It seems impossible to draw a hard line in the sand and say "This is when life begins." Conception? Birth? Most people think it's sometime in between. Via Matt D. (and via talk radio this morning on the way to work), here's an article in the Independent about using eggs from dead female unborn babies (or fetuses, if you prefer) to conceive children. Thus, someday a child will be created whose mother was never born.
Scientists announced yesterday that they have been able to remove immature ovaries from four-month-old foetuses. The theory is that they can then be stimulated in the test tube to go through the later stages of development before the creation of fully mature eggs.
Look, science can do a lot of things, but just because something is possible doesn't mean that it should be done. I hate to succumb to Godwin's Law so early in this post, but Nazis performed all sorts of interesting medical experiments on Jews and other concentration camp prisoners, but just because they gathered new data and made scientific discoveries doesn't mean that their "research" was justified. No one likes falling back on the Nazi argument, but it's an argument of extremes; if a position can be used to justify creating babies from the eggs of aborted babies, then such a position can be used to justify just about anything.
Françoise Shenfield, an ethicist at University College London and a former member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, also voiced concerns about where this sort of research was leading."I would be very troubled by this not only for ethical reasons but for psychological reasons, because what is the public going to think about where the eggs come from?" Dr Shenfield said. ...
"The authority does not consider the use of tissue from this source to be acceptable for infertility treatment. But the authority does allow the use of foetal material to produce eggs for research provided that it is taken only with full, explicit consent," she said.
Roger Gosden, a leading fertility specialist working at the Jones Institute in Norfolk, Virginia, said the ethical issues centre on the issue of informed consent - the foetus cannot give its consent.
Yeah well, aborted babies don't give consent either, so what's the difference? Again, see Nazi Germany for reference. The whole issue is disgusting to me, as are the people involved.
First THings magazine published what I consider to be a watershed article on the abortion issue. I don't know if you've got HTML tags here, but this is the link:
Life: Defining the Beginning by the End
An interesting article, Mark, however, that definition, life beginning at conception, which I do accept, by the way, leads to some rather unusual consequences.
Let's suppose, for argument's sake, that life does begin at conception and that such is now the legal definition. How do we deal with miscarriages? Does a miscarriage lead to a police investigation? After all, miscarriages can be induced. Suppose then that we ban all modern pharmaceuticals capable of inducing miscarriages. Fine. Libraries are full of books of herbal lore, many quite old, with recipes for purgatives, many using quite common ingredients. Do we then ban those books and the plants used therein? Do we then go further and make every woman take a pregnancy test every month with that data recorded by the local police such that if a woman goes from pregnant to non-pregnant without producing a baby (with appropriate DNA verification) that a criminal investigation is launched? That would seem to be the logical consequence of adopting, legally, such a position on when life begins.
The long and short of it is that even if the legal definition were to change and recognize that life begins at conception, there is precious little that could be done about enforcing that prohibition.
If a law can't be enforced, even if that law is founded on deeply moral principles, why have that law at all?
Very good article; I've read it before but had forgotten many of the points.
Interesting point Allen, and I agree that enforceability is an important component of any law. However, we don't go to the lengths you describe to prevent or detect murders of humans who have been born.
People don't have to check in with the government at regular intervals to show that they're still alive. In fact, there are probably hundreds or thousands of unsolved and undetected murders in America each year. Generally, investigations are only opened when someone feels there is reason to believe that a death wasn't natural, and that seems like a reasonable standard to apply to unborn children as well.
No law can prevent or punish every murder, and no possible law could prevent or punish every abortion. But we could make a big dent in the problem.
Allen, I'll go with Michael's response on the pragmatic end of things. I'd also add that the problems you've outlined, likely as they may be, don't seem much more complex to me than the current legal issues over abortion. Complexity & enforcement gray areas seem unavoidable in life and death matters.
Philosophically, the definition of life, the enforcement of a law, and the value of symbolic law are all separate matters.
Michael and Mark,
I was simply trying to express the notion about how such a law, banning abortion, would function in practice. If the legal definition of life was that life begins at conception, then any termination of that life, for other than an accident, would constitute murder (or manslaughter, etc.) and thus would be grounds for criminal prosecution.
How would one know if any given circumstance were an accident? That requires an investigation, even perhaps a fairly benign one, but an investigation never the less. Do you honestly believe that some adamently pro-life prosecutor wouldn't seek to make exactly this point by launching a detailed investigation against some hapless woman who had a miscarriage, but perhaps was a political target?
This would either cause a backlash to rescind the law, or would seek to modify the law in an attempt to make the criteria more objective. It's the latter case which might lead to some of the truly invasive stuff I noted in my first comment.
I do hope that none of that comes about and would prefer (strongly) that abortions didn't happen, but that is wishful thinking.
Murder is not something which can be prevented, granted, but once it has happened, we do seek to solve that crime and exact punishment (as a society) from the perpetrator. Aborting children, if the legal definition of life were altered, would fall into that area and as a result, women who undertook such abortions would be subject to prosectution. I'm not sure how the law could see it any other way. That's probably just a failure in my thinking, but that's what thinking is for. Better failed thinking, which can be corrected, than failed actions or policies, which oftentimes can't be corrected.
Allen: "If the legal definition of life was that life begins at conception, then any termination of that life, for other than an accident, would constitute murder (or manslaughter, etc.) and thus would be grounds for criminal prosecution."
Not all purposeful killing is murder.
I certainly agree that the laws would need to be carefully considered and crafted to avoid easy abuse, but I think that's the case with all laws and I'm not convinced that abortion provides particularly special circumstances.
"How would one know if any given circumstance were an accident?"
For that matter, how would anyone know that a women was three months pregnant and even had a miscarriage? Same way society discovers other crimes: someone reports it or the police stumble upon it. We certainly won't catch 100% of abortions, but we'll eliminate the easy and cheap access.
Sure, some people will drive to Canada or Mexico, but there's not really anything we can do about that. Heck, if Roe is overturned I'm sure there will still be many states that maintain legal abortion, so women could just travel to another state to kill their baby.
I agree that the policy will be complicated, but I'm not advocating it merely because I think it will be a neat new law. I'm advocating it because I think most abortions are murder, and as a moral issue we should do whatever we can ro reduce the number of babies killed.
If this makes me sound like a political correctoid (which I'm not, believe me), that's OK, but nothing makes my day more than opening up a comments thread and finding several conservative men discussing how to prevent an act that should be left up to the discretion of the only actual person involved: the woman.
Oh, and by the way, not only does the fatuous comparison of legalized, voluntary abortion to Hitler's policies violate Godwin's Law, but it also conveniently fails to mention that abortion was a crime for "Aryan" women, who were ordered by the state to reproduce as much as they could for the good of the "Nordic race." Women who sprogged six or more times actually got medals from the Nazis.
The essential difference between your position, Reginleif, and my own is that I don't believe that the mother is the only person involved. I believe that the baby she is killing is also an "actual person". Since that baby has no way to protect himself or herself, I don't think it's unreasonable for me, a mere man, to intervene.
Additionally, your argument could be applied to any murder. Why should anyone care if someone tries to kill someone else? It's just between the two of them! Mind your own business!
Almost sorry to write this...but: Reginleif the Valkyrie is an idiot. I have one of those idiot meters...and it went off big time.
If your going to kill anybody or anything...how can the killer be the only person involved? The only incident I know of involving death and one person is suicide.
Reginleif the Valkyrie...you need a check up from the neck up.