Posted on 03/09/2003 4:26:55 PM PST by MadIvan
Foetuses may develop consciousness long before the legal age limit for abortions, one of Britain's leading brain scientists has said.
Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, said there was evidence to suggest the conscious mind could develop before 24 weeks, the upper age where terminations are permitted.
Although she fell short of calling for changes in the abortion laws, she urged doctors and society to be cautious when assuming unborn babies lacked consciousness. "Is the foetus conscious? The answer is yes, but up to a point," she said.
"Given that we can't prove consciousness or not, we should be very cautious about being too gung ho and assuming something is not conscious. We should err on the side of caution."
Last year, a Daily Telegraph straw poll found many neurologists were concerned that foetuses could feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks after conception.
Many believed foetuses should be given anaesthetics during a late abortion, after 20 weeks. Some also believe pain relief should be given for keyhole surgery in the womb.
Abortions are allowed up to 24 weeks in Britain, but are rarely given so late. Around 90 per cent of the 175,000 planned terminations that take place each year in England and Wales are in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Around 1.5 per cent - or 2,600 - take place after the 20th week.
Terminations after 24 weeks are only allowed in exceptional circumstances if, for instance, the mother's life is threatened.
Lady Greenfield is sceptical of philosophers and doctors who argue that consciousness is "switched on" at some point during the brain's development.
She believes instead that there is a sliding scale of consciousness and that it develops gradually as neurons, or brain cells, make more and more connections with each other.
She told the British Fertility Society in London last week that she had serious concerns about foetal consciousness.
"The Home Office has legislation that applies to a mammal and they have now extended it to the octopus, a mollusc, because it can learn," she said. "If a mollusc can be attributed with being sentient, and now has Home Office protection, then my own view is that we should be very cautious after making assumptions."
In 2001 a Medical Research Council expert group said unborn babies might feel pain as early as 20 weeks and almost certainly by 24. They called for more sensitive treatment of very premature babies, who often had to undergo painful procedures like heel pricks and injections.
A second point is that opposition to contraception must be separated from opposition to abortion. Abortion is wrong because it violates the rights of the unborn child. A couple practicing contraception does not violate anyone's rights. No matter how much an individual may not like contraception, his/her rights are not violated by other people using it. I respect someone's right not to use contraception in keeping with his/her church's teachings, but I don't support forcing that teaching on everyone else.
There are acts that are wrong enough to punish even though they don't represent a direct violation of anyone's rights. However, I don't see use of contraception in this category and would not support laws that tried to tie abortion and contraception in this way.
I was a little confused by some of the comments you made about your situation. You said that you saw the heart beating at 5 or 6 weeks of pregnancy which was 3 to 4 weeks after conception. Do you have those numbers backwards? If not, they imply that you were pregnant for two weeks before conception. I'm also wondering whether you make a distinction between conception and implantation.
Abortion by choice is an entirely different matter and should no more be compared than an accident is to murder.
As I said in the previous post, the same God who created fertile periods in the woman's cycle also created infertile periods. He also gave us the intellectual ability to comprehend this fact. It is therefore permissible for a married couple to engage in intercourse during infertile periods to avoid pregnancy. However, the overarching purpose of the reproductive system is reproduction. Therefore, a couple should only practice "natural" birth control for grave reasons, that is, if a pregnancy would seriously threaten the existence of the marriage and family itself.
The marital act has two purposes: reproduction and the unity of a married couple. The pleasurable aspect of intercourse serves both ends. However, while it is morally acceptable to engage in intercourse only during infertile periods for grave reasons, it is not morally permissible to engage in intercourse only during infertile periods for convenience. This difference isn't superficial. In the former case, abstinence is directed toward the good of the spouse and the family. In the latter case, abstinence is directed toward personal pleasure. It's analogous to the difference between marital love and masturbation.
Also, I see no reason why denying the repro system its functioning is bad for the health, constant pregnancy can't be that beneficial either.
All medications have side effects. Birth control devices are no exception. For example, birth control users ("the pill') are nearly 10 times more likely to develop deadly blood clots in the lungs than nonusers. Women who use birth control pills are twice as likely to die from strokes. (Source: WebMD).
(Of course, this ignores the high rate of mortality for unborn children. Many birth control methods act as abortifacients. For example, "the pill" acts to thin the uterine lining thus making it difficult for a fertilized egg to implant in the uterine wall.)
Pregnancy, on the other hand, represents the proper operation of the body and therefore represents a state of health, by definition. The medical evidence confirms this.
A pregnant woman dies (maternal mortality) in 6 out of 100,000 births in the United States. The leading cause of death during pregnancy used to be motor vehicle accidents followed by blood clots that travel to the lungs, anesthesia complications, bleeding, infection, and high blood pressure complications. However, the leading cause of death among pregnant women today is homicide.
This sad fact can be attributed to some degree to the greater availability of artificial means of birth control. As Paul VI said in 1968 "On the Regulation of Birth":
Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
The use of artificial birth control is a selfish act. When the chosen method fails, the man at times resorts to more drastic means of "contraception."
Another point to consider is this: what is the difference morally between using birth control and simply deciding to not have sex during the fertal part of the cycle. Both choices result in no pregnancy. Both are conscious decisions made to avoid the creation of life. If BC is wrong for that reason, than not having sex at those times must also be wrong.
See above.
Extending that logic, a woman must be continuously pregnant her whole life. This seems absurd and highly unreasonable. Thanks.
Births are naturally spaced two years apart in nursing women. Fertility also decreases rapidly after age 35. Therefore, if a woman marries at age 20, nurses her children and is maximally fertile, she can expect to have approximately eight children over the course of her marriage.
Two issues. First, I'm not sure why the large number of spontaneously aborted embryos has any impact on what embryos are. If you look at the vast expanse of human history, it wasn't uncommon for around half of children, once born, to die before their first year of life. Many societies turned a blind eye to, or even condoned, exposure and other forms of infanticide and even today, the practice is often easy enough to hide because so many infants normally die at birth or immediately afterward. But even then, people from those societies have expressed that infanticide was wrong and, like abortion, it was often practiced in secret and not discussed.
Secondly, many if not most of those spontaneously aborted embryos are so genetically damaged that they (A) could arguably fail the genetic test of being "human" and (B) lack any potential to ever mature beyond a short number of cell divisions so they have no future, which is the seems to be the key to granting personhood everywhere else (e.g., we deny personhood to the brain dead because they have no future recovery).
I don't normally deal with "souls" because no one can objectively show me when a person does or doesn't have one. But I wouldn't find it difficult to beleive that God can tell the difference between a fertilized egg with a future and one without them and if God is troubled by so many fertilized eggs never making it very far, He could easily know when to withhold a soul, just as He can tell the difference between a white blood cell and a baby or a human and an animal and give a soul to one and not the other.
Quickening, today, also refers to the first audible fetal heart beat.
Hardly delusory, and you used weasel words in your assertion to avoid acknowledging the fact. To this day there is no written codified version of English Common Law. The first attempt at recording a unified body of precedent throughout the kingdoms happened only a few hundred years after the first Christian missionaries came to the British Isles, somewhere around the 11th century. Before the Common Law unification, it was practiced throughout the isles with only minor local variation between regions well into pre-history. The first attempts at codifying and centralizing legal procedure happened in the 12th century, but is known to have existed in essentially its current form at least several hundred years before the first Christian missionaries showed up in the region.
The exact origins of English Common Law are unknown primarily because it existed long before written histories of the region existed in any meaningful sense. The Christian missionaries (from which we get much of our early recorded history of the region) clearly indicate it was a strong and old institution when they showed up. The Normans, which didn't show up until a good four hundred years after the missionaries showed up, were the first to make a concerted effort to create a thorough written record of this ancient legal tradition.
So Nebullis, are you actually going to assert that English Common Law didn't exist before the Norman invaders made the first comprehensive written documentation of it? Did the English language not exist before the first dictionary? Most of what we know about ancient England is invaders and other people wrote about it. There is no written record of anybody invading or visiting the islands before English Common Law was an ancient institution there. Thanks for playing, but try again.
Precisely. But, since we know that Christianity spread to Great Britain long before such written histories, only wishful thinking will ignore its influence on development of English Common Law, especially in areas already codified in the Septuagint.
Before the Common Law unification, it was practiced throughout the isles with only minor local variation between regions well into pre-history.
There was actually considerable regional variation in practice.
The first attempts at codifying and centralizing legal procedure happened in the 12th century, but is known to have existed in essentially its current form at least several hundred years before the first Christian missionaries showed up in the region.
The first attempt at recording can be found in the Mercian Register (Cotton Tiberius) from the early part of the 9th century. And Christianity had more than a 500 year presence in Great Britain by that time, brought there by the Romans, esp. Constantine.
English Common Law, ancient and variable in origin, was influenced in its practice and evolution by all that constituted English history by the time it was first codified in the 11th century, including Northern European and Roman (Christian).
It wouldn't be surprising if all ancient cultures, by reason of the obvious physical presence of fetal movement around the 4th month, had a common treatment or definition of the fetus after quickening. But the judicial or ecclesiastical treatment of the fetus would differ between cultures. As the ancient Near East cultures had a codified record of treatment of the fetus as an individual with a soul, and, as Christianity dispersed this ancient record with the spread of Christianity, and, as Christianity was brought to England almost 1000 years before English Common Law was codified, it cannot be ignored that the ruling of homicide for a fetus after quickening was influenced by Christianity.
Oh, by the way, they also used to think that male babies "quickened" at a different time than female babies (I beleive the times were 40 and 80 days).
You have kids Hank? My grandchildren knew their fathers voice when they were born..when He spoke they turned to look at him..they knew my daughters voice and were soothed when she talked to them..
As for there being no record of consciousness I would refer you to a very OLD book Luk 1:41 And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
BTW One can often see a baby avoiding an amino needle in the womb via ultra sound..a conscious act
Yes. And all are essentially the same. They mark the beginning point of an individual with the real potential to become an adult human being, not a secondary capability or a theoretical potential.
Instead of parsing everything each of us has to say, how about offering your definitive definitions.
I'm simply trying to make everyone's arguments stronger. If a well-meaning but ill-equipped pro-lifer gets into a debate with a pro-abortion opponent, they could lose an argument and the opinions of anyone else who was paying attention. The pro-life side generally has its heart in the right place but often makes arguments that are some variation on, "That the unborn are people is self-evident, why don't you just admit it?" That doesn't win debates. You need to understand why that is so and why other people disagree.
My own criteria? As background, any reasonable criteria for personhood must be applicable to situations beyond the abortion debate and be somewhat compatible with people's intutive judgements concerning both real and fictional situations. The fact that people would think of Scooby Doo as a "person" and might think of killing Scooby Doo, if he were real, as "murder" is important to consider because situations like this (and the Star Trek example I suggested earlier) allow us to more clearly see how we migth apply various criteria used for the unborn to adults if they were in a similar state of dependency, motionlessness, or unconsciousness.
That said, I think you've got two rational choices for picking a criteria that will include human adults and exclude animals, yet doesn't exclude potential sentient aliens (or fictional beings like Scooby Doo that people would naturally think of as "persons" if they were real) or necessarily include the brain dead (though it could), include corpses, or include human cells that are clearly not human individuals. The criteria that clearly seperates humans from animals and Bambi from a real dear is a human-like awareness or "sentience". Your two choices are to pick (A) when that sentience is actually present or (B) when that sentience can be present in the future.
The first point to consider is that future capabilities are an integral part of how we judge events. Murder is wrong, not because of the pain it causes but because it is irreversible. It also robs a person of their future. This becomes clear if you think about various types of killings. If one could resurrect a dead person, is their any doubt that their murder would not be any more terrible than the sum of the non-fatal effects of the murder (pain, loss of freedom or time, etc.)? And if we didn't consider the future potential of a person and what was taken from them, wouldn't we look upon the old people dying every day in nursing homes as being just as tragic as the deaths of young people who die in car accidents or plane crashes? So it seems clear to me that what you take from a person matters which means that what they have ahead of them matters. In some ways, it matters more than their current condition (one might find it understandable to put a person who was dying painfully out of their misery but would probably not find it understandable to put another person, suffering equal pain but who was not going to die, out of their misery).
All that said, the problem with picking actual capability (A) is clear. It excludes infants (for those who think that humans are adequately mentally distinguished from animals before the age of about 2, I suggest this paper on the language capabilities of humans and chimps -- it discusses the inadequacy of chimpanzee language capabilities but also touches on the inadequacies of early human language capabilities in comparison) and it also excludes people who could temporarily lose their sentience but could recover it. Neither of these fits well with how people commonly react to either of these situations.
The better criteria is to look at the future potential of an organism and judge its present worth by what it can become, if simply given a reasonable chance (sufficient nutrition and a non-fatal environment), which is what we are expected to provide for children until they become more self-sufficient. This criteria recognizes infants as "persons" and explains why "perminent" is an important feature of the "brain dead" criteria for clinical death. It also addresses a whole host of hypothetical fantasy situations in a satisfactory way (e.g., my earlier Star Trek example). Once this criteria is chosen, it logically follows all the way back to the point where the individual became independent and reasonably capible of becoming a sentient adult. That could be either fertilization or cloning. In the case of twins, I see no paradox with one individual becoming two. Simply look at science fiction examples of replication machines is you need an adult example of one person becoming two at some intermediate point to wrap your mind around.
Now, you can (and people do) try to draw some other line based on some criteria to determine personhood, somewhere between fertilization and birth. For those criteria, I have two simple questions. "What does this criteria have to do with personhood?" and "If I apply this criteria to animals, aliens, or hypothetical examples, will it produce resonable results?" Suppose you pick a heartbeat, or neural activity, or myelination, or quickening or whatever. Animals may meet all of those criteria yet they will never be persons. And none of those criteria address the root criteria of sentience or real potential (that a fertilized egg doesn't implant does not address its real individual potential up to that point any more than an abandoned baby's failure to live addresses its real individual potential up to that point). And if you want to argue that any of these criteria only matters in the context of the developing human, it is easy enough to isolate them out with hypothetical imaginary examples using adults which demonstrates their weakness as criteria.
You'll note that I purposely avoid discussion of "souls" as a critera. If someone wants to raise that criteria, I need them to tell me what a "soul" is and how I can tell if an organism has one or not. If they can't do that, then the definition is essentially subjective. Yes, it may be reasonable to think about souls or worry about them but if someone can't demonstrate them and how to determine of they are present or not, they are a wholly worthless criteria for an objective discussion.
That's not to say that I don't have any respect for religious beliefs in this matter. I do. But if that's the basis for your pro or anti-abortion beliefs, then you first have to explain your religious views to me and convince me that they are correct before you even bother to start in with the abortion issue. Otherwise, dismissing religious abortion arguments is as simple as saying, "I don't believe it. Prove it."
When does a knitter begin the actually knitting process of a specific work such as a sweater or mittens? Scriptures tell us that God knits you together and science tells us that the process of the specific individual human being starts within minutes of fertilization. Even the earliest structures 'knitted' for the embryo (the yolk sac; the layer of the placenta which forms to the umbilicus and placental barrier, etc.) are incorporated into the later structures of the fetus (as gut and connective tissues). The form and function of the newly conceived individual human life at every age following fertilization are the hallmarks of that individual's body and personhood.
Since I cannot point to a specific moment during the lifetime of the individual begun at fertilization as the advent of the soul, I would defer to the logical position of assuming the knitting process of body and soul (soul to body) begins with first cell division that evidences the newly conceived expressing its life and its effort for survival of the individual at earliest age in the lifetime.
[One more aside, though it may too esoteric for this discussion: it is assumed that the soul is a timeless 'thing' since it continues even after the time-sequestered body decays and returns to constituent atoms, thus the notion of a soul existing before the body is not inconsistent with the knitting process whereby body and soul are joined ... when God creates that soul is and will remain in His purview, but don't assume that the miscarried bodies did not/do not have a soul in God's timing or His creative endeavors. As a Christian, I believe that your soul will exist sans body, but that you will again inhabit a body of God's special creation at some where/when of His choosing. It is entirely within the realm of acceptable belief for me or you to allow God the creative power to produce a body of completeness for even that miscarried embryo/zygote, not unlike the body you will inhabit in some where/when of His choosing, perhaps long after your natural death and dissolution of your current body.]
Interesting take, perhaps person is the better term, as in “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. I realize that there are problems with that definition as well. As I have said to another poster, who wants to make this a logical argument, the only way to get rid of abortion is to change the hearts and minds of the American people. This may sound cliché or trite, but I believe it is true. In my mind the best (in fact the only) argument against abortion is that fetuses are people. However, I think we must acknowledge that people of goodwill might disagree.
I have enjoyed the dialog with you, and would like to continue it. We are in different time zones so day by day interaction is unavoidable. I would like to respond to some of your other points but am not able to do so tonight. I will respond more later.
I wonder if it is a good or bad thing that people who agree 99.99% are ‘arguing’. It is also interesting how long this thread has existed.
First, I don't know enough of the details to draw a conclusion that I think is truly informed, so trying to comment extensively under those conditions bothers me. To get around that problem, I'll try to change the situation to show my thinking or explain how I've filled in the blanks.
My first set of questions revolves around the fate of the new child. Do they allow him to grow into a regular healthy baby and live a regular healthy life? If you're asking whether I am bothered by using parts of the placenta or umbilical cord of a regular baby to benefit another child or an adult, I'm not bothered by that practice at all. A baby doesn't have any special claim to a placenta or umbilical cord after birth, and I support letting the parents donate part or all of each to improve someone else's health. The article doesn't say whether the new baby is "designed" to be healthy or whether it is designed to have horrible flaws that will cause the placenta to produce something needed by the older baby. The article says that the baby is designed to be free of certain diseases, but one can be free of diseases and still have some inherent defect that causes tremendous problems. If they have selected the new baby to have some flaw, then I object to creating anyone with serious problems just to make something needed by someone else. This practice would be a violation of the rights of the "designer" baby. Likewise, designing and producing a perfectly good baby, using something produced by that baby, and then killing it would also be a violation of its rights.
The second set of questions revolves around the idea of selection of an embryo to bring to maturity. If 75% of embryos are too flawed to produce pregnancy naturally, I don't necessarily see a problem with IVF using a selection process. In normal IVF, they are likely trying to mimic the natural process whereby some embryos implant and try to grow while others are discarded early by the woman's body. The idea of selecting for something other than likelihood of survival makes me uncomfortable in a vague way, but trying to outlaw things when I don't have a better explanation for why they are wrong makes me more uncomfortable.
One of the distinctions that I make in this area is the difference between allowing things for an individual's benefit and allowing things for some collective purpose. I think that things done on an individual level are relatively safe. Allowing a couple to use IVF to have their own child is not particularly dangerous. Putting a technology like that at the disposal of those trying to improve "mankind" collectively or advance "medical science" collectively is dangerous. A couple that investigates IVF and decides against it can stop pursuing it easily. However, when decisions are suddenly cast in light of what produces a collective good for the society, the couple may find it more difficult to change their mind about a procedure.
One thing that "bothers" me about the article is the collective overtone of allowing the procedure. Right now, the couple can make their decisions on their own. The more we experiment with "people" or any kind of genetically unique human tissue, the more likely we will encounter a situation where that decision becomes forced by others.
WFTR
Bill
I was only arguing that one could not prove consciousness by the level of brain development or actions of a fetus or any other organism. I said, "Reactions and movement, in themselves, are not indicators or consciousness."
You said: You have kids Hank? My grandchildren knew their fathers voice when they were born..when He spoke they turned to look at him..they knew my daughters voice and were soothed when she talked to them..
What does that prove? Late one winter night, one of my children got out of bed, came into my bedroom and told me he had to go outside. I was barely awake, and by the time I realized what he was saying, he had managed to leave the house by way of the kitchen door.
Naturally, I jumped out of bed, ran to the kitchen, opened the door, and there stood a totally bewildered child in the snow.
He had no idea how he got outside, and absolutely no recollection of what he had done, because he was sound asleep, totally unconscious, the whole time.
Actions do not prove consciousness, period.
Hank
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