I saw this just after reading a diary and comments that popped up today entitled “A Religious View of Abortion…But Not What You Expect”.

That diary and this hit upon the core of the abortion debate: when does life begin? After all, no one I know who is pro-choice is pro-murder…

The thing is, for those who believe life begins at exception, a pro-choice position is akin to a pro-murder position, and as such should be expected to be one of those non-negotiable aspects of a political platform. Since the value of life is greater than the value of property, it can likewise be expected that they will place more importance on the abortion issue than fiscal issues.

The question is, will pro-choice fiscal conservatives understand this and abandon hope for capitulation or concession by the social conservatives? In order to unify, can conservatives agree that their future leader must be fiscally conservative and pro-life?

The Declaration of Independence says that all men are endowed by their Creator with the right to life… The question is when is one a “man”? I think we understand “man” in the general sense of human. When one becomes a human being, he/she has an inalienable right to life given by the Creator. All other statements of the Constitution become secondary to these inalienable rights. That is what “inalienable” means.

Legally, there’s a constitutional right to abortion. You and I would agree that is simply bad law. Likewise, the fact that legally, the fetus has no “rights” is not particularly relevant if the point of the discussion is to understand whether the fetus has a right to life that ought to be legally recognized. There are rights that are not legally recognized…

Now, whether the fetus has a intrinsic right to life is another matter. But trying to dismiss Ace’s point that a doctor deprives a fetus of the right not to be unjustly killed simply by pointing to bad law is not a substantive point, just as saying “legally I have a right to abortion” does not matter when deciding whether such a right actually exists prior to the legal creation of a “right.”

Some rights are not created by law, only recognized or not recognized by law. (Others are created by law but have less standing.) The fetus’s right to life is not created by law, but is there by virtue of the fetus’s nature and is thus natural and inalienable, though not always recognized and often trampled.

I commend to you Embryo which addresses your concerns very well.

I understand if you don’t have time or resources to read this, but if you’re ever curious as to how some of the best pro-life thinkers approach these questions, here’s one example.

Cheers,

Putting it another way, the violinist is an innocent entity who does not deserve to be killed even when the alternative is personal sacrifice.

What anyone in that situation should do is wait out the 9 months knowing he is doing the morally excellent thing, and then sue the bastards who hooked the poor violinist up to you. Theirs is the real crime, and it would be wrong to punish the violinist for something they, not him, did to you.

Which brings me to the analogous point: the baby is always innocent and should not have to pay the ultimate price for his parent(s) mistakes/crimes.

Look to prove my good faith in making my arguement I’ll point to another hole I’ve recognized and that is…if a child is conceived in say England and the mother birthed him in the US…wouldn’t it be a British citizen using my standard…

I see the Constitutional problems my approach would cause…but at some point we need to define what is a human being that can not be murdered at the hands of a mother and Doctor because as our technology advances…it’s becoming more and more obvious to more and more people that Abortion means a mother is exorcising a life or death decision concerning a separate person and imposing her will on that person who is subsequently killed

“Until it gets to the First Amendment, the Constitution has nothing to say on the matter of Human Rights. This doesn’t mean they didn’t exist until then. Americans had Rights before the Bill of Rights passed. Our Rights descended from English common, statute, and chancery law, and before that from the ancient traditions of free Christian Englishmen (the 1689 Bill of Rights not least among these enumerations of rights). But those are peripheral sources of Rights for Americans. Most central to the American concept of Rights is The Declaration of Independence.”

As the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with rights. Legal recognition thereof originated in English Common Law, but the rights themselves were God-given. A proper libertarian argument must account for this, as the protection of life is not merely a human convention but part of the natural order of human beings. Failure to recognize this eliminates any hierarchy of rights.

“Well, you ask, what about circumstances where the mother will die if she gives birth? Bingo, I respond. You finally got the circumstance where the libertarian argument is squarely on the side of abortion.”

Here, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between the libertarian argument being on the side of abortion and the argument being on the side of recognizing the woman’s right to protect herself. It may seem a small distinction, but it is by no means insignificant. I think that this is what you meant, but it’s important to clarify anyway.

The Declaration says that “Rights” are inalienable – that they are God given.

As I understand the situation in the Garden of Eden (well, as well as anyone else can) Adam and Eve both had

• LIFE – For God breathed into Adam the breath of life, and he became a living soul.
• LIBERTY – Adam and Eve were told that of every tree of the Garden they could freely eat, EXCEPT the tree in the midst of the Garden, which was the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. They had the right to choose their actions – but not the right to choose the consequences of those actions.
• PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS – Adam and Eve were commanded to dress the Garden, multiply and replenish, and be happy.
• COMPANIONSHIP – Eve was made specifically to be with Adam – to multiply and replenish – because “it was not good that man should be alone.” It would be my contention, however, that this “right” does not supersede the right of Liberty, however. Someone must choose to be your companion.

Whether or not rights are needed is not the point – they just are – they exist irrespective of what we do, or don’t do – of whether we need them, or not.

She has a followup which does not involve rape. It involves some imagination, being a thought experiemtn. Her followup argument is as follows:

Imagine a hypothetical world in which there are spores which float around through the air. These spores, called people-seeds, will grow into human babies if they manage to implant themselves into a carpet. Say you want to be able to enjoy a nice breeze through your house. So you buy fine mesh screens that block out the people-seeds, and thus enable you to enjoy the breeze.
Say, as sometimes happens, one screen is defective and allows a spore to enter and imbed itself in your carpet.

The morally relevant question is: given the fact that you’ve taken reasonable safeguards against the people-seeds, does a defective screen mean that you are now morally responsible for the baby growing in your carpet, or is it permissible to stop it from growing into a person?

If it is successfully argued that we aren’t endowed with such rights until we reach puberty, then we’d almost certainly justify legal protections prior to that on moral grounds. But if we accept the idea as a natural fact that we are endowed with inalienable rights (ie rights that exist regardless of government/law] then determining when that starting point is, is fairly critical on this subject.

You insist that this can only be determined by individual moral considerations driving appropriate legal treatment. But the natural right in question is assumed to be independent of such laws, and would, in cases of contradiction, necessitate opposing them to defend the right. The moral arguments of either side being irrelevant in justifying a law that conflicts with an inalienable right.

Which I suppose leaves us with a few options to fall on:

1) Arguing that we are never endowed with such an inalienable right by a creator of any sort, be it parents or supreme beings… and arguing that the inalienable right is, in and of itself, a moral argument that can be tempered with other moral concerns. (Stalemate remains)

2) Arguing that the natural right does indeed exist, but cannot be taken to its logical extremes as it would be impossible… and thus necessitating a pragmatic approach to find the most logical balance between the competing right to liberty of the mother and the right to life of the child where those rights converge at their most gray shades. [Stalemate remains]

3) Arguing that the natural right does indeed exist, but cannot be taken to its logical extremes as it would be unconscionable… and thus necessitating a moral approach to weighing the liberty of the mother versus a yet undeveloped child who may lack the capacity to recognize, feel, or at some points be little different than a fertilized egg that fails to attach itself to continue the process of becoming a viable fetus, let alone an adult human being. This would likely assume that the fetus’s loss of possibility is too trivial a moral concern to force a woman to endure the hardships and societal obligations against her will. [Stalemate remains]

These possibilities seem to be what we’re left with (with some variances possible), but require that the natural right isn’t as Jefferson first described it, or is an ideal that cannot be realistically adhered to in this (or perhaps other) gray areas.

To an audience that generally take this idea of natural rights to heart, I could see a great deal of introspection on the matter if they’re pro-choice libertarians, and while they may fall back on one of these three rationales to defend their current position, it seems impossible to do so without questioning the merit or applicability of something they currently believe.

As more of a classical liberal who is in the middle ground of the abortion debate, favoring restrictions but not outright bans, I found this line of argument quite thought provoking as it excludes much of what I consider extraneous to classical liberal concerns, but which you seem to consider intrinsic to the debate.

Perhaps it won’t change my mind, but it certainly has it piqued.

For the record, I cauld care less where a candidate stands on abortion. Where they stand on jurists on the other hand is crucial.

Whatever. I prefer to use English as it’s commonly understood by Americans, but I already translated my point into your preferred terminology just to avoid the distraction over word choice. So what’s the point of continuing to argue over whether someone should call a fetus a person?

For the approximately half of American people with the moral opinion that a single cell zygote (whether or not you call that cell a person) does not have a moral status similar to a person after birth, do you think it would change their moral opinions if all the dictionary publishers and English teachers announced that the words fetus, embryo, etc. were abolished, and henceforth the correct usage would be “human being in the Nth week before birth”?

Of course it would not change their moral views, no more than your views would be changed by a ban on calling a fetus a person. It would only mean using different words to express exactly the same moral opinions, as I’m now doing to indulge you. Wasting type trying to change common English vocabulary would only make sense if the moral beliefs themselves were less important to you than the words used to express those beliefs.

the difference between a fetus and what you consider a “human being” in the last trimester is generally mandated to which side of the vagina it is on

The late term fetuses (whether or not they’re called persons) example supports one of the main points I made in my original comment. There I said that most of the OP was a waste of type, arguing for points on life, liberty, property etc. that almost everybody (pro-life or not, libertarian or not) already agrees with. The real disagreement between the vast majority of pro-lifers and pro-choicers is a moral one, over whether those agreed points should also apply to early term pregnancies. For almost everybody, which side of pro-life vs. pro-choice they’re on is determined by whether they agree with the OP’s assertion that a zygote (whether or not it’s called a person) has similar moral status to a person after birth; the rest of the OP’s arguments don’t matter.

The vast majority of pro-choicers support laws banning abortion in the last months of pregnancy, because their moral belief is that a 9th month fetus (whether or not they call it a person) has similar moral status to a post-birth person. That proves my point that most of the OPs arguments are pointless, because almost everybody including pro-choicers already agrees with them. If being pro-choice was based on disagreement with those points, rather than rejecting the OP’s moral premise that a single cell zygote’s (whether or not you call that cell a person) moral status is the same as a person’s after birth, then most pro-choicers would favor the same unrestricted abortion for 9th month fetuses (whether or not they call them human beings) as they favor for early term abortions.

without some scientific rational on why one cell less from a viable fetus is no longer a human being, we’re left in the muddy waters of logic on why it suddenly gains the status of human being over mere human garbage that can be tossed into a wastebasket like a nose bleed soaked tissue

I agree with you about viability being a flawed criterion and have had a few arguments with pro-choicers over it, but that’s a separate issue. Whatever moral opinion someone has as a basis for deciding what stage of pregnancy abortion should be outlawed, your objection about “muddy waters of logic” drawing a line in the gray area between “definitely X” vs. “definitely not X” is refuted by real life experience. Our laws draw lines at some point in all kinds of gray areas, and it would be disastrous for society if we didn’t.

There are pollutants that if unregulated would cause many deaths, but there is uncertainty about exactly how high a concentration constitutes a risk of killing people. If the law limits a pollutant to say 200 parts per million, your objection would be that the distinction between that vs. 199 PPM or 201 PPM is arbitrary “muddy waters of logic”, so the only “logical” choice is to set a limit of 0 PPM. But for many pollutants the cose of reducing to 0 far exceed the costs of reducing it to a level that we believe is not a significant threat. Banning abortion at 10 weeks or 20 weeks based on whatever criteria is no more arbitrary than what we do with all kinds of laws.

And the continuance of this conversation may be helping my primary claim that this post is at least thought provoking.

You’re right it provoked debate, but almost all of it about the OP’s assertion of a moral equivalence between a single cell zygote (whether or not you call that cell a person) and a person after birth. Nobody’s arguing about the bulk of the OP that I said was waste of time, because most pro-lifers and pro-choicers already agree on those points.

I think it highly unlikely that any argument would succeed in changing your or the OP author’s moral opinion, that a zygote has a moral status same or similar to a 9th month fetus. My point has been that sharing or rejecting that moral opinion is what divides almost all pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Thus either side is wasting its time if, like the OP, it spends most of its time expounding arguments that assume its side of the moral disagreement as their premise.

There’s no silver bullet argument out there to use that will change pro-choicers mind (any more than changing pro-lifers minds), where pro-choicers will suddenly say “Oh man, I didn’t think about that! Now I understand, so agree we should ban abortion from conception.”

The only way you can change most pro-choicer’s minds is by convincing them to switch to your moral opinion, that a zygote should have the same moral status as a 9th month fetus. And those pro-choicers already know the DNA sequence is set when the spermatozoon joins the ovum, and that it usually will result in a 9th month fetus and birth if left undisturbed in the uterus.

Some pro-life advocates think those points on DNA and potential birth are slam-dunk q.e.d., but pro-choicers already know those points and react “So what?” Pro-life advocates will have to do better than repeating those stock lines to change pro-choicers minds.