Abortion. Are the lights on, and is somebody home?
Speaking of DJ Blasted Bill, we had a fun time at his broadcast last night of The Toad Elevating Moment. Between breaks while the music was playing the co-hosts argued about abortion. There were not even two people there who took the same position on it. Narf is pro-life, Minion is pro-choice, Bill is pro-death, and I believe in limiting abortions to the first two trimesters except in cases of danger to the mother. As usual I am the only one who doesn't join an absolutist all-or-nothing camp, and can't encapsulate my stance in a duosyllabic catch-word.
Most people are caught up in conventional thinking when it comes to matters of biology and personhood. But notice that even in conventional thinking we don't have two classes of things in the world, the non-persons such as rocks and trees given no rights, and the full persons such as human adults given full rights. We have always restricted the freedom of juveniles, yet freedom is a fundamental human right. So there already exists an intermediate level on a scale of human rights, as uncomfortable as it may be to point this out to a pro-lifer. I wish it were simple enough to suffice to say that a body always belongs to the individual in it. That's a completely true statement, but doesn't help us so much with a two-headed woman. To whom do the shared parts of conjoined twins belong? Perhaps we'd have an easier time with such a case than we do with abortion, because each personality inhabiting the body could argue for his or her ownership. But ultimately I think it's that very fact that would force them to come up with a settlement that they could both live with.
My views on abortion, like on so many things, infuriate activists on both sides. I think I'm cursed with a destiny to argue with everybody. On the one hand, the pro-lifers are disgusted with me because I favor RU-486 and limitless medical experimentation on human embryos. On the other hand, the pro-choicers despise me because I'd like to see abortion rights limited, to be previous to the third trimester except in cases of danger to the mother. As far as I can tell, the activists see it as an all-or-nothing issue because they honor one or the other out of a set of valid competing values, life and choice.
On the one hand, science has indeed verified that in an advanced fetus, possessing distinct tissues, organs, limbs and other features, the lights are on and somebody's home. On the other hand, previous to attachment to the womb wall, we're talking about a mindless single cell here, with none of those features. Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptics' Society, had an interesting perspective in his article The Secular Sphinx.
"Obviously neither egg nor sperm is a human individual, nor is the zygote, since it might split to become twins, or develop into less than one individual and naturally abort. Not after two weeks, since twinning can still occur. Nor by eight weeks-while there are recognizable human features such as the face, hands, and feet, neuronal synaptic connections are still being made. Only after eight weeks do embryos begin to show primitive response movements. Between eight and 24 weeks, however, the organism could not exist on its own (Pleasure, et al., 1984; Milner and Beard, 1984; Koops, et al., 1982).
There is provisional assent amongst most physicians and scientists-i.e., it is a "fact"-that fetus viability is 24 weeks of gestation. That is six months. It appears that it cannot be earlier because critical organs-lungs and kidneys-do not mature before that time. For example, air sac development sufficient for gas exchange does not occur until at least 23 weeks after gestation, and often later (Beddis, et al., 1979).
Additionally, not until after 28 weeks of gestation does the fetus develop sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities typically found in full-term newborns. Fetus EEG recordings with the characteristics of an adult EEG appear at approximately 30 weeks. In other words, the capacity for human thought cannot exist until 28 to 30 weeks of gestation (Flower, 1989; Purpura, 1975; Molliver, et al., 1973). Of all the characteristics used to define what it means to be "human," the capacity to think is provisionally agreed upon by most scientists to be the most important."
One may as well call a human corpse or human sperm a person, as call a human embryo a person. There's a long way to go before it becomes a human fetus, much less a human baby. Every human sperm and egg have the potential to become an embryo, which has the potential to become a fetus, but it'll just sit there and become nothing if it doesn't implant in the womb wall. They can be kept in a petri dish for a while, or frozen alive, as can sperm and eggs. The morning-after pill, RU-286, merely prevents implantation of this speck.
Why do people argue when life begins? There is no beginning to human life. I am the tail end of one long living continuum from my parents, who weren't the beginning of it either. At no point was this process dead when I sprung out of it. If a human sperm and human egg are previous to the beginning of life, then what are they, dead? If they're pre-human then what are they? They have human DNA. I believe that sperm and eggs are both human and alive... there's nothing else for them to be. And note carefully or you'll miss the whole point: I do not regard them as people. I've been using the words "human" and "person" with great care. As a transhumanist, what species they are isn't the deciding factor for me. The important thing is the set of experiences which have not begun. Take for instance the sperm or the egg that were going to later become me, and let's say they had died, or combined and aborted as an embryo. My set of experiences would never have begun and I would never have existed. We say about a dead person, "the shell is here but the nut is gone." The nut, the mind, would never have been there, so I would not have been killed by destroying the shell. I would have been prevented from ever existing and not even known the difference.
So what do we mean when we say, "the story of someone's life," or, "get a life," or "life is good right now"? We aren't talking about the opposite of biological death in these phrases. I'll tell you what I mean by it. My life is my series of experiences. That's why the important difference to me, is whether the lights are on and somebody's home. Somebody in a coma is merely "on pause," whereas a corpse is permanently post-experiences. A fetus in the third trimester has started having measurable experiences. Science shows that at a point, before birth, they can perceive, they can learn, there are brainwaves. Their series of experiences has begun in a tiny way. As far as I'm concerned, that carries a certain degree of rights. They have embarked on the lowest end of the sliding scale.
But just as a corpse is post-experiences, an embryo is without question pre-experiences. When I talk about ending a person's life, I mean interrupting an ongoing series of experiences in progress. When it starts, there's a person in that body. Before and after, it's just tissue.
Comments
twoofdtm on Jun. 10, 2004 1:55 PM — hear hear
as you and i have had this discussion before matt i won't get into it again but it's always great to read and open my mind to logical conversation!
netmouse on Jun. 11, 2004 3:34 AM
only in the last century did we start to check adult EEG before pulling life support from someone thought to be dead.
If we are to suppose this is a good indicator of humanity, would it not be better to actually use it (as in some complexity of EEG reading)legally to define the point at which a fetus is protected by law, rather than a fairly arbitrary amount of time that the mother has been pregnant, which is actually factually harder to determine?
matt-arnold on Jun. 11, 2004 5:27 AM
I would only to quibble with the use of the word "humanity" instead of "personhood," but you may use it however you wish. :)
It would be vastly preferable to run a test of consciousness experience than to measure pregnancy. On the one hand, we do know that the Intact Dilation and Extraction procedure, the one banned by the Michigan legislature this week for the fourth attempt, is performed beyond that stage in pregnancy. But on the other hand if a fetus is so diseased or that it can never gain consciousness and therefore personhood (which is the circumstance under which this procedure is commonly performed), the point is moot. Were the horror story true which was told by pro-lifers, in which this procedure was performed on a viable, conscious, un-anesthetized fetus who poses no risk to the mother, I would have to ask why the mother and the doctor think an eight-inch trip down the birth canal magically bestows personhood.
I don't know enough to say if the science that was done on pregnancies in controlled laboratory settings could be applied outside that setting in the modern day, so I had previously envisioned a future science-fictional world in which this was the practice. If it were possible to test for personhood today, that would be great; but why would it not have ended the abortion debate completely?
drkelso on Jun. 11, 2004 10:01 AM
I guess my problem with the whole "danger to the mother" deal is that in this day and age with all our "advanced" medical abilities, when is the mother's life truly in danger? It may happen occasionally but it has to be pretty rare. Why not just perform a c-section and extract the baby early and wait to see if it can survive on its own instead of doing the Intact Dilation and Extraction procedure?
Placenta previa would be an example. It is when the placenta covers the cervix so that when labor starts, the mother bleeds to death. Therefore a c-section is commonly performed prior to labor to prevent the problem. Therefore abortion is technically unnecessary.
If the baby is anacephalic or something, then it isn't there to begin with. So why the need for an abortion? The stillborn baby can still be delivered naturally or by c-section if something else is complicating the delivery.
I can see that in third world countries, the mother's health could be in danger due to inability to intervene but then abortion in those countries is equally as dangerous due to the lack of advanced care. Let's face it, abortion without proper care is very risky.
netmouse on Jun. 13, 2004 11:11 AM
I don't know enough to say if the science that was done on pregnancies in controlled laboratory settings could be applied outside that setting in the modern day, so I had previously envisioned a future science-fictional world in which this was the practice. If it were possible to test for personhood today, that would be great; but why would it not have ended the abortion debate completely?
It is certainly possible to come up with a scientific definition of personhood and apply it today. The problem is a) constructing that definition and b) getting anyone to adopt it.
Part of the reason it has not alreayd been done is that most of the people arguing about this and feeling passionately about it are not approaching it from a scientific perspective, but rather from either a religious or a political one. That is to say, most of the abortion opponents beleive in something called the soul, which is at some point given to a human to use for the period of their life and also into the afterlife. There has to date, been no way determined in order to detect the presence of a soul, and therefore we cannot argue on any scientific basis whether or not a zygote has a soul, etc. Those who have examined scripture about this, depending on their religion, either believe that a person gets a soul upon conception or at the time of their birth. Neither of those positions provide a sphere of possible social acceptance for a discussion of when, in the middle there, a person becomes a person.
Scientifically, as you say, there's not much reason why the passage down the birth canal should make any difference. It undoubtably does have effects on the child, but children born by cesarean are not today veiwed as any different from those born the old-fashioned way. Thus, in fact, it behooves us all to find a definition of the starting point of legal rights that is not related to the moment of birth.
The legal and political complications of this is of course that before birth, the baby resides inside the mother. So, many people who are pro-choice are coming in from the political perspective that a woman needs to have control of her own body, legally and politically, at all times. Psychologically that seems right. So even many of the people who might have otherwised considered a scientific definition of personhood that would occur before birth are, for political reasons, not willing to consider the question.
to sum up: there are many things about the current sociopolitical situation to suggest that we might very well have the technology to define personhood scientifically right now, but that we as a society lack the will to address the question.
matt-arnold on Jun. 14, 2004 6:41 AM
Yes. Creating consensus on a definition is a bigger problem than the operating-room instrument equipment to detect it. I was naive to suppose for a moment that scientific consensus alone could cause the religious faction and the political faction to link arms and skip merrily down the yellow brick road throwing flower petals. Other things are at stake. I won't be so presumptuous as to attempt to represent what is at stake for the political faction. If I tried to do so I'm afraid I would articulate it clumsily and offend somebody unnecessarily. I know they care deeply about women and rightly so. But I have an insider knowledge of the religious faction from personal experience. What is at stake is belief in the existence of a seperable soul. Some of them have told me so. To accept the mind as the seat of personhood would mean facing oblivion when mental function ends. It would also mean that each of them was not conceived with a unique and perfect plan that makes human beings special and is thought to give them cosmic purpose.
When I think about what is at stake, it's pleasing and reassuring to remind myself that theirs is the only stake seriously at risk. Abortion is currently legal and safe where I live. The biggest thing abortion opponents have been able to accomplish in decades is to ban in Michigan the most sketchy and questionable abortion practice. This should show how secure it is; in challenging the "partial birth abortion" ban, Planned Parenthood has brought the battle so far away from conception, that it is right up to the threshold of undisputed personhood.
brendand on Jun. 14, 2004 6:55 AM
My only real thought is that before a person becomes a person, they are certainly not dead. Death is the end of life, not the opposite of life. There may not have been a beginning to human life, but there is a beginning to an individual's life. That's what the debate is about however, is *when* that individual's life begins.
matt-arnold on Jun. 14, 2004 8:00 AM — Re: The Non-Existent Liberation Front
My answer is that the individual's "life," in the biographical and not the biological sense, begins when their series of experiences begins. This is because I think the self is both hardware and software. The self is not a body, it's a process. That process of information which is me is running on the system which is the brain. It has to run on some kind of physical, non-supernatural substrate of matter and energy, so the "software-only" position which people took for thousands of years is infeasible. But the hardware-only position is also difficult, because sperm and eggs are hardware. Ironically it contributes to the most extreme position against reproductive choice, which I refer to as the "non-existent liberation front." I do not support the rights of the nonexistent, but that's what the anti-birth control argument for the right to "develop potential" amounts to.
Close relatives of mine have spontaneously aborted at an early stage of pregnancy, and although I strongly empathized, I couldn't sympathize (there's a difference) with their sense of loss. "He" or "she" is a total abstraction; a hypothetical. In short, what we "lost" was a fictional character. I have no children. If I did, I'm sure I would love that child dearly, but I can't lose that which I never had. Some childless couples I've known have expressed a powerful love for an undefined hypothetical stranger. I can't relate to that. You can guess they are devoutly religious.
Hardware must be running software before the self can exist. The lights have to be on, and somebody has to be home. If a person doesn't even exist yet, "life" is an inapplicable word in any question about them.
brendand on Jun. 14, 2004 10:24 AM — Re: The Non-Existent Liberation Front
I can understand and respect your opinion, but I have to disagree at least with calling what is "lost" in a spontaneous abortion a "fictional character." Not having been pregnant, (nor the father of any "child") I am certain that I would still feel a great deal of sorrow if I were to learn that someone I knew had a spontaneous abortion. It's not just about what's "lost," it's also about hope, expectations, and the future. Even if you don't consider the "child" to be a living individual, there is still a bond between mother and "child."
matt-arnold on Jun. 14, 2004 11:16 AM — Re: The Non-Existent Liberation Front
I don't want to be insensitive to people's feelings. There's a bond not between parent and future-child, but between mother and dreams. That's why we don't grieve for sperm. I still maintain that hopes, dreams and futures are each fictional. Only one future exists, and that's whichever one comes true. Alternative futures, by virtue of being alternative, never will. In this reality, there never was a baby in these situations. So although I feel sorry for the expectant parents that their future is not what they planned, my sympathies are reserved for them. If certain features of quantum mechanics are true, then somewhere in an alternate reality they and "their baby" (if you want to call it theirs, or a baby) are happy. I'll never shed a tear for that hypothetical stranger.
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