Abortion
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I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.
Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.
Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.
Clearly, an embryo without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.
According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542179/, “CNS [central-nervous-system] development begins during the 3rd week of embryogenesis…”
This idea is for viable pregnancies only. Other considerations may apply for non-viable ones.
There are some practical considerations, too.
There’s no point allowing abortion only in the first six weeks because many women don’t realize they’re pregnant until later.
(Danny)
It’s arguably a sexually active woman’s responsibility to monitor whether she’s pregnant.
If it weren’t her responsibility, then a burden would fall on the baby, which can’t be right because the baby only exists because of the mother’s choices.
Home pregnancy tests are affordable and reliable. According to https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-early-can-you-tell-if-you-are-pregnant, “[h]ome pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy just two weeks after ovulation”. So there’s plenty of time.
A non-aborted child’s quality of life matters, too. One benefit of allowing abortion at any time is that, if a mother decides not to abort despite having had ample opportunity to do so, she is definitely responsible for the child’s wellbeing. Then she can’t blame lawmakers or having had too little time; she can’t evade accountability for the living child as easily.
(Dirk)
Blaming the birth on lawmakers or on having had too little time is already a lame excuse if a woman has six weeks to figure out whether she’s pregnant. That’s enough time for a conscientious person. And whose actions resulted in pregnancy? Not the lawmakers’.
I agree that a non-aborted child’s quality of life matters. For that reason, I think the process of giving a newborn child up for adoption should be as easy as possible. I don’t think killing an unborn baby who may as well already be a person and thus have rights is the right way to prevent him having a bad life. Like, don’t punish an unborn baby for having bad parents.
Why would a fetus without a nervous system not be a person?
Because personhood is not the result of something physical but of having and running the right software.
Specifically, it’s the universal-explainer software David Deutsch outlines in his book The Beginning of Infinity.
This software presumably can’t run in the baby before its nervous system is formed to some sufficient degree. At the earliest, it’s when the nervous system reaches computational universality. (Does anyone know when that is?)
There’s ‘evictionism’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evictionism
I like this view because it sidesteps the issue of personhood and at what point it arises. It says you’re free to evict anything, person or not. We don’t know how creativity (ie the universal-explainer software mentioned in #119) works so this is handy.
(Amaro)
The linked Wikipedia article says:
Evictionists view a woman's womb as her property and an unwanted fetus as a "trespasser or parasite", even while lacking the will to act. They argue that a pregnant woman has the right to evict a fetus from her body since she has no obligation to care for a trespasser.
If this is an accurate description of the evictionist view, it strikes me as deeply flawed.
A pregnant woman does have an obligation to care for her fetus (at least once it’s a person). She took an action which resulted in the fetus’s existence.
Building on #121, a baby is not a “trespasser”. A pregnant woman ‘invited’ the baby into her womb. Unless she was raped, in which case the rapist ‘put’ the baby there. But the baby is blameless either way and thus can’t be likened to a trespasser.
Evictionism doesn’t explain why personhood should be ignored.
(Danny)
Someone’s personhood has no bearing on whether you should be able to evict them, right? It’s your property, so it’s your choice.
(Amaro)
It does if you caused them to be there to begin with.
(Danny)
If you invite someone into your home and they come over you can still change your mind and kick them out. Just because you invited them doesn’t mean they can stay in your home against your will.
(Amaro)
That’s different because the person in your example made the choice to show up, whereas an unborn baby made no such choice.
(Danny)
Building on #140, it’s more like forcing someone into your home, locking the door, making them depend on you for food and water, and then complaining they’re in your home. Clearly, killing them is not the answer (if they’re a person).
Where exactly does a child’s dependency on the parents end? At five years old? When the child moves out? Seems arbitrary.
(Amaro)
Whenever a child may reach independence, it’s certainly well past pregnancy, so it’s not an issue wrt abortion.
Not a doctor but AFAIK we already have medical knowledge about when physical dependency in particular ends. For example, doctors will sometimes deliver a baby prematurely when continued pregnancy would be dangerous for the mother.
(Danny)
When developing rules for society, we run into many arbitrary lines. More important than drawling the lines correctly is retaining the means to redraw them over time.
(Logan)
Why does it matter exactly when personhood sets in? You know it becomes a person as long as you don’t abort the process.
(Dirk)
It matters because the abortion debate is largely about what rights (if any) an unborn baby has. Personhood determines those rights. Killing a person is morally (and legally) different from killing a non-person, so you need to know when personhood starts.
It’s true that you know personhood will start at some point as long as you don’t interfere, but this is for people who do want to interfere without committing a moral (or legal) crime.
While the fetus is attached to the mother, it’s her property and she is free to do what she wants with it. Therefore, she can abort the baby at any time prior to being born and the umbilical being cut, at which point the baby is an independent person.
(John)
If the baby is a person, the mother has a responsibility to it. She can’t just be allowed to kill it. That makes no sense.
(Danny)
Physical (in)dependence isn’t a valid yardstick because it does not confer rights. The only thing that confers rights to an organism is personhood.
Building on #123, cutting the umbilical does not make the baby an “independent person”. The baby still depends on the parents physically, financially, emotionally, etc.
This mistake strikes me as an instance of the wider mistake of granting or withholding rights based on physical differences.
Obligations to care for another person seem illiberal and coercive.
(John)
Obligations are only coercive if they are unchosen. People know that sex can result in pregnancy.
More generally, when you take an action that you know (or should know) can result in some obligation, then that obligation is not unchosen.
Fudging unchosen and chosen obligations is why some of the pro-abortion crowd strike me as people who just want to be able to act without consequence or responsibility. Similar to other women’s ‘rights’ issues (which aren’t about rights but special treatment and privileges).
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
I’m not sure newborn babies are “people” in any meaningful sense yet.
In which case, even ‘aborting’ 6 months after birth would be fine.
A child does not seem anything like a functionally complete person until somewhere between 9 to 15 months old. Most people cannot recall memories from before age 3.
I’m skeptical a newborn is anything more than a robot until their creativity comes online.
It would be gross and upsetting, though, so let’s settle for abortion up until the child can be delivered and adoption for any unwanted babies.
(John)
It would be gross and upsetting, though, so let’s settle for abortion up until the child can be delivered and adoption for any unwanted babies.
That’s an inversion of morals and emotions. The emotional response should come after you form a moral judgment, as a result of that judgment. Conversely, moral judgment shouldn’t be the result of an emotion.
A child does not seem anything like a functionally complete person until somewhere between 9 to 15 months old.
Basing personhood on ‘functional completeness’ is fudging smarts and intelligence.
Building on #164, rights do not depend on the presence of any specific skill or knowledge.
I don’t see why forgetting things that happened before age 3 is meaningful here.
I wasn’t talking about forgetting things. Memories might not even be stored before age 3.
(John)
According to WebMD:
Most babies will start walking between about 10 and 18 months old, although some babies may walk as early as 9 months old.
And they retain that ability. So something must be being stored here.
They also start saying basic words by age 1, which they retain as well.
It’s possible creativity, and with it, personhood and rights, only comes online after birth. For example, the universal-explainer program may be partly memetic, as David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity. In which case creativity only comes online upon exposure to other people.
But that’s highly speculative. The program might as well be wholly genetic and start running before birth.
If the fetus has "developed a nervous system" but is not yet capable of surviving outside the mother (even with all the technological knowledge of medicine), why should the mother have an obligation to carry it to term?
A baby with a nervous system may be a person and thus have rights.
having rights doesn't mean you get to be supported by others that don't want to support you
Except in cases of rape, the mother is responsible for the baby’s existence.
That the baby can’t survive outside the womb sounds like an additional reason to carry to term, not a reason not to do it.
it's not a reason in one direction or another, if other people are willing to save the baby and take care of it that seems like a win-win
You had originally described (#201) a situation where the fetus “is not yet capable of surviving outside the mother (even with all the technological knowledge of medicine)”, meaning premature delivery would be impossible.
If, contrary to #221, premature delivery is possible and others want to “save the baby and take care of it”, then sure, go ahead as long as there are no downsides for the baby. But that’s not abortion, so I don’t see how this stance is a criticism of my abortion stance. Abortion means the baby dies.
If my nervous system isn’t working because of coma, is it ok to kill me?
Clarity is suggesting it wouldn’t be okay, thus whether the nervous system is functional can’t be the determining factor.
I think it’s not okay to kill someone whose nervous system stops working later in life if it may work again.
They’ve already been a person and may well continue to be a person. That can’t be said of an organism that has never had a nervous system.
It’s arbitrary. A functioning nervous system does not imply complex thought.
Right, but the absence of a functioning nervous system implies the absence of sentience [see #107]. So I don’t think it’s arbitrary.
But if an accident removes the entire brain yet the body somehow stays alive like a vegetable, then yeah I’d say it’s okay to pull the plug.
Is that fair? It’s interesting how abortion and euthanasia are kind of related in this way.
i agree that morally the cutoff point should be personhood, though i think that probably happens later than the development of nervous system
Personhood presumably does come in later on, but we don’t know exactly when. Since the development of the nervous system is the earliest possible point, that’s the time we should choose if we want to be careful.
@dirk-meulenbelt argues that couples consider their first date to be the start of their relationship when it really wasn’t because you can’t ‘break up’ after a first date.
In other words, people choose somewhat arbitrary designations which aren’t morally relevant by themselves.
Killing a pregnant woman is considered a double homicide, so aborting until week 6 can’t be right.
I’ve heard that but I don’t know if that’s even true. If it is, the killing shouldn’t be considered a double homicide until after week 6.
Homicide is “a killing of one human being by another”. If an embryo isn’t a person yet, its death can’t be homicide.
It’s not right to force a parent to take care of a child they didn’t want. The result is often tragic. Abortion relieves parents of that responsibility and prevents this outcome. Parents don’t owe their children anything, and children don’t owe their parents anything.
(Amaro)
The result is often tragic. Abortion relieves parents of that responsibility and prevents this outcome.
Adoption
Parents don’t owe their children anything […].
Yes they do. They are responsible for bringing a helpless being into the world who depends on them.
depends whether the mother took measures to not get pregnant, if she did and still got pregnant - less responsibility
She was neither forced nor tricked. She took an action which she knew (or should have known) comes with certain risks. The risks materialized. That doesn’t make her any less responsible.
On the contrary, per my suggestion, she had six weeks to monitor whether she was pregnant. That’s long enough to miss her period, which is a huge warning sign she’d have to be extremely dishonest about with herself to just ignore. During those six weeks, she could have unilaterally decided to get an abortion safely and with impunity. She instead chose to ignore her pregnancy, evade it, not do anything about it, whatever.
Parents facing the consequences of their actions isn’t “force”.
A lot of the problems around abortion will go away with better technology. (Dirk)
There should be a pill for men, too. That would really shift the power dynamic, too. (Martin)
Many suggestions around abortion can be evaluated by asking at whose expense? Whenever the answer is at the baby’s, something is wrong, since the baby did not make any decisions and thus cannot be held responsible.
Ayn Rand writes:
An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not yet living (or the unborn).
It’s true that potential beings cannot have rights. But once a fetus is a person, it’s not a potential being anymore. It’s then an actual being.
It’s not the birth that turns a fetus into a person – it’s the running of the universal-explainer software I mentioned in #119. And that might occur before birth.
Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?
Shouldn’t the father have some say? He shouldn’t get to dictate what she does with the baby, but shouldn’t he have some say? It’s his child, too, after all.
Preventing unwanted pregnancy is the goal. Ending an unwanted pregnancy should happen with shame and as early as possible. It’s a mistake that gets worse with time.
If you want the abortion to happen as early as possible, then shame is the last thing you want, as it will cause pregnant women to put off the decision for fear of being shamed.
practically, i think the best we can do now is viability outside the mother
if it's viable and there are people willing to adopt [then] the mother shouldn't have the right to kill it
if there's no one willing to take care of it i don't see how anyone can demand for it to not be aborted.
Someone’s rights can’t depend on whether other people are willing to take care of them. That doesn’t make any sense. You said yourself (#225) the determining factor is personhood. Pick one.
I don't think it's a right to have other people take care of you. The cutoff point is a moral one, but rights are both moral and political institutions. You're right that it'd be ideal for the moral and political institutions to align but it's hard to do that. That's why I think there's some truth to the argument: "Even if abortion were immoral it should be legal".
Saying the baby has a right to be taken care of in such and such a manner means nothing if there's no one there to do the taking care of. One of the requirements of being a good parent, I think, is wanting to be one. So by forcing the mother that was irresponsible to carry to term might actually ruin her life, and make the baby's one not worth living.
This seems like a response to another idea (presumably #230 and/or #232), rather than a top-level idea itself. I suggest you move this idea and break it up if necessary. Mark it as a criticism to whatever ideas you end up criticizing.
But first, familiarize yourself with the current state of the discussion. Ensure that you’re making new points. These sound like points others have made before you. Read the entire discussion before you continue. If these points are indeed duplicates, either think of new criticisms or address existing criticisms. Don’t repeat the same ideas if you can’t address preexisting issues with them.
Some people say the demarcation point should be the heartbeat.
The heartbeat has no particular epistemological or moral relevance.
Some say that there’s a soul from the moment of conception; that the soul has a right to life.
For non-viable pregnancies, where a doctor reasonably predicts that the baby will die during pregnancy or shortly after, abortions should be allowed throughout the entire pregnancy to avoid unnecessary suffering for parents and child.
What happens if only one of two twins is non-viable but abortion would kill both?
If an already-born person is deadly ill, that doesn’t mean you can kill them. Why should that be any different for an unborn person?
This is the kind of thing that’s messed up and should be prevented: https://x.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1819079527366382071
There are financial incentives to do abortions as late as possible.
This video says 30 seconds in that babies cry inside the womb at 15 weeks. Crying seems to be a uniquely human activity. Maybe this is evidence that babies are already people and sentient in the womb.
Abortion is a technology problem, not a political issue. The choice between the loss of life and the loss of authority over one’s own body is a poor one. This dilemma is caused by a lack of medical knowledge.
At a high level, there are only two technologies needed to resolve this dilemma.
1. Safe extraction of a living pregnancy.
2. In Vitro Gestation.
In fact, if some of the political funding had been redirected toward research, it would probably be solved by now.
It seems odd to me when people argue pregnancy is a loss of authority over one’s body.
A woman had sex. Assuming it was voluntary, what did she think was going to happen?
Imagine someone saying: ‘I ate too much. Now I’m fat. I’ve lost authority over my own body.’ But they didn’t. They got exactly what they should have expected.
I think what those people are really saying is: they don’t like that their actions have consequences. They want to have their cake and eat it, too.
This is not a valid or interesting criticism of my argument that the apparent dilemma can be resolved through the growth of knowledge.
Not interesting:
You’ve merely argued one side of the dilemma, apparently insisting that there is no dilemma to be resolved. If the dilemma can be resolved, then any argument for one side or the other is pedantic and superseded by that solution.
Not valid:
Sex is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause pregnancy. “Eating too much” is also neither necessary nor sufficient to cause adiposity. Even if you assume that those voluntary actions played a causal role in the transformation, the argument you presented depends on the premise that “if someone voluntarily performs any action that contributes to the antecedents of a transformation and has knowledge about the antecedent relationship between those actions and that transformation, then that transformation is under their authority.” This is a deeply problematic theory, because it results in every accident or crime against someone happening “under their authority.” With respect to sex and pregnancy, specifically, this theory leads to the conclusion that miscarriages are also under one’s authority. Regardless of whether your real concern here is about the loss of life due to terminated pregnancies (vs. punishing women for having sex), far more potential lives are lost due to miscarriage than abortion, so this should be of much greater concern.
Fortunately, miscarriages could also be avoided by using the technologies I proposed above. In the future, this could even become the preferred method of gestation for the protection of the child’s life, and the optimization of their early development.
This is not a valid or interesting criticism of my argument that the apparent dilemma can be resolved through the growth of knowledge.
It wasn’t intended as a criticism. It was a related observation. That’s why I didn’t mark my idea as a criticism. It sounds like you’ve misunderstood me.
Please work on your tone. You’re mixing in personal accusations rather than just sticking with impersonal arguments. For example: “apparently insisting”, “pedantic”, and also a hidden accusation that I have an ulterior motive to punish women rather than save lives (“Regardless of whether your real concern here…”).
This kind of tone can derail and sabotage debate. Veritula has a policy against any behavior that sabotages debate. Please review our forum rules (#4460).
New accounts, especially anonymous ones, need to tread lightly and prove they’re worth engaging with.
You’ve submitted several criticisms in one idea. It’s in your interest to avoid doing that because you make yourself vulnerable to what we call ‘bulk criticism’. See #4471.
I may have more criticisms but I can’t really submit them productively until you split up your idea.