Abortion? - Kafuka Boards

Arguments against abortion based on potential are fundamentally misled. (Well, that is indeed just my opinion, but I will attempt to justify it.) For one, they apply an extreme amount of reductionist logic. Taking the reasoning one step further, are males committing acts of mass murder when they masturbate, because of the potential of every sperm? What about when, after ovulation, unfertilized eggs are reabsorbed into the body or discharged via menstruation? The obvious counterargument here is that sperm and eggs do not have the capability to develop into a full human by themselves--but neither do fetuses, which are, at least for a period of multiple months, entirely dependent upon the mother's body and incapable of growing outside the womb. An argument based on potential, taken a little bit further, implies that we are morally impelled to harvest sperm and eggs from men and women and combine them as efficiently as possible, and then to incubate these fertilized cells in as many women as possible so as to minimize the number of potential lives lost. But this moral imperative is clearly absurd, which demonstrates the weakness of such an argument.

An argument based on potential life also presupposes that human life, regardless of the nature, form, or manifestation of said life, possesses overwhelming unique and intrinsic moral value. It is easy to look back and say, as KP9000 did,

Hell, one of you very well might not exist because someone decided that you're an inconvenience to their lives. Weren't all of you a fetus at one point

But we are speaking from a position of privileged knowledge. It is natural, of course, that we value our own lives. However, before a fetus is actually born and before the child matures, it is impossible to precisely determine the course of the child's life, obviously because we are not capable of knowing how the future unfolds. It is easy to see that the argument that the potential of life must be protected is made from a position where we have little to no information about what this potential actually is, and hence, as I have noted, presupposes that bringing new life into the world is intrinsically morally good. But is this an assumption that we are willing to make? Do note that, conventionally, we value the preservation of existing life (e.g. through laws and taboos against murder), but this is very different from valuing the act of creating life. KP9000 writes,

But, there are places where you can give up a baby no questions asked. No paperwork, no fear of discipline. Most hospitals have a place to just drop babies off if they're unwanted.

But do we pay no regard to the quality of a child's life, particularly one that is sent off to live in a foster home or an orphanage? Statistically, children who are abandoned at birth end up unhappier and with poorer outcomes in life than children that are kept by their parents. Are we willing to potentially condemn a child to a life of unhappiness and inferiority? What about the effects of overpopulation and the decline in the quality of life of already existing humans that will occur as the result of an additional birth--do the rights of a child that is not yet born supersede the lives of people who have memories, experiences, and desires right now?

I do not presume to give answers to these questions. They are difficult topics. However, it is important to note that you cannot apply an argument based on potential without also thinking deeply about the answers to these questions, hidden as they may be underneath the sophistry of an emotional argument.

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In truth, the debate about abortion is about two different and separate questions--questions which are often confused.

First, what is the point between conception and birth at which we recognize the fetus to be morally equivalent to a living, grown human? That is, at what point does it acquire the rights which we take to be naturally granted to all mankind?

Second, supposing that we have passed the point at which the fetus is recognized to possess the natural rights of every human, how do we balance the rights of the fetus against the rights of other people (primarily the mother, secondarily the father, and peripherally the rest of mankind)?

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I'll begin by replying to some of the other posts in this thread.

I don't consider the fetus to be an independent human life before birth, so it is my opinion that abortion for any reason, including inconvenience, sex selection, or others are permissible. I use birth as the cutoff because that's the clearest medically-defined point; I consider late-term abortions a matter of the woman's conscience.

I find myself unconvinced that birth is an appropriate cutoff point. As you write later in the thread,

Before the point of conception no one worries about saving a potential life. After birth, it is clearly obvious that killing is wrong. These are as far as I can tell the firm facts of the matter; anything in-between is interpretation.

On these points, I certainly agree. But when we 'interpret' the 'in-between' part--that is, when we try to come up with an answer to the first question I have posed above--should we not aim on the side of caution? It seems to me that setting the cutoff point a little too early is more morally preferable to setting it a little too late. Indeed, consider the case of a premature birth--in many such cases, we have the technology required to save the life of the fetus (e.g. incubators in hospitals). That is, at some point in time before birth, we are fully capable of extracting the fetus and sustaining it to independence with our current level of technology. Also, in such cases, it's fairly clear that the fetus has developed a conscious mind, that is, it is capable of sapient thought and awareness on some level. In these cases, it would not seem particularly reasonable to me to permit an abortion.

(My personal preference for a reasonable cutoff point is the end of the first trimester.)

I consider late-term abortions a matter of the woman's conscience.

I'm afraid this doesn't immediately make sense to me. Is it not also a matter of the doctor's conscience, and indeed of society's conscience, since we collectively have the power to permit or deny such an abortion? Actions are not, after all, undertaken in a void.

Arguably, it could be said that the potential moral badness of a late-term abortion is less in magnitude than the potential moral badness of imposing society's views upon another person, but I'm not convinced that this argument holds up; it would work on the assumption that the moral badness of killing someone grows as said person's age increases (because we clearly find no trouble in imposing upon individuals the societal view that murder, even of a newly born infant, is morally impermissible).

If the fetus is not alive then why are the cells alive? I mean, of course the fetus is a living person. So abortion on demand is still murder and is still a crime a against humanity.

Your argument is based on a misunderstanding of why we consider murder to be morally wrong. It is not because we hold life itself to possess some intrinsic sanctity; indeed many people find nothing wrong with the slaughter of cows, pigs, chicken, and so on and so forth. The difference is that we consider grown humans to be in possession of self-awareness, consciousness, and most importantly human sapience; that is, we assign a particular importance to the experience of being human and find ourselves morally horrified at the idea of the cessation of human experience. It is manifestly clear that, after birth, humans can be said to be experiencing the experience of being human (as tautological as that sounds); the self-awareness and consciousness of a child are not in question.

But it is not so clear, however, that a fertilized egg possesses even the base qualities of self-awareness and consciousness, let alone the qualia of human experience. If you argue that the primitive form of "life" experienced by fetuses in the first trimester--a form of life devoid of self-awareness or consciousness or any of the qualities that embody what we consider to be the human experience--is sufficiently complex that it is worth protecting at almost any cost, then you also argue that organisms as simple as yeast and plants are worth protecting with equal, if not greater, vigilance. If you are willing to accept this, then so be it, but you cannot ignore the consequences of your moral calculus. If you are not so willing, then the only logically consistent option is to abandon your current line of argument.

But a fetus is what will be born as a human, just like a child will become an adult. Are children considered to be unhuman? No. To prevent a human from being born by killing the fetus is murder.

And every single sperm cell in every ejaculation has the potential to become a human. Is that also murder? Every single carbon atom in my trash has the potential to, one day, become part of a fetus. Am I a genocider of millions?

You commit the base fallacy of false equivalence, drawing an analogy between children and fetuses that does not necessarily hold. Or, to be more precise, you state that they are morally equivalent, but you do not make a justification for this claim. I could just as well as you: "But every pair of sperm and egg, though they may be separated and even reside in different bodies, may be born as as a child, which will then become an adult. When our bodies naturally recycle these cells, are we continually murdering unborn children throughout the course of our lives?"

Naturally, there is some point between conception and birth that the fetus acquires the moral and natural rights of every human. It is permissible to state that this point in time is always equivalent to the point of conception, but that claim must be justified somehow. The fact that the fetus can be born into a human is a mere tautology; it simply restates the definition of a fetus and is not itself an argument against abortion.