Talk:Abortion (Archive 1)

The following was found added to the article:

Despite global population pressures which many hold responsible for endemic hunger, overcrowding and environmental impacts, pro-life advocates, largely on religious grounds, argue that it is proper that the numbers of mankind increase, and that it is up to humankind to figure out how to support and care for the products of unwated pregnancies without denying them life. Pro-choice forces point to the misery index of unwanted babies, raised in a hostile environment, and the manner in which an increase of such infants might contribute to a panoply of social ills, from increases in crime, to a broadening of the population base of those living below the poverty level, to a ballooning of the state welfare rolls.

This is a perfect example of text that fails to adhere to a neutral point of view. If you want to contribute to Wikipedia, you must make a very strong effort to write from a neutral point of view. If you think this is impossible or a bad idea, please ie neutral point of view, where all is made clear and plausible. Wikipedia is not a platform for advocacy of any kind, period. By the way, I think the above could be rewritten and included, but I don't have the time and energy to do it. I hope someone else will. --LMS I agree with Larry on this one, if the pro-life position was correctly stated. Something along the following lines would be much more accurate than what is written: "Pro-life advocates largely adhere to the view that life begins at conception. Thus abortion is considered murder, proscribed in most religious traditions."

No disputing that many pro-lifers carry an excessive amount of accessory cultural baggage that appears at least archaic if not incomprehensible to many contemporary people, but the "abortion is murder" theme is the basic issue. DMD

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I think it's better now...

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Superb. DMD

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I didn't like Hank's evisceration of the religious basis for the pro-life argument. It is simply a fact that most pro-lifers are such for religious reasons, and it's dishonest to soft-pedal that. --LDC

Hm, but I think it has gone too far the other way now, esp. with the statement about a vague biological basis. I'm anti-abortion personally for religious reasons. I'm also against it politically, but here I switch to a biological and civil argument rather than expecting everyone to adopt my religious views. I'll put those arguments below for everyone's amusement, but the point is that I think there's a danger of taking the fact that we're religous to imply that our political argument is also fundamentally religous.

If you think its too anti-religion now I certainly won't object to a more neutral wording, so long as it is clear that the majority of of pro-lifers hold their view for religious reasons; that's simply a fact. They also _justify_ their beliefs by appeal (rational and otherwise) to non-religious argument, but that's a reaction after-the-fact. They know that religious arguments don't wash with pro-choicers, so they have to resort to non-religious arguments for a point of view that they still nonetheless hold for religious reasons.

BTW, is the pro-abortion side any more grounded biologically?

The idea of an average timeframe in which a fetus is viable isn't really disputed, nor is the idea that a fetus is always of species homo sapiens. The arguments I see from both sides tend to be on a civil rights basis, anyway. Where's the controversy (or room for vagueness) in the biology itself?

I don't think there are any arguments about the biology: the arguments are about social policy. We do want to enact social policies forbidding certain kinds of harm to certain persons in certain situations. The question is whether that desire is rationally applied to fetuses in conflict with our equally valid desire to protect the self-determination of the women carrying them.

Anyway, here's my argument from the non-religous point of view. Biologically, we're always the same species from conception. In terms of civil rights, then, to argue that babies which can't survive without mom don't warrant protection as other homo sapiens is to judge the right to life on essentially technological grounds - if somebody invented a machine which could support a 1 week old fetus outside the mother after, say, it was removed by induced labor, and then let it develop to maturity, we should then move the legal cutoff back to 1 week, since we could, with no difference to the mother, raise the child to maturity. But this philosophy says that we let the state of available technology affect what we elsewhere call inalienable rights. And how different is that from selectively offering rights based on the business concept in which one holds a receipt for purchase of a slave?

I'm certainly not arguing "technological grounds". "Viability" is certainly one other point at which we might say the state can step in, and it is perhaps a more rational one than conception, but I don't think that pro-choicers in general hang their argument on that one hook. Even if there were some technical means to bring any conception to term, I for one would certainly not require it--that would be even more horrific. The majority of conceptions have genetic defects and either never implant or are spontaneously miscarried without the woman ever knowing. It would be just as irrational to interfere with that natural process to protect every zygote as it would be to interfere by aborting every zygote.

Or even more fundamentally, in a balance between a women's freedom to choose a non-critical (to her own life or long-term health) medical procedure and the question of whether a certain creature is considered human, shouldn't we adopt a person-until-proven-otherwise attitude? Biologically, sure, there are differences in how a pre-natal fetus must be provided its oxygen and food (from an umbilical connection to its mother) and how an infant must be provided its sustenance (by being slapped on the butt and then fed by hand), but what bearing does that have on human rights? We have negligence laws for people who let infants die by not feeding them, even if they live out in the woods and can't give them away without taking a 9-month long hike to town. Here neither biology /nor[?]/ religion are really at issue, AFAICT.

The question to ask is WHY we wish, as social policy, to protect persons from harm in ways we don't apply to other things like objects, animals, human tissues, and similar things? A dog is an aware, sentient being no less than a person, but we don't protect them unconditionally. My own skin cells are living cells with my unique DNA no less than the few cells of the zygote from which I came, yet I shed thousands of them to die regularly. What is it about people that makes us want to protect them? I think it is rational to point to things like feeling: people experience feelings, perceptions, thoughts; they have memories, opinions, intentions. Murdering a person puts an end to all those valuable things, while my shedding a few skin cells (or even killing a few brain cells with a drink) does not. Killing a cow might cause it to experience pain, but we even allow that on grounds that the benefit to society of the food is great enough to justify it. If we make these kinds of judgments about other biological things, why should we not make the same judgments about zygotes? Clearly, an 8-cell zygote that hasn't even started cell differentiation yet, and has no nerve cells, no brain, no sense organs, etc. does not possess any of those qualities--intentions, memories, thoughts--that we find special about "people", so applying the protections we grant people to those cells is as ridiculous as applying them to my skin cells. On the other hand, one might reasonably argue that an infant at some later point of development does have some of those things--so it might be reational to apply some of those protections at some point before birth. This argument has nothing to do with "viability".

So again, the question is not biology; it's social policy and religion. If you think it is rational to use force (and make no mistake--if you advocate laws, you are advocating force) to restrict a woman's freedom to protect some cells that don't have any special properties my own skin cells don't have, you must convince me WHY it is rational to do so. If your only reason is that those cells have a "soul" or something, then I remain unconvinced. --LDC

I think it might be helpful if we let pro-life people rather than pro-choice people characterize the pro-life position, and vice versa. Rebuttal to the pro-life positiion should be included with the pro-choice position of which it is a part, rather than inserted in the description of the pro-life position. --HWR

I wouldn't disagree--as long as you present the position honestly and accurately, that is, as long as the argument accurately reports what most people on that side of the argument actually believe and what arguments they actually use. I would expect the same from the pro-choice side. So while I, for example, do not think "viability" and "dependence" have any relevance to my position on the issue, those arguments are in fact used by many others on the pro-choice side, so I would expect them to be included here. --LDC

It is simply wrong, in terms of biology, to suggest that there is no difference between a zygote and a somatic cell from the skin. The zygote is a developing organism, the skin cell is not. What the zygote posseses is not a "soul" but a "life", as an individual of the species homo sapiens. --HWR

I am more concerned here about what coverage of the arguments belongs in an encyclopedia article than in the arguments themselves, but as long as we're here--please don't dignify your semantic arguments[?] by calling them "biology". Real science doesn't hide behind definitions and wordplay, but actual observable facts. Every cell of every organism has some unique feature; something that distinguishes it. "Developing organism" is meaningless; all cells develop in some way. If I put a skin cell in a Petri dish with food and water it would live, metabolize, grow, divide, and continue living and developing for many generations, no different from an amoeba or any other living cell. If I implanted into someone geneticially similar to me, it would attach itself and go to work. Unlike a fertilized egg, it will never become anything but a skin cell--but neither will an amoeba become anything but an amoeba. You can't say that, however, about cord-blood stem cells. They can develop into anything, from a heart to a brain, and they've always been discarded for all of history. If you judge the "value" or "worth" of a cell by what it can become, then cord-blood stem cells deserve equal treatment to embryonic stem cells. If you emplant a cord-blood stem cell into a developing embryo at the right stage, it will attach itself and divide and become part of the growing organism just like any of the other cells, and the embryo will grow up to be a genetic chimera (which occur naturally from time to time as well).

If you don't want to use the word "soul", then tell me why you seem to think that (1) there is some definition of "life"--using only physically observable facts of nature--that applies to a newly fertilized zygote that does not apply to a cord-blood stem cell; or (2) why you think it is rational to apply laws designed to protect "people" from harm to entities that have no means of experiencing harm or anything else. You can't even say that a zygote is unique in that it can become a human being while other cells can't--that's not true anymore. Somatic cells can be cloned and develop into full organisms. And you certainly can't say that clones won't have rights--because then natural identical twins wouldn't either. --LDC

As I said, each human life begins at conception. This is a basic fact of human reproductive biology. Natural conception results from the union of parental gametes, but it may also be possible to achieve conception through various artificial cell manipulations. In either case, a human life is created. A zygote does not "become" a human being, it "is" a human being. (This would be true of zygotes produced by cloning as well as fertilization.) A human life is not a property (or a potential), it is a process. The beginning of that process is conception. -- HWR

That's not a fact, it's a definition. Definitions aren't facts, they're just semantic games. If that's the way you want to play it, then fine--I totally concede your definition of "human life" to include zygotes (although you don't specify at what point that achieve this--"conception" is not a point, it is itself a multi-stage process). It's also clearly a mistake to say that anything is "created" at conception--a fertilized egg does not contain any atoms or energy that didn't already exist in the gametes, so I fail to see your point there. But so what? That's just a definition, it doesn't actually say anything. Your argument seems to be: (1) "Human life" includes people at all stages of development; (2) The state should step in to protect "human life"; (3) Therefore, the state should protect zygotes. Premise 1 is a completely rational definition, and I think many pro-choicers would even agree. But then premise 2 becomes false, because the majority of people don't believe that the state should protect zygotes at the expense of their mother's autonomy. So in order to make your argument work, you must explain why premise 2 remains true under your definition of life that includes zygotes, using real political arguments, not just sematic wordplay. Until you do that, you're just blowing hot air.

Secondly, all of this belongs on commentary pages. The "Abortion" page should report on the basics of the arguments, and maybe even link to some more detailed ones, but it should not contain the arguments themselves. --LDC

I agree that the debate itself should happen here. Deciding how to characterize the positions from a neutral point of view is a tricky one, though, and I like the suggestion that it represent the most common arguments from each side, whether they be religous or whatever. I started looking around for demographic info, but so far the normal rhetoric is all I'm finding. Anybody know of sources which have attempted to survey how many people hold a particular view on abortion? -J

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http://blackgenocide.org/sayso_video Genocide against African-American people through abortion. If this short blurb survives the Stalinist Left cleaner squads at this depth of removal from the main "Abortion" entry, I'll come back and put more work into an article. Get tired of putting in much time and work only to have *those* come in and undo it. When *is* this going to be a democratically assembled encyclopedia, anyway?