Thursday, July 7, 2011

"So, if you had the option of saving 100 embryos or one baby..."

I love pro-abortion arguments. Oh, don't get me wrong-- I'd much prefer if no one supported abortion. But if they're gonna support abortion, it's best that they make arguments, because the arguments can be dissected and exposed for what they are so much more effectively than one can deal with obstinate silence.

Commentor Andreas:

... So, if you had the option of saving 100 embryos or one baby - you would the embryos ? Btw, the word "being" refers to sentient life forms, do you consider an embryo to be sentient ?

I'l leave aside the issue of sentience for now.  Let's answer the question: if I had the option of saving 100 embryos or one baby, who would I save?

Good question. Like many moral hypotheticals (would you kill the one guy on the right train track or just let the train run over the five guys on the left train track...?)  the question is valuable not for the actual answer but for the issue it raises and the clarity of thought it requires in the effort to answer it.

Would I save the embryos or the baby? I don't know. The embryos are 100 precious human beings, and I would do all that I could do to save them.  But the baby is precious too, and emotionally it would be much more difficult for me to harm a baby I can see and hear and touch than it would be for me to harm 100 embryos in petri dishes.  That does not mean that I would be morally right to save the baby and kill the embryos.  It's just that I love babies,  and I respect all life, and the decision would be agonizing. It's a decision that I would have difficulty making, either way. I do know this: I couldn't harm a baby.

I'd probably try to harm the guy who was giving me the ultimatum.

But there's a close parallel to this question that's very interesting and that's a bit more grounded in reality.

During WWII thousands of airmen flew bombing raids over Japan and Germany. My father (bless his soul) was one of them. The men on these planes were good men, many were heroes, and all were willing to sacrifice their lives (and many did) to protect their country and to defeat deeply evil regimes.

Most of these brave airmen would never think of hurting a child. Many were fathers themselves.  But when they flew their missions, they commonly killed thousands of innocent children, in the most horrible ways imaginable. They incinerated tens of thousands of kids in the firebombing of Toyko, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the saturation bombing of Dresden (one of the worst atrocities in a war of atrocities).

These airmen killed innocents wholesale.

Yet nearly all of these men would never think of hurting a child. If a child were placed in front of them,  they'd give the kid candy. They wouldn't even spank the child, let alone dismember or incinerate him.   Not for a million dollars. These were decent ethical men.

So why were basically good men able to kill so many innocent people-- by the millions-- without batting an eye?

The reason is obvious: they didn't see them. They didn't make an emotional connection to the people they were killing. They only knew them as cities in the bombsites. Yet if they were to see one of these kids personally, in front of them, as a real flesh-and-blood human being, they wouldn't dream of hurting the kid. Many soldiers sacrificed their own lives to protect civilians, when they saw the civilians as people.

The parallel to the abortion issue is obvious. Every human life begins at conception.  Every embryo is a human being, just like we were early in our lives. And killing an innocent human being is always wrong, at any age.

What allows otherwise decent people to support abortion and to have abortions is that they don't see the baby in the womb as a human being, just as the airmen on the Lancaster bombers didn't see the tens of thousands of women and children refugees on the raids over Dresden.  But the airmen did kill children, by the tens of thousands. And those who support abortion support the killing of human beings, by the millions.

The morality of saturation bombing of civilians in war can be debated, just as abortion can be debated. But the abortion debate, just like the debate about the bombing of Dresden, must begin with the recognition that real human beings are being killed.

11 comments:

  1. Dr Egnor wrote:
    I'd probably try to harm the guy who was giving me the ultimatum.
    Aye, if at all possible; or offer myself instead.
    As I noted in my lengthy original responses, the horror of the choice to be made is amplified when potential is factored in. If the 'embyros' are naturally created and in situ they have human potential.
    As for the comments on the Second World War, I can relate to what you mean, Dr.
    My Grandfather, who raised me with my father, was in the RAF. I myself serve in a modern military capacity. The TOTAL war that was WWII is largely impersonal to airmen. Even today the pilots of our crews have an extremely different view of the conflicts we face.
    For a soldier like myself, however, it is deemed highly unacceptable to TARGET innocents, thus killing them with intent. But dead is dead.
    I should note: Our enemies did/do not honour even this stark principle, neither do many of our 'allies'.
    War is a horrible thing.
    But on the unborn?
    Again, my tactical mind measures things - much of the time - in terms of potential. I see the embryos in the hypothetical as potential unlocked - little 'first stage' people.
    To make and break them for fun, or to satiate scientific curiosity is a VERY slippery slope, in my view.
    I see it just as morally precipitous as Oppenheimer's experiments.

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  2. "The parallel to the abortion issue is obvious. Every human life begins at conception. Every embryo is a human being".

    This isn't an "obvious" parallel unless one accepts the contentious (to say the least) premise that follows. At least be honest enough to admit that. Your comparison to the WWII allied bombers is of no relevance if this premise is false. And the notion that every human life begins at conception is a black and white statement about an issue which is anything but. You're just begging the question.

    Your using these kind of "arguments" is probably one of the major reasons that, only a few weeks after you started your blog, very few people are bothering to even engage with it.

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  3. And the notion that every human life begins at conception is a black and white statement about an issue which is anything but.

    He said, in black and white.

    Your using these kind of "arguments" is probably one of the major reasons that, only a few weeks after you started your blog, very few people are bothering to even engage with it.

    He said, engaging with the blog.

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  4. @Matteo

    I don't even know what you're trying to say with #1. Would you have preferred a different font colour? Is it supposed to be a clever rhetorical flourish? Do you even know what you were trying to say?

    As for #2, very few is not none. I doubt I'll spend much time here myself if the quality of the debate continues to be as bad as posts by Egnor and his defenders so far suggest.

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  5. Xorandor wrote:
    "... And the notion that every human life begins at conception is a black and white statement about an issue which is anything but."
    So life COULD begin at conception? You will concede that Xorandor? If the issue is not black and white, or cut and dry; you must harbour doubts?
    For the sake of ethics alone this matter should be settled beyond any lingering doubts before embryos are 'harvested' for research, surely?
    And surely the ethical position on abortion would need to be shifted if this area that is 'anything but'... 'black and white' turns out to be what people have always instinctively and traditionally conceived it to be: Conception. The moment all the potential of the coming human being is realized and begun.
    The current (and very convenient) positions on embryonic research, abortion, fertilization techniques, and stem cell harvesting would have to all be readdressed; on an ethical level. People with tenure and reputations admit they were wrong - a hard thing to make happen.
    But it can happen. Inhumanities in the name of 'progress' have been exposed and stopped in the past.
    I just pray it happens sooner rather than later.

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  6. Xorander is apparently starkly black-and-white regarding the implied belief that human life worthy of protection DOES NOT!!! begin at conception.

    He must be, since any other position which still allowed elective abortion to take place would be morally insane.

    If his implied position is not black-and-white and dogmatically absolutist, what would be?

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  7. Egnor: You can't defer the question of sentience. It is at the core of the question, at least how the original questioner posed it. IMO, even if an embryo was sentient (it's clearly not), and even if one considered an embryo to be a person (I do not, let that be clear) you still cannot force one person to enslave their very body to another person.

    If you are disgusted by abortion because you consider it murder, I consider it equally disgusting to attempt to pose babies and embryos as equivalent moral agents. As for your comparison of abortion to WWII bombing, destroying a zygote and killing a living human child with a bomb are worlds apart, morally speaking.

    Trying to play semantic games by labeling something "human being" or "not a human being," when we can already clearly describe what it is, is sophomoric. Everybody knows what it is: it's a human embryo. I don't care whether you call it a "human being" or not, because an emotionally-charged label has nothing to do with the actual debate, other than to confuse the matter.

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  8. How in the world does an embryo being in precisely the one place it belongs by its very nature and precisely due to the free acts of its parents constitute enslavement of the mother?

    And just what are you doing using an emotionally-charged term like "slavery" anyway?

    Don't you follow your own principles?

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  9. @Matteo:

    "any other position which still allowed elective abortion to take place would be morally insane."

    If this implied position is not black-and-white and dogmatically absolutist, what would be?

    (To be clear, I'm not saying your position is "dogmatically absolutist", I'm simply pointing out that your rhetorical question could be appended to pretty much any statement which takes a position and be as convincing.)

    @crusadeREX:

    "So life COULD begin at conception? You will concede that Xorandor? If the issue is not black and white, or cut and dry; you must harbour doubts?"

    I agree with @Mac about the semantic game of talking about "human life". The issue is of when life-worth-of-protection, as Matteo puts it, begins. (That's *one* of the issues involved in this complex debate, not the only one.) And that's what Egnor is talking about.

    For me, yes, it's cut and dried that an embryo consisting of two cells does not have a life-worthy-of-protection in its own right. It's two cells, with no nervous system, history, emotional attachments, memories, etc. An embryo of 38 weeks gestation, capable of surviving outside the womb and with a developed nervous system, does. Where to draw the line between the two is an informed but essentially arbitrary decision.

    That's what I meant by Egnor presenting a grey issue as a black and white one.

    Unless you believe in some supernatural component to that two-celled embryo, you should accept that it has no right to life. If you're introducing something supernatural like a soul, then you either have to demonstrate that or at least accept that you can't use it as an uncontroversial premise in your argument.

    Egnor is yet to address the fact that his argument begs the question.

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  10. Matteo: "And just what are you doing using an emotionally-charged term like "slavery" anyway?"

    Ya got me. I'll not call unwanted pregnancy "slavery" as long as you don't call an embryo a human being.

    You're entirely right though, to call me out, because otherwise the conversation really does lose objectivity (ah, my favorite word again!), and it's valuable when we keep each other on track.

    Matteo: "How in the world does an embryo being in precisely the one place it belongs by its very nature..."

    I think this says worlds about your attitude towards women, and their place in society. If I have a uterus, and I don't want an embryo in it, then that embryo does not "belong there," period, dot, end of story. If, however, it were true according to the bible that my uterus was given to me by god to fulfill his mandate that I make babies for his glory, then by golly embryos belong there. Load me up! That would clearly be a religious view, however. And neither you nor the state, by virtue of the first amendment, may force me to submit to a religious doctrine.

    "Life starts at conception," by the way, is another religious doctrine.

    Xorander's point, that rights are not owed to a 2-cell embryo, is the reason that most of the country is pro-choice to some extent. It's most definitely NOT because, as Egnor suggests, that we just don't see the embryos, like the bomber aircrew of WWII saw civilians.

    Another failure of the analogy: the doctor who does the procedure most definitely sees the embryo.

    Human development is anything but black and white. If your religion disagrees, then you are free to practice that within the confines of your religion. But your religion may not dictate what others do, no matter how deeply you believe in it.

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  11. What if it's a natural disaster like a fire forcing you to make the choice?

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