Pro-life vid of the day: “I’m done with being pro-choice”
by Hans Johnson
With every new year, the new generation is facing the facts more honestly on the subject of abortion.
Stefanie Nicholas is one of those Millennials who has really thought through the reality and the implications of this controversy. She explains her reasoning for abandoning her knee-jerk pro-choice position to become staunchly pro-life in the following video.
Warning: Some profanity…
[youtube]http://youtu.be/kKZWi0WWKew[/youtube]
Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.
Jan.06, 2015 12:00 pm |
Video of the day |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Great to see others awakening to the cause. It was a year ago yesterday that I changed my mind after finding horrific images on the Internet as I rushed to finish a science project. May this be the year that many other hearts and minds are changed :)
You don’t need to see images to stop abortion. You don’t need to be have a qualification to understand that it is cruel to kill an unborn child. You have to feel.This is what intelligence is.Working on hunches , feeling and putting yourself in the other persons shoes.
Zuri–it was the graphic images that also made me pro-life! I agree with you though Pique–careful consideration of the unborn child and empathy would make anyone pro-life. Unfortunately is seems empathy is not a natural characteristic of the society in which we now live. I’ve encountered women who have ultrasounds, see their babies moving and still shrug and say “So what? I still don’t want it.”
Well done, girl. You might give more thought to contraception. What is its actual correlation to abortion: PP people are always saying more contraception (and “sex ed”) will reduce unplanned pregnancies, thus abortion, but that’s not true. Contraception also distances you from what you now see as the obvious purpose of sex.
does she know you shared her video?
She put the video on the internet–DUH! That aside–one can tell how much Stephanie had/is struggling with this issue. That she was courageous to share her change of heart is amazing. Way to go–God bless you, Stephanie!
Welcome Stephanie!!!
God bless you for your witness!!
Thanks for a great video.
I would like to add something, though, about two of your points: your analysis that selfishness is at or near the heart of abortion-rights advocacy, and your response to the bodily-rights argument.
Selfishness: As you say, due to technological advances, it is becoming harder to deny the humanity of the unborn at relatively early stages of development. Therefore it becomes clear that a woman who aborts is knowingly killing another human being, for her own benefit — which, if she does not face a serious health risk, is a selfish choice. However, technology does make it clear that an early embryo lacks most human characteristics. If you base the analysis of selfishness on a conscious decision to kill a human being, it would not be fair to call parents who abort an early embryo selfish — unless those parents recognize that humanity may not only consist in existing human characteristics, but may also consist in the POTENTIAL for those characteristics. If the killing is wrong not only of a being who has human characteristics, but also of a being who will SOON have human characteristics, then only does the killing of an early embryo become selfish.
Here —
http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/dismantling-the-bodily-rights-argument-without-using-the-responsibility-argument/
— I wrote some thoughts about this:
“In thinking of the unborn, some people tend to perceive a still picture, an organism frozen in time, while some tend to perceive a process. If you kill a small clump of cells lacking, perhaps, even a beating heart, is it correct to say that you are killing an organism whose life presently has little value, or to say that you are depriving it of the complete human life which has started as a process? In fact, both statements are correct. Obviously the perception of a process is a more complete perception. If one does perceive a process, then one will also intuit that the unborn is a full-fledged member of human society, and will call it a person. But there is no way to prove logically that the process model is more valid morally than the frozen-in-time model as a basis for deciding the fate of the organism.”
So if parents genuinely hold the frozen-in-time perception, I might call them mechanistic or reductive, but I wouldn’t call them selfish.
The bodily-rights argument: Your conjoined-twins comparison is a good one, but may not reach the moral intuitions of all pro-choicers. Some may find that the lack of symmetry between the position of a pregnant woman and that of her unborn child (as compared to the symmetry of positions between two conjoined twins) is morally relevant. I have thought as best I could about the bodily-rights argument (as well as about the frozen-in-time perception) at the above link.
Acyutananda, I understand the symmetry objection (conjoined twins have equal rights to the shared organs because they came into existence at the same time). But I don’t think it’s morally relevant in the way critics of the pro-life position need it to be.
To illustrate, consider the following scenario. It’s hypothetical, bizarre, and physiologically impossible but nonetheless useful. Suppose Jack and Jill are conjoined twins, but they develop in such a way that Jack forms inside of Jill’s uterus. He’s connected to his twin sister the same way that an early embryo is connected to a pregnant woman. Suppose further that Jack grows and develops the same way an ordinary fetus does, but with severely inhibited growth. Each trimester of this “pregnancy” lasts ten years instead of three months, so Jill won’t give birth to Jack until she is 30 years old.
Jill appears perfectly normal when she is born. Throughout her early childhood, she regularly has mood swings and morning sickness. Her doctor can’t figure out why, but she is otherwise a typical young girl. When she reaches her teens, however, things start to get weird. Her morning sickness is gone, but she puts on weight and gradually grows a big round belly. Jill also has never had a menstrual period. After several tests and an ultrasound, her doctor concludes that she is pregnant with her own brother.
Intuitively, pro-choicers would want to say that Jill has at least as much of a right to an abortion as a woman that becomes pregnant from rape (and certainly one that becomes pregnant from consensual sex). Surely making a woman sustain a fetus for thirty years is a much greater violation of her bodily autonomy than making her sustain a fetus for nine months. Remember, however, that Jill isn’t really pregnant at all – she is connected to her conjoined twin. Removing Jack wouldn’t be an abortion, but a lethal separation (thus not permissible as far as the symmetry objection is concerned). The symmetry objection cannot account for this case, so it does not undermine the conjoined twin analogy.
Navi, I like your thought experiment very much. Thanks for sharing it.
If I understand the thought experiment correctly, however, it’s not precise to say “Jill isn’t really pregnant at all – she is connected to her conjoined twin.” The doctor has concluded she is pregnant. She is connected to her conjoined twin, but the connection has taken the form of a pregnancy, and that is now the only connection.
Thinking about everything in light of this thought experiment, I see it this way:
There are three asymmetries between a pregnant woman and her child that are not always present between conjoined twins:
1. The woman had an independent life before the child came along; the child did not.
2. The woman does not need the body of the child; the child needs her body.
3. The woman already has all human characteristics (presumably); the child’s are undeveloped.
So those asymmetries are not always present between conjoined twins. Between the conjoined twins in your thought experiment, however, two of those asymmetries, numbers 2 and 3, have now become present, making your scenario closer to the scenario of a normal pregnancy. The three asymmetries between woman and child may cause people’s moral intuitions to give preference to the woman. Yet in spite of the two asymmetries in your thought experiment, I think the moral intuitions of most people, including most pro-choicers, would continue to say (even if pro-choicers might not “want to say” it) that, as with normal conjoined twins, the “big” twin is not justified in killing the “small” one. (And because they feel that that would not be justified, people, in order to be consistent, would have to move closer to saying that a pregnant woman is not justified in killing her child.)
Stefanie Nicholas included asymmetry 2 in her conjoined-twins thought experiment. At 23:41 she said, “she [my conjoined twin] had to use my body to survive, but I didn’t need hers to survive.” So I should not have implied that those conjoined twins were completely symmetrical. She also included asymmetry 3 — at 23:34 she said, “she was severely mentally retarded” — in fact she made a bigger concession than you did in a way, because a mentally backward born twin will remain so, whereas the mental backwardness of the unborn child in your thought experiment is only a reflection of the stage it is temporarily at. But you have made your conjoined twins resemble more closely the scenario of a normal pregnancy, while our intuitions continue to say that the big twin is not justified in killing the small one. This seems to me like progress.
Pro-choicers can still cling to asymmetry 1; in fact they do cling to it. I have heard at least one pro-choicer argue that way (saying that the fact that the woman had already been leading her life before the child came along is morally relevant). But I would say that the ground on which the bodily-rights argument can stand with some relative amount of strength is at least contracted by your thought experiment.
One thing that I think always stands out when we mentally experiment with different situations in this way is that any moral principle we seem to be able to logically define always depends on some pre-logical moral intuition about some specific situation.
Having established the primacy of direct pre-logical moral intuitions about specific situations, if I now look at the specific situation of a woman whose risk of grave loss of well-being in pregnancy is small, and at the idea of illegalizing abortion, my related intuition dictates the moral principle “A woman whose risk of grave loss of well-being is small should be legally prevented from killing her unborn child.”
Of course someone else’s intuition on this point, even after we have both tried a variety of thought experiments, may differ from mine. Where do we go from there? I have thought about this as best I could at the link I gave earlier. Would appreciate your view of any of my thinking there (or in the latest post on that blog) that you might have time to read.