JAC: When I heard about the campaign by Irish women to tw**t their menstrual cycles to Ireland’s prime minister, I knew there was a story, but wasn’t clear on the details. I asked Grania, who lives in the Republic of Ireland, to enlighten us:
by Grania Spingies
Sometimes Ireland has to be a direct democracy to change certain laws, for the Irish Constitution, which came into force in 1937, was heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic church and prohibited a number of rights that modern democracies enjoy—including the right to obtain a divorce. The most recent example was this year’s campaign and subsequent referendum on same-sex marriage. But that was a relatively easy battle to win, in spite of pushback from conservative zealots. In the end, the majority of Irish citizens – and that includes Irish Catholics – saw the right to same-sex marriage as both necessary and a social good. A “Yes” vote could be celebrated loudly and with no mixed feelings.
It’s a lot harder to create the same feel-good sentiments on the contentious issue of abortion in Ireland, on which there is no consensus. Even though there appears to be majority support for the right to access abortion, there is no unanimity on whether it should be on demand, or for medical reasons or compassionate grounds only. As it stands, abortion remains illegal in Ireland (with a penalty of 14 years imprisonment) for any reason other than cases in which the mother’s life is in imminent danger.
However, recent attempts to exercise even that narrowly restricted right have produced horror stories. The current government has reiterated that it will not address the abortion issue during its term in office, and neither will the major opposition party. Both parties are largely conservative (by European standards) and god-fearing; this leaves Irish women with an unwanted pregnancy the choice of breaking the law or traveling outside of the country to obtain an abortion.
For some time there has been a concerted campaign to raise awareness about this issue and change people’s minds toward less restrictive laws on abortion. TV Writer Graham Linehan (Father Ted, The I.T. Crowd and my own personal favorite, Black Books) and his wife Helen recently joined forces with Amnesty International to highlight the issue by going public about a deeply tragic personal event in their own lives: Helen had to undergo an abortion as the baby they were expecting was diagnosed with acrania. Although this condition is invariably fatal to the baby, in Ireland the mother would be forced to carry this pregnancy to term or until she had a spontaneous miscarriage.
In October, Irish women started tweeting about their menstrual cycles to the Irish Taoiseach [prime minister] Enda Kenny. As comedian Grainne Maguire explains in The Guardian:
I thought it would be better to take the Irish state at its word. If they want to control my body, if they feel so comfortable interfering in what happens inside it, they should at least have all the details.
So, she and other women tweeted about the current state of “Ireland’s littlest embassy” using the hashtag #RepealThe8th, the 8th Amendment being the one that equates the life of a pregnant woman with that of a fetus or embryo, and criminalises abortion in Ireland.
Reactions have ranged from laughter to disgust: biology does horrify some people so. Nevertheless, people in Ireland will continue to campaign until an Irish government has the courage to bring the issue to a referendum. So far only the Labour party has committed to holding a referendum on abortion. However, the Labour Party has never won an election outright, at best being in the position of Coalition or Opposition. The current government has stayed silent.
No period for me, today, either!
b&
I see you used an exclamation point.
Bloody right I did!
b&
Be sure to let us know on the first hint. (And report on breast sensitivity as well)
Aren’t men generally sensitive to breasts?
b&
Probably depends on context, what state their in, etc. But I get your points.
Imminent death exceptions are a terrible idea. Often by the time you are facing imminent death it is already too late.
And in regards to self defence, we don’t tell people that they can *only* defend their bodies from harm if they are mere minutes from dying.
Just a great story and maybe the best example of what religion does but argues it does not. This is at the heart of faith vs Fact.
Grania mentions a 14 year jail sentence.
Who goes to jail? The mother? The doctor? The anesthesiologist? The hospital (or clinic) administrator?
Everyone goes to jail. Except for the child raping priest of course. A few Hail Mary’s is all that is necessary for him.
The woman of course. It’s her fault, and has been since Eden.
Before the Roman Catholic Church got hold of it centuries ago, Ireland was one of the better countries to be a woman.
I wonder if we could start a similar campaign in the US aimed at some state legislators.
If only there was some motivation to avoid aborting open discussion…
Its somewhat surprising to me that these factions haven’t been able join together enough to try and expand access at least a little bit. I understand that many more liberal people might object to abortion for medical reasons only, but that’s at least a step in the right direction compared to the current law. Join with the folks who only want that exception (and nothing further) to get a referendum on that, then worry about taking the next step.
Then again, we can’t even pass an annual budget. So other countries’ political impasses are probably not something I should be pointing my finger at.
Of course, even in religion thick America, it is the women who should decide this one because they are the ones with standing in the matter.
And it would be best if decided as simply as possible. Determine during what period that abortion should take place. During that time it is available and no longer a debate. Beyond that time the circumstances come into place. Let science and women settle the issue.
If we really believe in separation of church and state then we should do it.
Seems like those who argue (or claim, rather) that life begins at conception have a huge polemical advantage. Their adversaries have to make more complex arguments that resist sound-biting, particularly if they are fellow theists.
The “When does life begin?” question is a complete red herring.
Are parents required to donate blood or organs to their children after birth on pain of prison? Do we criminalize those who fail to rush into a burning building to try to save their children?
No?
Then there can be no similar legal requirement that women sacrifice themselves to their offspring before birth, either.
b&
Hey Ben. I asked a pro lifer your burning building rescue question. I specifically asked if a parent who refuses to go into a burning building to save their child should go to prison for the crime of murder if the child dies. She said no. She then added that if the parent *started* the fire, and then failed to rescue, that yes, it is murder.
I then asked if having sex while female is equivalent to arson.
Yes, this is the heart of it. It is all about teh s3x, and holding women responsible for their slutty actions.
Her analogy with starting the fire would seem to indicate that abortion should be allowed in the case of rape, because then the woman *didn’t* start the fire. Is your friend opposed to that exception or in favor of it?
The analogy can also be extended to prophylaxis, which I guess is kind of like doing something that has a very small risk of starting a fire but you don’t intend to do that. Like, say, having a lit scented candle in the house. If you do that, it causes a fire, and then don’t go back in to save people, most people would not call your action murder. Reckless endangerment or manslaughter at worst, but probably not even that, just ‘an unfortunate accident.’ So your friend’s analogy would also seem to support abortion in the case of a woman being on the pill or using condoms and getting pregnant anyway.
“It is all about teh s3x”
Using the Haidt framework for moral questions, I read somewhere that one’s feeling about abortion are most closely associated with the importance that “purity” plays in your moral universe. This basically supports your point.
I do not agree that it’s a red herring.
The examples you use involve the mother’s death, but carrying the child to birth rarely requires the death of the mother.
Blood and organ donations have little risk of death. In fact in terms of time and bodily stress they typically require far less personal sacrifice than pregnancy. So Ben’s analogy is not just apt, but any argument that the foetus’ life outweighs the mother’s inconvenience would be a stronger argument for compulsory blood and organ donation.
I have tried very hard to put imagine what it is like to be a pro lifer.
I think about the potential lost. A life that will *never* be lived. I think about what a tragedy it is. All so a woman could have some responsibility free sex? Why kill just so you can have a little bit of pleasure? Surely the right to live outweighs your right not to be inconvenienced?
Then I thought about it some more. The PL’ers, with heartfealt conviction, speak of the preciousness of life. Of how we only have one life to live. Of how that unique genetic combination WILL NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN. What i a little sacrifice compared to that. Ok. So we have a child dying of leukemia in a hospital. That child is 5 years old and will *never* get to live their life because someone was too selfish to donate some blood marrow. This is a life that will never reach it’s potential. 22 people die per day in the USA because they don’t get an organ in time.
So if this is really about LIFE, the preciousness of LIFE, then where are all of the crocodile tears for these dying 5 year olds? Why does abortion bring up feelings of revulsion (Yes, In pretending to a pro lifer, I have felt this way) but the thought of a child dying from leukemia because no one could donate bone marrow merely elicits an ‘oh, what a bummer’ response?
Because. One is associated with teh s3x0r and the other isn’t. Abortion is impure, as someone just pointed out. It is the intimate relationship with women’s bodies, and their sex-havingness that skeeves people out. And babbies. A dying 5 yo isn’t as innocent as a widdle baby. Though, I will add, most pro lifers tend to vote republican, and they cry about how their wallet autonnomy outeighs the ‘inalienable right to life’ of fetuses and newborns to live through the benefit of single payer healthcare. Oh, and they also routinely tell me that fathers should *not* ever be required by law to donate body parts or tissues to their dying children, born or unborn, because a woman forfeits her bodily autonomy when she has sex. Men don’t. Cuz nature.
And embryos are ultimately innocent because they don’t have a brain/mind. It is really easy to project all of your sad feelies onto something that is entirely innocent. They are a blank slate. A tabula rasa.
“I think about the potential lost. A life that will *never* be lived. I think about what a tragedy it is.”
That’s always a nonsense argument (as I think you know). There are billions of potential lives being lost all the time, any time someone ‘has a headache’ (or takes the pill or the guy just can’t get it up…) Just as well too, the earth is full, we don’t need moar hoomanz.
If referring to the loss of a much-wanted child, that’s a tragedy for the parents, but then in that case the question of abortion is irrelevant.
cr
While in some cases it might be a red herring, in the general case I agree, it is not.
You are also right that they have a polemical advantage. I have watched much of my family go from being indifferent about abortion in, say, the 1980’s and before, to being strongly anti-abortion, mostly on the strength of two things: group identity, it has become a mark of conservative/evangelical identity, and the power of the imagery of “killing babies”. At least that’s what works for the later abortions.
For the idea that an embryo is worth protecting it is a pure case of faith vs fact. We know, we really and truly know, that the thing we care about protecting, sentient human beings, is a product of brains. No brains = no person. Full stop. This is a fact. But religion doesn’t buy this exceedingly basic fact. For the religious a person, the conscious feeling experiencing “I” is some immaterial “soul”. Since this idea is a fiction, it leaves them free to make up any story they like about when a “soul” arrives on the scene, and about the significance of that soul, etc. This makes it not only difficult to argue with many religious people on this point, but often actually impossible, because they reject outright the scientific knowledge that would make such an argument possible. I see no way to convince my fundamentalist friends that an embryo isn’t a person because nothing I say about brains or organs or such matters to them. To counter their claim, I’d have to argue that it doesn’t have a soul, which is a bit like trying to argue with them about whether every murder creates a Horcrux (Harry Potter reference). There is no truth to the matter because it’s all made up. The only way to argue with such a thing is to get them to see that they are talking about fiction, which is roughly equivalent to getting them to abandon religion. A steep hill to climb.
I expect you’re right and nothing would convince them otherwise. But if you want to try a soul-based argument, you can point out that the ‘soul at conception’ model does have some pretty horrific consequences. Namely, tens or hundreds of millions of ‘humans’ dying every year due to miscarriages. Depending on what rate of miscarriage you want to believe (its hard to tell), this number could be as high as 30-50% of every ‘human’ ever conceived. On top of that, in many pregnancies twinning (and n-tuple duplication) occurs but one of the n-tuple zygotes will absorb the rest before development really gets going. For us normal people, this is no big deal, just part of the messy biological process. But add in the soul, and you have to contend with the fact hat this means many of us killed and ate our ‘siblings’ while still in the womb.
These things make no sense. It makes no sense to claim miscarriages mean 50% of all ‘humans’ ever to have existed died before birth and it makes even less sense to say that many of us ‘committed’ manslaughter and cannibalism in the womb because one zygote absorbed another. Those labels apply to the actions of humans, yes, but are a very bad fit for the actions of zygotes. Why are they a bad fit? Because fundamentally we recognize that zygotes are not people.
The miscarriage argument is useful for increasing cognitive dissonance. It’s not decisive, of course, because all of that falls into the hands of God. God can kill how ever many he wants for his own mysterious purposes. Or maybe God knows which fertilized eggs aren’t viable and doesn’t drop in a soul to begin with? Or maybe this is where angles come from? Any story will do… it’s all fiction.
As I mention in a post below, though, I do see signs that they suffer some cognitive dissonance on this idea of souls-in-embryos, or even fetuses. For one, while their Facebook memes suggest abortion is equivalent to the Holocaust, their actions tell a different story. There are no work strikes, or riots. In my mother’s church of 1000 people there are maybe two or three couples who have adopted any children, and some of those out of infertility, even though there are dozens of couples with children of their own. Would you really stand buy while children are bing mass murdered and not adopt a few to save them? So, clearly, in some sense they don’t REALLY believe what they are saying. Either that or they are more morally bankrupt than I imagined, but I think it is the former.
This is really why secularism has any hope at all. If any religious person really believed their religion the way they believe, say, that they won’t get paid if they don’t show up to work, it would be hopeless to argue with them. Fiction is just too malleable. It’s only because they suffer cognitive dissonance that they have a hope of escaping the delusion.
by
If pregnancy is truly a minor inconvenience, and abortion a holocaust, as they claim, then why are pro lifers not rushing to gestate snowflake babbies?
https://www.nightlight.org/snowflakes-embryo-donation-adoption/
And why isn’t there a bigger push to criminalize IVF?
The responsibility argument is one of their faves. If a woman chooses to have sex, to ‘force a babby into existence’, then she has a moral duty to care for it. Well, does this not apply to IVF? So, my new question is along the lines of ‘would you support legislation which, tomorrow, forced women to have all of their excess IVF embryos implanted. If she refuses, you tie her down and forcibly implant. Or, alternatively, if the embryos die after 10+ years in storage, you charge her with killing her child through neglect’
And yes, if pregnancy is truly a minor inconvenience, then forcibly implanting a woman with 20 embryos over a 10 – 20 year period, 2-3 per year, should NOT be a problem. Especially if they are 1) real people for sure 2) the woman has a ‘moral duty of care’ to fulfill. Jut as she would with a newborn.
Predictably, they refuse, in every case, to continue to talk to me about IVF. Because it’s about teh s3x, and not actually saving precious life.
Perhaps we should shorten our abortion arguments to: “So… how many children have you adopted to save them from being murdered?” One in a hundred will say, “One, or two”. For the rest we can just say, “So, you’re not telling the truth when you say you think it is murder, are you?” or “You’re a horrible person to stand by while children are being murdered.” And call it quits.
Sad to say, their inaction isn’t really a sign of insincerity. The holocaust example is instructive; while France and the low countries certainly resisted the Nazis, few people took in Jews. Of course that’s in large part because of the potential lethal consequences of getting caught, but the Milgram experiments showed that even with a minimal penalty of ‘social disapproval,’ only about 10% of people are willing to buck society and actually do something about a perceived evil.
Fundie Christians aren’t any different than the rest of us when it comes to Milgram-described tolerance for perceived evil, so if the fundie Christians you know of are adopting at about a 10% rate, I’d say their population is just standard human in terms of its dedication to righting perceived wrongs.
All right, I am totally dominating this thread so I will shut up for a while, but I quickly want to share this comment made by a friend of mine. She looked into embryo wastage, and came up with this brilliant post.
Even better, a sizable number, maybe up to 40-50% of lost zygotes, are actually normal and could possibly have been born. So the “not people” excuse just plain doesn’t work, even aside from the noxious ableism.
From Early Embryonic Development: An Up-to-Date Account:
PROF. SANDEL: So if we take the 7-day stage, [the human embryo loss rate is] 60 percent. The 80 percent [loss rate] is if you go back to the moment of fertilization. But if you take just starting at the 7 days, there’s 60 percent rate of natural loss. And of those 60 percent that are lost from the 7-day stage, what percentage of those have abnormalities or defects such that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to be born?
DR. OPITZ: I would say somewhere around 50 to 60 percent and mind you, many of these are empty sacs, tiny, tiny stunted little embryos, but when you culture the sacs you find a chromosome abnormality, even though the embryo has vanished already.
PROF. SANDEL: So of the 60 percent that are lost at the 7-day stage, 40 to 50 percent did not contain defects or abnormalities, could have been born?
DR. OPITZ: Right.
I had a hunch and looked up some numbers, and you know what other place had comparable death rates? Auschwitz. According to this source, at least 1.3 million people were sent to the death camp and about 1.1 million were murdered. That’s a death rate of up to 84%, which is about the natural rate of human embryo loss due to chromosome abnormality and subsequent miscarriage, according to my calculations from the earlier post. This is without induced abortion, which adds another 3.2% to the loss rate–paltry compared to the slaughter wreaked by nature.
War casualties don’t even compare. Belarus lost 25% of its citizens during World War II and this is called “astounding devastation” for good reason. In the Civil War, where the United States lost more people than in any other conflict, the chance of death by combat for soldiers was 6.7%.
Human reproduction is far deadlier for human organisms than war. It is naturally as deadly as a death camp where humans are deliberately and systematically exterminated on an industrial scale. So how is reproduction defensible on any level if you think fertilized eggs are tiny little babies?
That is not only horrible, it makes no effing sense. If the woman aborted her baby, then obviously a child can’t be born and can’t be murdered. Or maybe she meant the availability of legal abortion will make the woman likelier to murder her other children, or will contribute to a social atmosphere or legal regime more permissive toward infanticide? None of which she can give any evidence for, naturally, because she needs no evidence to slander women who get abortions.
I’ve been thinking about Dee’s assertion that the uterus is a home for babies and that is its only function, and it occurred to me that–naturalistic fallacy aside–this is plainly untrue. In fact, looking at statistics it’s clear the main function of the uterus is to kill, not nurture, human organisms. Pro-lifers say zygotes are also babies; well, the womb rejects 80% of them, over twenty times as many as abortions do. Of the 20% that are retained, another 15-20% (an additional 3-4% of the total) will be miscarried, mostly due to chromosome abnormalities that make development impossible.
Of the 16% that remain, about half are unwanted and about 40% of the unwanted pregnancies will be aborted. That means about 3.2% of fertilized eggs will grow to be deliberately aborted, about on par with the lower estimate of miscarriages.
Adding the numbers together, that means of 100 fertilized eggs around 13 will develop to be born. If induced abortion were not available, around 16 will be born.
That’s not a home, that’s a charnel house.
So even at “natural” rates, assuming no statistically significant numbers of women will ever try and succeed at inducing abortions, the uterus has a “success rate” of 16% as a baby incubator. If its goal is to nurture babies, starting from fertilized egg onward, it is one of the least efficient organs ever evolved. In Dee’s terms, if the uterus is an organ meant to nurture babies, then it is a failure. And since Dee believes childbearing is what makes women unique, then she must necessarily say women are evolutionary failures.
The alternative explanation is that selection is a far bigger part of the uterus’s function than gestation is. Other aspects of the female anatomy, such as the uterus’s extreme hostility to sperm, supports this idea, as does the fact that the background for much of our evolution–mobile hunter-gatherer societies–can’t support multiple small children in close succession. Seen this way, human females are not evolutionarily failed incubators–they are extremely successful and effective selectors of young.
The uterus didn’t evolve to welcome all babies but to choose the fittest babies for survival and, conversely, kill those that don’t make the cut. This makes sense given that human pregnancies are among the most resource-intensive and dangerous in the animal kingdom: It doesn’t make sense to use all those resources and take all that risk for babies that are unlikely to survive.
If the uterus is primarily an organ for selection, induced abortion doesn’t go against the natural fuction of the uterus–rather it enhances the selective function, much like glasses enhance vision. The woman’s higher brain functions know about additional situations that make the fetus unfit: Her social, psychological, and physical situation, not to mention fetal anomalies that the natural culling process can’t screen for but medical technology like ultrasounds can. Induced abortion allows these additional considerations for selection to take effect, and selection is exactly what the uterus was evolved to do.
Dee and other pro-lifers may think it’s an injustice that the uterus kills so many babies. They may think the uterus should have evolved to nurture babies at a much higher rate. That’s just the way things are, though. Pro-choicers didn’t make it so. Roe v. Wade didn’t make it so. Nature made it so.
Is there a link for this Cindy?
Here is an article on it with the link to Dr. Opitz’ research
https://reason.com/archives/2004/12/22/is-heaven-populated-chiefly-by
https://bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu/pcbe/transcripts/jan03/session1.html
Thanks so much. 🙂
very instructive, thanks much for posting this.
And if no brain/mind = a person, then it should be murder to disconnect someone such as Terri Schiavo from her feeding tubes. Terri’s brain was gone, but her body lived on, because she had enough of the brain in place to still pump blood and breathe. And of course, it should also be murder to remove a parasitic twin.
Of course, they will reply to this speaking of the ‘potential’ of every zygote to have a brain. Because in the PL mind, potential = actual. At which point, I like to bring up the fact that we don’t kill Tay Sachs babies simply because they are terminally ill. And that if there is such a thing as an ‘inalienable right to life’. then that right should apply simply because of *what* the embryo IS – ‘a human being/person’ – and not due to the actions of third parties (having sex) or it’s potential.
And regarding the brain/body connection, for old time sake, I resurrect this classic quote. Enjoy.
In fact, this argument just begs the question because it assumes that one must have a brain to be able to think. But if supernatural beings exist, there is no reason to think that they must have a brain to be capable of thought. In order to prove there is no afterlife, you have to prove that there is no immortal soul. Incidentally, it is the soul that guides one’s development from fertilization. DNA contains all the information that the organism needs to develop, but there is nothing in the human being’s DNA to run the program. The soul is necessary for that. The brain connects the soul to the body, and if the brain is damaged then the soul can’t communicate properly. But the brain controls everything, so to say that just because we need a brain to think proves there is no afterlife is short-sighted, since our thoughts are obviously not confined by our brain. If our brain is damaged a certain way, we also cannot move our limbs. But it doesn’t follow from that that our limbs are the same thing as the brain. Plus, the fact that we have thoughts proves that the soul is separate from the brain. We can think about cars, but our brain does not become a car when we think about one.
Whose quote is that?
Clinton.
https://archive.is/sbJ0a
I have compiled a list of quotes from some of the nuttier pro lifers on that site. Perhaps I will share some in the future. We are talking triple facepalm. Perhaps even, all four limbs facepalm.
I have also been reading up on fetishes and paraphilia lately, and yes, childbirth and pregnancy fetishes do exist. Makes me wonder about some of these people. It really really does.
/armchair psychologist
I do not think so. Human life begins when you can function as a human. My children are not quite adults (<12 years) and I would hardly call them responsible enough to live a fortnight on this planet without my or other adult help. Rewind 10 years and I would call them sacks of screaming water. My cats were more pleasant than they were until they were about three and a half. (And some days the cats are still better).
Before my two kids, I held an inch long, grey mass, ~8 weeks old in my hands. Miscarried. It's functionality was completely linked to it's mother, with no more life associated to it than a lost finger nail.
The Holyhead- Dun Laoghire ferry has a reputation for transporting more people one way than the other, and probably some quite unpleasant nicknames.
And on the subject of unpleasant nicknames,
Time for a pint of “Mother’s Ruin” (gin, the cheaper the better. Or worse, depending on your point of view) and a few “accidental” falls down the stairs.
“acrania” – does that mean what it sounds like? Yes – failure of the flat bones of the skull to develop. Nasty. Development can go wrong so easily.
The rational (in the religiously poisoned sense of “rational”) response to cases like this would be to ban ultrasound investigation, so that there is then no reason to call for a troublesome challenge to the “laws of god” like this. (And the natural corollary to this is that industrial NDT inspection gear would be re-purposed, for both back street ultrasound and back street abortions.
In a related (well, biologically) move, a woman’s group in Britain is protesting about the tax on tampons and other “sanitary products” in Britain. Protesting in a visible, and for many, highly discomforting way. Quoth the ravens (harpies?) : “We know it was gross and uncomfortable for people to look at, but that was the point.”
Irish authorities tried to stop a girl from traveling to Britain to terminate an anencephalic fetus. Yes, brainless.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6618911.stm
Most of the pro lifers that I talk to do not think that brains and minds have any value. At least, that is what they say. By pro life logic, human organism = human being = person. So, if we take them at their word, genetically defective zygote and parasitic twins are 100% real people for sure. In fact, one young lady stated that an ivf scientist should go to prison for life if they dispose of a defective zygote. Because it is murder. But when it comes to parasitic twins, which are just profoundly disabled but still living fetuses, suddenly it is OK to kill kill kill. Why can a brainless defective zygote be regarded as a “real person for sure”, yet a parasitic twin not?
They’re thinking with someone else’s emotions (usually a spittle-lipped preacher-man, to mis-quote an old song) not with their brains. Well, metaphorically.
If you want to stir this particular hornet’s nest, you could remind them of the (alleged) Homo floresiensis, whose diminutive stature and particularly their tiny crania have lead to the claim that they’re actually pathological human fossils, not a distinct species. I haven’t heard the “pathology” thesis defended recently, so I guess that the idea is being quietly dropped in the absence of new material, but the suggestion has certainly been made.
That would stir several hornets nests – YECs vs OECs ; non-human ensouled beings (well, they used tools, so presumably had souls) … Yes, I can see that one being a nice logical hand grenade to toss into the room and then bolt the door until there’s only one survivor.
Some aren’t thinking at all. But some are thinking about “souls”. I have a very intelligent Catholic friend, a successful author even, who had a long discussion with me about abortion once. I thought she was buying what I was saying until, near the end, she said, “You focus on brains too much”. What should I focus on, I asked? “Souls”, of course.
And that’s how they think. The body is just a thing. But it is a thing that can “house” a soul. And whether or not you have a brain is irrelevant to whether you have a soul. A fertilized egg, for example, can have a soul. Of course it can… because the idea is made up. Lamp posts can have souls if they say so, because the idea of “soul” is completely disconnected from anything in the real world. Even as a fictional construct, the word “soul” lacks any sufficiently detailed definition that would admit examination even as an object of fiction. It is the hermetically sealed Deus ex machina of abortion arguments.
Of course, you are right to say “if we take them at their word”. As I have said before, they do not behave as thought they really believe embryos, or even fetuses, are people. Otherwise they would be adopting a lot more. There would be work strikes and mass demonstrations, even riots, until the mass slaughter ended. But instead all they do is elect blow hards and post Facebook memes. Maybe that is a sign of hope. Maybe part of them realizes that their position is not really real, not real enough to actually make ANY personal sacrifice for. Maybe they are in a state of cognitive dissonance, and so maybe they are reachable.
I have heard one coherent definition of soul and it traces back to Aristotelian metaphysics regarding form and matter. The matter makes your body, the form is the “soul.” Fine, I can accept this as a reasonable definition at the macroscopic level where we function. Everything, at bottom, is made up of the particles in the Standard Model, which make up atoms, which make up molecules, which make up compounds and so on until we have a person or a tree or a chair. It’s perfectly fine to describe these things using their names rather than trying to account for the precise layout of all their atoms. But, under this definition, everything has a soul.
There seems to be a massive disconnect between the Aristotelian definition and the notion that humans are uniquely endowed with a soul. If it’s unique, it can’t be the formal soul described above; if it’s not the formal soul described above, what the hell is it? This question is never answered coherently. Instead, there is much blathering about matter and form, how God will restore everyone to their prime form upon the resurrection, etc; But the point that everything has a soul is simply glossed over as is what “restoring a zygote” would mean. Usually this is addressed with something about “what that zygote would have been had it reached full potential.” Of course, that opens up numerous follow-up questions, not the least of which is “What is full potential?” How would this person even be recognized?
Ever since I started thinking about abortion, I’ve thought that, since the objections to abortion are almost entirely religious, that no country that has freedom of religion should be able to restrict abortion.
I cannot fathom why religions are allowed to claim the moral high round. This quote says it succinctly:
“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hi-jacking of morality by religion.” Arthur C. Clarke
I know this is very serious stuff, but unfortunately the main thing I took away was
“What, you prefer Black Books to Father Ted and The IT Crowd. Really?”
Sorry.
Yes, but mostly because I relate to Bernard Black’s humanity-hating, alcohol-swigging, book-inundated ways.
I’m very fond of the other two series as well, of course.
Love them all. there is such an element of hilarious absurdity to all three.
As an entirely practical way of showing distaste for Ireland’s barbaric abortion laws, one could toss a few bucks the way of Abortion Support Network (you can Google them), an English-based charity whose primary aim is to assist Irish women travelling to the UK for an abortion.
cr
This piece from the Guardian refers:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/31/abortion-ireland-northern-ireland-women-travel-england-amelia-gentleman
It seems the fact that Northern Ireland is dominated by Protestants who hate Catholics is no bloody use at all, from a woman’s point of view. NI is just as bad as Eire.
cr