Letters to the Editor
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Poor Hypothetical
This is a contrived hypothetical which does nothing to either advance the cause of the pro-choice advocates or call into question the legitimacy of the beliefs of pro-life advocates. The reason is it has a very simple answer that does not require a pro-life advocate to abandon their fundamental belief about life. In fact Mr. Wilkow—who is not the sharpest tool in the shed—came very close to hitting. He used the phrase “situational triage” which, in fact, provides the easy response. Even if you consider a blastula “life” on a par with a two year old, you still save the two year old because the two year old has a much better shot at living a long and healthy life. This is a decision medics and doctors in wartime or major disasters must make all the time. Let’s say you have three patients who come in, all of whom could be helped by a dose of antibiotics, but you only have one dose. If two of the patients have other complications that make their eventual recovery suspect even with the shot, then you use the antibiotic where it will do the most good, i.e. with the patient who has the best chance at recovery. The same thing is true with your hypothetical. It is highly questionable whether any of those five blastulas will develop into living breathing humans, but it is certain that if you save the two year old, you will have a living breathing child. This does not mean that you are valuing the child any more than the blastulas; you are simply making the best of a bad decision by applying your limited resource to where it will have the most likely positive outcome.
If you were to tweak the hypothetical to assume a technology that would render the development of the blastulas a certainty, there is still an easy decision factor; pain. Let’s say you can save only one person from that same building, one is in a coma, the other is quite awake. It seems to me you save the awake guy because if one of them is going to go, coma-guy will not suffer. This is more extreme with the two year old vs. blastula example, being barely differentiated cells means they will not suffer; and who is going to leave a two year old to a screaming tortured death.
Now one might wish to draw an inference that this means the two year olds life has greater value, but that is not an inference that automatically follows. Even if it did, it by no means leads to conclusion that the blastulas have no value.
I should make clear that I am classically “pro-choice” in my views. Frankly I feel that most abortions are morally indefensible because it is my belief that from zygote to fetus, we are talking about life. However, I also believe that this does not answer the choice question because, ultimately, whether a woman wishes to sacrifice her own body for that “life” is a deeply personal decision that government has no right intruding upon.
J. Scott Smith
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Well, my question remains- is a baby a baby?
We could all have hypothetical debates about petri dishes and the like, but so many posts talk about unborn people like they were garbage. A "fetus" is according to dictionary.com is "the unborn young from the end of the eighth week after conception to the moment of birth, as distinguished from the earlier embryo."
So, the day before the baby is born, it's a fetus. The day after it's born, it's a baby.
Is anyone seriously of the opinion that the mere fact that the baby is one day shy of being born it's not deserving of love, respect and the right to life?
Please. Certainly we could debate about what a few cells in a petri dish deserve, or even a tiny embryo. But a fetus? That's just another term for an unborn child.
An unborn child isn't trash, though yes, because it resides in the mother, the mother has the right to rip it out and throw it away.
How sad a state of affairs. On the one hand, you have a president ready to throw the lives of young men and women away in Iraq, and on the other hand, you have millions of mothers throwing away the lives of their kids before they are even born.
And this little baby- this little unborn baby- I don't even have the right to CARE about, because I'm a man?
Wow. Whatever happened to the idea of mothering? Whatever hapened to the idea of respecting life.
Look, this isn't a far-right issue. Even if you pray to Buddha or the Yellow Pages, doesn't a life, a little baby deserve life?
'Cuase that's what a fetus is. It's not trash. It's a baby. Look it up.
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Situation Ethics Games are Fun, But...
we've got to stop framing the women's reproductive rights debate in those terms. The results to situation ethics puzzles are variable... women's rights should be an absolute.
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The Penalty?
My parents are as pro-life as they come and their answer to what the penalty should be is manslaughter charges for the performing doctor and counseling for the woman. They have zero hesitance in their answer, so I don't think that's the gotcha we're waiting for with the pro-life movement. It's kind of like punishing the john's instead of the prostitutes or something.
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The Logics of Abortion
I couldn't agree more with DSC that this is an unfair debate that could just as easily be played on the pro-choice side. It is a shame that War Room wasted so much space on this colloquy. Although I'm pro-choice, there are at least as many inconsistencies in that position as the position of the pro-lifers. Abortion is a difficult and complex issue and any attempt to simplify either the pro-life or the pro-choice position in one hypothetical question is both arrogant and narrow-minded.
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Resubmitted hypothetical question
This discussion confuses the legality issue of abortion with the ethical issue. I think a more reasonable hypothetical situation which would capture the ethical debate would be: imagine you are in a burning building and on the one hand, there is a young infant and on the other hand, there is a room which used to have five children in it but you aren't sure they're still there. If you rescue the five children which may or may not be present, you can't save the one young infant you are sure of.