Pro-life blog buzz 5-12-15
by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli
- Secular Pro-Life responds to Amnesty International’s recommendation that a 10-year-old rape victim in Paraguay should be made to undergo an abortion at 22 weeks – for her “safety”:
An abortion on a pregnancy this advanced is performed by lethal injection to the unborn baby’s heart, after which the mother goes into labor to expel the corpse. That means this poor 10-year-old is going to experience labor no matter what happens….The only question is whether she will give birth to a live baby or a dead one. But Amnesty International doesn’t even consider the idea of allowing this baby to take a breath. They’re just using this case to push a “safe abortion” agenda. I’m afraid the days when Amnesty International actually stood up for human rights are long gone.
- Clinic Quotes posts remarks on abortion from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (pictured left), a pastor who was executed after joining an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler during WWII:
Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. - At Live Action News, Rebecca Downs says now – not a year from now – is the time to find out where the Presidential candidates of both parties stand on the issue of life. She says, “With any hope, the right to life will be at the forefront of the campaigns, as candidates communicate to voters where they stand on this issue.”
- Wesley J. Smith calls out Princeton’s (unethical) bioethicist Dr. Peter Singer (pictured right) for “argu[ing] that it is ‘reasonable’ for the government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to infants with disabilities”:
On Sunday April 16… Singer’s remarks were made on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” which is broadcast on New York’s AM 970 and Philadelphia 990 AM. In the interview, which was perhaps ironically conducted as part of a press tour Singer is currently on promoting his new book about charities, “The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically,” the professor advocated the shocking claim that health care laws like the Affordable Care Act should be more overt about rationing and that we should acknowledge the necessity of “intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.”“Mr. Charity” then makes an uncharitable utilitarian assertion: Without offering any concrete measure on how quality of life could or should be determined, Singer admitted, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”
- A Culture of Life posts a powerful video of their recent event in which Dame Colleen Bayer, adoptive mom and director of Family Life International NZ expressed sentiments quite the opposite of Peter Singer’s; she encouraged “welcoming all people, especially unborn children, who have disabilities – including those whose lives may be very short”:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/WRWoOOUb_No[/youtube]
[Photos via lifeondoverbeach.wordpress.com and rabble.ca]
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.
it is ‘reasonable’ for the government or private insurance companies to deny treatment to infants with disabilities
As stated, I certainly disagree with this, but such things are usually taken out of context.
don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.
If it’s truly going to be “zero quality of life,” then I doubt it is much of an issue, to start with.
On rationing health care – it’s coming, no matter what. Heck, it’s here – many states are already rationing Medicaid, and this is before the real train wreck that it is, financially, happens, and before the demographics of our population exerts its full weight on the healthcare system.
A picture of what Amnesty International wants to happen would probably be more suitable than their teddy bear propaganda.
http://www.abortionno.org/wp-content/gallery/abortion-pictures/thumbs/thumbs_22_weeks-01_medium.jpg
Still, good on them for at least admitting that making abortion illegal does in fact stop women from having them.
Rebecca….
Brought forward from the April 27 ‘Pro-life vid of day: The central issue in the abortion debate’ thread:
A temporary coma patient has no consciousness, no sentience. They have been conscious in the past and have the potential to be conscious in the future, but you seem to grant them personhood based soley on past consciousness and the ability to be conscious in the future.
Their personhood is not in doubt nor at issue in that case, Rebecca.
If you took out a brain from someone, they could never be conscious in the future. If they could, would you consider them to be persons? Based on the fact that you grant personhood to temporary coma patients with severe brain damage that prevents sentience and consciousness, it seems that your answer would be yes.
Indeed, but so what? Nobody is saying “not a person,” there.
I consider all human organisms to be persons, particularly if they can become conscious in the future.
Okay, your opinion. Yet what if that organism dies – dies while it’s one cell, or a few, or a blastocyst? Most of them had a chance to become conscious “in the future,” but to me, to say that, for example, the zygote “is a person” is just plain ridiculous.
It’s no less arbitrary than declaring a human with an IQ of 15 to be a person, even though they are less capable of understanding than your average rat, and rats are not persons. One could just as easily argue that personhood cannot exist unless that person has demonstrated some ability for higher thought processes, which would exclude infants and those with severe intellectual disabilities.
There is more than one thing here. One is the societal attribution of personhood at birth, which indeed is somewhat arbitrary – it’s up to the will of society and it could be set at some other time.
Then there is how we as individuals conceive of people. If we had an example of a 15 IQ, that would be so profoundly mentally defective that yeah, a rat would be smarter. Really, on the low side, when you get down to about 40, that’s just about it – there, the percentage of people is already vanishingly small. They are not nearly the person they’d be if their mental development had been anything like normal.
Likewise, a normal adult is much more of a person than they were at birth, and more than they will be if they get severe Alzheimer’s and dementia later on.
After all, it would make sense of why we exclude other sentient animals from personhood, since the ability for higher thought is unique to us and a few other species.
Well, we don’t treat them, legally, like we do “normal” people. Personhood or not doesn’t really come into it, but they do have different status.
If an infant had brain damage that prevented consciousness in the womb and caused it to be comatose when it was born, it is still legally considered to be a person.
Yes, but the question of keeping it alive comes immediately to the parents and doctors.
This does not mean much, since the law is arbitrary, but if some new medical treatment was invented that would give that child a chance at a conscious existence, would you consider it to be a person, even though it never experienced consciousness before? If the treatment had a good chance of succeeding, would you support the parent’s choice to directly kill or deny that medical treatment to such an infant?
Rebecca, your hypothetical is so far-fetched that it pretty much just boggles the mind. ¯\_(?)_/¯
However, if, in fact, that treatment had a good chance of succeeding, then it’s not going to be legal to pull the plug, in the first place. I and most others would say go ahead and try the miracle treatment, and let’s see what happens.
Doug sez:
“but to me, to say that, for example, the zygote “is a person” is just plain ridiculous.”
Doug, or anyone else: please tell me why.
Please anticipate some of the counter-arguments to this claim that a zygote is not a person.
The first: trying to make a distinction between a living “human being” and a “person,” or an entity deserving “personhood,” or however you want to make an artificial distinction that allows an entity to be a human but not a person.
Next: argument based on vital dependence on the host mother / viability. This is itself ridiculous. Two arguments shoot this down. One: the bacteria in my gut CANNOT live without me as a host. “Viability” without dependence on a host individual is not a distinguishing characteristic of life. Two: each mammal specie has its range of development. Not all mammals emerge from the womb at the same development point (kittens are born with their eyes closed), and each mammal specie hits viability at a different point in the developmental timeline; if a mouse hits “viability” at a couple weeks, and a human at 21 weeks, what is qualitatively different about the 2-week-old mouse from us? Nothing; we are just gestating longer. Elephants even longer. The “viability” argument is really grasping at straws.
Argument: The zygote does not look like a developed human. Oh, this is great. It is just a blob of cells, so it cannot be alive. Or, sure, it is alive, but it is not human.
If it is not alive because it does not look like a 2-year-old, well, what about a maggot not looking like a fly? Is a maggot not alive? A caterpillar does not look like a butterfly. There are more drastic examples on our planet, but that pretty much ends the argument of “it doesn’t LOOK like a person, therefore not a human.”
It is only a blob of cells, therefore is not alive. SRSLY. We covered this in high school: the characteristics or qualities that distinguish living things from non-living things. Self-organization, etc. Also: this does not amke sense: a single-cell ORGANISM is alive, yo best be sur if you get infected with one that colonizes your gut, but a human cannot be alive because it only has 32 cells? WT? SRSLY?
how many cells does s single-cell life form have? Answer: ONE.
We happen to be a life form that does not stop at one.
If the number of cells matters, then please tell us what the magic number is?!
Sentience: speaking of ridiculous. A 2-month-old blob, with human DNA, post-delivery, does not have sentience. Go ahead and kill it. Wait: you cannot “kill” it because it is not alive yet?
Ridiculous.
The sentience argument: OK, let’s limit abortion, including post-delivery abortion, to those who do not yet have sentience. What will the measure of sentience be? Ridiculous.
So, Doug: please – you know so much more about biology than us dumb, anti-science, knuckle-dragging, misogynist, bigoted, oppressive, Christian, middle-class, white, stingey pro-lifers: please throw down your killer argument on why a zygote is not a person.
We ignorant, anti-science pro-life Christians will NEVER comprehend your answer, but at least you can illustrate to the rest of the world why no one should pay attention to our ramblings.
Thanks.
TLD: please tell me why.
Because I think “person” implies that there is somebody there, a personality, emotion, feelings, thoughts. It is our consciousness that makes us people, not just being alive, not just having unique DNA, not just being a certain species.
Later in gestation, almost all fetuses have what I am talking about.
For every abortion that takes place in the US, there are many more failures to implant or death otherwise resulting from genetic deficency or other problems that occur with the conceptus/embryo. This is almost always occurring in the first two weeks after fertilization, and this means roughly 20 or 21 times as many deaths as from elective abortion.
All those conceptuses – blastocysts – embryos that are dying in the first couple weeks, do you seriously see them as “People”?
Please anticipate some of the counter-arguments to this claim that a zygote is not a person.
There is society’s position, and then there are our individual opinions. Society says the zygote is no person. I agree. You may not.
The first: trying to make a distinction between a living “human being” and a “person,” or an entity deserving “personhood,” or however you want to make an artificial distinction that allows an entity to be a human but not a person.
What is this “artificial” distinction stuff? The line is drawn somewhere, whether by society or as a matter of our opinions. Take out somebody’s brain and keep the body alive by pumping oxygen and nutrients through the blood vessels. Or, take anencephalic babies, where there will never be cognition, where the possibility of gaining awareness is ruled out, and death usually occurs in a few hours or days after birth – and there too, keep the body alive. I’m saying there is “nobody home,” so to speak. A “living body,” alone, is not enough for a person.
Next: argument based on vital dependence on the host mother / viability. This is itself ridiculous. Two arguments shoot this down. One: the bacteria in my gut CANNOT live without me as a host. “Viability” without dependence on a host individual is not a distinguishing characteristic of life. Two: each mammal specie has its range of development. Not all mammals emerge from the womb at the same development point (kittens are born with their eyes closed), and each mammal specie hits viability at a different point in the developmental timeline; if a mouse hits “viability” at a couple weeks, and a human at 21 weeks, what is qualitatively different about the 2-week-old mouse from us? Nothing; we are just gestating longer. Elephants even longer. The “viability” argument is really grasping at straws.
Heh, speaking of ‘straws’… ?(????)
Just who have you seen saying that viability is necessary for personhood?
TLD: Argument: The zygote does not look like a developed human. Oh, this is great. It is just a blob of cells, so it cannot be alive. Or, sure, it is alive, but it is not human.
Why do you bother with silly strawman arguments?
If it is not alive because it does not look like a 2-year-old, well, what about a maggot not looking like a fly? Is a maggot not alive? A caterpillar does not look like a butterfly. There are more drastic examples on our planet, but that pretty much ends the argument of “it doesn’t LOOK like a person, therefore not a human.”
Same – strawman on your part. If you can quote somebody saying something, fine, but I think you have nothing.
It is only a blob of cells, therefore is not alive. SRSLY. We covered this in high school: the characteristics or qualities that distinguish living things from non-living things. Self-organization, etc. Also: this does not amke sense: a single-cell ORGANISM is alive, yo best be sur if you get infected with one that colonizes your gut, but a human cannot be alive because it only has 32 cells? WT? SRSLY?
Seriously, you go nowhere with strawman arguments.
So, Doug: please – you know so much more about biology than us dumb, anti-science, knuckle-dragging, misogynist, bigoted, oppressive, Christian, middle-class, white, stingey pro-lifers: please throw down your killer argument on why a zygote is not a person.
You are pretending that biology is the argument. It’s not.
We ignorant, anti-science pro-life Christians will NEVER comprehend your answer, but at least you can illustrate to the rest of the world why no one should pay attention to our ramblings.
Who is generalizing so pejoratively about Christians here, except you? Nobody.
On this site, we do sometimes see some pretty silly/stupid/superstitious/childish comments about groups of people, but it’s really almost always about pro-choicers or gay people.
Obviously I don’t think socialised medicine is a bad thing, let alone a bad thing comparable with Nazism – but it surely must be true that the achievement of the UK National Health Service in ensuring that 90% of people with Down’s Syndrome are killed before birth, is one that the Nazis would have aspired to had the technology been available. I just dropped one of the 10% off at school, so this is personal!
And, sorry, that was more about Bonhoeffer – but on the Peter Singer “quality of life” thing, not that bad quality of life is any excuse for killing someone, but even in Singer’s terms having Down’s Syndrome is no bad thing – all the people with Down’s Syndrome in MY family have a FABULOUS quality of life. I would hazard my son laughs more often than Peter Singer does – and I’m sure he prays more.
Peter Singer writes in his book Rethinking Life and Death,
“the quality of life of someone with Down syndrome [is] below the standard at which medical treatment to sustain the life of an infant becomes obligatory”
because
“the future prospects of life may be so bleak”
he or she will never be able
“to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player.”
Eric TL: Peter Singer writes in his book Rethinking Life and Death, “the quality of life of someone with Down syndrome [is] below the standard at which medical treatment to sustain the life of an infant becomes obligatory”
I don’t think it’s really his call. Me may just be theorizing, but I’d say he’s generalizing incorrectly, at the least.
If the “quality of life” is on one side of the equation, then the cost of medical treatment is on the other – and I think we are heading into a time when that will become more of a consideration, for better or worse. Probably “worse,” given our country’s financial situation.
Doug said, “If the “quality of life” is on one side of the equation, then the cost of medical treatment is on the other – and I think we are heading into a time when that will become more of a consideration, for better or worse. Probably “worse,” given our country’s financial situation.”
I agree Doug, which is one of the greatest arguments *against* the so-called Affordable Care Act. If the government can’t afford to provide quality of life care because of its massive debt, it just won’t provide it. Critics said this five years ago, that government take over of insurance would lead to death panels, and advocates and panderers decried the critics as alarmists. Yet here we are heading in that direction.
You mentioned Professor Singer may be just theorizing, but if you read his works, he espouses more than theory and is a huge advocate of governments to step in and do what needs to be done to make the tough choices that parents won’t do, which is to remove humans with, in his opinion, sub-human quality of life.
I loved Joshua’s comment (5/13/14 4:26am), “I would hazard my son laughs more often than Peter Singer does – and I’m sure he prays more.” So true… anyone who has spent time with people having Down Syndrome would know quality of life is about love and laughter more than discussing a Woody Allen movie.
Eric TL: So true… anyone who has spent time with people having Down Syndrome would know quality of life is about love and laughter more than discussing a Woody Allen movie.
Eric, I don’t even think that a reference to Down’s Syndrome need be made, i.e. I’d say love and laughter trumps Woody Allen, period.
There may be some element of context we are missing with Singer’s quotes, but they don’t really require anything “else,” as far as I can see. Singer is definitely getting quite subjective and putting his own spin on things – even without bolstering his case thereby.
Heck, I probably cannot chat with somebody about the latest Woody Allen movie, because odds are that I’m not going to see it for a long time, if ever. I have found some really funny things in some of his movies, but there are many times when I just want to beat him with a plastic baseball bat. Here’s this unattractive, middle-aged and later, old man, in some roles that defy belief. How could this talking-too-fast, goofy, neurotic, gnome-like creature, making cringeworthy utterances, be in the movie, in the first place? Oh yeah, it’s his movie.
I realize I’m being just as subjective as Singer or even Woody himself, and I think Woody makes more “chick flicks” and that obviously lots of people like his movies.
“…love and laughter trumps Woody Allen, period”
hahaha! true, very true :-D
I agree Doug, which is one of the greatest arguments *against* the so-called Affordable Care Act. If the government can’t afford to provide quality of life care because of its massive debt, it just won’t provide it. Critics said this five years ago, that government take over of insurance would lead to death panels, and advocates and panderers decried the critics as alarmists. Yet here we are heading in that direction.
Eric, I don’t think we’re heading there because of the ACA. After Sarah Palin went nutty with a Facebook post, the protesting public grossly misperceived the “death panel” thing. While the section of the law in question was later removed, rendering it moot, it was virtually identical with language from the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act.
Palin was trying to get in a dig at Obama, but the 2003 Act was introduced by a Republican, and as I recall 204 Republicans in the House and 40 or 42 Republican senators voted for it.
If they are “economic conservatives” then they should – and it’s something we can’t get around, ACA or not. We cannot take care of everybody and we can’t spend unlimited amounts of money on a given patient. Aside from that, “end of life counseling” is sensible, no?
Let’s say there was no ACA. We don’t turn people away from hospitals with no care, do we? If somebody gets medical care and doesn’t pay for it, then either the hospital eats the cost, or else the taxpayer/the gov’t ends up paying, anyway.
Staying with ACA or no ACA – if the deal is, “You gotta have health care,” then what do we do somebody opts out or just doesn’t do it? Young, healthy, “immortal” feeling person thinks he can get away without paying for it; cracks up his motorcycle. Do we let him die?
Doug, you hit upon great themes and questions which have been expanded upon before in this forum.
“We cannot take care of everybody”
Being devil’s advocate, but who is “we”? Many arguments can be made that private insurance, charitable organizations, and people themselves do a much better job of taking care of people than government does.
Also, the idea of taking care of someone who “thinks he can get away without paying for it, cracks up his motorcycle. Do we let him die?” Great question. Another place to ask, who is “we”? Would it be him rather than we who let’s him die?
Here’s another question: do we give the person who doesn’t pay in the same medical treatment as someone the same age who pays for health insurance, having less money to spend on luxuries like a motorcycle? (Having a Honda Shadow myself, I often think of a motorcycle as a necessity rather than a luxury, but I digress).
Eric TL: Being devil’s advocate, but who is “we”? Many arguments can be made that private insurance, charitable organizations, and people themselves do a much better job of taking care of people than government does.
Believe me – I am a gut-basic thinker that the gov’t ends up doing stuff poorly, stupidly, very expensively. I really regret the way things are – maybe it’s just human nature – but I sure wish the political and financial realities we’ve had the last many decades were different.
However, even after an admittedly crappy start, there were roughly 25% less Americans without healthcare coverage after one year of the Affordable Care Act. This was like October, last year. The newly-covered weren’t giving themselves the health care that they needed, and for whatever reason, it wasn’t coming to them via charity nor them purchasing it, prior to the ACA.
“We” is us taxpayers, who the federal gov’t can get money from.
Also, the idea of taking care of someone who “thinks he can get away without paying for it, cracks up his motorcycle. Do we let him die?” Great question. Another place to ask, who is “we”? Would it be him rather than we who let’s him die?
As a practical matter, I don’t know that the “He doesn’t have insurance, let him die,” deal would really work. There would inevitably be a screw-up where the deceased was later found to have had coverage. So, I don’t know what to do, there… What do we do – implant a microchip in all of us? (Heh.)
Here’s another question: do we give the person who doesn’t pay in the same medical treatment as someone the same age who pays for health insurance, having less money to spend on luxuries like a motorcycle? (Having a Honda Shadow myself, I often think of a motorcycle as a necessity rather than a luxury, but I digress).
Catastrophic injury is one thing, a fairly rare thing. Most doctoring is the routine, the chronic/continuing care – and I think people should be paying their way, rather than having others do it for them.
Now of course it’s not even close to that simple, i.e. we already have many millions on Medicaid. Whew….
“Catastrophic injury is one thing, a fairly rare thing. Most doctoring is the routine, the chronic/continuing care – and I think people should be paying their way, rather than having others do it for them.”
Agreed Doug. My fear is how emergency services get abused under a socialized medical system. When I was in the military, there was no cost for insurance nor co-pay for military members or their dependents, and the system was full of people who run to the emergency room for a sniffle and overburden the health care providers. I fear the ACA will lead to this as well, if it isn’t already.
Eric TL: My fear is how emergency services get abused under a socialized medical system. When I was in the military, there was no cost for insurance nor co-pay for military members or their dependents, and the system was full of people who run to the emergency room for a sniffle and overburden the health care providers. I fear the ACA will lead to this as well, if it isn’t already.
I don’t know how the ACA will relate to that, but for sure it’s a very real and very prominent concern. I saw it when I lived in Canada – there, it was all free, and there were certainly abuses, including lonely old people who went to the doctor just for somebody to talk to.
There was talk of instituting user fees, to curb such things, and I fully support that – there needs to be a disincentive to go.