THE LUKE SKYFREEPER ABORTION DOCTRINE

I would like to suggest that the following doctrine is a basis for an uneasy resolution to the political conflict; one that may eventually come to be accepted by all.

Abortion should be legal, but only up to a certain date. We need to define, as best as we can, when we are dealing with a human being.

The current definition of the law afford NO recognition that a developing child is a human being until the moment that child leaves his or her mother's womb. Anyone who pays the faintest attention to what we know through medical science can readily recognize that, at full term, this is far, far too late.

If a developing child is old enough to survive outside of the womb, even with medical assistance, then it's a human being. Obviously.

If the developing child is old enough to feel pain, regardless of whether or not an anesthetic is administered, then it is developed enough to be a human being, and destroying the said developing child must be illegal.

Practically, this means that for humane reasons, all abortions after a certain date (somewhere between 8 and 24 weeks) should be made illegal. This is only humane, and even 8 weeks would allow more than a month for decision making and getting an abortion appointment (although I suspect that a medical consensus would put the development of pain later than that).

The vast majority of abortions already take place before 24 weeks now. However, it is currently legal to destroy developing children at any stage of development, as long as at least part of the child is still inside the mother's body.

I believe this is the basis of the solution to the abortion problem. Part B is that accurate information must be provided to women considering an abortion. Potential adverse effects must be covered, and other options, including adoption, must be adequately presented. A waiting period may also be appropriate.

None of these takes away choice. The choice is still there whether to have a baby or have an abortion.

I also argue for use of the term "developing child" (which is intuitive, completely accurate and fully descriptive) rather than use of the term "fetus."

And no matter how much you talk about "sanctity of life" as a non-religious value, it really isn't. Or if it is, it's a weak and relative thing compared to what "sanctity of life" means to most people (religious meaning).

And when the secular person hears that fully-formed, adult lives can be saved through embryonic stem cell research, the "sanctity of life" of the adult immediately becomes far more important than the "sanctity of life" of the embryo.

There is a lot of science to support that the embryo is an individual human being. Do you know who makes the organs of the human baby body?

Sounds like a trick question of some sort, so I'll let you answer it.

Do you know which organ the new life makes first? And why?

Not offhand. Go ahead, tell me.

Genetic identity is a strawman, in most cases, especially when the debater has already taken as axiomatic that it is 'sentience' that defines someone as sufficiently human to be afforded protection as a fully alive human being.

In fact, 'sentience' is generally the difference between humans and animals. Didn't you ever read C. S. Lewis?

You speak of the embryo as if it possesses a conscious human will. Yet all of your commentary in this paragraph can just as easily be applied to chipmunks as to human beings. None of the processes that you name are what makes us human.

Your point is good: dehumanization is evil. I am advocating humanization but by excluding the very youngest humans I admit I dehumanize them.

My question to you: is it possible that dehumanization is a necessary evil in certain very limited circumstances? As an example we just took a number of lives in a war for the greater good of the many. In some cases those victims were literally dehumanized- we knew there would be civilian casualties, even though we did our best to minimize them.

In the same way the abortion issue is about what combination of social and legal systems would best serve to stop the abortion slaughter. As the author of this thread has pointed out, if criminalize the act equally at any stage after conception, we will surely lose that battle. That would also make it more likely to lose the war against humanity (euthanasia, humans in vats, embryo farms, etc).

To pretend there is a "moment" of conception after which the termination of pregnancy becomes murder is to try to defend an imaginary line in the sand. There is no such moment, only a continuous process. Choosing a particular instant in time in that process ignores reality and turns it into an arbitrary political decision.

Sure. But my emotional reaction is not the sum total of my opinion about abortion. My reaction to the excuses for the abortion was intellectual and not emotional -- the excuses simply didn't hold water. Several episodes of the original Star Trek, for example, also helped shape my views, as did Rollerball.

The truth is that most people don't think much about abortion and don't want to think much about abortion. The emotional response can often be a useful way to get someone to engage the more intellectual arguments. But it can also backfire, as in the case of the gruesome pictures, if you make people unwilling to think about the issue. Note that PBS's attempt at making an emotional appeal (the interviews with the couples who had abortions, explaining why they made that choice) backfired utterly on me, as did their showing of an actual first trimester abortion. I think their intent was to support abortion rights. For me, they did the exact opposite.

What makes you human is ... you were conceived by a human male and human female. Your lifetime began with your conception. The 'you' as an embryo built every organ and tissue you now haul around, during a progression of cell multiplication directed by the human design and carried out for your survival since your conception. At least be honest, as Palmer is, if you wish to discuss which class of human beings you wish to dehumanize for exploitation or discarding.

The period during your lifetime when your brain stem and body became coordinated to the point of directing your functions is but an arbitrarily chosen period before which you have decided already there is no human being there. You are wrong, both scientifically and regarding the soul.

I don't usually raise the soul in these discussions, but in your case, the cold-blooded dehumanization you've proposed needs to be exposed via the spiritual bankruptcy within it. Your dehumanizing transactional approach to human life is something now abhorrent to me. Reading through this thread, it is apparent that you either have a long way yet to travel to get humanity in perspective, or you have a whole lot to learn regarding the truths of human life, or you just have a need to view human life as a commodity prior to a certain arbitrarily chosen age; try absorbing more data, with a mind and heart open to the truth. Goodnight

I skipped this thread originally, but now have read through many of the responses and see no one bringing up the issues that give me pause about your proposal. Therefore I shall offer them to you.

I would advise you that your proposed solution is no better than the original Roe v. Wade decision. It settles nothing if enacted.

Why do I say that?

First of all, your proposal is a activist rational solution. Judge Bork in The Tempting of America explains better that most that activist Supreme Court Justices used just such an approach to get us to the unresolvable conflict we have today.

Certain types of matters are meant by our nation's structure to be settled by law within the legislative branch or left alone. This one should have been left alone, but failing that, should have been settled through long work, compromise and legitamacy imparted by the legislative process. It wasn't and your proposal is no different.

Judges, wanting rationality to prevail over the Constitution and the process of legislation, wrote law rather than adjudicated it. Lacking the process of political compromise or adherence to the Constitution, which is silent on issues like abortion, the decision lacks, and will continue to lack, legitamacy in the minds of much of the citizenry.

There have been other tough issues, Civil Rights' Acts come to mind, that have achieved legitamcy solely because they went through the process prescribed by our system of government.

You are trying to use rationality rather than Principle to "achieve" an end best left to the proper process. It won't work precisely due to peoples adherence to Principle when faced with overly expediant ratioanality.

I too, three years ago during the primaries, started a thread to discuss just the points I make to you now.

You wrote:

Right. However:

1) He is capable of surviving without being physically attached to another human being at all times.

2) He has physically developed sufficiently to exhibit brain waves.

3) He has developed sufficiently to be capable of acting at will.

4) He has an identity, even if it may have become distorted by disease.

5) Ditto for a memory.

6) He is sufficiently mature to have developed the ability to breathe air.

7) He is capable of feeling pain.

You have a "Checklist for Humanity" of seven items.

What if one qualification is missing?

What if someone wants to add another qualification?

What if people disagree on the definitions of the qualifications?

Pro-death positions are too complicated, too arbitrary, and too debateable to reflect the reality of humanness.

A human is a human is a human is a human. A simple check of an animal's dna will tell a scientist whether he is looking at a human being or not.

You are using two different meanings of the word dehumanization.

Leading pro-aborts seriously argue that their victims are non-persons.

But, I haven't heard anyone seriously argue that the Iraqi war victims weren't persons.

Dehumanization means two different things in these two cases.

You bring up a good point here.

When abortions were illegal, women having second or third term abortions might have "felt/understood" that they were killing a small human being. Some of those women might have felt their abortion was something akin to justifiable homicide, or murder in self-defense, or mercy killing, depending on their circumstances.

The "non-person" argument was latched onto, big-time, by the pro-abortion activists. Maybe they did that to assuage the aborters' feelings of guilt.

To pretend there is a "moment" of conception after which the termination of pregnancy becomes murder is to try to defend an imaginary line in the sand

But remember, the pro-aborts are the folks with the shifting lines in the shifting sands.

Pro-aborts confuse the road map with the real world...they are the ones drawing imaginary lines at so many differing levels of gestation. They are the ones who are trying feverishly to find imaginary reasons to defend their "right" to kill.

This is a real world...and fetuses are real people. Words don't change reality. Reality is, no matter who vainly tries to argue it out of existence.

The pro-aborts' attempts to "determine" the moment of "humanity/personhood" doesn't alter the reality that the fetus is a separate human being, identifiable as one, from the moment of conception.

The fetus may depend on someone or something else for life's necessities, but so do most of us.

we can surely all agree on when "viability" begins. If the "viability" time changes, it just means we're getting smarter

If someone dies, his death does not negate the fact that he was a human.

Viability has nothing more to do with a fetus's status as a human, than survivability for adults has anything to do with their status as humans.

People who might have lived with a heart-transplant in the 18th Century (but died) were just as human as people who do receive heart transplants now.

Human fetuses that might have survived 40 years ago (but died) were just as human as fetuses that now do survive.

Pro-aborts confuse the road map with the real world...they are the ones drawing imaginary lines at so many differing levels of gestation. They are the ones who are trying feverishly to find imaginary reasons to defend their "right" to kill.

That position is indefensible, hence their need to "legalize" the killing ignoring the immorality of it.

The pro-aborts' attempts to "determine" the moment of "humanity/personhood" doesn't alter the reality that the fetus is a separate human being, identifiable as one, from the moment of conception.

You seem to be so focussed on their imaginary moments, that you don't recognize your own. It is a metaphysical mistake to say that there is an instant or moment where conception takes place. The completion any particular process (e.g. DNA strands joining together) can't take place instantaneously because the individual atoms making up the DNA are interacting with non-DNA atoms and are already starting their post-completion processes.

The other mistake is defining murder to be anytime after the "moment". If you do decide to do that, the legal sanctions for such "murder" should be trivial since there are no sanctions for killing an egg before that "moment".

In short having a significant legal step-function at a moment that cannot exist is not a defensible position.

It is a metaphysical mistake to say that there is an instant or moment where conception takes place. The completion any particular process (e.g. DNA strands joining together) can't take place instantaneously because the individual atoms making up the DNA are interacting with non-DNA atoms and are already starting their post-completion processes.

What you write is very interesting. It sounds like you know a lot about the nitty-gritty science involved in conception. How long does it take for the DNA from an egg and from a sperm to combine into a "new" cell?

I apologize if I said conception takes only a moment. Maybe I should have said that there is a moment during conception (in which one "becomes a human") and that moment during conception takes only a moment.

Remember to give me a little credit though.

At least I was closer to the truth than the pro-aborts.

They say a fetus begins being a human being only the moment after it's totally outside the womb.

To them, it takes conception + 9 months + labor to make a human. Talk about s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the moment.

Who's made the bigger mistake...the pro-aborts or me?

In short having a significant legal step-function at a moment that cannot exist is not a defensible position.

I'm not sure I know what you mean.

The legally determined "time frame" in which a murder occurred is often much longer than the length of the actual "moment" of death, even though the prosecutor tries to determine "the moment" as exactly as possible.

Even though some leeway (perhaps several hours) is given for the moment of death, we are pretty certain that, in reality, the person was alive at one moment and dead at the next.

Even if we don't know the exact moment in which a person expired, we can know he was a live human being at a certain point and then became a dead human being at a later point.

It just occurred to me.....

If it takes 9 months to become a human, why not say it takes 9 months to stop being a human?

When people die, their death certificates should show the "moment" of death as lasting the last nine months of their life.

The logic of the pro-aborts can be pretty confusing.

On almost every count you are wrong. Thanks for playing though.

Nonsense.

1) He is capable of surviving without being physically attached to another human being at all times.

You're telling me your 72-year-old friend with Alzheimer's is attached to somebody else's body with an umbilical cord, which, if severed, would result in him being unable to continue to survive?

2) He has physically developed sufficiently to exhibit brain waves.

So you're telling me your 72-year-old friend has never exhibited brain waves?

3) He has developed sufficiently to be capable of acting at will.

Or acted at will?

4) He has an identity, even if it may have become distorted by disease.

Has no identity, no self-knowledge at all?

5) Ditto for a memory.

No ability to remember? More importantly, has never in his life had an ability to remember?

6) He is sufficiently mature to have developed the ability to breathe air.

Has never breathed air?

7) He is capable of feeling pain.

Is incapable of feeling pain? More importantly, has never been capable of feeling pain?

Nonsense.

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