demagogue on 1/6/2009 at 16:55

---

I don't think you weren't following what I was trying to do. But I didn't explain it in general terms first; so I don't blame you. I'm not trying to back one horse or another (at this point), so it can't be much of a strawman.

If you don't like the fact set-up of the question, that's a fair response on the sidelines... we need to clarify the phrasing of the question. But anyway the basic question still stands, about the moral grounds underlying different rules we have after different lines have been passed, "birth" being just one example I wanted to think about (including the "clear" difference you yourself just mentioned about the "health of the mother" exception applying to late-term abortions but not infants), and your response doesn't really answer it.

(To respond, though -- and this is all a tangent to my main point -- my original question that you're criticising would have to assume the conditions for a late-term abortion were met, either it's a jurisdiction where the reason is irrelevant or where the mother's life were in danger, or it wouldn't make sense; but it's helpful to make that explicit. And for comparability, yes, you'd need to make the situations parallel, where killing the infant would be for the same reason as the late-term, e.g., saving the mother's life. Then you might criticise that won't happen 99.9% of the time. But that's a problem coming up with a believable scenario. Come up with whatever you want. "The baby is playing with a gun or something; can we shoot it first?" I guess that brings in the self-defense defense. But if that's your position, does that mean that a "mother-saving" late term abortion is "murder with a self-defense defense" (or other-defense, since it's not the doctor endangered)? That doesn't seem right. So the same question is still there; late-term abortions are conceived differently than killing an infant post-birth. Different cases can probe that difference in their own ways, and I just brought up an unfortunately distracting case to get to it the first time around. The important thing is the case has to get to the moral reasoning underlying why our intuitions are the way they are, and we should work together in crafting a good one.).

Anyway, the point is I guess I should phrase my whole thinking in very general terms instead of trying to get it out in specific cases, which only distract from the point.

The basic question is, what's really morally significant about different lines where people want to insist before abortion is ok, after it's wrong ... starting from earliest to latest:
- "no line" (even birthcontrol is wrong; this smacks of a medieval worldview where sperm itself has "life-force"),
- "conception" (birthcontrol is ok but no morning-after pills; is this really different from that same medieval worldview of "life-force", just applying it from the point all 26 chromosomes get together? If so, what would make it different?),
- "sentience" (~90 days. And then, which part? The "being there" part, the "feeling pain" part, etc, and why that?),
- "viability" (21st-27th week; but what's special about viability by itself if the "unviable" thing preceding it is just as sentient and feeling just as much pain, so seems in the same position),
- "birth"
- and "self-awareness" (to throw in Singer's line), having a sense of existing over time and a preference to live" (somewhere between 2 months and 2 years depending on your test.)

And the second question is, there is (often) a sliding scale, where some things are permissible, or more permissible, earlier but not later. To take some things people might think:
- Birthcontrol is ok but not the morning after pill, or killing a stem cell
- aborting a fetus as a lifestyle-choice is ok before viability but not after, though the health of the mother is permissible (the fetus doesn't care what the reason is; so what makes protecting the mother's way of life any "worse" for it?)
- The "health of the mother" can be a reason to abort a late-term fetus (or partial birth abortion), but not after birth for infants, under rule "no affirmative killing, even if it saves a life".

What about the lines is relevant to those differences?
People disagree a lot without reflecting on what they're really disagreeing on. What I'd hope is that people really reflect what's at the very core of their intuitions at every line, what's really going on that makes aborting suddenly "wrong" after this point, but not before.

To really answer those questions, it helps to think about specific cases that turn on each line, and then ask how does our thinking change. That's what I was trying to do. I can only apologize that the first question I asked wasn't explicit enough to get to the actual purpose it was asked, and I'm very happy to rephrase the question to whatever gets to the main question I am interested in. I honestly wasn't trying to set up a strawman for anything.

---------------------------
Edit: As for my own position, my intuition wants to center on the important line being "consciousness", the "being there" part (and human consciousness), because it seems to me the really bad thing about killing a person is that a conscious being, which has its own world, has that conscious world being snuffed out and closed into darkness (although that's a big question; what kind of world is it really at this stage? It's not quite to "being there" yet, but it's not absolute darkness either. It's something still on the fringes). That's still earlier than the line a lot of other people choose (viability), but I wonder what's special about viability by itself if the experience of the fetus is the same before and after that line. One needs to distinguish it from animal consciousness, but I think a lot of rules we have turn on "human consciousness", the fact it's conscious, and it's the human brand of consciousness, that matter, so you don't need the higher level stuff like having a personality that come 6 months after birth. (That brings into question the issue of euthinasia for conscious but "vegitative" people, which I think is permissible, but more for reasons of dignity than the fact it doesn't have a personality so isn't "human").

I'm not as persuaded by the "disposition" arguments that a pre-conscious fetus will develop into something conscious, so that makes first-term abortion wrong, and "never getting a chance to light" is on the same level as "snuffing out" ... there's still nothing being snuffed out and disposition doesn't really add up to something that takes on full rights as a human being.

I'm still mulling over the Thompson argument that, even assuming a fetus were a full-fledged person, a mother still has a right not to have any entity living off of her body, even if cutting it off would kill it. Her analogy is another adult person using a woman's body, e.g., for circulation by pinning IV tubes from the woman to himself. The woman has a right, if she doesn't consent to the transfusion, to cut off the IV tubes, even if the other person would die as a result. Something seems a little fishy about the analogy, but I'm not sure what the actual moral difference is that would distinguish them, since it does seem a woman can cut off other random people; what makes a baby special... so still thinking about that one.

june gloom on 1/6/2009 at 17:40

---

Though I didn't vote for him, I like to point out to hysterical people that Obama is actually against late-term abortions. He didn't vote to ban late term abortions because it doesn't really happen enough to warrant legislation banning it.

Frankly I think more accountability is needed.

june gloom on 1/6/2009 at 18:00

---

oh god vomiting everywhere

demagogue on 1/6/2009 at 18:56

---

Not a very bright line, though. Do you (or anybody else) have an opinion on whether non-life-threatening abortions should be prohibited after 3 months (sentience), 6 months (viaiblity), or some other time? The difference between those is a lot of time and critical to a lot of women, so you want to have good reasons why we can insist they can't have an abortion except for life-threatening situations after that period.

BTW, the infanticide problem was a very tiny part of my main point, so I'm happy to toss it aside if it's just going to distract from it. I started with it just because birth is a bright line where people have strong intuitions, and because it raises Singer's argument that not only are late-term abortions not so bad, but infanticide isn't either if he's going to be consistent, which a lot of people find unintuitive.

I guess I was banking on a lot of people here not seeing the problem with late-term abortions (I didn't care about what the current practice is, only what people's opinions are, although I realize practice mirrors what a lot of people think). But if a lot of people do think it's wrong, all the better for debate, because that throws them into the murky depths of insisting that another, earlier line was actually the important one for prohibiting most abortions. The problem with that is that all the milestones before birth have big problems which crumbles your arguments in your fingers when you try to insist that *this* is a person with a full-fledged right to life (most animals have a comparable level of cognition; so you should prohibit meat-eating if you were consistent) ... But when you try to anchor yourself on to solid ground with things that really distinguish humans having a special right to life (over animals) in the normal way we think about it, it inevitably drives you latch on to things that develop quite a bit after birth (not earlier than 2 months), meaning if anything about abortion can be right, it has to apply to infants as well. That's the argument anyway, and where I was going with that when I brought it up...



Yeah, that was Thompson's basic point, and I agree with what you said most people probably think. The only thing I'd tweak is that the question of whether a fetus is entitled to any protection is exactly the question at issue, so you don't want to beg it in your answer. You'd phase it, even assuming the fetus had the full assortment of legal rights it wouldn't be protected. It doesn't really offer its own explanation for what the right actually is or when it begins, just that it doesn't matter in this situation. That's the argument anyway. But you got what I meant.

Displacer on 1/6/2009 at 19:56

---

My personal opinions aside (I think the guy was a murdering fuck that got what he deserved, the fact the he got capped in a church is poetic justice).

That out of the way I find the laws regarding fetuses quite the joke. In a lot of states if you kill a fetus (kicking the mother, or killing the mother and fetus) they consider it murder of the fetus, yet the law allows just that thing to occur with an abortion.

Also on the point of aborting the fetus to save the mothers life. I find any "mother" that is willing to sacrifice their child's life to save their own has no business ever having a child.