subbie - When Does Personhood Begin?

[Guest]

I'm ready.

I feel strongly that I have to stand on principle. I think you can tell that I dislike this topic. I think you can probably tell that I believe that life begins at conception. It doesn't matter to me if you or others believe that or not. That's what I believe. Still, I cannot impose my beliefs on those who believe differently. The moment I deny a woman her right to choose is the day that I take away her personhood.

Therefore I think that the door to choice must remain open in all cases, regardless of gestational stage of development. The choice belongs to the woman.

I hate that decision, however, it best represents what I believe to be true and ethical.

All of it.

Fair enough, and I appreciate your openness to discuss a topic you dislike with candor. I tend to agree that as a man, I have almost no reasonable way of inserting myself into the debate without huge blindspots. I can't know what it's like to carry a child or what it means to have such significant personal consequences for having sex when a man has almost no physical obligation once the deed is done so to speak.

But I do think that the idea "life begins at conception" is a misleading way to think about the subject. I believe that there are many definitions of life that would include not only the fertilized egg but even the gametes or sperm and unfertilized egg. The definition of life looks crystal clear out where the majority of living things are but gets very fuzzy once one tries to precisely draw the line. When people use that phrase in regards to the abortion debate, there is also an implied "human" attached to it at the front end. But there are serious biological issues with doing so. After conception as mitosis begins, one could theoretically manipulate those cells to continue to split into multiple separate pieces that could all become individual human beings. Identical twins are a short version of this happening. So were there always two human beings there all along? Or is there something about what it means to be a human being that the zygote just can't quite yet capture?

[_Hawkeye]

Life begins before conception because sperm is alive.

But a fertilized egg is just one step out of literally thousands before it becomes a person.

[_Chap]

...

Yes -- what EAllusion said was circular, as it's a definition. The definition of a square is circular too. And by offering the definition EAllusion did of personhood, one that is circular in the particular way in which EAllusion made it circular, we're protected against the term referring to a "conscious adult" -- which is what Subbs was originally upset about -- merely by definition.

We have a sentence: x has a right to life.

What is x? By definition, a *person* is an x that has a right to life. But we don't know what a person is yet beyond that, it is merely how we're framing the question. We could get rid of the term "person" and talk about x -- what "x" has a right to life?

Would he be happier with that? Well, enter more inconsistency, where he seems to want to talk about a "right to life" without an "x" at all -- perhaps in the same sense as a Jain Monk practices Ahimsa. Life intrinsically should live.

I went back and saw that Chap already called him on the question I raised: What is life? All he's really doing is moving the same discussion into different terms. We can either talk about Xs that have a right to live, or supply examples of living things that by definition should live.

Suspecting he's outclassed, he shut Chap down and said he didn't want to derail this thread by talking about what constitutes life, but his response to H is that X (or personhood) misses the point -- the point is about the sanctity of life itself. And so with a finger plugging up each ear canal, he's ready to have a discussion the way right-wingers do it best.

Yes, I rather noticed that.

One of the lingering effects of long historical exposure to Judeo-Christian religion is the notion that if only we look hard enough we shall be able to discover some kind of solid foundation from which all arguments about ethical questions can begin. That used to be because we thought that there was a deity who had to be obeyed, and who had stated his wishes unambiguously in scripture. But the habit persists once the faith in guidance by unambiguous divine guidance is no longer there.

My hope in trying to get past the stuff about personhood directly to the notion of being 'alive' and whether a living thing always has the right to remain so, and which kinds of living thing might have that right, was to point to the fact that the whole concept of 'life', and in particular 'human life' is unavoidably fuzzy at the edges.

One way of pointing this up is to ask people who have an absolute conviction that 'human life' begins at conception, and confers an immediate and non-negotiable right to have that life continued is to ask them whether they think that women who use intra-uterine devices such as the coil or the loop should be prosecuted for (at least) attempted murder.

For the precise purpose of such devices is to prevent a fertilised ovum (which in their view constitutes a fully rights-endowed human life) implanting in the womb, and hence ensuring that it dies. If you push the definition of the start of life up to implantation, then these devices also scrape off some implanted ova, and hence cause their death.

But we do not hear complaints about this, or demands that funerals shall be held over the resulting soiled sanitary products. Why not?

[_EAllusion]

Sorry. There is a 4th argument for pro-choice that is common enough to describe it as "major." I find it to be terrible and it doesn't appear in applied ethics much at all to my knowledge, but it none-the-less is deployed a fair amount by ordinary people. It goes something like:

4) If you make abortion illegal, even if it is wrong to commit abortions, women will still find means to have abortions, but their chosen methods will be much less safe. The aggregate harm from this is greater than the harm from legally accessible abortions, therefore abortion should be legal on pragmatic grounds.

I'm curious as to why you think this is a terrible argument. It does have the advantage of being supported by history. I mean, we already know what America looks like when abortion is illegal. It ain't pretty. The Right Wing zealot's attempt to legislate behavior has always been a fool's errand.

The abortion rate went drastically up when it was legalized. "Back-alley abortions" are bad, and quite lamentable when there's nothing wrong with getting an abortion, but they don't justify not making abortion a criminal offense when abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, you use the criminal justice system to drive down the murder rate.

[_subgenius]

...legislate behavior has always been a fool's errand.

yes, the Republicans and their long tradition of regulation, er, of legislating behavior...like making people buy health insurance, or deciding how they can own guns, or telling them where/when they can have money, or who they have to bake cakes for.....yep, a fool's errand indeed.

[_Hawkeye]

]The abortion rate went drastically up when it was legalized. "Back-alley abortions" are bad, and quite lamentable when there's nothing wrong with getting an abortion, but they don't justify not making abortion a criminal offense when abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, you use the criminal justice system to drive down the murder rate.

Did it really go up or was it the case that abortions were reported more because they were legal?

Abortion rates go down when countries make it legal: report

[_Hawkeye]

yes, the Republicans and their long tradition of regulation, er, of legislating behavior...like making people buy health insurance, or deciding how they can own guns, or telling them where/when they can have money, or who they have to bake cakes for.....yep, a fool's errand indeed.

Again, as dumb as advertised. A baker doesn't have to be a bigoted baker, a gun owner doesn't have to be a gun owner if he/she cared about actual safety, having health insurance isn't a "behavior" so much as it is exercising common sense and mandating it was a Republican idea to begin with. However, insisting more than 300 million people immediately adopt an extreme religious idea that sexual intercourse before marriage should not be engaged is about as dumb as it gets. This may be a no-brainer for people who look like you are are not typically going to get a lot of opportunities to have sex, but that doesn't mean you get to dictate to the rest of us what we do with our bodies.

[_EAllusion]

Did it really go up or was it the case that abortions were reported more because they were legal?

Almost certainly, yes. Since Roe vs. Wade, there's been about a million abortions per year on average. It is extremely dubious that this was the rate prior and just not captured by adequate research. This should make sense as dangerous and legally suspect procedures ought to have some deterrent effect on fence-sitters. Not everyone is who gets an abortion does so with a conviction to do so no matter what. This is why pro-life efforts to dissuade women from getting abortions, often dishonestly, can have a non-zero impact. And remember, the US's laws on abortion even prior to Roe vs. Wade weren't as strict as they could've been. There's room to squeeze further to deter people.

In no other area of law would people be so caviler about legalizing murder because people are going to murder anyway and therefore we must incentivize them to murder more humanely. People using this argument inevitably are being parasitic on the intuition that abortion really isn't that bad.

Abortion rates go down when countries make it legal: report

Citing this as evidence that abortions go up when criminalized is a pretty serious correlation / causation confusion. This is looking at relative permissiveness of abortion laws rather that a apples to apples criminalization vs. legality comparison. There is a wide range of laws on abortion in different countries. It also does not control for, nor intends to control for, confounding variables like access to birth control, cultural differences such as a significant decrease in the fertility rate at the same time, etc. It simply notes that abortion rates have fallen in general, on average in countries at the same time that countries' laws have made it easier to access abortions.

For instance, the study the article is about both notes that a huge decline in the abortion rate in Eastern Europe was due to improved access to birth control. It also notes only 6% of the world's population lives in areas where abortion is banned outright and that abortion rates are higher in the parts of the world where this is not the case.

[_subgenius]

Not everyone. But for you, yes. : )

well color me flattered.

More seriously, you haven’t really tackled that reality. And Themis is pretty spot on in his own observation. You really are remarkably guarded, preferring only to attack the position of others while offering no indication of the ground that you plant your own feet on.

You really have no idea of that ground?...that makes your previous sentence about the veil altogether not flattering but instead - confusing.

I know that makes good sport for you but other folks just end up dismissing that game after a while.

wait, i thought there was no indication?...nah, there are clear indications - and even with this OP, i am happy to answer straightforward and sincere questions in kind, there is ample proof of that simple fact. However, poorly laid traps, presuppositions, and absurdities are also responded to in kind...that consistency from me is a clear and fair indication of what ground my feet are planted on.

[_subgenius]

Oh, I had you on ignore and only saw your reply in someone else's post. Here's my response to the above.

“F” yourself freely.

Aww, you just had to come out from under your rock of censorship to speak freely...how gracious. If you send me a pm i will give you my secret of how you read a post you find disagreeable, or even find absurd, but still maintain adult status as a tolerant human being.
Or you could accept your inability to simply not "read" uncomfortable posts and get back under that heavy piece of granite that protects your eyes from that tiresome glare of free speech.