Is the Fetus a Human Being?

[Jennifer Rothnie]

A Big Think by a bioethicst talking about Judith Jarvis Thomson's thought experiment of the Worlds Most Famous Violinist. Judith Thomson's argument does not come down to whether or not the fetus is a person, since she assumes that the fetus is a person. But she demonstrates that one person keeping another person alive with their own body doesn't have a moral obligation to do so:

So people that criticize my church for saying that human beings at various stages of development have dignity are failing to realize we don't consider women walking incubators for babies. We believe they can choose to do that, but that is their choice and it isn't a "natural" justification for compelling them to do so, anymore than it is naturally justifiable for men to make multiple women pregnant to propagate their genetic material. Those are things human beings choose to do as a rational creature that is morally accountable to God.

Jarvis's violinist analogy is fundamentally flawed. In her analogy, you wake up having been connected to an ill violinist by some outside actor. In pregnancy, the mother consented to sex [rape excepted] and the egg comes from her own body and is released into her own womb.

This is more akin to a person kidnapping the ill violinist and then connecting the violinist to himself than it is someone being connected to a stranger. For obvious reasons, if you are responsible for the location someone is forced to be in (such as kidnapping or sex) then you *do* have the moral obligation to take care of them, since they would not be in that situation if it was not for your own choices and actions.

I am a women, and I am pro-life. I don't consider women 'walking incubators' but I do consider procreation one of the purposes God put both men and women on Earth for (from the very first, 'be fruitful and multiply.') This doesn't mean couples have to procreate or that women even have to get married, but it does mean that conceiving and bearing children is a good in the world, not an evil.

If a women gets pregnant, she is not "compelled" by anyone to conceive. Her own body naturally releasing an egg in conjunction with the male's sperm may lead to a child being conceived, but this was not "compelled" by any outside person. It was 'compelled' by biology. Nor does anyone compel her to continue carrying the child. No one points a gun at her or otherwise forces the process to continue - again, the biological systems and laws which God created are what keep her pregnancy continuing.

A woman seeking abortion is not seeking freedom from any person 'compelling' the child inside her to develop. No one has the power to do it. No one is violating her rights or using force to make her do something. Rather, she is seeking freedom from the choices that she herself freely made and the biological consequences that she knew could come from those choices. Perhaps she is seeking freedom from the responsibility she now faces, or perhaps seeking to hide that she made certain choices to begin with. And her desire to escape the biologically natural consequences of her own actions lead her to contemplate contracting with a doctor to *forcibly murder and remove* the child from her womb. By getting an abortion she and the doctor violate the rights of someone else - depriving a human of life, liberty, and any future pursuit of happiness.

Treating others wanting to stop this wanton holocaust of the unborn is no more 'compelling' a women to remain pregnant than supporting strong laws against murder is somehow 'compelling' would-be serial killers to keep following the law.

 

[ubicaritas]

That's precisely why we should be rooted in Christ and not the world.

We must live in the world as human beings. As Bonhoeffer said, to escape sin may be the ultimate guilt. Nobody can wash their hands of sin like a pharisee and find justification before God.

 

[redleghunter]

As a fellow DAVer what were we fighting for over there? Our country was never under attack. And the Stars and Stripes printed a poll from the citizens which overwhelmingly was on the side of 'us' not being there either....so much for democracy. Any "legal" killing done over there was based upon one thing, our government said to do it. Do you not believe Lieutenant Calley was not just a 'scape goat' for government ordered massacre at My Lai? I saw/heard and was involved in governmental lies personally. And now our government says abortion is just as legally right. Why do men fight wars? Money, loss of freedom, fears for the future. Why do most get abortions? Does that mean 'govenmental absolution'.

Hmmm I do wonder what Jesus will say on 'that day' concerning all these things? Because, as I said much earlier; "The fact that an abortion is even being considered, already tells us something is 'wrong'." Is it a 'sin'? I'm sure the answer is YES! NO! I DON'T KNOW. Since no one else wants to answer me please do; If it was a choice between your 'young wife' and your 'child to be' what would you do? Would you allow double deaths and let them both die? I know I would save my wife? On the day of judgment I truly do wonder just how much of this 'talk' will take a back seat in the realm of what's truly right.

I'm done. Good night.

I hope you realize a doctor will always perform triage and try to save both mother and child. That's how it works.

I guess you are asking for an answer to a hypothetical situation where the doctor comes out and says "you have to choose between your wife or child. I can't save both."

Answer this for me and I will answer your question. What situation would warrant such a decision be made?

If the mother dies so does the baby.

 

[ubicaritas]

Jarvis's violinist analogy is fundamentally flawed. In her analogy, you wake up having been connected to an ill violinist by some outside actor. In pregnancy, the mother consented to sex [rape excepted] and the egg comes from her own body and is released into her own womb.

This is more akin to a person kidnapping the ill violinist and then connecting the violinist to himself than it is someone being connected to a stranger. For obvious reasons, if you are responsible for the location someone is forced to be in (such as kidnapping or sex) then you *do* have the moral obligation to take care of them, since they would not be in that situation if it was not for your own choices and actions.

I am a women, and I am pro-life. I don't consider women 'walking incubators' but I do consider procreation one of the purposes God put both men and women on Earth for (from the very first, 'be fruitful and multiply.') This doesn't mean couples have to procreate or that women even have to get married, but it does mean that conceiving and bearing children is a good in the world, not an evil.

If a women gets pregnant, she is not "compelled" by anyone to conceive. Her own body naturally releasing an egg in conjunction with the male's sperm may lead to a child being conceived, but this was not "compelled" by any outside person. It was 'compelled' by biology. Nor does anyone compel her to continue carrying the child. No one points a gun at her or otherwise forces the process to continue - again, the biological systems and laws which God created are what keep her pregnancy continuing.

A woman seeking abortion is not seeking freedom from any person 'compelling' the child inside her to develop. No one has the power to do it. No one is violating her rights or using force to make her do something. Rather, she is seeking freedom from the choices that she herself freely made and the biological consequences that she knew could come from those choices. Perhaps she is seeking freedom from the responsibility she now faces, or perhaps seeking to hide that she made certain choices to begin with. And her desire to escape the biologically natural consequences of her own actions lead her to contemplate contracting with a doctor to *forcibly murder and remove* the child from her womb. By getting an abortion she and the doctor violate the rights of someone else - depriving a human of life, liberty, and any future pursuit of happiness.

Treating others wanting to stop this wanton holocaust of the unborn is no more 'compelling' a women to remain pregnant than supporting strong laws against murder is somehow 'compelling' would-be serial killers to keep following the law.

I'm not interested in arguments that appeal to nature. Christians who appeal to natural law are quite frankly misguided in this respect. As Pr. Ed Knudson points out, natural law has been mostly a weapon the Catholic Church uses to justify their refusal to question oppressive power structures; it's weaponized philosophy. What is natural is typically whatever an old, celibate, heterosexual person arbitrarily sees as natural, colored by an ideology of human control and regulation. Plus it's fundamentally confusing an is for an ought.

Furthermore, nature is most often just as red in tooth and claw as it is benign. If we go far enough with this logic, we risk making God the author of sickness, death and evils. I don't care for that line of reasoning one bit. It scandalizes the Gospel.

Who is to say that pregancy is not, in fact, a primitive form of reproduction and that eventually it is the destiny of the human species to transcend it through technology? Perhaps it would be more moral or ethical to embrace a kind of reproductive transhumanism. I just engage in that as a kind of thought experiment.

 

[redleghunter]

It goes alot further than sensationalism and accusing us of simply not being a Christian for having different viewpoints.

You may want to review some of your own posts before casting stones in the greenhouse.

We must live in the world as human beings. As Bonhoeffer said, to escap

Last I checked Jesus Christ was also fully human.

 

[redleghunter]

I took a look at your profile

I'm flattered but am already married.

Kind of creepy opo research there.

 

[ubicaritas]

I hope you realize a doctor will always perform triage and try to save both mother and child. That's how it works.

Triage does not involve necessarily trying to save everyone. It is routine in warfare or disasters, for instance, to deem certain patients to be unworthy of a certain level of medical treatment due to the severity of injuries and the finitude of medical resources.

I guess you are asking for an answer to a hypothetical situation where the doctor comes out and says "you have to choose between your wife or child. I can't save both."

Answer this for me and I will answer your question. What situation would warrant such a decision be made?

Ectopic pregnancy. It's not completely the same but its the closet example I can think of.

 

[ubicaritas]

Y
Last I checked Jesus Christ was also fully human.

He was a divine person with a sinless human nature. Human persons, on the other hand, are born sinners.

 

[ubicaritas]

that analogy would work if the purpose of driving a car was to get in an accident

Who says the only purpose of sex is to have children necessarily? That is something that mainline Protestants consider to be an assumption about sex that is alien to our ethos. It's based on natural law that generally has little or no place in Protestantism, especially Lutheranism, when discussing ethics. Our primary interest is in human beings as persons and moral agents, not human nature as an abstraction or merely a biological mechanism.

 

[The Times]

There are no excuses under the Sun for aborting Creation, by those who put a halt to the Creative Works of God. There is no excuse on the part of Anti-Creationists (Anti-Lifers), in thinking that legalistic verbiage can give them an escape from God's judgment.

Many of these advocates of abortion are running opposite agendas to the Creative Works of God.

In retrospect, I believe terminating the Creative Works of God, is an Act of War against the Creator and his Creation, that is directly tied to His Created Rights Image (proprietary intellectual property)

Jesus said..."It will be just like the Days of Noah".

Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the innocent. Eating Fetuses and Placentus are now a growing trend amongst these Noah's Days Harbingers of Death.

We are living in the times, where verbiage is the flavour of the day and what better master of legal verbiage, than Satan himself, who uses every trickery of his slithery tongue, to try and provoke God to anger.

Are you found to be provoking God to anger by infringing on his Created Rights Image?

If so, please don't! Refrain from your wicked ways and turn, prostrated towards the feet of Jesus and ask that your actions have not already forfeited your salvation.

 

[Jennifer Rothnie]

There have been some claims that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth, so I thought I would give some actual statistics and studies to clarify things:

- The '14 times safer' was found in one study by Plank, not a consistent sequence of studies or mega analysis of previous studies. It compared data points which are not actually comparable according to the CDC - for example maternal mortality and abortion mortality due not have equivalent measuring systems and so you can't just pick out which rate is higher and draw conclusions from that. Furthermore, some deaths classified as 'maternal' happen post-birth due to other complications and are not directly related to the pregnancy, so should not be counted in the same data set. In fact, in the case of WHO data many deaths due to abortion are classified as 'maternal' deaths, which completely skews the data by decreasing the apparent deaths due to abortion and applying them to deaths due to pregnancy!
https://www.findlawimages.com/efile/supreme/briefs/05-1382/05-1382.mer.ami.aclj.pdf

It also compared abortion via pill to abortion via surgery to mothers who gave live birth. But these are not valid comparisons - abortions via induced miscarriages should have been compared to mother's who naturally miscarried around the same time frame, and surgical abortions compared to live births. [Although, chemically induced abortions are actually riskier than surgical ones. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19888037] The best data control group would be comparing mothers in the second and third trimesters to shortly post-birth when deaths can be clearly linked to the child. Also, since no abortion takes place after nine months (and most in the first or second trimester) this artificially creates a disparity in the data where the mothers who give live birth are tracked for longer time periods than those receiving abortions.

Plank's study also relied on data that was known to be incomplete and unreliable. http://www.aaplog.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LNQ61-Maternal-Mortality-Review-7-17-13.pdf

There were a lot of other problems with it, but suffice to say it is hardly an accurate and definitive picture of birth vs. abortion risks.

- Nations allowing abortion have higher maternal mortality rates than countries with pro-life protections
http://www.lifenews.com/2009/12/11/int-1408/

- Kaunitz (1985) found that induced abortion was the fifth leading cause of maternal mortality in the U.S

- Gissler et al. (2005) found that those 15 to 24 years are almost 50% more prone to suicide in the context of an abortion than other women

- Gissler also found in another study that in Finland from 1987-1994 deaths within a year after an abortion were 4 times higher than deaths within a year after. birth) https://www.bmj.com/content/313/7070/1431.abstract?ijkey=o2njWBDkmGz5Q

- A similar study in Denmark also found that the risk of death was far higher (45%!) for women who received first trimester abortions than women who carried to term, and this risk was even higher for poorer women receiving abortions. And women who recieved abortions that weren't their first? They were 114 percent more likely to die during the period examined if it was a second abortion, and 192% more likely to die if it was their third!
https://aaplog.org/abortion-and-subsequent-maternal-death-rates-first-new-study-from-denmark/

- Women who receive abortions have an 81% higher risk then pregnant women who do not of developing mental health problems. 10% of this can be directly attributed to getting the abortion, while the other 71% is correlative but not necessarily direct. https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...hed-19952009/E8D556AAE1C1D2F0F8B060B28BEE6C3D

- Many studies claiming natural birth is 'risky' include results from countries with poor medical facilities in their data. Cases where the mother died from infection due to unsanitary conditions are lumped in with deaths directly tied to pregnancy. This vastly over inflates the numbers of 'maternal deaths' that some studies use.

- Many deaths due to abortion are never recorded as such. In some cases this is due to deliberate bias (wanting the numbers to look lower than they are) but in some cases this is due to the recording programs making it literally impossible to record a death as due to an abortion. Independent health researcher Isabelle Bégin found that in many cases U.S. medical coders have tried to code a death due to abortion under an abortion category but received a "reject message" from the computer program they were using. (A consistent 'bug' in any programs provided by the National Centre for Health Statistics of Washington D.C.)

I'm out of time for now, but suffice to say the idea that abortion is 'safe' while childbirth is 'risky' is greatly exaggerated and distorted, if not backwards.

 

[Jennifer Rothnie]

Who says the only purpose of sex is to have children necessarily? That is something that mainline Protestants consider to be an assumption about sex that is alien to our ethos. It's based on natural law that generally has little or no place in Protestantism, especially Lutheranism, when discussing ethics. Our primary interest is in human beings as persons and moral agents, not human nature as an abstraction or merely a biological mechanism.

You can certainly drive a car for pleasure, but that doesn't change a cars fundamental purpose of 'transportation' - traveling between destinations. A person who drives a car around for fun but expects to stay exactly where he started is delusional - the car is going to end up somewhere even if he wasn't specifically aiming for a given destination. And an accident is when the user *mishandles* the car or someone else mishandles theirs, etc. If the car is successful, it will operate without problem and move.

Sex can certainly be had for pleasure, but that doesn't change it's fundamental biological purpose of procreation. And getting pregnant isn't a failure of sex - it is a success.

 

[ubicaritas]

You can certainly drive a car for pleasure, but that doesn't change a cars fundamental purpose of 'transportation' - traveling between destinations. A person who drives a car around for fun but expects to stay exactly where he started is delusional - the car is going to end up somewhere even if he wasn't specifically aiming for a given destination. And an accident is when the user *mishandles* the car or someone else mishandles theirs, etc. If the car is successful, it will operate without problem and move.

Sex can certainly be had for pleasure, but that doesn't change it's fundamental biological purpose of procreation. And getting pregnant isn't a failure of sex - it is a success.

If a person is using contraception techniques, "natural" or otherwise, that is a sign that they are not consenting to conception, but that they consider it an unwanted outcome. If conception happens, it is accidental and not intentional. It is not a "success".

 

[ubicaritas]

- Many studies claiming natural birth is 'risky' include results from countries with poor medical facilities in their data. Cases where the mother died from infection due to unsanitary conditions are lumped in with deaths directly tied to pregnancy. This vastly over inflates the numbers of 'maternal deaths' that some studies use.

Parts of the US already resemble third world countries in terms of living conditions and life expectancy. Furthermore, Republicans who oppose abortion are nonetheless committed to eliminating or reducing the social safety net that helps pregnant women have healthy pregnancies. It seems to me this makes claims of being "pro-life" suspect. The kind of safe environment you imagine that pregnant women in our nation enjoy is not universal for all women and it is under threat for many others.

 

[SolomonVII]

The abortion agenda is a feminist agenda which at its core is a rebellion against biology itself.
Science informs us of the humanity of the fetus.
Faith informs us of the humanity of the fetus and the infinite worth of all human life, especially life at its most innocent and vulnerable.
Feminists however resent the 'privilege' that males are deemed to have, and do everything to level the disadvantages that come with having a child.
What in the Bible is a blessing becomes a curse for a core element of the feminist movement.

 

[ubicaritas]

The abortion agenda is a feminist agenda which at its core is a rebellion against biology itself.
Science informs us of the humanity of the fetus.
Faith informs us of the humanity of the fetus and the infinite worth of all human life, especially life at its most innocent and vulnerable.
Feminists however resent the 'privilege' that males are deemed to have, and do everything to level the disadvantages that come with having a child.
What in the Bible is a blessing becomes a curse for a core element of the feminist movement.

The Bible was written by men and we haven't exactly gotten herstory from it.

 

[Eloy Craft]

So people that criticize my church for saying that human beings at various stages of development have dignity are failing to realize we don't consider women walking incubators for babies. We believe they can choose to do that, but that is their choice and it isn't a "natural" justification for compelling them to do so, anymore than it is naturally justifiable for men to make multiple women pregnant to propagate their genetic material. Those are things human beings choose to do as a rational creature that is morally accountable to God.

You do reduce them to incubators. That's why you call a child in the womb 'a pregnancy'. You don't think of them as mothers or you wouldn't be able to support killing their children. As for choice,,a rational creature is by definition a self determined creature. A rational creature is able to determine to not be pregnant and choose to be pregnant. That very thing is real choice. The fact that people cannot act as rational creatures is the reason they want laws that you support and call it 'pro-choice'. But that's a lie. If you were pro-choice you would be supporting the effort for people to be self determined creatures.

 

[Eloy Craft]

Who says the only purpose of sex is to have children necessarily?

You are the only one saying that.

 

[ubicaritas]

You are the only one saying that.

I didn't say that at all. I believe there are many derived purposes for sexuality according to what human beings desire. Parenthood is only one of those.

 

[Eloy Craft]

The Bible was written by men and we haven't exactly gotten herstory from it.

It's in there. Theology of the Incarnation 101. 'nother topic I suppose.