OK, here's my next vote in the New Weblog Showcase. It's for Sebastian Holsclaw's post on the Right to Life controversy. I've followed his debate with Schwartz about the issue of "imminent threat," and he is a provocative thinker and debater. Here's an excerpt from his post:
"The central issue is whether or not the fetus is a person with rights protected by the state. If you want an obscuring political slogan, pro-choice is great. If you want to actually talk about abortion policy, choice is a component far less important that the personhood of the fetus. It is fair to argue that the fetus is not a person. It is not good faith to pretend that the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant."
I'm intrigued by this perspective because it ultimately raises issues about uncertainty that I've dealt with in a couple of other posts here, and here. Of course, if "choice" (seen as either freedom or license depending on your orientation) were not a critical issue, whether or not we regarded the fetus as a person would hardly matter. But the central issue is the "personhood" of the fetus, or some similar conception that tells us that he/she/it is sufficiently like us in the most critical dimension that we must regard the entity as inherently entitled to individual rights. And that'll be notoriously difficult to define. Perhaps R. Buckminster Fuller's method might shed some light. He regarded the status of an "individual" as having been established as soon as there is "consciousness of otherness." Or, in other words, if you can demonstrate that a fetus is conscious of persons other than itself, or indeed any item animate or inanimate, that he or she knows is not himself (the gender thing is tough), he or she is "a person." For such a person has the minimal requirements of "sovereignty." This is fairly unambiguous, and I suspect it's a good deal more robust than it appears at first blush. The primary sovereign right is the right to life, and "choice" is also seen as a critical property of sovereignty, which is more than tangential to the debate. Personhood therefore implies a capacity for choice.
I have to say that I'm not sure where I come down on this question. I've never seen any evidence that suggests a fetus is sovereign in this sense, but I don't discount the possibility that such evidence might be forthcoming one day.
And that raises what I think is the central dilemma regarding this issue. For we are confronted with uncertainty, and whether we assume the fetus is sovereign or not, in the mean time, will be determined by how gravely we regard the consequences, as well as the odds, of being wrong.
Posted by Demosophist at October 25, 2003 03:51 PM | TrackBackI think it should be noted that for most abortions, the $64,000 question isn't to show that the fetus is like us, the question is if the embryo is like us. The vast majority of abortions come early enough that the fetus has yet to form. Basically, the question is, does a blastocyst have a soul, or at least the spark that makes it uniquely human?
Posted by: JoeF at October 27, 2003 03:03 AMJoe:
I think it should be noted that for most abortions, the $64,000 question isn't to show that the fetus is like us, the question is if the embryo is like us. The vast majority of abortions come early enough that the fetus has yet to form. Basically, the question is, does a blastocyst have a soul, or at least the spark that makes it uniquely human?
Thanks for your contribution. I'm sure you're right that this is clearly the issue for most religionists, which isn't reconcilable with the views of those who don't believe. So the task that Holsclaw addresses in his post isn't to reconcile the extremes, but to disturb and then settle the middle. And the issue there is simply and unambiguously individual sovereignty, because that is the principle upon which this state is simply and unambiguously founded.
Posted by: Scott (to Joe) at October 27, 2003 08:15 AMThis is, as most know, the most vexing issue going and going and going.
Like most, my view has shifted over time. Noticibly after the birth of my daughter. Something about birth makes you realize the stakes involved in the issue in a way that was merely abstract before.
It seems to me that if the issue remains, or is contained, in the abstract for an individual then "choice" -- given the agnostic temper of the times -- remains paramount. But when you are confronted emotionally with the issue after having nutured a child, the issue is not so abstract at all.
It seems to me that (absent the usual disclaimers involving crime, rape, danger to the mother) the issue splits between those who operate in the abstract of choice and those with more concrete experience. This is not to say that those with children and are pro-choice are caught in an abstraction, quite the opposite. Only that, no matter where they stand on the issue, they have more standing, to me, than those without children.
Evidence is hard to produce in any case since all evidence on this issue is anecdotal when you come down to brass tacks. Yes, we know a certain amount about when higher brain functions arise. But wise people also know, first and foremost, and the last, what, 10 decades are a testament to, what we know most is that we do not know. And I don't mean that to be a cute little circular statement.
As to Fuller's proposition (Disclaimer: I've learned to be shy of Fuller's mindset, but okay, this time.): "'the status of an "individual" as having been established as soon as there is "consciousness of otherness.'"
Hummm.... 'otherness' strikes me as a bit furry. Almost as furry as 'consciousness' but I'll say I accept it for the present.
Suppose the fetus which, in its development, recapitualtes the forms of many fetuses of lesser orders does at some point come to a 'consciousness of otherness.' We really do not know, and we really, as far as I can see, *cannot* know what the instant of such an awareness would be.
If the ambiguity of life and human beings' development is any guide it could be anytime within a certain time range. The fetus as embryo might have a knowing of otherness, that which is not what it is, but it is a purely poetic exercise to suppose this. Indeed, it nothing but a leap of faith. Does a fetus only achieve the knowing of otherness when, as an infant, it says 'mama' or does it know it at some point in the womb? That point would be the nub. Since after that point the procedure would be killing and before that point it would be, what?, a medical procedure? I can realize that rationally, but I don't have to like it. And my dislike of it signals to me that what I really feel is that, regardless of any freedom of choice or any necessity, what is going on it wrong. We do many wrong things for a 'better' result in life, but that doesn't eliminate the wrongness of the action. It is mere mitigation.
Anecdotal experience tells me that the child knows the other in the womb before birth. The movements of the child in the womb. The reactions to music or other external stimuli. I'd say, without really knowing, that the fetus knows "otherness" certainly at some point within the last trimester. I suppose that most reasonable people who have been through a pregnancy to term would agree with me.
Okay, it knows other in the last trimester. How do we know? Because it is doing something that *we* perceive as knowing the other. But is it capable of this before it can exhibit behavior we can perceive as knowing the other? Probably. And if so, how far back into gestation does this go? Is it possible to know other before being a viable fetus that can live outside the mother? Here is where I get off into deep unknowing.
But.... but... something persists in me from a book read long, long ago concerning the Death Camps during the Holocaust. Read more than forty years ago as a teenager and not read since. Read so long ago that I cannot remember anything but the title and the photographs of Dachau in the center that shocked me out of childhood... nothing except one particular passage and it is strange that, given my youth at the time, and the thousands and thousands of books since, that this passage should stay with me.
I cannot quote it but its import went something like this. The person being interviewed was a female concentration camp survivor. She survived by being 'of use' to the camp. This use was to take the babies, the infants and the small children (dead of alive, I'm no longer sure), and throw their bodies into the ovens. At the end of this passage she reflected (in paraphrase): "Were we throwing another Mozart or Moses into the flames? We'll never know."
Early in my first marriage, involved in my career and my first wife involved in hers, she became pregnant. Because we still thought of children in the abstract, we 'agreed' to have it aborted. It seemed like the 'sensible' thing at the time. We 'weren't ready' (who is?). We went ahead and, after a short recuperation, life went on as before. At least it felt as if went on as before.
Two years later, my first wife became pregant again and this time we "were ready." Moved back from Europe, got jobs, got settled, had a little girl. An amazing thing. Stunning. You feel your whole previous life close like a giant circle coming together. And another circle begin.
Two years after that my wife told one day that she was pregnant again. She had been raising our daughter for two years and was not, she said, 'ready' for another. This time, though, my mind and soul had moved on and I was not in such an abstract frame of mind about abortion. I hung back. I wasn't sure. But then she reminded me that it was her body and she had a right to choose. My choice was not to be a 'hypocrit'-- a churlish choice as I now realize. And so, with my 'support,' she went ahead at a hospital in Boston on what I remember as a particularly raw late Autumn day.
And that was that.
And all that was long ago and far away, but still, today, here on a different coast and in a different life, I think at times, usually late at night, about those two abortions that I assent to. Were they, maybe, another Mozart or Moses? Probably not. Almost certainly not. Be that as it may, they were two of my children. And, rightly or wrongly, I was complict in their destruction.
And that, leaving aside all the abstract notions and the tidy ideas about consciousness and the other, is the private hell everyone who touches this issue enters.
Posted by: vanderleun at October 27, 2003 11:53 PMThanks, Gerard, for taking the time and trouble to wrestle with this. I, myself, don't have standing. I can provide but two facts, about the author of the concept. Bucky Fuller had two daughters, but lost one to meningitis in infancy. And this fact was a turning point in his life, that he discussed often. It was literally what motivated him to embark on his "project." So he did have the standing that concerns you. And he thought about the issue deeply, too.
And he was also certain that a fetus was not "counscious of otherness" (or simply aware of another) prior to birth. His certainty about that was what we'd have to call "metaphysical." His reasoning is rather complex, and typically "Fulleresque." But to simplify it, he saw no way that an infant still in the womb could possibly conceive of an "outside" or an "inside." Assuming that we make such distinctions based on experience (and according to Fuller at least four separate initial experiences), what experience would alow a fetal infant to make it? And this distinction, to him, is the most fundamental of all. According to Bucky's conception "birth" was something quite profound and unique, tied very closely with the shock of awareness that "there are others." And only with that awareness is there an "I," or a self, who could "own" it's own life (and therefore be responsible for it). To him, the supposition that such a distinction could be made while still in the womb demoted birth to something that simply didn't fit within his cosmology. It was to insist, essentially, that there really is no such thing as an individual. And if you think about the various theories concerning the development of embryonic life, even those with the greatest "spiritual content" and assigning the most profoundly sacred qualities to it, this distinction is simply lost, blurred... "deconstructed."
This isn't to say that the arguments about potential lives lost have no merit. But the universe is rife with unrealized potential, and while some is wrong it is not automatically always the same class of wrong as murder. And, of course, the case of the murdered babies in Dachau is unambiguous. While it would certainly have been a pity to kill a Mozart, it is no less a crime to kill a neighborhood grocer, not because we need grocers, but simply because his life is his... not hers, or the Commandant's, or anyone's.
In Bucky's view, to demote birth to the status of a "stage" was to devalue all human life. And in some way to make murder more acceptable. It was a slippery slope he would have resisted with every ounce of passion he could muster. To him there were no Mozarts in such a world. Not one.
I'm not sure I have Bucky's faith in that rather ideosyncratic conception of individualism, but I do respect it for something much more than simply "pro-choice." I think I do know what he felt, because it was in every word he wrote and spoke. It was the essence of the fellow.
Thanks again for your experiences.
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