Wired for Abortion: Responding to Erroneous and Incomplete Arguments from "Wired" Magazine

I was recently part of an informal discussion on the topic of abortion.  I made the statement that scientifically we know when human life begins--at conception.  The larger issue is whether we will grant "personhood" to that life and seek to protect it.  As a result of that one of the participants sent me an article Why Science Can't Say When A Baby's Life Begins by Sarah Zhang (10.2.15).  This was supposed to counter my claim.  However, reading Zhang's piece it quickly becomes clear that it is filled with fallacious reasoning with the result being obfuscation rather than clarity.

First, the essay is filled with one major fallacy that runs through the entirety of the article.  The author continually equivocates between "life" and "person(hood)."  Conflating these two concepts is the central fallacy of this essay.  Consider the following examples drawn from throughout the essay.

From the first two paragraphs:

SCOTT GILBERT WAS walking through the halls of Swarthmore when he saw the poster, from a campus religious group: “Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries about when personhood begins,” it read. “But scientists know when it begins. It begins at fertilization.” What troubled Gilbert, who is a developmental biologist, was the assertion that “scientists know.” “I couldn’t say when personhood begins, but I can say with absolute certainty scientists don’t have a consensus,” he says.

When life begins is, of course, the central disagreement that fuels the controversy over abortion. Attacks on abortion rights are now more veiled and indirect—like secret videos pointing to Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donations, or state legislation that makes operating abortion clinics so onerous they have to shut down. But make no mistake, the ultimate question is, when does a fetus become a person—at fertilization, at birth, or somewhere in between?

Under the section heading "The Quickening" we find these comments:

Before ultrasounds and long before Roe v. Wade, it was obvious when life began.  The "quickening," the first time a woman felt her baby's kick, was the moment the baby came alive, the moment it got a soul.

....

In a way, science made possible the argument for fetal personhood.  It's only tenable because people can peer inside the womb, at one time a black box.  Indeed, when American physicians began collecting human embryos and charting embryonic development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they began considering fertilization as the beginning of fetal life.

Later we find this comment under the section on fertilization:

Assuming that fertilization and implantation all go perfectly, scientists can reasonably disagree when personhood begins, says Gilbert.  An embryologist might say gastrulation, which is when an embryo can no longer divide to form identical twins.  A neuroscientist might say when one can measure brainwaves.  As a doctor, Horvath-Cosper says, "I have come to the conclusion that the pregnant woman gets to decide when it's a person."

The Wired piece ends with these words:

 To doctors and scientists, the question of when life begins isn’t a matter of gathering more evidence. “The science has very little to do with the answer,” says Gilbert. Every iteration and advance in the lab make the question even more the purview of philosophers and theologians. And lawyers.

Recognizing this equivocation is important.  Conflating the issues of "life" and "personhood" creates confusion.  If the question is, "When does an actual human life begin?"--the answer to that question is provided by science.  The answer, of course, is fertilization.  Consider the documentation provided by Patrick Lee, Christopher O. Tollefson, and Robert P. George in their piece at Public Discourse entitled, "Marco Rubio is Right: The Life of a New Human Being Begins at Conception."

 “Human life begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm 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.” “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).” Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2003. pp. 16, 2.


“Fertilization is the process by which male and female haploid gametes (sperm and egg) unite to produce a genetically distinct individual.” Signorelli et al., Kinases, phosphatases and proteases during sperm capacitation, CELL TISSUE RES. 349(3):765 (Mar. 20, 2012)


“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” (emphasis added; Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000, p. 8). (Many other examples could be cited, some of which may be found here. )

Lee, Tollefson, and George go on to argue:

 That is the authority of science. On request, we can cite dozens more examples. The authorities all agree because the underlying science is clear. At fertilization a sperm (a male sex cell) unites with an oocyte (a female sex cell), each of them ceases to be, and a new entity is generated. This new entity, initially a single totipotent cell, then divides into two cells, then (asynchronously) three, then four, eight and so on, enclosed all the while by a membrane inherited from the oocyte (the zona pellucida). Together, these cells and membrane function as parts of a whole that regularly and predictably develops itself to the more mature stages of a complex human body.

From the zygote stage onward this new organism is distinct, for it grows in its own direction; it is human—obviously, given the genetic structure found in the nuclei of its cells; and it is a whole human organism—as opposed to what is functionally a part of a larger whole, such as a cell, tissue, or organ—since this organism has all of the internal resources and active disposition needed to develop itself (himself or herself) to the mature stage of a human organism. Given its genetic constitution and epigenetic structure, all this organism needs to develop to the mature stage is what human beings at any stage need, namely, a suitable environment, nutrition, and the absence of injury or disease. So it is a whole human organism—a new human individual—at the earliest stage of his or her development.

This is why it is correct to say that the developing human embryo is not “a potential human being” (whatever that might mean) but a human being with potential—the potential to develop himself or herself (sex is established from the beginning in the human) through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages and into adulthood with his or her identity intact.

Human life begins at conception.  The scientific evidence is clear.  But what are we to make of this comment in the Wired article?

 As the fertilization researcher Harvey Florman has said, “Fertilization doesn’t take place in a moment of passion. It takes place the next day in the laundromat or the library.”

This is irrelevant.  The fact that fertilization does not take place immediately does nothing to overturn the fact that it does take place and when it does this is the beginning of an individual human life.

The Wired essay goes on to further muddy the waters with irrelevant facts.  Consider these words:

But even fertilization isn’t a clean indicator of anything. The next step is implantation, when the fertilized egg travels down the fallopian tube and attaches to the mother’s uterus. “There’s an incredibly high rate of fertilized eggs that don’t implant,” says Diane Horvath-Cosper, an OB-GYN in Washington, DC. Estimates run from 50 to 80 percent, and even some implanted embryos spontaneously abort. The woman might never know she was pregnant.

From the fact that there are human embryos that do not attach it does not follow that "fertilization isn't a clean indicator of anything."  This is simply a non sequitur.  Philosopher Francis Beckwith effectively argues:

Some estimate up to thirty percent [of all conceptions] die before implantation.  Some people argue that these facts make it difficult to believe that the unborn are fully human in at least the very earliest stage of their development prior to implantation.  But this is clearly an invalid argument, for it does not logically follow from the number of unborn entities who die that these entities are by nature not fully human.  To cite an example, it does not follow from the fact that underdeveloped countries have a higher infant mortality rate that their babies are less human than those born in countries with a low infant mortality rate.  (Politically Correct Death: Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1993], 96)

An individual human life begins at conception.  But what about "personhood"--when does that come about?  It is important to grasp that the answer to this question is not given to us by empirically testable processes such as science deals in.  The words of Lee, Tollefson and George are, again, instructive:

 Science reveals empirical facts. It cannot tell us who, if anyone, is a “person,” morally speaking—which beings, if any, have fundamental dignity and basic moral rights. There are correct answers to these questions—they are not merely subjective issues—but they are not answered by application of scientific methods of inquiry. We cannot determine whether there even is such a thing as human rights, or whether slavery, or Hitler’s genocide against Jews, was morally wrong, by conducting laboratory experiments or constructing mathematical models.

Often those who are in favor of abortion-on-demand will argue for the separation of life from personhood.  Most will acknowledge the scientific fact about when human life begins but they will want to withhold the idea of "personhood" from this human life.  Separating human life from human personhood potentially brings with it some radical consequences.  For example, there are those who argue that infanticide is justified on such grounds.  In a 2012 essay--"After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?-- Albert Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argued this exact point.

 The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.

Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, neither is a "person" in the sense of "subject of a moral right to life".  We take "person" to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.  This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons.  Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.  (p. 2)  [see my blog posts "After-birth Abortion": Politically Correct Infanticide and Evolution and Infanticide--The Deep Connection for a link to the original article as well as analysis]

 Notice that according to this reasoning "many non-human animals" are "persons" but a healthy newborn child is not a "person."  Thus the "personified" animal has a "right to life" but the healthy newborn does not.  All of this is pushed forward under the banner of a functionalist criteria of "personhood."  Personhood is a function of being able to "form an aim" that the individual wishes to accomplish.  There must be capability "of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her."  Because the newborn child cannot do this they are not "persons" in any moral sense.  They are only "potential persons."

The concluding words of Lee, Tollefson, and George's essay are helpful in countering the above separation of human life and personhood.

The real question is whether human beings have inherent worth and dignity—and a right to life—or whether their value and right to life depends on factors such as age, size, stage of development, or physical health. Do all human beings have a right to life, or are some “not yet persons” (the unborn, the newly born), or “no longer persons” (those suffering from severe dementia or in minimally conscious states), or lifelong “non-persons” (those congenitally severely cognitively disabled)? Are all human beings equal in worth and dignity? Pro-lifers say yes. Professor Singer and other honest, informed abortion advocates say no.

Science cannot settle that dispute. It cannot tell you that it is wrong to kill the physically handicapped on the ground that they are, as the Nazis said, “useless eaters.” For that matter, it cannot tell you whether people may be enslaved or pillaged on account of their language or race.

But for those who reject sorting human beings into “superiors” and “inferiors”; for those who embrace the principle at the heart of our civilization—the equal dignity of all human beings—science can reveal something crucial indeed: namely, who is a human being.

Sarah Zhang of Wired is simply wrong--as are a number of the people she quotes in her essay.  Science does tell us when an individual human life begins.  The larger philosophical question concerns whether we will value that human life and to what extent we will offer protections for that life.  

 

"After-birth Abortion": Interview with Author, Francesca Minerva

Francesca Minerva, one of the authors of the controversial article dealing with infanticide--"After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?"--was interviewed on a New Zealand radio program.  The download for this interview can be found over at the blog M and M.  This is the site of Matthew and Madeline Flannagan.  Matthew Flannagan, a Christian theologian and ethicist, was also then interviewed by the same host.  Both interviews are just over eleven minutes each.

Minerva's position seems to boil down to this: "This is an academic debate and everybody else should just stay out of it."  She seemed hesitant at one point when asked if this article was just an exercise in logic or if it also represented her views.  She seemed to shift ground quickly at this point.  Definitely worth listening to in order to see the thought pattern of one of the author's of this article.

Evolution and Infanticide--The Deep Connection

Infanticide is back in the news.  Of course, the trendy new oxymoron for this practice is "after-birth abortion."  It is important to see the philosophical presuppositions that lie underneath the ethics that allow for infanticide.  Back in 1983 philosopher Peter Singer published an article "Sanctity of Life or Quality of Life? in Pediatrics (July, 1983) in which he speaks of the erosion of the "sanctity-of-life view."  His words are almost 30 years old and they have set the course for a certain trajectory of bioethical thinking.  Here is a portion of his essay that lays out his philosophical understanding:

Whatever the future holds, it is likely to prove impossible to restore in full the sanctity-of-life view.  The philosophical foundations of this view have been knocked asunder.  We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation, made in the image of God, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing an immortal soul. Our better understanding of our own nature has bridged the gulf that was once thought to lie between ourselves and other species, so why should we believe that the mere fact that a being is a member of the species Homo Sapiens endows it life with some unique, almost infinite value?

Singer clearly sees the connection between the belief in creation in God's image and the sanctity of life.  He furthers argues that since we now know that this has been "knocked asunder" because there is no morally significant gap between us as humans and other species.  All of this must be predicated upon a foundation of naturalistic evolutionism.  Consider the words of Douglas Futuyma:

Perhaps most importantly, if the world and its creatures developed purely by material, physical forces, it could not have been designed and has no purpose or goal...Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere material mechanisms--but this seems to be the message of evolution.  Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (Pantheon, 1983), pp. 12-13

Naturalistic evolutionism militates against design, teleology, and purpose.  All that is left is the material world that can be acted upon by the forces of physics, chemistry, and biology.  Under such a materialistic conception the very notion of "human nature" becomes problematic.  J. P. Moreland, in his critical discussion of naturalistic versions of evolutionary psychology writes:

[T]here most likely is no such thing as human nature understood as the essentialist claim that there is some range of properties that all and only humans share and that grounds their membership in the natural kind "being human."  Darwin's theory of evolution has made belief in, for instance, human substances with human natures, though logically possible, nevertheless, quite implausible.   

Moreland goes on to quote evolutionary philosopher David Hull:

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of 'natures' to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental.  If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did.  If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo Sapiens as a biological species.  If Homo Sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one's claim about 'human nature.'  Perhaps all people are 'persons,' share the same 'personhood,' etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology.  Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin's theory brought into question all these theories.  The implications are not entailments.  One can always dissociate 'Homo Sapiens' from 'human being,' but the result is a much less plausible position.  J. P. Moreland "Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Psychology as Research Programs: A Comparison of Their Most Plausible Specifications" in Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue, edited by Robert B. Stewart (Fortress, 2007), pp. 129-130.

It is such ideas that underly the disjunction between being a member of the class Homo Sapiens (being a "human being") and the concept of "personhood."  A recent article discussing infanticide is dependent upon precisely this disjunction.  The authors of this article simply state the disjunction in the following manner:

Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a 'person' in the sense of 'subject of a moral right to life.'  Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva "After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" Journal of Medical Ethics (2012), p. 2.

This disjunction between "human life" and "human personhood" is sometimes difficult to understand for those new to the discussion.  It is important to see the deep underlying connection between evolutionary theory and the disappearance of human value.  Once evolutionary presuppositions are held then the ontological status of the human being changes.  Evolutionary assumptions allow only for naturalistic materialism.  The human being is a creature of matter only.  There are no immaterial aspects (i.e., spirit, soul, or substantive mind) only matter which is continually evolving.  Furthermore, the underlying matter which makes up the human constitution is simply the same material base (albeit reconfigured) that the rest of the animal kingdom participates in.  "Personhood" is, then, not a function of being created in the image of God.  Rather, it is becomes an arbitrary set point defined by what other humans deem appropriate.  In the current intellectual climate "functionalist" categories become the deciding factor for what determines "personhood."  The authors above arguing for the moral acceptability of infanticide offer their definition of "personhood" with following words:

We take 'person' to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.  (Ibid.)

Without this ability then there is no "personhood."  Without "personhood" then the interests of these "potential persons" is morally nil.  Without the grounding of "personhood" in the transcendent Creator who made us then there is no hinderance to treating people less than animals.  Coming back to Peter Singer, he writes in the above mentioned Pediatrics article:

Once the religious mumbo-jumbo surrounding the term "human" has been stripped away, we may continue to see normal members of our species as possessing greater capacities or rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and so on, than members of any other species; but we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species, no matter how limited its capacity for intelligent or even conscious life may be. If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can be plausibly be considered morally significant.  Only the fact that the defective infant is a member of the species Homo Sapiens leads it to be treated differently from the dog or pig.  Species membership alone, however, is not morally relevant.  Humans who bestow superior value on the lives of all human beings, solely because they are members of own species, are judging along the lines strikingly similar to those used by white racists who bestow superior value on the lives of other whites, merely because they are members of their own race.

In denying the reality of the living God as our Creator we have simultaneously diminished humanity.  If mankind is nothing more than the resultant by-product of matter, time, and chance--an ever evolving conglomeration of matter burped up in a sea of chance--then there can be no transcendent value.  Without God we do not bear the image of God.  And, as Singer rightly reasons, without the image of God there is no sanctity of life.

"After-Birth Abortion" Article Continues to Cause Uproar

Alberto Giubilini and Fransceca Minerva recently published an article "After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" which has caused quite a fire storm of protest.  I wrote about the issue HERE.  Now the authors of the controversial article have released an open letter attempting to clarify their intentions.  They begin with the following words:

"When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate.

“Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web.  The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments.  Indeed, as Professor Savulescu explains in his editorial, this debate has been going on for 40 years.

We started from the definition of person introduced by Michael Tooley in 1975 and we tried to draw the logical conclusions deriving from this premise.  It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y."

According to Giubilini and Minerva their paper was to be an exercise in logic and not a call for policy action enacted by legal statute.  Wesley J. Smith has written a response to their "open letter" that is brilliant.  Part of what he says accurately puts their words in perspective.

"But that is precisely why it was important that the public sit up and take notice. Bioethics is no mere debating society in which participants debate the propriety of infanticide today and oppose it tomorrow. Rather, the field is — and has been since its inception — about changing the values and public policies of society. As USC bioethics professor Alexander M. Capron once noted, “Bioethical analysis has been linked to action.” Bioethics historian Albert R. Jonsen has called bioethics a “social movement.” None other than Daniel Callahan, one of the movement’s founding fathers, wrote that “the emergence ideologically of a form of bioethics that dovetailed nicely with the reigning political liberalism of the educated classes in America” accounted for much of the movement’s influence and clout.

Bioethicists haven’t discoursed about infanticide for 40 years because they enjoy exploring novel concepts, but rather, because it isn’t easy to convince people — not even bioethicists — that killing babies is acceptable. Giubilini and Minerva pretend they are not part of that process of persuasion:

[W]e never meant to suggest that after-birth abortion should become legal. This was not made clear enough in the paper. Laws are not just about rational ethical arguments, because there are many practical, emotional, social aspects that are relevant in policy making (such as respecting the plurality of ethical views, people’s emotional reactions. etc.). But we are not policy makers, we are philosophers, and we deal with concepts, not with legal policy.

But gaining the philosophical high ground is precisely how radical bioethical ideas have historically been implemented. Here is the pattern: In the 1960s, the propriety of abortion was actively promoted in professional journals, leading directly to the great denouement of Roe v. Wade. Similarly, in the 1970s, bioethicists argued that it should be acceptable to withdraw feeding tubes from people with severe brain damage, an idea that was once beyond the pale. After a general bioethical consensus toward that end was achieved, the “concept” soon became public policy. Now, people who are unconscious and minimally conscious are dehydrated to death in all 50 states as a matter of medical routine."

Giubilini and Minerva seem blissfully ignorant and totally shocked at the public outcry of their ideas.  They wanted to serenely debate the merits of infanticide in an ivory tower (why they put their thoughts on the "world wide web" is a question to ponder) with other academics--"perhaps a spot of Earl Grey to enhance the ambience as we discuss killing newborn babies!"  The old adage is profoundly true: Ideas have consequences.  Killing whole segments of humanity is not an abstraction.  This has been done in our past.  Can you imagine an article written in 1935 which raised the logic of exterminating the Jewish race and then attempted to justify this by speaking of it merely as an exercise in logic?  It is a good thing that there was and is an outcry against the idea of infanticide.  It shows that although our cultural moral compass may be defective it is not completely destroyed.