to make that assertion – credibly – then you need to explain exactly how and when human life does begin.
At what point does the non-human thing become the human being?
And if it’s not the sperm meeting the egg that causes the creation of a human being, what does? Exactly what changes, when?
Is it the act of being born? Are you arguing that killing a baby in the womb is nothing more than property damage?
Or is it the act of a mother choosing that makes a non-human thing into a human being? The “wanted” baby becomes human when its mother accepts it, while the unwanted baby never does become a human, because that’s what “pro choice” is really all about?
The argument you put forth should make sense ethically, legally and biologically. If you can.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:33 pm
boonton,
“You do so because your professional judgement says you can’t properly inform your patient without using the photo.”
that’s exactly the point — and i am no longer sure why we are in disagreement.
to clarify, even if i were ardently pro-abortion and thought the fetus inside a 15 year-old black high school drop-out were a parasite about to destroy her life, my job as her physician would STILL be to “properly inform” her using “whatever tools available,” as you put it.
the proposition that “good physicians are ones who inform their patients as thoroughly as possible” is not very controversial. in fact, i’d say it’s self-evident, except to those who have other irrational reasons for disbelieving it.
finally, note that the foregoing analysis is true whether or not lobbying groups even exist. it is also true regardless of physicians’ personal philosophies.
well, except the exceedingly rare and paternalistic personal philosophy that says “concealing relevant information from patients is morally justified and sometimes required.”
May 13th, 2011 | 4:46 pm
that’s exactly the point — and i am no longer sure why we are in disagreement
We aren’t. I’m not saying doctors shouldn’t show sonograms to their patients, I’m not saying they should be made too by law. I’m saying that doctors have a professional duty to properly inform. What that specifically means is given by the context of a given patient, a given situation and given tools available. Likewise if you are accused of not properly informing your patients, that too is not a simplistic question of whether or not you showed a specific photo but one that must be judged by everything you said and did with that patient measured against what the state of professional judgement is.
So very simply in terms of informed consent, this law is nonsense. If it’s honestly true that any abortion that does not include showing the woman a sonogram is one lacking informed consent then all that need be done is find such women and sue the abortionists.
May 13th, 2011 | 4:57 pm
@pentamom
You’re right, many early natural abortions go undetected by the woman. However, medical science might change this, and make every couple aware just how often they conceive. When this happens, we’d become aware of just how many natural abortions happen. Do you think it’s worth having a funeral for every aborted zygote? If no funeral, why not? If zygotes are people (and our children no less), doesn’t it strike you as odd that they aren’t given funerals?
May 13th, 2011 | 5:04 pm
Blake – Looks like you were composing your message as I was composing mine. I believe that response ‘pre-answers’ your questions. (Not that I haven’t said substantially the same things to you before.)
May 13th, 2011 | 5:04 pm
Yes, this is why I started out with “detectable pregnancy,” to forestall this one. The vast majority of detected pregnancies go to term.
pentamom,
If you can find some reliable statistics to back this up, I would be happy to see them. (I am not saying you are wrong, but I am doubtful.) If by “detectable pregnancy” you mean a “known pregnancy,” then I think the rate of miscarriage is somewhere around 15%-20%. But if you you mean a pregnancy in which the embryo has implanted, I have figures that say women in whom implantation has occurred but who do not yet know they are pregnant suffer undetected losses up to 30%. Going with the high figures for both estimates, that means a 50% loss, on top of the 60% to 80% loss due to embryos that never implant.
May 13th, 2011 | 5:20 pm
@Blake
“And if it’s not the sperm meeting the egg that causes the creation of a human being, what does? Exactly what changes, when?”
Sperm. Egg. Fertilisation. We’ll have a hard time finding anything like this in the Bible. But let’s press on.
You will often here people talk about the “moment of conception”. The problem is there is no such thing as the moment of conception. It’s a process that last several hours. The sperm has to enter the cytoplasm of the egg, then you have the cortical reactions. And that’s just the beginning. What I want to know from you is when in that time is the human being created? When is the magic time? Is it simply enough for the sperm to touch the cytoplasm of the egg, or something else?
May 13th, 2011 | 10:51 pm
@Blake
“And if it’s not the sperm meeting the egg that causes the creation of a human being, what does? Exactly what changes, when?”
Sperm. Egg. Fertilisation. We’ll have a hard time finding anything like this in the Bible. But let’s press on.
You will often here people talk about the “moment of conception”. The problem is there is no such thing as the moment of conception. It’s a process that last several hours. The sperm has to enter the cytoplasm of the egg, then you have the cortical reactions. And that’s just the beginning. What I want to know from you is when in that time is the human being created? When is the magic time? Is it simply enough for the sperm to touch the cytoplasm of the egg, or something else?
I’m not talking about the Bible.
I’m talking about how one classifies an organism as belonging to a particular species.
If we can all agree that a sperm is not a human being, and an egg is not a human being, but a live-born baby is a human being, then when exactly does that “not” a human being turn into a “human being”?
If you say “the moment of birth”, then let me repeat: are you suggesting that if a man shoots a pregnant woman, and the baby dies, the man has done nothing more than property damage? Like breaking out a window, or defacing a work of art?
Or are you saying that the baby becomes human at the point when the mother accepts the baby as human? Can we classify someone as human or not human according to whether someone’s convenience? Is doing so consistent with the ideals of equality this nation is based on?
Let’s imagine two women get pregnant on the same day. One of them wants the baby and the other does not. If both of them were to go into a hospital at the same time, would their unborn babies be biologically different from each other? Can we have a classification scheme that sorts two physically identical organisms into two different categories – one as a living being with rights, the other as a thing, not even granted the rights we grant gerbils or chickens.
If we took a baby out of its mother and put it into an artificial womb, would that change its legal status?
If we took a baby out of its mother and put it into a surrogate mother, would that change its status?
Here’s another question. If you can say “all men are created equal” – but then add an asterisk to what one must be to qualify as a “man” – then what stops anyone else from doing the same thing? You say that humans who lack a particular quality (‘self-awareness’) are just obviously not human. But what’s to stop someone else from making up their own definitions of who is and is not human?
Cicero says that empathy is what defines humans, and you obviously lack empathy, so does that mean you’re not human? And does that mean I can kill you? (Since, after all, me selectively defining and interpreting “empathy” is not really any different from you defining and interpreting “lacking self-awareness” to include some temporary states but not others, eh?)
It’s about classification.
It’s about being honest.
It’s about the idea that just because you want a particular outcome, that doesn’t necessarily justify dishonesty. Or making exceptions to rules. Or just making stuff up.
We get it: you don’t think babies are important. You think a woman’s right to be promiscuous without consequences is more important. But rules matter precisely because they’re impartial. When rules stop being impartial, then they stop being rules; they are corrupted to nothing more than the whim of the strong.
May 13th, 2011 | 10:52 pm
David, honestly, you are arguing for arguing’s sake, not because you cannot grasp my point or because it is not soundly made. We’re talking about situations that might result in abortions. Therefore, we are by definition talking about situations where the woman knows she’s pregnant, which you concede result in going to term 80-85% of the time. Last I checked, that’s a “vast majority.”
May 13th, 2011 | 10:55 pm
“If zygotes are people (and our children no less), doesn’t it strike you as odd that they aren’t given funerals?”
No, it doesn’t, because funerals don’t occur because a person has died, but because people who have a relationship with the person wish to acknowledge their loss. Fertilized, unimplanted embryos do not have a relationship with anyone, but that in itself does not make them less than human.
This is another tired, old, anti-life canard — that we don’t really believe in the humanity of the very early pre-born because we don’t have funerals for them. This is based on a necessary pretense about why funerals occur and who attends them.
May 14th, 2011 | 2:22 am
“Or are you saying that the baby becomes human at the point when the mother accepts the baby as human? Can we classify someone as human or not human according to whether someone’s convenience?”
Blake, I think this is what we do in this country. The pregnant woman gives it thumbs up or thumbs down, just like a Roman emperor, or God. At that moment of decision, a miracle occurs—she is now carrying either a baby or just some “products of conception”. And she mysteriously changes, too, when she exercises her sacred right to choose—she is either still “a mother”, or transforms back into just “a woman” again.
On a slightly different topic, I am somewhat mystified by comments suggesting that miscarried babies are unmourned. That is not what happens in my circle, and I thank God it is so. Moreover, my experience is that priests are a big source of comfort in acknowledging the loss, the grief, and the need for prayers in that sad circumstance. If you want a funeral for your miscarried baby, you can have one (see the Order of Christian Funerals, #237. A quick google search will show you).
May 14th, 2011 | 8:49 am
I think the ‘relationship’ argument can fit the lack of funerals for miscarriages. A more problematic issue is that abortion has never been considered murder. At no point in history has a woman who got or a doctor who preformed an abortion been treated as a murderer by the law. The relationship argument is no good there. If I wander into some town and kill a homeless drifter whose name isn’t even known by anyone I’m still able to be charged with murder and “no one had any relationship with this man” would not serve as a defense.
There’s other implications as well that are often ignored. For example, if almost half of humanity dies in miscarriages there’s no ethical justification for our research efforts which are focused almost exclusively on the post-born.
AB
Blake, I think this is what we do in this country. The pregnant woman gives it thumbs up or thumbs down, just like a Roman emperor, or God.
That’s actually the way I suspect it is. The way you get into this world is not through the state, the police, the army but through the mercy of a woman and just to make sure the irony is really standing on its head, the best time for a woman to bring a child into the world is not at the peak of her intellectual and emotional development but at its beginning. Even if you outlaw abortion, you can’t really microregulate every little thing a pregnant woman may do to help or hinder a pregnancy. Even God himself placed himself at the mercy of a young woman. In other words you can’t substitute a state mandate for an act of love, which I think is something that many pro-lifers have neglected to give full consideration too as they’ve focused on rather obscure legalistic tactics and goals in their fight.
May 14th, 2011 | 9:29 am
@Pentamom
“that we don’t really believe in the humanity of the very early pre-born because we don’t have funerals for them.”
Yes. Not even your anti-abortion fundamentalist believes that abortion is truly murder. “Abortion is murder” is basically a dogma and slogan they’ve been taught but never reflected on. Every time you say “abortion is murder”, I want lots of questions to immediately come to your mind. Someone whom you claim to be human and is your child dies, and there’s no funeral. How can you not see the schizophrenia in that? Here’s another consequence of “abortion is murder”: women who have had abortions are child murderers. I’ve never heard an anti-abortion zealot say that. Why shouldn’t women who kill their children be put in prison? Don’t you find it a little weird saying that a murder has taken place, and the person who ordered it shouldn’t be in prison?
May 14th, 2011 | 9:52 am
“We get it: you don’t think babies are important. ”
ad hominem attack. But I’ll play along. Aren’t you trying to get every government program like Medicaid used for uninsured women and babies cut? Are you not campaigning to stop gay parents from adopting, even though there are millions of babies in the world needing parents? Are you not in favor of cutting birth control in third world countries, so that parents with starving kids have even more starving kids?
“You think a woman’s right to be promiscuous without consequences is more important.”
Where does promiscuity enter in to this? Are you suggesting that women who are raped be allowed to get abortions? Imagine a girl in high school who follows every one of your rules and is a virgin. But then she gets raped and becomes pregnant. Do you not believe she should have to endure the consequences of pregnancy and child birth, just like any other woman, regardless of her promiscuity?
“Can we have a classification scheme”
I think be anti-abortion in early term abortions is just silly, but later term abortions becomes non-trivial. But again, I don’t think the government should be allowed to force women to gestate. If abortion is a crime, why couldn’t we prosecute a woman who has bad nutrition? Wouldn’t that be assault on the fetus?
May 14th, 2011 | 10:41 am
“But the DNA in a kidney cell, vs. the zygote it ultimately split from, is indeed identical.”
What is your point? The kidney cell is a part of a human being. The zygote is a human being at that stage in human development.
“And the same applies before the brain forms, too.”
But the brain developing is part of the process of human development. A body being kept functioning by machines is not going to develop a brain.
This brain fixation pro-aborts have has no logic to it.
“And I’ve been pointing out – rather pointedly – that that’s not a “scientific fact”. Rather, it’s an interpretation of other scientific facts of genetics and embryology. An eminently questionable one.”
So do you regard the Earth’s orbit of the Sun as a scientific fact, or is it an interpretation of other scientific facts of astronomy and physics?
And if you think human life beginning at conception is questionable, can you cite an embtyology text that questions that assertion?
May 14th, 2011 | 11:44 am
David, honestly, you are arguing for arguing’s sake, not because you cannot grasp my point or because it is not soundly made. We’re talking about situations that might result in abortions.
pentamom,
Maybe we are looking at the matter from two different perspectives. Here is what the issue is for me. Within Catholicism, human life (full personhood) is said to begin at conception. I think many in the anti-abortion movement hold that view. From the studies I have seen, 60% to 80% of the time, when conception takes place, implantation fails. Consequently, most human lives are measure in days. Once implantation takes place and pregnancy (as medically defined) begins, up to 30% of the time, the pregnancy ends so soon that the pregnant woman is unaware of it. Then, of all the pregnancies the mothers are actually aware of, 15% to 20% end in miscarriage.
So it is possible (taking the high estimates) that if nature is allowed to take its course, of every 100 babies conceived, only approximate 11 are born. This is a staggering figure, especially if one is from a Christian tradition that holds the unbaptized are not saved. It basically means God designed human reproduction largely to populate Hell.
I agree with you that the issue of funerals for those who die without anyone knowing they ever existed is irrelevant. But to the best of my knowledge, there is not even a prayer for such individuals. And although the issue of early embryo loss is of concern to the cattle industry, since it effects productivity, there is no significant medical research aimed at finding ways to save the lives of the 60%-80% who die before implantation and the 30% who die after implantation but before the pregnancy is detected. Apparently huge numbers of people are conceived and die who are not even worth thinking about.
May 14th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
AB — just to clarify, I’ve never actually heard of a “funeral” for an early miscarried child, but I’ll take your word that it is done.
But I never meant that they are “unmourned,” just that the planned, public ceremony of a funeral doesn’t happen, in my experience. Certainly they are mourned, and certainly pastors and priests frequently play a role in offering special prayers and so forth.
May 14th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Okay, Jeremy, there’s obviously no point in having a discussion with someone who believes that I, and everyone who believes what I do, is an abject shameless liar, just because we don’t do what you think you’d do if you were us, even though you can’t know that because you don’t share any of our assumptions, let alone all of them. So, ciao.
And what’s with the messed up comments?
May 14th, 2011 | 12:37 pm
If abortion is a crime, why couldn’t we prosecute a woman who has bad nutrition? Wouldn’t that be assault on the fetus?
If you take the ‘equal protection’ argument at all seriously when it comes to pro-life, there’s no choice. Failing to prosecute the mother for bad nutrition would be no different than Southern DA’s who declined to prosecute the members of lynch mobs.
May 14th, 2011 | 10:06 pm
Hi, Pentamom: my comments regarding the grief of miscarriage were not directed at you. I was thinking more of Jeremy and David Nickol, who seemed to think miscarriages were mere statistics, and not treated as sad losses by religious pro-life people.
David Nickol, my experience is that most churches have prayers for miscarried babies and their parents. I absolutely cannot imagine a priest neglecting a request for spiritual assistance with this. I have never encountered this. Have you? This is a matter near and dear to me, as it was the assistance and support of my church and her priests who meant much to me in this circumstance. I found that it was the “secular” world that disregarded my pain.
Do you really believe churches think God designed human reproduction to “populate hell”? Good Lord.
Here are some links to actual churches and pro-life groups, picked at random. It takes seconds to get the scoop, you know:
http://www.saintlukemclean.org/liturgy/funerals.htm
http://www.ewtn.com/devotionals/prayers/miscarriage.htm
May 15th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
Ray, this awareness thing is a tad more slippery than one might think. The Terry Shiavo case in Fla. is one example where questions arose regarding degrees of awareness. Did she have awareness and if so how much. Whatever the exact answer was her brain was able to maintain her bodily functions and she apparently responded to light and noise. The court decided that wasn’t quite enough so they starved her to death. It took 2 weeks. My question to you is; when you say awareness are you saying awareness of anything or do you have a particular degree of awareness that passes mustard with you. Also, you are aware that most of the living organisms that share our world do not have the the awareness to pass even the most rudimentary awareness test. This is true even if we grade on a curve. So by what I take to be your standard nearly everything is death worthy but then thats not what you had in mind, it’s just the under 20 week things that live in women.
May 15th, 2011 | 4:09 pm
David Nickol, my experience is that most churches have prayers for miscarried babies and their parents. I absolutely cannot imagine a priest neglecting a request for spiritual assistance with this. I have never encountered this. Have you?
AB,
I am always pleased to hear that the Church has become sensitive to the feelings of women who have miscarriages. Some years after it happened, my mother told me that she thought she might possibly have had a very early miscarriage. (This would have happened in the middle or late 1950s.) She called the parish priest and told him what had happened, and she asked him what she should do with the product of the potential miscarriage. I should add that my mother was medically knowledgeable, having gone through nurse’s training. If she thought she had an early miscarriage, it is quite possible that she did. The priest told her to flush it down the toilet.
I am having little success researching the topic, but I believe the sympathetic attitude of the Church toward miscarriage is a quite recent development—and a very positive one—and I am guessing that it has happened in no small part because of the pro-life movement. I would be interested if anyone could point me to Catholic services and prayers for miscarried children from the 1950s or earlier. I am looking for them and not finding them, but maybe I am not looking in the right places.
One thing I will say is that I think issues regarding pregnancy and particularly miscarriage were much more private than they are now. Very unfairly, there used to be something embarrassing about pregnancy and shameful about miscarriage. You know, don’t you, that when Lucy was expecting her baby on I Love Lucy in the early 1950s, the network would not allow the word pregnant to be said on television?
May 15th, 2011 | 7:15 pm
The problem with the Shiavo case isn’t as close to the question as might appear. Shiavo was not deemed to be dead when her feeding tube was disconnected, She could have been perfectly aware and said “I don’t want to live with a feeding tube” and the same thing would have happened, assuming she couldn’t eat without one. The argument in that case was first could anything be detected in her that could lead anyone to believe that she could be communicated with and then communicate her wishes out? And second to what degree did her husband speak for her wishes?
So by what I take to be your standard nearly everything is death worthy but then thats not what you had in mind, it’s just the under 20 week things that live in women.
Less snarkily, the question is that this isn’t an academic debate about whether a person who got shot in the head but whose heart is pumping because of a machine is technically alive or dead. We are talking about a real woman who happens to have her own real body and that sovereignity needs to be approached with some degree of respect.
David
The priest told her to flush it down the toilet.
What I’m seeing, though, is that this is offered as a service for parents who experience a miscarriage which misses the point. Taking the argument seriously, a misscarriage should not be treated any different from any other human’s death, period.
May 16th, 2011 | 8:20 am
Brian English –
The distinction you’re trying to make is exactly why the following matters:
There may be no logic you can see, but that doesn’t mean there’s no logic to it.
And that logic really needs to be addressed. So, answer my two-pronged question from before: Would you accept a kidney transplant if your kidneys were failing? And, would you accept a brain transplant if your brain were failing?
“Yes” or “no” answers are appropriate. I would also accept answers of the form, “Yes, but…” or “No, but…”
Bonus question: Why, or why not?
May 16th, 2011 | 8:39 am
Michael Currie –
You may recall that I stated above, quote, “there are difficult boundary cases”. And, further, I have stated elsewhere, specifically about the Terry Schiavo case:
Similarly, there are very tough cases where we can’t tell if awareness has ended. In general, I think that things like living wills should be respected. In cases where there’s no clear will, the wishes of the legal guardian should be respected, though I’d prefer erring on the conservative side. For example, in the highly-publicized case of Terry Schiavo, I’d say that the husband should have simply given custody over to her parents. If he was right and she’s truly brain-dead, then it couldn’t harm Terry and would make her family feel better. If he’d been wrong, there’d be a chance therapy might help. If no one was willing to assume custody, I’d say that it was up to the husband what to do.
So, anyway:
(The phrase is “passes muster“, BTW.)
When dealing with human beings, I think – as I said above – “I’d prefer erring on the conservative side”. Self-awareness is a lot more complex – and hard-to-determine. Awareness is a little simpler, so I think it makes a more practical standard.
Even then, the standard I’m proposing is more ‘eliminative’. Only if it can be shown that no awareness is possible should we consider life ended (or not yet begun).
Well, I’m not a vegan or vegetarian, if that’s what you’re asking. (Are you?) Yes, we do kill all kinds of living organisms that lack awareness – I don’t avoid antibiotics when necessary, either. I’m at a loss to understand your point here.
Saying that killing non-aware living things is permissible (or maybe just not forbidden) isn’t the same thing as saying killing them is obligatory. I’m for a little killing as feasible.
May 16th, 2011 | 1:21 pm
Schiavo was never deemed ‘worthy of death’. If a man stormed into her hospital room ten minutes before she died and shot her in the head, he would have been charged with murder.
While it may seem like nitpicking, nitpicks do sometimes matter. Her death was the consquence of denying her medical treatment (and yes a feeding tube is medical treatment). If she had ‘woken up’ for a moment and asserted she didn’t want to live with a feeding tube, then everything would have proceeded a it did but minus the contraversy and court cases.
There was no real question then of whether she had awareness, had lost her awareness or just had her awareness ‘on hold’. The question was only whether she had opted to decline medical treatment based on the claims that her husband had made or if she had asserted she wanted such treatment based on theh claims her parents made.
May 16th, 2011 | 10:05 pm
Yes, we do kill all kinds of living organisms that lack awareness
We kill all kinds of living organisms, not because they do or do not have awareness (who cares if a cockroach is or is not aware?) but because there is (a) a reason to kill them and (b) no reason to oppose such killing.
But we have laws prohibiting humans from killing other humans for several reasons, not least of which is the belief in the sanctity of human life and the related belief in equality before the law.
There is no way to breach those two ideals without doing harm to society. They are either-or conditions: either it is true or it is not. Once it is not true for a baby, it’s not true, period: if we live in a system where arbitrary judgments can override the sanctity of human life, then we do not live in a Constitutional nation that honors rule of law; we live in a nation where the Constitution and the rule of law are honored when it is convenient for us.
Let’s face it: if you can justify killing a baby, who else are you willing to kill? Seems fair to assume you’ll justify killing anything & any one that is politically inconvenient.
May 17th, 2011 | 7:34 am
Seems fair to assume you’ll justify killing anything & any one that is politically inconvenient.
Actually it’s not fair at all to assume any such thing.
May 17th, 2011 | 8:29 am
Blake –
The fact that something is aware is indeed a reason to oppose killing it. In the case of more aware animals it’s not an overwhelming reason, but it’s enough that we need a good reason to kill them. We kill animals for food or medical research, but we have laws about killing – or even mistreating – animals for no reason.
Of course. We’re human, and therefore have an obvious vested interest in protecting human life. No surprise there. A little reflection shows the value of equality before the law as well.
So far, so good.
Here’s the problem. There is nothing ‘arbitrary’ about the statement that before 20 weeks, a fetus does not have a functional, interconnected brain. Nor is there anything ‘arbitrary’ about the statement that a brain is necessary for awareness. And finally, it’s not ‘arbitrary’ to say that something that is not aware is a ‘something’, a thing and not an agent.
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