The folks pushing these amendments don't understand human biology. Between 5% and 20% of naturally fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus. This happens naturally for a wide variety of reasons, usually within a few days of fertilization. Should the loss of these fertilized eggs be considered suicides?

My understanding is that the proportion is much higher, more like 3/4 do not implant. Therefore, sex leading to fertilization is certainly murder.

On top of which there is evidence that implantation, and placental gestation, may have been caused long ago by a retrovirus. It's a dangerous mutation that inhibits eggshell development. Conveniently it allowed live birth and larger newborns for mammals.

Bronto1,
As Chief Justice Roberts has correctly pointed out, there is no right to abortion in the US Constitution. Of course there is no right to eat, breathe, go to the movies or have sex either, which makes Roberts' statement kind of stupid. It's even more stupid when one considers, as we would expect a Supreme Court Justice to do, that the Constitution was never intended to be a compendium of rights, but a protector of inherent rights (see the Declaration of Independence), rights that we are born with.

Oh, you say, but there are "constitutional rights" listed in the Bill of Rights. Yes, because the Founders didn't trust government (smart!) they listed some fundamental rights just for emphasis, and to make sure that people didn't take this listing the wrong way they included the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

So, as you suggest, a woman's legal right to control her own surgical procedures is identical to a man's, AND it is an inherent right, not a constitutional one. Of course there is no guarantee that the Supremes understand that the purpose of government is to protect our rights, not take them away.

Yes, the nation, such as it is, has gone mad.

Half the country, reading an ancint text and generally ignoring the teachings of the man after whom their religion is named, actually believe in and accept a form of fascism. The other half, watching their rights and freedoms eroded, do little except send angry and resentful messages between themselves.

The fourth estate has, it seems, been castrated. Scientific method and logic is optional. Soon all conception will be believed to be the gift of god and, hence, immaculate.

It would be an enlightening experience for the Chief Justice, and other male Justices, to become pregnant. 

Immaculate, indeed.

Eph.5:22-24 "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing."

Seriously, folks, has the nation gone mad?

If you heard Ron Paul on "The View" the other day, he made a good point that, as a doctor, he can get sued at any point in the pregnacy if he endangers it.

I thought that was a good point because, according to your logic, people couldn't sue their doctor either, for harm, if the fetus wasn't considered to be a person.

To boldly go...

Is a fertilized egg a person?

Certainly it is a potential person and as such is worthy of more consideration than it generally receives on the choice side of the argument.  

It is disturbing that you feel compelled to continually redefine your terms.  It is an indication that your argument for choice is not sound.   It is based on denial.  Fetus, embryo, fertilized egg, blastocyte, just a clump of cells, all words used to dehumanize and trivialize the issue mean essentially the same thing – a potential human being. 

Maybe before continuing to promote this argument you should ask yourself if a fertilized egg is a person, would you still be pro-choice?  If so, then find new arguments.  If not, stop deceiving women with a fallacious one.  Many women who choose to have abortions will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.  Their decision should not be based on intellectually dishonest arguments that deny them even a reason to mourn their loss.

My foot isn't a person either, but if a doctor injures my foot through malfeasance or bad judgement he/she is responsible for the injury. 

 An emergency room where I once worked got sued because a patient's very expensive dress was ruined as they cut it off her to get to her stab wound.  As I recall she was not claiming that her dress was a person.

If you base your arguments on who can get sued, you are really not going to impress anyone with your depth of thought.  You can pretty much sue anyone for anything.  You may even win.  It doesn't render anything to be a person just because it was the subject of a lawsuit.

Jan

EGAD!

"new ballot measures proposed in Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi and Montana would provide a fertilized human egg with full constitutional rights and protections under the law.

Oh, you said full constitutional rights... for a minute there I thought you said that fertilized human eggs would get full health care coverage...WHEW!  We KNOW these guys don't want THAT!  LOL

Jan

Some philosophical arguments for and against the rights and wrongs of abortion do amount to arguments over whether a fetus is a person. One well-known paper says it must be a person as it has a full genetic compliment (but then so does a corpse, and another species can look awfully similar genetically, while birth defects never interfere with humanity). Another says it can't be a person because people are capable of pain, rational, able to communicate, and capable of autonomous action, things that a fetus acquires only over time if at all (although these, too, mature over the course of a life, and some paralytics or even anesthetics can impair these characteristics).

Interestingly, though, many arguments have nothing whatsoever to do with personhood. For example, perhaps the most famous philosophical paper on abortion grants that, ok, if you like, call a fetus a person, but you're still not required to give your body over to sustain another person. Meanwhile, a contrary paper takes instead a view a little like one expressed here about potential. More precisely, it says that we consider murder heinous because it eliminates a future, so by analogy abortion would be wrong. (Contraception would not be, this argument goes, because one can't identify the future person amid ejaculate.) Another looks for middle ground, saying that not every killing is murder, while not every nonperson, such as an animal, can be killed at will; it ends up asking for a limit only on late-term abortions. 

Of course, these positions too are debatable, which allows philosophy departments to stay in business. But what's interesting is how the right to life movement, by insisting on the personhood issue, basically hijacks the whole debate. It denies other approaches, which is a dishonest way of making feminist concerns off limits. It's also helpful recall that Roe v Wade put privacy broadly in terms of a doctor - patient relationship, which seems reasonable to me.

What bothers me, too, is knowledge that different religious traditions assign the beginning of life differently. I forget how many weeks it takes for the spirit to inhabit the fetus in Judaism, but it is not zero. Thus, feminism aside, I feel personally injured by any limitation on abortion rights, because it necessarily amounts to government choosing one religious definition over another. We already know that it's at least partly about the Christian right forcing its beliefs on others, but it's helpful to remember that this is necessarily wrong in itself.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

if the mother's life is at risk, that's a different dilemma than abortion and the dilemma of asking: "which one should survive."

I wholely agree with Ron Paul that such a situation is a local issue since the mother might choose to sacrifice herself if that's the only alternative for her baby.

men, of course, have sacrificed themselves to save loved ones.

To boldly go...

1.  Gosh, it gets really complicated when you are the one who decides "which one should survive."  In the case I gave, only one could, but the doctor killed the other because the mother would definitely die an excruciatingly painful death.  Ron Paul, with whom you wholely agree might not get that the mother could sacrifice herself for nothing, since the fetus could not possibly develop into a human being, but that is based on...you know...scientific knowledge.   

2.  What is local about that?

3.  Only men?  And what does that have to do with fetuses?  Have men gone into the line of fire to save fetuses from assault?  Give me a break!

Jan

I am mostly in the viability camp, but not for philosphical/ethical reasons. I mean that as long as a fetus depends on a human body to reliably provide gestation, it must be the sole responsibility of the person that carries the sole risk. There are two reasons for this.

1) It is always best to set responsibility at the same place as effect. That is, the woman will be the one who faces the major responsibility for protecting the growing fetus, birthing, it, and raising it. A father may disappear to another state, and he will at worst be hauled back as a deadbeat. The woman cannot similarly abandon the newborn without serious criminal charges, up to murder 1. She also should watch her diet, exercise, etc. Given that she is the whole shooting match it is fitting she is able to decide her future.

2) For now, and likely the foreseeable future, it will be impossible to know if a woman is pregnant without her saying so, (in the early stages). Only removing personal freedom to observe menstruation, or privacy invasion of other sorts, can prove the case. So any abortion laws are not enforceable without informants, or surreptitious surveillance. And in the near future there will be no evidence at all, with morning-after or Plan B drugs becoming available generally. If not legal, there will be a black market.

Abortion restrictions hope to affect an activity that is wholly within a woman's body, and is basically unenforceable, to boot. Not wise.

And I think it is an easy sell to say that if the 4th amendment means anything it means someone can't look inside your body.

Devon quoting me: "'More precisely, it says that we consider murder heinous because it eliminates a future, so by analogy abortion would be wrong.' I've never really understood how one could take this position and not also take a radical view of animal rights." I suspect it's clear enough, but just to be safe: I wasn't supporting such an argument. I was merely trying to inject some perspective, by suggesting what a real ethical debate looks like, in order to show how the right-to-lifers have framed the issue in an alarming and unfair manner.

In fact, the future argument has an intuitive problem for me, in that it attributes a motive to the ban on murder we probably don't share. Indeed, the people most likely to associate abortion with murder are also those who'd oppose terminating lives by euthanasia even in cases of permanent vegetative states, where the future is not exactly filled with possibilities. It's almost like an Existentialist argument against murder, of all things.

However, since you asked, sure I can distinguish the case from animal rights. This point of view, odd to me as it is, is not about cutting off the future as an arrow of time (like a rock's future) or even a volition (like an animal's future). It's just about terminating a human future. That is, it's arguing that while a fetus may or may not be a person, it has every chance to become one. Since a dog won't become a person, this argument goes, it's not a case for animal rights.

As I say, I'm just playing amateur philosophy prof here. My own opinion on such things as animal rights isn't worth taking too seriously so can be withheld.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Oh, sure, Devon.  I appreciated your comment a lot, too.  I just figured I better be safe in case I'd misread you and in case that meant others had misread me in the way I feared. Besides, I like philosophy too much to resist trying to quote it. 

The taste came slowly.  I took a philosophy course, mostly on Nietzsche, freshman year with Walter Kaufmann, the Nietzsche scholar and translator. While I remember him as a kind person and precisely the humanist one would expect from his writings, I also remember the first and only time I asked a question, in the first lecture.

He'd summed up quickly as background some of Kant, which wasn't in our reading, including the two versions of the categorical imperative. One is about acting from principles one would accept if they were generalized to all others, and from this is supposed to follow the other, more specifically ethical claim to treat others not as a means only, but as an end also. I asked, innocently, for help in that I didn't get how the second followed from the first. He replied, dripping with irony, that he didn't say it did. After that, it took me a few years to go near philosophy again! 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

BTW, Feministing currently has a fund raising goal... to raise $5000 to preserve the future of the site. And it's about 2/3 the way there.

This is a site that claims to be on the vaguard of feminism, and is having difficulty raising $5k despite being mentioned here and Salon and elsewhere? What a fraud. What a bad joke on it's delusional readers.
:rolleyes:

That's only 50 contributions of $100, or 100 of $50, about as expensive as many magazine subscriptions. For $5000 they could rent a nightclub or banquet room, and actually do a head count of how few they are. But I doubt such a blatant example of their fringe nature would be welcomed.

Talk about faux-empowerment, or perhaps empowerment to cognitive dissonance.

For a little comparison to a human rights organization that actually matter, the ACLU's annual budget is about $45 million. I don't know what TPM's annual budget is, but judging from the number of staff, I'd guess it must be into seven digits.