I am unsure about when it stops being moral to terminate a foetus/baby. I think it’s somewhere between 6 and 14 months, but that’s just my gut feeling. Some people are astonished that I would even consider that it could be after birth, but it’s not like any sudden development occurs at the moment of birth.
but it’s not like any sudden development occurs at the moment of birth.
You mean other than breathing its own air and no longer being physically connected to its mother’s womb? I’d call that pretty significant. I would argue that the moment it breaths its first breath on its own rather than as a part of its mother’s uterus, it becomes a murder victim, not an abortion.
I suppose to me, one’s moral weight is in their mind. If someone has no mind – such as a brain-dead patient – then they aren’t really a person. Seeing as there’s no reason to believe there’s an immediate jump in neural development in a baby at the moment of birth, I do not believe it’s a special moment for the baby in a moral accounting sense. So I don’t think the baby becomes more intrinsically worthy of life at the precise moment it draws its first breath.
(For the parent, of course, it is a special moment, and in particular new options are available outside of the keep-or-abort dichotomy.)
As for being an individual, I don’t really see how the child’s autonomy is relevant. It’s still fully dependent on its parents and society and could not function on its own regardless, so this is a fairly arbitrary step on the road to autonomy.
I suppose to me, one’s moral weight is in their mind.
The problem that i see with that is the following: Assume a child has little neural activity (which, btw, is not true at all; children and newborns often have higher neural activity than grown-ups), but assume for a moment that a child had little neural activity, and therefore would be less worthy of preservation.
Now, somebody who has migraine, or has repeated electrical shocks in their brain, might be in a lot of pain, but has probably more neural activity than you. Would you now consider that since they have more neural activity, they are more worthy of life than you are? And what if you and that other person would be bound to the tracks of a trolley problem? Wouldn’t it then be the ethical thing to kill you because you have less neural activity?
I don’t mean to say that neural activity ∝moral weight. I am merely asserting that something without neural activity at all (or similar construct) can’t be worth anything. This is why a rock has no moral value, and I don’t need to treat a rock nicely.
I am less confident – but still fairly confident – that consciousness, pain, and so on require at least a couple neurons – how many, I’m not sure – but creatures like tiny snails and worms probably aren’t worth consideration, or if they are then only very little. Shrimp are complex enough that I cannot say for sure that they aren’t equal in value to a human, but my intuition says they still don’t have fully-fledged sentience; I could be wrong though.
The strongest evidence that shrimp don’t have sentience is anthropic – if there are trillions of times more shrimp than humans, why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable? But anthropic arguments are questionable at best.
why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable?
haha yes i agree with that :D
my personal (kinda spiritual) take on this is that we are conscious because we are “nature’s soldiers” and we’re fighting the greater cause of life itself. That is what our consciousness is targeted at and what gives it justification in front of the world.
It’s dependent on a caretaker, but not necessarily on its own mother. Neural development also does take a big step starting at birth because the baby is now receiving stimuli.
If someone has no mind – such as a brain-dead patient – then they aren’t really a person.
Perhaps “not a person” isn’t the right way to put it. More like “already passed away.” I was being a bit provocative, sorry.
Regarding stimuli – fair enough, that is a good argument actually. But to me that indicates a “kink” in the graph of their moral worth; it ought to resemble a point where they start gaining moral worth, but not a point where they immediately have it.
Of course, this is all very speculative, vibes-based and handwavey. I don’t know how to define someone’s moral worth – which is precisely why I don’t see why birth is special to one’s moral worth.
Fair enough. I think you’re right to question these things; people have very strong opinions with hard lines here, but I don’t think there’s always solid reasoning for why some things that may seem like an obvious hard line are considered one.
I dislike criminalization at all because if a doctor at any point has to consider if they can prove that an abortion was medically necessary in a court of law, I find that to be a violation of their ability to care for their patient.
While I think this is mostly true, I think there are some potentially problematic “edge cases”, for example do you think it would be moral for someone to abort all girls until they eventually have a boy?
Is it moral to kill a 2-year old because the parents no longer want it?
I’m sure that abortion is fine for the first few months. After that, I am unsure either way, but I don’t feel strongly enough to wish to see abortion rights curtailed at all. So this is largely academic.
A 2 year old is a baby, an unborn fetus is a fetus, an extension of the parent. It doesn’t have thoughts, feelings, communication, and I would always value the parents life over its own.
If you give away a 2 year old you don’t really have to do much, but if you want to give away a 7 week old fetus, you still have to carry it to term, deal with discrimation and discomfort, deal with any medical issues that may arise, go through the extremely painful procedure of giving birth.
Just as you cannot be forced to donate your organs after death to help save countless lives, you cannot be forced to go through so much pain and trouble just to give birth to a life that doesn’t exist yet.
Let’s put aside 7-week old fetuses, as we both agree it’s fine to abort those.
I am pretty sure a 3-month-old fetus does not have thoughts or feelings to any significant extent. I am less sure about an 8 month old fetus; a lot of people who are 8 months pregnant do think their fetus has started to develop a personality. Regardless, I don’t see any particular leap in thoughts and feelings from just prior to birth compared with just after birth; at least, I don’t see why such a leap should occur at the moment of birth.
I don’t think being forced to donate organs is a good metaphor – at least, I don’t intrinsically value post-mortem bodily autonomy. A better metaphor I think would be being forced to do something in order for another person to live. Consider a Saharan desert guide on a 1-month tour for some clients. Once the tour begins, it would be morally reprehensible for the guide to abandon the clients to the elements; they must bring the clients out of the desert safely, whether they want to or not. It should be a bright-line case, because the lives of the clients rely on the guide, and the guide got them into this situation.
I don’t see 7-week old fetuses as being people; their lives are below my consideration. I do see an 8.5-month baby as being close in moral value to a 2-week old baby – I don’t know what that moral value is, but either killing both is fine, or killing neither is.
I can’t believe this word doesn’t seem to have made it into any part of this thread, but I think you’re looking for viability: the point where a fetus can live outside of the womb. This isn’t a hard line, of course, and technology can and has changed where that line can be drawn. Before that point, the fetus is entirely dependent on one specific person’s body, and after that point, there are other options for caring for it. That is typically where pro-choice folks will draw the line for abortion as well; before that point, an abortion ban is forced pregnancy and unacceptable, after that point there can be some negotiation and debate (though that late into a pregnancy, if an abortion is being discussed it’s almost certainly a health crisis, not a change of heart, so imposing restrictions just means more complications for an already difficult and dangerous situation).
There has been discussion somewhere in this tree about viability, but the word itself wasn’t used. Viability also has another meaning: the potential to someday be able to live outside the womb. I actually think the latter is more important morally speaking than the former. In a reasonable world, I would think that sensible pro-lifers should agree that if the foetus is doomed one way or another, why prevent an abortion? (Not that pro-life policies in e.g. Texas are sensible.)
But viability as you define it doesn’t mean much to me. Consider the earliest point at which the foetus is viable (could potentially survive outside the womb), versus the day before that. On the day before, the parent has the option to wait one day, at which point the foetus will become viable. Now compare this with a different situation: for the price of $20, a certain drug can be used to save a foetus’ life. Would you agree that in the latter situation, the foetus is already “viable”; it just needs a little help? If you agree with this, and since waiting 1 day is a similar cost on the behalf of the parent as paying $20, this means, the day before the foetus becomes viable, it’s already “viable” – the word has no meaning.
(If you disagree, and you think that the necessity of $20 drugs before the baby becomes viable means that it’s okay to abort it, I find that to be a strange morality, and I’d like to learn more. Or perhaps you think there’s something fundamentally different between waiting 1 day and paying $20.)
I don’t see how this makes killing a 2-year old worse than killing an 8-month old fetus.
Let’s keep separate these two things: the worthiness of the child to live, and the worthiness of the parent to have bodily autonomy. It seems to me that you’re making the observation that the 2 year old does not violate the parent’s bodily autonomy. Or are you asserting that because the child has independence, it is more intrinsically worthy to live?
It’s not about the development of the fetus, it’s about the woman’s autonomy. So long as it’s still inside her, her right to choose takes priority over its right to live, full stop.
Why do you assert this? Based on what moral framework? Is it morally okay to abandon a baby to the elements after birth, in favour of the autonomy of those who would raise it?
Bodily autonomy is different than “freedom to go about your life as you see fit”. Carrying a baby and giving birth come with risks and responsibilities and it changes your body. All of this risk is for the baby at the expense of the mother.
Analogy: let’s say someone needs a kidney transplant or they will die. Turns out, you’re the only match. Donating a kidney is not risk free and your body will be changed for the rest of your life. Should you donate? Yeah, probably. Should you be legally forced to? Absolutely not.
To me, this analogy completely solves the issue. I can say that life begins at conception and still say that bodily autonomy is a right. It doesn’t matter if the fetus/baby is a person yet, as long as the mother’s body is being used to sustain them, then it’s the mother’s choice.
Let’s put aside legality, as that’s separate from morality. I am not claiming that abortion should be illegal.
My claim is that intrinsically the morality of killing the fetus just before birth ought to be similar to the morality of killing the fetus just after birth. It’s true that there is another term in the moral equation (whatever you think that is) based on bodily autonomy of the parent, which has a dramatic change at the moment of birth. I also believe that this bodily autonomy term ought to be less than the value of a grown adult life (maybe not of a fetus though). In other words, it’s worse for someone to die than it is for someone else to temporarily lose some bodily autonomy.
Please note that I’m not sure that the intrinsic value of an 8-month-old fetus is equal to that of a full-grown adult. If a newborn baby’s life is intrinsically worthless outside of future potential – say, because they don’t have sentience – then there is clearly zero problem with an abortion at any stage. But most other people think a newborn baby’s life is equal to that of an adult, and I think you can more or less substitute “newborn baby” for “8-month old fetus.”
In your analogy, I do think that the moral action is to donate one of your two kidneys. It’s an even better analogy if it’s only a temporary donation of the kidney somehow, and a yet better analogy if you had caused them to be in this predicament. In the case of a several-months pregnant person living somewhere with easy abortion access, the analogy is improved further like so: you had previously agreed to lend them your kidney, but you change your mind during the critical part of the surgery when it’s too late for anyone else to sub in their kidney (we can relax the stipulation that you’re the only match in this case; this is because I believe life is fungible at inception).
I mostly agree with you on the morality of abortion. The only problem I have with your analysis is with the temporary nature of pregnancy. There are risks in pregnancy that can have permanent consequences. Even if the birth goes off without a hitch, the mother is often left with weight gain, stretch-marks, and a risk of post-partum depression. Incisions are often needed to widen the birth canal and sometimes a C-section is required which is major emergency abdominal surgery. These risks are entirely taken on by the mother.
If we look at morality as having things people should do, and things people must do, only the musts should be law because the shoulds can be more open to interpretation. I wouldn’t assign my morality onto others. I would classify going through with a pregnancy as a should.
The analogy still works because the temporary loan of the kidney might have permanent consequences afterward. And it’s only an analogy. I still think those possible side-effects (save for the truly serious ones) don’t outweigh the death of a grown adult. Again, I’m not claiming that a grown adult is the same as a fetus.
I make this rather strange argument because I actually am a tentative proponent of post-birth abortions – but most people think such a concept sounds so outrageous that they assume I must be trolling. It’s generally only something people are open to considering after they can be convinced that there isn’t much of a difference between killing a fetus and killing a newborn.
Based on the moral frame work that no person has a right to another person’s body parts. We don’t take organs from people who haven’t explicitly said they’re organ donors even after death, because that axiom is held so high. If I accidently hit you with my car, I have no legal obligation to donate a kidney to you to save your life.
I agree that axiom does lead to absolute certainty that fetuses can be aborted at any month. I don’t agree with the axiom though. If I sign up to, say, share a kidney with somebody to keep them alive for 8 hours in some kind of bizarre medical procedure, I don’t believe it’s acceptable for me to shrug and change my mind halfway through. See also the metaphor about the Saharan desert guide in the adjacent thread.
I’m not going to engage with you on the topic of a women’s right to choose, or the meaning of bodily autonomy. On the off chance you’re not a troll, good luck with your research on this very well documented political debate.
I am unsure about when it stops being moral to terminate a foetus/baby. I think it’s somewhere between 6 and 14 months, but that’s just my gut feeling. Some people are astonished that I would even consider that it could be after birth, but it’s not like any sudden development occurs at the moment of birth.
You mean other than breathing its own air and no longer being physically connected to its mother’s womb? I’d call that pretty significant. I would argue that the moment it breaths its first breath on its own rather than as a part of its mother’s uterus, it becomes a murder victim, not an abortion.
I don’t really see why breath is special.
Okay, to put it another way:
Once the child is born, it stops being literally a part of its mother and instead becomes an individual.
I suppose to me, one’s moral weight is in their mind. If someone has no mind – such as a brain-dead patient – then they aren’t really a person. Seeing as there’s no reason to believe there’s an immediate jump in neural development in a baby at the moment of birth, I do not believe it’s a special moment for the baby in a moral accounting sense. So I don’t think the baby becomes more intrinsically worthy of life at the precise moment it draws its first breath.
(For the parent, of course, it is a special moment, and in particular new options are available outside of the keep-or-abort dichotomy.)
As for being an individual, I don’t really see how the child’s autonomy is relevant. It’s still fully dependent on its parents and society and could not function on its own regardless, so this is a fairly arbitrary step on the road to autonomy.
The problem that i see with that is the following: Assume a child has little neural activity (which, btw, is not true at all; children and newborns often have higher neural activity than grown-ups), but assume for a moment that a child had little neural activity, and therefore would be less worthy of preservation.
Now, somebody who has migraine, or has repeated electrical shocks in their brain, might be in a lot of pain, but has probably more neural activity than you. Would you now consider that since they have more neural activity, they are more worthy of life than you are? And what if you and that other person would be bound to the tracks of a trolley problem? Wouldn’t it then be the ethical thing to kill you because you have less neural activity?
I don’t mean to say that neural activity ∝moral weight. I am merely asserting that something without neural activity at all (or similar construct) can’t be worth anything. This is why a rock has no moral value, and I don’t need to treat a rock nicely.
I am less confident – but still fairly confident – that consciousness, pain, and so on require at least a couple neurons – how many, I’m not sure – but creatures like tiny snails and worms probably aren’t worth consideration, or if they are then only very little. Shrimp are complex enough that I cannot say for sure that they aren’t equal in value to a human, but my intuition says they still don’t have fully-fledged sentience; I could be wrong though.
The strongest evidence that shrimp don’t have sentience is anthropic – if there are trillions of times more shrimp than humans, why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable? But anthropic arguments are questionable at best.
haha yes i agree with that :D
my personal (kinda spiritual) take on this is that we are conscious because we are “nature’s soldiers” and we’re fighting the greater cause of life itself. That is what our consciousness is targeted at and what gives it justification in front of the world.
I apologize, I just realized I got mixed up with a neighbouring debate regarding animal welfare lol. Thus the shrimp.
It’s dependent on a caretaker, but not necessarily on its own mother. Neural development also does take a big step starting at birth because the baby is now receiving stimuli.
This is gonna be a fun thread
Perhaps “not a person” isn’t the right way to put it. More like “already passed away.” I was being a bit provocative, sorry.
Regarding stimuli – fair enough, that is a good argument actually. But to me that indicates a “kink” in the graph of their moral worth; it ought to resemble a point where they start gaining moral worth, but not a point where they immediately have it.
Of course, this is all very speculative, vibes-based and handwavey. I don’t know how to define someone’s moral worth – which is precisely why I don’t see why birth is special to one’s moral worth.
Fair enough. I think you’re right to question these things; people have very strong opinions with hard lines here, but I don’t think there’s always solid reasoning for why some things that may seem like an obvious hard line are considered one.
I dislike criminalization at all because if a doctor at any point has to consider if they can prove that an abortion was medically necessary in a court of law, I find that to be a violation of their ability to care for their patient.
Fair enough, that’s unrelated to morality though. I already don’t wish to see abortion criminalized.
It is always moral if the woman doesn’t want the baby. Sometimes you don’t even find out you’re pregnant until it’s 7 weeks or so
While I think this is mostly true, I think there are some potentially problematic “edge cases”, for example do you think it would be moral for someone to abort all girls until they eventually have a boy?
I don’t like that but I don’t think they’d be nice to the girl if it was born either, so maybe it’s for the best
Is it moral to kill a 2-year old because the parents no longer want it?
I’m sure that abortion is fine for the first few months. After that, I am unsure either way, but I don’t feel strongly enough to wish to see abortion rights curtailed at all. So this is largely academic.
A 2 year old is a baby, an unborn fetus is a fetus, an extension of the parent. It doesn’t have thoughts, feelings, communication, and I would always value the parents life over its own.
If you give away a 2 year old you don’t really have to do much, but if you want to give away a 7 week old fetus, you still have to carry it to term, deal with discrimation and discomfort, deal with any medical issues that may arise, go through the extremely painful procedure of giving birth.
Just as you cannot be forced to donate your organs after death to help save countless lives, you cannot be forced to go through so much pain and trouble just to give birth to a life that doesn’t exist yet.
Let’s put aside 7-week old fetuses, as we both agree it’s fine to abort those.
I am pretty sure a 3-month-old fetus does not have thoughts or feelings to any significant extent. I am less sure about an 8 month old fetus; a lot of people who are 8 months pregnant do think their fetus has started to develop a personality. Regardless, I don’t see any particular leap in thoughts and feelings from just prior to birth compared with just after birth; at least, I don’t see why such a leap should occur at the moment of birth.
I don’t think being forced to donate organs is a good metaphor – at least, I don’t intrinsically value post-mortem bodily autonomy. A better metaphor I think would be being forced to do something in order for another person to live. Consider a Saharan desert guide on a 1-month tour for some clients. Once the tour begins, it would be morally reprehensible for the guide to abandon the clients to the elements; they must bring the clients out of the desert safely, whether they want to or not. It should be a bright-line case, because the lives of the clients rely on the guide, and the guide got them into this situation.
I don’t see 7-week old fetuses as being people; their lives are below my consideration. I do see an 8.5-month baby as being close in moral value to a 2-week old baby – I don’t know what that moral value is, but either killing both is fine, or killing neither is.
I can’t believe this word doesn’t seem to have made it into any part of this thread, but I think you’re looking for viability: the point where a fetus can live outside of the womb. This isn’t a hard line, of course, and technology can and has changed where that line can be drawn. Before that point, the fetus is entirely dependent on one specific person’s body, and after that point, there are other options for caring for it. That is typically where pro-choice folks will draw the line for abortion as well; before that point, an abortion ban is forced pregnancy and unacceptable, after that point there can be some negotiation and debate (though that late into a pregnancy, if an abortion is being discussed it’s almost certainly a health crisis, not a change of heart, so imposing restrictions just means more complications for an already difficult and dangerous situation).
There has been discussion somewhere in this tree about viability, but the word itself wasn’t used. Viability also has another meaning: the potential to someday be able to live outside the womb. I actually think the latter is more important morally speaking than the former. In a reasonable world, I would think that sensible pro-lifers should agree that if the foetus is doomed one way or another, why prevent an abortion? (Not that pro-life policies in e.g. Texas are sensible.)
But viability as you define it doesn’t mean much to me. Consider the earliest point at which the foetus is viable (could potentially survive outside the womb), versus the day before that. On the day before, the parent has the option to wait one day, at which point the foetus will become viable. Now compare this with a different situation: for the price of $20, a certain drug can be used to save a foetus’ life. Would you agree that in the latter situation, the foetus is already “viable”; it just needs a little help? If you agree with this, and since waiting 1 day is a similar cost on the behalf of the parent as paying $20, this means, the day before the foetus becomes viable, it’s already “viable” – the word has no meaning.
(If you disagree, and you think that the necessity of $20 drugs before the baby becomes viable means that it’s okay to abort it, I find that to be a strange morality, and I’d like to learn more. Or perhaps you think there’s something fundamentally different between waiting 1 day and paying $20.)
The 2 year old can exist separately from their parent. A fetus can’t, in most abortion cases.
I don’t see how this makes killing a 2-year old worse than killing an 8-month old fetus.
Let’s keep separate these two things: the worthiness of the child to live, and the worthiness of the parent to have bodily autonomy. It seems to me that you’re making the observation that the 2 year old does not violate the parent’s bodily autonomy. Or are you asserting that because the child has independence, it is more intrinsically worthy to live?
I agree with my mom. 25 years is good.
For context she said that when I wasn’t 25 yet.
I agree with the following: If your mother tries to kill you, and dies themselves instead as a result of the conflict, they have no right to complain.
It’s not about the development of the fetus, it’s about the woman’s autonomy. So long as it’s still inside her, her right to choose takes priority over its right to live, full stop.
Why do you assert this? Based on what moral framework? Is it morally okay to abandon a baby to the elements after birth, in favour of the autonomy of those who would raise it?
Bodily autonomy is different than “freedom to go about your life as you see fit”. Carrying a baby and giving birth come with risks and responsibilities and it changes your body. All of this risk is for the baby at the expense of the mother.
Analogy: let’s say someone needs a kidney transplant or they will die. Turns out, you’re the only match. Donating a kidney is not risk free and your body will be changed for the rest of your life. Should you donate? Yeah, probably. Should you be legally forced to? Absolutely not.
To me, this analogy completely solves the issue. I can say that life begins at conception and still say that bodily autonomy is a right. It doesn’t matter if the fetus/baby is a person yet, as long as the mother’s body is being used to sustain them, then it’s the mother’s choice.
Let’s put aside legality, as that’s separate from morality. I am not claiming that abortion should be illegal.
My claim is that intrinsically the morality of killing the fetus just before birth ought to be similar to the morality of killing the fetus just after birth. It’s true that there is another term in the moral equation (whatever you think that is) based on bodily autonomy of the parent, which has a dramatic change at the moment of birth. I also believe that this bodily autonomy term ought to be less than the value of a grown adult life (maybe not of a fetus though). In other words, it’s worse for someone to die than it is for someone else to temporarily lose some bodily autonomy.
Please note that I’m not sure that the intrinsic value of an 8-month-old fetus is equal to that of a full-grown adult. If a newborn baby’s life is intrinsically worthless outside of future potential – say, because they don’t have sentience – then there is clearly zero problem with an abortion at any stage. But most other people think a newborn baby’s life is equal to that of an adult, and I think you can more or less substitute “newborn baby” for “8-month old fetus.”
In your analogy, I do think that the moral action is to donate one of your two kidneys. It’s an even better analogy if it’s only a temporary donation of the kidney somehow, and a yet better analogy if you had caused them to be in this predicament. In the case of a several-months pregnant person living somewhere with easy abortion access, the analogy is improved further like so: you had previously agreed to lend them your kidney, but you change your mind during the critical part of the surgery when it’s too late for anyone else to sub in their kidney (we can relax the stipulation that you’re the only match in this case; this is because I believe life is fungible at inception).
I mostly agree with you on the morality of abortion. The only problem I have with your analysis is with the temporary nature of pregnancy. There are risks in pregnancy that can have permanent consequences. Even if the birth goes off without a hitch, the mother is often left with weight gain, stretch-marks, and a risk of post-partum depression. Incisions are often needed to widen the birth canal and sometimes a C-section is required which is major emergency abdominal surgery. These risks are entirely taken on by the mother.
If we look at morality as having things people should do, and things people must do, only the musts should be law because the shoulds can be more open to interpretation. I wouldn’t assign my morality onto others. I would classify going through with a pregnancy as a should.
The analogy still works because the temporary loan of the kidney might have permanent consequences afterward. And it’s only an analogy. I still think those possible side-effects (save for the truly serious ones) don’t outweigh the death of a grown adult. Again, I’m not claiming that a grown adult is the same as a fetus.
I make this rather strange argument because I actually am a tentative proponent of post-birth abortions – but most people think such a concept sounds so outrageous that they assume I must be trolling. It’s generally only something people are open to considering after they can be convinced that there isn’t much of a difference between killing a fetus and killing a newborn.
Based on the moral frame work that no person has a right to another person’s body parts. We don’t take organs from people who haven’t explicitly said they’re organ donors even after death, because that axiom is held so high. If I accidently hit you with my car, I have no legal obligation to donate a kidney to you to save your life.
I agree that axiom does lead to absolute certainty that fetuses can be aborted at any month. I don’t agree with the axiom though. If I sign up to, say, share a kidney with somebody to keep them alive for 8 hours in some kind of bizarre medical procedure, I don’t believe it’s acceptable for me to shrug and change my mind halfway through. See also the metaphor about the Saharan desert guide in the adjacent thread.
I’m not going to engage with you on the topic of a women’s right to choose, or the meaning of bodily autonomy. On the off chance you’re not a troll, good luck with your research on this very well documented political debate.
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