When Does Abortion Become Wrong?

[BPSCG]

Trying to help 1inChrist here (see his earlier poll that got pounded with baseball bats and dead cats).

I think most people have little problem with abortion shortly after conception; they probably take the view that while life may begin at conception, killing a two-week-old collection of cells is no more murder than killing a few cells from your kidney for purposes of a biopsy.

I also think most people have serious problems with abortion in the very last stages, that while it may not legally be murder, there's something ethically terribly wrong with crushing an 8-month term fetus's skull and sucking its brains out.

So at what point do you think abortion becomes ethically wrong, assuming bearing the child would be no more risky for the mother than, say, having a hysterectomy?

 

[HarryKeogh]

I voted 6 months to 8 months, when brain activity starts.

of course at any time when the mom's health is in danger (however rare that may be) mom takes precedence.

edited to add: please refer to a wonderful essay by Carl Sagan "Is it possible to be pro-choice AND pro-llife". it can be found in his book "Billions and Billions"

 

[MRC_Hans]

I think abortion is never good, but it is necessary.

I tend to think it becomes wrong at the time when it is a viable baby. I did not vote because I am not sure when that is, currently. However, I feel it is not just a matter of timing, it is also a matter of reasons.

Finally, there is a difference between what is wrong for the individual and what society should consider wrong.

Very fuzzy, perhaps I should not have posted .

Hans

 

[Luke T.]

I chose "it is always wrong" since there wasn't an option for exceptions in cases of rape, incest, etc.

A collection of cells from someone's kidney won't grow up to become President someday, although the current President forces me to place that in the "Theory" category.

I have no doubt the demographic of this forum will shortly diminish the majority anti-abortion vote in this poll that exists at the moment to a tiny minority.

At some point during pregnancy, it becomes impossible to deny that there is a human being in the womb and not a mass of cells. And medical science is pushing that boundary back further and further.

Human beings are entitled to human rights. A woman's "right to choose" does not supercede a human being's right to life.

 

[BPSCG]

of course at any time when the mom's health is in danger (however rare that may be) mom takes precedence.

I tried to control for that issue in the last line of the OP. That's been a stumbling block for the politicians all along, the "health of the mother" issue. I think very few people would insist that a mother with a one-month fetus go through the birth at substantial risk to her life, and very few would insist she go through it if she ran substantial risk of being crippled for life. But what about the other extreme? Every medical procedure has some attendant risk; if you don't think so, try having a tooth pulled without signing a waiver of responsibility that informs you you could die from it. So what if the mother is carrying an eight month fetus? Should she be allowed to abort it because if she has the baby, she would run a fever for a few days? I used the hysterectomy risk as a concrete yardstick, to help facilitate the issue, but could have used other ones.

 

[TragicMonkey]

An extremely difficult question. And one that causes a wee bit of a fuss occasionally, or so I'm told.

Life begins at conception, say some. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's automatically sacred. It's an unfortunate biological fact that conception happens quite frequently--but the resulting (is it zygote?) doesn't always attach to the uterine wall. Frankly, human lives are getting pissed out all the time, through nobody's fault, even if there are no birth control pills involved. So if you think there are millions of extra baby angels the size of a pinhead up there, feel free. Blame God and his mechanical ineptitude.

The more complicated and intelligent the life form, the more it deserves protection. Most people don't have issues with eating chicken, but would balk at killing dolphins. They're too smart. It's creepy. What's the cutoff point? It's hard to draw an arbitrary line, and say "this life form is intelligent, this one is not". And when you're talking about abortion, you have to decide. Is a group of sixteen cells a baby?

To determine the rightness or wrongness of abortion, you have to first determine the underlying questions:

1. When does life actually begin? You'll have to define "life" to start with, then figure out how many cells you have to have to count as a living entity.

2. If it's okay to take life below a certain level of intelligence, what's the cutoff point? Start by defining intelligence.

Real easy to figure this out, eh? Most people seem to either go with:

The Catholic position that life begins at conception, all abortion is automatically wrong. This position is at least consistent, and dodges the second question entirely. (It also fits into the Church's position against the pill, because the pill discourages fertilized eggs from sticking around.)

Or,

Dodge both questions and leave it up to the mother/potential mother to decide, because she's the one most immediately concerned. If there is a concern about protecting (potential) people under the banner of common humanity, it is made secondary to the mother's rights over her own body. Conflict between the two is troublesome, but the idea of legal intervention to force an unwilling woman to carry a baby is more repellent than the idea of abortion. Compromise is made by creating cutoff dates --three months is okay, four months is not okay, etc. The problem with this position is that it hasn't really answered either of the two questions above, and therefore has inherent inconsistencies that make the position philosophically weak. That doesn't mean the position is wrong, just that it's more difficult to argue.

Personally, I dislike the idea of abortion. I dislike the idea that people aren't allowed to control their own bodies. These are incompatible in an abortion debate. So my position is that the ethical thing to do is prevent unwanted pregnancies at all costs. Making birth control widely and cheaply available, improving sex education so people realize the consequences (and none of this abstinence only crap), and vastly increasing the ease and availability of adoption would at least cut down on the number of abortions. I think it should stay legal, but the women concerned should be given all the other options. But no condemnation should they choose abortion, either. I can't imagine it's an easy choice in any circumstances, and I feel sorry for people faced with it.


Sorry for the length of this. As usual in murky questions, I see validity in both sides, and my attempts to reconcile them lead to muddled abstraction. Also, since I'm male and not planning to impregnate anyone, I sort of occupy the sidelines on conception issues, and am therefore less emotionally attached to either position.

 

[HarryKeogh]

Human beings are entitled to human rights. A woman's "right to choose" does not supercede a human being's right to life.

if you consider it a human being why would you be okay with abortion in the case of rape? Why punish the innocent human being in the womb?

 

[BPSCG]

I think abortion is never good, but it is necessary.

Qualify that as "sometimes necessary" and I'd agree (I know some of y'all who perceive me as an irredeemable, reflexive, reactionary conservative are going into heart failure reading this...)

However, I feel it is not just a matter of timing, it is also a matter of reasons.

True enough, but I was trying to get a sense of when people believed that it's simply too late, regardless of the reason (other than mother's life vs. the baby's).

 

[Luke T.]

if you consider it a human being why would you be okay with abortion in the case of rape? Why punish the innocent human being in the womb?

I personally would not want my wife to abort a fetus that was the result of rape. My wife and I have even talked about this, and she would not either.

But abortions due to rape are about one tenth of one percent of all abortions. It's like talking about a leaky faucet in your upstairs bathroom when the dam down the street has burst and a tidal wave is carrying your house away.

 

[TragicMonkey]

if you consider it a human being why would you be okay with abortion in the case of rape? Why punish the innocent human being in the womb?

Or even incest. True, incest is generally regarded with disgust (and I needn't point out that this is an ingrained cultural attitude, and there have been cultures in the past that didn't have problems with it) but the resulting offspring won't be necessarily monstruous of disfigured. It would take multiple generations of such close inbreeding to cause serious defects.

 

[Darat]

...snip...

But abortions due to rape are about one tenth of one percent of all abortions. It's like talking about a leaky faucet in your upstairs bathroom when the dam down the street has burst and a tidal wave is carrying your house away.

I don't understand how you can hold this view if you think abortion is wrong. Surely the circumstances of the pregnancy are a total irrelevance if the non-borns' right to a potential life are paramount?

 

[BPSCG]

I chose "it is always wrong" since there wasn't an option for exceptions in cases of rape, incest, etc.

See my reply to Hans above; I was trying to get a sense of when people believed it was simply wrong because it was too late in the term, i.e., at what point in the pregnancy would you say that the only justification for an abortion would be to save the mother's life or prevent severe health consequences for her.

A collection of cells from someone's kidney won't grow up to become President someday,

Right, but the neither the kidney cells nor the two-week old embryo can feel pleasure, pain, hope, regret, ecstasy, or horror. I think the point at which most people have problem with abortion is when they believe there is a being that can feel those things. They have no problem with abortion before that, in much the same way they have no problem with pulling the plug on Grandpa when his brain is flatlining but his heart is still beating.

Human beings are entitled to human rights. A woman's "right to choose" does not supercede a human being's right to life.

So does right to live of the the three-day old embryo inside a twelve year-old girl that was placed there by the father's forcible rape supersede the girls right to not bear the child?

 

[BPSCG]

Wow! Such a touchy subject with such a wide range of views and yet such civilized, rational debate! I'm proud of ya!

Now if we could just get ABCCBSNBCFoxCNNFoxNewsMSNBC to cover this instead of those idiotic demonstrations with people screaming their fool heads off at each other...

 

[TragicMonkey]

So does right to live of the the three-day old embryo inside a twelve year-old girl that was placed there by the father's forcible rape supersede the girls right to not bear the child?

Perhaps abortion is an ethical dilemma that will be solved by technology. Suppose we reach the point where we have the means to painlessly and easily remove an embryo of any stage of development and let it live outside the womb and grow to be a normal, healthy human being. The circumstances of the conception would be irrelevant, and the woman would not be required to bear any pregnancy she didn't want.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Qualify that as "sometimes necessary" and I'd agree (I know some of y'all who perceive me as an irredeemable, reflexive, reactionary conservative are going into heart failure reading this...)

I meant, of course, that it is necessary that the option exists.

True enough, but I was trying to get a sense of when people believed that it's simply too late, regardless of the reason (other than mother's life vs. the baby's).

For me, that would be around the point where the foetus is viable. (a point that is moving)

I feel that the life is sacred argument is somewhat hypocritical as long as we accept that humans die because we deem it necessary to have cars, wars, firearms,.....

The basic dilemma of abortion is that we have a conflict of the interests of two lives, and their individual freedom. We have a woman's right to her body, and we have a foetus' right to it's body. True, the woman's life is not (normally) at stake.

I cannot help wonder how a lot of men were to view this, if they were the ones getting pregnant .

Hans

 

[BPSCG]

Surely the circumstances of the pregnancy are a total irrelevance if the non-borns' right to a potential life are paramount?

What do you mean "potential life"? Is it your position that the just-impregnated egg is not yet alive?

 

[MRC_Hans]

Perhaps abortion is an ethical dilemma that will be solved by technology. Suppose we reach the point where we have the means to painlessly and easily remove an embryo of any stage of development and let it live outside the womb and grow to be a normal, healthy human being. The circumstances of the conception would be irrelevant, and the woman would not be required to bear any pregnancy she didn't want.

That would certainly change it in my eyes. Perhaps even the possibility to move the embryo to an other woman who could not conceive in the normal way, although, of course, logistics would be daunting.

Hans

 

[Darat]

What do you mean "potential life"? Is it your position that the just-impregnated egg is not yet alive?

I would give no more thought to the destruction of a just fertilised egg then I would of the destruction of the millions of sperms that didn't get to fertilise that particular egg.

But that wasn't why I used the word "potential". I used it simply because we just don’t know the future of any particular child and therefore any "life" we "save" by not aborting is just a potential life. After all the child could be born normally and yet be dead within a few days of birth. The child may even die during childbirth.

 

[TragicMonkey]

That would certainly change it in my eyes. Perhaps even the possibility to move the embryo to an other woman who could not conceive in the normal way, although, of course, logistics would be daunting.

I was thinking of teleporters, like on "Star Trek". Woman A and Woman B step on the platform, there's an irritating sound and some flashing lights, and then the embryo has a groovy new pad.

It could also be adapted for weight loss.

 

[HarryKeogh]

What do you mean "potential life"? Is it your position that the just-impregnated egg is not yet alive?

not to put words in Darat's mouth but perhaps potential human being would have been clearer? (or more specifically, not an embryo or fetus)