subbie - When Does Personhood Begin?

[_Gadianton]

Doc,

Many women are traumatized by miscarriage and feel a deep connections even at an early stage. I knew one woman who was adamantly pro life and she believed women who got abortions were often traumatized over it and felt a great deal of regret. I don’t know how much of that is cultural or shaming, but if there is any real truth to it then that’s one of the better arguments I’ve heard. That was long ago and since then I’ve known women for whom it was no big deal.

However, I don’t think that explains the psychological grounds for the pro life movement. I’m just saying there are people who are really deeply pro-life.

To explain the movement requires understanding the cousin position against birth control, period. Pro life is an extension of that. And what are the psychological grounds for that?

That’s the sex-crazed male clergy protecting the herd for themselves. If any woman is to ever have sex with a man other than himself, at least she should bear the punishment of raising the child. Some other dude getting it more than him, and for free - without consequence- is unbearable.

I’ve only known a handful of right-wing men who have taken in real life a strong pro life stance with me in a conversation, but they’ve all been chauvinists and pervs, and I would bet every last dollar that I have if they were to get a side project pregnant, they’d be first in line to pay for the abortion and cover the whole thing up.

[_subgenius]

without being distracted by arbitrary birth/population statistics, does being pro-life not have an inherent link to the perpetuation of the human species. Is not reproduction 101 simply about making humans for tomorrow?

[_Gunnar]

As I and others have often tried to point out, being pro choice is not equivalent to being anti-life, as implied by the anti-abortionists who by calling themselves pro-lifers intend to imply (falsely) that pro choicers are anti-life. As also often pointed out, If the "pro-lifers" were really pro-life, they would not fight tooth and nail against programs intended to help the most vulnerable of these young children to survive after birth and get on a path towards a productive and meaningful life. My being pro-choice does not prevent me from being, overall, at least as pro-life as any anti-abortionist, if not more so.

[_EAllusion]

People being particularly concerned about murder over and above natural causes of death while simultaneously preferring natural causes of death be thwarted or delayed isn't anything new. Pro-lifers tend to care about miscarriage if you ask them, but there are simply limits to what medical science can do. Meanwhile, from their perspective, you have millions of murders occurring every year, with hundreds of thousands in the US alone, that are preventable with some simple changes in the law. It's not even a little uprising that this would produce significant activism once you accept that internal logic.

[_EAllusion]

As I and others have often tried to point out, being pro choice is not equivalent to being anti-life, as implied by the anti-abortionists who by calling themselves pro-lifers intend to imply (falsely) that pro choicers are anti-life. As also often pointed out, If the "pro-lifers" were really pro-life, they would not fight tooth and nail against programs intended to help the most vulnerable of these young children to survive after birth and get on a path towards a productive and meaningful life. My being pro-choice does not prevent me from being, overall, at least as pro-life as any anti-abortionist, if not more so.

There is an exact parallel to describing the pro-choice position as "pro-choice." The most staunch pro-choicers often call the pro-life position "anti-choice" in an act of rhetorical gamesmanship. But that phrasing implies some general anti-choice philosophy when opposition to the legality of abortion is nothing of the sort. We'd never describe the desire to to make rape illegal as "anti-choice" or even describe the desire to make it legal as "pro-choice" even though it is true what is at stake is the freedom to choose to rape. That's because the label has a rhetorical implication that what is at stake is the very idea of choice when really what is at stake is a narrow question over the legal permissability of rape. So it is with abortion.

Pro-lifers, by contrast have an an almost exact parallel in calling pro-choicers "pro abortion." Ask a half-way intelligent one and they'll tell you what they mean is thst it is advocating for the existence of (legal) consequence-free abortions, which true, but the phrasing implies that pro-choicers somehow want people to get abortions, which while sometimes true, isn't necessarily so.

I think the way to settle this state of affairs is to let pro-lifers call themselves that and pro-choicers call themselves that. Are they playing with words to have a positive association with their stance? Yeah. But it doesn't hurt much because there is a mutual understanding what those positions outline. Where it goes off the rails is when either side tries to stick the other side with a negatively connotated label or people try to distort the meaning of those labels to say they are both or neither. Then it's a mess.

[_Hawkeye]

People being particularly concerned about murder over and above natural causes of death while simultaneously preferring natural causes of death be thwarted or delayed isn't anything new. Pro-lifers tend to care about miscarriage if you ask them, but there are simply limits to what medical science can do. Meanwhile, from their perspective, you have millions of murders occurring every year, with hundreds of thousands in the US alone, that are preventable with some simple changes in the law. It's not even a little uprising that this would produce significant activism once you accept that internal logic.

I agree but I think you missed some of the point of Doc's post. I've brought this up in the past with little to no response which I thought was off because pro-lifers seemed to be so worried about "babies" dying before birth.

Well, 90% of them happen naturally and they're not even pretending they can take measures to reduce those. But they can. From the article:

Pro-life supporters should ban marriage between people having different blood groups because the abortion rate among such mothers is so high.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that this has never been an issue raised by pro-lifers. And yet it could potentially save thousands of lives.

Following a pro-lifer's own logic, the "baby" only has a 10% chance of surviving and its greatest threat is natural abortion.

A quarter million "babies" are aborted by God every year. And the irony is that the pro-lifers are typically the same people who insist medical abortions are evil because God told them.

[_Chap]

I'll go out on a limb here and say that this has never been an issue raised by pro-lifers. And yet it could potentially save thousands of lives.

Following a pro-lifer's own logic, the "baby" only has a 10% chance of surviving and its greatest threat is natural abortion.

...

Following this logic further, and assuming that the survival rate of fertilised ova is as stated, and making the assumption that the death of a fertilised ovum at any stage is the death of a human being ...

Suppose you were a couple who wanted a child. Someone shows you a wonderful machine, where you press a button, and a baby pops out of a drawer.

"Wonderful! Let's press the button dear, and get our beautiful new family child!"

"Sorry, there's a catch. For some reason, after the machine has produced each baby it plays a severe version of Russian Roulette. In nine cases out of ten, the baby in the drawer will have been shot through the head. But hey! One baby in ten will be fine!. So no worries."

No parent would, I think, ever push the baby button on those terms.

So, if the facts are as stated, and if the death of a fertilised ovum at any stage is the death of a human being, why does anybody ever take the appalling responsibility of trying to conceive a child, given that the price of one born human being will be, on this reckoning, nine human deaths? It's just too terrible to bear thinking about, isn't it?

But, somehow, it doesn't seem to bother people. Could it be, perhaps, that they don't really, in practice, believe in a simple and generalised equivalence between 'death of a human being' and 'cessation of development of a fertilised ovum'?

[_EAllusion]

I agree but I think you missed some of the point of Doc's post. I've brought this up in the past with little to no response which I thought was off because pro-lifers seemed to be so worried about "babies" dying before birth.

Well, 90% of them happen naturally and they're not even pretending they can take measures to reduce those. But they can. From the article:

Pro-life supporters should ban marriage between people having different blood groups because the abortion rate among such mothers is so high.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that this has never been an issue raised by pro-lifers. And yet it could potentially save thousands of lives.

Do you 1) want murder to be illegal and 2) allow people with the APOE4 allele to reproduce? I'm guessing the answer is yes. There's nothing logically incoherent or unusual about people having a strong enough desire to stop murder to be politically active about it while allowing people to make choices that cause them or their children to be more likely to die younger or worse. People, especially conservatives, often make distinctions between natural causes of death and deliberate ones. Then on top of this, a significant input into the pro-life movement is Catholic ideas about reproduction where this distinction looms very large. Others plainly would like to prevent miscarriages if they could, but they don't think about it a ton for the same reasons you don't think about the morality of reproducing with the APOE4 allele much. People can be wrong without being hypocrites.

This argument really is a variant of an argument that Doc seems to be fond of: A person is a hypocrite or logically inconsistent unless they focus all their attention on the most significant source of harm. Having any other priority in their actions reveals a defect in a person's motives or reasoning.

This can be turned on anything though. Have a problem about school shootings? Want to change gun laws to reduce their frequency? Well, childhood cancer kills far more kids than school shooters do, and if you really cared about preventing childhood death, you wouldn't be wasting a single breath on gun laws. That's morally inefficient. You'd be pushing dealing with cancer. In fact, you wouldn't be posting here at all. That's a waste of time. You should be working on childhood cancer prevention.

This is a "what about all those murders in Chicago?!" argument for liberals.

[_EAllusion]

Following this logic further, and assuming that the survival rate of fertilised ova is as stated, and making the assumption that the death of a fertilised ovum at any stage is the death of a human being ...

Suppose you were a couple who wanted a child. Someone shows you a wonderful machine, where you press a button, and a baby pops out of a drawer.

"Wonderful! Let's press the button dear, and get our beautiful new family child!"

"Sorry, there's a catch. For some reason, after the machine has produced each baby it plays a severe version of Russian Roulette. In nine cases out of ten, the baby in the drawer will have been shot through the head. But hey! One baby in ten will be fine!. So no worries."

No parent would, I think, ever push the baby button on those terms.

So, if the facts are as stated, and if the death of a fertilised ovum at any stage is the death of a human being, why does anybody ever take the appalling responsibility of trying to conceive a child, given that the price of one born human being will be, on this reckoning, nine human deaths? It's just too terrible to bear thinking about, isn't it?

But, somehow, it doesn't seem to bother people. Could it be, perhaps, that they don't really, in practice, believe in a simple and generalised equivalence between 'death of a human being' and 'cessation of development of a fertilised ovum'?

Until recently in human history a huge % of children who were born ended up dying before reaching adult age. Yet people still kept having children and seemed to be Ok with making that choice despite it consigning so many people to young lives and painful deaths. People knew this going in. Death was all around. People were pushing the button. It's a necessary evil to being able to reproduce.

The fact that people were having children in those circumstances doesn't logically commit them to the position that child murder is OK or that they shouldn't worry about it too much.

[Guest]

There's nothing logically incoherent or unusual about people having a strong enough desire to stop murder to be politically active about it while allowing people to make choices that cause them or their children to be more likely to die younger or worse. People, especially conservatives, often make distinctions between natural causes of death and deliberate ones.

Sure, but the reason we see natural causes differently is because we assume the outcome is out of our hands. But some natural abortions can be stopped with an ounce of prevention, meaning we do have some control over the numbers of baby deaths, even natural ones. For religious nuts to be so up in arms about a fertilized egg being terminated by a "morning after pill," but then have nothing to say about a fully developed baby in its third trimester miscarried because the parents didn't take preventative measures... It tells me their true motive has nothing to do with caring about the unborn and has more to do with identity politics and trying to transform our society into a theocracy where their Bible is the law.

This argument really is a variant of an argument that Doc seems to be fond of: A person is a hypocrite or logically inconsistent unless they focus all their attention on the most significant source of harm. Having any other priority in their actions reveals a defect in a person's motives or reasoning.

Maybe. But I don't see what's wrong with that argument.

This is a "what about all those murders in Chicago?!" argument for liberals.

Not really. The Chicago argument is raised in the context of people complaining about civil rights violations, typically innocent black people being murdered by agents of the state with no disincentive or repercussions to be had. Right Wingers bringing up Chicago are just misrepresenting the argument. The number of black citizens (not working for the state and are typically engaging in criminal activity) killing each other in Chicago s a completely different matter.