I’m a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a “you must be this rational to ride” line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.
(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide—really pro it, not just the “lol yeah delicious babies” kind we sometimes see on LW. And there’s a coherent position of “the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I’m contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem”. But I don’t think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )
killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside
89% of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (source). A 12-week-old fetus is not viable outside of the womb.
Also worth noting is that the majority of pregnancies are terminated by natural miscarriage within that 12 week period. In most such cases, the mother has not even realized she was pregnant. (source) Do you consider these natural miscarriages to be the equivalent of human deaths from disease or injury, and if so, what should be done about them?
I rounded off “I think abortion laws should be stricter than they currently are in my country” to “I am anti-abortion”, which was misleading and I’m sorry. I think that still puts me out of line with my political group though (e.g. the provisions of that Texas bill that was notably filibustered sounded reasonable to me).
I think we should be less squeamish about acknowledging when we’re trading off on human lives, particularly those of children. I think the life of a 12-week fetus is less valuable than that of a 30-week one, which in turn is less valuable than that of a 12-month child, but not by a huge margin. I think we should attempt to reduce (and ideally eliminate) these natural miscarriages through funding of medical research, the same way we do e.g. cot death.
the provisions of that Texas bill that was notably filibustered sounded reasonable to me
Political and social context is important for the Texas bill and others like it. The relentlessly pursued goal of the “pro-life” movement is to restrict access to abortion. Requiring hospital admitting privileges sounds reasonable on its face, but the stigma faced by abortion providers makes it an onerous burden that is more likely to shut down clinics than to improve the safety of their operations.
I think we should be less squeamish about acknowledging when we’re trading off on human lives, particularly those of children.
Alongside bills such as the above, the “pro-life” movement is making every attempt to restrict access to long-lasting low-failure-rate birth control, which is one of the best ways to reduce abortions. They often base their arguments on erroneous claims that such birth control is abortifacient. Even if those claims were supported by evidence, the idea that a single-celled zygote is morally equivalent to (or even anywhere in the neighborhood of) a thinking, self-aware person is absurd.
“Human lives” is an artificial category. What counts as a human life? Why should we care about those things?
I think we should attempt to reduce (and ideally eliminate) these natural miscarriages through funding of medical research, the same way we do e.g. cot death.
There are two important points about these natural miscarriages. The first is the sheer number of them, which certainly would merit medical research and treatment if one considers fetuses morally equivalent or close to persons. The second, however, is not addressed by that proposal. In most cases of early natural miscarriage, the woman did not realize that she was pregnant. Does medical treatment for a fetus warrant, e.g., surveillance of women to ensure that no pregnancies go unnoticed?
One additional factor is that it is theorized that a heck of lot of those miscarriages are in fact the body spotting something fundamentally wrong with the pregnancy and going “Abort, Retry”. One would certainly want to examine if this is the case before proceeding on a project to stop it from doing so. Not that this seems like a very easy project. I mean.. what is the research team supposed to do? Collect feminine hygiene pads from women trying for children and go through them for cell samples to analyze? That really sounds like a very.. obnoxious. project to set up. Persuading at least several hundred would-be mothers to consign their menses to a cold chain for starters. Logistics hassle from heck.
I’m pro-infanticide, but there’s also a consistent position of “the line between not having and having a right to not be killed is crossed while in the womb”. Another plausible position is evictionism—“Regardless of whether you have the right to kill a fetus, you aren’t obligated to support it and are free to expel it if you wish”.
Is “birth is the schelling point” really that rare a position? In LW circles it’s in every discussion. Although the more common argument in wider circles is “one person’s right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life of anyone whose life depends on impinging on the first person’s bodily autonomy”, cf “famous violinist”.
Although I see both of the above as independently being enough to make it a slam-dunk for pro-choice, I’m pro-infanticide so don’t have to actually worry about it.
People actually find the famous violinist metaphor convincing, would permit the “host” person to kill them? I’d be interested to see it happen in real life. To my mind society has always reserved the right to curtail your freedom where it would threaten others; compare e.g. the detention of Typhoid Mary.
Probably what would happen in real life would be that rights get ignored, people just take sides based on popularity, and being famous, the violinist wins. Or, people recognize it as the thought experiment from abortion debates, and the masses take sides based on previous pro-choice or pro-life opinions and nobody changes their minds and we don’t learn anything.
I think there’s a difference there between negative freedom and positive freedom—the freedom to go around spreading typhus everywhere, vs the freedom to not have things stuck in your body and the freedom to not be forced to dedicate resources to constantly keeping someone else alive.
The systems in the US and Europe treat infanticide and late-term abortion the same. They are quite coherent, but just don’t like to spell out the rules. Infanticide by the mother is illegal, just like late-term abortion, but not much more. If the mother expresses grief at the death, people figure that there’s no punishment worse than losing a child, and call it an accident. Many countries have laws on the books explicitly making infanticide a lesser crime than homicide, with a shorter jail sentence. Even when there is a conviction, the sentence is usually suspended.
The pro-life/pro-choice argument seems to be, as it tends to be in many other cases, about where to place the Schelling point. Is all sperm sacred? Is Plan-B evil? Should a fetus with likely very poor quality of life be forced to develop, anyway? Should we take any and all measures to reduce the incidence of “natural” miscarriages? How much risk to the pregnant woman’s life is acceptable in the name of saving her future baby?
The problem is that different Schelling points seem unique to different groups. When you say “(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide”, what you really mean is “I see no Schelling point past the conception stage”, whereas someone else (like ZankerH) sees brain activity as such a point, or the heartbeat, or a fixed number of weeks, or birth.
There is very little difference between your position and theirs, except one number.
And there’s a coherent position of “the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I’m contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem”. But I don’t think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position.
There’s at least one. Actually, I thought this was the obvious answer even before I knew what a Schelling point was: there’s no clear point at which humans become sapient and it probably isn’t a binary issue, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere, putting it at conception implies a lot of nasty tradeoffs, and so we might as well put it at the other big obvious developmental transition.
(There are smaller and less obvious alternatives, of course. One’s the viability standard that’s usual in the US post-Roe. Another is the point of “quickening”, when fetal movements become obvious to the mother, which has seen historical use in this context. And then there are various developmental stages post-birth, as are used in many older cultures to mark when to name the kid. I think these are all substantially worse Schelling points as things stand, but you could make an ethical case for any of them given certain assumptions or additional data.)
I always thought this was a pretty straightforward issue from a rationalist perspective—we have the technology to figure out whether the foetus has an active brain and can meaningfully perceive pain. That should be the cutoff point.
Maybe it’s straightforward to discover when the fetus can feel pain, but it’s not straightforward that being able to feel pain should be the cutoff point.
I always thought this was a pretty straightforward issue from a rationalist perspective—we have the technology to figure out whether the foetus has an active brain and can meaningfully perceive pain.
I see no reason to believe that you can in general kill a person because the person can’t perceive pain. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a thing.
I think for pro-abortion it is more about letting the woman decide to undergo an intervention over something which will affect her health/well-being significantly. So killing a fetus/baby might still be a certain amount of bad (maybe ramping up continuously with age), but it is more bad to not allow this choice (but this is de-emphasized by the pro-abortion movement for the obvious political reasons). I think this also explains why lots of people are ok with early-term abortions, but not late-term abortions.
It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a “you must be this rational to ride” line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.
Do you suggest that women have a right to abortion but doctors have no right to help them with the procedure?
I don’t think very many people who are “pro-choice” are actually pro-abortion. The crux of the issue is that people will be getting abortions whether they are legal or not, so there should be a safe option for those people (as opposed to backroom doctor, coat hanger, etc) which requires it to be legal and regulated
I should know better than to explain anything to homeschooled randroids
The crux of the issue is that people will be getting abortions whether they are legal or not
That’s not a particularly persuasive argument, to see why replace “getting abortions” with e.g. “stealing” (pro-life people would replace it with “murder”).
Having something done to yourself VS doing something to other people, there’s really no comparison here. The science is sound.
Not that people with grade school equivalent knowledge of politics are worth arguing with (I mean you by the way). Dunning-Kruger alarm bells ringing. Don’t worry, you’ll get laid one day
Having something done to yourself VS doing something to other people, there’s really no comparison here
Heh. It’s interesting how you assume the real crux of the issue away.
The real crux (IMHO, of course) is whether and when a fetus stops being a chunk of tissue and begins to be a human being. There are two endpoint views—at birth and at conception—and a variety of intermediate positions.
Your post assumes that the fetus is a chunk of tissue so when you are doing something, it’s to yourself, not to another person. But that assumption is precisely the root of the disagreement.
I’m a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a “you must be this rational to ride” line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.
(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide—really pro it, not just the “lol yeah delicious babies” kind we sometimes see on LW. And there’s a coherent position of “the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I’m contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem”. But I don’t think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )
89% of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (source). A 12-week-old fetus is not viable outside of the womb.
Also worth noting is that the majority of pregnancies are terminated by natural miscarriage within that 12 week period. In most such cases, the mother has not even realized she was pregnant. (source) Do you consider these natural miscarriages to be the equivalent of human deaths from disease or injury, and if so, what should be done about them?
I rounded off “I think abortion laws should be stricter than they currently are in my country” to “I am anti-abortion”, which was misleading and I’m sorry. I think that still puts me out of line with my political group though (e.g. the provisions of that Texas bill that was notably filibustered sounded reasonable to me).
I think we should be less squeamish about acknowledging when we’re trading off on human lives, particularly those of children. I think the life of a 12-week fetus is less valuable than that of a 30-week one, which in turn is less valuable than that of a 12-month child, but not by a huge margin. I think we should attempt to reduce (and ideally eliminate) these natural miscarriages through funding of medical research, the same way we do e.g. cot death.
Political and social context is important for the Texas bill and others like it. The relentlessly pursued goal of the “pro-life” movement is to restrict access to abortion. Requiring hospital admitting privileges sounds reasonable on its face, but the stigma faced by abortion providers makes it an onerous burden that is more likely to shut down clinics than to improve the safety of their operations.
Alongside bills such as the above, the “pro-life” movement is making every attempt to restrict access to long-lasting low-failure-rate birth control, which is one of the best ways to reduce abortions. They often base their arguments on erroneous claims that such birth control is abortifacient. Even if those claims were supported by evidence, the idea that a single-celled zygote is morally equivalent to (or even anywhere in the neighborhood of) a thinking, self-aware person is absurd.
“Human lives” is an artificial category. What counts as a human life? Why should we care about those things?
There are two important points about these natural miscarriages. The first is the sheer number of them, which certainly would merit medical research and treatment if one considers fetuses morally equivalent or close to persons. The second, however, is not addressed by that proposal. In most cases of early natural miscarriage, the woman did not realize that she was pregnant. Does medical treatment for a fetus warrant, e.g., surveillance of women to ensure that no pregnancies go unnoticed?
One additional factor is that it is theorized that a heck of lot of those miscarriages are in fact the body spotting something fundamentally wrong with the pregnancy and going “Abort, Retry”. One would certainly want to examine if this is the case before proceeding on a project to stop it from doing so. Not that this seems like a very easy project. I mean.. what is the research team supposed to do? Collect feminine hygiene pads from women trying for children and go through them for cell samples to analyze? That really sounds like a very.. obnoxious. project to set up. Persuading at least several hundred would-be mothers to consign their menses to a cold chain for starters. Logistics hassle from heck.
A third point would be that, often, the reason for the miscarriage was a fundamental defect of the embryo or fetus that makes it nonviable.
I’m pro-infanticide, but there’s also a consistent position of “the line between not having and having a right to not be killed is crossed while in the womb”. Another plausible position is evictionism—“Regardless of whether you have the right to kill a fetus, you aren’t obligated to support it and are free to expel it if you wish”.
Is “birth is the schelling point” really that rare a position? In LW circles it’s in every discussion. Although the more common argument in wider circles is “one person’s right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life of anyone whose life depends on impinging on the first person’s bodily autonomy”, cf “famous violinist”.
Although I see both of the above as independently being enough to make it a slam-dunk for pro-choice, I’m pro-infanticide so don’t have to actually worry about it.
People actually find the famous violinist metaphor convincing, would permit the “host” person to kill them? I’d be interested to see it happen in real life. To my mind society has always reserved the right to curtail your freedom where it would threaten others; compare e.g. the detention of Typhoid Mary.
Probably what would happen in real life would be that rights get ignored, people just take sides based on popularity, and being famous, the violinist wins. Or, people recognize it as the thought experiment from abortion debates, and the masses take sides based on previous pro-choice or pro-life opinions and nobody changes their minds and we don’t learn anything.
I think there’s a difference there between negative freedom and positive freedom—the freedom to go around spreading typhus everywhere, vs the freedom to not have things stuck in your body and the freedom to not be forced to dedicate resources to constantly keeping someone else alive.
To this entire thread I’ll say that it’s not just about the rights of the fetus/baby, but the rights of the host/mother as well.
The systems in the US and Europe treat infanticide and late-term abortion the same. They are quite coherent, but just don’t like to spell out the rules. Infanticide by the mother is illegal, just like late-term abortion, but not much more. If the mother expresses grief at the death, people figure that there’s no punishment worse than losing a child, and call it an accident. Many countries have laws on the books explicitly making infanticide a lesser crime than homicide, with a shorter jail sentence. Even when there is a conviction, the sentence is usually suspended.
The pro-life/pro-choice argument seems to be, as it tends to be in many other cases, about where to place the Schelling point. Is all sperm sacred? Is Plan-B evil? Should a fetus with likely very poor quality of life be forced to develop, anyway? Should we take any and all measures to reduce the incidence of “natural” miscarriages? How much risk to the pregnant woman’s life is acceptable in the name of saving her future baby?
The problem is that different Schelling points seem unique to different groups. When you say “(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide”, what you really mean is “I see no Schelling point past the conception stage”, whereas someone else (like ZankerH) sees brain activity as such a point, or the heartbeat, or a fixed number of weeks, or birth.
There is very little difference between your position and theirs, except one number.
There’s at least one. Actually, I thought this was the obvious answer even before I knew what a Schelling point was: there’s no clear point at which humans become sapient and it probably isn’t a binary issue, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere, putting it at conception implies a lot of nasty tradeoffs, and so we might as well put it at the other big obvious developmental transition.
(There are smaller and less obvious alternatives, of course. One’s the viability standard that’s usual in the US post-Roe. Another is the point of “quickening”, when fetal movements become obvious to the mother, which has seen historical use in this context. And then there are various developmental stages post-birth, as are used in many older cultures to mark when to name the kid. I think these are all substantially worse Schelling points as things stand, but you could make an ethical case for any of them given certain assumptions or additional data.)
I always thought this was a pretty straightforward issue from a rationalist perspective—we have the technology to figure out whether the foetus has an active brain and can meaningfully perceive pain. That should be the cutoff point.
Maybe it’s straightforward to discover when the fetus can feel pain, but it’s not straightforward that being able to feel pain should be the cutoff point.
I see no reason to believe that you can in general kill a person because the person can’t perceive pain. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a thing.
“Active brain” is also a term that wide open.
I think for pro-abortion it is more about letting the woman decide to undergo an intervention over something which will affect her health/well-being significantly. So killing a fetus/baby might still be a certain amount of bad (maybe ramping up continuously with age), but it is more bad to not allow this choice (but this is de-emphasized by the pro-abortion movement for the obvious political reasons). I think this also explains why lots of people are ok with early-term abortions, but not late-term abortions.
The latter is exactly my position and the reason for it, although I didn’t know the term “Schnelling point” years ago when I decided that.
Do you suggest that women have a right to abortion but doctors have no right to help them with the procedure?
No, that wasn’t my intended meaning.
I don’t think very many people who are “pro-choice” are actually pro-abortion. The crux of the issue is that people will be getting abortions whether they are legal or not, so there should be a safe option for those people (as opposed to backroom doctor, coat hanger, etc) which requires it to be legal and regulated
I should know better than to explain anything to homeschooled randroids
That’s not a particularly persuasive argument, to see why replace “getting abortions” with e.g. “stealing” (pro-life people would replace it with “murder”).
Having something done to yourself VS doing something to other people, there’s really no comparison here. The science is sound.
Not that people with grade school equivalent knowledge of politics are worth arguing with (I mean you by the way). Dunning-Kruger alarm bells ringing. Don’t worry, you’ll get laid one day
Heh. It’s interesting how you assume the real crux of the issue away.
The real crux (IMHO, of course) is whether and when a fetus stops being a chunk of tissue and begins to be a human being. There are two endpoint views—at birth and at conception—and a variety of intermediate positions.
Your post assumes that the fetus is a chunk of tissue so when you are doing something, it’s to yourself, not to another person. But that assumption is precisely the root of the disagreement.