Life does not begin at conception
One of the primary claims of the anti-abortion brigade is that “life begins at conception”, and because it is wrong to take a life, therefore it is wrong to abort a fetus (and perhaps wrong even to prevent a zygote from implanting by use of a UTI). However, this claim is not merely wrong, but ludicrously wrong.
Let me make an aside here. If you are of a religious bent, and if you believe in the existance of a soul, and if you believe that this soul is created, implanted, magicked into being, or otherwise attached to a developing human at some particular point in development, then of course that provides a logical point whereafter abortion may be seen as a crime against said soul. I think you are dead wrong about the existance of souls, but granted that premise, this objection to anti-abortionism does not apply to you. To you, all I have to say is this: Remember that your arguments are inherently non-secular and cannot carry force in a secular judicial system; and please remember that your arguments hold no force with those of us who are not religious.
With that out of the way, let’s restate the obvoius: Life does not begin at conception. Conception, in us sexually reproducing animals, consists of the fusion of gametes—the sperm fertilises the ovum. But, and this should be painfully obvious to everyone, the gametes are alive. You are the product of a living spermatozoon and a living ovum. Fertilisation did not mark the creation of life, only the fusion of two living cells into a single living cell.
This fusion is certainly a defining moment in your life. Barring mutation so unlikely that I expect it can be discounted, and excepting rare conditions like chimerism and mosaicism, it is the last event that defines your genetic makeup, when the chromosomes you inherit from your parents merge. It is, in a very real sense, a defining moment. It is not, however, the defining moment, because there are many. Even after fusion, not every zygote goes on to successfully implant, and early pregnancies often terminate spontaneously. The biologist Lewis Wolpert famously said that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”.
But before conception, a startling number of things had to happen in order to make you who you are. Before the fertilisation event was to matter at all, the specifics of meiosis in the germ line of each of your parents played as big a role in determining your genetic specifics as did the fertilisation itself: Meiosis, the process where a germ line cell divides into (haploid) gametes with half the chromosomal complement of a normal cell, is when the genetic contribution of each parent is determined. And of course any number of things had to happen very specifically in order to make you who you are, on this basis: Your parents had to have sex at just the right time when the spermatozoon and ovum each carrying half of your genes were alive and active. If they’d waited until next month, things would have been different…
But this is only the beginning (or the end, depending on your view). Those haploid cells, after all, were alive, each of them a living cell from one of your parents, whence they were produced by meiosis from diploid germ line cells. Each of those cells was the unlikely product of very specific meiosis, reproductive timing, and fertilisation by the (most likely four) people who were their parents…and the same goes for all of their parents…and that lineage goes back, centuries, millennia, millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. You are the product of a lineage of living cells that stretches back to the very dawn of sexual reproduction. Looking back further, you’re still the product of living cells, though the processes are different and lateral gene transfer makes the family tree a bit harder to draw…but ultimately, you are the scion of a family of cells—living cell to living cell to living cell—reaching back some 3.6 billion years—3,600,000,000 years—at a ballpark estimate.
That is when life began, and that is, in a sense, when your life began, too: It started then, and it hasn’t died since. Every single intermediary between you and the first primordial, primitive, living cell that serves as ancestor to all life on earth was alive. It started then, and in a sense, you’re just a heavily modified offshoot—3,600,000,000 years down the living line.
I find this an awesome fact to contemplate.
What, then, is so magical about conception? Nothing, really. It’s a defining moment in making you who you are, but it’s really just one of billions upon billions of defining moments. Causing the death of a zygote does exactly as much in preventing a particular potential person from coming about as does causing the death of a spermatozoon (e.g. by masturbating, by ejaculating outside a woman, by using a condom, or by doing nothing and letting the spermatozoon die and get reabsorbed into the body); as does wasting the life of an ovum (by menstruating, in the luteal or ischemic phase). But removing the possibility of a specific human being is even more ubiquitous; after all, every human alive represents millions of potential people lost, as the ones produced by the spermatozoa who lost the race would undoubtedly have been different.
My own opinions on abortion are not very well-defined. I am, of course, pro-choice, but since I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make a hard choice, I’ve never needed to figure out exactly what I think the hard lines are. What I do think, however, is that it is in no way wrong to destroy human tissue, while it is definitely wrong to destroy a moral human person.
The question, then, is what constitutes moral personhood. I will not pretend to have a clearcut answer. If I had to sit down and develop one, it would combine concepts like having thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, and desires; taking part in emotional relationships (a reciprocal relationship); interacting (in some way) with people; acting as a moral agent, rather than merely being acted upon as a ‘moral object’.
It seems abundantly clear to me that no lump of human tissue can possibly meet my criteria unless it has a mind, which requires a working brain. After the brain works in some sense, I believe there is a window, a grey area, where I would in all likelihood agree that abortion may very well be morally acceptable—but this is beside the point I wish to make here, which is that until brain activity begins, I regard it as “no context”: Abortion prior to this is absolutely acceptable. (This may be around week 25 or so of a pregnancy; research shows that sustained EEG activity first appears in bursts around week 20, become sustained around week 22, and bilaterally synchronous around weeks 26–27.)
Once the position is taken that an early abortion does not, in fact, destroy a moral person, we are back to the notion of destroying “potential” persons. The problem is that we destroy potential persons all the time, no matter what we do. If we have sex, we destroy lots of potential persons (since most of the potential ones will never be, even if we do have children); whenever we don’t have sex even though we could, we are passively murdering potential persons, because we aren’t making children at all.
Modern biotechnology allows us to stretch this argument to a reductio ad absurdum without leaving the realm of the possible. In recent experiments (documented in some very nice articles in Nature), scientists have induced pluripotency in mouse cells and produced viable mice (fully viable, as some of them went on to reproduce). While cloning humans is likely to be much more difficult than cloning mice even on purely technical considerations, and it may well be impossible right now, it seems obvious that the technology is if not in our grasp, then certainly close to it, to produce viable humans from induced pluripotent stem cells. Taking things just a bit further, it may become possible to extract genetic material and inject it into pluripotent cells and so produce clones from any cell with intact genetic material.
Once the technology exists for doing this, the loss of any viable genetic material is, in a sense, the destruction of a potential human life. Scratching your head, cutting your hair or your nails, losing scrapings of epithelial material from your mouth, bleeding…every such act will prevent humans from being who might otherwise have been.
Unless you are willing to condemn this as murder, then any argument that boils down to “You are destroying potential life!” loses all force.
Labels: biases, definitions, ethics, fallacies, morality, Petter, pro-choice
posted by Petter Häggholm
at
8:00 AM
20 Comments:
In his defense, I don't think Augustine79 has brought up souls at any point in the course of this discussion. The only people who have are we atheists, making a straw man of his position. Of course, there are people who do seriously attempt to bring souls into this sort of discussion, and to them I say:
There are conditions under which one zygote splits into two, creating identical twins. Did its one soul split into two? Was it given an extra soul at conception? Does one twin wind up soulless (presumably this is the evil twin)? Do they wind up sharing a soul?
What about when two separate zygotes merge into one? Does the resulting chimera have two souls? Were they each only given half a soul to start with, or one given a soul and one not?
I think everyone can agree that this "arithmetic of souls" makes no sense. But the main reason why it makes no sense is because the very idea of souls is absurd. Moreover, none of these questions can ever be answered (you can give opinions, but there's no way to verify them. There's no possible way to know whether it's fine to kill one of a pair of twins because he doesn't have a soul, or whether it's twice as evil to kill a chimera because he has two), because souls cannot be observed and have no effects in the real world. Until it becomes possible to prove or disprove the existence of a soul, it's most sensible to just operate under the assumption that it does not exist, much like gods and leprechauns.
The SI unit for evil is the Hitler: 1 Ht is equal to exactly six point two million special chosen souls or 12.4 million unsaved ones.
The Hitler is a unit too large to use in practical terms, though, and in common parley, microHitlers (µHt) are the preferred unit of count. An abortion, then, of a jew or christian is 0.16129 µHt of evil, an abortion of a pagan or atheist is 0.0806 µHt. Given the rare occurence of chimerism, and the liberal 18% estimate of nonbelievers or at least semi-nonbelievers, we can calculate an abortion in America as (0.82 * 0.16129 µHt + 0.18 * 0.0806 µHt) = .14678 µHt. This number is lower in European countries, and even lower in countries of entirely pagans.
The imperial system used to count evil according to a feudal scale in ancient Europe, based on the relative evil of the murder of various members of society (non-murder cases instead take the murder rate, reduced by a factor of actual soul-depreciation endured). Although, with the recent decline in feudalism, the system has fallen into obscurity and is used exclusively only by backwater countries too stubborn to abandon it. Use of the imperial system is wildly popular in this country only, and shows no signs of changing despite its having been implicated in foreign trade issues, confusing standards and Mars explorer disasters. For reference sake, the conversions are presented here.
1 King (Ka) = 8.87095 mHt (milliHitlers)
1 Pope (Pa) = 35.4838 mHt
1 Cardinal (Ca) = 887.095 µHt
1 Duke (Du) = 32.258 µHt
1 Clergy (Cl) = 16.129 uHt
1 Merchant (Ma) = .32258 µHt
1 Peasant (Pa) = .16129 µHt
1 Non-believer* (Na) = -.16129 µHt
1 Woman** (Wa) = .08065 µHt
*Non-believers have a negative value, representing the righteousness of their murder under the Imperial system. (Semi)-obselete.
**The convention of women having half the value of men under the Imperial system shows scattered practice, even among Imperial system practitioners, although it remains as a standard practice in Middle eastern implementations of the SI system of evil. The struggle on the part of the Middle East for greater acceptance of this convention is one of many sources of strife.
Since you appear to be as unfamiliar with the natural law arguments against abortion as with the arguments against same-sex marriage, I am providing the following link for the benefit of your readers:
http://tinyurl.com/7qlhh
A simple us of the "search Ziztur" toolbar on the right will show you that we are not unfamiliar with the natural law arguments. You might also click the "pro-choice" label at the bottom of the post.
From the article (which, I freely admit, is nowhere near as atrocious as the last one):
“There are three important points we wish to make about this human embryo. First, it is from the start distinct from any cell of the mother or of the father.”
This is also true of every single gamete—hundreds of millions of distinct ones, in the father’s case, barring unlikely coincidences.
“This is clear because it is growing in its own distinct direction. Its growth is internally directed to its own survival and maturation.”
Also true of gametes. Of course, they require something else (a complementary gamete) to achieve this effect, but so does the zygote/gastrula/fetus (lots of things, from the mother).
“Second, the embryo is human: it has the genetic makeup characteristic of human beings.”
So does every gamete (albeit in haploid form); so does every human somatic cell (in diploid form).
“Third, and most importantly, the embryo is a complete or whole organism, though immature.”
This seems to be the main part of this argument—this is soon contrasted with gametes, which are said to be “manifestly not whole or complete organisms”. However, I fail to see the qualitative distinction. Certainly there’s a great difference between gametes and a zygote (viz., haploidy versus diploidy), but a zygote and a fetus are in no way “complete”. The authors are simply redefining “complete” in order to blur all moral boundaries. A complete human being can think; it has a functional brain. This is why the early embryo is not
“the same kind of entity as you or I”
—The authors (presumably) and I (certainly) are thinking creatures. An embryo which has not yet developed a brain is clearly incapable of thoughts, emotions, hopes, and fears. This makes it a very different sort of entity from you and me.
Later, they go on to dismiss the distinction between thinking and non-thinking creatures (“No-Person” arguments) as necessarily being dualist, which is either so ignorant or so disingenuous that I lost further interest in the article.
Petter: "A complete human being can think; it has a functional brain. This is why the early embryo is not 'the same kind of entity as you or I'"
Surely it is not the possession of a functional brain that distinguishes the human being from the non-human being. Dogs and monkey have brains, yet they are clearly not human. A person in a coma may not have a functional brain, yet is clearly still human.
Ayer
“Dogs and monkey have brains, yet they are clearly not human.”
Don’t be ridiculous. I never said that having a functional brain is equivalent to being human. I am saying that (in a general sense) mind distinguishes a moral person from a lump of human tissue. Mind is a necessary, not a sufficient condition.
That said, of course, if some genius dog or monkey is capable of the same level of mind as humans, I think they also deserve the same moral considerations.
“A person in a coma may not have a functional brain, yet is clearly still human.”
If I ever fall into a coma (that does not last so long that it causes lasting damage so great that it makes my life not worth living), I want people to keep me alive. If I had been aborted as a pre-sentient fetus, I would not ever have been around to form even the vaguest desire on the matter.
That said, the coma argument is one of many reasons why I don’t consider the issue to be simple and clear-cut. However, as you can tell, I think there are very major differences. A comatose person has a history of mind; a fetus does not. A comatose person may have had (and even expressed) the desire not to die; a fetus was never capable of wanting to live. A comatose person has had time to establish memories and relationships; a fetus has not. A comatose person is undergoing an interruption of thought; a fetus has never had a thought. A comatose person has made moral choices; a fetus has merely grown as blindly and mindlessly as a turnip.
This only goes back again to the problem of distinguishing fetuses from other lumps of unthinking human tissue that have never had, and may never have, a thought, such as tumours, somatic cells, unfused gametes, or anything else that might one day be induced to pluripotency or otherwise cloned. Why do they not deserve the same moral rights as the unthinking fetus?
I will say without equivocation that my cat is absolutely more intelligent than a newly fertilized zygote. And a person in a coma with a brain which could function is a person, but a body in a coma with a brain damaged irreparably is not a person but a living cadaver, one that should be granted all the dignity of an object which holds importance to a number of people who care about it, but not as a person in any way.
Personhood as a concept is nebulous, anyway, and there is no moment which marks the beginning of life any more than there is an answer to whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Conception is not a magical moment where non-person human tissue becomes a person. It's a moment where two human gametes fuse to form a zygote, a cell which, given the right environmental conditions, nutrition and a thousand things going right (most of which don't more often than not), eventually gets born with cognitive capacity, which then requires another set of conditions and nutrition in order to develop into what we consider a person.
A box of cake mix is not a cake. It does not become a cake when you add egg, milk and oil to it in a mixing bowl. It does not become a cake when you pour it into the cake pan. As it cooks in the oven, complex things happen within it where it proceeds along a gradient from definitively not a cake to definitely a cake. Then it comes out and has to get finished, frosting, decoration gets applied, and it's definitely a cake.
Yet you cannot point to a precise moment in time where you can say, 'before this instant, it was not a cake, now it is'. So why is throwing away cake mix equivalent to throwing away a cake?
Personhood, intelligence and thought is a product of the brain. We know this because changes in the brain, whether chemical, electrical or physical, cause magnificiently noticable changes in personhood. The human brain, with its systems of information processing, capacity for abstract reasoning, thought, intent-formation, reaction, and interaction, is the seat of personhood.
Embryo has no brain = not a person.
As far as I have seen, any argument otherwise is nothing more than an emotional appeal and a gut feeling, and has no basis in logic and scientific knowledge.
What about a one-day-old newborn? Or a newborn that immediately goes into a coma? Human or not human? Ok to terminate?
Ayer
" Personhood as a concept is nebulous, anyway, and there is no moment which marks the beginning of life any more than there is an answer to whether the chicken or the egg came first. " --Zi
I'm sorry, but I feel I must make the argument that the egg came before the chicken, for the embryo that mutated into the modern chicken was contained within an egg laid by the modern chicken's ancestor.
I also apologize for this slight thread-derailment.
We humans want to put things into nice neat categories; while nature doesn't give a shit what we want - she is happy with continuums. We want black and white; nature gives us shades of gray. Our minds impose categories on continuums all the time (think about the colors of the visible spectrum or racial groupings). We want to believe that our imposed categories reflect some deep reality but actually, when looked at carefully, they are just arbitrary - we chose where to draw the lines.
"What about a one-day-old newborn? Or a newborn that immediately goes into a coma? Human or not human? Ok to terminate?"
Again, it depends on what exact definition of "human" we are using. I assume you mean a "person," a being who possesses "human rights" that, morally, must be respected?
If this is what you mean, I would not call a one-day-old infant a "person." However, I would *not* say that it's okay to kill it, because "birth" seem to me to be a reasonable cut-off point, for various reasons. I'd be happy to discuss them, but it seems irrelevant at this stage, given the much larger issues that we still haven't resolved.
Perhaps we need to boil this down to a more basic level. For example, I can't help but notice that the pro-life folks are very fond of bombarding we pro-choice folks with questions, which we invariably answer in considerable detail. Meanwhile, the questions asked by the pro-choice people are often ignored.
Example; pro-life people have asked us what criteria we should use to determine "personhood," and we pro-choice folks have all explained our position.
Let's try and get to the heart of the matter - to all our pro-life folks out there, my question is this:
What criteria do you think we should use to determine whether a given thing is a "person"?
Even if we were concieved compleatly sentient I'm not sure pro-life would be moral. To me, as a transhumanist, the important concept is control over your own body. Does another life form have the right to force you to sacrifice your metabolic processes for their own gestation? Pregenency is certaintly a drain on the body and potentially risky no doubt, does any creature have the right to force another to go through that without their consent? If it were an alien who reproduced via implanted spores (like in the movie Alien) that was sentient would removing it before it gestated be just?
"does any creature have the right to force another to go through that without their consent?"
The consent occurs when the sex occurs; I believe in the law it is called "assuming the risk"
Oh, you mean like when I consent to die when I get in my car?
Or when I consent to my house catching on fire when I light a candle?
Or when I consent to cancer when I smoke?
Or when I consent to being shot if I join the military and serve in active duty?
Or when I consent to being ripped off by a crazy seller when I buy things on eBay?
"Oh, you mean like when I consent to die when I get in my car?"
No, more like you assume the risk if you pass a sign that says "danger--bride on verge of collapse" and you keep driving anyway
"Or when I consent to my house catching on fire when I light a candle?"
No, more like you assume the risk if you light a candle after you have been told there may be a gas leak.
"Or when I consent to cancer when I smoke?"
That one's actually about right.
"Or when I consent to being shot if I join the military and serve in active duty?"
You certainly assume that risk; you don't hear military people complaining "that's outrageous--there was violence in that war zone!"
"Or when I consent to being ripped off by a crazy seller when I buy things on eBay?"
No, more like you assume the risk if you have evidence that the seller has ripped off 50% of his customers in the past.
“…more like you assume the risk if you have evidence that the seller has ripped off 50% of his customers in the past.”
Here we see how your argument breaks down: The risk is, of course, nowhere near 50%. There’s a vast difference between engaging in a behaviour that’s very likely to have an unwanted consequence, and a behaviour that has a small chance of such consequences.
If I buy something on eBay, there’s a small chance I will be ripped off, but clearly I am not consenting to it by accepting that said small risk exists. Of course, in that unlikely event I can effectively abort the transaction by involving my credit card company and/or a court of law…
"Of course, in that unlikely event I can effectively abort the transaction by involving my credit card company and/or a court of law…"
Of course! That's why soldiers are routinely allowed to abort their service early whenever they get a gunshot wound...because we know that the military has nothing to do with shooting, just like sex has nothing to do with pregnancy. How unreasonable to expect soldiers to know that ahead of time?
“That's why soldiers are routinely allowed to abort their service early whenever they get a gunshot wound...because we know that the military has nothing to do with shooting, just like sex has nothing to do with pregnancy.”
Soldiers who sign up do not consent to get shot; they enlist in spite of the risk and, during their service, do their best not to get shot. If they do get shot, they expect to receive medical care, and yes, if the injury is serious, medical leave or discharge.
I find it rather comical that you launch so many yet such feeble attempts at shooting down metaphors that illustrate a tangent to the main argument. I sort of wish that this blogging system supported threaded comments.
"they enlist in spite of the risk and, during their service, do their best not to get shot. If they do get shot, they expect to receive medical care"
They do so knowingly assuming the risk that they will get shot, and do not regard themselves as a "victim." Similarly when people wishing to avoid pregnancy have sex they do so in spite of the risk (while knowingly assuming the risk) and do their best not to get pregnant; if they do get pregnant, they should receive medical care in seeing that pregnancy to term (at which point they can avail themselves of the adoption process). Surely you know this is the reason why pregnancy due to rape is considered a special case? Because in that case there was no knowing assumption of the risk; the woman is truly a victim.
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