Brownback: "Abortions for Rape Victims? I don't think s

[Gil Hamilton]

Well, if you are using self-awareness as a milestone, then the milestone is set some months after the baby is born. Developmentally, infants don't become really self-aware or aware of anything beyond basic immediate stimulus for a couple of months while their brains are wiring for it. Like any newborn animal, they eat, shit, and sleep while their brains take in stimulus to continue developing.

Thus, I'm not sure that self-awareness is a very good milestone. The problem lies in... what is a good milestone for personhood? I don't even think anyone has agreed on what "personhood" even is.

Though, frankly, they are never going to. I don't think that any Republican politician would ever seriously ban abortion, because it would be political suicide for the party to do so. If they ever actually managed to completely ban abortion or completely ban gay marriage, they'd have to figure out how to get out single issue "values" conservatives, who are only supporting them because of those issues. They need these issues to stay in the game, which is why none of them are ever going to get rid of Roe v. Wade.

[Flagg]

By the way, accusing someone of being hypocritical isn't really an argument in of itself. It's basically admitting you can't attack the truth of his proposition, so you have to resort to attacking him with an ad hominem.

That depends on the type of hypocrisy you are accusing him of. If he says one thing yet does another, he might still be right. However, if he has a self-contradictory position (which most "moderates" do, on the subject of abortion), then it is not a fallacy at all to point out that his position is self-contradictory and therefore cannot be correct.

Put it another way, you can be hypocritical and still be right.

Not in the case of people who claim that a two day-old fetus should be granted the same rights as any person while simultaneously saying it should be OK for rape victims to get abortions. That is a self-contradictory position, and it is therefore impossible for it to be correct.

But isn't it prefferable that one be a hypocrit in that instance, rather than being in favor of forcing women to have their rapists child?

[Edi]

Higher brain functions or cognitive brain functions do not equal full self-awareness, and those are the most reasonable benchmark to use. Cognitive brain functions start appearing sometime around five months or a bit earlier, but before five and a half months, a prematurely born baby is incapable of survival even with all the tech we have. Even then, survival for the 5½ month olds is very low, but it increases steadily the more time the baby has to develop in the womb before birth.

There are a number of factors to consider, and they are 1) the cognitive functions, 2) survivability, 3) the body control issue and 4) mother's health issues.

At the early stages, 1 and 2 are completely missing, so 3 is the only factor
Roughly at the halfway point 1 starts appearing and gains strength the more time passes, and so does 2, which means that the strength of factor 3 starts going down the more time passes. Number 4 generally trumps 1 and 2 and in conjunction with 3 tends to reduce any anti-abortion arguments to total shreds in objective analysis.

[Surlethe]

Cognitive brain functions start appearing sometime around five months or a bit earlier, but before five and a half months, a prematurely born baby is incapable of survival even with all the tech we have.

Do you have a source for this?

[Starglider]

Well, if you are using self-awareness as a milestone, then the milestone is set some months after the baby is born. Developmentally, infants don't become really self-aware or aware of anything beyond basic immediate stimulus for a couple of months while their brains are wiring for it. Like any newborn animal, they eat, shit, and sleep while their brains take in stimulus to continue developing.

Logical conclusion; babies aren't really people. From a strictly materialist viewpoint there's a gradual development of function from a few months past conception (where the forming brain starts to actually process stuff) to about age seven where kids are for all intents and purposes fully sapient. But of course try saying that and the rationalise-our-instincts-and-call-it-morality crowd will be screaming for your head.

[Plekhanov]

I'm pretty sure this has been mentioned here before, but this is actually a more consistent application of the "life begins at conception" belief; if that notion were really true, then it shouldn't matter whether or not that life was conceived as the result of rape.

The "abortion debate" isn't really about "the woman's right to choose", it's about "when does the sanctity of human life begin". But screaming about "the woman's right to control her body" seems to make for a more compelling sound-bite than "we don't think life begins at conception".

Actually I think you'll find that for many people, myself included, the principle issue when it comes to abortion is women's right to exercise control over what happens to their own bodies.

So you're cool with third-trimester abortions, then?

I think women should have abortion on demand, I doubt this would lead to third-trimester abortions outside the conditions in which they currently occur (ie. health of the mother is endangered or someone very wrong with the foetus) as the chances of a medical team agreeing to carry out a third trimester abortion in any other circumstances is minimal and any woman wanting an abortion would be easily able to procure one well before the 3rd trimester.

[Elaro]

I never understood why the Catholics abhor birth control or contraception and having recently had a bad personal experience with them, they're the most smug, inconsistent and backstabbing prickstained morons I ever came across.

"Outbreed. Outnumber. Outlive." At least, that was pre-Vatican II policy. I think. I hope.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Some of my confusion on this issue involves self-awareness. A lot of modern utilitarian ethicists, as well as scientists studying primates, use the concept to differentiate between the moral value of humans in relation to non-human animals.

They seem to place a lot of emphasis on it (e.g. Dawkins and Singer in the Great Ape Project etc). They argue that animals that are not self-aware or possess it a very small degree are not on the same level of moral consideration because they lack the capacity to form many welfare interests which preference utilitarianism weighs. I think one they mention is the right to life. In order to have a right to life, the being must at least know it exists and have the capacity to desire to continue to live or have some conception of continuing existence. The right in that sense is a protection of their interest in continuing to live. A cockroach wouldn't likely have a strong claim to a right to life seems follows from their arguments; you cannot maximize their equal preference for continued life if they cannot form or conceive of one.

Not being self-aware to a high degree I wouldn't think makes a being have no moral value at all, though. They seem only to indicate that self-aware beings should be given higher consideration. In the case of abortion, they advocate that the fetus doesn't have a strong claim to a right to life.

We could go by higher brain functions, as someone mentioned, but they seem also to indicate that the two tend to correspond. Whether this is true or not I don't know. I don't know if that would also create further problems of consistency. When these ethicists tend to look at self-awareness, they often link it to higher level thought going on.


The definition of personhood I have seen most used in bioethics is: a self-conscious being with a sense of continuation.


Even if it weren't self aware, you should be careful because you can still cause it pain. If you are going to cause something objective damage and pain, you should have a good reason for doing it.

[Surlethe]

I never understood why the Catholics abhor birth control or contraception

The bog-standard Vatican position is that sex and marriage exist only for procreation, not for recreation. Therefore, any and all sex should be for the sole purpose of conceiving children. Since birth control, abortion, and contraceptives all pretty much stem the production of children, the Catholic Church condemns them all. For a more thorough introduction, see here.

I don't agree with it, myself; in fact, I think you'll find that at least a significant minority of Catholics disagree, don't think about, or simply don't follow this particular teaching.

and having recently had a bad personal experience with them, they're the most smug, inconsistent and backstabbing prickstained morons I ever came across.

Yeah, fuck you too.

[JME2]

Here's a dilemma I'd love to pose to the fucker live and in person. Okay, suppouse a women is raped. You believe against abortion, that...

"We need to protect innocent life. Period,"

Yes. Okay, so if a woman is raped and the baby resulting from the rape is destined to become, oh let's say, the Anti-Christ. So, knowing that the infant will become the scourge of Christianity and the world, is the child still innocent or do we nip this problem in the bud?



Seriously though, fuckers like this can go hang.

[Uraniun235]

You're forgetting that the arrival of the Anti-Christ heralds the return of the Lord and the salvation of all good God-Fearing Folk... so, yeah, I imagine they'd be all for protecting him as much as any other.

[JME2]

My bad; didn't take that into account.

[Edi]

Cognitive brain functions start appearing sometime around five months or a bit earlier, but before five and a half months, a prematurely born baby is incapable of survival even with all the tech we have.

Do you have a source for this?

Read it from a Time Magazine article a few years ago. Shouldn't be too difficult to find other corroborating sources. If my memory of that article is correct, precursor spinal column starts developing at around 42 days and brain activity at 85 and cognitive functions start developing somewhere around 110 days or so.

It's also very much in line what I learned in high school biology courses, there was a whole course on human development, but I don't remember the textbook having the dates. Then again, it was 13 years ago.

As for prematurely born babies, 5½ months is survivable, but very rare. For reference, Innerbrat is one such person, she has stated as much publicly.

[Turin]

Well, if you are using self-awareness as a milestone, then the milestone is set some months after the baby is born. Developmentally, infants don't become really self-aware or aware of anything beyond basic immediate stimulus for a couple of months while their brains are wiring for it. Like any newborn animal, they eat, shit, and sleep while their brains take in stimulus to continue developing.

Thus, I'm not sure that self-awareness is a very good milestone. The problem lies in... what is a good milestone for personhood? I don't even think anyone has agreed on what "personhood" even is.

I would argue that the argument over "personhood" is an example of the debate being defined by one side -- the religious / absolutist. If you define the morality of the action by whether or not the fetus is, at any point in its development, a "person", then there's no real means of making the argument except in terms of semantics. What does it mean to be "self-aware" or "human"? These are locations on a continuum, and no one is going to have an objective way of defining the location on that continuum.

If instead you define the morality of the act of abortion in terms of utilitarian ethics, the argument becomes entirely different. Does the fetus experience suffering? How does any such suffering compare to the suffering experienced by the mother prior to, during, or after the fetus is born?* Coming at it from this direction, there's no need to say "first term is okay but second and third terms are out." One can even make an argument in some rare cases for infanticide -- for example in the case of a child that is born so severely disabled to the point where it's life would be a very short one filled only with agonizing pain, although hopefully such a child would have been aborted before it was born to such an experience.

With this analysis, any given decision to have an abortion becomes a decision that needs to be made by a woman and her doctor, rather than some politician or priest with no connection to the actual consequences of the action.

* I can't claim this argument is entirely originally mine, as the details are largely inspired by Richard Dawkin's discussion of abortion in The God Delusion. I'm certainly prepared to defend the position, however.

[Cairber]

I never understood why the Catholics abhor birth control or contraception

It stems from a couple of things. First, church doctrine says that the procreative and unitive aspects of sex cannot be separated. So, they argue, birth control does this obviously by taking away the procreative.

Then there is the abortion issue which applies to the pill. Hormonal birth control prevents pregnancy in three ways: it thickens the cervical mucous so that the sperm cannot reach the egg, it stops eggs from being released (usually), and it makes the uterine lining unfit for a fertilized egg to implant. So the church argues that, because ovulation can sometimes still occur, an abortion can take place if a fertilized egg is prevented from implanting.

[Darth RyanKCR]

In introducing Brownback, Wood criticized Catholic politicians who fall short on doing just that on issues such as abortion.

"I don't know about you, but this stuff by many Catholic politicians who say, 'I'm personally opposed, but.' But what?" Wood said. "You should have the integrity to be consistent in both the personal and public life," he said.

Several other attendees at the conference agreed.

"You can't separate your political life and your Christian life," said Barry LeMay from San Jose, Calif.

"I think if a politician's going to run for office claiming to be Catholic, they need to ascribe to everything that the Catholic Church teaches," said Michael Scheuren of St. Petersburg Beach, Fla.

It's interesting how these knuckle-dragging troglodytes are seemingly incapable of recognizing that there's a difference between believing in a principle for your personal conduct and using force to make other people obey that principle too.

I never understood this line of reasoning. You pick and choose when it is valid. If a murderer followed this reasoning he would say the same thing back to you. Don't use force to make him obey your principle of not murdering.

[Darth Wong]

I never understood this line of reasoning. You pick and choose when it is valid. If a murderer followed this reasoning he would say the same thing back to you. Don't use force to make him obey your principle of not murdering.

Except that the anti-murder principle has an objective basis, unlike a personal religious belief. Don't be an idiot.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

I would argue that the argument over "personhood" is an example of the debate being defined by one side -- the religious / absolutist. If you define the morality of the action by whether or not the fetus is, at any point in its development, a "person", then there's no real means of making the argument except in terms of semantics. What does it mean to be "self-aware" or "human"? These are locations on a continuum, and no one is going to have an objective way of defining the location on that continuum.

If instead you define the morality of the act of abortion in terms of utilitarian ethics, the argument becomes entirely different. Does the fetus experience suffering? How does any such suffering compare to the suffering experienced by the mother prior to, during, or after the fetus is born?* Coming at it from this direction, there's no need to say "first term is okay but second and third terms are out." One can even make an argument in some rare cases for infanticide -- for example in the case of a child that is born so severely disabled to the point where it's life would be a very short one filled only with agonizing pain, although hopefully such a child would have been aborted before it was born to such an experience.

Well, personhood ends up having an impact on utilitarian ethics. The modern form of Utilitarianism: Preference Utilitarianism, is affected by it. It is assumed that an organism with introspective awareness and social awareness can be greater affected by suffering than an organism which has neither.

It's not a case that personhood is the ultimate criterion for being able to do anything to it. You can blend Preference and Hedonistic Utilitarianism for different levels of cognition. Many animals can experience pain, but I don't know if they can all comprehend it to the same level. Not all animals can have the same desires, preferences, etc. either.

Personhood is a shorthand for judging the capacity for preferences, comparing what one organism has to lose compared to another one. For instance, a human person can create long-term desires, preferences to continue living. It can create a whole future of desires, while an organism that has no self-awareness like that is a lot more limited.

By killing a person, you are violating a lot more of its preferences, and the preferences are often very different from the desires of non-persons (the objective of P.U. is to maximize welfare preferences and given equal consideration to preferences that are similar/overlap.

I don't see it as equal in severity to cause pain to a fetus as to an adult, since the adult tends to have a high degree of introspective awareness.


* I can't claim this argument is entirely originally mine, as the details are largely inspired by Richard Dawkin's discussion of abortion in The God Delusion. I'm certainly prepared to defend the position, however.[/quote]

I agree with Dawkin's argument largely as well. He seems to be a strong Utilitarian advocate. Did you know he's part of Singer's G.A.P? I thought that was neat.

Many people don't approve of the classical utilitarian opinion originally offered by Dawkins and Singer, which is one reason why he developed the new Preference Utilitarian/Classical model. The implications for the treatment of non-human animals wasn't accepted. They had to find a way to separate humans from other animals by expanding the utilitarian framework. No one would accept that you should treat all animal pain equally, which is what utilitarianism originally would require given the assumption that all animals that could experience it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The ironic thing is that Roe Vs. Wade actually said that the overriding interest was for the state in the third trimester, the states in the second, and the mother in the first; it was actually a very conservative ruling, suggesting that it was the absolute interest of the federal government to preserve life in the third trimester (which can mean abortion to save the life of the mother), with the issue being one that the court, with the knowledge of the time, couldn't decide in the second, and the first trimester obviously being a situation where the mother's rights were triumphant in all circumstances.

What this means is that except for health clauses it's possible to actually ban abortion entirely in the second and third trimesters, if all of the state governments agree to do so in the second; considering the fact that when higher functions begin is rather fuzzy, this may be a good idea. I understand that most European countries have extensive limitations to late-term abortion or ban it entirely.

The key there is that abortions are far less necessary than in the United States because those countries have a coherent policy for teaching safe and effective means of birth control, whereas no such thing exists in the US.

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't know about that, Marina. The third trimester is the brains big growth spurt actually happens, where the initial wiring for various function really gets cemented. In fact, it's practically what defines the third trimester. Before that, the brain is still basically in a growth phase where its replicating neurons and various in-brain organs are taking form (the completion of the hypothalamus is a second trimester event).

I'm curious what you consider a "higher brain function". Could you elaborate on that?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I don't know about that, Marina. The third trimester is the brains big growth spurt actually happens, where the initial wiring for various function really gets cemented. In fact, it's practically what defines the third trimester. Before that, the brain is still basically in a growth phase where its replicating neurons and various in-brain organs are taking form (the completion of the hypothalamus is a second trimester event).

I'm curious what you consider a "higher brain function". Could you elaborate on that?

I don't suggest true sentience, but even if a baby in the late stages of the second trimester is only as mentally functional as a simple mammal, we don't exactly approve of putting pets to sleep for random and frivolous reasons, do we?

The jury is still out on the second trimester, I'll grant.

[Justforfun000]

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:

I don't suggest true sentience, but even if a baby in the late stages of the second trimester is only as mentally functional as a simple mammal, we don't exactly approve of putting pets to sleep for random and frivolous reasons, do we?

I tend to agree with you on this. I think if the baby is allowed to reach the second stage trimester, it should be considered formed enough to be considered a near-personage. It just doesn't seem right to terminate a pregnancy at this stage. While that may be just emotionalism talking, I still think there is enough evidence to consider towards becoming truly "alive" at this stage and wouldn't this also be a relatively serious risk towards the female to abort at this period?

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't suggest true sentience, but even if a baby in the late stages of the second trimester is only as mentally functional as a simple mammal, we don't exactly approve of putting pets to sleep for random and frivolous reasons, do we?

The jury is still out on the second trimester, I'll grant.

We put a great many animals to sleep for reasons far less serious and pressing than many women who get abortions in their second trimester who get reviled for it. And many breeds of dogs have more sophisticated minds than a human baby will develop for more than six months post-birth.

When women get abortions in their second trimester, its usually not for "random and frivolous" reasons, nor on any sort of whim. I wouldn't trivialize abortion that much.

[Sephirius]

Maybe a big burly black man should rape and knock up his daughters. See how he reacts then.

[Starglider]

I don't suggest true sentience, but even if a baby in the late stages of the second trimester is only as mentally functional as a simple mammal, we don't exactly approve of putting pets to sleep for random and frivolous reasons, do we?

From what I've read, very few women have late-term abortions for 'random and frivolous' reasons. The accounts I've read are almost universally 'it was a difficult, agonising decision that affected me for years afterwards'.

It will be interesting to see what happens if and when we develop the 'artificial womb' technology to support an embryo of any stage (up to and including a completely artificial pregnancy). The pro-life people will campaign to have every removed embryo raised artificially, and most mothers probably would not object to this, but would that cause and adoption crisis?