We don't force people to donate blood or donate organs, even when doing so would save someone's life. Here is a hypothetical to help us get away from the emotional baggage of the abortion argument:


Imagine you are in a car accident. You were talking on your cell phone, and you hit a pedestrian. Also, you bump your head on the steering wheel, and pass out.

When you wake up, you are in a hospital bed. You've got tubes coming out of your side, and in the bed next to you is the pedestrian you hit. The tubes go from you, to a machine, to the pedestrian.

Of course, you ask a nurse, "What the hell is going on?"

The nurse tells you, "While you were out, a fast-track judge heard your case. The pedestrian you hit is in a coma, and lost both of his kidneys, and by a lucky chance, YOU are perfect blood match for him! He needs continuing dialysis, and people just can't survive on dialysis machines for very long. The machines just aren't as good at filtering the blood as a human body. So, the judge decided that you must serve as a living dialysis machine until we can find a donor. Pity you weren't a tissue match or this whole thing would be a lot less inconvenient."

"Don't worry. It should only take about 9 months to find a donor."

I've tried very hard to come up with a realistic hypothetical that imitates pregnancy as closely as possible.

1) The car accident was your fault. Just like pregnancy comes from having sex, which can usually be avoided.

2) The other person needs your bodily resources, or they will die. Just like pregnancy.

3) Unhooking them from those resources requires a deliberate act. Just like pregnancy.

Is this a situation that we would consider moral? Does anyone think a judge's decision like this would/should be upheld?

Not everyone agrees that life begins at conception. Not everyone even agrees that it begins with a heartbeat. Most of us agree that the development of a functional nervous system (and with it, the ability to feel pain) is a damn significant step, and is as good a measurement as any. So what is your moral argument for why the cutoff point between a morally acceptable/unacceptable abortion should be moved back to conception?

a parent is asked to provide nutrition, warmth, basic medical care, etc. to the best of his ability. He is morally and legally required to do so. The law can and does and should force him to do so.

See the problem? That's right. A mother also has these responsibilities. The question is when and how she gets them, exactly what they are, and how her interests are weighed against those of the child.

Is a fertilized egg human? Why or why not?
Is a zygote with 24 cells human? Why or why not?
I don't think either of these above classify as "human" and certainly not "persons." Simply repeating over and over again "It's human, it's a being, it's a human and a being..." isn't much of an argument.

That's the key, for me.

A functional nervous system.

I don't think we know enough about the nervous system to be able to determine exactly when "consciousness" (whatever THAT is!) begins, but we DO know enough to know that it requires something a lot like a fully developed human brain. So, it MIGHT be possible that children do not actually become conscious for the first time until they are actually born (or maybe even some time AFTER that!), but we can't really be sure of that. In the interest of being SURE we aren't doing something wrong, we should extend protection to the fetus from the moment it might POSSIBLY have a conscious nervous system. Now, according to medical science, that happens sometime in the second trimester. So, there should be no problem allowing elective abortions in the first trimester, and we should require some restrictions after that, like maybe medically important abortions in the second trimester, and only critical abortions in the third trimester. This may be more of a restriction that we really need, but any loosening of the restrictions should wait until medical science can tell us confidently that consciousness does not start until later.

1) Is it really the unique DNA that makes them a human being? If so, what about identical twins? Are they only ONE person? Is one of them disposable?

2) Is it the potential to become a human being that makes them a human being? If so, what about eggs? They also have the potential to become a human being, if they are exposed to the right enviornment and circumstances. Same argument for sperm. Heck, we've got the same argument for the cells lining your mouth! (They've developed a way to take cheek swabs and force the cells in them to become sperm) Do we really want to say that there is a moral imperative to try to get every sperm to reach its potential? The great philosopher Monty Python addressed this issue some years ago.

3) What about ancephalic babies? (Babies that are born without brains) Do you consider them to be human beings? Why? What is it about humans that make us humans? Isn't it our mind? Our brain?

Be on the careful lookout for the natural human tendency to try to hold on to the emotional part of the belief. You think of yourself as "Pro-life", and that's a belief that depends on being against abortion. As you think about these questions, keep an eye on yourself. There is a chance that you may struggle to make the answers fit the conclusion you already have (abortion = bad) rather than really thinking about the implications of the questions in their own right.

My position since then is unchanged: since abortion is currently legal, the continuing debate on the subject remains a moral debate first and foremost, by which the anti-abortion camp likes to imply that something that is immoral should always be illegal, and therefore seeks to prove that abortion is immoral.

For one thing, proving the morality/immorality of something is just about impossible, since morality is subject to the collective value judgments of the whole of society, and right now we're dealing with a society in which two competing value systems are in conflict. But Doddy has made a spectacularly good point in that it makes no sense to legalize something strictly because you are afraid of the consequences of it being illegal; theoretically (the argument goes) something should only be legalized based on a moral imperative in the first place. Quite possibly the reverse could be true: it makes no sense to keep something legal just because you are afraid of the consequences of prohibition. In that sense, at least, the "back alley abortion" argument is a non-sequitur.

All that leaves us to determine, then, are the arguments for whether or not abortion is or isn't a moral practice. Unfortunately, as I just said above, that discussion cannot be easily settled without starting from a certain set of basic assumptions about the value of human life and human rights. It's not so much a question about the rights of the unborn, but about the rights of individual mothers to use their own particular value system in deciding whether or not to go through with an abortion. To be sure, the anti-abortion camp insists that a single standard (theirs) should be imposed by rule of law, while the pro-choice camp seeks to preserve a certain margin (varies, depending on who you talk to; usually up to about the second trimester) where the choice is still up to the mother.