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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