Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It is also Blog for Choice Day. It has also, by way of a sharp stick in the eye to those who believe women should be the ones to choose to have abortions or not, been declared National Sanctity of Human Life Day by President Bush. This is from the President’s proclamation.
National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2006
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of AmericaOur Nation was founded on the belief that every human being has rights, dignity, and value. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.
America is making great strides in our efforts to protect human life. One of my first actions as President was to sign an order banning the use of taxpayer money on programs that promote abortion overseas. Over the past 5 years, I also have been proud to sign into law the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and a ban on partial-birth abortion. In addition, my Administration continues to fund abstinence and adoption programs and numerous faith-based and community initiatives that support these efforts.
When we seek to advance science and improve our lives, we must always preserve human dignity and remember that human life is a gift from our Creator. We must not sanction the creation of life only to destroy it. America must pursue the tremendous possibilities of medicine and research and at the same time remain an ethical and compassionate society.
It’s funny, but try as I might, I can’t “remember” that my life is a gift from a mythical Creator. And I wish the President would stop trying to enshrine his personal beliefs as national policy.
But the Culture of Life does crack me up. In this week’s New York Review, Garry Wills reviews the latest book by Jimmy Carter, on the hijacking of moral values by conservatives.
Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the “pro-life” movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:
Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.
The “culture of life” idea traces its origin to the Catholic doctrine that life is a seamless garment, to be respected from conception to grave — but its American incarnation has dropped some of the inconvenient bits, like opposition to the death penalty. As Governor of Texas, Bush presided over a record spree of executions, while ridiculing death row inmates’ pleas for clemency. Wills continues:
Capital punishment is also a pro-death program. It does not protect life. It aligns us with authoritarian regimes: “Ninety percent of all known executions are carried out in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia—and the United States” (emphasis added). Execution does not deter, as many studies have proved. In states that abolished it, Carter writes, capital crimes did not increase:
The homicide rate is at least five times greater in the United States than in any European country, none of which authorizes the death penalty. The Southern states carry out over 80 percent of the executions but have a higher murder rate than any other region. Texas has by far the most executions, but its homicide rate is twice that of Wisconsin, the first state to abolish the death penalty. It is not a matter of geography or ethnicity, as is indicated by similar and adjacent states: the number of capital crimes is higher, respectively, in South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia (all with the death sentence) than in the adjacent states of North Dakota, Massachusetts, and West Virginia (without the death penalty).
How can a loving religion or a just state support such a culture of death? Only a self-righteous and punitive fundamentalism, not an ethos of the gospels, can explain this.
On its anniversary, Roe v. Wade is threatened as never before. Perhaps it will have to be eviscerated beyond recognition before the American public will make an effort to preserve abortion rights.
#8, CI re. #6, BGS: BGS refers to the blastocyst – a primitive organization of a few cells – rather than the fetus – the embryo in its final stages of development. For those of us not guided by the universal certainties of religion, the personhood of an embryo is a moot question that must be addressed by any (non-religious)person concerned with the morality of his/her position on the abortion issue.
Let’s assume that a baby is a person and a blastula is not. Few of us would argue that it’s moral to kill babies. But, given that there’s no difference in the degree of sophistication between the newborn organism and the organism about to be born, asssigning personhood at birth is obviously arbitrary. My next point is obvious – at what point in the regression from birth does abortion become murder? We can’t know. Ergo, there is a real, albeit indeterminable, possibility that many abortions are murders.
My point in #5 is that the usual liberal coupling (pro-abortion, anti-death penalty) is no less inconsistent than the standard conservative position (anti-abortion, pro-death penalty) given that in both cases the sanctity of human life is cited, and that in both cases we accept the possibility that innocent human beings are being put to death due to the exercise of policy.
…”let the yahoos have their patriarchal theocracy in their own stupid states”, just doesn’t wash because a lot of people in those states weren’t consulted and can’t afford to get out…
I’d enthusiastically get behind legislation to support funding for the relocation of refugees from persecutorial regions.
Yeah, not very realistic, I know…
This story got a bit of play a week or two ago, but not as much as I expected. From the New York Times article:
“Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old legal immigrant being kept alive by a ventilator as she lay dying of cancer last month in the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Tex. Physicians offered no prospect for her recovery. She was hoping, however, to hang on until her East African mother could reach her bedside.
Ms. Habtegiris had little money and no health insurance. On Dec. 1, hospital authorities notified her brother that unless another hospital could be found to treat his sister, Baylor would be forced to discontinue care after 10 days…. Baylor disconnected her ventilator on Dec. 12, invoking a law signed in 1999 by George W. Bush, then governor of Texas…. Unlike the comatose Terri Schiavo, Ms. Habtegiris was fully conscious and responsive when she was disconnected, according to her brother. She wanted to continue breathing. Her brother and several other family members have described the agonizing spectacle of her death by suffocation over the next 16 minutes. ”
This law would seem to allow people to withold the necessities of life from those in their care if it represents an economic burden to them. So could a parent claim that they were unable to afford to feed their child and thereby let the child starve to death? Would anyone really prefer infanticide to abortion? Surely anyone who could write a law allowing the willful killing of a conscious human due to economic arguments would embrace the right of a woman to choose an abortion based on economic arguments (even if they rejected other reasons). The “sancitity of human life” seems utterly absent from this Texas law. In fact, the most primitive elements of humanity seem utterly absent from this law.
#28 KM: A law that justifies pulling the plug on a fully conscious human being on economic grounds endorses economics as a foundation for morality. Unfortunately, moral philosophy has been overwhelmed by recent developments in science and history; more and more we are unable to convincingly respond to the “It saves/makes money, so why not?” argument – even when it’s used to justify egregious cruelty.
An economically-based value system is difficult to argue against because it’s quantifiable and therefore readily explicable. “The bottom line” becomes an independent alternative to “Because the Bible says so” for many of those lacking the courage or mental resources to deal with ambiguity.
What many politicians do is inconsistently related to any given value system. Politics is a magnet for sociopaths; we shouldn’t be surprised at many politicians’ ability to effortlessly leap back and forth between value systems, given that, to the sociopath, morality is merely something to be exploited.
To be fair, some politicians are decent human beings who are tormented by having to frequently compromise their beliefs to accommodate practical concerns.
Well said, sisyphus.
Quibbler:
Then it is equally impossible to prove that I am a person, should my personhood be a private judgement made on the level of other individuals? Here there be Dragons.
I think the concept only appears fuzzy because it is unknown.
Indrax:
not quite. Take the following example — it is possible to tell when someone is definitely bald, and it is possible to tell when someone is not bald. But now many hairs does it take for someone to be definitely not bald?
Clearly, you and i are people. Anti abortion people say that personhood begins either at fertilisation or at the implantation of the zygote in the uterine lining (there’s some disagreement — people who are anti-emergency-contraception think the former).
Other people think that personhood beings when a foetus starts to look like a person, or starts showing brain activity, or starts being able to breathe, or is first able to survive outside the mother’s body. But it’s i’mpossible to say *exactly* when personhood starts. The only thing we can say is that someone is definitely a person once he/she is born.
Q.
Baldness is fuzzy (oh irony!) but ‘being able to breathe’ is greatly less fuzzy. I think that ‘being a person’ is more like ‘being able to breahte’ than ‘being bald’ in terms of it’s fuzzyness. The range of states where someone can ‘almost breathe’ is small compared to ‘breathing’ and ‘not breathing’, likewise the period of ‘almost a person’ is brief, if it exists at all.
The only thing we can say is that someone is definitely a person once he/she is born.
But that saying is meaningless.
Regardless of the potential fuzzyness, it is useless to talk about personhood without having some meaningful way to descripe the scale. The concept of ‘baldness’ is only useful because we know it is a function of the number of hairs a person has. Until that is defined we are open to claims of God-given- spectral-headfuzz on some who apear bald and lack of that headfuzz on say, animals that appear hairy.
If it’s fuzzy we need a reason why certain organisms score .001 person and others .999. What produces that score? Otherwise saying that a newborn is a person is just as meaningless as saying that a zygote has a soul.
yep, but the fact that there is a lack of definiteness means that it’s a losing strategy as far as formulating a pro-abortion argument goes. Anti-abortionists will simply disagree with pro-abotionists about where to draw the personhood line, and neither side is going to convince the other.
Q.
#’s 31,33 Quibbler &: Premature babies reach viability at 6-7 months. Is one fetus at 6 months a person because it’s expelled prematurely from its mother’s womb while another fetus, destined to be carried to full term, at 6 months is still 3 months from personhood?
Perhaps there’s no definite cut-off point, but the grey zone can be pushed back at least to 6 months.
But there doesn’t have to be a lack of definiteness to the question, the only problem is that science has not seriously tried to find such an answer. Whether or not it’s a ‘winning strategy’ is irrelevant. Learning about the origins of life isn’t about proving the creationists wrong, and learning about personhood is a matter of gaining scientific knowledge.
If we abandon the question of personhood, we are philosophically open to pure uninhibited amorality.
#’s 30, 32, 35 Indrax: Looks like there’s ‘what’ personhood question and a ‘when’ personhood question. If science had a definition of personhood to work with, it could determine when personhood begins. But where will this definition come from?
You indicate in your close to #35 your awareness of the significance of addressing the question of personhood; we’re in agreement 100% here. Addressing the question of personhood maintains the concept of personhood – in however nebulous a state. But once personhood is defined the concept can be appropriated by those who may not have humanity’s better interests at heart.
But as you indicate, in the absence of a notion of personhood morality is meaningless.
IMO the question of personhood should ever be posed, but never quite answered.
As I read through these comments I thought to myself, is there anything sadder or more foolish than the pure, sterile, and soulless intellect.
This, was a standout:
“Human life is one of the least valuable obserables on planet Earth – and one of the most miserable. Our goals should be to have less of it of higher quality”
Yeah. A real tragedy eugenics never caught on.
Sysiphus, actually we must also question whether babies are persons. It’s certainly not politically correct to do so, though. I think that somewhere between one and two years after birth does the child become sufficiently developed to be considered a person. Our earliest memories are usually from that period. With some effort we can imagine being a two year old, but not being a baby.
#38 CI: Hey – politically correct, schmolitically correct! To the truth-seeker, no thought is off-limits; all concepts are worthy of consideration. As long as we refuse to think the unthinkable, unthinkables will continue to blindside our evolution.
True, a newborn isn’t a ‘person’ in the sense that you use the word. Perhaps ‘human being’ might be a better term; ‘individual’ might be worse. But, as a term that indicates a basic social status that includes a bundle of fundamental rights, ‘personhood’ seems to work pretty well, though I have no definite idea at what stage ‘personhood’ should be granted.
#37 GD: Some shocking things can be posted, even on a nice blog like CV – but that’s good. A statement that apalls us may apall us all the more because we know that it’s rational. We just have to dig deeper for an effective reply.
You people make me sick! I’m about 9-1/2 weeks pregnant and i believe my BABY to be completely HUMAN. It doesnt matter what it looks like or if and how it responds to pain, just like when its born it will be completely DEFENSLESS and still need my protection and care!
Jayme,
No one here has advocated killing a baby or a foetus against the will of the mother.