16th February 2020, 11:13 AM
I didn't bother with the comic- but I'll say that my opinions on abortion are rather nuanced.
Let's start with an old argument which I had to dismiss. The "potential" argument. Essentially that one just argues that if a clump of cells has potential to one day be a thinking feeling person, then it should be protected. The more emotional version of it is "You wouldn't exist today if your mom aborted you!" Well, sure, but to first dismantle the emotional version, I wouldn't exist if my mom never met my dad either. Back to the Future is not a basis for a moral code. More to the point, ANY clump of human cells, thanks to modern science, has potential to be a human life. Are we morally obligated to freeze every sperm and egg just to be absolutely sure all those potential lives come to be? I say no, that's ridiculous. Potential is no argument against abortion, moving on...
Now we get to the argument from conciousness. This one's a pretty good clincher for me. Yes, the science on the brain and the seat of conciousness is in it's infancy, but what we CAN say is that at least during the first couple trimesters, there appears to be no evidence that the mind of the fetus is developed enough to have any sort of real awareness. Maybe that will change with future evidence, but I don't feel guilty relying on the best science has to offer in that regard to make my choice. Eugenics was dismissed almost immediately, it was never real science in the first place, so I don't think it compares very well.
Ben Shapiro is an idiot pretending to be a smart person. I don't care about his rhetoric, however, I am entirely sympathetic with the idea that conciousness is a gradiant. When it comes to biology, most things are.
So, if you were going to restrict it, fine, err on the safe side and place the cutoff at the start of that gradiant rather than near the end. Laws can't be gradiated, so we need a cutoff point. It's not different than minority consent laws and drinking age laws. Of course you're going to get some people that are still too immature on the other end of that cutoff, but that doesn't render the need for one moot. We still need one, even if it's a tad arbitrary. However, the start of that gradient is still pretty far into the pregnancy, plenty of time to not worry about a moral quandry. Plus, we make such calls all the time. We have all determined, as a species, when someone is dead and not worth protectin the rights of, and when certain life forms seem capable of experiencing pain (such as plants). We use the best we as a species can know about to make these calls, but we may be wrong. It doesn't mean we don't have to make that choice though. Right now, the evidence points to those first few months being essentially without conciousness, so we are justified in making decisions based on that knowledge. We do that ALL THE TIME in every other element of our lives after all.
Then there's one simple reality. We have to make choices between two lives all the time. More accurately, doctors do. That's the point of triage. Yes, that person with the lesser injury might actually have something more accute that needs immediate action than the one that presents as more serious, but a choice has to be made, and that first glance diagnosis has to determine where medical attention goes. So, while there's a chance you're sentencing the lower end of the triage scale to death by focusing on the more immediate concern, you still have to make that choice. This does feed into pregnancy of course, in situations where a fetus or a mother will die, a choice must be made. I think in those situations erring on the doctor "playing god" is simply a must.
Future science may make the decision moot. If the need for pregnancy was removed entirely (big crystal eggs we gestate our young in), there wouldn't even be much of a discussion. There's already some beginnings of that starting with deer, but it's in it's- ahem- infancy. For now, we still have decisions to make that affect people out in the real world, and that's the crux. If we force women to carry to term from an armchair perspective, we're forcing painful scenarios that don't necessarily need to exist, and pain that doesn't need to be, out into the world. Even in late term abortions where arguments can be made that one may be snuffing out a life, that's a moral decision between two bad scenarios, and in that event it's really up to the mother and her doctor to make that call. It's a grey area, not a black and white situation, and it's one every person has to decide for themselves, hence a law won't help.
Now, once the fetus can be safely removed, I would argue we have a moral obligation to do that rather than an abortion in the event the mother doesn't want the fetus inside them any more. We ALSO have a moral obligation, as a society, to provide for these children and ALL homeless children better than we are doing now. Adoption needs to be made an attractive option, not a "sentence".
Let's start with an old argument which I had to dismiss. The "potential" argument. Essentially that one just argues that if a clump of cells has potential to one day be a thinking feeling person, then it should be protected. The more emotional version of it is "You wouldn't exist today if your mom aborted you!" Well, sure, but to first dismantle the emotional version, I wouldn't exist if my mom never met my dad either. Back to the Future is not a basis for a moral code. More to the point, ANY clump of human cells, thanks to modern science, has potential to be a human life. Are we morally obligated to freeze every sperm and egg just to be absolutely sure all those potential lives come to be? I say no, that's ridiculous. Potential is no argument against abortion, moving on...
Now we get to the argument from conciousness. This one's a pretty good clincher for me. Yes, the science on the brain and the seat of conciousness is in it's infancy, but what we CAN say is that at least during the first couple trimesters, there appears to be no evidence that the mind of the fetus is developed enough to have any sort of real awareness. Maybe that will change with future evidence, but I don't feel guilty relying on the best science has to offer in that regard to make my choice. Eugenics was dismissed almost immediately, it was never real science in the first place, so I don't think it compares very well.
Ben Shapiro is an idiot pretending to be a smart person. I don't care about his rhetoric, however, I am entirely sympathetic with the idea that conciousness is a gradiant. When it comes to biology, most things are.
So, if you were going to restrict it, fine, err on the safe side and place the cutoff at the start of that gradiant rather than near the end. Laws can't be gradiated, so we need a cutoff point. It's not different than minority consent laws and drinking age laws. Of course you're going to get some people that are still too immature on the other end of that cutoff, but that doesn't render the need for one moot. We still need one, even if it's a tad arbitrary. However, the start of that gradient is still pretty far into the pregnancy, plenty of time to not worry about a moral quandry. Plus, we make such calls all the time. We have all determined, as a species, when someone is dead and not worth protectin the rights of, and when certain life forms seem capable of experiencing pain (such as plants). We use the best we as a species can know about to make these calls, but we may be wrong. It doesn't mean we don't have to make that choice though. Right now, the evidence points to those first few months being essentially without conciousness, so we are justified in making decisions based on that knowledge. We do that ALL THE TIME in every other element of our lives after all.
Then there's one simple reality. We have to make choices between two lives all the time. More accurately, doctors do. That's the point of triage. Yes, that person with the lesser injury might actually have something more accute that needs immediate action than the one that presents as more serious, but a choice has to be made, and that first glance diagnosis has to determine where medical attention goes. So, while there's a chance you're sentencing the lower end of the triage scale to death by focusing on the more immediate concern, you still have to make that choice. This does feed into pregnancy of course, in situations where a fetus or a mother will die, a choice must be made. I think in those situations erring on the doctor "playing god" is simply a must.
Future science may make the decision moot. If the need for pregnancy was removed entirely (big crystal eggs we gestate our young in), there wouldn't even be much of a discussion. There's already some beginnings of that starting with deer, but it's in it's- ahem- infancy. For now, we still have decisions to make that affect people out in the real world, and that's the crux. If we force women to carry to term from an armchair perspective, we're forcing painful scenarios that don't necessarily need to exist, and pain that doesn't need to be, out into the world. Even in late term abortions where arguments can be made that one may be snuffing out a life, that's a moral decision between two bad scenarios, and in that event it's really up to the mother and her doctor to make that call. It's a grey area, not a black and white situation, and it's one every person has to decide for themselves, hence a law won't help.
Now, once the fetus can be safely removed, I would argue we have a moral obligation to do that rather than an abortion in the event the mother doesn't want the fetus inside them any more. We ALSO have a moral obligation, as a society, to provide for these children and ALL homeless children better than we are doing now. Adoption needs to be made an attractive option, not a "sentence".
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)