Asymmetrical Information

That's an incredibly impoverished definition of human life: there's a whole lotta not-particuarly-human-lookin' things that meet those criteria. Like gerbils. (Not to be dissing gerbils or anything.)

He avoids (or more accurately, doesn't deal seriously with) the burden argument, which is really the meat of the Roe argument.

Also it's germane to ask, is the fetus genetically distinct from the mother? Because if so, it is a *unique* individual deserving of full protection by the government.

But pro-abortion people won't listen to such arguments. Their0 sickening euphemisms, like "a woman's right to choose", are reminiscent of the euphemisms in favor of slavery in the 1800s.

This is an idea I first saw forwarded by Carl Sagan in Demon Haunted World: one is dead when one's brain stops issuing the unique patterns that constitute human activity (that all, even the most mentally handicapped humans exibit) and that makes sense as a metric at both ends of life. Usually starts between 4 and 6 months.

Conchis, I think Mr. Allen's definition comes off as impoverished precisely because it attempts (or at least purports) to be based on observable science and on dry legal definitions applicable at the time of death. I'm sure he would add a "human genome" element of some sort to overcome your "gerbil" objection. I do find appealing the notion that if we've settled on an a set of criteria that should be used to define the difference between life and non-life at one end of it, and there's no scientific reason not to use those same criteria that the other end, then the use of different criteria cannot be said to be based on science. Of course, there's no requirement that legal rules be based on science, but I think it's useful to acknowledge it when they aren't.

He avoids (or more accurately, doesn't deal seriously with) the burden argument, which is really the meat of the Roe argument.

To address that argument directly enters into whether or not people should be held accountable for consequences of previous decisions that subsequently impact other people.

If you say "no, absolutely not" then empty the prisons. If you say "yes, in cases x1,2...n" then we need to recognize that, under the principles Doug Allen proposes, a previous decision (in this case, voluntarily engaging in sexual activity and failing to abort before the proposed threshold) creates a legally-definable life.

That life may be dependent on the maternal host for another seven months, but the "burden" argument no longer sways and the case must be either forfeited, or else argued on other grounds -- and you know what happens after that (Don P. shows up braying and kicking, wrecking the comment thread in the process).

Actually, I think there is an obvious, reasonable, non-religious counter to Mr. Allen's argument. At the end of life, it's not just that the brain/nervous system has stopped. It's also that it's very unlikely to restart.

At the beginning of life, even if brain activity has not started, there's usually a high likelihood that it will. That seems like a reasonable distinction, even from a purely scientific standpoint.

[Please note: I don't actually accept that as a reason to ban abortion. I personally believe abortion should be legal and acceptable at a sufficiently early point during pregnancy, but usually not at later points (with exceptions for special circumstances). I just wanted to point out that it's not an unreasonable way to look at things.]

Qetzal beat me to this point, but let me second it: there's a big difference between a lack of beating heart, brainwave activity and active nervous system at the beginning of life and at the end of life.

At the beginning of life, all you have to do is wait around for a few months and odds are these "signs of death" will disappear. On the other hand, at the end of life, the chance that these conditions will spontaneously cure themselves is remarkably small.

Let me add Qetzal's disclaimer -- I don't really have a view on pro-choice/pro-life. I just recognize an unsatisfying argument when I see one.

This is a lame argument. Most people would usea slim but not insignficant chance that these signs of life would reappear at some fixed time in the future as reason enough to maintain life support for a loved one, unless they were cold and calculating and found some advantage to pulling the plug or maybe they thought maintain life support might be cruel. In the case of the embryo or fetus, the probability is high that such signs would appear in the future.

I think it's correct to say that future expectations make the beginning-of-life situation different from the end-of-life situation, but I don't think that difference is relevant to Mr. Allen's point. I think he'd probably agree that when comparing, say, a second-month embryo with a imminently dying cancer victim, the former is much more likely to be "a human life" under his definition six months from now than the latter is. But what's the point of that distinction? If I'm interested in knowing whether this particular mass of human-genomed cells constitutes a human life *right now,* how does it help me to know whether it is likely to constitute one at some time in the future?

But the justification for "pulling the plug" on people at the end of their life isn't merely that you managed to catch them temporarily inactive, regardless of whether or not the state is permanent. As I understand it, the medically-accepted procedure when someone's heart stops beating is to try to start it again, not to say "tag, I got you!" and end the life quickly to prevent recovery.

What we're talking about with abortion is taking active steps to prevent someone from living. Without interference, a human would exist (unless it dies first, but we're all going to die eventually - that's not considered a justification for murder in any other setting). The question is whether or not it is acceptable to take active steps to end a life. The part about whether the heart has already started to beat is just timing - the question is who has the right to prevent someone else from living.

As for the woman's choice, engaging in sexual activity bears certain risks, one of them being that birth control isn't foolproof. The "right to choose" surely should include the responsibility to live with the consequences of one's actions.

"Without interference, a human would exist"

Let's rephrase that: without the 'interference' of the mother, there's no hope of a human existing. The fact that commenters are advocating drafting the uterus before viability is unusual on a supposedly libertarian blog.

"All Catallarchy, All the Time"

The best blog.

The problem with the addition of the "human genome" criterion is that it has no relation whatsoever to the criteria for death. (I still have human DNA after I'm dead.) So, whatever it's [the criterion's] other merits, Doug's argument from the definition of death gives it no support. I could posit an additional "not in someone else's womb" criterion, and the argument from death would have nothing whatsoever to say about it. (I'm not actually advocating this, or anything else, as a criterion, merely pointing out that Doug's argument doesn't get us all that far here.)

I agree though that Doug's argument may help to rule out some criteria for for what constitutes life: for example it suggests that things like "a certain level of cognitive ability" might not be good criteria if we don't think that old people who fall below that level (through dementia or similar) should no longer qualify as alive.

But even that doesn't get us very far, because it doesn't immediately follow from "X is a human life" that "X has a right not to be killed". Even if you think that the definition of "life" is somehow scientific (which I doubt: it's just a definition, and we can define words however we want), the criteria sufficient to establish a right not to be killed aren't; they're purely moral. Science can inform them, but it can't determine them.

"At the beginning of life, all you have to do is wait around for a few months and odds are these "signs of death" will disappear."

Yes, and a person will then exist. Before that happens, no person exists.

An organism cannot be a person unless it has a brain. It need not have a lick of human DNA whatsoever, though - there may be people living on other planets, and they would be people even though they are not related to homo sapiens, sharing no common ancestors with us.

But among Earthborn creatures, the human brain is the real defining mark of a person. When you get right down to it, the person is the brain; the rest of the body is there to feed him and do his bidding. So any organism that doesn't yet include a human brain cannot be a person and should not be entitled to the same protection that people are - and we should be able to not only abort them, but to use them in medical experiments with impunity, to the benefit of actual people. When a brain is present, however, there's a chance that a bona-fide person is in there and he should not be killed except in self-defense.

Why should a human brain or thought be used as the defining factor for deciding whether one should live or not. In my book this is nothing more than a rationalization that people use to justify the protection of their own lives.

There is absolutely no rational reason to believe that higher mental capabilities some how makes human life valuable. If you believe in evolution, it is in fact likely that human beings evolved to rationalize their own value on faulty logic and assumptions. I would argue a human who was geneticly disposed towards perfectly rational thought would come to the conclusion that human life, including their own, has absolutely no value. They would have no compunction about killing themselves or other people, and as a result would either take their own life, engage in risky activity that leads to the loss of their own life, or end up being killed by other less rational people who valued their own life and viewed the perfectly rational person as a threat. Thus perfectly rational people would be eliminated, leaving only those people predisposed to valuing their own lives and engaging in a social contract with others who value their own lives to avoid killing each other. The willingness of some people to leave embyros/fetuses and even babies and young children out of the contract is a reflection of the fact that human beings at earliest states of the human life cycle are not able to retaliate.

Ken and others, I think the problem with the argument presented is that it leaps past a key dispute in the abortion debate as if it's been settled and then tries to proceed from there. To paraphrase Ken, the pro-choice argument is:

Before a certain point we should be able to kill a fetus because it's not a person.

The pro-life argument would be:

Regardless of its current status, we shouldn't be able to kill a fetus because it will be a person if we leave it alone.

Allen's proposal proceeds as if this point has already been settled in favor of the pro-choice view, which of course is not so.

> He avoids (or more accurately, doesn't deal seriously with) the burden argument, which is really the meat of the Roe argument.

Since we force men who aren't biological fathers and weren't involved with the mother to pay child support, why is it unreasonable to impose burdens on biological mothers?

DRB, I think your point is a good one as far as it goes, but you're using the phrase "a certain point" to cover a whole range of views about what that certain point might be. The location of that "certain point" is itself an interesting and important question for anyone who doesn't hold the position you've identified as the only one that qualifies as pro-life. (BTW, I suspect that there are lots of people of perfectly good will who would identify "no abortion if fetus has brain waves" as a pro-life position.)

"without the 'interference' of the mother, there's no hope of a human existing"

The mother's act of interference was in creating the life. Beyond that, she really doesn't have to do much to let the pregnancy proceed - she only needs to interfere to kill her child, not to allow it to live.

Yes, I remember being pregnant - one does get indigestion and have to buy new clothes and change one's sleeping position (except for those lucky ones that already preferred to sleep on their sides). Being pregnant can be distinctly uncomfortable at times. But otherwise, it really doesn't take much.

Are all pro-abortion people also against "good samaritan" laws? If a woman can't be forced to do something relatively minor to protect a life that she helped to create, then how can totally innocent people be forced to inconvenience themselves to save the life of someone else?

"Regardless of its current status, we shouldn't be able to kill a fetus because it will be a person if we leave it alone."

And if you left that sperm alone (by not using a condom, say), it will be half of a person.

Your point, markm? Seems like reductio ad absurdum... That gamete by itself will never be anything, no mattter how long you wait - except for "no longer viable" after a few days, at most.

The point is, there's a big difference between a duty not to kill a person and a duty not to prevent a person from coming into existence. It doesn't matter whether a person will come into existence over the "natural course of events" (however you define that - does that include sperm that's supposed to meet the egg but are blocked by a piece of rubber?) or not.

There are billions of billions of billions, etc., etc. of people that could potentially exist, although there's not enough matter in the universe for them all to exist (and the existence of some will prevent others from existing). All but an infinitesimal fraction of them will fail to come into existence. It just doesn't make much sense to impose a duty to avoid preventing the existence of people that might exist in the future or even probably will exist in the future. It makes a lot more sense to impose a duty to avoid killing a person that does exist, since only people that exist can have rights.

The people here who are arguing against the pro-life position don't really seem to grasp the argument. Once the egg is fertilized and the process started, everything after that is just a stage in the development of a unique human being. Unless you undertake action to kill that human, they are alive ... just in different stages of development. You can't argue with complete certainty that any point after that isn't human. Different people will claim different criteria. To be sure, you must err on the side of not killing.

Lets say you have too many drinks at a party and you decide to drive yourself home. You think you'll be smart and choose a less travelled road to drive home on. Does that absolve you of recklessly endangering other people? Maybe you kill someone on your way home and maybe you don't ... does that make you any less culpable or negligent?

We don't know EXACTLY when "human" life begins. We only know at what point the process that results in "human" life begins. Thats the point we have to start respecting life unless we want to be just like the drunk driver and not care whether we risk lives or not.

"The people here who are arguing against the pro-life position don't really seem to grasp the argument."

I feel the converse is true: the anti-choice group are so focused on the embryo & fetus that they cannot understand that there is a second person whose rights are involved, and whose control of her body the state cannot, practically and morally, usurp.

Further, they take as an axiom one of the items of debate; whether or not the fetus is a person who has a legal and moral standing. To which the wisdom of court answered: once it is viable outside the mother.

There's the subtext of punishing "sluts" that's evident in the anti-choice post here. She had her fun; now she should pay for it.

"Once the egg is fertilized and the process started, everything after that is just a stage in the development of a unique human being."Unless you undertake action to kill that human, they are alive"

75% of blastocysts never implant. If God's implanting a soul in each at conception, he must have a lot of them to waste. He's causing more souls to die in darkness than any decision written by Judge Blackmun.

""If a woman can't be forced to do something relatively minor to protect a life that she helped to create"

My kid was C-sectioned after 20 hours of labor, six weeks early. Minor it ain't.

Alan, you seem to suggest that there's objectively such a thing as "when human life begins," but since we don't know when that is, we can only guess, and it's a big problem if we err on the late side. How did you you arrive at the initial belief or conclusion that there's an objective point at which human life begins (if only we could find it), such that a guess about it could be wrong? At least for purposes of establishing legal rules, it seems to me reasonable to think that we must make our best efforts to fix the point correctly with the information currently available to us, mindful that the sort of "precautionary principle" you appear to favor has very considerable costs of its own.

Urinated, while I have no doubt that there are some people who think that pregnancy results from sluttish behavior that deserves to be punished, I don't think any participant in this discussion has even hinted at such a view. It is a commonplace in our society that people are at least presumptively held responsible for the natural and foreseeable consequences of their voluntary conduct, and that principle implies neither moral condemnation of the voluntary conduct nor a punitive spirit in assigning responsibility for the consequences of it. Suppose I install a pool in my backyard and take care to see that it is appropriately drained. Despite my precautions, the pool overflows and floods both my basement and my neighbor's. Few would morally condemn me for installing the pool, and few would call it "punishment" if I had to pay my neighbor for his damaged stuff. There is no more reason to assume that one who proposes applying the general rule in the abortion context is guilty of moral condemnation or punitive purpose. (The principle is of course not at all helpful in determining when human life begins, but it may have a legitimate bearing on the question of whether a human life, once begun, may be terminated in order to accommodate the mother's countervailing interests.)

This argument always ends up with everyone chasing each other around three points:

(1) Responsible for your actions - completely meaningless absent a social construction re: what your next options are. I mean, why can't someone getting knocked up simply be responsible for getting to the doctor at the right time for the abortion? We don't pretend that people shouldn't take other medical treatment b/c their behavior led or contributed to a medical condition (or at least not in blue states).

(2) Undue burden - amounts to an argument for balancing interests. This splits in two places, usually - what are the fetus's rights/interests, and how "responsible" should the woman be for providing life support to the fetus. The former is really "is the fetus a person," the latter looks like the argument over responsibility.

(3) Is the fetus a person - the big one. I'd be shocked if end-stage definitions of "life" are a field of much scientific inquiry; I'd bet much more that the weight of discussion/line-drawing about this is set by lawyers, philosophers, and bioethicists. In any case, even an answer here doesn't clearly indicate why a woman must continue to provide life-support to a person/fetus.

Somewhere along the way we import the deciders from other fields. It's largely a social question, so science may clarify what we're deciding, but I very much doubt it will answser the questions (at least not anytime soon).

Abortion is one of those issues that people find intractable b/c it is hard. I'm pro-choice, but I admit I waver a fair bit on the issue, particularly as the fetus ages.

I admit that the "from conception" arguement has a certain elegance to it, but I have not yet found anyone who has advocated investigating all miscarriages as homicides to determine negligence or other culpability. If we really believe in full human rights for the fetus, doesn't this necessarily follow?
Using the same legal criteria for "end of life" and "beginning of life" sounds like one of those compromises which no one will like, but maybe everyone could live with. Who knows, if it had been left to the legislatures to argue out, maybe that is what would have evolved.

Nevertheless end-of-life does bear on the question in my view, chiefly because people's opinions over the course of their lives can change so dramatically about both. Before kids, I was pretty ardently pro-choice; now, although I guess I still have to call myself "pro-choice" because I'm willing to put up with first-trimester abortion, I feel much more like a pro-lifer. The sensation of "quickening" is an absolute bright line for me as a mother; if I had chosen to abort any of my children after feeling them move, I would have immediately gone out and thrown myself under a truck. This is my personal view only and I don't seek to impose it on anyone, but I confess that it's hard for me to get my mind around the idea that any parent (or anyone who's been part of a baby's life) could sanction third-tri abortion.

End-of-life issues are, I suspect, similar: as an "immortal" twenty-something, in terrific health and utterly unaware of my good fortune, I adamantly insisted that I wanted to die "naturally," with no medical "interference." I'm far from feeling the true pangs of age, but I can - ahem - sense that I may undergo some amount of change of heart as the time approaches...

Just a quibble, raf, but I don't think the right not to be killed is quite the same thing as "full human rights," and all anyone here has been talking about is the former. I do completely agree with your second point, and I'm enough of an optimist to think it may not be too late for some such legislative compromise to finally take this issue off the front burner.

Pissynated:

I feel the converse is true: the anti-choice group are so focused on the embryo & fetus that they cannot understand that there is a second person whose rights are involved, and whose control of her body the state cannot, practically and morally, usurp.

Whatever you're on, share! Nobody in a functioning civil society has an unconditional right to do whatever they want with "their bodies" when a particular use directly conflicts with the rights or legally-conferred privileges of another individual.

The fact that pregnancy is a unique case doesn't automatically exempt it from such statutory regulation, particularly *if* the issue at stake is a human life.

anony-mouse wrote:

"Nobody in a functioning civil society has an unconditional right to do whatever they want with "their bodies" when a particular use directly conflicts with the rights or legally-conferred privileges of another individual."

There you go again, assuming the conclusion of your argument. Whether or not the fetus has rights is the issue of debate. My argument is that practically and morally the State cannot force the mother to bring the baby to term/viability - so the State cannot confer those rights.

And hey, the Book of Exodus agrees with me in that a fetus is not a person.

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