Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watmath.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!saquigley From: saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) Newsgroups: net.women Subject: abortion (part3) Message-ID: <6935@watmath.UUCP> Date: Fri, 17-Feb-84 22:16:45 EST Article-I.D.: watmath.6935 Posted: Fri Feb 17 22:16:45 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 18-Feb-84 04:37:07 EST Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 211 Part 3 Preliminary warnings: 1 In what will follow, adjectives such as "reasonable", "unreasonable", "emotional", "logical" will be used in their proper sense, i.e without the value judgements that are usually associated with them; thus by calling a point of view unreasonable, I will not be meaning that this point of view should not be listened to, or that people who hold that point of view are fools or crazy, but simply pointing out that this view was obtained by means other than reasoning. 2 I do not claim to have an unbiased point of view on the matter. I have a very biased point of view in the matter simply because I am a woman, and the possibility of ever needing an abortion is something which is ever present, especially since, for personal reasons, the method of birth control that I practise is not the "safest" (in terms of avoiding pregnancy) one available in the world. Therefore I have a very vested interest in the whole topic. I believe that every woman should be allowed to have an abortion if she so desires, so flamers who have the same opinion as me can save their energy and aim their flame-throwers at somebody else. I have already made my position clear in my previous article, but felt that it needed to be clarified again. From now on, I will not bother. First I will look at things from the pro-life point of view. Pro-life people are those who will have answered "no" to all my questions, even to the one concerning the right of a woman that gets pregnant as as result of rape, to get an abortion, even though going through with the pregnancy may cause this woman deep pain (as I believe would happen in most of these cases probably). This position comes from the belief that no amount of suffering that would be avoided by an abortion justifies the killing of a fetus, because kil- ling a fetus is more immoral than forcing someone to suffer. Here are what I believe to be two different pro-life view of fetuses: The first one is that fetuses are persons (defined as being of the human race + having some form of consciousness or "soul") from the moment of conception and therefore deserve all rights accorded to other persons, the most important of which is the right to life. The second is that we do not know whether the fetus is a person, so in absence of evidence of the contrary, we must assume the worst (or best depending on the point of view) and treat the fetus as a human being so as not to commit the mistake of killing a person. A variant of this view is that, at some point in the development of the fetus, the fetus gains "consciousness" (or a "soul") and thus becomes a person. That point is not known, (although judging from some pro-life posters I have seen, the appearance of a soul seems to be closely related to the development of the feet of the fetus :-) ), so in doubt again, we must assume the worst. These two beliefs are put to test when facing the ques- tion of whether abortion should be allowable to save the life of the mother. This question is very easily answered by people of the second persuasion: it is one life against another, we know the mother is a person, we are not sure about whether the fetus is, so clearly it makes more sense to save the mother rather than the fetus. For people adhering to the first belief, the answer is not so clear: we have two lives of equal value. How do we decide which one to choose? the only way to answer this question fairly is by tossing a coin, but nobody will do that. What will probably happen is that other values will come into play. The people making the decision probably know the mother already, so based on this will decide (hope- fully) to save the mother. There are many other decision- making processes, which are more or less horrible and which I will not mention. But no matter what the decision is, unless it is done completely at random, making a decision on such a matter implies deciding that one person deserves to live more than another, i.e that not all human lives are equal. This is a very disturbing realisation. We will see why later. I personally regard the second view of a fetus as the more reasonable of the two, as the first one is based on faith while the second one is simply based on our current knowledge. I believe that most pro-life people, except for those who have faith in some kind of doctrine telling them that there is a soul from the moment of conception on, prob- ably adhere to the second belief. The problem with adhering with the second view is that it forces us to face reality, which is uncertainty about the nature of the fetus. This approach opens up the possibility that we might be wrong and that one day we will be proved wrong (although that is very unlikely since it is so hard to determine the existence or even define the meaning of the existence of a soul). How- ever this also introduces the idea that there might be a hierarchy of beings more or less human, more or less cons- cious, and this hierarchy might end up placing other "lower" animals on an equal or higher level than fetuses. This notion profoundly disturbs many of our commonly held views of the supremacy of the human race and touches very taboo subjects as it points out amongst other things the insignificance of human lives: we were all at one point embryos, which could be "less" than animals. This defin- itely opens up too many cans of worms, which is why many pro-life people will decide to stick to the first view of fetuses, which is a much simpler one. However, it is one for which there is no supporting evidence, so must be defended through non-reasonable means, which is exactly what most pro-life groups (I've seen or heard) are doing. Notice however that the logical conclusion of these two views is that most pro-lifers, except those who would toss coins in the above example, will somehow arrive at the con- clusion that some human lives are "worth" more than others. (Non-prolifers, i.e. anybody who would agree to let one woman have an abortion, have already arrived at the conclu- sion that some lives are worth less than other things.) Now, this is a disturbing concept because it implies that lives can be given values like other things, such as suffering, can be given a value, therefore the value of life can be compared with the value of not suffering and one declared more worthy than the other. The pro-life solution is to simply give a much higher value to life than to other desir- able things. The extreme pro-choice position is to give a much higher value to the freedom of the mother to have con- trol of her body than to the life of fetuses. There are many different value systems for pro-choice and other people than the two just mentioned and I will look at them later on. It is important to recognise that reason cannot go further than this level. At this level values are assigned for many different emotional reasons, most of which depend greatly on which images stir us more: for some, it is the image of a fetus being torn to shreds, for others it is the image of mothers and children separated by adoption, for others it is the image of women dying from illegal abortions (my worst image) or of unloved and battered children of unhappy mothers. The fact is that most people decide on their values for emotional reasons. The only exceptions to these are people who decide what their values are based on what they have been told (by god, or someone else) that these values should be. These people have chosen that is is of value to relinquish responsibility for their choice of values. So we are in the following very sticky situation: We have different people living together. They have many dif- ferent ways of looking at very important issues. None of the values they are basing their point of view from on such topics can be defended logically, yet some decision must be made that will be "good", for everybody, but what is "good"? we all have different definitions of it. I place the avoidance of suffering very close to the top of my value list, so my definition of the best solution would be one which would minimise all the suffering that is involved in this process: this would involve minimising the suffering that pro-life people feel when they think of embryos being torn up, as well as the suffering of women who find themselves pregnant with a child they do not want. However pro-lifers might not be interested the least bit about their own suffering since eliminating suffering might not be as high on their priority list of things to get done as making sure that as many embryos as possible live (unless it is suffering they are concerned about, but they simply believe that the suffering of an embryo being aborted is greater than any other suffering that will be incurred by its life). Therefore if anybody is to make any decision on this matter that will affect others (and as the nature of this matter is about making decisions that will affect others, they will) they will have to remember that they will be imposing their value system on others. The value system which has been imposed upon us by the present laws is that it is more important for all people to have a say in this matter rather for all women to be allowed to completely control the course of their pregnancies or for all fetuses to have the right to live. This value system is called "democracy". Again if one goes to its roots, one will find that it is based on emotions about what is right. Having clarified all this, I will turn my attention towards people who have the same emotional justification for their values as I do, these are the non-prolife people who have decided that life is not always on top of their value system. I am doing this not as a conscious decision to snub prolifers, but rather simply because I know that our emo- tional value backgrounds are completely irreconcilable, and therefore our goals will probably be too (except if we both artificially push "democracy" to the top of our priority list, which we will not do in this case, but other people will do and have already done for us in making laws on this matter). So from now on, I will be assuming that life of embryos does not always have the greatest "value", but that it does have some value. Note that this eliminates certain pro-choice points of view too: those that are based entirely on the belief that embryos are just little blobs of cells throughout pregnancy, and whose lives are worth about the same as any fly's. I realise that I might have unfairly represented pro- life people. I would welcome any corrections to what I have said on them. Stay tuned for more.... Sophie Quigley watmath!saquigley