Asymmetrical Information

Megan, this is exactly spot-on, like all of your other abortion posts. The pro-choice line has always been that it's about the right not to be pregnant, not the right not to have a biological child. The moment it became possible to dissociate the two things, all hell would break loose, because not having to endure pregnancy is not the pribary reason women abort, and everyone knows it.

Of course, if someone develops an artifical womb, you'll have the twin problems of how to extract the fetus undamaged, and how to care for it subsequently, and both are definitely going to be very expensive (and the first probably traumatic and painful for the gestating woman).

A question about "giving a baby up for adoption": does the biological father have any say in this at all? I suppose he can't in situations like anonymous baby-abandonment, pretty much by definition, but what about more regular adoption proceedings? I don't know the law here, and wonder whether there are mandatory notification/consent procedures before a man's son or daughter is handed over to a new set of parents.

Thank you, Megan, for sensible talk about this issue. The whole *rational* question of whether and when an unborn child is a person, to whom the right to life attaches, is commonly swept under the rug. The rabid pro-choicers operate under the tacit assumption that personal rights attach by the process of changing one's location from inside to outside the womb, and prior to that point the unborn child has no rights whatsoever. Most people, if they allow themselves to consider it, realize this is pretty irrational.

The rabid pro-lifers say that the single-cell organism which exists immediately after a sperm penetrates an egg is morally equivalent to a one year old child. This is also irrational, but at least the pro-lifers are honest about this opinion coming from a religious point of view.

We need some idea of what a "person" is, which question *should* be worked out by common, democratic procedures and consent. Yet the Roe v. Wade decision means that we must accept the rabid pro-choice position as the unquestioned law, and it is this fundamental enshrined irrationality that insures this issue will continue to fester.

Urgh, so many typos. Do Not Post Pre-Java.

Viability should be pretty obvious, no? If a fetus is carefully brought out of the womb and lives, it is viable, albeit virtually helpless.
And the person who brings it out in a viable but helpless condition is responsible for supporting the baby until it is capable of doing so on its own. If pro-lifers want to start bringing out 3 month fetuses, and they have the medical and mechanical means to succor the baby, then they are the ones responsible for the baby, not the biological mother.

If you are going to add advanced medical technology to the argument, add this - the ability to easily, temporarily, sterilize yourself (for males or females) without long-term damage. If this was done routinely at adolescence, and you had to explicitly take the antidote and reverse it in order to conceive a child, would you then allow abortion to be criminalized?

That technology seems at least as likely to me as artificial wombs.

Creech your comment makes no sense. Every baby needs physical care at birth. Preemies need more, full term less but they're ALL "viable but helpless." Once a fetus is viable, it's viable. If it's OK to kill a viable fetus at 20 weeks, shouldn't it be OK to kill a viable fetus at 39 weeks or right after birth? If viability doesn't matter because the fetus is still "helpless" then there is no difference between them.

At what point did we take questions about what is or isn't a human being away from the philosophers and theologians and hand them over to the engineers?

Is the location of the line (bright or otherwise) merely a technical question that depends on what's been invented lately?

We really ought to think twice before we go down that road.

Thanks for your excellent work in this area.

Gotta concur with BladeDoc. Every live infant now, full-gestation or not, is in a "viable but helpless condition," but no one suggests that the delivering physician take responsibility for its succor until it's old enough to get a job (i.e., capable of "[supporting itself] on its own," as you put it. What's the difference between delivering a 6-month baby now and (in a possible future) delivering a 3-month one? Both are obviously going to need expensive medical care.

I guess I'm struggling with explaining this concept: if a woman fails to take action until the fetus becomes viable, then she is responsible for raising the baby or giving it up for adoption.
However, if she is forced by someone to carry the fetus to viability, then the someone should be
responsible, etc. Medical technology keeps pushing back the viability date so those who don't want to be forced to raise babies need medical advances that will allow them to avoid pregnancy - like easier access to safe "morning after" pills if, say, passion the night before overwhelmed them with no condoms on hand.

Have you had an abortion or carried a baby to term? Because I've done both (the latter twice), and this is silly:

If nine months of abdominal swelling, acid reflux, and hemorrhoids were an occasional side effect of sex, most of the people I know would probably just endure it rather than have a doctor vacuum out their abdomen with a painful and bloody surgery.

While a wanted pregnancy is a joyful thing in many ways, it's only worth it because the expected result is so important. Considered purely physically pregnancy is incomparably more burdensome than a half-hour outpatient procedure.

If you want to make an argument that abortion is immoral (not that you have -- you seem to be raising questions rather than taking a position) that's one thing, but starting from the premise that pregnancy isn't particularly physically burdensome, particularly compared to having an abortion, is just silly.

1. Not that I can comment from personal experience (being male and all) but I think LizardBreath has a point. Even one day of the advanced stages of pregnancy has to be more physically uncomfortable than an abortion.

2. I don't see much stigma attached to giving a baby up for adoption these days; less than being an unwed mother, and that's become pretty mainstream. I think in most cases where a woman is reluctant to consider adoption, it's because she doesn't think she'd be able to break the attachment (the "puppy back to the pound" analogy that Jane made).

I've never been pregnant or had an abortion. But I have surgero-phobic friends who've endured things much worse than pregnancy rather than go under the knife.

But the main point is this: if you had to choose between being pregnant, without ending up with an unwanted baby, or getting an unwanted baby without ever being pregnant, which one would you pick? I'd choose the pregnancy, and so, I imagine, would 99% of women. In other words, for all our talk about controlling our bodies, we wouldn't march on Washington to keep from being pregnant; we'd march on Washington to keep from being mothers.

Steve Klein, I flat out disagree. If I were pregnant, I'm 100% positive that I'd be more worried about the reaction from colleagues and family to my having a baby that I wasn't keeping, than I would be about getting attached. Maybe this is a white professional thing, but I don't think so.

To add to what LizardBreath wrote, giving birth is an extrordinarily traumatic medical event that, even now, causes several hundred deaths per year in the United States (7.6 per hundred thousand, in 1996, see http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00054602.htm). One of the reasons that I suspect adoption is such as unpopular choice is that if you're going to go through nine months of physical discomfort followed by eight or nine hours of searing pain and weeks of painful recovery, you sure as hell want something to show for it at the end.

Even one day of the advanced stages of pregnancy has to be more physically uncomfortable than an abortion.

I disagree. Having spent time with both pregnant women and women immediately after an abortion, one day of pregnancy doesn't compare. One week? Maybe. Labor? Certainly. Abortion is not a friendly process. Nobody wants to have an abortion, it just happens to be preferable to actually having a baby.

I have to agree with Jane that the major reason that a woman has an abortion is not to prevent pregnancy but to prevent motherhood. I've never heard anyone seriously claim that they really wanted to have a baby, but wouldn't because being pregnant sucks. That said, being pregnant does suck and the thought of going through 9 months of hell at great personal expense with nothing to show for it is at least as compelling a reason as social stigma for not opting for adoption. This is especially true if you don't believe you have a baby-equivalent from the get go. Plus, aside from personal stigma, people don't view orphans as having a particularly good beginning.

It's not that you don't have a point -- unwanted pregnancy is a huge burden, and unwanted motherhood is a huger burden. The reason that the discourse about abortion rights is largely about the right to be free of an unwanted pregnancy is that that's the stronger legal argument.

While Roe doesn't put it this way, I see the constitutional argument as a 4th and 9th amendment argument -- the 4th makes it clear that there's a right to be free of government intrusion in decisions relating to one's bodily integrity ("right of the people to be secure in their persons"). While the 4th only makes this right concrete in terms of 'searches and seizures', the 9th allows us to treat the right referred to by the 4th broadly, as a fully protected constutional right. There isn't a similar argument, that I'm aware of, to be free of unwanted motherhood.

If the abortion issue wasn't discussed so exclusively in terms of constitutional rights, you'd probably hear more about unwanted motherhood and less about unwanted pregnancy.
But in any case, the comparison between the burden of pregnancy and of motherhood is a valid one; between pregnancy and abortion is goofy.

Re Creech's comments: The "viability" argument essentially makes the determination as to whether an unborn child has rights or not a question of the current state of technology. Babies are "viable" now a whole lot earlier than they were, say, thirty years ago. I do not see how that has any relevance to whether something(one) is a person or not.

Arguments pointing to the stage of development are what I would like to see (e.g., measurable brain activity, heart beating, that sort of thing), but I don't see that whether something can survive given the current state of technology is a rational method for determining if something is a person or not.

Re LizardBreath's comment. That is precisely what I was talking about: the whole question of whether the unborn child has itself any rights is being swept under the rug. Phrasing the question solely in terms of the mother's rights assumes that there is no *other* individual involved who may have rights.

To Megan: perhaps attitudes are quite different in New York, but here in Texas everybody I know believes that when a single mother carries her child to term and gives it up for adoption that is praiseworthy, especially when one considers the alternative. There are thousands of couples aching to adopt babies (I know the situation is quite different with older children), and we admire women willing to make the sacrifice and preserve life. I guess there may be some social stigma left, but think it is not nearly what it was years ago.

It's not that people don't think it's praiseworthy; I'm sure people would think better of me for giving up my baby for adoption than for having an abortion. But an abortion can be hidden; a pregnancy cannot. And so in practice the stigma for giving up your baby attaches entirely to the woman who puts hers up for adoption. If abortion data were public, I'm sure more women would decide to have the baby (not that I'm suggesting it should be made public).

Jane,

Eschewing adoption is not just a white professional woman thing, if things I've seen and heard among my extended family and friends/co-workers are reliable.

There IS a stigma to giving up a baby for adoption, and it goes something like this: "It's your baby--how could you even think of giving it up? No one can love that baby like you can. We take care of our own in this family." etc, etc.

Pride gets injected into this somehow, and it's as if adopting out the baby was taking the coward's option. I've thought about this often over the years, but your statement was the first time I saw it in print.

It also goes with some the writing you've done on adoption---about the competition for newborns. I often see this shortage blamed on abortion, but almost never on the real reluctance of many single mothers to consider adoption.

I haven't given birth, but I am raising children, and it is difficult. I can't do things that childless adults can. That's can be frustrating at times. I can see people (even subconciously) being more concerned about parenthood than about pregnancy. Problem is, admitting this makes you sound self absorbed. Few are willing to portray themselves like this.
As far as adoption, this is a rational choice that should be encouraged (I have a sister who has been on an adoption waiting list for 5 years), but the people in the position for said choice aren't in the most rational frame of mind.

You know, for someone who, like me, believes that a fetus is not a person, and that an abortion (certainly an early abortion) prevents a person from coming into being, it is perfectly rational, even aside from the negatives of pregnancy, to abort rather than to give birth and have the baby adopted.

If I have an abortion, there is no baby, and never was -- there was a pregnancy that I brought to an end, and I therefore have no responsibilities to worry about whether I have fulfilled or not. If I give birth and give the baby up for adoption, I have responsibilities to that baby which I'm signing over to the adoptive parents. I have no way of knowing if they will be good, or even adequate parents, and if they aren't, I've failed in my responsibilities. Giving a baby up for adoption, without the kind of in-depth research into the adoptive parent's sutability that's really not possible, strikes me as terribly lacking in a sense of the biological mother's responsibility to the baby.

(Note: I recognize that this argument is completely unsatisfying to someone who thinks that a 12 week fetus is a baby, rather than something that might develop into a baby. If you take my premise, that it's not a baby yet, I think that this sense that giving a baby up for adoption is less responsible than not having it explains a great deal of the preference most women have for abortion over adoption.)

"Yet the Roe v. Wade decision means that we must accept the rabid pro-choice position as the unquestioned law." Actually, Roe vs. Wade allowed for increasing restrictions in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters. It's decisions since then that have made "reasonable restrictions" functionally equivalent to "no restrictions" even if the woman has to rush to the abortion clinic to get a 9 month baby killed before it pops out naturally...

Not that I can see any reason at all for a woman to carry it for 9 months and then decide to abort a healthy baby. There are cases of third trimester abortions that I would support - when ultrasound or other tests reveal a horrendous condition that couldn't have been detected much earlier, such as the brain outside the skull. But just because the mother couldn't make up her mind earlier??? Does this ever really happen? Anyway, the radical pro-choicers make themselves ridiculous by insisting that she still has the right to have an abortion on caprice when the "fetus" is older and in better shape than three of my grandchildren were at birth.

I'm fine with first trimester abortions. The fetus at this stage is hardly human - a newborn dog has a better developed nervous system, and a cockroach might have more awareness of it's own existence. (Don't tell me stories about fetuses squirming away from a needle - so will a puppy, or an insect.) This changes somewhere in the second trimester. So I think that once it starts kicking, it's beginning to resemble a baby, and it should be too late to terminate it for anything but serious medical reasons.

Jane: About your surgery-phobic friends, I strongly suggest that they either get over it, or make sure their birth control is 100% effective. (I only know of one method that effective - keeping your knees together.) A normal delivery involves enlarging certain body passages to 3 or 4 inches diameter - either the obstetrician does some slicing or tissue tears. (After all these centuries, doctors are still arguing about which way will grow back together better.) Or there's somewhere between a 10% and 30% chance that instead they'll wind up with a C-section, which is a serious surgery.

Early period abortion is quite simple by comparison - I may not be up on the latest technology, but the commonest method of 30 years ago involved sticking a vacuum tube and a small tool through a passage that normally won't pass a toothpick, but there's no cutting involved. Take too long to decide and it gets more serious.

I don't think viability says much (maybe viability absent extraordinary medical intervention would). Consider that fertilized eggs in fertility clinics are viable in that if implanted in a suitable host they have a reasonable chance of survival. Many such eggs are routinely discarded and most people don't care a lot. Also I believe the courts have generally ruled that either parent can veto implanting the embryo citing a right not to have children.

In the future it may be possible to clone anyone from a single living cell. Would that mean that any human cell is the equivalent of an adult human? I think not.

Jane Galt said:

But I think the real test of what we worry most about is simply that I'd bet most pro-choice women would rather live in a world with an abortion ban, and stigma-free adoption, than in a world with an abortion ban, and artificial wombs. This will raise some interesting questions as medical science improves.

I think this is wrong. A world with artificial wombs is probably one in which there are no natural pregnancies and therefore one in which abortion is not an issue.

James, I think you misunderstand Jane's point. In the context she describes, "abortion ban" means that the fetus would have to be brought to term (whether in a live womb or artificial one) and the mother would then have to assume responsibility for it. She's saying that when a woman has an abortion, it's usually because she doesn't want to have a child, even if she could do so without going through the physical process of pregnancy.

There is an odd underlying premise in this discussion of adoption: that rather than allow a child of hers to be alive in the world without her, being raised by someone else, a woman would prefer to kill the child; that the pain of such a thought--her child existing outside her care--is too much for a mother to bear, and therefore she must destroy the child rather than allow him to be. That is beyond perverse. As is another point: that being confronted with "how could you give your baby up?--what kind of a mother are you?"--is more of an indictment of one's maternal suitability than aborting the child, and a mother would prefer the latter rather than suffer the former. This is like the woman who went naked to the cocktail party because she had nothing appropriate to wear and didn't want to be thought ill-dressed.

I had an abortion years ago, while married to my ex-husband who was an alcoholic and in rehab at the time. To be honest, if I really look back at it, I couldn't handle the thought of all of it: the pregnancy, the baby, the fact that I would be tied to this man for the rest of my life through this child. But mostly, I didn't think about it. We live in a world of people who are proudly pro-choice, so one of the ramifications is that you don't really have to dig that deep emotionally. No one is asking you to dig deep, not really. So, it's all your own internal compass, you know what I mean?

And now it looks like I won't have children. I look back at that decision a lot. When I was first diagnosed with MS, a part of me thought: well, maybe I deserved this thing to happen to me. Okay, I don't really think that, but it did cross my mind fleetingly. How strange is that? I know a lot of proudly pro-choice women who have children and I can barely listen to them talk about choice. They have their children and they don't seem to think beyond them. I know of women who've had abortions, but no children, and don't seem to feel regret.

I wish I could tell any young women considering this decision that you might regret having the abortion, for lots of reasons, and more than just regretting not having children. You might simply regret what you did; the act, in and of itself. You might regret that you did not find courage. Well, as long as we are being honest, why shouldn't I say these things? But we live in such a wierd time; how do you say these things without the pro-choicers and the pro-lifers coming out of the woodwork and taking your own words and twisting them? Because I've been throught this many times, and they always, always twist them.

I wish I could tell any young women considering this decision that you might regret having the abortion, for lots of reasons, and more than just regretting not having children. You might simply regret what you did; the act, in and of itself.

anon -- Or, you know, you might not.

There is an odd underlying premise in this discussion of adoption: that rather than allow a child of hers to be alive in the world without her, being raised by someone else, a woman would prefer to kill the child; that the pain of such a thought--her child existing outside her care--is too much for a mother to bear, and therefore she must destroy the child rather than allow him to be.

MC -- It's a little odd (to borrow your language) of you to call this an underlying premise when I explicitly brought it up a couple of posts ago. Your position here makes sense only if you think a fetus is a baby. For someone who, like many, many people, believes that an abortion prevents a baby from coming into being, it is the responsible decision to make not to bring a child into the world that one is not prepared to care for.

I'm not saying that I can establish that your position is wrong -- you appear to believe that abortion is equivalent to killing a child, and I don't expect to convince you otherwise. I'm just pointing out that there are lots of people who have thought about this just as deeply as you have, and disagree with you.

There is an odd underlying premise in this discussion of adoption: that rather than allow a child of hers to be alive in the world without her, being raised by someone else, a woman would prefer to kill the child; that the pain of such a thought--her child existing outside her care--is too much for a mother to bear, and therefore she must destroy the child rather than allow him to be.

Ah, but you're missing the point. Shame is all about what other people think, not what you think. Because they are private, an abortion means you don't have to hear what other people think.

Jane, I've never heard anyone else admit that there's a social stigma against adoption, but you're certainly right that it exists.

We live in a world of people who are proudly pro-choice...

Really? What color is the sky there?

Anon, to live is to regret. But there are regrets that are difficult to voice. Few would blame a woman for regretting an abortion. But what if she regretted having children? You don't hear a lot of that, and not, I think, because there are no regrets.

Angie - shall I change that to "*I* live in a world," since I am talking about my personal experience, and I do live in that world. Currently, the sky is blue. It's a lovely day in my corner of Massachusetts. And it's true, to live is to regret. That's exactly what I am saying.

LizardBreath - of course you might not. I said that explicitly in my post. I know women who do not regret their choices, just as I know women who do. There you go.

Oh, and Angie, you make a good point. What man or woman would feel comfortable explicitly saying they regretted having children? Because, how would the child feel and what would be the point of it? I'm sure some people feel that way, though. To be honest about that would invite a lot of criticism and precious little empathy. Which is usually the way most things go in this particular area.

You know, this whole exchange has reminded me why I dislike discussing this topic. Everyone knows better, including me, I suppose.

Thinking about it some more, I suspect Jane and I are both right about the stigma of adoption. If a teenager adopts her baby out, it's considered, as Mike put it, praiseworthy; I don't think she'd suffer any stigma beyond what she got for being pregnant in the first place. (Depending on where she lives and her social circle, that could be virtually none or quite a bit.) But past a certain age--20? 22? I don't know, somewhere around there--people would think it strange if she didn't raise her own child.

As Markm said, all this talk about "viability" is precisely irrelevant under current U.S. law, which allows babies to be killed for any or no reason up until their feet leave the birth canal. It also reminds me of a story the Catholic philospher Peter Kreeft tells: he was arguing with a pro-choice women by telling her that there is no arguement justifying abortion that cannot also be used to justify infanticide. She disagreed furiously, but then came back the next day and told him that she had thought it over and was now convinced. "So, you're pro-life now?" he asked. "No," she replied, "I decided I'm for infanticide."

And yet, what a minor issue this would be if men were more responsible.

I haven't asked, lately, but someone once told me that more than 50% of the vasectomies he did were for married men who had finally had a male child.

Well since most urologists won't do vasectomies on single men or men without children all the others were done on men who finally had a female child. And OH MY GOD did you notice that almost ALL of them were done on men who had already procreated! Selfish bastards.

BladeDoc,

What you said. Brilliantly & wittily put.

If you're interested in the idea of artifical wombs, dig out Lois Bujold's SF novels. The first had rape victims transferring their fetuses to "uterine replicators", which were then delivered to the perpetrators.

A couple of other implications of the tech--a fetus in vitro can put up for adoption with much less stress on the mother, or even transferred to an adoptive mother's womb in a reverse of the original surgical procedure.

That little monster?

Note that you speak of yourself in the third person. You are that little monster, just older now.

Going on three decades ago, my wife delivered twins.
The day before, she was in a university library, big as a house and lumbering around.
I was at work, just doing my thing.
We have not had a day of such heedless freedom since. If you're not busy with the kids, you're making plans, or worrying, or...something.
I think several of the posters have hit on it. It's not the pregnancy. Not the birth process.
It's the next thirty years.
It would be better if the pro-choicers fessed up.

BTW, the choicers used to be far more argumentative on the subject of whether the unborn are people for legal and moral reasons.
They have quieted down substantially, left the field to the lifers.
Either they simply don't want to argue on the grounds they can't make a good one--other than a statement of belief--or they don't care one way or another, but don't want anybody to know.

If human beings were meant to be grown in artificial wombs, we would be laying eggs and not gestating human beings within the bodies of other human beings. Even if the woman and the fetus aren't aware of it, what the fetus is learning during gestation, about being a human being, is a necessary part of the fetus' development. In the womb, the fetus is exposed to the same stimuli that the woman is and is a forced to share her hormonal response. If a woman is happy during her pregnancy, the womb could be a pleasant place to hang out. But imagine if a woman isn't happy about being pregnant. That womb can be a living hell.

How can you possibly argue against abortion because a fetus shouldn't have to know what it feels like to have its' life ended, and dismiss the lifelong effect that losing its' mother at birth has on an adoptee?

In the animal kingdom, adoption is unique to human beings. In nature, if a baby becomes separated from its' mother, for whatever reason, that baby is dead. It is very unusual to find adult animals taking somebody else's offspring on as their own after the mother dies.

There are worse things than death, as some of those being tortured in U.S. prisons overseas would tell you. Death isn't a matter of if, but when. It's inevitable. Death is all part of life's cycle. Some people cram a whole lotta living into short lives, while others don't seem to be doing much with their time here except wait around to get Willard Scott to mention them on the Today show. Me, I've never met a person whose own life wouldn't be vastly improved had they concentrated their good intentions about others on themselves.

Death isn't a matter of if, but when.

My, my, but its been a while since I've seen "life is cheap, and it might suck anyway" trotted out as a reason for allowing abortions. A bit prettied up but still the same basic notion.

How can you possibly argue against abortion because a fetus shouldn't have to know what it feels like to have its' life ended, and dismiss the lifelong effect that losing its' mother at birth has on an adoptee?

Wow. Well, as as an adoptee myself, plus having known at least three others very well, we all pretty much appreciate being alive. I know not everyone feels that way, but there are ways for them to make that choice for themselves.

I am a "pro-choicer", but I'm very ambivalent about it. So I end up supporting stuff like parental notification (I could rant for days about that), partial birth bans, etc.

Most of my sympathies lie with people arguing against the practice. Unfortunately, most of them also fight against most of the better ways of preventing unwanted pregancies in the first place. Ah well. Life ain't fair, but it can be awfully nice to have.

Jammer: “…as an adoptee myself, plus having known at least three others very well, we all pretty much appreciate being alive. I know not everyone feels that way, but there are ways for them to make that choice for themselves.”

Hello? Are you suggesting that unhappy but otherwise healthy adoptees (and others, presumably) should be allowed to commit suicide? (Dr. Kevorkian is so conservative.) Even if this were sensible and politically feasible, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Bringing someone into the world and then telling them they can make the choice for themselves is like forcing a person to become a drug addict and then telling them they can make the choice to quit for themselves. Except it’s much worse, because life is much more addictive than any drug, plus which one is surrounded by life-dealers, and there are no treatment programs available. I personally do not appreciate (do not like) being alive (notwithstanding I was not adopted and am not physically or mentally challenged in any documentable way), but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fight for my life if I had to.

We simply do not have the choice of not having lived. That is why I believe (quite seriously) that the only morally defensible policy is to terminate all lives before they become self-conscious. Obviously that’s not politically feasible, and perhaps not sensible either, but it seems to me that, once you even assert that people have the right to have children – to impose life on someone without that person’s permission – you have already involved society in a huge moral compromise.

When non-surgical abortions become the norm this discussion is over.

We simply do not have the choice of not having lived. That is why I believe (quite seriously) that the only morally defensible policy is to terminate all lives before they become self-conscious.

Hee. Had me going there for a while.

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