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Human Development and Abortion Laws

The True Scotsman said:
I'm having trouble coming to a position on what point of development abortion should be illegal (or what point we start to consider a ball of cell a human). My main problem with the issue is that one person might say "this ball of cell is 'human' at this point in development" while another might say "no, it is a 'human' at this point in development." Whose to say who is wrong and who is right? My main worry on this issue is that any position on it will be arbitrary to the point where it is indefensible. Any thought?
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The problem isn’t that a choice would be somewhat arbitrary but that people on both sides insist it must also be absolute. In truth we can probably make well reasoned judgments about the end points but what’s in between is somewhat gray. IMO it’s pretty hard to argue that a ball of a few dozen cells is a person, just as it’s pretty hard to argue that a foetus that could survive outside the womb on its own is not and it’s really only the extremists on either side that try to argue these positions.

Again in my own opinion, we should focus on brain development and when we first start to see a significant number of working neurons, when the brain looks mostly like that of a newborn and choose a convenient point in between with the understanding that although it’s arbitrary it need not be absolute. I think is should be possible to find a point in development that falls within this range but still allows a women reasonable time to get an abortion if she wants one. As we are no longer dealing with absolutes we can still allow later abortions if the circumstances suggest it’s “the lesser of two evilts”.

Ultimately abortion is a difficult problem with no absolute right answer, but not having an absolute right answer should not prevent us from finding a pragmatic answer that deal somewhat acceptably with most situations. The main obstacle to this being the people in the extremes who insist “it has to be one or the other”
 
In general, we hold human life as worth protecting over other life forms because we consider ourselves special, rightly or wrongly. Sentience (or sapience as some would say, as it most closely recalls our species denomination of homo sapiens sapiens) is the key differentiator, even though it is difficult to define. The rich inner life that we experience as sentient beings can be projected on others; thus we experience empathy for the sufferings and joys of others. Empathy has often been argued as the cornerstone of "golden rule" ethics.

The presence of a brain wave (measurable phenomenon) is one reliable way we can say that the inner life, or selfhood, may attain to an unborn child or a patient in coma. [I am quite sure a medical professional might wish to refine that in terms of active areas of the brain in the case of the infirm, but let it suffice for now.] So, provisionally, I place the limit for abortion on the presence of a brain wave, the observable start of the mechanisms for inner life. If and when medical knowledge places harder limits on what might constitute the conditions required for the start of awareness, I would amend the limits on both abortion and euthanasia.

Because there are other species that share our ability to conceptualize a sense of self, as a corollary I would extend moral and legal protection to those that pass the mirror test (chimps, orangutans, dolphins, elephants).

In short, to end another's inner life, selfhood, is morally reprehensible IMO.
 
Hlafordlaes said:
In general, we hold human life as worth protecting over other life forms because we consider ourselves special, rightly or wrongly. Sentience (or sapience as some would say, as it most closely recalls our species denomination of homo sapiens sapiens) is the key differentiator, even though it is difficult to define. The rich inner life that we experience as sentient beings can be projected on others; thus we experience empathy for the sufferings and joys of others. Empathy has often been argued as the cornerstone of "golden rule" ethics.

The presence of a brain wave (measurable phenomenon) is one reliable way we can say that the inner life, or selfhood, may attain to an unborn child or a patient in coma. [I am quite sure a medical professional might wish to refine that in terms of active areas of the brain in the case of the infirm, but let it suffice for now.] So, provisionally, I place the limit for abortion on the presence of a brain wave, the observable start of the mechanisms for inner life. If and when medical knowledge places harder limits on what might constitute the conditions required for the start of awareness, I would amend the limits on both abortion and euthanasia.

Because there are other species that share our ability to conceptualize a sense of self, as a corollary I would extend moral and legal protection to those that pass the mirror test (chimps, orangutans, dolphins, elephants).

In short, to end another's inner life, selfhood, is morally reprehensible IMO.
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How do you define the "mirror test"? According to this fascinating paper, there is a continuum of the development of self. Fetuses are "aware" of their body:

When infants experience their own crying, their own touch, or experience the perfect contingency between seen and felt bodily movements (e.g., the arm crossing the field of view), they perceive something that no one but themselves can perceive. The transport of the own hand to the face, very
frequent at birth and even during the last trimester of pregnancy, is a unique tactile experience, unlike any other tactile experience as it entails a ‘‘double touch’’: the hand touching the face and simultaneously the face touching the hand. Same for the auditory experience of the own crying or the visual-proprioceptive experience accompanying self-produced movements. These basic perceptual (i.e., multimodal) experiences are indeed self-specifying, unlike any other perception experienced by the infant from birth and even prior to birth in the confine of the maternal womb.
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However, the ability of a child to recognize that it is, in fact, themselves in the mirror doesn't appear until around 18 months of age (defined as "Level 3" in the paper).
 
In the case of developing humans, full cognitive skills are not in play until well after birth. Yet this does not invalidate the fact that memory and experience, important parts of self, indeed begin in the womb. I would hesitate to draw too many inference about infant mental processes when they are only observable in behavior.

The point of my choice of a rationale for distinguishing between abortion and murder is the presence or absence of self, be it developing or fully expressed. Selfhood is (secularly) sacred to me, but in broad terms, any and all life does not receive the same ethical respect (I do use bug spray, for example).
 
Darnit--I've been too busy this weekend to keep up with this thread. Sorry, but I can only do a quick little bit right now.

EatatJoes said:
It's gross.
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I hope that's not your argument. A great many medical procedures are gross.

The mother has incubated the child for this long, why not just give it a chance? If the child isn't going to suffer for any known reasons, why terminate it?
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That doesn't answer Nealy's question. How about I word it this way, "Why not terminate it?"

Your statement that you don't think a woman should abort a late term baby for no reason isn't consistent with what you said before--that it should be the woman's choice all the way up until the baby is born.

It sounds now like your position is more in line with Roe v. Wade. The state recognizes a growing interest in the fetus as the pregnancy gets later and later in its term. In the first trimester, the state recognizes no interest, and the woman can have an abortion for any or even no reason.
 
lomiller said:
Again in my own opinion, we should focus on brain development and when we first start to see a significant number of working neurons, when the brain looks mostly like that of a newborn and choose a convenient point in between with the understanding that although it’s arbitrary it need not be absolute. I think is should be possible to find a point in development that falls within this range but still allows a women reasonable time to get an abortion if she wants one. As we are no longer dealing with absolutes we can still allow later abortions if the circumstances suggest it’s “the lesser of two evilts”.
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Agreed. All evidence indicates there's no significant brain activity during the first trimester. There are random firings, but nothing remotely organized like you'd see in a person. IIRC, somewhere in the late second trimester this changes. So in my view, first trimester abortions are definitely ok as well as early second trimester ones. Third trimester abortions are very sketchy AT BEST and it is probably best to ban them except when the mother's life is in danger.
 
Drachasor said:
Agreed. All evidence indicates there's no significant brain activity during the first trimester. There are random firings, but nothing remotely organized like you'd see in a person. IIRC, somewhere in the late second trimester this changes. So in my view, first trimester abortions are definitely ok as well as early second trimester ones. Third trimester abortions are very sketchy AT BEST and it is probably best to ban them except when the mother's life is in danger.
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I will take issue with this. The third trimester starts at the 25th week. Sometimes the option to terminate doesn't present itself until the third trimester. Women who chose to terminate that late in pregnancy do so because they see it as the best choice for the baby. Those children were wanted but it is learned that the child has little chance for survival, their lives would be miserable, etc. I'm not going to make a woman deliver a stillborn because the pregnancy isn't going to kill her. Sometimes abortion is considered the more compassionate option for all parties involved. There are stories in which women were going to abort but decided on an early induction so they could hold their child. Why should the state tell these women what is best in these situations? I am willing to give women the benefit of the doubt in those situations.
 
EatatJoes said:
I will take issue with this. The third trimester starts at the 25th week. Sometimes the option to terminate doesn't present itself until the third trimester. Women who chose to terminate that late in pregnancy do so because they see it as the best choice for the baby. Those children were wanted but it is learned that the child has little chance for survival, their lives would be miserable, etc. I'm not going to make a woman deliver a stillborn because the pregnancy isn't going to kill her. Sometimes abortion is considered the more compassionate option for all parties involved. There are stories in which women were going to abort but decided on an early induction so they could hold their child. Why should the state tell these women what is best in these situations? I am willing to give women the benefit of the doubt in those situations.
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I don't think it would be hard to craft some reasonable laws regarding it, with a proviso that there is a way to get a special exemption in particular cases.

At a certain point, it is the job of the State to tell the women what is best for the baby, just like it is the State's job to stop child abuse and the like.
 
EatatJoes said:
I will take issue with this. The third trimester starts at the 25th week. Sometimes the option to terminate doesn't present itself until the third trimester.
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We don't always say it, but the general Roe v. Wade guidelines in terms of age of development only pertains to normal pregnancies.

But the general guidelines are the same. People talk about brain development as a measure of something like "consciousness"--a problematic word, which is why I prefer the approach of Desirism and words like voluntary movement or more traditionally quickening.

For unusual cases, these things don't happen on schedule (or at all), and we certainly allow for late term abortion when it's plain that there isn't sufficient brain development.

I'm not sure how things work in the anecdote you linked to. It sounds like the fetus had normal brain development but a problem with his abdominal organs. I just skimmed the story, but I think in that situation you have to treat the baby as an entity deserving of some moral consideration. It might be that the question is whether or not it could survive (viability--what Roe v. Wade explicitly mentions as part of its reasoning), or it might be a question of how much pain and suffering it would endure.

ETA: To quote from the story:
When we arrived at the Women's Health Center, we immediately felt the compassion and understanding from the entire staff. We had a story, and they listened. The doctor instantly connected with us and assured us that although our decision was a difficult one, he knew how sick our son was and that the choice we made was because we love him so much and couldn't bear to put him through a short life full of pain and suffering.
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This is definitely NOT a case where the woman was choosing an abortion for any or no reason at all. In late term pregnancies, we need a reason sufficient to offset the developing interest the state has in the fetus/baby's life.

In this case, the interests of the fetus/baby were what led to the decision to abort, not the mother's distinct interests.
 
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EatatJoes said:
Why should the state tell these women what is best in these situations? I am willing to give women the benefit of the doubt in those situations.
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You could say the same thing about murders where there is some sympathy for the murderer. The fact is, when someone commits a murder (like maybe a teenager who kills a brutally abusive father), the state (i.e. the people--that is the society that establishes moral conventions) does have the right to review those decisions. If we disagree with their reasoning, we can even convict them of murder or manslaughter or something similar.

We don't always give them the benefit of the doubt.

I still see no reason to differentiate a story like that from a very late term abortion. In fact, most late term abortions are like the one in the story you cited--there is a legitimate reason and the state accepts it. But we certainly do have the right to review a decision like that.
 
Ehh, to me it seems obvious, but I don't know that much about the subject.

I would say that when a fetus has a functioning brain, it is a human and should be treated as such.

I do not know if it is possible to tell when the brain begins to function, though.
 
caniswalensis said:
Ehh, to me it seems obvious, but I don't know that much about the subject.

I would say that when a fetus has a functioning brain, it is a human and should be treated as such.

I do not know if it is possible to tell when the brain begins to function, though.
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There has been a fair bit of research on brain activity in the fetus. You start seeing organized signals sometime in the second trimester (like I said before, I believe it is towards the end of the 2nd trimester).
 
EatatJoes said:
It's gross.
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And immoral to kill another human "just because".

The mother has incubated the child for this long, why not just give it a chance? If the child isn't going to suffer for any known reasons, why terminate it?
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You're the one that claimed the mother has an absolute right to abort at any point. Sounds like your saying, "I would never commit murder, but the state has no right to interfere if someone else wants to."
 
caniswalensis said:
Ehh, to me it seems obvious, but I don't know that much about the subject.

I would say that when a fetus has a functioning brain, it is a human and should be treated as such.

I do not know if it is possible to tell when the brain begins to function, though.
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It's not possible, certainly, to draw the line with great precision. We can't say that in all cases on day X of a pregnancy the fetus has a functioning brain. (And function itself isn't something we can measure as a binary quantity. A brain isn't fully developed until something like age 18 or so.)

But I think you're exactly right, that this is what we consider. I prefer to think in broader terms, though, because apparently a fully-functioning brain doesn't distinguish the morality of killing a baby compared to killing a fish for food, for example.

I think what we're after is, again, what Desirism talks about--the ability to have desires that may be thwarted or fulfilled.

At any rate, sticking just within the human race, a more-or-less fully functioning brain (think again of cases like Terry Schiavo) or the very slippery word "consciousness" or volition or some such is what we look for.

Our legal system draws these sorts of fairly arbitrary lines all the time (surely the difference in maturity between someone who is 20 years and 11 months old and someone who has passed his 21st birthday isn't significant, but in most states--if not all now-- the latter can possess and drink alcohol but the former cannot).

In the case of abortion, I think, we've drawn the legal lines on the conservative side. In normal pregnancies, we err on the side of not killing something that has the level of development we look for at the cost perhaps of some degree of freedom for the woman, who--in normal situations--does have ample time to make the decision.
 
Neally said:
You're the one that claimed the mother has an absolute right to abort at any point. Sounds like your [sic] saying, "I would never commit murder, but the state has no right to interfere if someone else wants to."
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I think maybe EatAtJoes has a more nuanced position than I previously thought. I think EatAtJoes is saying that it is morally wrong to commit late term abortions, but that it is not something morally wrong enough that the state should make laws against it.

If so, I think the question you and I are getting at is, why isn't as morally wrong as other crimes? We certainly don't give a woman the benefit of the doubt if she shoplifts, for example. It's illegal because it's morally wrong. While the two realms are different, there is a LOT of overlap. Morality evolved by natural selection to provide for better functioning human social groups, and you could consider the law to be our intelligently-designed attempt to formalize morality for the exact same end: a better functioning society.

One aspect of justice is looking out for the rights of those who aren't strong enough to protect their own rights. It's not merely a matter of reciprocity (we treat weak people well in case one day we ourselves may be the weak person) but something connected, I think, with our evolved mental capacity for morality. (I think of mirror neurons and the selective benefits of altruism.)
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
It's not possible, certainly, to draw the line with great precision. We can't say that in all cases on day X of a pregnancy the fetus has a functioning brain. (And function itself isn't something we can measure as a binary quantity. A brain isn't fully developed until something like age 18 or so.)
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There's a fuzzy line, but that doesn't mean there aren't unfuzzy areas on either side of that fuzzy line.
 
Drachasor said:
There's a fuzzy line, but that doesn't mean there aren't unfuzzy areas on either side of that fuzzy line.
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Exactly!

We err on the side of confidence, so that we allow abortions in the first trimester for any or no reason since we are reasonably certain that there hasn't yet been sufficient brain development. It doesn't mean that we think there's a significant difference in the fetus one day into the second trimester. We look to be safely on one side of that fuzzy line.

And in the fuzzy region--or in fuzzy situations (like abnormal pregnancies)-- we make these decisions by balancing a growing state interest in the fetus with the known interests of the woman.
 
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