ONCE UPON A TIME there was a beautiful young married couple named Ken and Barbie. They had two children named Ken Jr. and Barbarella. Ken was a lawyer, in a very successful private practice. Barbie was…what else…a soccer mom with her monster SUV to ferry her kids around for music lessons and soccer practice.
They lived a perfect life, and their kids were progressing toward an equally perfect life. Ken Jr. was only in the first grade, but he was already planning to join his father's law firm, after graduation from Yale law school, where his father had gone. Barbarella already had her eye on a guy in her third grade class who was managing his own stock portfolio at home on his computer, and was following in his father's footsteps to become a stockbroker.
So life was proceeding smoothly and they should have lived happily ever after…
…BUT…
Barbie suddenly discovered that she was pregnant.
Now, Ken and Barbie went to church, and their church disapproved of abortion. So, Ken and Barbie disapproved of abortion. Well, Barbie did. Ken wasn't so sure. And when he found out she was pregnant, he was not pleased. They had been taking all the precautions to avoid another pregnancy. They already had a perfect family. Another member would alter that perfection.
So Ken suggested that maybe Barbie should consider an abortion.
Barbie was aghast! Their pastor had thundered that abortion was murder. She reminded Ken of the grisly pictures the church had posted, of the mangled bodies from late-term abortions. Ken reminded her that the fetus was currently the size of a pinhead, and could be removed in five minutes with a simple surgical procedure. She was unmoved.
She told Ken that she simply chose NOT to have an abortion.
DISCUSSION BREAK: Is Barbie's decision not to have an abortion good or bad? I, and virtually everyone I know, would say that it is her decision to make. Nobody else, not even her husband should be able to tell her what to do, even if her health is threatened by having the baby. Let me restate that: If her doctor says, "Barbie, if you have this baby, you will die," it is still her decision, and her decision alone. Neither her husband nor her children nor anyone else can make this decision for her. She has to decide…my life or the baby's. Even the most rabid pro-choicer would agree with this, I think. It's her choice. Good or bad is irrelevant. It is simply nobody else's business.
Back to the story…
So Barbie sleeps on it for a few nights, and…she changes her mind. But…horrors!...Ken has had a change of heart, and has decided she is right. They should have the baby. He starts fantasizing about handing out cigars at work. So now he tries to talk her out of an abortion! Again, she is undaunted. It is her decision to make.
DISCUSSION BREAK: Is Barbie's decision to have an abortion good or bad? I think it is exactly the same as before. But, a significant number of people in this country would say that her decision is bad regardless of her personal circumstances. Even if her life were endangered. They would have applauded her decision to choose not to have an abortion, and would have vehemently defended her right to make that choice. But they would criticize any other choice. For them the right to choose is only valid if she makes the "right" choice…which is of course, no choice at all. Because only Barbie can decide what is "right" for her…and it is nobody else's business.
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Comments: 65
Does that make you feel all fuzzy inside?
It is a complex problem, and there is no "right" answer in my opinion.
I posted this to stimulate discussion.
So...AGAINST the Death Penalty are you, Don? All FOR helping out (with MONEY) the single Moms YOU would force to have unwanted children?? All FOR deciding wht YOU think should apply and to hell with the rest because, as we ALL know . . . you're the answer man! When is it a child? Does she have to give birth if she was raped by her brother?? Tell us, oh answer man!
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
A sperm is alive and an egg is alive. They're life! And you KILL them and the potential bouncing baby boy the MOMENT you put a condom on. Killer.
Only because you stop it. What about IUDs? They allow the egg to be fertilized but incapable of attaching to the uterine wall . . . and what about my other questions? Killing them after birth into unwanted families that are also not supported after they turn to a life of crime . . . is that cool?
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
Life starts at conception. We agree on that. But when is it a human being? This is a crucial question, because terminating life is not murder unless it is a human being.
Is it murder to scrape that single cell off the wall of the uterus? Is it murder to prevent it from attaching to the wall using through chemical or mechanical methods?
If the answer to either of those questions is "no" then terminating the life of a fetus is not murder until it is deemed to be a human being.
That, of course, is the real question, isn't it?
Is the use of these murder too?
There are so many questions here and so many answers for so many people. There doesn't seem to e a right or wrong.
From what I understand, some late term pregnancies are teminated because there is serious damage to the foetus. On the other hand when you have silly so-called celebrities having babies to use as accessories, who gets the blunt end of the stick?
I'll be watching this.
Oh, by the way, Bert, excellent way of laying out this question.
It is an individual commitment, which goes on for decades.
In my opinion raising a child is about the most important career a woman will ever have. But there are no guarantees at all.
And the older Ken and Barbie who thought they were all through the child-bearing business, may need to make another decision.
It's unlikely that birth and procreation will ever stop. So the decision for the woman whether she can love and nurture the baby of a rapist may be different from that of the woman who decides pregnancy might ruin her figure.
And yes, I think the man should have a say in the life or unlife of the child to be. Maybe before the young couple starts to frolic, they need to sign a commitment slip that whatever issue comes from the love-making they will support and honor. Then they may need to begin parenting classes.
If we get into sticky areas: unmarried women, married women who have been raped, or, sadly, pregnant children, it becomes even more messy to decipher. Should it be the parents of the child if they're faced with raising a grandchild? The child if she knowingly became sexually active? The fetus' father?
Someone has to have the final say, though I think others can try to influence the decision. In the end, the mother takes the risk and lives with the consequences more than anyone else.
But I knew the discussion would lead us here, to the question of when a fetus is a person, because that is the basis of the whole argument.
As I said earlier, there is no "right" answer to this in my opinion. So how can it be resolved? The only practical way that I can see is...compromise. And tolerance for people with different views.
I think that pro-choice people are willing to tolerate people who are against abortion as long as those people don't try to impose their views on others. But anti-abortion folks tend to be self-righteous and moralistic about this, unwilling to compromise and militant about imposing their views on others.
So...the only solution I can think of is to establish an arbitrary time (e.g., end of first trimester) before which abortions are entirely legal, and after which they are not except under special conditions (woman's health, etc.) And the later it is in the pregnancy, the more restrictive the criteria should be.
The devil is in the details, of course, but this is the only way I see to solve the problem.
Since there is no scientific means of determining that, (at least for now) it is a philosophical question. Therefore Don B is stating his opinion and has no right to impose it on any woman.
It will be interesting to see if the Chinese government will allow people who lost a child to have another. I have read about their "one child" program, and it is not enforced in agricultural areas where farmers want big families, especially boys, to help out with the farm work. It is enforced more strictly in cities, where many people work for the government, and can be denied jobs, etc. if they don't comply.
I wrote an article a couple years ago for Gather on this same subject. It's a story, and the main character has views on abortion that I think you agree with. I would appreciate your comments on it.
Here is the link.
Mike E, only about a quarter of fertilized eggs result in a live birth (in the absence of induced abortions). Most of these fail to implant or are miscarried so early that the woman won't even know she had conceived. If you want to define these early embryos as "human beings" or "persons", you'll have to wrap your mind around the fact that most human beings and persons are flushed down the toilet and no one even knows about their existence.
If you come back...I wasn't really arguing with you or trying to put you in any category. I agreed with you that life begins at conception...when the egg is fertilized. There really can be no argument about that.
But anti-abortionists call destruction of that fertilized egg MURDER! Don called it that in the very first comment in this thread. Now, that is, in my view, an incendiary, intolerant statement. One dictionary definition of murder is "The unlawful killing of one human by another." Given that definition, abortion is NOT murder, since it is not unlawful. But when I said that anti-abortionists are intolerant, this is the kind of thing I was referring to. And yes, I think we pro-choicers ARE tolerant of any other view, so long as those views are not imposed on us. In other words, we are intolerant of intolerance.
But, of course, that's the problem, isn't it? Because that is EXACTLY what they are trying to do.
On the issue of the man being consulted on the decision whether to have an abortion...ir seems reasonable that most women would do that. But the final decision must still be hers. I thought Stephanie gave a very logical explanation of this. The decision affects the mother a lot more than it does the father.
bruce...Hey, if Barbie is a schizo, so is Ken. They BOTH changed their minds.
So maybe you are right. No kid should have to grow up with two schizo parents!
And out of it, we got a pretty good discussion, with quite a few different views.
I am satisfied with the result.
The scientific way to look at this is never going to be perfected as science and reason has to be based on basic assumptions and we are back to what your believe and people seem to have no better thing to fight about that reality.
None of us know the nature or reality any more than any of us know the nature of God ... maybe that is why we fight so hard about it!
I don't understand why you think Aniko and I are not "getting it." We are not saying that YOU call it murder. Don called it murder. And we both agree that life begins at egg fertilization. You were clear, and I think we were clear in agreeing with you.
Now who pays for it...that's a new issue you haven't raised before. Indigent people in California can get medical care through Medicaid. I believe abortions are covered under that, but I am not sure. And I certainly agree that late term abortions that are not for medical reasons (health of the woman, etc.) should be restricted.
I think that for women at the poverty level, it is particularly important for them to have access to abortions, and almost none of them have any insurance. I would even favor free voluntary sterilization.
I understand that you don't want to pay for it with your tax dollars, but if we allowed all the people who don't want to pay for specific things to be able to opt out, we would have no programs whatsoever. (One might say that would be a good thing with the current war, which many of us have moral objections to, but putting tongue-in-cheek aside, a country does need national defense and people need to pay for it.)
I have no idea, by the way, if Medicaid covers abortions--I suspect not, unless it's for health reasons. The restrictions placed on foreign institutions receiving US aid in places like Africa are extremely harmful though--they can't even mention abortion to the women they are supposed to be taking care of. If they are to provide what is standard and reasonable medical care or even just advice to some of the poorest and most desperate women in the world, they have to forgo help from the richest country in the same, based on this argument that US taxpayers should not have to pay for abortions.
(In short: the federal program covers only cases of life endangerment, rape and incest, as per the latest version of the Hyde Amendment. Some states include other health circumstances from their own funds. South Dakota is noncompliant and does not cover rape and incest, only life endangerment.)
Other countries have tried this, with limited success...India, for example. But there, the culture favors large families.
I agree with 20th century philosopher Henri Bergson in his book "Creative Evolution" that "consciousness corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice." Our consciousness as humans rises as we have more choice.
Someone once said--I don't remember who--that evolution doesn't go to the perfect, it goes to what works for the most people of that culture. The ideal might be to have no abortions, but it's not going to work. It's better for society to regulate abortion and make it safe.
I like your idea of setting criteria for making abortion legal at different stages of the pregnancy.
The very same groups of people who would deny a woman an abortion, think nothing of blindly killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in a war.
In my work and experiences, my sense is that it really only has to do with a very ancient man-made fear to control life... and that which nurtures life... woman.
Did you read the comment thread? Some of them were quite interesting.
i don't know who wrote this, but...uh... can we get REAL for a second?
1)abortion's a TYPE of murder.
2)you can't be sure WHEN it becomes such (thanks, Aniko: i really winced at that "toilet-flush" bit, and that's more than enough to intrigue me. i'll be hitting you up later...) "Which came first: the soul or the egg?".
y'know?
3)cigarettes? -murder.
4) 9/11: murders.
5)military response in the Fertile Crescent? ...um. no-brainer.
6)knocking an attacker over the head with a table lamp, sending them into a coma?
murder.
yep.
rationalized, each and every one.
-i could go on and on here, but here's the kicker: at this point in history, we should be relieved when humans die. there's too many of us, and i wish we were ALL more like Hannibal Lecter--but, like so many of us, i've been taught that Murder's Wrong Except.
the Except, of course, varies.
isn't that strange--it's okay to kill when such-and-such happens, but NOT okay to kill when this over here goes awry for somebody else.
why do we think we have the answer for someone else?
why do we think to impose?
why don't we THINK? -we're so busy FEELing about things... -i don't like it when somebody i love dies, just like the next person. i don't like the idea of Taking A Life, either--mainly because of that all-permeating Golden Rule, which seems to show Itself in ev'ry society at one point or another.
but here's the thing:
it's a weird, unsettling time. we can crack the Earth like a warm Cadbury Egg, spilling atoms left and right, blah blah blah; we can get hit with an Avian Flu/SARS Number Whatever/Fill In Your Favorite Pandemic; we can have a death penalty; we can have abortions; we can pull the plug on grandma when she's been drooling for long enough...
...and we're STILL acting like death's some evil cretin, lurking around the corner to chop our souls in half.
that murder is "immoral". (oh, flighty word! -oh, chameleon!)
look, guys: i don't want to kill anybody any more than the next chap or lass. doesn't sit well with me.
at this point, though... i can see why we should let the crazies out of Arkham.
and, y'know, i'm probably saying this because i'm the devil. i must be in collusion with The Dark Lord HisDamn(ed)Self. i must be eating babies.
and harmless old people, too.
i'm not, like, being LOGICAL or anything. watching the shrinking resources, doing the math, and realizing that THERE'S TOO MANY OF US.
right?
right.
how a coma's murder.
let me say this: living inside your own head can't be fun. IF you're one of the luckies (the guys and gals who can feel the squeezing hand, hear Doyle's "Holmes" being read faithfully from bedside, etc.), you have something resembling a life.
if you are lost in your own personal Matrix, battling forever the dragons of your subconscious... whew. you are NOT alive. you're just waiting to die "for real", if you follow.
that's "taking a human life", though the hair be split.
table lamps tend to DO that.
split hairs, i mean.
And you are dead (if you'll pardon the expression) right about population.
A whole lot of mankind's problems...to say nothing of the poor animals and plants we are threatening...go away if we get back down to a sustainable population level.
I have read some expert opinions that put the number around a billion-and-a-half.
Instead, we're over six and headed for eight or ten billion in a few short years.
No matter how environmentally responsible we become, no matter how tolerant and peaceful, ten billion people on the earth is a disaster.