At what stage is abortion immoral?

[Lucian]

# By the fourth month, you can tell the face of one fetus from that of another.

I can't tell the face of one fetus from another four months after they're born.

 

[Achán hiNidráne]

What do we do in the mean time?

Whatever we want, especially telling the fetus-fetishists to go frack themselves with some uncomfortable foreign object.

 

[Captain.Sassy]

"At what stage is abortion immoral?"

"Every sperm is sacred...
Every sperm is greaaatt...
If a sperm is waaa-sted
God gets quite ii-raaaatee..."

-M. Python

Flippancy aside, and pro-choice though I am, I have to admit that something sits ill with me when I think about late term abortions...

 

[JFrankA]

Personally, I really feel it's up to the woman who is carrying the fetus. It's her body, I can't make a moral judgment on her own body.

 

[NewtonTrino]

Can't it just be immoral to have an abortion except in special circumstances (e.g. life of mother in danger?). It doesn't mean it should be illegal but I personally would try to avoid participating. Can't something be distasteful yet all of us can agree that it's not up to us?

Maybe I'm reading too much into the question but it seems like people are coming up with what they think the legal definition should be, not answering the question. Almost like they implicitly accept the idea that morality and law should be one and the same.

Of course those pointing out the morality is relative and this is a pointless question are also correct.

 

[GreNME]

Once they leave home.

 

[AWPrime]

Once it leaves the womb.

Clear and simple. Quite workable.

 

[Rairun]

I'm comfortable drawing the line at the point where the child is able to survive outside the womb.

I really don't quite get why some people feel so strongly about human babies, though. Obviously, I'm not suggesting it should be legal to kill newborns, but I feel a lot more empathetic to, say, a 5 month old dog or cat than a day old human baby. They are so active and full of curiosity. Humans really aren't very well-developed the moment they are born.

 

[gnome]

We measure the end of life in terms of brain activity, and so I would argue for that in the beginning as well...

To me, before the brain "boots up", my body is just an organic shell waiting to house me. Afterwards is a completetly different story, of course.

 

[gnome]

I'm comfortable drawing the line at the point where the child is able to survive outside the womb.

With or without medical assistance? Even slightly premature babies usually need medical care--and it could be someday that the fetus can spend the entire pregnancy outside the womb with appropriate assistance. The line may be difficult to draw.

 

[Darat]

We measure the end of life in terms of brain activity, and so I would argue for that in the beginning as well...

To me, before the brain "boots up", my body is just an organic shell waiting to house me. Afterwards is a completetly different story, of course.

But the brain is like most of the rest of the body in that it takes many years for it to fully mature, in other words it can be years after birth before it is fully capable of "running/being" you.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Why must there be a time limit?
Why must it ever be moral?
Why must it ever be immoral?


It is a social question if many people care enough to hold an opinion.
It is a moral question when enough people choose to think their opinion is any more than that.
It is a legal question when a law is passed.

Having six billion people around, of whom roughly 1/6th live on a dollar a day and many of whom would go hungry to bed if they had a bed is however an issue of interest to nobody, any more than the fact that number may double in the next decade or two.
Let me rephrase the question:-

At what stage is having children immoral?

 

[HansMustermann]

The thalamocortical connections form in the 26'th gestation week. (Which is actually measured since the last menstruation, so subtract about 2 weeks if you want age from fecundation.) That's when the brain actually gets connected to the sensory inputs from outside. That's when it can possibly start to feel any pain or be aware of its surroundings or even of its own body at all.

(Mind you, the brain is still so demielinated and so much of the final structure is missing, that "aware" here pretty much just means "can receive input", not something like "conscious.")

Until then, it's just some disconnected brain tissue in a (biological) jar.

So the "when it starts feeling pain" argument would put the limit around 6 months. Until then the connections simply don't exist that would relay that information to the brain.

To me that makes a good deadline from other considerations too. Until then, pretty much the little thing never even knew it existed in the first place. The raw data on which it could form a world model (small as his/her world is at the moment) and draw a conceptual line between the "I" and the "everything else", simply doesn't reach the brains yet. It's like having a CPU that's not connected to the motherboard, really.

The argument about having a face, on the other hand, seems incredibly silly to me. A Barbie doll has a face too, but nobody would give it any rights based on that.

 

[Dragoonster]

To me that makes a good deadline from other considerations too. Until then, pretty much the little thing never even knew it existed in the first place. The raw data on which it could form a world model (small as his/her world is at the moment) and draw a conceptual line between the "I" and the "everything else", simply doesn't reach the brains yet. It's like having a CPU that's not connected to the motherboard, really.

Going on my own experience I had no idea I existed until several months or a year or two out of the womb. There was no I. Can anyone here remember what the womb looked like, or any episodes of pain while in the womb? Perhaps memory is tied to language or needs future brain development. But I still think it's a stretch to think fetuses can actually appreciate pain, as in they have a mental desire for it to stop. Fetuses also seem less mentally developed than adult members of other species we slaughter, eat, and wear as clothing.

I don't see abortion as immoral at any stage. If I did I'd have to be a vegan.

 

[Belz...]

Going on my own experience I had no idea I existed until several months or a year or two out of the womb. There was no I.

Full realization of self occured at about 4 for me. Before that the few memories I have are rather fuzzy.

 

[gnome]

But the brain is like most of the rest of the body in that it takes many years for it to fully mature, in other words it can be years after birth before it is fully capable of "running/being" you.

True enough, so at some point the line is hazy, I generally recommend setting an arbitrary point that is clearly before the ambiguity, but close enough to be a useful mark.

 

[Darat]

21









years?

 

[entrope]

I focus on the pragmatic: The largest majority of women affected by outlawing abortion would be those of low income. If I'm right about the sanctity of life, hooray. But if there's even a 0.1% chance that I'm wrong, then I'm just a rich white guy telling poor people how they have to live their lives. Even I'm not that much of a jerk.

On this note, I'd like to point out that it has been demonstrated that, thanks to Roe v. Wade, the crime rate in the US dropped significantly. To the older posters, you may remember the warnings of the 'coming crimewave', and the subsequently dumbfounded analysts when it never happened. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out Levitt - 'Freakonomics'.

As for the morality of abortion, it is very hard to argue that life does not begin at conception, and equally hard to argue that anyone should be required to surrender their body to the needs of another. However, when I think of this, I keep coming back to Judith Jarvis Thomson's example of the violinist:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

From Wikipedia - A Defense of Abortion. Surely, it is permissible to unplug at any time? I can't think of any reason it wouldn't be. That's not to say it would be a nice thing to do, but surely, we can't say this person has a duty to allow this to happen?

 

[quarky]

Morality always seems to have the flavor of "I'm right; you're wrong." Its self-serving, or non-existent.

 

[Undesired Walrus]

As for the morality of abortion, it is very hard to argue that life does not begin at conception,

It doesn't. As Sagan says in the essay, the existence life is an unbroken chain dating back to the primevil swamp of 4 Billion years ago. A sperm cell is unquestionably alive.