NYT columnist Ross Douthat voiced a strong thought I had yesterday–but decided not to get into so as to not muddy the waters–when reporting about a NYT Magazine story extolling a couple buying the services of four women–two for eggs and two “gestating carriers”–so they could have “twiblings.” This couple all but moved heaven and earth to have children, just the way they wanted them. Yet, a million pregnancies are terminated each year in the USA, making it far more difficult for would-be parents to adopt–one of the factors the couple cited in their decision to manufacature. Douthat first cites some shocking adoption statistics. From “The Unborn Paradox:”
In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.
Indeed. I don’t think any woman need abort because her child would not be wanted. This includes children with disabilities, who pro life couples leap at adopting if they learn of the need.
After discussing an MTV reality show involving abortion, Douthat concludes:
Last week’s New Yorker carried a poem by Kevin Young about expectant parents, early in pregnancy, probing the mother’s womb for a heartbeat:
The doctor trying again to find you, fragile/fern, snowflake. Nothing.
After, my wife will say, in fear/impatient, she went beyond her body,
this tiny room, into the ether—… And there
it is: faint, an echo, faster and further/away than mother’s, all beat box and fuzzy feedback. …
This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.
Alas. Legality aside, why abort when so many people desperately yearn to be parents? Birth is the only choice that offers opportunity for great joy.
January 3rd, 2011 | 11:18 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys. Vince Humphreys said: SHS: Unborn Human Life: So Desperately Wanted–So Easily Discarded http://bit.ly/hq4NDE #tcot [...]
January 3rd, 2011 | 11:50 pm
A woman at my church has adopted five special needs kids, though only three of them are alive at this point (one of the babies died shortly before her first birthday from a heart condition, but I never got the specifics of what happened to her, and I’m not sure about the second child she lost).
She said that the waiting list for parents to adopt special needs kids is a mile long, what with all the tests she had to pass, the money, the proof that she could provide, etc. She also said that since most parents abort special needs kids these days, it’s harder and harder for her to adopt them.
January 3rd, 2011 | 11:59 pm
Unfortunately, there is a big push among some leaders in the “pro choice” community to paint adoption as a tool of the religious right that is bad for women, and to present abortion as the solution to that problem. One site that tends to be the guiltiest of this is RH reality check. Although there seems to be an effort among some on the site to present adoption more positively, like this story:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/06/21/
adoption-abortioncommon-ground-mistake
the general dialogue around adoption on that site has been extremely negative. Here is a thread that exemplifies that trend:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/reader-diaries/2009/05/19/abortion-vs-adoption-ask-an-adoptee
and another:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/10/06/shotgun-adoption
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2007/10/31/the-adoption-vs-abortion-myth
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/12/15/the-adoption-consensus
All of this, I believe, because adoption subverts the pro choice narrative that abortion is absolutely necessary to preserve the right of women to participate fully in society.
January 4th, 2011 | 4:55 am
What an awful mentality it is that holds that hundreds of millions of helpless women in the unborn stage have to be destroyed so that selfish immoral women of an older generation can “participate fully in society”.
January 4th, 2011 | 6:28 am
“All of this, I believe, because adoption subverts the pro choice narrative that abortion is absolutely necessary to preserve the right of women to participate fully in society.”
I can agree with this statement and I believe it answers in part the (strangely over-simplifying?)question, “why abort when so many people desperately yearn to be parents?” because being pregnant for nine months can be an ‘inconvenience’ to say the least, disturbing the ability to work. Socio economic factors will be very relevant but what about medical issues? Pregnancy is not without its medical risks.
Being able to decide to have an abortion, after all, has become the ability of a woman to say, I control my body, my life, not society.
Obviously what is lost in such a way of thinking is that the human being growing inside is not given any control over their life.
January 4th, 2011 | 7:56 am
Safepres: In the articles you link to the (presumably) pro-choice authors express support for adoption and for the idea that reducing the number of abortions performed is common ground to which both pro-choicers and pro-lifers may aspire. They are just critical of the idea that encouraging adoptions will have an effect of the desired magnitude.
One of the articles actually makes the sorts of points you would expect Wesley to: Women are sometimes used merely as gestating units by adoption agencies. Some of them are subjected to emotional manipulation and given false information before finally having to hand over their children to wealthy couples who care little for the mothers’ welfare. This may not be a representative picture of adoption in America but it does accurately reflect the experiences of some mothers and should not be excluded from the narrative.
It has been said before but I think it bears repeating: Virtually no-one (without a diagnosable mental condition) is literally pro-abortion i.e. no one thinks that abortion is inherently preferable to childbirth or that it is a thing to be encouraged in its own right. A great many people are pro abortion rights but that’s an entirely different thing.
I am quite strongly pro-choice in that I am committed to the idea that prior to the emergence of fetal consciousness women should be able to, without legal interference, choose whether or not they wish to terminate a pregnancy of carry it to term. But I am quite pleased when I hear of women who freely decide to carry their unexpected pregnancies to term and are willing to do the hard work necessary to ensure that the resultant child does, in fact, have a life worth living. It always seems strange to me that people automatically assume that being pro-choice means you will tend to vote “abort” when a couple asks your opinion or that you will be somehow opposed to adoption or be particularly biased against the disabled. Why, for instance, does Wesley refer to only pro-life couples adopting disabled children? Is there any evidence that pro-choice couples do not do this? (This is an honest question and not a rhetorical one).
January 4th, 2011 | 10:00 am
safepres, having read a little of RHrealitycheck occasionally, consider too they might just think so little of raising children that they have a bias against those who actively want to do it. Some of the writers there are better/worse than others.
January 4th, 2011 | 11:03 am
We often hear that women with crisis pregnancies view adoption, in the immediacy of the situation, as the worst option, worse than abortion and raising the child. Women in crisis need to know that when they place a child for abortion, that adoption is a loving option, that is is a good option for them and that they are heroes to the children they could have aborted. There should be a campaign to promote adoption.
January 4th, 2011 | 1:16 pm
Raven,
If you support the legalization of slavery, but don’t own slaves, does that mean you aren’t pro-slavery? Here’s an interesting statistic to put this in perspective. Your views that enable this destruction of human life (and yes, it is undeniably that) has meant that since 9-11, 330 times the number of New Yorkers have been aborted as the number that died that fateful day at the WTC.
I believe Wesley included that point because a common argument is “pro-lifers don’t care about babies after they are born,” despite the fact that many like me volunteer at and/or financially support centers that provide free education, diapers and other goods for women. Planned Parenthood on the other hand issues you a receipt for $400 and sends you on your way with some free condoms. Abortion is not an empathetic response for women, it’s a quick “solution” to the “problem” of a developing human being. We can do so much better. If you support health care reform, why not some pregnancy reform?
January 4th, 2011 | 2:16 pm
JustChris:
To stick with your slavery example, someone who is opposed to the criminalisation of slavery is not necessarily pro-slavery – he might just feel that its criminalisation causes more problems than it solves. Similarly, one who supports the decriminalisation of marijuana use might be strongly opposed to widespread use of the drug (but feels that legal proscription is counter-productive).
Or consider adultery. Would someone who opposed a law proscribing extra-marital sex be considered “pro-adultery”? Would you immediately assume that he or she wasn’t committed to the institution of marriage and imagine that he would be pleased at developments which undermine it?
Each abortion does indeed terminate the life of a genetically human organism but the vast majority involve organisms that are yet to become human in the psychological sense. The people who lost their lives in the Trade Centre bombings had thoughts and feelings, memories and expectations. Their deaths were tragic because these constellations of human attributes were abruptly terminated. The loss of a pre-conscious human might be emotionally consequential to those who observe or contemplate it – but there is nothing psychologically human there to extinguish.
I suspect that none of us would like this discussion to revert to a familiar debate about the morality of abortion with the liberals accusing the conservatives of ignorance and ideological rigidity and the conservatives accusing the liberals of complicity in acts ethically indistinguishable from murder. We have, all of us, been down that road far too often and are unlikely to change our minds at this late hour. It is still possible, however, to come to a nuanced understanding of the opinions held by those on “the other side”. I understand that you are not “against choice” – and all I ask in return is that you appreciate that I am not “pro-abortion”.
January 4th, 2011 | 2:46 pm
It’s simple: because women realize that if they take the child to term they will want him or her. Giving the child away for adoption will hurt because there is none of the abstraction of Raven’s “organisms yet to become human”-you see and hold the child, and the biology is on full force.
Abortion proponents will always downgrade adoption because of this. It’s because it decimates the cozy little abstraction layer which lets people dehumanize the fetus. Putting up a live child for adoption because your career is more important becomes a lot harder to justify.
January 4th, 2011 | 3:13 pm
But Raven, abortion is not adultery. Adultery is an issue that can sometimes have public concern; some societies indeed have laws, whole families are affected. It does not however rise to an issue of grave injustice. Nobody’s life, liberty or property is at stake in adultery (though I understand it causes immense pain).
While some modern tastes may give you no guilty conscience, history looks very unfondly on those who choose to ignore grave injustices. Take the story of the German church who played their organ louder when the train rolled through town on the way to a concentration camp. These people were not participating in the evil, but any child could easily tell you they were not doing the right thing. They may have been caught up in the culture or didn’t want to risk their families’ lives. It’s within the realm of historical precedent and political feasibility to say all or at least most abortions could be made illegal, and a great majority of them therefore stopped. The only thing standing in the way of that are those who give moral or legal support to abortion. I gave you that statistic to remind you that you have power as an individual in our Republic to assent or protest the reality of abortion; if you continue to support a legal “right” to abortion, you are saying that you are OK on some level with that current reality. I for one thing the appallingly high abortion rate, particularly in minority populations signifies that something is very wrong here.
And if we define species in a psychological sense, are human beings in good mental health intrinsically worth more than a schizophrenic patient? Are awake people worth more than sleeping people? We can take the rhetorical carousel all the way around, but at the end of the day the issue is do we draw lines through humanity and say some are worthy of death by definition, and who decides who lives or dies? That’s not a good thing to do and it has other consequences in how we value other human lives.
I have a “nuanced” understanding of people’s views on the issues, one of my friends from class worked at the same Planned Parenthood we would be carping about at our table in the student union. That always made for an interesting discussion when she walked by. But just because I understand them doesn’t mean they aren’t wrong or are missing the point. And I for one am not giving up on you or anyone in this late hour yet!
January 4th, 2011 | 3:14 pm
RavenC-
Some of the articles make those points. However, it is important to read the first two articles I posted, the ones about Shotgun Adoption and Abortion vs. Adoption, ask an Adoptee, to see what I am talking about in terms of RH being against adoption in general. For instance, it angered me to read the adoption vs. abortion piece from an adoptee’s perspective because she represents only a small majority of the adopted populace and her feeling of not knowing her true “identity” is not universally shared. It is a narrative the so called pro choice (I mean people who call themselves pro choice but are really pro abortion, not people who really are pro choice in supporting all pregnancy options) use to make adoption sound like a bad thing. If you look at the commentary section, there is a lot of vitriol being spewed about adoption and what seems to be a concerted effort to portray that option as if it involved going away from home and being locked in a home for unwed mothers, like it was in the 1950s. Adoption is not the same as it was back then, but people who are pro abortion ignore that fact.
January 4th, 2011 | 5:45 pm
Don Nelson: If you continue to support a legal “right” to abortion, you are saying that you are OK on some level with that current reality.
My supporting a legal right to abortion means that I consider the present situation preferable to the alternative (i.e. to the criminalisation of what are essentially victimless acts).
You contention is, obviously, that the unborn child is clearly a victim. That his “humanity” is undiminished by his lack of conscious thought, or a psychological history. If we begin to draw distinctions based on mental states, you argue, what prevents us from redrawing the lines to exclude those with cognitive impairments or the temporarily unconscious?
These are questions I have addressed at length elsewhere (and I am unfortunately unable at this point to give the issue the attention it deserves). Suffice it to say that, as you probably appreciate, we approach ethical issues from entirely different perspectives. It is, in my opinion, meaningless to describe an act which harms no one as unjust. Nothing may be described as a harm (in this ethical sense) if it is not capable of being experienced as such either by the person who is harmed or by individuals who might conceivably find themselves in that position at some time in the future. Killing sleeping or reversibly unconscious persons ought to be discouraged because there are conscious persons who have an interest in such rules being established.
People often say “all human beings have a right to life” and mean by this that all genetically human organisms somehow (by some magical process no one is quite able to explain) have those rights ascribed to them in spite of the fact that they may be no more than a clump of cells floating around without the slightest glimmer of consciousness or neural activity. The well-established historical tradition (though tradition is far from being a perfect guide) is that such rights are ascribed only to creatures who are deemed to be part of the human community (rather than just being biologically human). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all men are born free and equal in dignity and rights. At the document’s drafting, some of the French delegates suggested that the word “born” be removed (realising what it implied) but the consensus was that these rights ought to apply from birth and not from conception. The question isn’t whether the ball of cells contains human DNA, it is rather whether or not it is a member of the human family and is capable of being harmed.
I’ve rambled on again (without fully fleshing out the argument) but I’m curious as to how you would respond to this thought experiment: Suppose a fertility clinic is on fire and you are able to save only a 3 month old child or a cooler filled with dozens of frozen embryos (destined to be implanted at some point in the future) – but not both. Isn’t it immediately obvious that we ought to save the child? How can this choice be justified if we believe that each of those embryos represents an individual with a right to life?
January 4th, 2011 | 7:10 pm
Sorry, the last post was meant to be addressed to JustChris.
January 4th, 2011 | 7:50 pm
Believe it or not, a toxic meme has implanted itself in many teen girls’ and younger women’s minds that giving a child for adoption is somehow “cruel” to the child. The argument is usually framed as a justification for keeping a baby born out of wedlock, but I’ve actually heard of it being used to justify abortion as well.
And it’s not just younger women. Check out these comments excerpted from another forum:
“I’m a 72 year old great grandmother raising my 6 year old great grandson who I’ve had since birth. Having a lost a child to adoption when I was 15 (in 1954), I never wanted to have another child missing from our family. My 24 year old granddaughter became pregnant and was an addict. … I stepped up to the plate and took the responsibility. I have never regretted my decision and actually consider it an honor to have positive input into this child’s life. … He will never have to wonder ‘why was I given away?’ Adoption is not always what it’s cracked up to be and every child wonders at some point in their life – ‘why wasn’t there someone in my birth family who cared enough to keep me.’ And I [think] that’s certainly a fair question. Adoption is always a permanent problem [presumably she meant "solution"] to a temporary problem.”
Another factor requires consideration. Many US states have liberalized adoption laws to allow adult adoptees to find their birth parents. This raised the spectre, depending on the state, of an adoptee simply calling or showing up at his/her birth mother’s residence out of the blue and potentially causing major problems for her. After such a law passed in Oregon some years ago, I clearly remember hearing quoted a woman—who had given a child for adoption years before—saying (paraphrased), “If I had known this was going to happen, I would have just had an abortion instead.” Unintended consequences, at least for some…
However, I fear this debate sidesteps the real issue with import for our society. More teen girls and young unmarried women are choosing to keep babies and raise them as single mothers. The illegitimacy rate in the US has hit 40% overall, with some subpopulations considerably higher, and this reality has had profound negative efects on society as a whole. The abortion–adoption question is simply a sideshow compared to this. Maybe it remains a question worthy of debate, and I say it does (especially in a forum such as Wesley’s), but it’s still a sideshow.
[Wesley, this is a duplicate. Please delete the FIRST post. I hit "Submit comment" before fixing formatting.]
January 5th, 2011 | 12:12 am
Raven, you could even think of me supporting abortion rights? Holy Secondhand Smoke. I fear all that global warming in the balmy UK is getting to you:) As you know I believe humans are inherently personal, have a personal nature, and as a result do not need to function as persons to be regarded as persons and that being human is all that is necessary to keep one from being protected from harm at any stage of human life and development, as well as to possess the right to life.
Thanks for the correction. I hope you have a Happy New Year and the rest of you have fun arguing this.
January 5th, 2011 | 2:53 am
Safepres: The abortion vs adoption article appears to represent one woman’s honest opinion about the issue. Some have good experiences with adoption, others do not. I think we are in dangerous territory when we attempt to silence some voices merely because their stories foster either a “pro-choice” or “pro-life narrative”.
The shotgun adoption article similarly highlights real problems some people have with the process – and as I’ve said before the concerns raised are similar to those expressed by Wesley in the context of assisted reproduction. The article’s writer is worried that some adoption agencies have shifted their emphasis away from finding homes for children and are primarily concerned with finding children for wealthy couples. They engage in predatory practices, strong-arming vulnerable young women to give up their children to couples who are “better able to take care of them”. This is a real cause for concern and should not be dismissed merely as a “pro-choice argument” to make adoption look bad. These are issues which ought to be aired and addressed.
Getting an accurate picture of the adoptive process and of the experiences of adoptees and birth mothers requires that we be open to all these stories and not come at the issues with rigid “pro-life” or “pro-choice” preconceptions. For a great many children, adoption is quite literally a life-saver which enables them to become integrate and productive members of society – others however have experiences which are less satisfactory. Who are we to tell them to “shut up and get with the program”?
January 5th, 2011 | 2:55 am
K-Man: A recurring theme here is that (presumably) pro-lifers do not want to hear anything negative about adoption. We live in a culture which is (rightly or wrongly) dominated by emotional narratives and we have developed a tendency to listen only to those voices which tell us what we want to hear. A smiling woman woman explains how adoption saved her from the abortionist and we applaud – but when an elderly grandmother who has herself given away a child and adopted another one expresses regret we dismiss her comments as being part of a “toxic meme”.
The laws which sealed birth records for adopted children were, if I remember correctly, instituted to protect the adoptive (and not the birth) parents. The worry was that women who had given up their children were likely to have a change of heart and constitute a problem for the new family. Also, as far as I remember, the abortion rates in the relevant states have been unaffected by the liberalisation of adoption laws (I think the Guttmacher Institute actually carried out a study looking into it)
January 5th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
RavenC-it’s not the individual articles I am worried about, it is the narrative all those articles together create. It is very difficult to find an article on that site from a woman who had a positive experience with the adoption process, and that results in a narrative that pushes abortion as the solution to the problems involved in the adoption process.
January 5th, 2011 | 1:23 pm
Lastly, the sentiment, expressed by many, that EVERY adopted person yearns for their birth family and agonizes over why no one wanted to keep them is false. I honestly don’t give a crap about whether people in my birth family wanted to keep me. My birth mother could have been a great person or she could have been a jerk. I don’t care: her identity has no bearing on my identity or life.
January 5th, 2011 | 2:32 pm
Safepres: I’ll take your word for it (not having read many of their articles myself) – but I’m an evidence-based sort of person and the very first RH Reality Check article I clicked on, after running a search for “adoption”, was in support of it. (It’s actually titled “Adoption: A Pro-Choice Option” and talks about the process not as an “alternative” to abortion but as an entirely valid choice in its own right).
It’s all part of an ongoing conversation. Some voices are strident and unreasonable while others carefully consider all options (and this applies to both “sides” of the debate).
January 5th, 2011 | 2:41 pm
Raven,
The inherent value of a person is irrelevant to my choice, though I would go for the child first and save both if possible. If my mother and my wife were in the building and I could only choose one, does that mean my mother is less of a person than my wife? Or consider the dilemma of your wife and daughter drowning. If I can only save one, does that give me license to pull the other limb from limb or suck her brain out at will? Or if I spend $500 on sponsoring someone’s drug rehab versus feeding 500 poor Libyan children for a day, does that mean we forcibly starve them to death?
January 5th, 2011 | 3:34 pm
JustChris:
Your response would have been perfectly acceptable had the choice been between an infant and one frozen embryo. What you are faced with is the option to save one human or several dozen embryos. All the imperilled “persons” are unknown to you. One what grounds could you possibly decide to save the 3 month old when the same degree of effort could save a great many more “people”?
This thought experiment isn’t meant to justify our current treatment of embryos (As you rightly point out, the fact that we prefer A to B doesn’t mean that we regard B as worthless or disposable). My point is that most pro-lifers who are willing to subscribe to the rhetorical formula that a zygote is just as much a person as its mother are nonetheless unwilling to follow this claim to its conclusion outside of the narrow confines of the political debate.
If you had to choose between saving one girl or 12 boys (all unknown to you, all in the same sort of danger and both groups requiring the same degree of effort to save), you would go for the greater number of persons. Similarly with 1 adult and 12 children, 1 German and 12 Canadians, 1 teenager and 12 pensioners etc.
When faced with the infant/embryo choice, however, we intuitively know that an infant’s life is worth immeasurably more than that of preconscious cells. We would chose an infant over a hundred or a thousand zygotes. We do not consider the natural loss of multitudes of pre-implantation “humans” to be a major tragedy worthy of remedy and research dollars (All those human lives wasted. You would think someone would care).
If someone were to actually run into our hypothetical burning building, pull out the cooler full of embryos and allow the sentient child to die we would immediately recognise that as a perversion of ethics. Embryos are important because of what they may become – but they are not important enough for us to insist on their survival when this survival causes sentient humans to suffer. This is not a view you share but it is consistent with reason and some of our deepest intuitions.
January 5th, 2011 | 7:08 pm
Raven Chukwu, my “toxic meme” comment was not intended as an anti-choice slap, but as a statement of reality: if a pregnant minor girl hears from her friends that giving her baby for adoption is “cruel” to it, that leaves two even crueler choices: (1) abortion, as discussed here, and (2) allowing an immature, underage girl keeping an infant—especially if her same friends tell her that “babies are so cool”. In other words, children having and keeping children—an excellent way to ensure abuse and neglect of the infant as it gets older and harder for the teen mom to manage. But that strays from this topic.
However, it must also be said that often the teen’s parents end up doing most of the job of raising the baby in a de facto open “adoption” process (at least until the teen matures). Somehow, the teen mom never seems to visualize this arrangement as “cruel”. Of course, it all means that a much more qualified adult couple who want to adopt go without…
And in the quoted testimony of that 72–year-old great-grandmother raising her great-grandson is enough to cause alarm. It simply isn’t a wise arrangement, and adoption would have been a far better choice, despite her experience and doubts. She won’t be around forever, and odds are she will pass away before the boy is much older. What then? And why did no other family members wish to adopt him? Could it be that he is “special needs” from his mother’s drug use? Sensing a martyr complex isn’t too difficult here.
Sealing adoption records as used to be the practice was certainly to protect the adoptive family as you say, but doing so also came to serve the purpose of protecting the birth parents as well, allowing them to move forward in privacy after a youthful indiscretion. To judge from the publicity, most of the complaints from liberalizing records laws to allow adoptees to research their birth parents have been from birth parents, not adoptive parents. So this, too, will serve as another deterrent to adoption instead of abortion.
January 5th, 2011 | 9:18 pm
I really didn’t want to get into this . . . but something morbidly interesting kept coming into the discussion . . .
Note the terms used for human beings, as well as the adjectives.
That is a “conscious” effort to avoid crediting the pre-born with being what they are—human beings.
Raven—I would advise finding better hypotheticals and terms than the ones you used. You need to quit dancing around the periphery, and speak straight to the bloody, pre-meditated termination of life that is an abortion. You have no qualms justifying it, so why back off your descriptions of it, or mediate your terminology of what is or isn’t human?
Be bold. Tell the truth fully.
“Yes, Ma’am, that is a live baby in your womb–growing at many times the rate he or she will outside the womb over the rest of their life. But you see, Ma’am, it is merely a ball of cells because it cannot think and reason like me, who was once in the same position. But since I wasn’t aborted, I am now smart enough to tell you that it is okay to abort your baby. I just take this scalpel, you see, and with a little slice and dice magic, you’ll be good as new and the world will be just fine.”
Better yet, Raven, go watch an abortion. It takes an extraordinarily callous individual to walk away from that experience unchanged. And if you have done so already, then I can only offer you my sympathy.
January 5th, 2011 | 9:37 pm
One more thing, Raven . . .
I’d dash in, toss the kid in the cooler with the embryos, and haul all of them out.
Like I said, you really need some better hypotheticals.
January 5th, 2011 | 9:58 pm
RavenC-that came up first because it’s their most recent adoption article, likely written in response to complaints from some in the commentary section that the site was presented an unbalanced picture of adoption.
January 6th, 2011 | 3:57 am
jb: Abortion involves the taking of human life – but life that is human only in the trivial biological sense. An embryonic horse is still technically a horse – but one may be excused if one consistently declined to describe terminating early equine pregnancies as “killing horses” (though, of course, that description would be biologically correct)
I am here only because my parents decided to have children and “I” wasn’t aborted. If they had decided not to have children or to terminate the resulting pregnancy, I wouldn’t be here. I also wouldn’t be here if my parents had decided not to get married or my grandparents on either side had chosen other partners (or for that matter copulated on different days).
None of these outcomes would have harmed me (because there would have been no “me” to harm). If “I” had been evacuated from my mother’s uterus before, let’s say, my 23rd week of intra-uterine life, and my body had been sliced and diced (or whatever) regardless of what such violent acts might have said about their perpetrators, I would have felt absolutely no pain, no wishes thwarted and no experiences cut short. The termination would preclude the possibility of my emergence as a psychological entity (the conscious being who is temporally continuous with the creature I call “me” today) but this closing off of options would have occurred with just as much finality had my parents or grandparents decided not to get married or had the circumstances on the night (or day) of my conception been such that a different spermatozoon won the race to the ovum.
So if I say a woman may abort a preconscious child, I do it in precisely the same way that she may chose whom to marry or have sexual intercourse with – and when to do so. I believe that she is free to make those choices even if this means that some “future people” fail to come into existence.
January 6th, 2011 | 4:14 am
Jb: And when it comes to thought experiments, the general rule is “play by the rules or don’t play at all”. You don’t have to run off with the ball just because you don’t like the way the game’s going.
I didn’t make up the hypothetical; It’s a pretty standard argument in bioethics. Although it’s sometimes used to justify embryonic destruction in research, my point was merely that most of us (regardless of the rhetorical phrases we routinely deploy) do not really believe that the lives of human embryos are inherently as valuable as the lives of sentient children or adults and would be more than willing to countenance their death if this would result in the mitigation of human suffering.
Here’s a response from the National Catholic Bioethics Center (to the single child, single embryo scenario). Might be of interest to you – or then again, it might not be.
January 6th, 2011 | 6:23 am
jb: Forgot to add, I have watched abortions, though I have not performed any myself. Many years ago, I spent three months as a junior doctor in an O and G department (in a third world country in which abortion is illegal and commonplace and the emergency rooms are filled with women with sepsis from back alley procedures).
I know that the process is often emotionally traumatic for the women involved but all the neurological evidence leads us to believe that prior to at least the 24th week the fetus experiences nothing at all regardless of how distressing the terminations might look to onlookers.
Morally serious individuals frequently come to different conclusions about the same issue. Whatever else it may be, I can assure you that my attitude towards abortion and the unborn child is not an indication of “callousness”.
January 6th, 2011 | 12:59 pm
Raven–
I repeat, you need better hypotheticals (even if others use them, too). In the three posts above you just trotted out all of the usual arguments that have been well-polished over the years since Roe v. Wade–even the back alley abortion bit–not merely by you, but by billion dollar industry that has grown up around the abortion culture.
Were one to grant you the “24th week” argument (I do not–science is still learning, and often undoing previously held positions), nonetheless, legal abortion has morphed into the horror of partial birth abortions, which does not sit well with the 24th week bit at all, and some now contend that even after birth, and up to a certain age, termination of life could be considered moral.
You have an excellent grasp of language, and you choose your words well, and I do enjoy most of our give and take along the way, but on this one, the bottom line is what it is.
Killing babies ain’t cool, even if they (the babies) might not be able to “rationalize” it fully as their lives are snuffed out, legal or not. The 20th century introduced more excuses for killing our own kind, and abortion does so to the most innocent of us all.
If saying so bluntly isn’t playing by the (your?) rules, or is taking my ball and going home . . .
So be it.
January 7th, 2011 | 8:59 am
Raven,
You still commit the fallacy of justifying the premeditated, deliberate killing of individuals because some individuals die naturally. If that one person was my son and the 12 others weren’t, I might still go for my son (I would hope not, but having never been in such a situation). That doesn’t mean the other twelve are chopped liver.
Yes, unborn humans die naturally because of miscarriage. Many because they are simply not able to make it to birth due to “pregnancy defects.” Many people also die before they hit 100. That doesn’t mean everyone under 100 is available for mass slaughter. Do we not respect human life because we aren’t feverishly looking for a cure to aging? Because we value the drunk we know personally over the 500 anonymous children in Libya from my earlier post, does than negate any claim to humanity the children have?
You are conflating the natural order with human agency. Just because nature kills with a tsunami doesn’t give you moral license to atom bomb Jakarta to ashes because they could die at some point anyway.
In the end, if that person did pull out the cooler of embryos instead of the child, all the embryos gestated healthfully and 20 years later had a reunion with their savior, I would defy you to attend and tell them they all ought to have burned.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 7th, 2011 at 10:41 am
There was a note in today’s paper–41% of NYC pregnancies result in abortion.
January 7th, 2011 | 12:35 pm
Used to be higher. Still, they obviously need to use more contraceptives (or make better use of the ones they already do).
January 7th, 2011 | 2:07 pm
JustChris: One of the problems with these discussions (our walks through down these well-travelled paths) is that when certain terms or phrases pop up, it is immediately assumed that the same old familiar arguments are being made.
My references to the multitudes dying prior to implantation was certainly not meant to justify abortion or the deliberate instrumental use of embryos. I was trying to further illustrate the point I made earlier about the enormous disparity between the rhetorical formulations pro-lifers routinely employ and their attitudes to situations slightly different from those presented during the course of political debates.
My point was that each of these early embryos is considered a human person. Their lives, according to you, are inherently valuable – in their own right and not merely by virtue of what they may or may not later become. Hence each embryonic death whether or not it is deliberately caused ought to be considered a tragedy worthy of prevention.
If a disease kills millions of children annually, we devote financial and medical resources to investigate the problem. We closely examine risk factors for the development of disease and advise on risk mitigation modalities. We intervene if intervention is possible. And if our efforts fail, we recognise that each death represents the death of a significant person and console ourselves that we did all we could under the circumstances. Or at least that’s the ideal.
The data show that 25% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions prior to the 6th week. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: My highlighting this fact is not an attempt to say that we may justifiably kill embryos (or fetuses). My question is: why are no steps being taken to avert this tragedy? We assume that most of these dead humans must have had some chromosomal abnormalities that made long term survival impossible but we don’t really know do we? No one’s calling for more research funding. And people are dying.
Back to the thought experiment: I myself admitted, in one of my earlier posts, that the fact that one expresses a preference for A over B hardly means that we consider B worthless. The point wasn’t to establish the embryo’s disposability, it was rather to demonstrate that we all have a hierarchical view when it comes to who deserves to live or die, suffer or be exempt from suffering. You do not truly believe that embryos have as much a right to life as a fully conscious child or an adult does (or more accurately, you are unable to explain your intuitive preferences by your rhetorical formulas).
Unfortunately, thought experiments are like magic tricks: your subjects need to play along for it to work – and apparently you do not want to. The scenario wasn’t about your son and 12 others (in that case there would be other ethically relevant factors which would affect the decision and the choice would be based not just on considerations as to the “value” of those to be saved). In the scenario presented, you had to chose between individuals completely unknown to you, “people” with whom you had had no prior emotional involvement and who were equally imperilled. All you knew about them was what you had been told – and hence the decision was meant to be made on the basis of that information alone. [Further modification: the child was heavily sedated and hence would not actually have suffered in the fire, though he would certainly have died if left there]
No matter, that’s all in the past tense (or past perfect). My point was that assertions about embryos, fetuses and adult women being (from a morally relevant standpoint) equally “human”, and about the ethical equivalence of killing humans at all stages of development (or allowing their death) are easily made but difficult to rationally defend.
January 8th, 2011 | 3:03 am
Ya know, Raven, you keep saying some things as though everyone accepts them, and if not, they are such old arguments so as to not be worthy of much effort on your part to refute.
You might have some here who quibble here and there on the issue of life . . .
But as you have discovered, I am not one of those. You gave me a long-winded response when I told you I would toss the toddler in the cooler with the embryos and save them all.
But you slipped right by what I said.
The Holy Sacrament of Feminism—Abortion—is genocide by another name and the stupidest decision ever made by the Supremes. Hell, a C- student in Law School can poke holes in Roe V. Wade.
You defend a supposed rational view of human eradication by choice, decided by the fact that YOU have determined that the lack of consciousness or pain permits you that latitude, even though neither fact has been absolutely nailed down by science. It is “just where they are now, subject to change next week,” as is so often the case with science.
You say Yea and champion it anyway. It is a part of your worldview.
We’ve seen that before . . . hmmm, where was it?
You play verbal games with what YOU think is human or is not. Be careful, there might come a day when, God forbid, you won’t meet the qualifications yourself.
And please, don’t pretend it hasn’t happened before.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
January 8th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
jb: Raven is from the UK. The UK’s law severely restricts abortion after viability.
January 8th, 2011 | 3:32 am
As an aside, especially with your using spontaneous abortions as some sort of equivalent to the genocide of the intended medical abortions on demand . . .
I fished the body of my 2nd child out of the toilet when my wife spontaneously aborted. No, Raven it was not some genetic choice by nature.
Her endometriosis was crushing her uterus, even though pregnancy is supposed to suppress such things. If you have the experience in OB/GYN you say you have, you know what I say is true. Furthermore, many medical strides and many dollars have been spent toward easing that problem.
How many dollars have been spent to stop the stooges at Planned Parenthood and other clinics from doing the slice and dice handiwork they do? NOT a single dollar!
How many charities have you visited or contributed to, Raven, to lessen the number of abortions?
How many lectures have you, with your education and erudite manner, given to explain to women what they do to their OWN babies in abortion and the potential harm they do to their own bodies and any future children?
Just asking, Dude. I know it is all probably one of “our walks through down these well-travelled paths” (your words).
But that is a dodge, and you know it and I know it. You sold your soul to the pro-death/do whatever movement a long time ago. You get uncomfortable when some folks get too close to saying so, and you start dancing a bit and all.
I don’t care. I see past your garbage. You want, or argue for, selective genocide, no matter the terms you substitute in its place.
January 8th, 2011 | 6:07 pm
jb: I understand that this is an emotive topic (and one about which there is often little room for compromise) – but believe me when I say that I understand where you’re coming from. I once held those views myself.
As I’ve probably said before, it’s clear we approach this issue from radically different viewpoints. You think that attributes such as sentience are ethically irrelevant and I feel that morality ultimately relates to the well-being of human beings (i.e to the things they experience).
You say that the science is uncertain and in some respects it is. It is highly unlikely (bordering on impossible) that the fetus is able to consciously perceive pain at 24 weeks in utero – but it is absolutely certain that an embryo without a cerebral cortex has no conscious feelings of any kind. But this, as you have previously stated, is irrelevant to you.
I’m sorry to hear about the loss of your child. It is not a tragedy I have directly experienced but I have had several close family members who suffered miscarriages. Obviously pregnancy loss is a matter of great emotional significance to those involved and there are many many institutions, scientists and research dollars devoted to fetal and maternal medicine. My point was really about deaths of very early embryos, the millions who die prior to implantation and in the weeks shortly afterwards, the multitudes who go quietly into the good night sometimes even before their mothers are aware that they are pregnant. Are these all lives tragically cut short? Does each doomed zygote possess an eternal soul?
I previously touched on the problem of “familiarity”. We’re talking about abortion, I’m pro-choice, so you assume I support the arguments of Roe v. Wade. I do not. I agree completely that Blackmun’s arguments stand on shaky legal ground (the opinions expressed in Planned Parenthood v Casey are, in my non-legal opinion, much more compelling). Being British, however, I more interested in the general ethical arguments for and against abortion – rather than the specific question of whether a “right to abortion” may be construed from this or that amendment of the US constitution.
Yes, I have criteria for “ethically relevant humanity” – and if I ever fail to meet those criteria, I will be necessarily irreversibly unconscious and it would not matter to me at all what anyone did to my body. Regardless of what happens to my body, my “life” ends the moment a certain kind of electrical activity in my brain ceases. Although you disagree, surely you have to concede that it is hardly perverse to view the commencement of this activity in utero as an ethically significant turning point.
I’ve been long-winded again – and for this I apologise. When I’m criticising views I respect, I find that I often spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining: extended hypotheticals, facetious asides, endless digressions which attempt to say, imperfectly: “I am not your opponent. Although we come at this from different angles, we’re both ultimately striving towards the same goal.”
January 8th, 2011 | 9:16 pm
Raven–
You are correct . . . it is an emotive topic, highly so, and for me, given my background with my own child, and dealing with mothers who did abort their children, and upon the birth of another child, went to pieces–even moreso. The most difficult task in all of that is the pastoral task. One is supposed to have answers, and often, even though it is sufficient faith-wise, absolution seems woefully inadequate to those who grieve their own actions in this particular issue.
I could even say I have (nah, I DO have) a visceral reaction to it all, but that is because I hold to, as a matter of my faith, THE faith, and Scripture, the exceptionalism of human life with zero exceptions–including science when it speculates rather than knowingly articulates.
Where we differ, it is apparent we will both say so–long-winded sometimes, short verbal jabs other times. Since I am guilty of what Wes called sharp elbows, I know I can stir the works in a few sentences. I confess I intend to do so sometimes, because it all needs to be discussed at length.
Our humanity depends on it. Peace, in spite of our differences. jb
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