Abortion - is it a Political, Religious, or Medical debate?

[vanesch]

Obviously it should be. Unfortunately our medical knowledge is no where near what we need it to be at in order to determine 'life'. We still need to make a decision though, so it falls to lesser disciplines.

It is not a medical debate, because medical sciences can only give us certain answers ONCE we've fixed the criteria of what specimens are entitled to "right to live". We first have to establish the criteria (if any!) on which to base our logic, and these criteria should be of general validity (and not beg the question), and justifiable for themselves, and not for the outcome.

An instance of a non-valid argument is:
- "human beings have the right to live" (why? - where does this come from ?)
- next, you can define "human being" the way you want, to include exactly those cases which you emotionally/religiously want to be included, and use *after the fact* some medical aspects to help you in your definition of "human being".

However, the real problem is: why does exactly that definition of "human being" for which you choose a medical definition, need to have a "right to live" and not other beings ? You can more or less arbitrarily define the words "human being", but then it is up to you to show why those specimen must have a "right to live". Or you can start with a general argument about what ought to have a "right to live", and then you have to show that whatever you define as "human being" satisfies exactly that argument. But in about all cases, you run into some troubles.

In other words, what we give "right to live" is essentially a purely social convention, with no deep philosophical or medical principle behind it. We only use philosophical or medical arguments *after the fact* to try to justify our purely social convention. The only exception to that is religious doctrine, where your favorite deity did the thinking for you, and just gave you the rule.

EDIT: for instance, you use the term "life". Although there are instances where science has some difficulties deciding whether certain processes should be included in the *definition of the word* "life" (like virusses), concerning human beings, there's no discussion. Even white blood cells are "life". So this criterion is useless, because bleeding is already "murder" in that case.
The same applies to "contains the entire human genome". Apart from the reason why this should be any criterion to "protect against murder" (after all, what's so special about human genome: an order of base pairs with a certain variability to it), white blood cells also contain the entire human genome. A chimp has about 95% of genome in agreement with a human being. So how does it work out for a chimp then ?

But maybe with "life" you actually mean "conscious life". Well, as I pointed out, a mature dolphin has more "self-awareness" than a new-born baby. But also certain birds and certain monkeys, and elephants. So why don't we include them then in our list ?

Maybe we should talk about suffering. Does that mean then that murder is ok, if we don't make the victim suffer ?

You see, it is far from easy to establish a universal criterium on which to base all deduction to the "right to live".

 

[russ_watters]

I seem to miss something, why is murder illegal and immoral by definition?

I'm not sure what you are asking. A definition is a definition because it is defined. Murder is illegal because that's what the definition of the word says.

Furthermore, not all murder is illegal. If that were the case many soldiers and their superiors would be on trial for (attempted) murder.

Perhaps you are confusing the word "murder" with the word "kill"...?

Murder: Law. the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. [in other words, murder is illegal killing]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/murder

You may not have realized how pedantic I was being - this is related to what Moridin was saying on page 1 about the argument being circular. People who are pro-life ofen argue that abortion is murder and therefore should be illegal, because that's the definition of the word "murder". But whether abortion is murder or not is not something you can take as a premise - it is the entire crux of the debate.

 

[BobG]

Selfless care of an infant is most certainly a natural and healthy compulsion that ensures the survival of the human race.

Not necessarily. It may be a "natural and healthy compulsion", but it isn't a compulsion that's particularly hard to overcome.

Quite a few cultures go beyond abortion to infanticide - especially female infants. Other cultures weed out the weak and ill infants through neglect. The rules can wind up seeming entirely arbitrary and complex, since you are right that "selfless care of an infant is most certainly a natural and healthy compulsion". That just means that over riding that compulsion to improve the group's overall chances of survival is painful and the rules are as much to separate the parents from the decision as anything else.

The Inuit used to engage in infanticide until interaction with Europeans reduced their reliance on hunting (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n22_v146/ai_15952600)

In Alto de Cruzeiro, Brazil, women tended to just neglect the weak and ill, justifying it by the infant's lethargy (they have no will to live, so the mother won't force them to).

Infanticide is fairly common in India and China, as well. (http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html).

Early Christian taboos forbade killing newborn infants, but abandoning children was still fairly common - the myth of the newborn baby left on a doorstep - a myth because they usually weren't actually left on anyone's doorstep. (http://www.infanticide.org/history.htm )

Even falling short of infanticide, children's welfare didn't figure very highly even in the US. Discipline of children was a matter entirely left to parents and no one would have ever thought to intervene into abusive punishment. At least until the late 1800's. Henry Bergh found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in 1866. Shortly after, there was an attempt to protect a child from abusive punishment as a subclass of prevention of cruelty to animals. The resulting court case and publicity led to the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

In one sense, abortion is just a more efficient method of eliminating an age old problem before it becomes more painful to deal with. That's not to say abortion is right or wrong; just that natural instinct isn't a particularly strong argument when that natural instinct is pretty weak.

 

[BillJx]

It's not a medical debate, and it's not a logical debate (or you'd have to agree with Vanesch). It's a debate of social values. That includes religion and morality, which are vastly different things.

Why do so many pro-life types favor capital punishment? Why do so many pro-choice types oppose it? Reverence for life isn't the issue, on either side.

The pro-choice argument that the woman has the right to control her body is irrational. If the fetus is considered a child, then it's not about the woman.
The pro-life argument that God created a child with a soul, at the moment of conception, is irrational to anyone who doesn't share that religious belief.

People have the opinions they do for social / cultural reasons. The arguments are just back-up, and are rarely the point.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that a fertilized egg isn't a person, but a near-full term fetus is. To me, it's a gradual process. That's not an entirely rational view, because I consider a newborn infant or a mentally limited adult to be as human as anyone else. (i.e. once you're 'in the club' there are no gradations of human-ness.) But before birth I do see it in terms of gradations.
That's probably a common humanistic atheistic take on it, but it's still a cultural stand, not a logical one.

 

[BobG]

It's not a medical debate, and it's not a logical debate (or you'd have to agree with Vanesch). It's a debate of social values. That includes religion and morality, which are vastly different things.

Why do so many pro-life types favor capital punishment? Why do so many pro-choice types oppose it? Reverence for life isn't the issue, on either side.

The pro-choice argument that the woman has the right to control her body is irrational. If the fetus is considered a child, then it's not about the woman.
The pro-life argument that God created a child with a soul, at the moment of conception, is irrational to anyone who doesn't share that religious belief.

People have the opinions they do for social / cultural reasons. The arguments are just back-up, and are rarely the point.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that a fertilized egg isn't a person, but a near-full term fetus is. To me, it's a gradual process. That's not an entirely rational view, because I consider a newborn infant or a mentally limited adult to be as human as anyone else. (i.e. once you're 'in the club' there are no gradations of human-ness.) But before birth I do see it in terms of gradations.
That's probably a common humanistic atheistic take on it, but it's still a cultural stand, not a logical one.

I agree. Even more illogical is the number of pro-choice women that support the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. You can't logically argue that an unborn child has no rights to protection against abortion by the mother while it does have rights to protection against someone else killing it.

At least not without rewording the Unborn Victims of Violence Act to make it a property crime against the mother. Of course, the same conflict existed between abusive punishment by parents vs. some stranger beating a child.

Logic has little to do with either argument.

 

[vanesch]

It's not a medical debate, and it's not a logical debate (or you'd have to agree with Vanesch). It's a debate of social values. That includes religion and morality, which are vastly different things.

Why do so many pro-life types favor capital punishment? Why do so many pro-choice types oppose it? Reverence for life isn't the issue, on either side.

The pro-choice argument that the woman has the right to control her body is irrational. If the fetus is considered a child, then it's not about the woman.
The pro-life argument that God created a child with a soul, at the moment of conception, is irrational to anyone who doesn't share that religious belief.

People have the opinions they do for social / cultural reasons. The arguments are just back-up, and are rarely the point.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that a fertilized egg isn't a person, but a near-full term fetus is. To me, it's a gradual process. That's not an entirely rational view, because I consider a newborn infant or a mentally limited adult to be as human as anyone else. (i.e. once you're 'in the club' there are no gradations of human-ness.) But before birth I do see it in terms of gradations.
That's probably a common humanistic atheistic take on it, but it's still a cultural stand, not a logical one.

I mostly agree with what you write, except that I can see the "transition" also without problems many months after birth. The link with heavily mentally handicapped persons is also interesting: I got into an argument with someone in my family who passed his masters in social sciences exactly on the problem of motivating people who care (professionally) for mentally heavily retarded (mental age 1 or 2 years old), where there is a serious problem of mistreatment (the caring personnel doesn't always consider their patients as "human beings", sometimes more as live stock).
I pointed out to him that an important part of his writeup was missing, namely an argument on WHY in the first place these people should be "considered as humans" and if we wouldn't be better off without them - as this is exactly what some of those professional caring people end up thinking. You can say, "it's the law, son", but that's not a MOTIVATION. Of course the personnel is obliged, legally, to treat their patients nicely, but his subject was to motivate them through dialog. I got the same reaction as here, where he considered me as a late-born commander of a nazi extermination camp, but I only wanted to provoke the reflection that deep down, there is no strictly philosophical or logical argument. It's in the end, nothing else but a social convention. That doesn't mean it is meaningless, but it is not something that can be argued about, in the same way as one can't argue about one's favorite color.