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October 30, 2006
South Dakota
A little more than a week away - the word from South Dakota is that the abortion ban is losing in the polls by a few percentage points, Planned Parenthood is pouring money into the state - the main group coordinating support of the ban would appreciate your help, if you can - they have a donor with a matching offer on board.
At the site you can, of course, watch some of their very powerful ads - but they can't run them if they can't buy the time.
Related: This post at First Things by Richard Stith, professor of law at Valparaiso University School of Law. takes a slightly different angle in examining how people think about abortion and the unborn.
Why do many pro-choice people find our arguments against early abortion not just unconvincing but absurd? Consider, for example, the ridicule that the defense of human embryos sometimes draws. In order to have any hope of winning the debate, defenders of unborn life must understand how an argument that seems wholly reasonable to us can strike our opponents as a bizarre (therefore religious) doctrine wholly unconnected to the real world.
I submit that pro-life arguments seem absurd to any listener who has in the back of the mind a sense that the embryo or fetus is being constructed in the womb. Here’s an analogy: At what point in the automobile assembly-line process can a “car” be said to exist? I suppose most of us would point to some measure of minimum functionality (viability), like having wheels and/or a motor, but some might insist on the need for windshield wipers or say it’s not fully a car until it rolls out onto the street (is born). We would all understand, however, that there’s no clearly “right” answer as to when a car is there. And we would also agree that someone who claimed the car to be present from the insertion of the first screw at the very beginning of the assembly line would be taking an utterly absurd position. To someone who conceives of gestation as intrauterine construction, pro-life people sound just this ridiculous. For a thing being constructed is truly not there until it is nearly complete. (Moving from ordinary language to metaphysics, we would say that a constructed thing does not have its essential form until it is complete or nearly complete. And it can’t be that thing without having the form of that thing.)
Now, this way of thinking (treating gestation as construction, assembling, fabrication, making) has not only intuitive appeal today but a grand pedigree. For thousands of years, it was the dominant (though not the exclusive) way to conceive of what was happening in the womb.
Posted by Amy Welborn | Permalink
Comments
That was as lucid a defense of the Pro-life viewpoint as I have ever seen. Very well done.
Posted by: Mike at Oct 30, 2006 10:33:57 AM
I don't know how many people will find Stith convincing, but I think it's very good. Here's an effective image:
The difference between making and developing is not just an accident of language. Suppose we’re back in the pre-digital days and you’ve just taken a fabulous photo, one you know you will prize, with your Polaroid camera. (Say it’s a picture of a jaguar that has now darted back into the jungle, so that the photo is unrepeatable.) You are just starting to let the photo hang out to develop when I grab it and rip its cover off, thus destroying it. What would you think if I responded to your dismay with the assertion: “Hey man, it was still in the brown-smudge stage. Why should you care about brown smudges?” You would find my defense utterly absurd. Just so for pro-lifers, who find dignity in every human individual: To say that killing such a prized being doesn’t count if he or she is still developing in the womb strikes them as outrageously absurd.
By contrast, if I had simply destroyed a blank, unexposed piece of your film, you would have been much less upset. You really would have lost little more than a smudge. Passive potential does not count for much. Only developing potential already contains its own form (essence, identity), is already the what that it is in the process of manifesting.
I conclude that pro-choice folks think pro-life claims regarding embryos to be not only wrong but also absurd whenever they think (even unconsciously) that embryos are under construction in the womb. And pro-life folks find pro-choice denials of prized human dignity in embryos to be equally absurd whenever they think that the unborn child develops (indeed, develops itself, unlike the Polaroid photo) from the moment of fertilization.
Having talked about this with some intensely secular friends, it certainly rings true that pro-choice folks think pro-life claims regarding embryos to be not only wrong but also absurd. My friends certainly do. I've thought about this in the context of whether abortion is murder. From where I sit it isn't even manslaughter because at least in that case, everyone acknowledges you've killed somebody, even if you've done it "merely" in say a driving accident. Do we need a new word for this--when someone kills a human being that they don't recognize as a person.
Looking at it this way might help explain why sensible pro-life forces don't want to throw women who get abortions in jail--
Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. It also might help some of us refrain from characterizing pro-choice advocates as baby-murdering monsters, or Western countries as the Reign of Moloch.
I'm pro-life, I'm against Roe. v. Wade, and I'm in favor of making abortion illegal. If I lived in South Dakota I'd vote for that ban. But as we think about our fellow citizens, there has to be a fundamental difference between a neighbor who knows he's killing someone and another who doesn't. Maybe with people like Stith in one hand and sonograms in the other, we can reverse this bloody tide.
Posted by: Christopher Fotos at Oct 30, 2006 11:02:28 AM
This brings to mind a conversation I had with a relative, a fallen-away Catholic, about embryonic stem cell research. She kept insisting that the embryo wasn't a baby until the "mother made it a baby", although she could not articulate how exactly that happened. I couldn't adequately articulate that such a thing was a human being, no matter the stage of development. During the course of our conversation she did seem to come to a realization of the moral problems with in-vitro fertilization; so perhaps there was some progress.
I'll keep the polaroid analogy in mind.
Posted by: Catherine L at Oct 30, 2006 11:25:16 AM
I don't think any such long drawn out explanations or comparisons will have much effect on the general masses who follow like sheep such word images as "only a blob of cells or tissues". I will never understand why all the intellectual delicacy is taken to try to explain to the very indelicate types who have such hardened and materialistic hearts. Why are they never confronted with the idea that they are really advocating suicide since what they promote, if done to them at the very same stage of their own personal and unique development (whether completed or not ... in fact, at just what point are we ever completed?)would end with their own obliteration and they would not be standing or sitting where they are now, pontificating on just what human life should be flushed. They just would not exist in this world, period. They are advocating obliterating essential portions of themselves necessary for existence.
What has been missing so very much is any kind of a much needed shock effect to the seemingly mindless masses .... and that's the very reason the pro aborts and flushers of life will not tolerate real life images of the torture done to the small humans to be shown. The media won't do it while at the same time they will run to all other kinds of degradation of human dignity that earns the filthy lucre. When have you seen any "in depth" investigations of abortion clinic conditions, caught in the act of filth done by, say, 60 Minutes? At this point I believe only the "in your face" kind of message of such depravity (along with the labs of destruction of embryonic life) plastered alongside of Nazi "clinics" and death camps, incinerators, can have any real effect on the "duh" crowd! There was a lot more of that kind of approach when it came to protesting the Viet Nam war. Just where are all those "brave" voices for the 40 and more million dead today?
Posted by: chris K at Oct 30, 2006 12:58:39 PM
While having this discussion with a couple of "pro-choice" vegetarian friends, I asked them if they eat fertilized chiken eggs.
Of course not, was their answer.
Why not?
When they realized where this logic was heading, these self-proclaimed pacifists got royally POd at me.
Posted by: Don at Oct 30, 2006 1:04:26 PM
I'm not sure Prof. Stith's argument quite makes it. Polaroid film with a potentially valuable an image is of greater value than blank film (though not if taking the latent image was a mistake or would turn out badly), but it is not the same as a developed pic and not as valuable. Likewise, a pear tree sprout may be a sort of pear tree, but it is certainly not as valuable as a pear tree that presently bears fruit. (Try suing someone who destroyed your pear tree sprout, then someone who destroyed you fruit-bearing pear tree and find out the difference.)
Posted by: Celine at Oct 30, 2006 1:07:52 PM
Having myself been on the receiving end of very strong incredulity from some friends, I will say the only thing that can sometimes get them to move a bit closer to suspending abject judgment of my absurdity is when I explain that the functional model of human development is at profound odds with other progressive desiderata, which more often presume that being precedes doing and that the value of being is not to be contingent upon productivity or evaluations of worth(iness) by others. That to my mind is the bridge point to at least holding the bridge open to further discussion. (It helps mightily if you are known to be coming from a perspective that holds the reductionist functionalism of our secular culture in some level of contempt. If however, you are seen to be something of a social darwinist, either actively or by default (the latter being more common), you might was well realize you have some serious internal conflicts to resolve before you try to work on other people in this regard.)
Posted by: Liam at Oct 30, 2006 1:11:41 PM
Celine,
His argument rested on two points--an empirical point about when a human being begins to exist and a moral point about the dignity of each human being. His argument dealt only with the empirical point in detail. He referred to the moral doctrine only in passing.
The example of the Polaroid was given as evidence for the empirical point. A Polaroid that has been "activated" and is in the process of developing is already a picture, even if it hasn't yet manifested all of its characteristics. This is an argument about when a picture begins to exist, not which kinds of pictures we value more.
The moral principle of human dignity that he refers to in passing holds that it is unjust to take the life of an innocent human being. This applies to all innocent human beings equally whenever they begin to exist. He didn't give a defense of this moral principle he merely noted that pro-lifers hold this principle.
There are alternative principles and you refer to one of these. Some people make a distinction between a human being and a person. A human being is a mere animal and begins to exist at conception, but a person is a self-conscious being with beliefs, memories, desires, etc. They then claim that only persons have a right to life. This position would be the equivalent of claiming that only "fully developed photos" are valuable and "developing photos" are not as valuable and can be destroyed.
But one can agree with his argument for the empirical point, which appealed to the example of the Polaroid, and then give a separate argument for the moral principle of human dignity. For one thing, if only "persons" in the sense of a self-conscious being have a right to life then no human being acquires a right to life until 2-4 years of age. Before that time, according to this view, it would be morally permissible to kill them. Some people (e.g. the philosopher Michael Tooley) have defended this view.
Posted by: Brad C at Oct 30, 2006 1:47:40 PM
For thousands of years, it was the dominant (though not the exclusive) way to conceive of what was happening in the womb.
Even a number of Catholic theologians seemed to view gestation in this way so I can understand the appeal of this argument.
But the problem with it is that there simply isn't any point after conception at which we can say that before this point we don't have a human being and after this point we do.
Lets pray for South Dakota.
God Bless
Posted by: Chris Sullivan at Oct 30, 2006 1:51:39 PM
Nice argument, but we should also try to understand why the pro-abortion crowd show such disdain for the pro-life position. It's easy: they think the pro-life movement is hypocritcal. How can you treat an embyro as deserving of such rights when you treat the "born" with such disdain? This is somethjing you hear over and over. You will see pro-lifers supporting war, the death penalty, and (in recent times) torture. You see little attempts to improve the economic conditions that may foster abortion in the first place. And, I'm afraid to say, these arguments have some merit (moreso on the evangelical side but Catholics are tainted too, especially with the rightward shift in recent times). Now, you can argue prudential arguments all you like, but the only way the pro-life movement will be accorded the kind of respetc it deserves will be for it to resurrect the seamless garment. I know that's not popular in some Catholic circles, but it's the only way for the pro-life movement to gain currency beyond the narrow enclaves of the political right. Plus it's the right thing to do.
Posted by: Morning's Minion at Oct 30, 2006 2:05:03 PM
Stith is definitely onto something here.
Fundamentally, I think, we as a culture have great difficulty conceptualizing an embryo as an embryo -- or a zygote as a zygote, or a fetus as a fetus, etc.
Instead, we're preoccupied with thinking about what the zygote/embryo/fetus is going to do in the future -- that is, to be born -- and I don't think we appreciate enough each stage of human development along the way.
Even after a baby is born, this tendency continues: "Is your baby crawling yet? Is your baby talking yet? Is your baby walking yet?"
It seems to me that this all too common tendency to perceive children (either born or unborn) as somehow "incomplete" persons has arisen in large part due to a fundamental misunderstanding of who children are.
Correcting this misunderstanding must be an essential componenet of any pro-life ethos.
Posted by: John Jansen at Oct 30, 2006 2:18:01 PM
Thanks, Amy, for the link. Good article. His points reflect my own conversations with pro-abort friends.
"It seems to me that this all too common tendency to perceive children (either born or unborn) as somehow "incomplete" persons has arisen in large part due to a fundamental misunderstanding of who children are.
Correcting this misunderstanding must be an essential componenet of any pro-life ethos. "
How true. We have a severely disabled family member. After Terri Schiavo was killed, many people called to ask if we were going to kill her "now that it is legal."
Posted by: Radical Catholic Mom at Oct 30, 2006 2:47:24 PM
Morning's Minion,
Do you just cut and paste your previous posts. Zzzz.
Your argument is irrelevant in this sense: it does not take up the issue at hand. It is an ad hominem argument. It attacks those advancing the argument, not the argument itself.
Question for MM: What offends you more? Unlovely, unfashionable pro-lifers? Or abortion?
Posted by: Fletch F. Fletch at Oct 30, 2006 2:52:20 PM
MM
I don't doubt that many pro-choicers discount pro-life arguments as you stated. Of course, the PC'ers are still wrong - "I don't believe you because you do other things I don't like" is not an argument, its a rationalization. Sure, it would help if conservatives applied principles in a more consistent way - but you know as well as I do that pro-abortionists would just look for another excuse. They just don't want to let go of their "back-up contraception." Facts and logic (all 100% on the pro-life side) mean nothing to them.
Posted by: c matt at Oct 30, 2006 2:55:46 PM
"It's easy: they think the pro-life movement is hypocritcal. How can you treat an embyro as deserving of such rights when you treat the "born" with such disdain?"
Yes pro-aborts sometimes make this sophistical argument, and it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference when they are confronted with a pro-lifer who is against the death penalty and is in agreement with them on whatever other laundry list of issues they choose to throw up. They simply raise other objections to any arguments against the sacred right of abortion. The seamless garment approach may have its merits on other grounds, but as an approach to convince pro-aborts has been a spectacular failure thus far. Most hard core pro-aborts know that a human being is killed in an abortion and they simply do not care.
Posted by: Donald R. McClarey at Oct 30, 2006 3:06:51 PM
Polaroid film with a potentially valuable an image is of greater value than blank film (though not if taking the latent image was a mistake or would turn out badly), but it is not the same as a developed pic and not as valuable.
Perhaps part of the problem was with his choice of a jaguar as the subject of the photo - a little too familiar and known. So what, you could take another picture of another jaguar.
I think he was trying to get at the radical uniqueness of every human being (hence his trying to make it unrepeatable) simply by its coming into existence. That is, it is valuable simply because it is, regardless of whether it is developed enough for others to discern its value. Think how valuable that developing picture would be if it was of space aliens landing in Parkersburg, or a picture of the real Elvis downing a frozen mocha latte at a Starbucks in Tempe. At the point the picture is taken (conception) its value is imputed to the film. All that can happen is that this intrinsic value (evidence of Elvis alive or space aliens) will become apparent to all (develop) or our ability to perceive this value will be lost or somehow diminished (not develop). No more intrinsic value can be added after this point from the outside (the picture/exposure can not be redone). Thus, while "greater" value can be ascribed to it from the outside (i.e., people can discern what the photograph already was - evidence of these sightings), no greater value can be added to it intrinsically.
Posted by: c matt at Oct 30, 2006 3:13:03 PM
Donald
"Most hard core pro-aborts know that a human being is killed in an abortion and they simply do not care."
I certainly know some who would be accurately captured by that. More commonly in my experience is what I would call culpable denial: they will acknowledge something living is being killed, but they fight very hard to avoid equating that with a human being. They may at most say human organism of some sort. The next step is to point out that the human tendency to classify other human organisms as outside the worthy class of humanity. This is something liberal pro-choicers hate being confronted with. Some will still resist, but I find that it does give pause to some. (It helps for our side in this one-on-one kind of dialogue to restrain our temptation to point out that Hitler or Justice Taney did this; such rhetorical overkill can miscarry the process of tugging at the conscience.) And then one needs to pursue the point that advocacy for the most vulnerable of human organisms is an essential foundation for any solid advocacy of others, that it is indeed the necessary assumption of progressive political views. This may be hard for political conservatives to pull off with any enthusiasm, let alone to pursue onward, but it is the necessary work to be done here, at least for pro-choicers who claim progressive views. I am quite aware that there are conservative pro-choicers who are simply thorough-going utilitarians (the Scrooges of our day, as it were), and I am really unsuited to dialoguing with them.
Anyway, with progressives, one has the chance to find common ground on objections to (1) the historic tendency of human beings to objectify and devalue one another (e.g., racism, sexism, and many other isms), (2) philosophical materialism (the counterculture was big on condemning that; some progressives have not been entirely coopted by it....), and (3) utilitarianism. Abortion is the negation of the progressive opposition to those things.
And then I get started on ESCR, which is doubly worse....
Posted by: Liam at Oct 30, 2006 3:44:05 PM
For people who raise scientific objections, it should be helpful to remind them that the notion that the human being is formed at conception was a standard secular scientific fact that was not meddled with until the abortion debates ripened a generation ago. All of the films and textbooks I had in high school in the late 1970s made that claim without qualification. It takes zero religious belief to adhere to that undisturbed fact of science, as pro-life atheists willingly will attest. In fact, one can argue that secular humanists were once much clearer on this on pure science than the Church, which has reserved the finality of deciding on when ensoulment occurs, preferring instead to advise that it behooves us to assume it occurs at conception, IIRC.
Posted by: Liam at Oct 30, 2006 3:49:12 PM
I think that a better analogy would be paint rather than film. If Jackson Pollack starts spattering paint on a canvas, is there any point at which you could destroy it and be able to say, for sure, that you have not destroyed a Jackson Pollack painting?
Humanity is God's greatest artwork, not his greatest machine. Each individual is a glorious, unique creation.
Posted by: TM Lutas at Oct 30, 2006 3:52:42 PM
Don, Don, re vegans and chickens and life:
Stop making sense you're upsetting everyone's assumptions!!
:)
Posted by: Adam at Oct 30, 2006 4:02:34 PM
c matt:
Your point is well-taken, but it neglects a central problem for those who argue the you-already-are-what-you-will-develop-into position.
What if you discover, after taking that precious snap-shot of the real Elvis downing a frozen mocha latte at a Starbucks in Tempe, that the film you used is defective and cannot develop into an actual picture of Elvis? It is worthless then, isn't it?
Well, dropping the analogy, what if an embryo or blastocyst simply cannot, because of genetic or environmental conditions, develop into a what we describe as a full human person? Doesn't this diminish its value, just as that photo of Elvis that cannot develop is devalued?
This is why identifying time of ensoulment is crucially inescapable for prolifers. Just classifying an entity as a "human being" doesn't resolve the problem of that being's value through some sort of taxological imperative. An extra-scientific imperative that should "never to kill at least some human beings" must also be invoked. And it doesn't help to define human beings in terms of their potential for development when one considers such severely disabled developing human beings that will never develop uniquely human attributes. You've got to decide that these early human beings have souls that bestow substantive value whatever accidents of human development may or not come to pass.
Posted by: Celine at Oct 30, 2006 4:04:59 PM
the notion that the human being is formed at conception was a standard secular scientific fact that was not meddled with until the abortion debates ripened a generation ago
It's still a fact that is increasingly relied on both by popular and by academic science.
Now we know that schizophrenia, say, is programmed "in the egg" (and is not the mother's fault, as was previously asserted). Ditto autism. Ditto, to a very large extent, high intelligence, to be more positive.
If you think these two trends of what we may loosely call "scientific thought" (on the one hand, the increasing evidence that A LOT happens at conception, and on the other, that conception doesn't matter a bit) are on a collision course...well... I'd say you're spot on.
Posted by: Adam at Oct 30, 2006 4:07:02 PM
If this is the same porfessor from Valpo I heard at a pro-life service a few years ago, he is very, very good. Very effective speaker.
And the service dealt with death penalty, elder care, extreme health care, and the stranger among us as pro-life issues, so no charges of hypocrisy would have stuck.
"the embryo wasn't a baby until the 'mother made it a baby', although she could not articulate how exactly that happened."
Ah! isn't that the heresy of "Receptionism"?
Posted by: Leper at Oct 30, 2006 4:09:56 PM
Adam
Precisely...
Posted by: Liam at Oct 30, 2006 4:12:23 PM
Celine
Actually, as I noted earlier, ensoulment is not necessary for debating with non-theists, which is good because even the Church has somewhat finessed that issue. If anything, some people have tried to use the lacuna of ensoulment as a loophole to permit abortion.
Posted by: Liam at Oct 30, 2006 4:15:31 PM
