What a can of worms unregulated IVF has become. Latest example: A couple using IVF and a surrogate have ordered the hired gestater to abort because the fetus/unborn baby had Down syndrome. From the story on BioNews:
A couple from British Columbia, Canada, have been embroiled in a complex ethical battle after their surrogate refused their request to abort the fetus she was carrying. The couple made the request after tests revealed the baby would likely be born with Down’s syndrome. Although the parties had entered into contract, legal proceedings were not brought by the surrogate who, in the end, decided to have an abortion due - in part - to her own family obligations…Dr Ken Seethram, the treating doctor, recently addressed the Canadian Society of Fertility and Andrology on the dispute. He revealed that, according to a signed agreement between the parties, the surrogate’s refusal of an abortion would absolve the commissioning couple of any responsibility for the child.
Sickening on all counts. And whose responsibility would it be to care for the child that didn’t meet the couple’s criteria for being worthy of life if the surrogate didn’t want the baby? The surrogate’s according to the contract.
IVF has led to a sense of entitlement to only have a baby we want–as if a child is a mere consumer product:
Sally Rhoads, of Surrogacy in Canada Online, said decisions pertaining to the future of a defective fetus should be made at the outset. Furthermore, she argued for the protection of the commissioning couple. ‘The baby that’s being carried is their baby. It’s usually their genetic offspring’, she said. ‘Why should the intended parents be forced to raise a child they didn’t want? It’s not fair’. Ms Rhoads points to the United States where, in some states, the commissioning couple can sue the surrogate to recover costs if the surrogate continues with a pregnancy against the couple’s wishes.
I repeat, sickening. Such contracts should be voided by public policy outlawing surrogacy for pay. I mean, if this isn’t human trafficking, what is it?
October 11th, 2010 | 3:18 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Commercial Surrogacy is Human Trafficking: Biological Parents to Birth Mother–Abort Down Fetus! » .. http://bit.ly/c3tb0G [...]
October 11th, 2010 | 5:33 pm
This true, in Spain the interests of the clinics have been imposing their law.
the distance between what makes the Assisted Reproduction Act 2006 and the pure and simple reality of the market for fertility. Of course, the law provides that the donation “will never profit or commercial character.” May only be given financial compensation for the inconvenience resulting from the donation. For now, the market value “discomfort” between 600 and 1,000 euros, perhaps because in a clinical cause more discomfort than others.
Awfulness of the matter is that the greed of IVF clinics are eroding the basic philosophy of organ donation, human dignity, so that you can not buy and sell human organs, blood transfusions pay etc. Also The Law also sets a limit of six children produced using eggs from the same donor. But the reality is that nobody controls this is so and a donor can sell their eggs in different centers. Another cited in the report has sold her eggs five times the rate of six eggs each time. If everyone had been fertilized and would give rise to viable fetuses, infants thirty would have the same genetic mother. So we can not exclude the possibility of blood links between a boy and a girl born to a single egg.
Nor is respected age limit, all these misdeeds of reproductive-abortion lobby eventually destrur the pride of the Spanish health care system: the donation of organs.
October 11th, 2010 | 6:14 pm
This sounds like an argument to me that if women aren’t willing to abort children that the father of the child doesn’t want, that he is not liable for child support.
October 11th, 2010 | 6:45 pm
Don:
I agree with you. That should be the law. If a woman won’t take responsibility for birth control, she should have an abortion. There should be a procedure where the putative father disclaims all rights and finances the abortion. If the mother refuses, the rights AND RESPONSIBILITIES, for the child are hers alone.
This would do wonders to repair the ghetto culture of carelessly making children which cultural conservatives rightly decry. Of course the cultural conservatives’ unquestioning religious objections to abortion, make this politically infeasible.
October 11th, 2010 | 7:44 pm
GK – please tell me when the man has to take responsibility for the actual sex? Your comments illustrate perfectly the misguided conclusions that are natural to the warped understanding of sexuality that society currently embraces. Regardless of religious stance, the natural law purpose of sex is BABIES. That is it’s function. The unitive/enjoyment aspect is secondary. Divorcing the function from the act, as you do, leads only to such horrific stories such as these, and comments such as yours.
October 11th, 2010 | 8:02 pm
Did you notice that the BBC Business page reports that this is big business in India, bringing in 500 million dollars a year?
LINK
October 11th, 2010 | 8:30 pm
GK: “If a woman won’t take responsibility for birth control, she should have an abortion.”
You must be kidding. If not, here is a reply for you:
“If a man won’t take responsibility for his penis he should be sterilized and/or castrated.”
If it sounds good to you, it sounds good to me.
And by the way, I object to abortion and how this act is commonly understood (and thus disagree with the rhetoric of a woman’s ‘right to choose’ since it is question-begging, if it is not to be understood as based on convenience and comfort trumping human life) and am neither ‘conservative’ nor religious.
October 11th, 2010 | 8:32 pm
Tioedong:
Thanks for linking the article, but this passage from it:
“The chances of success are higher here because doctors can implant four to five embryos into a surrogate mother, whereas in the UK the maximum is two, while many European countries limit it at a single embryo.”
is probably going to keep me up nights. What a race to the bottom.
October 11th, 2010 | 9:59 pm
GK, I didn’t mean to mislead you. I’m a staunch pro-lifer and one of those “cultural conservatives” who would make your suggestion “politically infeasible.” I’m even a friend and supporter of the next senator from the great but depressed state of Nevada, Sharron Angle, http://www.sharronangle.com, Harry Reid’s opponent.
I know your idea strikes a cord with a lot of men for a lot of reasons. I was making an analogy that I thought would illustrate the absurdity of Sally Rhoads comments that:
“‘The baby that’s being carried is their baby. It’s usually their genetic offspring’, she said. ‘Why should the intended parents be forced toe would think was outrageous to raise a child they didn’t want? It’s not fair’. Ms Rhoads points to the United States where, in some states, the commissioning couple can sue the surrogate to recover costs if the surrogate continues with a pregnancy against the couple’s wishes.”
I thought if we agreed that telling a woman she had to abort or they’d get no child support was outrageous, then I thought we’d see Ms. Rhodes comments were wrong and so is this idea of compelling surrogates to abort. I don’t apologize for my view, but I didn’t mean to mislead you to think that’s what I thought. I think it’s wrong for men to skip out. I think it’s even more wrong and unconscionable for the mother of the child to arbitrarily abort the unborn child.
I’m offended by the Rhoads’ notion that people can dispose of unborn children if they don’t want them, and that it is unfair to be forced to raise them or be responsible for them if they don’t meet our expectations. I’m also offended by her instrumentalization of children. How did we ever come to this idea that we deserve a certain type of child and that we can chose them like we chose floor plans for a new house… we walk through them until we find just the one we want to suit us? “I like this floor plan, but would like some upgrades here and here.” Her description of the parents of the child as being a “commissioning couple” speaks for it self. So does the notion of suing the surrogate. God help us.
Didn’t mean to mislead you GK.
October 11th, 2010 | 11:17 pm
I think Don Nelson and GK need to learn to keep their pants zipped up, as should any man who is desparate not to be a father.
In no way should women be forced, by law or any other way, to have an abortion.
Maybe we better start looking at sex as the procreative thing that it is. If we don’t want to procreate, then maybe we shouldn’t have sex, or use very good birth control.
October 11th, 2010 | 11:36 pm
So….the couple does not want the child because it would “likely be born with Down Syndrome.”
Following the logic that they don’t want to raise a possibly “handicapped” child what would they do if the child was born “normal” then later in infancy or as a toddler contracted an ailment that caused physical and or mental disabilities?
Is this when the convenient euthanasia program would kick in? Retroactive abortion as it were?
Really, really sad!!
October 11th, 2010 | 11:42 pm
Erin:
Thank you for your comments. There is no such thing as “natural law”. There are of course the laws of physics which are indifferent to humanity and moral content neutral. Humans are partially altruistic to others. This altruism drives us to create policies such as do not steal, do not murder, etc., which maximize the public good. These are policies that we invent; not a “natural law” that is out there independent of humanity.
You write: “the natural law purpose of sex is BABIES. That is it’s function”. How do you determine what the function/purpose of a biological structure or behavior is? This is actually a subtle non-obvious question. The only serious answer that scientists have been able to find, in over 90 years of study, is that organisms and behaviors are means for genetic information to replicate itself. (I can elaborate on this on a follow up post if you’d like). If we make it a moral imperative to follow biological function (follow “natural law”) we get some conclusions that you may not like. A male would feel morally obligated to spread his genetic information widely not only by having lots of sex with different women but by making numerous donations to sperm banks. It is also universal across most species, including humans, for a high status male to mate with numerous women. This tends to maximize the spreading of his genes. Monogamy, at least for high status males, would thus be against the “natural law”. Genuine altruism towards non-relatives would also be against “natural law”. For most of our history, we lived in small groups comprised of our close relatives (who shared many of our genes). Selfish genes drove altruistic behavior in individuals to benefit versions of the same genes in close relatives. (this is called” kin selection”). Genuine altruism towards non-relatives, EXACTLY LIKE SEX WITHOUT PROCREATION, is against the function/purpose of altruism and thus against “natural law”.
Do you see the problems that are encountered when we try to treat this set of ideas rigorously? Rather that following our own biases (or religious indoctrinations) and saying that we follow “natural law”. It is better to state what our fundamental values are and discuss how best to achieve them.
Thank you for your comments following up on my post.
October 11th, 2010 | 11:52 pm
Raven:
The issue is when does a system develop to the point that we consider it to have human rights. Most educated people grant human rights to toddlers but do not grant them to individual cells (thank goodness: I cut myself shaving this morning and killed so many blood cells it would count as a a genocide to rival Stalin and Pol Pot if we did so classify individual cells). Of course rational people can, and do, differ as to what point in the developmental continuum rights should be granted.
A toddler which suffered a disability would have human rights. A prenatal cluster of cells would not.
If you are interested in these issues, I recommend reading Derek Parfitt’s Reasons & Persons.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 11th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
GK: Personhood theory leads to tyranny. An embryo is not a mere cluster of cells. It is much more. It is a full fledged organism. That’s the biology.
October 12th, 2010 | 12:47 am
Ceecee, read my second comments. Sorry you missed my point too. I should have been clearer. I oppose abortion.
October 12th, 2010 | 9:38 am
“Maybe we better start looking at sex as the procreative thing that it is. If we don’t want to procreate, then maybe we shouldn’t have sex…”
Procreation, not recreation? Ceecee: my guess is that you haven’t “been there, done that” yet. You’ll be far better equipped to comment when you have.
October 12th, 2010 | 9:42 am
Wesley writes: “An embryo is not a mere cluster of cells. It is much more. It is a full fledged organism. That’s the biology.”
That may be the biology, but the fact remains that American jurisprudence does not recognize that the “full-fledged organism” has any rights until it’s born.
October 12th, 2010 | 9:46 am
“Commercial surrogacy is human trafficking”?
Nonsense. You’re co-opting a term that has a totally different legal meaning in order to stir up people’s emotions. That kind of misuse of language is in the same league as “abortion is murder” — in other words, it’s pure and simple propagandistic BS.
October 12th, 2010 | 9:46 am
Good grief: how are there THIS many people who can’t tell the difference between an embryonic human being and a skin cell or a blood cell or a human hair? And these people call their OPPONENTS “anti-science”?!
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 12th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
bmmg39: They know. It’s sophistry. They think they’re being clever.
October 12th, 2010 | 10:11 am
GK: “The issue is when does a system develop to the point that we consider it to have human rights. Most educated people grant human rights to toddlers but do not grant them to individual cells (thank goodness: I cut myself shaving this morning and killed so many blood cells it would count as a a genocide to rival Stalin and Pol Pot if we did so classify individual cells). Of course rational people can, and do, differ as to what point in the developmental continuum rights should be granted.
A toddler which suffered a disability would have human rights. A prenatal cluster of cells would not.”
But you contradict yourself here. You wish to deny human rights to the “cluster of cells” that articulates itself not into skin cells alone, but a human being, and state this is a rational objection. If you speak in terms of cells you have to grant that all human beings are simply clusters of cells. If there is something more then the argument can’t simply be cells, or in principle we have no cause to object when someone takes the life of another, being a cluster of cells and all.
October 12th, 2010 | 11:11 am
The majority of fetuses with chromosomal disorders, such as Down or Edwards syndromes, end in miscarriage. The reproductive system seems to have what we can characterize as a quality control system. To apply natural law reasoning: nature or biology wants us to abort fetuses with chromosomal disorders.
I’m not actually arguing this because nature doesn’t “want” anything. I’m merely pointing out the absurdity of the naturalistic fallacy (ie “natural law”).
Wesley writes: “An embryo is not a mere cluster of cells. It is much more. It is a full fledged organism. That’s the biology.”
Nobody disputes the operations of physical structures like cells or embryoes. The question is to what physical structure we should map ethical concepts like “human being” or “person” or “soul”. The only mapping rule that does not collapse to absurdity is to map the ethical concept of a PERSON to the physical structure that constitutes a MIND.
Wesley: to hold the doctrinaire “pro-life” position you must map personhood not just to embryos but to individual human cells. I committed genocide yesterday when I cut myself shaving. This will strike you as absurd so you will add an arbitrary ad hoc rule applying personhood only to nucleated cells. I therefore committed a mass murder in killing thousands of white blood cells that contain my entire genetic code. This will strike you as absurd so you will then add a second arbitrary ad hoc rule applying personhood only to nucleated cells that are in a position to begin replication. I am therefore at least a serial killer because there must be many of my wife’s ova that I fertilized but which failed to implant on the uterine wall. This will strike you as absurd so you will then add a third arbitrary ad hoc rule …..
Do you see the problem? Scholars in bioethics had this debate decades ago in the journals. As you’ve noted on this blog, the overwhelming majority of professional bioethicists support personhood theory. Why do you think this is?
October 12th, 2010 | 11:37 am
“Most educated people grant human rights to toddlers but do not grant them to individual cells (thank goodness: I cut myself shaving this morning and killed so many blood cells it would count as a a genocide to rival Stalin and Pol Pot if we did so classify individual cells).”
How can one remain pro-life when confronted with such a withering argument? I guess I am just not “educated” enough to comprehend GK.
October 12th, 2010 | 12:48 pm
That is truly tragic and disgusting. I wish the bith mother could have stuck to her guns and not had the abortion. I think it’s really LOW of the biological parents to go and say, “You don’t want to abort our genetic offspring? Well, fine, than YOU take care of it, SLAVE.”
October 12th, 2010 | 2:48 pm
Avdotya: Thank you for your feedback:
“But you contradict yourself here. You wish to deny human rights to the “cluster of cells” that articulates itself not into skin cells alone, but a human being, and state this is a rational objection. If you speak in terms of cells you have to grant that all human beings are simply clusters of cells. If there is something more then the argument can’t simply be cells, or in principle we have no cause to object when someone takes the life of another, being a cluster of cells and all.”
My position is that a cluster of cells which CONSTITUTES A MIND should be given human rights. Cells which do not constitute a mind should not. I’d grant you human rights, but not a bag of yeast. This is contrary to the position of some antiabortion activists who believe that a single cell (called a zygote) should be given the same human rights as a fully born human.
To Wesley and bmmg39:
A single celled zygote replicates and differentiates into different types of cells such as skin and muscle cells. These cells divide and differentiate further. The earliest cells are programmed to become any kind of cell. With many replications, programming which limits what the cell can turn into is activated. Thus a white blood cell does not normally grow into a new human being. For information about cell differentiation, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_differentiation
Every single cell with a nucleus (such as a white blood cell) has the complete genetic program to become any type of cell or a brand new human being. It doesn’t do so because programming which limits it has been activated by the cell division. Scientists have deactivated this programming and converted adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells. See: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090205133744.htm
It is only a matter of time before they can program any nucleated cell, which contains the entire human genome, to become a zygote.
This is the reduction ad absurdum of the position that a single celled zygote should be granted human rights. The majority of all zygotes do not implant into the uterine wall and are flushed down the toilet with the other menstrual waste. If you believe that all single celled zygotes should be treated as people, then this is a genocide greater than the Holocaust and Rwanda put together.
BTW Wesley, I know that you attended law school where the 1L professors taught you how to reason about mapping normative legal rules to fact patterns. Ethical reasoning is similar. It is not sophistry to show the weakness and inconsistency of poor arguments.
Of course I don’t believe in killing babies. I don’t believe in killing late term fetuses either. This is because, later in the pregnancy, fetuses’ neurons have wired together and they constitute MINDS, and thus should be granted moral value. If they don’t have MINDS, then no moral issues are implicated.
What is this horrible personhood theory that has Wesley all worked up? It is simply this: Things with MINDS have MORAL VALUE, and things without minds do not. Forget the fancy philosophical and scientific talk. It is very simple. You wouldn’t object if I burned a bag of yeast. You would object if I burned your dog alive, even if I compensated you for its economic value. You would strongly object if I burned a living human being. But if a human or dog had died (their mind no longer exists), you wouldn’t object if I cremated the bodies.
October 12th, 2010 | 3:52 pm
GK,
Just because some human beings never develop due to natural reasons doesn’t give one a right to willfully destroy life. It’s no different from arguing that we should do experiments on starving African impoverished children because they’ll starve anyway. You are conflating nature with willful human action. If humans were purposefully killing those embryos, then yes, that’s wrong. If a human being in it’s zygote form is not healthy enough to implant, that’s not genocide any more than our inability to stop the aging process can be considered active euthanasia of the elderly. It’s the natural state of things.
Exactly what point in time does the unborn child have a mind? What rational and natural day in the pregnancy should we draw a line? How do you objectively determine that any other living organism has a mind? If having a mind is your criterion for value, do smarter people have more moral value than idiots? Do normal people have more rights than the disabled?
Your argument about adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells is also a rabbit trail. iPS cells are not zygotes in of themselves. Even if we could make zygotes out of any cell in the body, it requires a willful action that the person has full knowledge of, be it uniting sperm and egg in the horizontal mambo or genetically altering a cell to become the same thing (but costing about $5,000,000 more to create than option A and no fun along the way).
At the end of the day, your arbitrary argument is that we should be able to kill human beings that aren’t developed enough to feel pain. But have you stopped and considered the pain and negative consequences of treating human life like a commodity to be destroyed if found “defective” on the conveyor belt or if mother or father has “buyer’s remorse?”
The only logical conclusion is that a human being is a human being, from his creation to his death. Applying rights and moral worth to different categories of human beings based on arbitrary criteria is no different than plantation owners saying slavery is needed because African slaves are unable to care for themselves and therefore should have no rights.
October 12th, 2010 | 4:46 pm
GK, the “mind” you speak of is derived from the human being when she is just a unicellular organism. No “mind” (or any other bodily component) is magically “added” later on; the zygote/embryo/fetus receives only nutrition and a hospitable environment for development — two things we STILL require after we are born. A blood cell is a blood cell and that is all it will ever be. The same cannot credibly be said about a human zygote or embryo. The embryo HAS cells, yes, just as you and I do, but the embryo is NOT EQUIVALENT to a cell.
October 12th, 2010 | 5:05 pm
“My position is that a cluster of cells which CONSTITUTES A MIND should be given human rights. Cells which do not constitute a mind should not. I’d grant you human rights, but not a bag of yeast. This is contrary to the position of some antiabortion activists who believe that a single cell (called a zygote) should be given the same human rights as a fully born human.”
First, the stage of zygote doesn’t articulate itself into something ‘mindless.’ It is a necessary condition for the mind to exist.
Second, from your logic I then have nothing to stop me from cutting off someone’s arm, since those specific cells don’t constitute the mind.
October 12th, 2010 | 5:35 pm
How many of you have carried a clump of cells within your womb? How many of you have felt the first tiny flutters of movement within your womb from that clump of cells? How many of you have felt the pain of loss when that clump of cells died in the first trimester ? I don’t believe there is a woman out there who has become pregnant that doesn’t know in her heart the difference between a clump of cells and her own human offspring. A woman’s life is forever changed after carrying a child whether she carries it for a day or 9 months. You can talk all you want but we are all able to have this discussion becausse we had intelligent mothers who knew the difference between a clump of cells and a baby.
October 12th, 2010 | 6:57 pm
Wesley, can you confirm the statement it makes in the article about jurisdictions in the U.S. where the bio parents can sue the surrogate if she doesn’t abort at their command? Do you know what states they are and/or what (if any) limits there are on this? Can they pay her a “down payment,” change their minds for whatever reason at all, and then demand that she get an abortion and give them their money back?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 12th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Lydia: Sorry, I can’t. I wouldn’t be surprised though, since many states treat surrogacy as just contract law. So much for protecting the best interests of the child, huh?
October 12th, 2010 | 9:49 pm
gk-I would rather give birth to a child with down syndrome than a child who will grow up to hold your opinions. [Personal attack deleted]. Go and grow up.
October 12th, 2010 | 10:55 pm
I know the conversation here is essentially dead but I feel the need to add this all the same.
To GK and other nay-sayers;
I have been thinking about this all day. There is a very important element that we are missing here, which is simply:
We don’t all agree. The posters on this site, people we meet, doctors, bio-ethicists, biologists and so on. Which is to say, there is no authoritative response that is universally agreed upon, hence what we are lacking is unequivocal and concrete ‘truth’ that has been shown to be beyond questioning (such as, for instance, simple math equations such as addition and subtraction).
And since what is at stake here is the life of another human being, which I would like to say we all value (if anything our own lives, and that of whom we love) the question then becomes:
IF it is possible that life does begin at conception, then what are we to do? If this is possible (and it is a possibility) then can you be one with your conscience in having advocated for, or been indifferent to, the destruction of another human life?
October 12th, 2010 | 11:56 pm
To all these walking sperm banks jumping on the anti-child-support bandwagon, let me explain something to you.
Abortion is about whether a woman wishes to remain pregnant. It has to do with a woman’s right to control her own body.
Child support has to do with taking care of a child who is already born. So there is no pregnancy. Child support has nothing to do with abortion.
No one should ever be able to coerce a woman into ending a pregnancy if she wishes to continue it. No one should ever be able to coerce a woman into continuing a pregnancy if she wants to end it. Because that’s about HER body and the decisions that affect it should rest with HER alone.
Parenting is a whole different matter. And while you shouldn’t be able to choose whether someone entirely physically separate from yourself can have a medical or surgical procedure done, you certainly can choose whether you become a parent.
It’s funny how often the gender stereotypes are backwards. It’s no different for this. Society has been telling women for a very long time that if we don’t want to get pregnant, we shouldn’t spread our legs, even though most sex acts do not result in pregnancy. I notice almost no one, however, is telling men that if they don’t want to be dads, they should keep it in their pants.
Well, then you should hear it more often. Don’t want a kid? Rent a movie, get a magazine, buy a tub of Astroglide… and stay home. Alone.
As for the anti-abortionists: you’re all a front group for the adoption industry, and infant adoption also constitutes human trafficking. It’s irrelevant when life begins–the pregnant woman’s the one being used as a life support machine and should have some say in the matter. When it’s your pregnancy, you have an equal right to a say in the matter. I wouldn’t force an abortion on you. Don’t you dare force a continued pregnancy on me.
I’ve had two kids, I think kids are awesome, but forced pregnancy (or forced abortion) never is.
October 13th, 2010 | 5:35 am
JustChris, bmmg39, and Avdotya; Thank you for your responses.
Just Chris:
1. “It’s no different from arguing that we should do experiments on starving African impoverished children because they’ll starve anyway. You are conflating nature with willful human action.”
Once children are born, or late term fetal neurons develop, we are dealing with minds which should be granted personhood rights. Children in Africa, or anywhere, have personhood rights which should not be violated. Pieces of matter which do not develop into minds should not be granted personhood rights. If something is not a mind, it does not have preferences or cares for the future or even knowledge of its own existence.
With respect, you evade the bulk of my critique by focusing on the nature vs. willful human action. If there was a country where a million person genocide was conducted every year. (Or a natural disaster killed a million people a year) and the US & Europe sat by and did nothing, they would be severely criticized. Nobody would say “You’re conflating nature with willful human action”. We’re not responsible for the killing, so we aren’t concerned by it.
2. “Exactly what point in time does the unborn child have a mind? What rational and natural day in the pregnancy should we draw a line?”
This is an excellent question. We do not yet have theories of cognition accurate enough to tell us exactly when and how minds of different types develop. (If we did, we’d utilize that knowledge to build computers as intelligent as humans, which we can’t yet do.) This is not a weakness of the personhood theory but a strength. IT ELEVATES THIS DISCOURSE TO A SCIENTIFIC QUESTION. In the next century or two, we will understand minds well enough to answer this more precisely.
What decision to we make now? Most decisions are made with imperfect information. From what I’ve read, neural development near the end of the second trimester makes the system likely to have rudimentary cognition and the ability to feel pain, so I’d put the deadline there. I would of course, change my opinion in either direction as more information becomes available.
3. “If having a mind is your criterion for value, do smarter people have more moral value than idiots? Do normal people have more rights than the [mentally] disabled?”
This is an excellent question. But first a quibble: let’s rephrase it in non-moral realist language: Should it be our policy for the law to grant more moral value to smart people that the mentally disabled?
I believe that the relevant criteria for personhood are the ability to feel pleasure and pain, understanding of one’s self as an individual, what neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate, Gerald Edelman calls “secondary consciousness”. This is grossly related to intelligence in that mice will lack secondary consciousness and that humans will not. But variations within human intelligence (IQ) are trivial for these purposes. It should be our policy to give all humans, irrespective of IQ, equal rights and moral value. If a person has an accident and loses all of his brain except the brain stem which controls basic body functions, then the person has irrevocably lost secondary consciousness and it would serve no purpose to continue to keep his body alive. But this issue is different than whether that person had high or low IQ prior to the accident.
4. “iPS cells are not zygotes in of themselves.”
Here we are getting into a semantic game. There is not a fundamental difference between the different cells except what subroutine in the DNA they call and execute. Scientists have hacked into some cells and turned off the block on executing some subroutines. We say they
have “turned adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells”, though my phrasing of it is just as accurate and more telling. I call attention to this to show the absurdity of an ethical system which treats one cell as a full human being while treating an identical cell, except for executing different sections of the DNA, as nothing.
5. “your arbitrary argument is that we should be able to kill human beings that aren’t developed enough to feel pain”
Yes, that is it in a nutshell.
6. “But have you stopped and considered the pain and negative consequences of treating HUMAN LIFE like a commodity to be destroyed if found “defective” on the conveyor belt or if mother or father has “buyer’s remorse?”
As I said above, (see #5), I consider human life, for ethical purposes, to be systems which are developed enough to feel pain. Destroying other systems is not destroying human life any more than taking out an appendix is.
In terms of treating biological systems as commodities, there are too many issues to address here. We need a serious ethical framework to discuss these types of issues as biotechnology advances in the next century. The crude arguments of bioconservatives are, at best, a distraction.
7. “[You’re arguments are] no different than plantation owners saying slavery is needed because African slaves are unable to care for themselves and therefore should have no rights.”
How so? African slaves have minds and the ability to feel pain and pleasure and thus should have full moral value.
Bmmg39: “GK, the “mind” you speak of is derived from the human being when she is just a unicellular organism. No “mind” (or any other bodily component) is magically “added” later on; the zygote/embryo/fetus receives only nutrition and a hospitable environment for development”.
A mind is the operations of trillions of cells and synapses in the brain. A single cell, or a tiny cluster of cells, cannot support a mind. A mind is not “magically added” to the body the way waves are not magically added to water. The mind is simply what the brain does.
You don’t use the magic words “God” and “soul” but religious thinking permeates your comment. Let’s not mince words. The question is: If the soul is not added in at the point when the sperm and egg meet, when is the soul added in?
The Church has taken the position that the soul enters the body when a zygote is formed. To see how fundamentally wrong the Church’s traditional understanding is, consider the following:
There are times when two separate zygotes, or embryos, having separate genetic codes will merge to form a single embryo. The person who forms is normal in every way. But if you take a genetic test from the cells on his feet, it will give a different genetic pattern than cells taken from his head.
What happened to the two independent souls of the two independent zygotes which merged? For that matter, where do the souls of the zygotes who don’t implant into the uterine wall go. Millions of un-implanted un-baptized zygote souls must be crowding Purgatory every year.
You might be interested in Roger Sperry’s split brain experiments: http://nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background.html
It seems that a simple surgery splits the soul of an adult into two souls (corresponding to each hemisphere).
Avdotya:
“First, the stage of zygote doesn’t articulate itself into something ‘mindless.’ It is a necessary condition for the mind to exist.”
A necessary BUT NOT SUFFICIENT condition.
“Second, from your logic I then have nothing to stop me from cutting off someone’s arm, since those specific cells don’t constitute the mind.”
The person would likely object to you cutting off his arm. On the other hand, if a doctor had to cut off an unconscious person’s arm to save his life, the doctor would do so and it would raise no ethical issues.
October 13th, 2010 | 5:55 am
Avdotya:
I just noticed your last post, which I had not responded to:
“IF it is possible that life does begin at conception, then what are we to do?”
I think that part of the problem is the conventional phrasing of the question. What do you mean by when does life begin? None of the scientific facts are in dispute. There is never a point when sperm, ova, zygotes and embryos are not alive in the sense of maintaining homeostasis, decreasing local entropy, exchanging material across membranes, etc. The same is true for the millions of blood cells that I massacred when I cut myself shaving or the millions of un-implanted zygotes that pass into the toilet every year.
What most people mean when they ask “when does LIFE begin” is “when does the soul or mind begin”?
I agree with Avdotya that we should be cautious. I think that neural connections in higher brain regions begin to form in the end of the second trimester, but I would be happy to push that date back if more evidence comes to light.
October 13th, 2010 | 8:37 am
Dana, you busted me, this walking sperm-bank is a sinister paid consultant for the evil and nefarious adoption agency consortium…
But here again, we come back to it, it’s the willful destruction of human life purposefully created. In 99% of cases, nobody coerced the father and mother to go about creating that life. They already made that decision, and a son or daughter is created.
The question is, what to do now? You seem to be of the opinion that that life only has moral value if the mother wants it to. Since twins are depending on each other for life support, does that make them less human? You seem to be falling back on the argument that women need abortion so they can have consequence-free sex. Well, unfortunately, abortion doesn’t make it go away and for a lot of women (and men) it can scar them pretty deeply.
What about the 50% of unborn children that are women? Don’t they have a say about their bodies? In other countries, abortion is used as a tool to specifically kill female daughters. As a product of conception whose parents weren’t married and making me statistically a prime candidate for abortion, I am awfully glad my mother – like you – was willing to accept the consequences and not have me torn limb from limb because she thought it might be the easy way out. It would the highest hypocrisy for me to say I deserved to live, but stand by and say others deserve to die.
“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even his life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love – that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.” – Mother Theresa, sinister adoption industry agent
October 13th, 2010 | 8:50 am
@Dana;
This notion that a woman should control ‘what goes on in her body’ and that is the reasoning for abortion is just ridiculous. If a woman really wanted to ‘control her body’ she would utilize a method of birth control to keep from becoming pregnant in the first place-including abstinence. There is no ‘right’ to sex. No one will die from abstaining.
There has been for decades now this mind-set that babies in utero are just parasites sucking the life out of their host. Babies are not parasites! They are the result of a DELIBERATE sexual act. No woman ‘accidentally’ falls on a penis and gets pregnant, the act is DELIBERATE. Why is it that the inability of the woman and the man to ‘control their bodies’ results in the death of another?
And please, let’s not throw in that whole, rape & incest thing. The proportion of abortions related to rape and incest are minuscule in relation to the abortions performed out of convenience.
October 13th, 2010 | 10:23 am
[...] brings to our attention a really good example of the importance of including an abortion clause in your surrogacy contract. Otherwise, if you change your mind and decide to off the baby, the surrogate mother might cavil. [...]
October 13th, 2010 | 10:29 am
I’ve tried to research the contract claim made in the article but haven’t been able to confirm it. The Human Rights Campaign (yep, that’s the one you’re thinking of) has a whole series of pages that claim to summarize surrogacy law in various U.S. jurisdictions, but they don’t address this issue. It appears that in some jurisdictions surrogacy agreements are treated as enforceable contracts, but only if they are “non-compensated.” It’s hard to see exactly how that dovetails with the claim about suing for recovery of costs. I’m guessing that the money that changed hands in that case would be said to be for the pregnant woman’s “costs” such as prenatal care. So, one way that it could work is this: The pregnant woman is sent money that has been agreed upon in the contract from the biological parents for her prenatal care. This still counts as “non-compensated,” I suppose. The couple then decides they want an abortion. The surrogate refuses. The couple sues her to get back the money they’ve already sent, while refusing to take any parental responsibility for the child, all per the contract. Court enforces the contract.
That’s how it _could_ go in states that recognize the surrogacy contract at all.
Interestingly, it appears that a number of states do not recognize or enforce surrogacy contracts when the surrogate is the biological mother of the child (e.g., artificial insemination).
October 13th, 2010 | 11:10 am
GK,
Your argument is that personhood depends on the quality of a human being.
a) Jim is a human
b) Only humans that feel pain are persons
c) Jim can’t feel pain
d) We can kill any human that is not a person
d) Kill Jim
But what about B? What happens if Jefferson Davis comes along and says that blacks shouldn’t be considering persons because they are black. What’s your counter argument? They can feel pain? What if Jeffy doesn’t care? Why should we care about others feeling pain? Your retort? He’s crazy? No, Jeffy is just saying blacks need to fit certain special criteria to not be bought, sold or killed. His criteria is arbitrary and he’ll do whatever is most comfortable to him. At the end of the day, either human rights apply to all people equally, or some humans get to decide who has rights and who doesn’t based on if they can win a popularity contest. That’s really shaky ground to me, and your moral code seems to be whatever doesn’t make you squeamish.
People die when they get older, it’s a natural state of their existence. Your argument that because some unborn child don’t survive until birth, all unborn children can be killed before birth would indicate that you think aging is genocide, since elderly people can feel pain and all of us not searching for a cure for aging are complicit. There is a difference between a natural state of events and arguing that because there are unhealthy unborn children, healthy unborn children ought to be killed through the willful, purposeful action of others, because you don’t think they will feel enough pain.
I don’t see any logical consistency here, just your desire to look the other way when it comes to abortion.
October 13th, 2010 | 11:27 am
Wesley: You write concerning what you believe is the insufficiency of existing surrogacy law: “So much for protecting the best interests of the child, huh?”
Huh? The “child” (which, by the way, is a FETUS until it’s born) has no more “interest” to protect than a car that’s changing hands has an “interest” in the transaction. Surrogacy law, such as it is, is a form of contract law. You did take Contracts in law school, didn’t you?
In any event American law is clear on the issue: fetuses do not have rights to life, liberty and property until they are born. You can imagine that they have rights from now until the cows come home, but that changes matters not an iota. They don’t have any. Period.
October 13th, 2010 | 12:41 pm
How is this situation any different from the 90% of women who terminate their pregnancies following a positive screening for Down Syndrome? We are losing a whole group of beautiful, big-hearted people in this world because “parents” don’t want to raise a child with a disability. I don’t hear any outcry over that.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 13th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Megan: You must be new here. I write about that a lot at SHS and in articles.
October 13th, 2010 | 1:12 pm
GK: “I agree with Avdotya that we should be cautious. I think that neural connections in higher brain regions begin to form in the end of the second trimester, but I would be happy to push that date back if more evidence comes to light.”
Here’s the thing. The minute that we act, we, as they say, throw caution to the wind.
And as you say, ‘I think,’ not, ‘I know with certainty.’ In this particular instance, caution would require not that we act upon belief, but upon certainty, and certainty in this case – because of the implications – cannot be something merely subjective considering what is at stake. If I think people with green eyes are less human for this or that reason, should I be able to act upon this? If it is only them fighting back that would stop me, is it only because the fetus is unable to fight that determines that we can rid ourselves of it, and therefore it is perfectly okay to do so? If it is consciousness, is a human being still a human being that is not fully conscious, which would make a baby less than human? I could go on.
The point, is because the question remains a question, and not an unquestionable truth, we should not be “pushing back the date,” rather, we should not doing it at all, or acting indifferently towards it. That is the rational solution, and not one that succumbs to arbitrary belief and subjective lines of defense. Which, I might add, is ironic considering the arguments about evidence.
If there is no evidence to refute the claim – and I will amend my use of the term human life so as to be clear that I mean that which articulates itself into a human being – that a human being exists at conception, and the line has not been clearly drawn and decided upon that could clearly defend notions to the contrary, then reason itself tell us that the question is as yet undecided.
It is interesting how science is used to argue that only that which is based upon evidence is to be accepted and yet defends action upon statements that have yet to be proved.
This is the dilemma. Either way there is no certainty. However, what we do with that knowledge – knowledge that we don’t know – speaks to how we view human beings in general. Do we simply by-pass the issue and claim that it really doesn’t matter, in which case, we are saying human beings don’t really matter? Or do we seek answers, so that we might have knowledge of what we are doing before we act? To do contrary is to act unthinkingly, and rather irrationally with belief rather than truth.
And Dana:
The question is far from irrelevant, for if it were, than women would have no rights to speak of, let alone over our own bodies. We don’t live in the world all alone – but with and for others, without which you and I would not exist, or even survive. The woman who carries the child is simply the first stage of this reality, that we are not alone in the universe and require others to live as individuals, understand ourselves as individuals, and to meet our needs as individuals and as a species.
October 13th, 2010 | 1:21 pm
Wesley, yes this is the first article I’ve read, so I was just commenting on the comments. I’ll read more though, thanks.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 13th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Welcome! I have often criticized eugenic abortion.
October 13th, 2010 | 1:37 pm
Most women don’t even know they are pregnant until a month (at least) into the pregnancy. I’ve seen the ultrasound of a 5 week old baby. The little heart was beating and she was moving around and she was beautiful.
This is not a bunch of cells. And the truth is that science does not entirely know when that baby feels pain. What we do know is that every happy mother calls it a baby – because it is. Only those inconvenienced by it try to slap a bunch of truth shuffling definitions on it like fetus and cells.
I have to wonder how we got to the point where the obvious (you’re having a baby) has gotten so convoluted. The truth is that humanity can rationalize anything they don’t want to face up to. It’s a sad truth that’s killing us, literally and morally.
October 13th, 2010 | 1:58 pm
As far as I know, the concept of the “mind” is a philosophical construct to explain the higher-order thinking a human brain is capable of. It has no real empirical existence, it’s just kind of a nominal placeholder.
In fact, when I was studying psychology, the more strict behaviorists didn’t like the term “mind” since it suggested the existence of the “mind” independent from the “brain”, which was a product of dualist thinking and lacked scientific grounding.
October 13th, 2010 | 3:35 pm
SparkVark:
You are right that the mind is not a different magical substance. It is merely the higher order operations of the brain in the way that software, like Microsoft Word, is nothing more than electrons moving in circuits. It is often useful to talk about abstract patterns like the mind just as it is often useful to talk about abstract patterns like software as opposed to electrons moving through neurons or circuits.
In ethical discussions, it is convenient to talk on the level of abstract minds than about the operations of billions of neurons. If someone asks me how to do a mail merge in Microsoft Word, it is conventient to talk at the level of the abstract program (ie pulling down this menu and select this option) than it is do describe the movement of billions of electrons through circuits.
October 13th, 2010 | 10:35 pm
I’m not sure why we’re even talking about a five week old embryo-by the time down syndrome can be detected, a baby has developed to the point that it is a fetus with organ systems, etc. We can debate about a blastocyst being a “cluster of cells,” but that definition is clearly inaccurate when applied to a fetus that has been gestating for several weeks.
October 14th, 2010 | 12:40 am
Welsey:
Such contracts are in fact totally banned, illegal and unenforceable in the Quebec Civil Code.
I don’t have my copy handy but it’s in the early articles.
xavier
October 14th, 2010 | 11:11 am
[...] Secondhand Smoke on the “norm” of aborting Down syndrome fetuses [...]
October 14th, 2010 | 9:00 pm
A majority — as in all — born human beings end in death. Life seems to have what we can characterize as a quality control system.
This logic justifies murder far more than it does abortion.
October 16th, 2010 | 1:20 am
@Don Nelson — “This sounds like an argument to me that if women aren’t willing to abort children that the father of the child doesn’t want, that he is not liable for child support.”
Yes, that’s exactly what Ms. Sally Rhoads’ remark sounds like.
@GK — “There should be a procedure where the putative father disclaims all rights…”
There used to be such a procedure: he didn’t marry Ms. Sperm-Seeker.
@Avdotya — “If a man won’t take responsibility for his penis he should be sterilized and/or castrated.”
No one was recommending that women be “sterilized and/or castrated.” What feminists (and neo-feminists) consider ‘equal’ is so often beyond reality altogether!
- – -
Automatic father-only custody of all children out of wedlock would solve so many of these problems. No more enabling any make-a-baby, win-a-prize behavior of females. The belief that raising a child is punishment would be put to the test (and if it is, then the wish of so many females to punish her sex partner would be granted). All in all, we’d see a sharp drop in out of wedlock births – a good thing.
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