"No In-Between in Abortion Debate" — For a Very Dangerous Conflict

A long letter to the editor of, or submission for a short column in, The Ventura County Star, in a continuing debate on abortion:

Re: Noel D’Angelo’s May 22 letter (part of a "thread")

By recent definitions of life, a fertilized egg is alive with a specific individual life, as is the ball of cells that it forms and on through the stages of embryological development to a fetus and newborn. However don’t say, "All life is sacred" and we can’t destroy such life if you’re eating a bacon burger or a carrot or just used a hand-sanitizer.  Unless you’re a very strict Jain* or vegan, you routinely kill various forms of life or have them killed for you (and often eat them); and even the most life-respecting among us usually wants a robust immune response to invading bacteria, which will kill those bacteria.

If you want to go back to old ideas of life, one idea would be whether or not an embryo or fetus is nephesh for the Hebrew word or the Greek equivalents: So is a fetus a "living being" in a Biblical or more generally ancient sense? Well, one answer is that "living beings" have the breath of life — note Adam’s story in Genesis — and one interpretation there is that a fetus takes on that sort of life with the first breath.**

Necessarily if perhaps arrogantly, we humans usually declare human life is special, and the question with abortion on one side is when and if a human zygote, embryo, or fetus is or becomes human: a person under the law with rights that can be balanced against those of the fully-human mother.

A consistent, coherent, and logical argument can be made if you go from "life-breath" to soul and have humans special because we are "ensouled" and place the moment of ensoulment early in fetal development or perhaps at the moment of conception. Doing so, you have unborn babies in the womb and, to push the argument, unbaptized unborn babies, possibly damned to hell if not allowed to be born and baptized.*** Q.E.D.

A consistent, coherent, logical, historical, and powerful argument can also  be made on how abortion laws have become a fairly recent twist in the millennium-long patriarchal efforts to control and oppress women, and must be opposed if societies are to recognize the full humanity of women. Also Q.E.D.

And people can argue that the United States Constitution sets up a secular Republic and that serious efforts to inflict upon it the rules of a Christian nation is an attack upon that Republic, to be opposed by all who’ve sworn or affirmed to defend the Constitution and our Republic "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

All of which is why abortion is a highly divisive and dangerous conflict. And it is why we need America to move into the mushy middle and continue to accept the Roe vs. Wade compromise. That position is not logically consistent and elegant and historically informed, but it is tolerable to most Americans.

First trimester of so: We don’t feel that there’s a person yet.

Approaching the time of birth: Not yet with the rights of a full human if weighed against the mother, but getting there, and not to be killed unless that death is really, really necessary.

In between: Some reasonable regulation, which respects the rights of that fully-human mother.

And meanwhile we need a major campaign for effective contraception so that abortion is legal, safe, and indeed rare.

We are dealing here with definitions of "human being" and the nature of our country. These are issues about which people feel very strongly and over which they have killed one another: killing fully-developed, obviously human, human people, and in large numbers (this is part of what World War II was about, and the US Civil War).

Roe v. Wade isn’t intellectually neat and pretty, but it has worked. Most Americans can support it, even against our more logically rigorous fellow citizens. It’s something we can live with.

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

** Ward, Roy Bowen. "The Use of the Bible in the Abortion Debate," Saint Louis University Public Law Review 13.1 (1993); 391-408, here III.A.1, "Person" in the Bible, "Nephesh and Breath."

*** https://www.bartleby.com/96/10.html — On those unbaptized babies:

The Day of Doom

By Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705) Then to the bar, all they drew near   Who died in infancy, And never had or good or bad         235   Effected personally, But from the womb unto the tomb   Were straightway carried, (Or at the last ere they transgress’d)   Who thus began to plead:

[answered at length by "the judge most dread, ending"]

"A crime it is, therefore in bliss
You may not hope to dwell
But unto you I shall allow	355
The easiest room in hell.”

TODAY'S VOCABULARY WORD: "Animals"

What a piece of work is a man! 

How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! 

In form and moving how express and admirable! 

In action how like an angel, 

in apprehension how like a god! 

The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. 

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? 

— Hamlet 2.2

In the kids' game of Twenty Questions, the first identifier is "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral," and the classification for human beings is "Animal." In a system out of the work of Carl Woese et al. of the U of IL — for more grownup games of taxonomy — living things with cells are Archaea, Bacteria, or Eukarya, with the Eukarya made up of Fungi, Plants, and Animals. If you're multicellular, with a pretty large and complex structure, don't do photosynthesis, and live on Earth, you're an animal.

In the old system of The Great Chain of Being, we're what Hamlet called "the paragon of animals" and the highest of animals, but still animal. Also, "a little lower than the gods," or "than the angels" in more recent usage: at the nodal point on the Great Chain between mere animals and divine beings. Homo duplex: flesh and spirit, perhaps a soul. Life-breath plus small "e" earth in one version of us in Genesis, or, again from Hamlet, "this quintessence of dust."

Deal with it.

Really ancient archaea and their bacterial relations have been around a whole lot longer than fancier species, and they may heft more biomass than we do today. There is a good chance they will succeed us as well and are the true dominant creatures in the history of Earth and its inheritors.

Animals we colloquial call "animals" — our mammalian or anyway vertebrate cousins — are what people often mean when they refer to other people as "brutes" or refer to with "brutal" — and maybe after that go down that ol' Great Chain and label other people "cockroaches" and such.

It's like us civilized folk calling low-tech people barbarians or savages or "barbarous savages."

Uh, huh.

Tigers have never practiced crucifixion, and savages didn't invent cluster munitions or nerve gas. Some ants are into analogies to slavery and genocide, but otherwise our brutal fellow critters are relatively well-behaved, relative to us, humans, who have been guilty of such necessarily civilized human behavior — acts by urbanized, literate high-tech folk — as fire-bombing cities.

Some of my favorite animals are people, and all my relatives; but we really must stop flattering ourselves. Hamlet's praise of our species — "in apprehension how like a god!" — should be pronounced only in the course of that bloody satiric tragedy, Hamlet, or sung amid the scattered bodies on another stage, for the climax of Hair.

Abortion and Such Yet Again (January 2016)

            Once or twice a year I write on the abortion controversy, usually in a small-city newspaper or a blog post. Sometimes, I'm just pedantically correcting the question, "When does life begin?" That formulation is forgivable since common, but pretty useless: one thing the Bible and biology since the late 19^th century agree on is that life doesn't begin, but began and has been transmitted ever since. So eggs and sperm are alive, as are zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. "There is always a death in an abortion" — and death with each menstruation and miscarriage and millions of deaths (over 100 million in humans) with each ejaculation. The relevant and crucial question is "What dies?" and following from that, "Is that what to be a human person under the law?"

            My most serious agenda (which I'll follow here in a short form) is to demonstrate that the set of issues surrounding abortion is unresolvable in any philosophically respectable way and recommend a messy, intellectually incoherent, vulgarly pragmatic political compromise. E.g., we may be able to get what looked like might follow from Roe v. Wade. Building upon the feeling of many ordinary Americans that early abortions are okay while late ones are not, and that contraception is a good idea, what we could get are strict restrictions on late-term abortions while contraceptive use by women — and fertile girls and men and boys — is encouraged, along with "Plan B's" of various sorts, plus readily available, safe and legal early abortion as needed, with the goal of making the need for any abortions increasingly rare.

            Meanwhile we'll engage in cycles of unresolvable arguments stemming from radically different premises and competing but complexly-related histories. On the one side, are the history of patriarchal oppression and the control of women's bodies, and the resistance to patriarchy and control. On the other side, this:

            If "People are the riches of a nation" and a large and growing population the source of a nation's strength and prosperity, then policies of "pronatalism" (also just called "natalism") are essential, and society and State must act aggressively to encourage live births, with the kids raised to where they can be militarily and economically useful, and ready to produce another generation. One obvious way to this goal: harness sex to reproduction by striving to prevent all sex outside of the reproductive and reproductive in a stable social unit (long-term families) in which the kids can get raised. Under this approach, the sexual "abominations in Leviticus" etc. make sense as do secular-based prohibitions on contraception.

                        (Whether pronatalism is a good idea in a world of over 7 billion people facing another and particularly serious period of climate change and resource depletion — that's something we need to discuss.) 

            If the goal (finis, telos) of sex is reproduction, it is unnatural to engage in sex that is nonreproductive. If Nature is part of God's plan, such unnaturalness is sinful. If the State should get involved in prohibiting unnatural acts and/or various kinds of sin, then laws against contraception make sense (and condoms when and where I was a kid were quite properly legally "SOLD FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY").

            If a human being is essentially a soul, and if that soul is of infinite value; if that soul enters a zygote at the moment of conception, then anything that destroys a zygote or embryo or fetus is a variety of murder. Worse — maybe infinitely worse — if/since the victims are unbaptized they will join the other unbaptized infants and miscarriages in damnation: perhaps in a Limbo, if that theology comes back into fashion, or in "the easiest room in hell," as in Michael Wigglesworth's teaching-poem, "The Day of Doom" (the Year of the Lord 1662 [the date for the poem, not the Apocalypse]).

            Given the US First Amendment and at least a fair amount of de facto separation of Church and State, we're not going to have much honest debate on the theology of contraception and abortion and the politics that debate implies. Nor are we going to have an open and vigorous debate on population policy and its implications for and involvement in climate change, resource allocation, immigration, who pays for old people, and tax breaks for families. (Some Americans who are all for population control in theory still want tax deductions for their children, even third and fourth and fifth kids.)

            There has been some social progress on these issues, certainly with gay rights and, maybe more relevantly here, condoms: which are now advertised, required in LA-produced up-scale professional pornography, and apparently encouraged in some areas of amateur porn upload sites — uh, or so I have heard. On the other hand, there is the logic of abortion = murder, hence large-scale abortion = mass murder, hence … well, hence bombing an abortion clinic or shooting abortion providers can be admitted as an act of terrorism but then defended as a "lesser evil." On the other side, if one just rejects the whole idea of souls and ensoulment and follows a rigorous materialism, then it becomes fairly easy to justify even a late-term abortion but more difficult to condemn killing older human organisms, especially before or after they can talk rationally or after you've been forced to admit that there may be little justification in nature to put so much value on speech or reason or consciousness that "mind" become a kind of stand-in for "soul."

            I hope Americans will say on the abortion debate and other sex issues, "Screw ideology and intellectual rigor folks! Let's cut a political deal on abortion and sex stuff and move on." As much as Americans are generally anti-intellectual, though, I expect the opposing logics of the abortion debate to continue robust and dangerous — and we'll be cycling back to the topic for the rest of my life.

Abortion Yet Again: Stewart, Huckabee, & When Life Begins (14 Nov. 2012)

Okay, when Jon Stewart f*cks up on a basic point, it's time to review. In an interview portion on The Daily Show on gay marriage, Mike Huckabee shifted the discussion to the abortion debate and to the science of how life begins at conception, and Stewart allowed him to get away with it (The Daily Show 12 Nov. 2012).

No, gentlemen, life doesn't begin at conception. Life doesn't begin at all. It began. If the Bible is right, life began some 6000 years ago (it's year 5773 in the Jewish calendar). If recent estimates in the life sciences are correct, life on Earth began well over three billion years ago. And since then life has been passed on, each species reproducing after its kind, strictly according to the Bible, with variation and selection according to Darwin.  Plus other scientific complications but, as a practical matter, no "spontaneous generation."

Human sperm are alive; human eggs are alive. The product of the joining of egg and sperm — a fertilized egg, a zygote — is alive. Monozygotic siblings ("identical" twins and such) as a complicating case, each zygote is a potential unique human animal.

The abortion question is on the status of a zygote and its various stages through embryo, fetus, and finally a human baby.

'Cause, people, very few of us can say "All life is sacred" and not be a bleeding hypocrite.

For various reasons — including my killing a fair number of mammals in my work as a lab technician — I don't eat mammal meat. But I did kill those animals in labs; I cheerfully eat fish and fowl and crustaceans;  and I have killed bacteria by the billions. For that matter, I also eat carrots, and unless you are a really strict Vegan, you do too, do all such killing and/or eating.

And as healthy mammals we kill huge numbers of bacteria and viruses by our immune responses. And most of us squash cockroaches.

So, please, no bullsh*t about the sacredness of life.

If you like — and I insist that we do — we can make a huge leap of faith and say that human life is special and in some sense sacred and that we shouldn't kill people unless we really, really have to. That puts me with the Catholic Church against the death penalty and (sometimes contrary to the Church) against most wars. And that makes me, like most Americans, not too fond of abortion and nervous about late-term abortions.

This is something we can argue.

Still, I just can't see a single-cell organism like a zygote as a human being, even if it is a human zygote. Potential human, yeah, but only potential. Ditto for blastomeres and other early stages of embryonic development: until the organism has more complexity than, say, a mosquito, I'm not concerned about killing it. At all.

If you see humans as primarily souls and souls to be saved and see "ensoulment" taking place at conception and an aborted embryo a soul in an unbaptized body going to hell — then you should feel differently. And we can argue some more, vigorously argue. Second trimester? I'd keep the State out of it — and third trimester we can have some serious fights.

But we are not arguing about life or when life begins; we are arguing about personhood. Personhood and status under the law, including the status of — the rights of — fully-born women.

OK?

Abortion is a difficult enough issue without starting off stupid. (And if you tell me, "Gee, by 'life' I only include human life," I'll tell you that that's really arrogant and that arrogance on that kind of scale is really stupid.)