When Is A Life A Life?

“I generally think the pro-lifers have the better moral argument ... the vast majority of unwanted pregnancies happen to women who are either too stupid and/or too irresponsible to take precautions in advance.  I think society and the gene pool is better off if these people don't pro-create and raise stupid irresponsible children.”

Way to blame the victims of biological and socio-cultural circumstance there.

Let’s bring in some facts and figures: “About half (49%) of the 6.7 million pregnancies in the United States each year (3.2 million) are unintended. ... Unintended pregnancy rates are highest among poor and low-income women ... Compared with higher-income women, poor and low-income women are less likely to end an unintended pregnancy by abortion. Consequently, poor women have a relatively high unintended birth rate.”  [see http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-Unintended-Pregnancy-US.html#6] The data indicate that intelligence and responsibility have less bearing on the occurrence of unintentional pregnancies than does the availability of reliable contraception. Moreover, the data demonstrate that it is the more educated, higher-earning women who are having more abortions than poor and low-income women.

In short, your eugenic justification for abortion isn’t supported by the evidence; in fact, when women find themselves unintentionally pregnant, it is those you’d ostensibly want to be procreating (those with higher incomes and more education) who are having more abortions than their less privileged counterparts.

But the more egregious aspect of your reasoning is the implication that pre-conception birth-control is the responsibility of women and women alone (implicit in the statement that “unwanted pregnancies happen to women who are either too stupid and/or too irresponsible to take precautions in advance”). Human reproductive biology being what it is means that unintentional pregnancies do not happen to “stupid, irresponsible” women acting alone. Why are men, too, not held morally culpable for the fate of the new lives they help create?

“In general, I think that society would be well served by defining ‘personhood’ as the start of the third trimester.”

Any particular reason you think that such an arbitrary bright line would serve society well? The trimester framework no longer carries legal weight as regards abortion restrictions [http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/abortion.htm], so why should the third trimester be the line of demarcation for legal personhood?

“I doubt, that society would tolerate Doctors being prosecuted for murder unless the[y] deliberately were killing fetuses in contravention of whatever the law happens to be. ... Murder, as a legal matter, requires intent. Your argument number 1 is kind of a strawman unless you are talking about a scenario where the Doctor's intent was to kill the fetus.  On the other hand, in many states, a murderer who kills a pregnant  woman can be charged with two murders and I thoroughly approve of those laws.”

If one considers the extinguishment of fetal life “killing” then doctors performing abortions most certainly are engaging in deliberate killings, because the motivating purpose of an elective abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. Furthermore, murder does not necessarily require intent; unintentional killings are criminally punishable as manslaughter or depraved heart homicide in almost all jurisdictions, requiring only a negligent or reckless state of mind. Under the personhood rubric, a doctor who performed an abortion could certainly be tried criminally (and likely civilly) for his or her actions in extinguishing fetal life, because the personhood laws are blanket legal pronouncements which grant the full protections of law to human life in utero. How that broad legal classification of human life would play out on the ground (for doctors and women) depends on the motivations and aspirations of the legislators, prosecutors, and judges who have the power to implement the laws.

You reject the OP’s point number two (that, if a woman is unfortunate enough not to have regular, monthly periods, it could be well into the first trimester before she finds out that she’s pregnant) without addressing its merit. Thus you avoid the question: should a woman who doesn’t know of her pregnancy until after she has acted to the detriment of the embryo be legally liable for those actions?

This not a strawman line of questioning, but a valid challenge to the reasoning behind fetal personhood laws. Much of the most crucial embryonic growth takes place in the very earliest weeks of pregnancy. Fetal abnormalities can result from something as simple as a woman not having enough folic acid in her diet, or from something more serious such as a woman’s alcoholism. Under a personhood rubric, if such a woman then miscarries or delivers a stillborn neonate, she could be criminally charged for feticide, even if she had no reason to suspect that she was pregnant (i.e., the pregnancy was the result of a contraceptive failure) and thus alter her diet and habits (i.e., if she were a regular, heavy drinker). Such a criminal charge would not be the necessary result of fetal personhood laws, but it is an undeniable possibility which deserves consideration in any discussion of the merits of personhood laws.  

“I looked through the article you posted above and frankly I'm not at all concerned that those women are being prosecuted.   They are not a very sympathetic bunch and it is OK with me if a jury sorts out their crimes. One was a cocaine addict, one swallowed rat poison and  about 40 were cooking amphetamines.  One denies taking drugs but I sure that the prosecution has some toxology data that tells a different story.”

I won’t try to defend women who use drugs while pregnant, even though I believe that a society which grants women the right to abortion cannot justly punish women for actions during pregnancy which endanger unborn human lives. If we’re willing to cede reproductive autonomy to women, it cannot be conditional; society ought to trust women who choose to be mothers to make the best choices for themselves and their children. I submit that better access to contraception and abortion would result in fewer women taking such reckless actions during pregnancy, because in such a world only women who genuinely desire to be mothers and give their offspring the best in life would find themselves pregnant. But I digress.

I will vehemently defend BeiBei Shuai, who has been in prison for over a year, without the possibility of bail, for the so-called crime of attempting suicide while pregnant. Shuai suffered a major depressive episode when she was pregnant, after the father of her developing child abandoned her. In the depths of her depression, Shuai tried to take her own life a few days before Christmas in 2010. Luckily – or not, when you consider her current predicament – friends found Shuai before the rat poison she ingested killed her. In the hospital, doctors delivered Shuai’s developing child prematurely via cesarean surgery, but the neonate only survived four days outside the womb. Rather than providing this traumatized, mentally fragile woman with mental health care or counseling, the State of Illinois seeks to imprison her for the rest of her life. [http://www.aclu.org/reproductive-freedom/state-indiana-v-bei-bei-shuai-aclu-amicus-brief] This is the type of injustice perpetrated against women when fetuses are given legal protections which obscure the humanity and autonomy of their gestational mothers.

“the vast overwhelming majority of pregnancies occur because women make the choice to have sex without taking proper precautions to avoid pregnancy.”

I assume that you’re talking about unintended pregnancies here, even though you did not so specify. In any event, this statement reveals the misogyny inherent in your consideration of the abortion question. With this statement, you reveal your position that women and women alone are responsible for avoiding pregnancy. It never ceases to amaze me when intelligent, logical, reasonable people – who are fully aware of the biology underlying human reproduction – insist on assigning all moral culpability for the occurrence of a pregnancy to women alone, despite the fact that a woman, alone, cannot become pregnant.

“ The law often talks about a "reasonable person" standard and I think that a reasonable person should be thinking about the risks BEFORE they get pregnant.”

“I'm willing to rely on Doctors to identify the particular pregnancies that for one reason or another that are particularly risky and allow them to do what Doctors do.  Overall, I don't think much of this as a moral argument unless the law was so strict that it did not allow for exceptions with regard to the health of the mother.”

Fetal personhood is a blanket legal classification of zygotes, embryos, and fetuses as constitutional persons, for whom all legal protections extend. As mvenus notes, this classification obfuscates the different values assigned to different forms of life. Under the fetal personhood rubric, a fertilized egg which implants in a woman’s fallopian tube (rather than the proper place: the uterus), where the zygote cannot physically progress to term such that, if the pregnancy is not terminated, the woman’s life is in danger, has as much right to its short, sad life as the mother has to her life. [http://parentsagainstms26.com/2011/10/14/pro-life-practices-in-the-real-world/] Who gets to decide whose life prevails?

Again, what exactly the declaration of personhood would mean will be left up to the legislators, prosecutors, and judges who have the power to implement the laws. As blanket statements, personhood measures do not give doctors sufficient autonomy to make decisions in the best interests of pregnant women, which is why the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposed the vague constitutional personhood measure Mississippi recently tried to pass. [http://www.acog.org/About_ACOG/News_Room/News_Releases/2011/ACOG_Statement_on_Mississippi_Personhood_Amendment_Proposition_26]

“Many cultures prefer male children over females and abortion is increasingly on a tragically large scale being used to select against female babies.  As a consequence of mass immigration, this practice is becoming increasingly common in the Western world.  Do you think that the sex of a fetus is a valid reason for a parent's decision to abort it?  Do you think this practice, which is currently happening on a scale that amounts to genocide against females, should be legal?  If you disagree, with these types of abortions, how should these fetuses (that you would define as non-persons) be protected?  Or perhaps you think it is OK to selectively kill female fetuses?  What would prevent a woman who's true motive was to abort a fetus because it was a female from simply telling a lie and just saying something like, "I don't want this fetus because it would be inconvenient for me to have a baby right now?"”

As a philosophical matter, I think any reason upon which a woman bases her decision to terminate a pregnancy is a valid reason. Likewise: as a philosophical matter, I think the decision to terminate a pregnancy based on the sex of the fetus is morally reprehensible. Even still, I would not hold any individual pregnant woman morally culpable for making such a decision, because the pregnancy originated and the decision was made in a socio-economic context which is outside of the control of any individual woman. [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/24/the_worst_places_to_be_a_woman#7]To wit: the remedy for genocidal female feticide is not a restriction on the availability of abortion, but is rather to raise the worth of females in society, so that it is not a regretful choice for a woman to give birth to a female child.

Talk about a straw man, jeeze. Female feticide on a genocidal scale is not eradicated by fetal personhood laws. Women will terminate pregnancies regardless of what the law says, especially where prevailing socio-economic pressures incentivize pregnancy termination. Criminalizing elective abortions will not ameliorate any of society’s ills, and fetal personhood has the potential to go even farther by criminalizing the failure to sustain a pregnancy from fertilization to live birth. The public welfare is not improved by fetal personhood laws; they are moral judgments in the guise of legal proclamations, and they are dangerous to the individual liberty and personal autonomy of women and medical professionals.

The fetal personhood rubric leaves no room for natural miscarriages and stillbirths, despite their inevitable occurrence even to careful, healthy, and eager mothers. Any line drawn between “good mothers” (those who can avoid prosecution for failure to sustain a pregnancy from fertilization to live birth) and “bad mothers” (those who deserve criminal sanction for their failure to sustain a pregnancy from fertilization to live birth) would be subjective and arbitrary, and patently unfair.

For all of these reasons and others, I am vehemently opposed to legislation conferring constitutional personhood on pre-born humans.

--IA