Morality, Religion & Philosophy: November 2005 Archives
What could be more horrible than reading the pathetic justifications offered by "mothers" for their abortions?
An 18-year-old with braces on her teeth is on the operating table, her head on a plaid pillow, her feet up in stirrups, her arms strapped down at her sides. A pink blanket is draped over her stomach. She's 13 weeks pregnant, at the very end of the first trimester. She hasn't told her parents. ..."It was a lot easier than I thought it would be," she says. "I thought it would be horrible, but it wasn't. The procedure, that is."
She is not yet sure, she says, how she is doing emotionally. She feels guilty, sad and relieved, all in a jumble.
"There's things wrong with abortion," she says. "But I want to have a good life. And provide a good life for my child." To keep this baby now, she says, when she's single, broke and about to start college, "would be unfair." ...
A high school volleyball player says she doesn't want to give up her body for nine months. "I realize just from the first three months how it changes everything," she says.
Kim, a single mother of three, says she couldn't bear to give away a child and have to wonder every day if he were loved. Ending the pregnancy seemed easier, she says — as long as she doesn't let herself think about "what could have been." ...
Amanda, a 20-year-old administrative assistant, says it's not the obstacles that surprise her — it's how normal and unashamed she feels as she prepares to end her first pregnancy.
"It's an everyday occurrence," she says as she waits for her 2:30 p.m. abortion. "It's not like this is a rare thing."
Amanda hasn't told her ex-boyfriend that she's 15 weeks pregnant with his child. She hasn't told her parents, either, though she lives with them.
"I figured it was my responsibility," she says.
She regrets having to pay $750 for the abortion, but Amanda says she does not doubt her decision. "It's not like it's illegal. It's not like I'm doing anything wrong," she says.
"I've been praying a lot and that's been a real source of strength for me. I really believe God has a plan for us all. I have a choice, and that's part of my plan." ...
His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don't think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says.
The last patient of the day, a 32-year-old college student named Stephanie, has had four abortions in the last 12 years. She keeps forgetting to take her birth control pills. Abortion "is a bummer," she says, "but no big stress."
The perceptions of these women were formed in our modern environment of quick and easy abortions of convenience. The self-styled "abortionist" featured in this article claims to have killed more than 20,000 babies during his career, and takes pride in his lack of frustration with repeat customers like Stephanie -- but then why should he get frustrated when he's making $750 a head?
Three abortions before lunch and three more after: The appointment book is always full.
Never forget that abortion is an industry.
For all our technology and wealth, there's one advantage that the terrorists have over us: moral clarity. Sure, they're completely evil and insane, but at least they think they're right. Many of our leftists, like Chris Matthews, don't seem to get it (bolding mine).
Four years after 9/11 and the "crazy zeitgeist" that permeated the United States, most Americans have still not learned to know their enemies instead of just hating them, U.S. political journalist Chris Matthews says. ..."The period between 9/11 and Iraq was not a good time for America. There wasn't a robust discussion of what we were doing," Matthews said.
"If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil -- they just have a different perspective."
As Clayton Cramer points out, their "different perspective" is one that allows them "behead[] a bunch of teenaged girls because they attended a Christian school in Indonesia".
No matter what you personally believe about the origin of our universe you must agree that the Vatican's chief astronomer is unfamiliar with the Bible. Says the Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory,
"If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly."Rather, he argued, God should be seen more as an encouraging parent.
"God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity," he wrote. "He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves."
Basically, I have no idea what that even means. It's fluff. God "continuously creates" the world, but that doesn't count as "intervening"? It's just foolish nonsense. No matter what you believe about the universe, I hope it makes more sense than that.
Job 38:1-111 Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:
2 "Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.4 "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels [a] shouted for joy?8 "Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,11 when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt'?
Jane Galt, a generally pro-choice libertarian sort, has a great essay about abortion and responsibility that parallels most of my own opinions on the matter.
If I don't use my birth control correctly--if I forget a pill, don't notice my patch has fallen off, use a petroleum-based lubricant that dissolves latex, or decide to go without a condom or my diaphragm "just this once"--am I responsible for the pregnancy that results? Damn straight.If paying attention to really rather simple instructions, which are included right in the box, is truly beyond your abilities, then you need to be in a state home where you can be taken care of like the mental infant you are. This is not to say that everyone who has an accident is a mental infant--it seems like every third morning I forget either my asthma pills, or my inhaler, and yet I have my own apartment and student loans and everything. But if I have an asthma attack because of this, it's my own damn fault. I can't blame anyone else, or the universe, for something that I could easily have prevented with a little more care.
Given those rates, it seems safe to say that at least 80% of couples who got pregnant while "using" birth control are responsible for what happened to them.
Then, of course, there are the people who unintentionally got pregnant while not using birth control--although I don't see how you can call this "unintentional". It's rather like "unintentionally" getting fat while eating supersize McDonalds meals three times a day.
... I think that responsibility does matter. If you knowingly take a risk, and something happens, society rightfully does less to help you avoid those consequences than if you were just touched by the fickle finger of fate. And intuitively, people are, and I believe will remain, far more horrified by the woman who is on her fourth abortion because she just can't be bothered to use birth control consistently, than by that 1-in-200 woman who found out, the hard way, that she's one of those lucky few who just don't respond well to the pill.
The most offensive aspect of abortion is that many women use it as a form of birth control. Jane Galt has more thoughtful posts about abortion if you scroll through her archives towards the future.
I love statistics, so I'm facinated by these two applications of statistics to the future of human civilization. First up, the Doomsday Argument, which uses statistics to demonstrate that humanity must be close to extinction.
The Doomsday argument was conceived by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter some fifteen years ago, and it has since been developed in a Nature article by Richard Gott [1993], and in several papers by philosopher John Leslie and especially in his recent monograph The End of The World (Leslie [1996]). The core idea is this. Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (Pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about mankind's prospects and realise that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought.
Followed a decade later by Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument.
ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
As Tyler Cowen points out, there are problems with both arguments since we have no reason to believe we are "random samples" of humans from which legitimate generalizations can be drawn.
In my first post about abortion and responsibility I discussed some of the profound inequities that arise when fathers are allowed no input into the decision over whether or not to have an baby. Women cannot be forced to face the consequences of their actions by being required to care for a baby, but men are routinely forced to financially support children they never wanted or were tricked into conceiving. Women can abort or put a baby up for adoption and men are essentially powerless to either protect their child or to absolve themselves of responsibility. Despite our culture's dogmatic support of women's "choice", men have none.
Along these same lines, Cathy Young has an excellent article about a man's right to choose and how men and fathers should fit into the abortion controversy.
Advocates of "choice for men" have a point when they charge that there is a certain hypocrisy in these declarations [that it's biology's fault that women have the upper hand], now that the link between sex and procreation has ceased to be binding for women. "We are no longer being truthful when we chide the male defendant: 'It took two to make the baby,'" writes Fred Hayward. "It might have taken two to conceive an embryo, but thanks to legalized abortion, only one person controlled whether or not the baby was made."Some maverick feminists agree with this view. Karen DeCrow, an attorney who served as president of the National Organization for Women from 1974 to 1977, has written that "if a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support ... autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice."
Yet, by and large, feminists and pro-choice activists have not been sympathetic to calls for men's reproductive freedom. "If there is a birth, the man has an obligation to support the child," says Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center. "The distinction with respect to abortion is the physical toll that it takes on a woman to carry a fetus to term, which doesn't have any translation for men. Once the child is born, neither can walk away from the obligations of parenthood." (Actually, a woman can give up the child for adoption, often without the father's consent, and be free of any further obligation.)
Indeed, on the issue of choice for men, staunch supporters of abortion rights can sound like an eerie echo of the other side: "They have a choice -- use condoms, get sterilized or keep their pants on." "They should think about the consequences before they have sex." (The irony is not lost on men's choice advocates or pro-lifers.)
Unlike Cathy Young I'm opposed to the vast majority of abortions anyway, and the gross unfairness of the status quo as she describes it merely underscores the moral vacuity required to justify legalized abortions of convenience. I hope that this unfairness will ultimately be resolved by the outlawing of most abortions, and I think Miss Young identifies one way in which technology might help bring about that cultural shift.
Some day, perhaps in our lifetime, science will add a new wrinkle to these issues. Reproductive technology will have advanced to the point where the fetus can be taken from the womb early in the pregnancy, with no more medical risk than an abortion, and incubated until it becomes viable. Will the law then allow the man to petition for custody of the unborn child if the woman doesn't want it? Will he be able to sue her for child support afterward? Will many feminists argue that it's an intolerable violation of a woman's reproductive freedom that her child should be brought into the world without her consent, let alone that she should be stuck with the bill?
It's just too bad that so many people have to die in the meantime.
