Reductio Ad Carota

Back when some folks on the right (myself included, though the posts have vanished into the ether) were griping about the absence of a critical, substantive liberal response to Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death - and yes, I know, the title was inflammatory, and books with inflammatory titles don't deserve to be read, etc. etc. - someone responded (again, in a post I can't find) that they already knew what the pro-life arguments were on abortion, they'd heard the debate a hundred times before, and unless Ramesh's book had discovered some new, as-yet-unconsidered argument against feticide and embryo-killing, it was just the same old song, and they didn't need to hear it again.

Now of course The Party of Death covered all sorts of ground beyond the "is it murder/should it be legal?" debate - but even setting that aside, I would find the "nothing new to see here" line much, much more convincing if it didn't appear that no less eminent a figure than Garry Wills, who boasts a long career as a (Catholic!) public intellectual on the front lines of the culture war, seems to seriously believe that it's worth his time to explain to abortion opponents that the pro-life principle is mistaken because "harvesting carrots, on a consistent pro-life hypothesis, would constitute something of a massacre."

Comments

The title "Party of Death" wasn't just inflammatory, it was slanderous. You don't dignify people slandering you with a response.

Posted by Glenn | November 5, 2007 2:53 PM

When are you going to step up and condemn the Republicans--and the National Review and the Weekly Standard--for their loud-and-proud embrace of torture?

No more posts about the horserace. No more posts about the Red Sox or movies or Sam's Club Republicanism. The conservative movement seems to have completely embraced torture and executive branch dictatorship. Don't you have something to say about this?

We're waiting.

Posted by Jim | November 5, 2007 3:07 PM

Ross, why is it that you rarely, if ever, lay out your own thinking and arguments on this subject? If they had non-inflammatory post titles, I would be interested to read them.

jenny

Posted by jenny | November 5, 2007 3:07 PM

The title "Party of Death" wasn't just inflammatory, it was slanderous.

Whom did it slander?

Posted by Mark Adams | November 5, 2007 3:10 PM

As a pro-choicer, I didn't think much of Wills' article either-- despite my problems with pro-life arguments, it is perfectly valid to distinguish hair cells and carrots from fetuses. But I don't think Ross understands what was going on with pro-choice reactions to "Party of Death".

First, obviously, the title was inflammatory, and in a very specific way. Conservative publishing houses that publish right-wing books for right-wing audiences give the books inflammatory titles that imply that liberals are evil. Ann Coulter is the master of this (calling us traitors, for instance), but even more mainstream conservative authors, such as Jonah Goldberg, do it. And most of these books are not serious. You can read 15 random Regnery titles and not come across one serious attempt to engage liberals in an intellectually honest debate.

So not only did Ramesh (who, I should add is, by all accounts, actually a very reasonable person who cares about ideas and is quite willing to take criticism from liberals) defame liberals as a bunch of murderers, but he also utilized a book-selling technique that signals to wingnuts that this is a book that they should buy while signaling to the rest of us that it is a book we shouldn't take seriously.

Second, though, on its merits, I don't think Ross realizes that many pro-choicers find the whole claim that we can be certain that personhood begins at conception to be both absurd and distracting. Absurd because it is quite obvious that a zygote doesn't have the same rights as a human baby, and distracting because we think pro-lifers don't even consider the adverse effect that abortion restrictions will have on gender equality and the lives of women (or, in some cases, consider such effects a feature and not a bug).

So telling pro-choicers "here's a great new book that makes fresh arguments to how life begins at conception" is like touting a book that makes fresh and interesting claims in favor of intelligent design to evolutionary biologists, or telling macroeconomists that they really should read a new book that makes fresh arguments about how tax cutting really does always raise revenues.

This isn't to say that there aren't pro-life books that might make arguments that pro-choicers would be interested in. I would suppose that books that talk about making abortions less necessary, or books that talk about compromises that both sides might be able to live with, or books that set forth concrete proposals that pro-lifers must take to mitigate the harm that their policies might do to gender equality, or arguments against forced abortions in China, might all have some appeal to some pro-choicers. But no, we don't want to hear about how human personhood begins at conception, especially in the absence of any consideration of what we think is a very compelling competing interest. We think that's an attempt to win the argument by assuming false and contestable premises.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 3:12 PM

"When are you going to step up and condemn the Republicans--and the National Review and the Weekly Standard--for their loud-and-proud embrace of torture?"

For the torture debate to approach the level of the abortion debate one would have to see the right arguing.

#1. Terrorists are no longer to be consider human and have no rights under legal or moral norms.
#2. The constitution protects the rights of torturers absolutely.
#3. The definition of torture is irrelevant, all terrorists can be tortured regardless of their "guilt" or "innocence".
#4. Society has advanced and evolved to the point were educated people no longer consider torture immoral but rather progressive.

Posted by Fitz | November 5, 2007 3:16 PM

Dilan: nice comment. But note: the issue whether or not personhood begins at conception has little or no bearing on the issue whether any abortions are morally permissible. Even if fetuses are persons, it would take argument to show that killing them is always impermissible. Compare: it does not follow from the fact that I am a person that there are no circumstances in which it would be permissible to kill me. Both sides in the abortion debate fail to appreciate this point.

Ross: talk about torture. Seriously. You're the best young conservative writer on the scene. Why do you have so little to say about torture?

Posted by Jim | November 5, 2007 3:19 PM

I haven't read the book, because the title was such a turn-off. (I reserve the right to ignore a book that insists on making itself ridiculous. Particularly when the supposed "Party of Death" isn't the one that, for instance, wants to preserve the state's ability to execute the severely mentally retarded.)

I'm told that one of the major arguments in his book is the idea that, if you follow pro-choice arguments to their logical ends, the legal distinction between infanticide and abortion is arbitrary. To which I say, so what? The law is full of arbitrary distinctions. You go to jail for having sex with a girl who is a day younger than 18 but not for girl who is a day older. You go to jail for six months for selling 19 hits of a drug but for 3 years for selling 20. The process of developing a legal system many times amounts to drawing arbitrary distinctions. And as far as arbitrary lines go, defining the beginning of life as birth seems pretty good to me.

Posted by Freddie | November 5, 2007 3:29 PM

RE: " Party of Death - I know, the title was inflammatory"

George Orwell once wrote "Evil is done by little men in starched white shirts who never raise the tone of their voice"

Q.Why don’t they raise the tone of their voices?

A. They don’t have to.

RE: “Ross: You're the best young conservative writer on the scene.”

This is arguable: Not “young” or “best,” but rather “conservative”.

Posted by Fitz | November 5, 2007 3:35 PM

Mr. Ponnuru states "Wills's skin cells and sperm cells are human, and alive, but they're part of an organism (him)." Well, an embroyo is also part of another organism (the woman), until some point it is not. Where that point is can be endlessly debated. As Freddie points out, in the law, we have to make those distinctions all the time. (I'm more inclined to say it's a little earlier than Freddie, but that's a policy decision, not a philosophical one.)

There, see, liberals have too engaged RP's ideas. But when he labels Democrats the Party of Death when HIS party is advocating torture and executing the mentally disabled, it's pretty easy to want to disengage from such rhetoric.

Posted by alwsdad | November 5, 2007 3:48 PM

But when he labels Democrats the Party of Death when HIS party is advocating torture and executing the mentally disabled, it's pretty easy to want to disengage from such rhetoric.

When the party that sees the intentional killing of 1.3 million unborn humans every years as an exercise in liberty tries to scold my party for advocating torture, the death penalty, or otherwise not promoting a consistent ethic of life it's pretty easy to want to disengage from such rhetoric.

Posted by Mark Adams | November 5, 2007 4:10 PM

Hang on a minute, Mark Adams.

Whether any abortions are morally permissible is a difficult moral question, one on which reasonable people can and do differ. Smart people on both sides of the issue disagree in good faith.

Until a year or so ago, though, whether torture should be official US policy was not a difficult moral question: everyone--Democrat and Republican, right and left--agreed that the US should not torture. But the Republican party has suddenly shifted. They are now the party of torture--and they're proud of it! Just visit The Corner or turn on Fox News.

Abortion is a hard case. Torture isn't. And yet the GOP is in favor of it. So save your "disengage from the rhetoric" for another forum. If you don't like being accused of supporting torturers, stop supporting Republicans.

Posted by Jim | November 5, 2007 4:17 PM

When the party that sees the intentional killing of 1.3 million unborn humans every years as an exercise in liberty tries to scold my party for advocating torture, the death penalty, or otherwise not promoting a consistent ethic of life it's pretty easy to want to disengage from such rhetoric.

... except that no one here has written a book about conservatives entitled "The Party of Death."

What's more, whether or not those "unborn humans" are in fact human are not is precisely the issue. And whatever your feelings on torture or the death penalty, there is no denying that they apply to humans. So pro-choice advocates are not, in fact, advocating ending life from their own perspectives, while anti-abortion, pro-death penalty advocates do just that.

Posted by Freddie | November 5, 2007 4:18 PM

*are in fact humon or not

Posted by Freddie | November 5, 2007 4:20 PM

Freddie,

You wrote:

"What's more, whether or not those "unborn humans" are in fact human are not is precisely the issue."

That isn't the issue at all. Look, I'm a human; but it doesn't follow that there are no circumstances in which killing me is permissible. So even if fetuses are humans (or persons) it still doesn't follow that there are no circumstances in which killing them is permissible.

Repeat after me, people who argue about abortion: whether fetuses are humans/persons or not is not the question. Proving that a fetus is a human or person would, by itself, prove nothing (for or against) about abortion.

Posted by Jim | November 5, 2007 4:24 PM

Abortion is a hard case. Torture isn't.

Well, come on now. I suppose that, pro-lifer that I am, I'd actually agree that in my own case, the case against abortion is less lock-tight than the one against torture. But it's not that way for everyone, and a line of reasoning something like the following can - if not tempered with a commitment to the sacredness of human persons, or something like that - make the case of torture seem pretty darn "hard":

1. These people are involved with a movement that is out to kill loads of people.
2. Torturing them is a potentially effective way to get information out of them, and that information could save many lives.
3. So it's okay to torture them.

I'd question (2) and - more importantly - foot-stompingly reject the inference to (3), on the basis of the above-mentioned commitment to sacredness. But it's not as if the defenders of torture, repugnant and misguided as they are, are coming from NOWHERE.

Posted by John | November 5, 2007 4:33 PM

Repeat after me, people who argue about abortion: whether fetuses are humans/persons or not is not the question. Proving that a fetus is a human or person would, by itself, prove nothing (for or against) about abortion.

Of course it wouldn't, but only because it takes at least two premises to form an argument. Proving such a thing would, however, show this:

(*) IF it is always wrong to kill human persons, THEN abortion is always wrong.

(Or perhaps, if you could show that fetuses are /innocent/ persons (and surely if they are persons then they are innocent), then a more realistic version of (*) could get off the ground.)

It's hardly an unimportant issue ...

Posted by John | November 5, 2007 4:35 PM

Fitz: George Orwell once wrote "Evil is done by little men in starched white shirts who never raise the tone of their voice"

Jim: Whether any abortions are morally permissible is a difficult moral question, one on which reasonable people can and do differ. Smart people on both sides of the issue disagree in good faith.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | November 5, 2007 4:39 PM

Proving that a fetus is a human or person would, by itself, prove nothing (for or against) about abortion.

It's relevant to the discourse. In this very comments thread, we have people saying that we are the party of death, because we advocate the murder of 1.3 million unborn human lives a year through abortion. But that argument only has traction if we concede that fetuses constitute human life. (Which is the kind of question-begging pro-lifers do often.)

Posted by Freddie | November 5, 2007 4:43 PM

(Which is the kind of question-begging pro-lifers do often.)

How is it "question-begging"? It's a (quite plausible) CLAIM that many individuals on both sides of the issue are willing to agree upon. It's not uncontroversial, nor does it settle the issue on its own. But it clearly is, as you admit, a key element in the debate over abortion, and it's also a claim that many people - once again, on both sides of the aisle - are willing to offer arguments (of varying degrees of cogency) in favor of. So why does its introduction constitute begging the question?

Posted by John | November 5, 2007 4:50 PM

John:

1. You wrote: "But it's not as if the defenders of torture, repugnant and misguided as they are, are coming from NOWHERE." I agree. When I wrote that abortion is "hard" but that torture isn't, what I meant was the following. Take abortion. There are obviously smart, informed, and morally sensitive people on both sides of the abortion debate. This is not what you find on the torture question. Everyone who is smart, informed, and morally sensitive agrees that torture should not be US policy. Most who disagree are simply uninformed about torture. There are, of course, those who disagree because they see no problem with it.

2. I think you may have misunderstood my point about the relevance of humanity or personhood. Open the newspaper or turn on a television. The abortion debate is always--always!--conducted in the following manner. The pro-lifers insist that fetuses are persons. Stop. But that's relevant only given the obviously false premise that if something is a person, you can't kill it. The pro-choicers insist that fetuses aren't persons. Stop. But so what: even if they aren't, it doesn't follow that you can ever kill them.

I do NOT deny that the question of fetal personhood is important. What I deny is that it has the bearing on the question of abortion's morality that most seem to assume it has.

Peter Leavitt: what in the world is the message of your post?

Posted by Jim | November 5, 2007 4:51 PM

Everyone who is smart, informed, and morally sensitive agrees that torture should not be US policy.

I strongly doubt that this is so, unless you load more into the notion of "moral sensitivity" than you think ought to be there. But if you're allowed to do that, then I guess I'd say that the abortion issue isn't "hard" after all: either folks are just misinformed about what counts as a human life, misinformed about whether destroying such lives is okay, not smart enough to put these bits of information together, or too insensitive to recognize their import.

In my mind the real problem with the abortion debate is that it always focuses on /legality/ rather than /morality/.

Posted by John | November 5, 2007 4:57 PM

* ... unless you load more into the notion of moral sensitivity than I think ought to be there.

Posted by John | November 5, 2007 5:15 PM

Jim: I think Peter Leavitt is suggesting that you are one of the "little men" in the Orwell line.

I just finished reading the book and have a few thoughts:

The title is by far the most polemical aspect of the book. Ponnuru goes after Republicans (Senator Hatch and former Senator Frist for example) as well as Democrats. In fact, the politician who comes off looking the worst is Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) who makes a ridiculous argument in favor of the federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

Ponnuru is opposed to the death penalty, and yet he takes on the argument that the the Republican Party is hypocritical for being anti-abortion yet in favor of things like the death penalty and the Iraq War. You'll have to read it to see if you find it convincing.

He tackles the argument that abortion is helpful for women, especially poor women, because it helps them avoid unwanted chidren that might further impoverish them. Since this is a favorite talking point among the pro-choicers (and I think they are sincere in this), then hopefully people like Dilan Esper will consider that maybe it is this premise--that abortion automatically benefits poor women--that is flawed. I certainly think the premise is fundamentally flawed.

Finally, while Ponnuru is Catholic, his arguments are grounded in basic embryology, logic, and the rights that our Founding Fathers cherished. In other words, his arguments are accessible to people of any faith or no faith.

In sum, don't judge the book by its cover!

Posted by torourke | November 5, 2007 5:49 PM

Proving that a fetus is a human or person would, by itself, prove nothing (for or against) about abortion.

Under most moral usages of the term "person", it would prove quite a bit -- the circumstances under which most folks other than Peter Singer consider it "fine" to kill a person are fairly limited: self defense, war, possibly punishment for certain crimes. There is, I know, a pro-abortion argument stemming from self-defense, but it doesn't sound very plausible to most regular people, I suspect, or even most pro-choicers. I'd say granting personhood leaves the pro-life stance not perhaps totally triumphant, but clearly on the moral high ground, unless you're competeing for the moral high ground among the callous and the malicious.

Frankly, if pro-choice folks actually grant personhood, but think it's irrelevant, "Party of Death" seems to be a lightweight attack. "Murderous sons-of-*****" seems the least that would be in order, and in _that_ circumstance, I'd start wondering if the folks with guns and bombs for clinics didn't have a point.

Now, I don't think that's the way things are, but there's something very worrisome about people who say "who cares if it is a person." I'd keep an eye on them -- hey, who knows if me (a person) might turn out to be conveniently disposable for some reason, in their view? More normal pro-choicers are less worrisome.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 5, 2007 5:59 PM

In other words, I'm giving most pro-choicers some credit. They don't think we're dealing with _people_ here. If they do, and don't think this is fairly heavy evidence against their side, they are pretty horrible people. I wouldn't kill them (I'm not sure why, since after all we "agree" that it's ok to kill people when we find it useful), but they're pretty awful. Sorry, Jim, but that's true.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 5, 2007 6:04 PM

In other words, I'm giving most pro-choicers some credit. They don't think we're dealing with _people_ here. If they do, and don't think this is fairly heavy evidence against their side, they are pretty horrible people. I wouldn't kill them (I'm not sure why, since after all we "agree" that it's ok to kill people when we find it useful), but they're pretty awful. Sorry, Jim, but that's true.

Marquis, it's probably closer to a difference between people who care about theoretical implications and people who care about practical implications. (And in saying this, I will note that at least some pro-lifers LIKE the antifeminist consequences of abortion bans. But I will leave those people off to the side and talk just about the "life beings at conception" people.)

The arguments about how if you don't draw the line at conception, you get to Peter Singer-land is a theoretical argument. It is a slippery slope that says that accepting a certain set of theoretical underpinnings will get you to a theoretical place where other, bad things are possible.

Pro-choicers, however, simply aren't incredibly concerned about the moral status of a zygote or a blastocyst. (Some of us are more or less concerned about the moral status of a fetus and especially a viable fetus.) What we are concerned about are the practical consequences of banning or restricting abortions, i.e., what it will do to gender equality, how it will affect sexually active women, what it will do to women's careers, whether it will force women to stay in bad relationships, etc.

Compared to those very concrete harms, the fact that someone can theoretically label a clump of cells a "person" based on some exercise in formal syllogistic reasoning isn't particularly compelling to us.

But as I said, when it comes to later term abortions, pro-choicers have a very diverse set of opinions.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 6:47 PM

I agree with the Marquis. The cases where you can legally kill a person are fairly limited so if someone accepts the fetus is a person, but is still Pro-Choice, they're ethically weird at best.

Although in most cases whether a genetically, or otherwise, distinct human has a fully separate body or personhood is usually not important. I believe a conjoined twin has to get permission if they wish to engage in a separation that is certain to kill the other twin. A human who has limited synaptic connections can not be euthanized, in normal cases, without a fairly involved legal process. The idea of humans (with hearts and heads) who are not persons mostly exists in thought experiments, like that of deceased science fiction editor John W, Campbell, I'm not sure it ever crops up legally anywhere else. For that matter removing and destroying a non-cancerous or non-infected organ is also quite a process in normal cases.

Posted by Thomas R | November 5, 2007 6:58 PM

The title "Party of Death" wasn't just inflammatory, it was slanderous.

Whom did it slander?

The Grim Reaper. I understand he's actually a really nice guy.

Posted by Bill | November 5, 2007 7:06 PM

The reason some posters are so intent on focusing the question on the “personhood”
Of the fetus (rather than the accuracy of the statement that it is “human life”) is a obvious dishonest attempt to move the goal post – given the scientific advancement & consensus in embryology.

Justice Blackmun wrote in Roe v Wade “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in … medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” , & “(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”
That “difficult question” has been answered: human life begins at fertilization in the biological sense. There is no more pivotal moment in the subsequent growth and development of a human than at conception. It is a unique, fully integrated, self directing organism. All current embryologists accept this and it is the understanding of the field.
Pro-abortion advocates know this, and know that Blackmun (above) drew no distinction between “human life” & “personhood”. This second “personhood” question is meant more to distract than to inform.

Posted by Fitz | November 5, 2007 7:09 PM

I must say Dilan Esper makes an important and candid concession.

“What we are concerned about are the practical consequences of banning or restricting abortions, i.e., what it will do to gender equality, how it will affect sexually active women, what it will do to women's careers, whether it will force women to stay in bad relationships, etc.”

This seems to be the reason detra’ of pro-choice philosophy. In all my moral training I have never heard issue’s such as this raised concerning fundamental human rights. Pro-lifers don’t seem to concerned if a man has to quit law school and get a job in order to support a new born child. Nor do we see abortion as a great excuse for greeting out of a bad relationship or consider the crimp it puts in peoples sex lives to be serious reasons for ending what is clearly a human life.

Posted by Fitz | November 5, 2007 7:22 PM

The reason some posters are so intent on focusing the question on the “personhood”
Of the fetus (rather than the accuracy of the statement that it is “human life”) is a obvious dishonest attempt to move the goal post – given the scientific advancement & consensus in embryology.

Fitz:

It's not shifting the goalposts at all. The precise issue (if we are talking about the view that life begins at conception-- I make the caveat that some people favor abortion restrictions but not all the way back to the fertilization of the egg) is whether a zygote is the same thing as a human person and thereby has a "right to life". The fact that it is "human life" does not end the inquiry; that is like assuming that a catarpillar and a butterfly are the same things. Something may be alive and may be human but nonetheless not be the same thing as a rights-bearing human person.

Pro-lifers constantly overlook that just because they have their theoretical arguments as to why a zygote and a human infant are moral equivalents doesn't mean they aren't making a big leap in comparing two things that, despite the common thread of their genetic code, have vastly different attributes and are quite unlike one-another, and that many of those attributes that the infant has and the zygote lacks are exactly the sorts of attributes that lead us to the conclusion that a being has a legal interest in not being killed.

Simply put, it's not pro-choicers who are being counterintuitive by claiming that some persons are less than equal to others, it's pro-lifers who are being counterintuitive by saying that single-celled organisms have the same rights as fully-developed human infants.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 7:30 PM

This seems to be the reason detra’ of pro-choice philosophy. In all my moral training I have never heard issue’s such as this raised concerning fundamental human rights. Pro-lifers don’t seem to concerned if a man has to quit law school and get a job in order to support a new born child. Nor do we see abortion as a great excuse for greeting out of a bad relationship or consider the crimp it puts in peoples sex lives to be serious reasons for ending what is clearly a human life.

Fitz, if the application of your theory leads to grave disruption and harm to women's lives, that's usually an indicator that you've got a bad theory, not that you should discount the disruption and harm.

And by the way, gender equality is a fundamental human right.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 7:35 PM

Something may be alive and may be human but nonetheless not be the same thing as a rights-bearing human person.

Dilan -- I was answering Jim's point -- not that you might grant "it's a human life" (you know, by actually knowing some biology) and still think that only some human lives are "persons" who cannot be killed willy nilly on purely consequentialist grounds (that is, most of us, though not Singer, grant that you cannot kill a _person_ even if doing so "improves the general welfare" if there is not some further justification (self defense, punishment, in war, etc.). I think you're talking about human life, but not granting personhood, with the usual moral attributes connected. Or, an alternative reading is that for the most part you're pure consequentialist, and don't have much truck with this whole thing. If the consequences for women's rights, equality, etc. were sufficiently good, you'd be willing to toss a grown man into the wood chipper on very rare occasions, if he was sufficiently retarded or already sick, or something.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 5, 2007 7:38 PM

And by the way, gender equality is a fundamental human right.

And I still have no clue where Dilan gets his list of fundamental rights -- were they written on Craig's bathroom stall or something?

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 5, 2007 7:40 PM

"It's not shifting the goalposts at all. The precise issue is whether a zygote is the same thing as a human person and thereby has a "right to life"

This is a obvious shifting of the goal post from the question - When does life begin? To When is life worthy of life?

In all my years - and as I quote Justice Blackmun in legal precedent... the question is one of human life...not "personhood".

To redefine "human life" as a zygote may be convenient to assuage what is being ended... but as you admit.. it is a matter of degree not kind.

Posted by Fitz | November 5, 2007 7:44 PM

That “difficult question” has been answered: human life begins at fertilization in the biological sense. There is no more pivotal moment in the subsequent growth and development of a human than at conception. It is a unique, fully integrated, self directing organism. All current embryologists accept this and it is the understanding of the field.

I try not to say things as impolite as this.

But this is just pure bullshit.

Posted by Freddie | November 5, 2007 7:49 PM

Dilan -- I was answering Jim's point -- not that you might grant "it's a human life" (you know, by actually knowing some biology) and still think that only some human lives are "persons" who cannot be killed willy nilly on purely consequentialist grounds (that is, most of us, though not Singer, grant that you cannot kill a _person_ even if doing so "improves the general welfare" if there is not some further justification (self defense, punishment, in war, etc.). I think you're talking about human life, but not granting personhood, with the usual moral attributes connected. Or, an alternative reading is that for the most part you're pure consequentialist, and don't have much truck with this whole thing. If the consequences for women's rights, equality, etc. were sufficiently good, you'd be willing to toss a grown man into the wood chipper on very rare occasions, if he was sufficiently retarded or already sick, or something.

You want to know why pro-choicers don't see the point of engaging Ramesh's arguments? It's because of stuff like this.

Look, Marquis, yes, I think that a zygote is not the same thing as a human child, for the same reason I think that a catarpillar is not the same as a butterfly. No, that doesn't mean that I would sacrifice human persons for utilitarian purposes, any more than believing that catarpillars are not butterflies says anything about what I would or would not do to butterflies.

The fact is, you guys on the pro-life side think that without all your theories and rigorous formal logic and categories, we're all going to turn into little Mengeles preying on the weakest among us. But it's not true. We have our own principles-- principles that separate a zygote from a human child, principles that separate a fetus in the womb from one outside the womb, and yes, principles that separate actions that will impinge on the ability of women to succeed and reach their human potential in society as opposed to actions that will not do so.

But more importantly, strict adherence to "principles" doesn't prevent people from doing bad things. Indeed, pro-lifers indifference to women's rights is a great example of this. But there are many others. Life is complicated, and you are just as likely to make moral errors by having the wrong set of principles as you are by being willing to draw fuzzier lines.

And I still have no clue where Dilan gets his list of fundamental rights -- were they written on Craig's bathroom stall or something?

If you really believe that the rights of 51 percent of the American population are of equal worth to the writings on a bathroom stall, it is only further proof that your moral principles are warped, and the strict application of warped principles will inevitably lead to a warped result.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 7:59 PM

Marquis, that's the problem with rights talk. Some people say that gender equality is a fundamental human right, some people say that life that begins at or before conception has a fundamental right to become a full human life.

Are you of the belief that the Bible says that human life begins at or before conception, and that settles the matter? Or where's the platform from which you're criticizing Dilan?

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | November 5, 2007 7:59 PM

This is a obvious shifting of the goal post from the question - When does life begin? To When is life worthy of life?

In all my years - and as I quote Justice Blackmun in legal precedent... the question is one of human life...not "personhood".

Fitz, you are assuming your conclusion. If the question is whether it is "human life", then no, not all human life is entitled to protection. Skin cells are human life, as are sperm and egg. But they are not entitled to protection.

In addition, in theory, something can be nonhuman and yet still entitled to protection. Humanoid extraterrestrials, should they exist, may perhaps fall into this category.

When we say "personhood", we are referring something that is entitled to protection. And when someone is arguing the pro-life position, at least at its extreme end (i.e., life begins at conception) they are contending that the zygote is entitled to that protection, i.e., that it is a human person, and not simply "human life" in the same sense a sperm or egg or skin cell is.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 8:07 PM

The very fact that we are having to debate this question and are seriously entertaining earnest logical arguments that our society should be able to destroy children in their mother's womb, is an indication of how sick our society is.

Ultimately while I could supply many reasoned arguments as to why abortion is a terrible thing which should be abolished, I feel that there is something wrong with our society that we are trying to answer through reason a question that would have a very quick and obvious answer if we only stopped arguing and listened to our own deepest moral intuitions, the voice of our heart and conscience.

If we for a moment shut all of the reasoned arguments for and against out of our minds, and let ourselves be filled with the natural tenderness towards a newborn baby that is the voice of our heart, could we possibly remain in that state of mind and think that the destruction of babies in their mother's wombs was ever justified? I think not.

I would like to respond to the pro-choice side in the same way that Tertullian refuted Marcion: "Look at a baby in its mother's arms; thus do I refute Judith Jarvis Thomsen."

Whenever you debate the issue of abortion, please leave aside the arguments for a moment. Visualize the babies. Visualize an unborn baby in its mother's womb, and visualize who the baby will be in a few months, after it is born. These are not abstract bits of tissue we are talking about. They are individual, unique human beings. They already are destined to have a particular race, a particular sex, particular features, particular personality traits. They are as human as you or me. The narratives of their lives have already begun, and will continue on for another 70-odd years if we don't horribly destroy them in their mother's womb. The question of abortion could be solved very quickly if we just stopped arguing and thought about the babies.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 5, 2007 8:22 PM

Stickler deal to Fitz, I believe it's "raison d'etre" not "reason detra."

Dilan states "Something may be alive and may be human but nonetheless not be the same thing as a rights-bearing human person."

First can you think of an example of this besides an unborn human? Does the law state those in a vegetative state have no legal rights? If so why did Schiavo's husband ever worry about courts at all? Why not just shoot her as you can with a dog or horse?

Second "not be the same thing" does not imply being an almost opposite thing. What if the unborn were given 1% the rights of what you deem a "human person." So killing one earns you days in jail instead of years. Or what if they were given the rights many primates have where cruelty or unnecessary killing can result in fines? Or what if they only have the rights a woman's ovaries, or man's testicles, has where removal generally requires a medical justification? IOW why is a human embryo less than a monkey or a testicle?

D"we're all going to turn into little Mengeles preying on the weakest among us."

TR: No need to go that far. However 90% of the time when a mother finds out her unborn baby has Down's Syndrome she aborts. In addition these tests, as I recall, are generally done in the second trimester when the fetus has an expanding cerebral cortex. Many pro-choice people make it clear that late-term abortion is necessary in cases of such "abnormalities." I'm a fifth child and I was born with osteogenesis imperfecta. It's difficult for me not to see the Pro-Choice culture as one that says my life is worth less than yours. Mostly because Pro-Choice people have outright told me so.

Posted by Thomas R | November 5, 2007 8:50 PM

And I will admit late-term abortion does energize me a bit more because the justification for that seems much weaker. According to the Pro-Choice Guttmacher Institute every year around 80,000 abortions are performed on women who have been pregnant 16 weeks or longer. In addition they say that in 71% of those cases the reason was that the woman didn't recognize she was pregnant or misjudged gestation, So something like 56,000 fetuses, many of whom do have brains as defined by science, are ended because of misjudgment or ignorance.

Polls indicate that the majority of Americans would support greater restrictions for abortion in the second and third trimesters. In Sweden abortion is much more restricted after the 18th week than it is here. In Germany restrictions after the 14th week are severe. Germans do not have a high-rate of maternal mortality or female oppression for that.

Posted by Thomas R | November 5, 2007 9:00 PM

I would like to respond to the pro-choice side in the same way that Tertullian refuted Marcion: "Look at a baby in its mother's arms; thus do I refute Judith Jarvis Thomsen."

Look at a zygote in a microscope, thus do I refute Hector Dauphin-Gloire?

And furthermore, Hector, you are ignoring the other side of the ledger. Again, women's rights are a big part of the equation, and one of the reasons that pro-choicers and pro-lifers can't discuss this issue is because many pro-lifers seem to think that if they scream "life begins ta conception" loud enough it means that they will never have to consider the impact of their policy prescriptions on women.

Does the law state those in a vegetative state have no legal rights? If so why did Schiavo's husband ever worry about courts at all? Why not just shoot her as you can with a dog or horse?

My understanding is that human beings in certain states indeed do not have a right to life. Others may have a right to life, but not one that is enforceable against a person deputized to make decisions on their behalf (which is somewhat analogous to the power that a woman would have to make decisions on behalf of zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses within her body). So sure, there are examples of human beings that don't have a right to life.

However 90% of the time when a mother finds out her unborn baby has Down's Syndrome she aborts. In addition these tests, as I recall, are generally done in the second trimester when the fetus has an expanding cerebral cortex. Many pro-choice people make it clear that late-term abortion is necessary in cases of such "abnormalities." I'm a fifth child and I was born with osteogenesis imperfecta.

That isn't Down Syndrome, and you should understand the hopelessness of that condition before you assume that the statistics about such abortions say anything more generally about abortion rights.

But I will make you this concession-- there are serious issues about whether unlimited abortions can lead to people using late term abortions as a tool to get the baby they want, rather than simply as something to turn to in a desparate emergency. The prevalence of sex selection abortions in parts of the third world is a nice example of this.

But the thing is, that is exactly the sort of consequentialism that the posters above reject. I can conceive of a situation where I might conclude that unrestricted abortion rights are being put to such improper purposes that their harm might outweigh their utility. But what I object to is pro-lifers refusal to even consider the interests of women in having this right.

And I will admit late-term abortion does energize me a bit more because the justification for that seems much weaker.

It should. But again, that's the sort of reasoning many on the pro-life side reject. They don't want to admit that there's something much more troubling about aborting an 8 month fetus than aborting a zygote. That's a lot more complicated reality than "life begins at conception".

The truth is that if there was more good faith on the pro-life side, we might be able to come to some compromises that protect the rights of women to deal with unplanned pregnancies early in the term, while protecting viable fetuses from late-term abortions. But while there are sensible pro-lifers who might be inclined to work towards that, there are also many pro-lifers who are either committed to their formal logic that says that if we don't protect zygotes, we will legitimize infanticide or who want to use abortion restrictions to roll back the changes in the accepted role of women in society and female sexuality over the past 50 years.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 9:22 PM

The very fact that we are having to debate this question and are seriously entertaining earnest logical arguments that our government should be able to take control of women's bodies, is an indication of how sick our society is.

See? Everyone can substitute sneering for argumentation.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | November 5, 2007 9:24 PM

For those unsure about the facts of basic embryology, Ponnuru's book offers the following examples in its notes section:

1. "In this text, we begin our description of the developing human with the formation and differentiation of the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual." William J. Larsen, Human Embryology, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone, 2001), p. 1.

2. "Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual." Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human (6th edition, 1998), p. 18

3. "It needs to be emphasized that life is continuous, as is also human life, so that the question, 'When does (human) life begin?' is meaningless in terms of ontogeny. Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a 'moment') is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte." Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition (New York: Wiley-Liss, 2000), p. 8.

4. "Fertilization is the process whereby two sex cells (gametes) fuse together to create a new individual with genetic potentials derived from both parents." The first sentence of the chapter titled "Fertilization: Beginning a New Organism" of Scott F. Gilbert's Developmental Biology, 6th edition (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2000)

Since the science is clear, arguing that a human embryo cannot be distinguished from a a skin cell, or from sperm, is simply wrong. (Dilan, you were able to see this distinction in your first post; I'm not sure why you are not able to in your 8:07 post). The human embryo is a genetically distinct entity, and is thus wholly different from the mother's kidney for example.

Posted by torourke | November 5, 2007 9:33 PM

1. "In this text, we begin our description of the developing human with the formation and differentiation of the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual." William J. Larsen, Human Embryology, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone, 2001), p. 1.

2. "Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual." Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human (6th edition, 1998), p. 18

4. "Fertilization is the process whereby two sex cells (gametes) fuse together to create a new individual with genetic potentials derived from both parents." The first sentence of the chapter titled "Fertilization: Beginning a New Organism" of Scott F. Gilbert's Developmental Biology, 6th edition (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2000)

These statements are not always true. Specifically, a zygote can twin. Indeed, my understanding is that twinning can occur as long as the cells in the embryo are unspecialized. So fertilization does not create a unique individual. At best one can say that it creates at least one, and perhaps more than one, individual, and that if it creates more than one, they won't be genetically unique.

3. "It needs to be emphasized that life is continuous, as is also human life, so that the question, 'When does (human) life begin?' is meaningless in terms of ontogeny. Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a 'moment') is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte." Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition (New York: Wiley-Liss, 2000), p. 8.

This statement is true. Human development is a continuous process, and fertilization is one critical landmark. Others are cell specialization, implantation, development of a nervous system, development of the brain, fetal viability, and birth.

Ponnuru assumes that one should draw the line at fertilization, but there's plenty of other places where one can draw the line and not harm so many women.

Since the science is clear, arguing that a human embryo cannot be distinguished from a a skin cell, or from sperm, is simply wrong. (Dilan, you were able to see this distinction in your first post; I'm not sure why you are not able to in your 8:07 post).

I was responding to different arguments. I agree with Ross that it's perfectly plausible to draw distinctions between skin cells and embryos for purposes of abortion policy, and that therefore Wills' argument isn't some killer refutation of the pro-life position. However, my point to Fitz is that "personhood", not "human life", is the attribute that confers rights, because skin cells certainly are a form of human life; they are not, however, persons.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 5, 2007 9:48 PM

Marquis, that's the problem with rights talk.

I'm ducking out of this one, which has iterated to one of the standard fixed-points of useless abortion, debate, but I should let Elvis know: yep, that's exactly my point. Rights talk, which seems to be about all we engage in these days, is useless and silly, and ends in men shouting opposed first principles increasingly more loudly at each other, given the increasing divergence of some of our basic notions on certain points. We can get along fine when rights have little to do with it, as on many public policy issues, but rights talk ends in assertion. If it boils down to rights talk, I think Mao had a point about rights coming out of the barrel of a gun (well, maybe that's not what Mao said, but it's close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades).

And Dilan -- I think it depends on what one means by "gender equality" -- I don't think I'd grant that what YOU think that means is a "right" (even if believed in such reified oddities as "rights" in the modern usage), but I imagine I believe in something you'd agree was a good, if incomplete subset of it.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 5, 2007 9:56 PM

Re: That “difficult question” has been answered: human life begins at fertilization in the biological sense.

Um, no. Fertilization does not create either life or humaness. In the whole process of reproduction there is NEVER a point when something that is not living becomes something living. Nor is there any point at which something that is non-human becomes something human. Sperm and egg (of us homo sapiens) are alive and they are human already.
Also: beware making "fertilization" and "conception" synonyms. They aren't. Fertilization precedes conception.

Posted by JonF | November 5, 2007 10:00 PM

Marquis,

I think a quotation from Simone Weil's essay 'On Human Personality', is appropriate here, 'To place the notion of rights at the center of a social conflict is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on either side.'

you should read the whole essay; it's about that very idea, and is brilliantly written. Pope Paul VI said that she was one of his three favorite writers.

JonF,

Well, fertilization is the point at which that which can develop into a complete human being comes into existence. let's not split hairs here.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 5, 2007 10:49 PM

Dilan wrote:

"These statements are not always true. Specifically, a zygote can twin. Indeed, my understanding is that twinning can occur as long as the cells in the embryo are unspecialized. So fertilization does not create a unique individual. At best one can say that it creates at least one, and perhaps more than one, individual, and that if it creates more than one, they won't be genetically unique."

So because there is the possibility that there could be two individuals there, there are in fact really none? Here's Ponnuru on your scenario: "This is like saying that a flatworm isn't a flatworm because it can be split into two flatworms. Besides, what is cloning but the creation of a twin? The promise of cloning...is that an embryo with our genetic code can be formed from the skin cells of any one of us. If an embryo has no right to life because a twin can be formed from it, and a twin can be formed from any of us, then it follows that nobody has the right to life." (p. 156)

"The truth is that if there was more good faith on the pro-life side, we might be able to come to some compromises that protect the rights of women to deal with unplanned pregnancies early in the term, while protecting viable fetuses from late-term abortions. But while there are sensible pro-lifers who might be inclined to work towards that, there are also many pro-lifers who are either committed to their formal logic that says that if we don't protect zygotes, we will legitimize infanticide or who want to use abortion restrictions to roll back the changes in the accepted role of women in society and female sexuality over the past 50 years."

Right, the bad faith is all on the side of the pro-lifers. I guess we should just ignore the fact that the Surpeme Court invented a right to abortion on demand and imposed it on the entire country. Pro-lifers can't get a ban on late-term abortions no matter what level of good faith they exhibit because the Supreme Court says that this is a protected Constitutional right. Given that several liberal legal scholars (Laurence Tribe, Edward Lazarus, John Hart Ely, etc.) have admitted that Roe vs. Wade is constitutionally bankrupt ("borders on the indefensible" as Lazarus, a clerk under Blackmun put it), it would seem to me that the bad faith has been on the side of those people who defend abortion as a "constitutional right."

But more than anything Dilan, I want to challenge the notion that abortion on demand has been some sort of blessing for women, especially the poor. I think it has been the exact opposite. The problem as I see it, is that Roe vs. Wade essentially told young, irresponsible men that they had the green light to act like young, irresponsible men. How many poor women have been impregnated by men and then abandoned (or worse, forced into the abortion) because these men figured that the availability of abortion meant that they had no obligation to stick with the mother should she choose to keep the baby?

Ponnuru notes in the book that the rates of illegitimacy and abortion rose together in the 1970's and fell together in the 1990's, which suggets that there is a link between the two. Since illegitimacy is a primary factor in poverty (note that the illegitimacy rate among Asian Americans is in the single digits while it approaches 90% in inner-city, black America), then abortion on demand has been a disaster for poor women in our nation's inner cities.

I think restricting abortion would send a signal to men that their days of casually impregnating women and then abandoning them--which is a major reason why women choose to abort--are numbered. There are a number of other reasons why the pro-choice position is not the pro-woman position, and why the pro-life position is not the anti-woman position: the heavyweights among those who advocated for women's suffrage opposed abortion (Lucretia Mott et. al.), pro-lifers run crisis pregnancy centers all over the country, and indeed, these centers now outnumber abortion clinics. The very presence of these clinics argues against the notion that pro-lifers are just a bunch of women-hating scolds. Furthermore, polls show that women tend to favor abortion restrictions more than men do.

Alright, I'm done. Time for bed.

Posted by torourke | November 5, 2007 10:58 PM

Mr O'Rourke,

Women tend to be more strongly pro-life than men, but also more strongly pro-choice; they tend in other words to favor one extreme or the other. Among the young (18-25) incidentally, young men are more pro-life then young women. This doesn't surprise me because young men tend to be idealistic and the pro-life position is the more idealistic position on the abortion issue.

I would doubt whether illegitimacy is the cause of abortion because it doesn't appear to be true in an international context. The highest rates of out-of-wedlock birth in the world are, if I remember correctly, in Jamaica, Costa Rica, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Abortion is legal only in Jamaica.

Personally, I believe in a future where society and the state take it upon themselves to ensure that every person who is conceived is provided with the material, educational, and spiritual resources for a productive and fulfilling life. My socialist politics are cut from the same cloth as my opposition to abortion, which is my belief in building a society that tries to embody the principles of the Gospels. Abortion, if nothing else, is proof that a society is unwilling to care for the poorest and weakest of its members. Women do not have abortions because they want them at the deepest level of their being, on the contrary they have them because society has told them that they are worthless and so is their baby. It is no accident that poor African American children are overwhelmingly more likely to be aborted.

As a man of the left, and as a Christian, I am viscerally hostile to the libertarian idea that people ought to be able to do whatever they like and the State ought not to get involved in how we live our lives. It surprises me that people like Dilan who probably consider themselves on the 'left' whatever that means, should by this libertarian argument when it comes to abortion. The raising and care of children ought to be the concern of society as a whole, and ipso facto that concern ought to begin with making sure that those children are not killed in their mother's womb.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 5, 2007 11:22 PM

But more than anything Dilan, I want to challenge the notion that abortion on demand has been some sort of blessing for women, especially the poor. I think it has been the exact opposite.

You can believe that. But you probably should talk to actual, successful women first. I think you will find that huge numbers of them feel they would not be where they are today if they had not had the ability to terminate a pregnancy.

I don't think most pro-lifers care about actual women. Sure, they have theories about how women are really harmed by abortions, etc., but they have no idea how important it is to successful women in America to be able to have an active sex life and not worry about childbearing, i.e., to have abortion as an option.

That's just not that important to the average pro-lifer, and is antithetical to many of them who want women to have less non-marital, non-procreative sex. But it's extremely important to women, so don't condescend to them and say they don't know what's good for them.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 3:02 AM

"are seriously entertaining earnest logical arguments that our government should be able to take control of women's bodies" Elvis E.

Your statement is based in a fallacy, a common fallacy but a fallacy nonetheless.

There is no nation on Earth now, or in the past, that gives women or men absolute autonomy on what they can do with their bodies. For example take LSD and voluntary amputation of a limb. Very different things, but both concern what you do with your body. Neither has a high fatality rate when done in controlled settings and some British study said LSD was safer than tobacco. Now name a nation that legalizes both voluntary amputation and LSD? Or for that matter name a nation where LSD, mescaline, thalidomide, and Fen-phen are all legal.

Dilan: It should. But again, that's the sort of reasoning many on the pro-life side reject.

TR: The Pro-Life side is full of idealists who are perhaps unwilling or unable to concede certain unpleasant realities. Although I consider all abortion wrong I concede that the point in the term can make a difference. Also that for a variety of reasons banning all abortion is an unrealistic goal at least for the foreseeible future. Possibly if we reach the point technologically where we can easily transfer the embryo to a new womb or frozen container, ala Star Trek Deep Space Nine, it'll be different. For now I think it's more practical to encourage better information, leave it to the states, and provide support for pregnant women.

Morally I still consider all abortion to be in essence killing, murder requires a level of informed intent that I don't think exists, but legally/rationally I'm aware that might not be able to be unambiguously justified before "the quickening."

Posted by Thomas R | November 6, 2007 3:43 AM

Dilan: but they have no idea how important it is to successful women in America to be able to have an active sex life and not worry about childbearing, i.e., to have abortion as an option.

TR: For the Christians who are Pro-Life I think many of us value family or responsibility over material possessions. For example I also believe in men paying child support or taking responsibility for their illegitimate children, even though both things may hurt their career or status.

Posted by Thomas R | November 6, 2007 3:54 AM

"I don't think most pro-lifers care about actual women."

Actually, most of the truly ardent pro-lifers, the kind who run crisis pregnancy centers and say the rosary outside clinics, are women. It is true that all the posters in this thread, on both sides, have been men (unless you're a woman - there are women named Dylan or Dilan).

I don't think anyone has mentioned that the name "Party of Death" was not coined by Ponnuru, but by a pro-choice author disturbed by the excesses into which his side had fallen. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the book on hand and can't find the author's name quickly on Google, but I will look again later. Also, the book makes it clear that "the party of death" is not be considered synonymous with the party of death, but unfortunately Regnery's promotional campaign obscured and even outright contradicted this.

Posted by James Kabala | November 6, 2007 10:01 AM

But it's extremely important to women, so don't condescend to them and say they don't know what's good for them.

I think Dilan, it would be safe to say it's important to SOME women. It certainly isn't to all, any more than it's important to all men to be able to dodge the consequences of their sexual activity with a quick, convenient murder.

Actually, one point -- if we're talking gender equality, it has always seemed to me that a reasonable extension of the pro-choice position as it currently stands is the eliminiation of many forms of child support for men. The current regime gives a biological father no say in whether the woman gives birth to the child -- she always has the option of abortion. If you really believe in the "woman's right to choose" rhetoric and think this is an actual, embedded right, then the most payment a non-married woman should be due from a father is the cost of the abortion she could have had. Now, that's pretty clearly a reprehensible position, but I don't see how it doesn't follow from the current approach to "empowering" women, which among other things makes it none of a father's business if the mother kills his child (unless they are married, maybe).

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 12:08 PM

Terms such as human “adolescent,” “infant,” and “embryo” or "zygote" do not refer to beings of distinct kinds; rather, they refer to the same kind of being — a human being, an individual member of the species Homo sapiens — at different developmental stages. You were once an embryo, just as surely as you were once an adolescent, and before that a child.

To leave no doubt, I quote a couple of the standard texts. Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, in The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, perhaps the most widely used of the embryology texts, make the following unambiguous statement about the beginning of a new and distinct human individual: “Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell — a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual” (p.16, emphasis supplied).

Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, in their book Human Embryology and Teratology, say this: “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte” (p. 8,).

see also any other standard embryology textbook, for example, Bruce Carlson, Human Embryology and Developmental Biology (St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 2004); or William J. Larsen, Human Embryology, 3rd ed. (2001);

Posted by Fitz | November 6, 2007 12:34 PM

"However, my point to Fitz is that "personhood", not "human life", is the attribute that confers rights, because skin cells certainly are a form of human life; they are not, however, persons."

No they are not a "form of human life" they are parts of a human the same way a liver or a spleen or a toe nail clipping are parts of a human.

They are not however a human being.

Posted by Fitz | November 6, 2007 12:38 PM

Actually, most of the truly ardent pro-lifers, the kind who run crisis pregnancy centers and say the rosary outside clinics, are women. It is true that all the posters in this thread, on both sides, have been men (unless you're a woman - there are women named Dylan or Dilan).

But that's very different from caring about the actual lives that women lead and their actual wants and desires.

This is, I might say, a problem I have with some forms of religiously motivated compassion. When someone says "I will pray for your soul", I know that in their own mind they are being compassionate. But that doesn't mean that they are addressing anything I care about, or doing anything to improve my ability to achieve my hopes and desires.

There are a lot of women in this world who don't want the sex and family lives that Christian conservatives believe were ordained for them. They want to pursue a different set of goals; a set which reproductive freedom facilitates. And when I say a lot of pro-lifers don't care about women, that's what I mean: they don't care about the actual goals and desires of many American women, but would rather "help" women only towards a very narrow path that they see as virtuous but which many others reject.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 2:11 PM

Actually, one point -- if we're talking gender equality, it has always seemed to me that a reasonable extension of the pro-choice position as it currently stands is the eliminiation of many forms of child support for men. The current regime gives a biological father no say in whether the woman gives birth to the child -- she always has the option of abortion.

Marquis, you are ignoring context. A woman has to carry the child for nine months at huge disruption to her physical health, her mental sanity, her career, her activities, etc.

A man just has to pay child support.

It's a big difference, and one that justifies reposing the choice to terminate in the female.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 2:15 PM

No they are not a "form of human life" they are parts of a human the same way a liver or a spleen or a toe nail clipping are parts of a human.

They are nt however a human being.

They can be no different, in your logical scheme, than an undifferentiated cell in a blastocyst, which are also parts of what you call a human being. And yet that undifferentiated cell can form a twin.

This part/whole distinction doesn't get you away from the problem of determining personhood.

(Indeed, at some point it may become possible to transfer the nucleus of the skin cell and produce a clone, further blurring the distinction.)

To be clear, as I said before, there is a difference between a human skin cell and a human being. But the difference is that the skin cell is not a person.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 2:21 PM

Dilan wrote:

"You can believe that. But you probably should talk to actual, successful women first."

As opposed to talking to theoretical, unsuccessful women? And I'm the one who's being condescending? Look Dilan, I've been around a lot of actual, successful women who would be where they are today even without the availability of abortion on demand. And the idea that you speak for all successful women is just a tad presumptuous.

"I think you will find that huge numbers of them feel they would not be where they are today if they had not had the ability to terminate a pregnancy."

Have you spoken to huge numbers of women who feel this way, or do you have any kind of evidence to back this up? The research I have read from the Alan Guttmacher Institute suggests that poor, unmarried women obtain the majority of abortions in America. In addition, from 1994-2000, the rate of abortions declined among middle and upper-income women while it increased among the poor. So it appears that most economically successful women today get where they are without needing to have an abortion.

"I don't think most pro-lifers care about actual women."

Why must you assume bad faith among people with whom you disagree? You might even consider visiting a crisis-pregnancy center and see how much they care about "actual" women. If I were to argue the way you do, and suggest that you favor abortion "because you just want to kill lots of unborn babies," then that would be a lame way of shutting down debate, and I doubt you would appreciate it.

"Sure, they have theories about how women are really harmed by abortions, etc., but they have no idea how important it is to successful women in America to be able to have an active sex life and not worry about childbearing, i.e., to have abortion as an option.
That's just not that important to the average pro-lifer, and is antithetical to many of them who want women to have less non-marital, non-procreative sex. But it's extremely important to women, so don't condescend to them and say they don't know what's good for them."

As I argued in my previous post, abortion on demand has harmed women--espcially poor women--because it has given men the go-ahead to have casual sex and then not take responsibility for the women they impregnate. You respond with a caricature of how pro-lifers view women, suggest that all successful women think the way you think they should without a shred of evidence to back it up, and then suggest that I am condescending to them because I won't play along with your game. Very unimpressive.

Hector wrote:

"I would doubt whether illegitimacy is the cause of abortion because it doesn't appear to be true in an international context."

I'm suggesting that the availability of abortion on demand has led to greater illegitimacy, not the other way around. Ponnuru's book quotes from a 1996 study by two researchers (who were not pro-life) at the Brookings Institute that suggested why this might be. Basically it amounts to women being increasingly unable to extract pledges of marriage from men before sexual activity because the men figured that the availability of abortion and contraception let them off the hook in terms of committing themselves to these women should they become pregnant.

In general, I think it is more helpful to evaluate the evidence of any link between abortion and illegitimacy in America pre- and post-1973 rather than look at other countries because there are not nearly as many factors that you have to control for (like differing levels of poverty). Other than that Hector, I'm with you on abortion. Except I'm not a socialist!

As for James's point about where Party of Death comes from. I'm pretty sure the term is Ponnuru's, although he does quote from a book by the liberal legal scholar Ronald Dworkin who states that abortion and euthanasia are both "choices for death."
Dworkin supports the notion that there is a right to these choices, but he doesn't dance around the fact that these choices do in fact cause the death of living human beings.

Posted by torourke | November 6, 2007 2:46 PM

As I argued in my previous post, abortion on demand has harmed women--espcially poor women--because it has given men the go-ahead to have casual sex and then not take responsibility for the women they impregnate. You respond with a caricature of how pro-lifers view women, suggest that all successful women think the way you think they should without a shred of evidence to back it up, and then suggest that I am condescending to them because I won't play along with your game.

I don't have to caricature your views. You make them quite clear. In your world, voracious men are waiting for the "go ahead" to have casual sex with unconsenting women and then abandon the babies.

In the real world, women like sex as much as men do, casual sex is very pleasurable to both sexes, and the best way to have a great sex life without disrupting your dreams and ambitions is to be able to avoid having babies.

In any event, more generally, the vast majority of women who have succeeded in the workplace are pro-choice. And the reason is that whether or not they had to have abortions themselves (and a significant number did), the availability of abortion allowed them to get educations and have careers while also having sex lives and not having to worry about getting pregnant.

You will find very few pro-life women in the boardroom.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 3:21 PM

It's a big difference, and one that justifies reposing the choice to terminate in the female.

But given that choice -- the absolute power of a Roman paterfamilias to decide who lives and dies -- asking for a perpetual support if you make one choice seems unfair. Again, only on pro-choice premises -- I find the idea abhorrent. But that it is only considered by a few (rather cranky) libertarian pro-choice voices seems to indicate the intellectual dishonesty of the movement. Look, for those (like you) who are "upset" by later term abortions (though I doubt you'd actually make any legal restrictions), maybe we should allow for some payments in cases where there's a good case to be made that there was no chance to "deal with it" at an earlier point.

In the real world, women like sex as much as men do, casual sex is very pleasurable to both sexes, and the best way to have a great sex life without disrupting your dreams and ambitions is to be able to avoid having babies.

Actually, studies of the happiest folks with their sex lives don't completely bear this out. But it bears noting that if "a great sex life" as defined by quantity of orgasms and multiplicity of orifices involved is the goal, then avoiding emotional entanglements, fidelity, and honesty is also very helpful. The logic of the "sex uber alles" crowd tends to crowd out all merely human concerns and loves in its pursuit of some engine of pleasure. That this leaves many of us frankly hostile, for good reason.

In any event, more generally, the vast majority of women who have succeeded in the workplace are pro-choice.

Really? Do you have any actual backing for this statement? Or did you find it wherever you find "fundamental rights" -- i.e., you suspect it's true, so it must be.

I'll also suspect that Hector and I, at least, don't think women or men in the boardroom are the best people to base our moral values on. Not to fall into a John Edwards or Marx caricature, I vaguely assume people in the boardroom are more likely than the average to be ambitious, heartless, amoral thugs, willing to stab or take anything to get where they've gotten.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 3:38 PM

Mr. O'Rourke and Dilan,

Sorry, I mis-stated the point that I was arguing against about abortion causing illegitimacy. I still don't agree that the causal link is there. My point in bringing up some other countries is that I don't think abortion and illegitimacy are necessarily correlated. Look at Japan, which has lots of abortion and very little illegitimacy, compared with the Central American countries, which have almost no (legal) abortion but very high rates of illegitimacy.

I don't mean this as a slur against the Catholic Latin American countries, btw. The patterns of marriage and childbearing work for those countries in a way that they wouldn't here, because their societies are set up to deal with them.

in contrast to conservatives I don't think that the pre-1960s sexual morality was a good thing, although I do think we have gone too far in the other direction. I don't think that sex before marriage is necessarily wrong, and I would argue that the dichotomy of "either abortion or 1950s morality" is a false one that has been propagated only because the conservatives and liberals both have an intrest in spreading it. there are lots and lots of ways that a woman can avoid being locked into an early and confining marriage without demanding that she have the right to destroy her child. Periodic abstinence during the fertile period; the birth control pill; birth control patches and other hormonal methods; adoption; and yes, in opposition to conservatives I would also argue that society and the state should extend financial, social and economic support to every woman who conceives a child such that she can bear and care for her child without forsaking her education and/or career. There are many ways in which society can enable women to be sexually active and to have a career without allowing them to destroy their unborn children.

Praying for your soul is meant as a gesture of sympathy and love, if you choose not to take it that way then it's nobody's fault but your own. And yes, I do think that women who believe that they want or need an abortion are objectively mistaken about what is good for them, at least in the sense of being good for their ultimate spiritual welfare. I think that they are operating under false consciousness, much as I think that many Americans are operating under false consciousness when they embrace the consumerist, materialist lifestyle of modern American capitalism. I think that much of that false consciousness is generated by the elite who try to convince poor women that they are worthless and so is their baby so they should just go ahead and destroy it. Abortion has brilliantly served the interests of the powerful in society, by creating a society in which there are fewer black people, fewer poor people, fewer disabled people. It is beyond me how such a society could be to the liking of anyone who calls himself a liberal.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 6, 2007 3:39 PM

Dilan,

I posted this before I saw your last comment.

You call yourself a person of the left?! And you actually think that the denizens of the American corporate boardroom are the people to go to for moral advice??! And you associate 'success' with the ability to 'succeed' within the framework of modern US capitalism?

Sorry, you've lost me here. I think that the American corporate boardroom is for the most part infested with greed, ambition and materialism, and anything that men and women there told me I would take with several heaping tablespoons of salt. "Where a man's treasure is, there will his heart be also." I would rather look for moral advice from Lazarus than from Dives.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 6, 2007 3:54 PM

Really? Do you have any actual backing for this statement?

According to Gallup, affluent women poll 12 percent higher on the question of whether they consider themselves pro-choice. You might also look at the 1995 compilation "Perspectives on the Politics of Abortion", which contains a bunch of data and cites to surveys on this issue.

Basically, successful women tend to understand that an unplanned pregnancy can wreck a woman's career. Pro-lifers may claim to care about women, but as I said above, it's caring in the "I'll pray for your soul" sense and not in the sense of actually being sympathetic to the goals of working women.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 4:01 PM

Heh, I thought Hector would jump on that boardroom comment.

Note that I'll amdit Dilan's partly right -- given other moral concerns, making it possible for women to be as sexually active as they want without any of the biological consequences isn't really anything I'm interested in. It's bad for women, bad for men, and it's bad for society. I'm not remotely a libertarian, and though I wouldn't outlaw any of it, I see no reason to ignore primary goals like "the law should be aginst killing innocent people" in pursuit of things like "everyone should be free to have consequence-free sex, whee" that I don't even consider good at all, much less high-order goods.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 4:08 PM

You call yourself a person of the left?!

Actually, I don't. And I don't have any problem with capitalism. I'm a liberal, not a leftist, and at best, I'm a social democrat.

So yes, I want to facilitate women being able to make a ton of money and run corporations and have huge amounts of influence just like powerful men do. That's an important aspect of gender equality, which is one of the most important values that humans can pursue.

But, I might add, I also want to make the life of a poor woman easier who just wants to be able to stay in her job and support the two kids she has already while having a decent sex life. That's gender equality too.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 4:09 PM

That's an important aspect of gender equality, which is one of the most important values that humans can pursue.

But you can understand how at least some of us might consider that a rather less important value than not killing people? I mean, that seems a _slightly_ more fundamental point. It's only if you _don't think killing people is involved_ that this becomes a big point. And, to be honest, even without abortion on demand, I suspect women can still make a ton of money and run a big corporation -- they may just have to resort to (gasp) birth control and run some risk. Distorting all other goals to attain equality of outcomes between the genders is not a root value for _me_ (for instance, the Summers' mess shows what happens when you toss academic integrity and scientific curiosity out the window for this kind of purpose -- not as important as lawful murder, but still a bit shameful).

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 5:27 PM

But you can understand how at least some of us might consider that a rather less important value than not killing people?

Of course I can understand it. But I have two caveats-- (1) you guys seem to be unable to understand that the case that abortion is actually "killing people"-- as opposed to killing something that is in the earliest stages of development and doesn't have much in common with a human person-- is quite contestable and is something that reasonable people really disagree about; and (2) many on your side really don't think that gender equality is such a good idea, which calls into question whether the drive to make abortion illegal is really all about "killing people".

But subject to those two caveats, I certainly do understand how someone who is absolutely certain that a zygote is the same thing as a human child might then conclude that a woman can't kill it.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 5:33 PM

As I said, I doubt I think what _you_ imagine to be the proper kind of "gender equality" is a good thing -- for one thing, you assume that the answer to "victorian" sexual double standards is bad behavior for all, when some of us might think that fidelity, love, and chastity for all is a better ideal -- unlikely to be _realized_, people being what they are, but then your vision of no double standards seems equally doomed at the limit.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 5:57 PM

As I said, I doubt I think what _you_ imagine to be the proper kind of "gender equality" is a good thing -- for one thing, you assume that the answer to "victorian" sexual double standards is bad behavior for all

Marquis, stealing is bad behavior. Breaching contracts is bad behavior. Polluting our rivers is bad behavior.

Having an orgasm is good behavior. The entire edifice of "traditional sexual morality" is based on the incorrect notion that there can be anything wrong with consenting adults enjoying sexual pleasure by themselves or with other consenting adults. It's all BS, premised on a bunch of mystical crap about the "divine purpose" of sex that has nothing to do with our reality as mammals with a sex drive.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 6, 2007 6:21 PM

Well, yes, Dilan, I know that's what you believe. It just happens to be false.

Quick quiz: other than the "breaching contracts" thing, or perhaps lying, is there anything _wrong_ with having an orgasm with someone else when your spouse thinks you only have them with them? Or, for that matter, not your spouse, but just your girlfriend? Is sexual jealousy purely a made-up phenomenon, based on "mystical crap"? If your answers are yes, I hope nobody with a heart ever sleeps with YOU.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 7:24 PM

Dilan Esper (writes)
“They can be no different, in your logical scheme, than an undifferentiated cell in a blastocyst, which are also parts of what you call a human being. And yet that undifferentiated cell can form a twin.”

As you are aware- this elision has been asked and answered multiple times.

Naturally occurring identical twins originate from the same fertilized egg. (Fraternal twins develop from different fertilized eggs.) Twinning occurs early in gestation when the single embryo splits into two identical embryos — a natural form of cloning. These identical embryos are now siblings.

Before twinning, an embryo — whether naturally conceived or cloned — is an individual, self-contained embryonic human life with a gender and an individual genetic makeup. After identical twinning, there are now two individual, self-contained human lives, each having an identical gender and genetic makeup. In other words, there are now two human lives instead of one. However, even though they appear to be identical genetically, each life is unique. (For example, should the twins ever be born, each would have different fingerprints.)

“This part/whole distinction doesn't get you away from the problem of determining personhood.”

Nor does it get you away from the problem that it is a human life you are ending.

Skin cells are a part of a complete organism; they are not themselves complete human organisms. (When separated from the whole human organism, they are no longer functioning parts of that organism; they become mere cells — fundamentally different from whole, though immature, members of the human species.)
A human embryo — precisely because it is a complete member of the human species — can develop towards maturity, given a suitable environment and adequate nutrition.

“(Indeed, at some point it may become possible to transfer the nucleus of the skin cell and produce a clone, further blurring the distinction.)”

Which under your logic would not have a single ethical or moral reason for avoiding & could not be made illegal do to “reproductive freedom”?

“To be clear, as I said before, there is a difference between a human skin cell and a human being. But the difference is that the skin cell is not a person.”

No the difference (a difference you keep trying to slide past- intentionally I believe) is that one is not a human being but only a part of a human being (that does not require a human beings death) while the other (the embryo) is a human life.

What you seem to be doing Dilan is engaging (unfairly) in the "when does human life begin" argument & then using the minutia of that argument to juxtapose it with arguments concerning female autonomy.

It is unfair. Stick to a set of arguments. Concede the (recognized) point about ending human life.

Then you can outline your dichotomy between human life VS sexual freedom & careerism.

Posted by Fitz | November 6, 2007 7:58 PM

Re: It's all BS, premised on a bunch of mystical crap about the "divine purpose" of sex that has nothing to do with our reality as mammals with a sex drive.

Dilan and Marquis,

I'm usually annoyed when conservatives and those who sing the praises of Victorian sexual morality, assume that premarital sex necessarily means casual, commitment-free, consequence free sex. But then Dilan comes along and gives the conservatives more fodder for their arguments. Didn't he compare having sex to going bowling in one of the previous threads?

I don't think that everyone is required to abstain until marriage, although i do respect and admire the people who make that choice. I think that sex is meant for straight couples who are in steady, monogamous relationships, who are sincerely in love with each other, and have been together for a while. i don't think they necessarily need to be married. and yes, i think that fidelity ought to be part of the packet, whether it's with your wife or your girlfriend. and i think that while couples who don't want to have children should take all reasonable precautions including watching the calendar, taking temperature measurements, using the Pill and other contraceptive methods, they should also be willing to at least bear the child if pregnancy does result. childbirth should be something we have a certain degree of control over (i.e. contracepting if we want) but not total control- if you do become pregnant then you have an obligation to both your child and to nature and to God not to destroy it. as for gay couples i'm still not sure what my opinion is.

so does that make me a liberal or a conservative on the sexual issues? certainly a liberal by any historic standard. but i think that while i disagree with Marquis about premarital sex, I probably disagree with Dilan even more about his basic premises. So love, fidelity and a certain degree of chastity are just 'BS', 'mystical crap', etc? that's not just flying in the face of Christian teachings it's flying in the face of all historical experience. have you read any medieval love poetry, Dilan?

but Marquis, please don't assume that all of us, who reject the Victorian sexual morality, want to get rid of all standards altogether. Dilan may be for 'casual sex', but many of us are certainly not, even while we may not support your sexual morality either. There is such a thing as moderation.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 6, 2007 8:14 PM

Hector,

Of course not -- I don't agree with you on some important points, but you're much closer to my view than Dilan is. I just think Dilan's is the natural endpoint of an aggressively secular "rational" "liberal" view of sex and man. It doesn't strike me as very free, of course.

I don't know what the natural end-point of your view is -- but it's something more humane and romantic than this "bowling" and "a particularly enjoyable sneeze" nonsense you hear from some folks (but certainly not all liberals -- Garry Wills, at random, God bless him and smack some sense in his head, is closer to you than to Dilan, I think, never mind his lack of charity on the point of abortion).

I think completely irreligious liberals will tend towards Dilan's views, though I know at least one gay atheist who's somewhat closer to our view than Dilan's, by and large.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 6, 2007 11:53 PM

"Ponnuru notes in the book that the rates of illegitimacy and abortion rose together in the 1970's and fell together in the 1990's, which suggets that there is a link between the two."

If this is the sort of "reasoning" common in the book, no wonder it was so roundly ignored.

Ramesh has never seemed anything other than dishonest to me in my correspondence with him. He screamed bloody murder when anyone said that Republican candidates opposed stem cell research (as if this were somehow misleading just because the word "embryonic" was sometimes omitted) but then smirkingly brushed off any complaints I had about calling bans on stem cell research bans on "cloning" (which IS misleading in the public mind, since it implies the creation of mature adult clones to most laypeople, unlike the "stem cell" case in which everyone already knows that we are talking about embryonic cells: the only ones which had any controversy in the first place)

Posted by Bad | November 7, 2007 1:08 AM

As you are aware- this elision has been asked and answered multiple times.

You explained twinning, but what's unanswerable is how many lives are in an undifferentiated clump of human cells. Is it one? Is it more than one?

Each of those cells is potentially a human life, no different than a zygote. But if they don't split off, they never become a human life, they become part of one.

So, life doesn't begin at conception anymore. It begins when one cell splits off from another.

The point is, the only reason we get into these debates is because you are trying to pretend that personhood has nothing to do with the issue, and that anything you label "human life" gets protected. That can't work, because there the aren't bright lines that you think.

i don't think they necessarily need to be married. and yes, i think that fidelity ought to be part of the packet, whether it's with your wife or your girlfriend. and i think that while couples who don't want to have children should take all reasonable precautions including watching the calendar, taking temperature measurements, using the Pill and other contraceptive methods, they should also be willing to at least bear the child if pregnancy does result.

That's wonderful. You can have that opinion. But it has nothing to do with morality. Morality is whether you fulfill your obligations to other people and to society, not that you conform to someone else's opinion-- pulled out of nothingness-- about under what circumstances it is acceptable to pursue pleasurable activities.

I think completely irreligious liberals will tend towards Dilan's views, though I know at least one gay atheist who's somewhat closer to our view than Dilan's, by and large.

You know, if you look at what people actually do as opposed to what they say, adults agree with me for the most part. People pursue lots of nonprocreative, pleasurable sex.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 7, 2007 2:05 AM

Quick quiz: other than the "breaching contracts" thing, or perhaps lying, is there anything _wrong_ with having an orgasm with someone else when your spouse thinks you only have them with them?

That's like asking "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" Breaking solemn commitments is a pretty serious wrong, especially when it can lead to unwanted children and STD's. I don't see how someone can see that as insufficient to explain why it is wrong to cheat on your spouse.

In contrast, your theories would leave us unable to understand why swingers and people in open relationships may not mind if their partner has an orgasm with someone else.

Posted by Dilan Esper | November 7, 2007 2:07 AM

It is surprising to hear someone just say abortion should be legal for purely hedonist reasons. A baby gets in the way of your sex life and money-making so abort.

However even going by the premise it doesn't make much sense to me. A woman who wants lots of money and casual sex should have no objections to birth control or safe sex. So restricted abortion might encourage her to know how to do these things better. If she can just see abortion as an "out" when those fail she doesn't have to worry as much about failure rate. Improvements in birth control effectiveness or proper use can be ignored. (I'm Catholic, but if a person male or female wants power and casual sex they're already well outside being concerned with Christian morality) So basically it's a reward for sloth and incompetence, which doesn't sound like material for future female CEOs.

Besides which I'm very skeptical female entrepeneurs are even that significant among those who have abortions. From what I've read it's mostly poor women who lack social support. If wealthy women are more Pro-Choice it's plausibly because wealthy women are less churchgoing as a whole. I believe wealthy men are more Pro-Choice as well. The Pro-Life element of the Republican party is generally made up of poorer people than the Pro-Choice element as I recall.

Posted by Thomas R | November 7, 2007 5:21 AM

Dilan,

It's not pulled out of nothingness, it's based on a combination of 1) innate emotional intuition, 2) thinking about the ultimate end of human tendencies, abilities and aspirations, and under what circumstances these human capacities (for example, for love, nurturing and fidelity) can best be fulfiled, and 3) a interpretation of what history, Scripture and tradition have to say. The same three things in other words that all other moral reasoning is based on.

And no, I don't think most adults agree with you. Not unless they are having casual, commitment free sex, which is actually not very common. I was in college a few years ago, and I'm a graduate student now so I know quite a few college students, and I can tell you that 'Charlotte Simmons' type stories aside, most of them only sleep with their reasonably long-term boyfriends or girlfriends. They don't cheat on their partners, they don't cruise rest areas or bath houses, and they don't sleep with people that they met a few hours ago at the bar. And this applies a fortiori for people that are middle aged or older. The fact that people today are having pre-marital sex, and that sadly, a few are even having affairs, doesn't mean that they buy your premises about the ultimate end of sex and man.

Re:In contrast, your theories would leave us unable to understand why swingers and people in open relationships may not mind if their partner has an orgasm with someone else.

Well, I have no reason to explain that, because I think they're wrong. Barring exceptional circumstances, I think that cheating on your partner is wrong, and so-called 'swinging' is even more wrong. I can't believe I actually have to explain this. Is there any doubt that swinging is a travesty of what a romantic/sexual relationship is supposed to be?

It wasn't too long ago when we shook our heads about the African or Eskimo tribes where a man would offer his wife to household guests. Sadly, Dilan is apparently trying to normalize that kind of behavior in America too.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 7, 2007 9:10 AM

PS Dilan -- thanks for backing up the claim, which I didn't find unlikely, I just wanted to see if there was much evidence for it. I'm not sure this is a super-tight case for it being crucial to their (perceived) well-being -- it's also true (as far as I know) that "elites" tend to poll more socially liberal in general, in part because this is more acceptable in their circles (I try to keep my mouth shut in scientific circles about my beliefs, to some extent, since they don't exactly tend to win friends and influence program committees). But it is a decent support for a claim that successful women (by the measure of "she who dies with the most money wins" -- which I'm not much for, but it does seem to be the way of this world) are more likely to be pro-choices.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 7, 2007 11:39 AM

You know, if you look at what people actually do as opposed to what they say, adults agree with me for the most part. People pursue lots of nonprocreative, pleasurable sex.

Well, that's a silly argument. For one thing, people who aren't perpetual selfish adolescents tend to eventually demand (if not always get) fidelity and monogamy from themselves and others. For another thing, a lot of men beat their wives (I know this from family experience). If we look at what people do, their values are to be selfish, treacherous, lazy, and mean-spirited, and (not infrequently) brutal and cruel. You can make that your goal -- to mirror the worst that we manage. But don't ask me to join in, or to do anything other than fight it tooth and nail.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 7, 2007 11:43 AM

In contrast, your theories would leave us unable to understand why swingers and people in open relationships may not mind if their partner has an orgasm with someone else.

It leaves me able to understand it -- people often do things that are wrong. I know this became an unpopular sentiment in some circles, after Rousseau, but it's true. What people want and enjoy is often bad. We're able to understand this with violence or theft or cruelty, I'm not sure why it wouldn't apply to sex as well. Human beings will often enjoy degrading and destroying themselves.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 7, 2007 11:45 AM

Marquis,

I'm not sure if it's true that atheists or social radicals are necessarily for free love, commitment free sex, etc. It seems to mne that's true more of a specific kind of Western European/North American liberal; it certainly wasn't true of a lot of Marxists, for example. Eric Hobsbawm points out that left-wing, socialist revolutions often had a tendency to become sexually puritan. Marx and Engels, after all, were fond of using homosexuality and prostitution as examples of capitalist decadence, and on more than one occasion referred to heterosexual monogamy as the natural state of man, which capitalism had distorted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_and_LGBT_rights#_note-13

One of the official slogans of Maoist China was 'Sex is a mental disease', and countries like Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua were probably substantially less free-and-easy in terms of sexual morality after their revolutions then before. The affinity between a strict sexual morality and a radical economic morality also characterized the Nonconformist sects in England, and for that matter More's "Utopia" as well.

I'm not sure what this indicates other than perhaps that while left wing governments may have rejected religion and 'natural law' in theory, they were as much or you and I, at some level, in thrall to the idea that some things are natural, others are not, and morality lies in conforming to that pre-existing standard. after all, if you don't believe in some pre-existing standard of 'natural' morality, then it's hard to argue in favor of a fairer distribution of wealth, or for that matter for anything else.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 7, 2007 12:15 PM

Marquis,

IO'm curious however....you seem to be suggesting to Dilan above that it's wrong for him to cheat on his girlfriend....as a conservative though you presumably believe they shouldn't be sleeping together in the first place, so as long as he's commiting one sin why not another one? Is adultery worse than fornication? I think it is, of course, but then again I'm not a conservative....

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 7, 2007 12:17 PM

Dilan (writes)
"The point is, the only reason we get into these debates is because you are trying to pretend that personhood has nothing to do with the issue, and that anything you label "human life" gets protected. That can't work, because there the aren't bright lines that you think."

The reason your still in this debate is to pretend that your "personhood" is the REAL issue.
I am in this debate because it is not ME who has "labels anything "human life"" but rather the established objective scienctific facts of embrology.

Posted by Fitz | November 7, 2007 1:36 PM

Hector,

I agree. Dilan's is (I think) the natural endpoint of the European/American _liberal_ of an aggressively secular sort (the fellow who's sure there's nothing to all this bullshit, not the fellow who doesn't think there is but thinks the mystery of how good Bach is suggests maybe there's _something_ going on). It's not where old-fashioned Marxists end up, and in some ways (not all) bully for them (though I sure wouldn't go for the kind of persecution of "deviants" that Castro or Mao have had "fun" with at times). I don't like Marxism much, but _selfishness_ of the "orgasms uber alles" kind isn't really its essential problem.

To be fair, a lot of people I know who share Dilan's general theory in fact feel bad about such behavior and act like many Christians -- monogamy and marriage and kids, but more serial monogamy with sex before marriage.

As to Dilan & his girlfriend -- well, I think Catholics are fairly comfortable ranking "sin A is worse than sin B" (heck, we do it for ourselves in confession quite often), and I'd say adultery or "adultery" is worse than fornication. Anyway, the "if you're committing one sin, might as well do 'em all" is absurd, and (though I hear it from some Protestants on a "all sins are the same in God's eyes" basis) IMO un-Christian.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 7, 2007 1:49 PM

Marquis,

Well, of course. But the problem I have with the point of view of many conservatives is the way the separate everything into either marriage, or casual sex, which is exemplified by this conundrum. If Dilan and his girlfriend count as 'casual' then there should be nothing adulterous about him cheating on her since their relationship has nothing in common with a loving marriage. If you are critical of Dilan cheating on his girlfriend however that seems to imply that you think there is something 'there' that he is betraying; the act of adultery presupposes marriage, and the act of 'adultery' presupposes that the boyfriend/girlfriend relationship partakes of some of the goodness of marriage, and that therefore being unfaithful to that relationship is wrong in the same way that adultery would be.

Personally, I think that a loving, long-term relationship of boyfriend and girlfriend may carry with it the same rights (to sexual intercourse) and responsibilities (i.e. faithfulness) as a marriage does. But for a conservative who doesn't see it that way, it seems to me this is something of a conundrum.

I would agree with you about Maoism, though not really about Cuba...I think it would be good for both the left and the right not to think about communist (or for that matter, far right) states as a monolith. Castro isn't the same as Stalin or Mao, in much the same way as John Metaxas wasn't the equivalent of Hitler or Mussolini.

Posted by Hector | November 7, 2007 11:55 PM

Hector,

This has fallen off the front page, so I don't know if you're still reading, but I'm not sure this is the conventional traditionalist Christian sexual view, even if it is not completely uncommon. I suspect that in most of history, the view would be that a couple sleeping together, unmarried, _should get married_ (all things being equal) or stop sleeping together. A long-term relationship without marriage carries no "right" to sexual intercourse (which, yes, a marriage does), but it carries responsibilities in the same way that all loving relationships do. Before I married my wife, we had many duties of loyalty and love, but not duties of what Christians properly consider "the marital act."

But there's no sense in making the perfect the enemy of the somewhat good -- it is not only in modern times that people have sexual relationships with much good in them without marriage. It would be good for these relationships to become marriages -- but better to be faithful imperfect things than unfaithful imperfect things. There's no contradiction here, any more than in suggesting that because a man pilfers petty change from my employer (while trying, perhaps, to be a good employee in many other ways) he will be no worse if he lets robbers into the store to loot the safe. And -- of course there is something "there" he would be betraying -- my wife and I didn't sleep together before we married, but if I'd kissed another woman with passion that would have been a great betrayal. I just don't quite see the logic here, Hector.

As to Cuba -- I'm not well informed on it, but I've read in a few places that at one time Castro's actions with respect to homosexuals were rather brutal -- camps and persecution. I don't have to favor homosexual acts as moral to find that abominable.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 8, 2007 12:52 PM

More to the point -- I know lots of people who slept together before they got married (or who haven't gotten married). The conservative point isn't "there's no 'there' there, and these are false and unreal relationships, and thus no fidelity is owed, and these people shouldn't be together at all." Rather, it is "These relationships should aim at being marriages, and if things are serious there should be an expectation of fidelity and not 'courting' others." That a couple is committing a sin by sleeping together before they are married doesn't "ruin" what good is in the relationship -- it's bad, but last I checked we're all sinners and our sins do not infect and undo all good in every aspect of our lives.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 8, 2007 12:57 PM

Marquis,

What isn't the conventionalist Christian view...mine? yes, I know that. I think that the traditional Christian view happens to be mistaken about this one issue, although it did contain a lot of value and truth, and that there can be valid, monogamous and loving heterosexual relationships that aren't marriages. I do hope that someday the Church re-evaluates their position a little bit, as they have done from time to time. But I certainly don't hope that we ever come to view sex the way that Dilan sees it, as a particularly enjoyable sneeze. I would also point out that while I don't think that most people live the way that Dilan would like them to, neither do they abstain before marriage- I think that only between 5 and 10% of Americans do that.

I do think that there is a strain of conservative thought- perhaps more among the evangelical abstinence advocates than the Catholics- who insist that any premarital sexual relationship is ipso facto worthless and unreal, like a whore sleeping with her john. And it seems to be that if one does accept that premise, then it doesn't make much difference whether you sleep with 3 people before you're married, or 30. after all, no one would censure a whore with sleeping with people other than her john. Your point of view seems much more reasonable, although I still don't agree with it about restricting sex to the locus of marriage.
One can view marriage as the ideal state without saying that all other sexual relationships (no matter how committed, romantic, etc.) are sinful.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 8, 2007 3:14 PM

Hector,

My question, on Christian premises, would be "if the relationship is committed and romantic, why not have it be a marriage?" The primary reason, as far as I can tell, to avoid marriage, is either a mere disgust with institutions or _an implicit assumption that the relationship is not permanent, it is in fact a potentially (likely?) ephemeral thing." This expectation often creates the reality, even where the hope is otherwise -- and in Christian thought, deriving from both the Genesis account and the brief words of Christ on marriage (as well as from other historical and philosophical strains), sexuality is reserved for _permanent_ relationships, not ephemera. Sexuality is only right when it is full giving, not conditional "for now, for the moment, until a problem arises or something better comes along" giving. If the commitment (to heck with "romance", though I personally like it I don't think it's an essential element) is the same as in a marriage -- why not make it a marriage? If it isn't, why not disparage that lack of commitment, which will limit the ability of each to limit their own desires and seek the beloveds'.

As to percentages -- the list of sins in Christianity is not particularly ordered to being a list of "statistically non-prevalent behaviors" of humans. Sloth, gluttony, lust, anger, avarice, envy, and pride are the sea in which most of us swim. That 97% of Americans are envious or cruel does not make cruelty or envy something to be desired, though both are things we may expect to see a lot of in our fallen state. Fornication (to use a rather ugly word for a fairly human failing) is common, and probably has been throughout history, on and off at least. It's not the worst thing we're prone to, but the popularity of a sin does not magically make it right.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 8, 2007 4:02 PM

Well, perhaps. When you say that Jesus indicated that marriage should be permanent, yes he certainly did. But it's suggestive that immediately afterwards he said, 'Not everyone can accept this word but only those to whom it is given." It seems to me that Jesus was stating what the ideal was, while implicitly allowing that it could not be expected of everyone. I don't think it is realistic to expect that people will find the one of their heart's desire right away and that they will remain happy together for the rest of their lives. And I think that Jesus has compassion on the realities that constrain us and won't hold it against us.

i don't know that a given unmarried couple is necessarily any less committed to each other than a married couple. we all know plenty of married couples who use and despise each other, and plenty of unmarried couples who would do anything for one another. I don't think the piece of paper necessarily makes much of a difference.

I also think that a good part of the prohibition against sex before marriage was relevant to a time when women were economically dependent on men, and lacked modern birth control. It is one thing to promote premarital chastity in a context where a girl will be left pregnant and without any means of support, it's another in the modern context where we have modern birth control and where women work outside the home. (and yes, I do think that if a guy gets a girl pregnant today then they should stay together until the kid is grown).

I don't think you are going to convince me, nor I you; I already accept a lot on faith, and to accept that sex before marriage is always wrong is just too much for my common sense to accept. But I do wish you good luck in promoting your opinions....God knows that there needs to be someone out there counteracting the Dilans of the world. I just don't think that condemning all premarital sex is either right or productive, when we could be focusing on the things that we all do agree are wrong, like adultery and abortion.

Posted by Hector Dauphin-Gloire | November 8, 2007 4:46 PM

Hector,

Well, I do spend more time on public policy to do with abortion and adultery, myself. But because those are more important doesn't mean that, if asked, or if (say) raising my children or discussing how to live in a Christian way, I won't also note other things. I see it less as "lecturing the bad folks" (I'm not a good folk myself, in numerous ways) as that we all have a duty to "endorse" those ways of life we believe (or know) to be conducive to peace, joy, and the love of God.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | November 10, 2007 12:49 PM