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Notes -
I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/17/trump-gop-must-endorse-three-exceptions-for-abortion-to-get-elected/
This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:
I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.
But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.
I think Trump is right here and has framed it in a good way as well.
Americans (liberal and conservative) are pretty ignorant about how Europe actually works, conceptualizing it merely as a more-liberal version of the U.S.
Thus, they are shocked when they go to the Duomo in Milan and get told they have to wear something less slutty. Or, on a different note, that abortion rules in most European countries are actually much stricter than in U.S. blue states.
Republicans need to flip the script. Instead of being forced to defend a blanket ban on abortions, they need Democrats to defend their (frankly pretty insane) beliefs that a woman should be allowed to terminate a viable pregnancy one second before delivery.
That said, the fact that many Republicans are willing to defend a losing strategy is somewhat admirable. If you believe life begins at conception, then a blanket ban on abortions follows naturally from that. And you don't consent to the murder of millions just so you can get re-elected and lower the marginal tax rate by 2% or whatever.
So, the Europe thing is a dodge.
In a sense, some Western European countries are more strict about abortion, but not in reality. As a 'up until birth' pro-choicer, if the GOP position on abortion was unlimited abortion on demand in the first three months at any hospital paid for by the government, then basically incredibly socially liberal judges giving OK to later term abortions via giant loopholes, then yes, that'd be an election winner.
The problem, is Republican's idea of 'moderate' restrictions are all the downsides of European restrictions plus the supply side restrictions that make it difficult to keep a clinic open plus waiting periods and so forth.
If the choice was European abortion laws vs blue state abortion laws, European abortion laws would win. But, the GOP isn't putting forth European abortion laws. It's putting forth unpopular restrictions, being backed by people who have talked about completely banning abortions.
Plus, again, there is a very American-style libertarian defense of expansive abortion laws - 'we trust women and doctors with their reproductive freedom. Have an abortion or don't have an abortion, that's your choice. Meanwhile, the Republican's want to make a government small enough to get between your doctor, yourself, and your own beliefs, because they think they know better than you.'
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I’d say this is a pretty uncharitable way of describing the pro-abortion position.
More importantly, there’s a symmetry. Why shouldn’t pro-lifers have to defend their beliefs? Why is it obvious that conception is the important point, and not implantation, heartbeat, brain activity, premature viability, birth, sexual maturity, or first tax return?
You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.
Some of these positions are frankly pretty insane. Others are just unreasonable. I’d say both “conception” and “birth” are in the latter category. Not coincidentally, policy tends to fall somewhere in between, because it’s not actually an obvious question.
I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.
A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.
You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.
So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.
It’s the same reasoning that makes the “but for” test so common in law. Lots of normal intuitions about causation and liability are covered, but you can still get to some pretty perverse results.
Something like 30-50% of eggs fail to implant. That probably compares favorably to acorns, but the fact remains: those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg. Are they immoral for taking the action?
Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?
Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?
A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action. Demanding she let the mechanical process continue looks unjust. But so does killing the child for the sins of the literal father. Hence the disaster that is “victim blaming” discourse.
Combine the two, and you end up with something like the Violinist argument, where the victim had no expectation of being used to support another human. Pulling the plug is framed as a return to the last state she expected.
Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?
Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?
Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.
Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".
I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.
Hey, somebody in the other thread pointed me to search.pullpush.io! I wanted to share the existence of a working search tool.
I found my previous conversation on the violinist here. Not sure if you're any of the other participants.
Thanks for being a good sport about this discussion.
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I do remember our previous discussion regarding the rope. With Reddit’s decisions to cripple search tools, I can’t find it either. I remember having some objections to the metaphor, but I’ll agree that it avoids the main pitfall of the violinist.
That said, the only reason I mentioned the violinist was to point out that a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything. Especially if one wants to account for expected outcomes. But at the same time, expected outcomes are really important.
In the case of a couple genuinely trying to conceive, they can still expect a >30% chance of failure to implant. They’re increasing the chance of a dead embryo from 0% to 30%. The only way to avoid that outcome is abstinence. But it’d be outrageous to assign blame based on that reasoning. Why?
Is it because they’re trying their best? We don’t have any way to create children without that 30% rate. A necessary evil. I am very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, which still doesn’t provide a good way to decide which ends merit such a gamble.
I think it’s worth considering whether those embryos really are as valuable as their implanted—or born—cousins. Or that intentionality isn’t enough to settle the argument.
Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.
Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.
You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.
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Catholic doctrine isn’t opposed to masturbation as murder, but as disordered. The only permissible sex is the kind that occurs between a married man and woman and that is open to life.
See CCC 2352.
Right. I was suggesting that someone with the murder-position would find the Catholic stance too weak.
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Pro-lifers do have to defend our beliefs, it’s pro-choicers that usually don’t and aren’t asked to. Red state governors who’ve banned abortion get asked about this all the time. Politicians who go out of their way to defend the legality of partial birth abortion virtually never are. Yes, partial birth abortion doesn’t happen very often, but that’s not actually an argument against banning it.
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100% agree. The Republicans are being forced to defend their most insane beliefs while the Democrats are not being forced to defend theirs. Neither should be exempt.
Personally I'd say the Democratic beliefs (killing a baby t-minus 5 minutes) is the most insane, but that's just me.
On the flip side, I agree that "life begins at conception" doesn't seem to be supported by common sense. We certainly don't mourn a first-trimester miscarriage as we would a child. And, of course, IVF polls positively despite its destruction of embryos. Forcing a woman to carry a child with serious birth defects to term also seems incredibly cruel.
Trump's position here is actually considerably more reasonable than the mainstream Democratic and Republican positions, and is closer to what the average person actually thinks. First time for everything I guess, amirite?
"Every sperm is sacred".
I mean, any smart pro-choice person can make the late term abortion argument - "Almost all late term abortions are tragic situations where there is no other choice, and it's sad religious extremists want to make these women jump through hoops to appease their own doctrines. Like most American's, I trust women and their doctor to make the right choice for them, as opposed to thinking they need to fulfill whatever those who have already openly said they want to ban all abortions want them to do."
Then, depending on the audience, maybe throwing in a crack that Republican's want it to be more difficult for a woman and a doctor to come to a conclusion about an abortion than for a teenager to get an assault rifle.
I think the Democrat argument is a good one, but would fall flat in the face of the actual realities of a late-term abortion. I don't know what late-term abortions look like, but I imagine it's a lot like killing a baby.
If those images were seen by people, I doubt many would actually countenance it.
But why stop at late-term abortions? In early Roman times, a man had the right to kill his wife and children. Even in later Roman times, infanticide was widely practiced. Why should the state get between man, the gods, and his right to kill his family? It's downright un-Roman.
The reality is that the state already controls all areas of our life. Personally, I think this is wrong. But I find it bewildering that you can't cut hair without a license but terminating a 8.99 months pregnancy is totally fine. If you're going to allow unlimited abortion on libertarian grounds, fine. But only if you also want to dismantle like 99% of existing laws and regulation. Otherwise it just feels like an unprincipled argument.
I mean, the pro-life side has tried the whole "show pictures of fetuses after abortions" in ads and such, and it hasn't seemed to work. Even low-info people understand that medical procedures are messy. Hell, if I was an enterprising liberal media type, I'd take a video of some perfectly benign medical procedure, chop it in a way it could be seen as possibly a late term abortion, then go to a pro-life rally, and see what reactions I could get.
Because once a baby is born, the rest of society can step in, not while it's still in the mother's womb, and we've decided it's bad to force a woman to go through a pregnancy when it might affect her mentally or physically, only for a child to barely survive or only survive for hours or days.
Well, I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian, but neither are most American's, but most Americans have an undercurrent of 'don't tell me what to do', which makes life difficult for both lefties like me and social conservatives. But, I'm happy to use the libertarian-style argument when it's to my advantage.
Ironically, though, government licensure is why people both want the government to make sure a hairdresser isn't a fly by night operator (especially for more complicated things a guy like me with short hair doesn't understand) and why they think it's OK for a doctor, who has been licensed by the government to make a decision, with a woman when it comes to reproductive choice, instead of getting the OK from a panel of conservative politicians who were formerly used car salesmen, dentists, and McDonald franchise owners.
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There is a license for terminating pregnancies - the medical license.
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Why is any abortion insane? Where you you personally draw the line? There is only no limit in 7 states btw.
Going by just moral revulsion, the idea of a aborting a couple of cells seems like no big deal.
On the other hand, imagine a newborn baby. A living, crying, perfectly healthy baby. Only a monster would kill that baby. But wait, rewind the clock 1 day. Now they are in the womb. Same baby, one day earlier, looks like 99.9% the same. Now, it's totally okay to kill. Go ahead and murder them for any reason, no matter how capricious. That is an insane belief system.
First trimester as in the original Roe v. Wade decision seems like a good Schelling point.
How often are 9 months minus 1 day abortions happening, though? This always seems like a questionable argumentative tactic because all the data shows that it almost never happens. Even most liberal doctors in NYC or San Francisco would refuse to abort a healthy third trimester baby as a matter of conscience.
This is sort of the problem for the pro-life argument. There are basically zero 'oops, let's not have a baby' decisions in month eight of pregnancy, and as you said, there are basically no doctors willing to do that. Almost all late term abortions are terrible tragedies and incredibly sad situations, and pro-lifers look bad when they try to make some poor woman jump through a bunch of hoops to appease their religious beliefs, instead of trusting a couple (far more women with partners have abortions than you think) and a doctor all not to be blood hungry monsters desperate to kill a baby.
Even most second trimester abortions outside of medically necessary ones are because a lack of money to afford the abortion in the first trimester or some sort of waiting period or lack of access, as opposed to somebody suddenly deciding they don't want a baby after four months.
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From a purely technocratic perspective, this is a bit hairy. You can only do an initial screening for certain genetic anomalies starting at 10wks (which, incidentally it's itself a borders-on-magic-technology that's fairly new). The test itself takes a couple of days to process and then a confirmation test is performed before scheduling a termination.
Reliably fitting that in under 13-14wks is quite hard. A realistic schedule (one that assumes mothers will schedule everything within a week but are not min-maxing-it-to-the-day) under the technology that we have would yield most terminations for genetic anomalies by the 16-17th week of pregnancy. After all, some small fraction of mothers will be traveling, some small fractions of samples will be lost or contaminated.
And FWIW, the anomalies revealed tend to be awful. Some are either incompatible with life or incompatible with living beyond 1-2yrs.
That all said, I understand that a technocratic-type approach is not palatable across the political spectrum for obvious reasons. Just a comment about the best we can do for genetic screening.
Very good points. Let me refine my position.
Abortion for any reason should be allowed during the first trimester. After that, abortion should be banned except for specifically enumerated reasons. I know it might be difficult to arrive at a reasonable middle ground, but apparently some European countries have done it. I think we could do it too, or at least we should try.
I respect that. I don't know that liberals will trust conservative states to govern those reasons or vice versa.
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Let's say a child was missed in screening and was born alive with Trisomy 18. Is it ok to kill the child then and there?
If the argument jeroboam is making is that after the first trimester the child is old enough to resemble what we value in a human, and therefore should have a basic right to life, then why would the presence of a disease change that?
No, but I would be in favor of a supportive-care type model that realizes that there is no long term potential to that life and eschews aggressive-but-futile medical intervention. I'm not holier than the Pope.
Yes, I am in favor of more palliative care options and honest counseling. But the question isn't whether you would let the child die but rather would you let the parents kill the child? Maybe the distinction is meaningless to your ethical system, but it is not to many people's ethical systems.
I thought I answered that clearly in the first word: No.
Honestly, that distinction is meaningful in most contexts but is a lot less distinct for a newborn, especially one with serious medical problems.
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I would not object.
In reality, I would be constrained by legal concerns and my desire to maintain my job and good standing with the medical licensing boards of two different nations. But in that case, I would object only because I'm forced to, not because I want to.
I've seen plenty of babies born for whom the kindest option would be a pillow over the face, if an overdose of morphine wouldn't suffice. Thankfully most of them just die on their own when the "acceptable" option of extending minimal supportive care or simply withdrawing it is possible, which is thankfully accepted in the UK.
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Most countries let the parents surrender the child if they don't think they can care for it themselves, though with severe conditions nobody else is really able to either.
I knew some teen girls who were basically pressed into service from a young age caring for their disabled younger sister who needed around the clock care or she would die (it sounded like the government had approved funds to hire a carer, but it was difficult and unstable to actually find one), and it didn't seem very good that they were doing that instead of having more normal childhoods themselves.
I'm not sure that I could care for a highly disabled baby very well, with two children already. It wasn't even that trivial to get them to learn to eat at first, and they were healthy. Newborn babies are unbelievably dependent on their mothers taking active steps to keep them alive. My expectation would be that babies with very severe problems mostly weren't up to breastfeeding before modern medicine, and usually couldn't get enough nutrition to survive. It's not a clear win to then hook them up to a feeding tube and oxygen or something if their parents don't even want that and the prognosis is basically hopeless.
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