What I’d really like to see is for people from both sides to sit down and have a civil conversation about it, but that’s not looking likely. The last time I saw a debate on the subject, it ended with someone ragequitting Facebook. Failing that, I decided to write a dialogue between a pro-choice character and a pro-life character. It’s been done before, of course; Peter Kreeft’s The Unaborted Socrates was one of the formative books of my childhood. And that brings up the next problem, namely writing a dialogue honestly when you disagree with one side. Who gets to stand for the Wrong side and get zinged? How long will it take before they become a blatant strawman?
Well, in my case I have the perfect candidate. This is an issue on which I have changed my mind; therefore, my interlocutors will both be myself, on either side of the change. I’m not claiming that everybody – or anybody but me – on either side holds the opinion I present on their behalf here. I do promise that they both honestly represent my opinion on the subject at different times in my life. I know myself well enough to know that if I were to meet myself I would ignore any topic to hand and try to figure out how the time loop I’d obviously run into worked. Therefore, the dialogue takes place over the internet and neither side is aware that they are the same person.
TheHatMan is approximately me at age 19, but I haven’t pinned him down to an exact point in my life. Also, he’s magically clued-up on things like Google which weren’t around in 1997. However, a content note: he is even less mindful of privilege than I am and at one point makes an inappropriate rape analogy. VeryRarelyStable is obviously me now, except that wherever TheHatMan discusses things in his own life VeryRarelyStable has conveniently forgotten them (and vice versa).
TheHatMan:
OK, I’ll go first. I have concerns about abortion. For one thing, it worries me that a woman might be coerced, say by her partner, into having an abortion when she doesn’t want one. Or that a New Right government might force women on the dole who get pregnant to have abortions rather than support the baby at the taxpayer’s expense.
VeryRarelyStable:
Those sound to me like good things to be concerned about, but bad reasons for banning the procedure. To draw an analogy, you wouldn’t want to ban condoms just because a sexual offender might use them to avoid leaving DNA evidence behind. But is that really the cause of your discomfort?
TheHatMan:
Then there’s the fact that in India and China, which means nearly half the world’s population, abortion is used as a tool of misogyny – it’s overwhelmingly female babies that are aborted, following amniocentesis to determine gender.
VeryRarelyStable:
So not the real source of your discomfort, then. Because again, that’s not a problem caused by abortion. Before there were abortion clinics, the common practice was infanticide. Can I ask you a question? Supposing your concerns – your real concerns – about abortion were met, what would it look like? What would people be doing instead of having abortions, to solve the problems that abortion is used to solve?
TheHatMan:
Well, I guess there would be free contraception provided by the State for anybody that wanted it. There would be comprehensive sex education in high schools, addressing both how to use contraceptives and also stuff around sexual attitudes and responsibility and so on. And there would be State support for people who are struggling financially so that they could afford to feed the child. And if we’re talking ideally and I can imagine this is some time in the future, there would be medical technology to allow babies extracted from the womb to be kept alive from an earlier stage of development, and obviously a programme for connecting them with adoptive families.
VeryRarelyStable:
OK. You seem comparatively sane. So far. Now a follow-up question. What exactly makes abortion so much worse than any of those? The contraception one is just as prone to the concern in your first post about a neoliberal government forcing it on unemployed people; in fact that very scheme has already been proposed by our beloved Social Development Minister.
TheHatMan:
Hang on, if we’re doing this by asking each other probing questions, I think it’s my turn. Why do I seem “comparatively sane”? Comparative to what? What were you afraid I was going to say? What unacceptable moral beliefs did you think I was going to reveal, and what would have been unacceptable about them?
VeryRarelyStable:
Fair question. Had you been representative of any prominent anti-abortion organization I can think of off the top of my head, you would have said something like: “Young women would stop having sex outside of marriage and dressing provocatively to tempt men, and those nasty feminists who obviously hate children and families because why else would you be a lesbian would repent and turn to the Lord and stop advocating murdering babies.”
TheHatMan:
Well, gee, it’s nice to know you’re not prejudiced against people of different beliefs or anything.
VeryRarelyStable:
Honestly. Google Family First or Right To Life, and tell me that’s not pretty much their platform.
TheHatMan:
And is it your impression that that’s representative of Christians or pro-lifers on the whole?
VeryRarelyStable:
Does that count as another probing question? Because I still have one hanging for you to answer.
TheHatMan:
Which was what again? Ah, right. What makes abortion so much worse than contraception or adoption. Honestly – the problem for me is I can’t see that any kind of metaphysical break happens at birth. The baby is unambiguously a baby one hour after birth, and it’s pretty much the same as it was two hours previously. I mean, apart from that it’s started breathing and the umbilical cord has been severed, but I can’t for the life of me see how those make you not a person beforehand. And the same is true if you compare it at any two hours apart during gestation, all the way back to conception. So either you have to say that the change from non-person to person has nothing to do with what the baby actually is, or else that at some point during that process it is some kind of halfway-person. Either way there are disturbing metaphysical implications.
TheHatMan:
Now, your turn. Do you think Family First or whoever represent Christians and pro-lifers?
VeryRarelyStable:
They claim to. And I don’t see many moderate pro-lifers standing up and saying “Well, we disagree with abortion but we’re fine with contraception and sex education, we’re OK with people making their own sexual choices and we have no problem with non-standard sexual orientations, plus we think it’s wrong to harass women at clinics.” Individually, like you just did, yes. Publicly disowning the extremists, no.
TheHatMan:
Re the harassment, what you’ve got to remember is that these people are absolutely convinced that abortion is murder. If you genuinely thought you were saving lives through protest, you’d do whatever you could too, and not worry particularly much about the feelings or convenience of the people you were obstructing.
VeryRarelyStable:
But if I thought abortion was murder, it would also follow that I would be saving lives through campaigning for contraception and sex education, and Family First et al. do just the opposite. Which strongly suggests that it’s not about saving lives, it’s about controlling women’s sexuality – reducing the available options to virginity, marriage, and public shame.
TheHatMan:
So your theory is that all these people who are so passionate and angry and motivated to save unborn babies are actually making the whole thing up because what they secretly really want is to make women’s lives miserable? Not buying it.
TheHatMan:
Again, imagine if you really sincerely thought abortion was murder. I mean really believed it, that’s what it was to you. Not making it up. Not, it was a convenient political position. That to you abortion is killing a person. OK? Now let’s say you also believe it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage, which a lot of people do. Not necessarily wrong like murder, but still wrong. Can you see what it might look like to have a bunch of people saying “But if you don’t let us keep committing murder, you have to come up with some way that we can still get the same sexual pleasures without consequence”?
TheHatMan:
I say this not with the intent to offend but to make it clear just what these people’s position really is. Imagine that there was an organized crime ring kidnapping young women, having sex with them and then murdering them. And you are pleading with them to let the women go. And their response is “We have to kill them, otherwise we would have to take responsibility for having sex with them.” Now that’s not how I see it, I want to make that very clear, but if you were totally convinced that abortion was murder, that’s what it would look like to you to be told “Well, you have to allow for people’s sexual freedom” as a reason for continuing to provide abortions.
VeryRarelyStable:
Are you done? HatMan, I’m going to ask you to respect basic netiquette and not rapid-post so that others can’t get a word in edgeways. For the record, yes, that was a tasteless and offensive analogy and you could have taken the time to come up with something more appropriate.
VeryRarelyStable:
I see what you mean, but you notice that in that scenario the crime ring is committing kidnapping and rape as well as murder. Those are not things you should invoke just casually unless there is something equivalently horrible in the situation you are using them as an analogy for. And you do realize that a lot of women getting abortions are rape survivors, don’t you? And you just compared them to rapists. Speech is a social act, dude. Your words have consequences.
VeryRarelyStable:
...Look, I can see you’re still online. The other thing wrong with that analogy is that abortion is a medical procedure. I don’t see anything medical about your crime ring. Now you’ve said you’re all good with free contraception and sex education, but yet you’re comfortable equating non-monogamy with organized rape. So I have to wonder to just what extent you think a person’s sex life should be their own free choice. Because if you are in the “Women should just keep their legs together if they don’t want babies” camp, the disagreement between us on that is going to be too deep for there to be much point talking through your metaphysical issues.
TheHatMan:
I don’t know that I want to be part of a discussion where I’m going to be accused of things I haven’t done. I actually find that quite badly upsetting. I made it quite clear, I thought, that that wasn’t my own opinion. I was just trying to see things from somebody else’s perspective. I’m sorry I caused offence and I didn’t mean to upset anybody. I do not think premarital sex is equivalent to rape and kidnapping.
VeryRarelyStable:
I do understand that. I have a similar social anxiety. I didn’t intend to trigger it. But you need to understand that other people also have social anxieties, and in particular rape survivors have big anxiety and trauma issues around rape, and you need to be respectful of those and think before you speak. Communication is a two-way street. What you mean doesn’t magically shine through from behind what you actually say.
TheHatMan:
OK.
VeryRarelyStable:
You know the bit where you said “that’s not how I see it, I want to make that very clear”? You didn’t get what you wanted. I still don’t know how you do see sexual ethics. Because, ironically, I’m afraid you’re right, some people do think non-monogamous sex is like rape. I once made the mistake of reading the comments thread on an article about the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and one of the commenters there said “Sure, it’s wrong for priests to sexually abuse children, but it’s not that big of an issue, children sexually abuse themselves all the time.” So you will please excuse me for not automatically assuming you’re not someone like that, when you make a comparison that that person would have agreed with.
TheHatMan:
Well, if you’re asking me, do I think masturbation is equivalent to child abuse, the answer is no I don’t.
VeryRarelyStable:
Listen. You took umbrage at the idea that the pro-life movement is about controlling women. But if you believe that sex before marriage is wrong, or sex with more than one partner in your lifetime is wrong, or that sex with someone of the same gender as yourself is wrong, then at the very least that has to mean you wish people would stop doing those things. If you don’t think that, I’m not sure what “morally wrong” means. Now, when we think something is morally wrong, we don’t usually think of it as coercion when we stop people from doing it. So if you held a purity ethic about sex – if you thought that a sex act could be safe, private, consensual, not violate anyone’s trust, and still be morally wrong – you might very well sincerely say “I don’t believe in controlling women” when actually you had every intention of preventing them from doing those particular acts. So I’m going to ask you what you do think about sexual ethics. Scrolling back through the thread, I see you said you thought sex education should include “stuff around sexual attitudes and responsibility and so on”. What did you mean by that?
TheHatMan:
A couple of years ago I would have had a very definite answer for you, but there are some things I’m not sure about any more. I’m a Christian, OK? I am still sure of that. And the way I was brought up, sex outside of marriage is a sin. But I’ve had to rethink some things lately about what I believe. For one thing the Bible does say “flee fornication” but there isn’t anywhere that defines what “fornication” is; in context it might mean no more than “don’t use prostitutes”. And that whole passage I think is kind of a purity prescription for devoted Christians; it doesn’t say that non-Christians would be committing sin if they have sex and they’re not married. I’ve been trying lately to find the spirit of the Bible instead of being wedded to the letter of it. That’s where I’m coming from.
TheHatMan:
That being said, I do think sex is better saved for committed relationships. I am aware of how sexual desire can warp your judgement about what’s a good idea and what’s not, in the heat of the moment, so to speak. If it’s a couple of people who don’t really know each other, doesn’t the strength of that urge make it easy to think only of the sexual sensations and not of who they are as a person? To answer your question, I wouldn’t have sex education prescribe Christian chastity to teenagers as the only option. I would want it to include messages like “You don’t ever need to give sex to get love” and “Pressuring your girlfriend into sex doesn’t make you a man”. By the way, even in the most fundamentalist parts of my Christian upbringing it was never about “Women shouldn’t have sex before marriage”. It was always for men and women both.
VeryRarelyStable:
It depends what you mean by “not thinking of who they are as a person”. Obviously you can’t contemplate someone’s inner character and hopes and dreams if you don’t know what those are. But if you mean, does the person at any point appear to cease to be a person and become just a body, the answer is no. Not unless you thought that already.
VeryRarelyStable:
On the gender equality part, there’s the small problem that women get pregnant and men don’t. So if a man and woman have sex, and they live in a context where that’s not acceptable, it’s the woman who’s going to get “caught”. The man can simply walk away and deny all involvement, and the more unacceptable it is the stronger the motive for him to do so. That’s where the double standard comes from.
TheHatMan:
But isn’t it kind of obvious that for every woman who gets pregnant there’s a man involved somewhere, even if you don’t know who?
VeryRarelyStable:
Yes, but you can always blame it on some (perhaps imaginary) shady character, and never make the connection to the guy you think you know. So his social character is untouched. Whereas in the woman’s case you know it was her who did the bad thing. So even if in theory your sex prohibition is gender-equal, in practice it’s always women who get the worst of it.
TheHatMan:
I’m going to have to think about that a bit more.
VeryRarelyStable:
I heartily endorse that sentiment.
VeryRarelyStable:
There’s still the matter of sexual orientation. What are your feelings about people having sex with people the same gender as themselves? Or people whose gender isn’t binary?
TheHatMan:
My feeling, honestly, is that it makes me a bit uncomfortable to think about, and I’m afraid I don’t know how to talk to people when I feel uncomfortable. But that’s a feeling, not a moral judgement. My church teaches that homosexuality is an illness and we should be compassionate to people who have it. I’ve thought about it and thought about it and I honestly can’t see that there’s anything morally wrong with it. It’s in the Bible but, like I said, spirit not letter.
VeryRarelyStable:
I’m afraid I don’t have a great deal of patience for that kind of discomfort, because people who actually are gay suffer a lot more from it than you do. Obviously take whatever time you need to get over it, but remember you’re on the pleasant end of the attitude.
TheHatMan:
Hey, just because I’m straight doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced homophobia. I’ve been bullied because I fit into a lot of people’s stereotype of gay people – no girlfriend, prefer art to sports. But it’s not particularly relevant here, is it? You can’t get pregnant to a same-sex partner.
TheHatMan:
Sorry, I don’t mean to be insensitive, I only just realized I was presuming you were hetero and not speaking from experience.
VeryRarelyStable:
Oh, the only part where I was speaking from experience was that you can get over that discomfort if you take the trouble to acclimatize yourself. I’ve never been attracted to my own sex on a personal level. I’m mostly hetero in terms of physical attractions as well, with enough leeway in “mostly” that “I am straight” isn’t an important part of my self-concept any more. But I certainly do have heterosexual privilege, in that if I kiss my partner hello in public nobody’s going to scream hate at us.
VeryRarelyStable:
To try and bring this back to the topic – you did say you’d like to see adoption services taking infants who would otherwise have been aborted. Now we have better treatments for infertility, straight couples have less incentive to adopt. The families looking to adopt, especially in your high-biotech scenario, would be mostly same-sex couples.
TheHatMan:
I hadn’t thought of that. Can a gay couple raise a child as well as a hetero couple?
VeryRarelyStable:
Thank you for phrasing that as a question. Yes.
TheHatMan:
That wasn’t my next probing question, by the way.
VeryRarelyStable:
Go ahead, then.
TheHatMan:
Well, basically it’s: shouldn’t we give people a chance to live? This is why I really think it would be worth making an effort to extract embryos alive. My father was adopted. If his birth-mother had chosen to abort him, if that option had been legally available back then, he wouldn’t exist and neither would I.
VeryRarelyStable:
There’s a big honking problem with any arguments based on that principle. Let me give you a parallel one. My mother’s family came to New Zealand in 1957 because the UK’s economy was in the crapper. The economy was in the crapper largely because an enormous amount of production and infrastructure had been destroyed in World War II. Therefore, if Hitler had been removed from power before the war, my parents would never have met and I wouldn’t exist. Shall I conclude that it would have been a bad thing for Hitler to have been removed from power?
TheHatMan:
That’s not all that good of an analogy. Sure, you wouldn’t have been born, but presumably other people would have been who in fact haven’t. Whereas, while I’m sure you could come up with a scenario where somebody is born because my father wasn’t, that would never be more than a distant possibility, but it would be an absolute certainty that he and I wouldn’t.
VeryRarelyStable:
Right. A better analogy, then. As a preliminary – I would observe that it makes no difference to your concern whether the intercourse that began the pregnancy was consensual or not; a human life is a human life, yes? You aren’t about punishing women for having sex, you’ve said so yourself, and the only way it makes sense to have an exemption specifically for rape is if you are about punishing women for having sex but you’ll let them off if they didn’t mean it.
TheHatMan:
That feels a bit harsh but I guess it makes sense. I certainly would want an exemption if the mother’s life was in danger.
VeryRarelyStable:
Good. Now the analogy. Sure, aborting an embryo denies it the chance to live. But if it was conceived through rape, then preventing the rape also denies it the chance to live. I’m not going to insult you by asking whether you think preventing rape is a good or a bad thing. It follows that stopping someone from ever existing is not wronging the non-existent person. You have to already exist, to have the right to exist. The “giving them a chance to live” argument depends critically upon the idea that the embryo is a person who can meaningfully be said to have the human right to live. And you haven’t made a case for that yet.
VeryRarelyStable:
Now. A probing question for you. You just said you’d want an exemption if the woman’s life was in danger. That should remind you what abortion fundamentally is: a medical procedure. Women do not get abortions for the hell of it. These are people in dire need of medical care. Their lives may not always be in danger of being ended if the pregnancy continues, but you can bet they’re in danger of being ruined. You have metaphysical concerns about the exact status of the foetus; that’s OK. I’m not going to tell you you can’t think that way or that you can’t talk about it. But I am going to ask why your philosophical/religious quibbles should trump someone’s basic right to medical care.
TheHatMan:
That’s not a probing question at all, it’s an easy one. My “metaphysical concerns” are about whether the foetus is a person or not. That’s not exactly a minor distinction. I can see how having a child could ruin someone’s life, sure. But let’s suppose this has already happened; let’s suppose a family that is poor, starving, because there are too many kids to feed, and the mother is an emotional wreck and cannot give them the love they all need either, and to cope with that there are a couple of kids she just doesn’t show any affection to at all. You didn’t need to ask whether I think preventing rape is a good thing, and I don’t think I need to ask whether it would ever cross your mind to solve the problem by euthanasing (if that’s the word) the child she loves least. But why not? Because the child is a person and you don’t kill people except to save other people’s lives. One person’s right to medical care does not negate another person’s right to life. Therefore, if the foetus is a person, then it too has the right to life and abortion is the wrong answer no matter how much the mother might benefit from it.
VeryRarelyStable:
“Euthanizing” is now the accepted usage, I believe. So if you woke one morning to find somebody had been plugged into your body and had to use your blood supply and oxygen for nine months or they would die, all without your consent or wishes, you’d be cool with that?
TheHatMan:
“Euthanatizing” would surely be a more correctly formed derivative. No, I’d be far from cool with that, but I would feel morally obliged not to kill them.
VeryRarelyStable:
So it all comes down to, is the foetus a person or not?
TheHatMan:
That’s the crux of the matter. Precisely.
VeryRarelyStable:
And how confident are you that the answer is “yes”?
TheHatMan:
I’m not. But I don’t have to be. If there’s a chance that abortion kills people, then you shouldn’t do it, just in case. Otherwise you’re like, shall we say, a pest control agent who fumigates a building without checking whether it’s been completely evacuated.
VeryRarelyStable:
Ah, you’re a Peter Kreeft fan? The Unaborted Socrates?
TheHatMan:
You know it? How can you read The Unaborted Socrates and still be pro-choice?
VeryRarelyStable:
Didn’t the “why the foetus is not part of the mother” bit give you an insight into the general quality of his logic?
TheHatMan:
No, I thought that was an uncharacteristic slip-up on his part and the rest was OK. I don’t know why he didn’t just say “The foetus is genetically distinct from the mother and therefore not part of her.”
VeryRarelyStable:
For the benefit of anyone else reading this thread, Kreeft’s actual argument was “If the foetus is part of the mother, then once its feet develop we would have to say the mother had four feet, and if it’s male we’d have to say she had a penis. That sounds silly so it has to be wrong.” He has the abortion doctor character agree with Socrates and later, when they’re picturing their discussion as a boat-journey for reasons I forget, he calls that argument “a big waterfall with rocks at the bottom”. In reality, of course, while it would be a rather odd use of language to say that a pregnant woman has four feet and potentially a penis, it would neither contradict itself nor fall foul of the facts.
TheHatMan:
Which was kind of clumsy of him. But I don’t see that it invalidates his main point, which is that you don’t do things where you’re not sure you’re not killing people in the process.
VeryRarelyStable:
No, that’s not his main point, it’s a stepping-stone to his main point. Because he follows that up with the argument that conception must be the moment at which something truly new comes into being, because we use the word “conception” for it and that’s also the word we use for when thoughts pop into our heads out of nowhere.
VeryRarelyStable:
Some other highlights. He names the abortion doctor “Rex Herrod”, so, you know, really impartial starting-point right there. He insists there is an “essential” difference between women and men that goes deeper than “mere” physical features. At one point one of the other characters asks “Who’s to say who’s sane and who’s insane?” Socrates replies “You are, if you are an honest man” – i.e., he imputes any factual or philosophical queries of Kreeft’s concept of sanity to immorality on the part of the questioner. Oh, and when the modern philosopher argues that “every child should be a wanted child”, Socrates suggests we should “learn to want the ones we have” (which tells you that Kreeft hasn’t bothered to figure out what “wanted” means, and thinks it’s a matter of taste); the philosopher says “That was fast, you had no pity on that argument,” which is a really weird thing to say but of course Kreeft is setting it up for Socrates to retort “Abortion is also fast and has no pity on its victim.”
TheHatMan:
Then what does “wanted” mean?
VeryRarelyStable:
Well, up to about the ’70s it referred to the mother’s marital status. Nowadays it’s more a matter of whether you are mentally, physically, and financially capable of supporting a child. Not something you can willpower your way into.
VeryRarelyStable:
Then, when Herrod objects that an undifferentiated ball of cells just can’t be a person, Socrates says “What is it, then? an ape? a fish?” – as if a ball of cells can’t be, you know, a ball of cells. And that’s where the flaws and logical oddities in The Unaborted Socrates cease to be peripheral, and undermine Kreeft’s central argument. Kreeft’s argument stands on the proposition that something can be a person in “essence” while having none of the outward characteristics of a person. Indeed he explicitly goes through each of the major external differences between a foetus and an adult and rejects them, one by one, as criteria for personhood, until Herrod has to concede that he just doesn’t know whether foetuses are persons or not. Then he declares, without further argumentation, that conception (unlike any of the changes during gestation) does make the difference between personhood and non-personhood.
TheHatMan:
Well, mightn’t it? I don’t see anything fundamentally implausible about the idea; and even if Kreeft gets other things wrong, you can’t fault his basic point that if there’s a chance you might kill a person, you shouldn’t.
VeryRarelyStable:
I think you’ll find I can. Kreeft goes through the differences between a foetus and an adult. Let’s now examine the differences between a zygote (that’s to say a fertilized ovum) and an unfertilized ovum, and see if any of those are any better at determining personhood.
TheHatMan:
Wait, wait a minute. Isn’t it my turn for a probing question before we get into that?
VeryRarelyStable:
I guess so. “How can I not agree with Peter Kreeft” wasn’t very probing.
TheHatMan:
Yeah, whatever. Under what circumstances would it be morally right to do something you knew had a possibility of killing a person?
VeryRarelyStable:
To begin with, you have to ask how far from zero that probability actually is. It is possible that the next time you start your car there will be a cord that you didn’t notice tied round the towbar, with the other end round someone’s neck. There are no physical or logical impossibilities in that scenario, therefore the probability is nonzero. There; you now know that driving your car has a nonzero probability of killing a person. Does that make it morally wrong for you to drive?
TheHatMan:
I don’t drive, but I take your point. Let’s rephrase the question. Suppose you knew there was a cord on your car and you knew it was tied around something within the right bounds of shape and size to be a human being. You know you’re going to destroy something, you just don’t know whether it’s a person or not; which I think is a closer analogy to what abortion does. What is the moral thing to do? Snark at Kreeft all you want, you haven’t answered this point yet.
VeryRarelyStable:
That’s a slightly closer analogy, but there’s still a gap. That situation could be settled by an investigation of the facts. You follow the cord to its other end. If you find it tied around something you look at what that thing is. Either it’s a person or it isn’t. Question settled. But what factual finding could settle whether the foetus is a person? Or perhaps I should say, whether the embryo is a person, since the great majority of abortions happen shortly after the pregnancy is confirmed. We know the physical facts – the embryo is a small collection of human cells, genetically distinct from the woman’s body that contains it, but with no cognitive capability. None of that tells us whether it fits the definition of “person” or not, because that depends on what the definition actually is. Either this is a mere word game, in which case whether a particular act is murder depends solely on linguistic usage, or it’s a metaphysical conundrum, in which case whether an act is murder hangs on a question which cannot in principle be answered. And if you let me now go through the differences between an ovum and a zygote, you’ll see why that’s a problem.
TheHatMan:
First, what’s your answer to my question?
VeryRarelyStable:
You asked about the “possibility of killing a person”. “Possibility” implies ignorance. My answer is that factual ignorance and metaphysical ignorance are two entirely different beasts, and if you treat a metaphysical uncertainty as a factual one where your concept of murder depends on the outcome, your moral reasoning will blunder into monstrosities.
TheHatMan:
Monstrosities such as...?
VeryRarelyStable:
Monstrosities such as you’ll see if we go ahead with this ovum vs. zygote thing.
TheHatMan:
Fine. Go ahead.
VeryRarelyStable:
Thank you. Kreeft, as I said, goes through each of the parameters on which a foetus differs from an adult – size, general development, cognitive capability, dependence on the mother – and with each one finds that the same difference exists between an adult and an infant, just to a lesser degree. Since infants are persons, he concludes, none of those parameters defines personhood. And it’s the same, he says, right back to the fertilized egg, the zygote. The metaphysical break in his view falls between the zygote and the unfertilized ovum. So let’s adopt his method and go through each of the differences between the ovum and the zygote, and see which one (or which combination) is the true test for personhood.
TheHatMan:
Here’s a kind of an obvious one: an unfertilized ovum isn’t ever going to turn into an adult human being, a zygote is.
VeryRarelyStable:
Two problems with that. First, an unfertilized ovum isn’t going to turn into an adult human being so long as it remains unfertilized. A zygote is going to turn into an adult unless it fails to implant or is aborted. Second, relatedly, you remember we decided that a person who doesn’t exist yet can’t be said to have the right to exist at some point in the future, because otherwise preventing rape would be murder. Can we continue to agree that failing to fertilize an ovum is not murder?
TheHatMan:
We can, but isn’t there a critical difference between intervention before fertilization and intervention afterwards? Most ova, left to their own devices, don’t end up getting fertilized. Most zygotes, left to their own devices, do end up growing into embryos, and then foetuses, and then infants, and so on. Could we not say that, if it’s more likely than not that one day you’re going to be a person, then you count as a person?
VeryRarelyStable:
First of all, that’s not actually true. Most zygotes fail to implant and are expelled from the body. Implantation, not fertilization, is the point at which a pregnancy becomes more likely than not. You could define implantation as the beginning of personhood, which would mean you had no objection to the morning-after pill – but nothing particularly changes in the embryo at implantation. It’s just moved to a different position in the mother’s body. And if personhood can depend on one’s position in one’s mother’s body, well, birth is a much more radical change to that.
TheHatMan:
But birth is not the point at which it becomes more likely than not that one day you’re going to be a person, which is what I actually said. Conception is. Or if what you’ve just said is true, implantation is.
VeryRarelyStable:
Second, as I was about to say, that too opens us up to absurdities. From memory the chance of a pregnancy resulting from any given act of intercourse (assuming it’s unprotected, vaginal, heterosexual intercourse and both partners are fertile) is about one in 30. Let’s now suppose that a woman is getting fertility treatment. I’m not an expert on fertility treatment, so let’s suppose it’s some new technique which involves releasing sperm into her uterus in much higher numbers than is usual during intercourse, accompanied by a drug which (somehow) makes implantation much more likely to occur. Specifically, the treatment is so potent that she is more likely than not to get pregnant following a single dose. And now let’s suppose that she gets right up to that point and then, at the last minute, chooses not to administer the treatment. She has prevented the development of a pregnancy which, absent that choice, was more likely to occur than not. Has she committed murder?
TheHatMan:
Er, no. Sure, it was more likely than not that some embryo would have come into existence, but given the huge number of sperm there was only a tiny chance that a particular embryo would come into existence. No particular embryo has achieved likelier-than-not existence and thus qualified as a person.
VeryRarelyStable:
Very well, then, suppose all the sperm are exact clones of each other.
TheHatMan:
Are you saying that a person’s identity is determined by their DNA sequence?
VeryRarelyStable:
No, I’m saying a sperm’s is – and a zygote’s is. Your other option is to suggest that an unbroken sequence of cell membrane cohesion during division is somehow integral to personhood, and I’ve got to tell you, that’s clutching at straws.
TheHatMan:
I can understand every individual word in that last sentence, and I think I’m doing OK with some of the clusters, but the whole thing... the whole thing is eluding me. What are you talking about?
VeryRarelyStable:
I’m contrasting the situation where the ovum has already been fertilized (and is aborted) with the hypothetical situation where the ovum was practically certain to be fertilized by one of a large number of identical sperm (but then wasn’t). What’s different? In both cases the ovum is in the same intra-uterine environment. In both cases there is one specific set of paternal DNA involved. In both cases the ovum would, but for intervention by the woman, eventually have become an infant. The only thing different is that, in the first case, the cell membrane of the ovum is not breached; or, if it’s already divided into a few cells, that those cells have continued to stick together by their membranes. That’s the only thing stopping you from calling the cells in the second case a “particular embryo”.
TheHatMan:
I don’t think that’s as stupid as you’re making out. Suppose that ball of cells splits at that early stage, and suppose the mother carries them to term. Then you have two embryos, then two foetuses, then two infants – identical twins. Two people.
VeryRarelyStable:
Seriously? That’s what you’re going with? If the cells stick together it’s murder?
TheHatMan:
I’m saying it makes sense for personhood to be tied to a coherent history.
VeryRarelyStable:
For this purpose? I can see how if you were studying development in gestation, cellular coherence might be a good way to define the bounds of your subject matter. But you’re talking about telling someone “Sorry, ma’am, you have to spend nine months putting every system in your body under increasing strain, then eighteen years raising a child you haven’t got the resources to cope with, because these cells are sticking together.” I can’t see that as the moral high ground, I really can’t.
VeryRarelyStable:
So, the main differences I can see between an ovum and a zygote are: it has an increased chance of developing into an infant, which we’ve dealt with; it contains genetic material not derived from the woman, and you’ve already rejected genetics as a determinant of personhood; and it has a full complement of chromosomes, and if you were going to go that way I was going to point out that I think it is murder to kill someone with Down’s syndrome despite their having a different number of chromosomes from other people.
TheHatMan:
Now what was that you said about rapid posting and the netiquette thereof?
TheHatMan:
If I were certain that an embryo was a person, then what I would be saying is “You can’t kill a person”. It’s not a detail you can skip over. I don’t think it’s something you can define arbitrarily, either. Otherwise, what’s to stop someone redefining personhood according to, say, skin colour, or sexual orientation?
VeryRarelyStable:
A moment ago you were defining personhood according to cellular cohesion. It looked to me like you were doing it arbitrarily; you didn’t mention what criteria you were using to determine that that was the true start of personhood. So you’re saying now that the beginning of personhood is objective? How do you know that an ovum, an unfertilized ovum, is not a person?
TheHatMan:
Um. That would mean somebody dies every time a woman has her period.
VeryRarelyStable:
Yes it would. And every time she allows it to happen, she would be guilty, if not of murder, then at least of homicide through neglect. And that would be very inconvenient to our moral and legal systems, not to mention to, you know, women themselves. But does any of that make it false? Objectively?
TheHatMan:
I don’t see that a cohesive history plus a high probability of developing to an adult is all that arbitrary. An unfertilized ovum doesn’t have those things.
VeryRarelyStable:
But what’s your argument that it’s not arbitrary? Is it just down to, it feels right? Then let me jog your moral intuition. I’m a scientist in a stem cell lab. I stand up on a table and raise my hands so they’re like three metres off the floor, and it’s a hard concrete floor. In one hand I hold a glass test-tube which you know contains ten living human embryos, at the blastula stage or whatever you call it when it’s a tiny ball of cells. In the other, I hold a new-born infant by the ankle. I’m going to let them both go at the same moment. Which one do you try to catch?
TheHatMan:
...OK, I take your point. I have to be honest, I couldn’t say “the test-tube” and claim I was acting from concern for human welfare. You can probably guess why it took so long to post this reply, it’s never pleasant to have to admit you’ve been going wrong. I suppose I’ll have to chalk this up to one more aspect of my faith I’m going to have to re-examine. There have been an alarmingly large number of those lately.
TheHatMan:
But can I take it that that was your probing question to me? Because I still have a question for you. By this logic it seems no concrete point in development can be called the “start” of personhood. I guess the question then is, what is it about being a person that makes it wrong to kill one? Once we know that, we can hopefully answer when a human organism acquires those characteristics. You asked me about my moral beliefs before; now I’m asking for yours.
VeryRarelyStable:
In my view, morality comes down to trust. You act in such a way as to earn others’ trust, and also in such a way as to enhance trust among third parties. (I can argue that out for you if you like, but not in this thread, it would be too big a derailment from the topic.) Now, to earn trust, you have to act in a manner that is benevolent and consistent; hence why it’s usually better to have clear and easily readable principles like “Do not kill people”, “Do not cause needless suffering”, “Keep your promises”, and so on. But when two of those principles come into conflict, the question you ask is “What course of action best allows the people involved to trust each other?”.
TheHatMan:
So you don’t kill people because that would make you untrustworthy, and you don’t value embryos over women because that would make you untrustworthy. I guess that does make sense.
VeryRarelyStable:
Do you have any other objections to abortion you haven’t raised yet?
TheHatMan:
This is going to take a while for me to process mentally, but to be honest, no. If I think of one I’ll come back.
VeryRarelyStable:
And with that I think we can wrap up the discussion. Unless anyone else wants to chip in?
Well? Go ahead, the comment space is just below.
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