Happy Monday, faithful FR readers! Hope everyone had a nice weekend. We’re back on track with Stephen’s Monday post actually being posted on Monday, WOO HOO!!! Have a great day!
With the recent passage of laws in Alabama, the topic of the week is no longer investigations in Washington DC but the modern feminist issue of abortion and the terrors of the prospects of a throwback to that ancient fictional future of The Handmaid’s Tale.
So naturally all sides are screaming for debate, discussion, and open dialogue by continually talking past each other or repeating like a holy mantra one talking point or another, casting dispersions upon their fellow man in a global effort to hysterically avoid anything which might actually resemble debate.
So . . . let’s.
As a man, my ilk have been told that they are not entitled to voice or even have an opinion because we do not have uteri, unless of course we agree with the left in which case we are supposed to shout our agreement with feminist opinions from the rooftops. Which brings us to our first point of scientific clarification, opinions are formed in the mind not the uterus, therefore the left is clearly wrong, I can certainly have an opinion; vocalizations are formed in the throat so I can clearly voice my opinion; and I have functional fingers so I can clearly type this post.
Let us first discuss the perpetual call for feminists for “women’s rights”, which has supplanted the prior call for “equal rights” which had focused upon such things as women’s suffrage and standing in court for married women. As near as anyone is able to define the phrase, “women’s rights” means nothing other than “abortion” as there is nothing else which feminists identify as one of those “women’s rights” (except the specious claim for the average woman to be paid the same as the average man regardless of occupation and work history).
It can only be abortion of which they speak when they call for “women’s rights” because our legal system, not our culture but our legal system, treats men and women virtually identical. There are certain instances where women are given preferential legal treatment, such as lower physical standards for certain occupation, but none that I can identify where men are given preferential treatment.
(There is the requirement of men to register for selective service and combat positions which are reserved for men to fill, but one can hardly count getting shot or shot at as a preferential legal treatment. I suppose is one were to divide legal issues along gender, the draft and military combat service is a question of “men’s rights”.)
As the topic is abortion, let us first dispense with the notion that this is a modern phenomena or societal issue. The original, as opposed to the modern, Hippocratic Oath forbade the physician from prescribing abortifacients, abortion/miscarriage inducing drugs, indicating that well over two thousand years ago, abortion was an issue, so I don’t imagine that this issue will go away regardless of the outcome of the current bevy of laws, protests, politics, and court cases.
Let us then address many of the modern and ancient arguments for and against abortion.
First, let us address the overarching issue of the state having a say over the lives and bodies of women. As just mentioned, the state has a claim over the lives and bodies of men when it comes to war. As such, there is no legitimate claim that women can make that the same state does not have some claim over their lives and bodies as it does the men.
It was in ancient Sparta considered a service to the state for men to die in war or for women to die in childbirth. However, in the modern state, we recognize a man’s right to conscientious objection to refuse, or religious or moral grounds, to take a life. Likewise, any civilized society must recognize that a woman has a right to not create a life.
Herein, we are talking about the act of conceiving not the act of terminating the life in question, which we will address hereafter. Thus the specter of the forced breeding scenario of The Handmaid’s Tale is a ludicrous idea and nothing but thoughtless hyperbole.
Before we try to tackle the issue of a person’s humanity, let us first examine the concept of life itself. When does life begin? One of the demarcations of life is the ability to grow, breath, eat and reproduce. A single celled bacteria can’t really grow but it is considered alive.
In this light, those who oppose the idea that live begins at conception want to compare the male spermatozoa to a fertilized egg. One recognizes that both are living cells, but gametes are not capable of reproducing independently, so that is an obvious straw man comparison.
However, at conception the fertilized egg now has a complete and independent genome, will rapidly divide into a multiple celled zygote, and becomes capable of implanting on the uterine wall. This is where the argument for life begins at conception becomes tricky, because that zygote can be formed in a petri dish, and frozen for future use.
Thus the pro-abortion argument that a jar of frozen zygotes (which they often call embryos, a term not proper until after implantation) would have to have full human rights if you take the life begins at conception argument to such an extreme. Thus, the argument about the “morning after” pill which chemically prevents implantation is often mistakenly called an “abortion” pill. How much right to life does a frozen zygote in a jar have, is part of what makes the issue more complicated than previous generations.
It has been put forth that a fetus or embryo is merely a “clump of cells” and not “fully” human. Two points of science readily argue against such a casual blanket dismissal.
Firstly, the genetic code of the embryo is already determined to be human. There is no instance where the embryo is going to develop into any other type of being. Illustrative of this point is the concept of surrogacy, whether human or one animal being surrogate for another species, the embryo has its own unique and determinative genetic code.
Secondly, the development of the embryo to fetus to baby is a continuous process of development. While there are certain points or events which serve as markers of that development, after the point of implantation and cellular differentiation there is no real clear distinct line to be easily drawn.
The recent Alabama law in question marks the beginnings of the protection of life from the development of the fetal heartbeat, that is to say the differentiation of cellular tissue and function into what will be the heart as it begins to beat.
In medieval times, the courts tried to mark the occasion of when they thought that the soul interred the body, which was when movement was first detected called “the quickening”. That traditional view has much in common with the Alabama law in that the only thing which has really changed is that we can now detect the internal movement of the fetal tissue rather than having to rely upon overt motor movement.
Some abortion advocates would claim that the proper line ought to be drawn based upon not a physical movement but at the point when the entity becomes self-aware, claiming that to be the only clear line from a moral and intellectual point of view. From this they would claim that the act of birth would be the point of self-awareness, thus any abortion prior to birth would be acceptable.
However, we also know that babies in the womb respond to outside stimuli, particularly sound, so it is difficult to try to objectively define when another being is actually self aware. It is a problem in developing artificial intelligence, and I dare say that many a politician might fail such a criteria in many people’s estimation. So, do we mark instead the estimated moment of brain activity?
Lacking a clear point of delineation after implantation and before birth, the advocates for abortion turn to arguments about “using the mother’s body” to gestate the child. At the same time they dehumanize the child by calling it a “clump of cells” or even a “parasite”.
However, it has been pointed out that by calling the woman a “mother”, they have already conceded the humanity of the child, for there can be no mother without a child. h/t – @EveKeneinan, Twitter. Aside from this inadvertent self-own of the pro-abortionists, the philosophical observation is correct that the definition of a mother necessitates a existence of a child.
The pro-abortion argument often resorts to deflection against men as claiming that they are responsible for the pregnancy, dissolving women of any claim of autonomy and authority over their own bodies and actions while at the same time claiming that they are asserting the woman’s autonomy through abortion.
Such inconsistency cannot stand. One cannot claim autonomy in the destruction of a pregnancy but no autonomy in the creation of that same pregnancy. (They often resort to “rape” and “incest” claims but that only makes up about 1% of all abortions.)
However, the bodily autonomy argument runs directly against the bodily autonomy of the fetus which even in their own “parasite” analogy clearly has its own body distinct from the mother’s body.
Declaring the fetus to be a parasite denies the actions of the mother in creating the fetus in the first place. “Most arguments for abortion ignore the unique nature of pregnancy/parenthood. We have obligations to our offspring that we do not have to strangers.” @unTayIored, Twitter. The pregnancy must be viewed as the result of the actions of the parents, with a special obligation of the parent to their own progeny, distinct from a stranger’s child or a parasite.
There has been a tragic but recent case which oddly bears on this discussion. A woman was murdered and her child cut from her body; that child was then in the hospital fighting for its life. Everyone is rightly horrified by this event.
However, from a certain perspective it is a case of a reverse abortion, where the fetus lives but the mother is terminated. In the bodily autonomy argument, the child won out through the actions of a third party. Of course, that unfortunate murdered mother was not about to terminate her pregnancy, but it is the abstract idea that it illustrates for which I mention it.
The very notion “feared” by the pro-abortion activists is that women would be forced to be incubators of children against their will. Could a child demand to be carried? We really can’t ask, can we?
Let’s look closer at that frequent “exception” of rape or incest. There are three entities involved, the mother, the child, and the father. We accept that the father is guilty. We accept that the mother is innocent. So is the child innocent or guilty? Does it inherit its father’s guilt or its mother’s innocence? Is this really a rational exception, or an emotionally driven designed to make people back away from actually debating the issue?
Finally, the last time frame of the abortion argument, the expectation of the life of the fetus after birth. The argument has been made that the unwanted child would be a burden upon its mother, that it would be a burden upon society, and that it would lead a miserable life not worth the living.
There always exists tragedy, there is no question. Does the likelihood of tragedy outweigh the chance for a better outcome? One would think it would be better to be alive to strive and struggle than to never have a chance at all. However, statistics show that these negative anticipated outcomes are a very small fraction of the actual outcomes, being far more the exception than the rule.
Take the second argument, that the unwanted child would be a burden upon society. How would that argument be different than a forced termination, a eugenics argument? If your argument is the societal impact of the child, you are no longer arguing for the free choice of the parents.
Then the argument turns to try to impose a duty upon that society to care for the child born, and attacking those who oppose killing the fetus as uncaring if they take upon themselves the burden of every poor child absolving the parents of their responsibility. The best argument against that (and a way to end the post) comes from satire comparing puppies to babies:
https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1129823974895104000
