On Abortion and Ethics

I recently made a comment at the Raving Atheist concerning my view on the wrongness of state abrogation of liberty. The crux of the discussion was in relation to abortion, and whether or not our ethical views justify a legal restriction of individual freedom. Obviously they do when the freedoms or rights of other citizens are infringed. Animal rights and abortion rights are tricky, because animals and fetuses are not citizens, but can be considered legal property. Jim Brennan followed up with a question:

nsfl,
So, for the record, you also don't think the State has any grounds to abrogate my liberty to douse my 4 year old beagle in gasoline and light him up in my front yard to make S'mores?

As you might suspect, I strongly disagree, and laid out my reasoning why below. Before getting into that, it should be noted that I had a letter to the editor on abortion published in our campus newspaper a while back, and made some clarifications on it here.

First, let me say that although I think this is a very complicated ethical issue in concerning late-term abortions...but not terribly complicated in legal terms. Let me outline the premises of interest [I highlighted the key terms to consider]:

P1) fetuses are conscious creatures/animals
P2) abortions cause a high degree (possibly described as "cruel and unusual") of pain and suffering to the fetus
P3) abortions are unnecessary (and/or are "trumped" by some "higher necessity/right"), and are not justifiable as a "lesser evil" in terms of causing pain to a fetus to avoid risking the life of a mother
P4) torture is the unnecessary inflicting of pain and suffering to a conscious creature, and abortions constitute torture
P5) the state has the right to outlaw torture, abrogating the liberty of an individual to torture other animals
C1) the state has the right to outlaw abortions, from P4 and P5

I think that the state has the right to ensure that we don't torture our property, when our property is a conscious creature [this is implicit in the usage of the term "torture"]. This seems to be the basis of civil law regarding animal rights. You asked me to clarify this point, so I am attempting to do so, in saying that I do not disagree with P5. I will explain how C1 does not follow because P1-P3 are far from proven, and thus P4 is where the "buck stops".

P1) You asked about setting a beagle ablaze. An obvious and demonstrable difference between dogs and fetuses involves their state of self-awareness. Dogs qualify as conscious creatures. In setting a snail ablaze, although it writhes and we project onto it our own mind and the awareness of the agony, the writhing of the snail is the involuntary response of its biochemical signals. There is no conscious brain to be aware of pain or suffering. You obviously chose a beagle for this reason--they have a conscious, self-aware [however limited] ability to experience pain and suffering.

Does P1 hold for (even a late-term) fetus? Although the nervous system development is capable of pain response at 28 weeks, this does not imply consciousness. There are some strong arguments that self-awareness doesn't begin until some time after birth (during the first year of infancy). Medical science cannot demonstrate consciousness, just as the writhing of the snail does not indicate a conscious mind, but it does demonstrate the presence of a complex central nervous system (CCNS). The assertion that consciousness can exist without a CCNS is entirely without merit, and is akin to my asserting that a teapot orbits a planet in a galaxy at the edge of the universe: completely unfalsifiable. Therefore, we will consider only those fetuses with a CCNS as capable of consciousness, which occurs only fairly late in the third trimester (for the sake of argument, let's say past month 6).

Therefore, we can prune this discussion down to considering the only possible fetuses with a potential self-awareness as those in the late term, and abortions of those fetuses. In lieu of scientific or philosophical support of your premise (that they are conscious), let us just consider this premise unsupported.

P2) We must establish the degree of pain and suffering involved in an abortive procedure, versus what we consider "normative" or "allowable" thresholds. Does the "pain and suffering" of an abortion compare to, say, a light pinching of an infant? It is obvious that the degree of pain and suffering experienced is important. We do not prosecute mothers who pinch their baby's bottoms, or give them a little spank on the butt, as though it is child abuse, until it passes a certain threshold of pain and suffering. Let us then consider only the procedures which may cause the most pain and suffering: D&E skull decompression procedures (aka "partial birth abortions"). Is a D&E procedure "torture"? Torture involves an extended period of pain and suffering, relative to "normal" pain. Is the D&E "protracted/extended", as it occurs in seconds? Obviously not.

This procedure has been refined and designed to quickly and mercifully terminate the life of the fetus. It is not a protracted and excruciating procedure for the fetus. The brain tissue is removed within milliseconds after the puncture, which means little or no pain is felt. I don't know if you're aware of this, but you don't have nerves inside your brain. IOW, you can't "feel" pain inside your brain. The skull puncture is the only arguable infliction of pain, and considering that loss of the entire brain immediately follows, the ability to perceive and endure this pain is much abbreviated. It is important here to note that football should be outlawed (and a whole lot of other things, too) if we want to prevent all degrees of pain and suffering from being inflicted. Yes, shades of gray appear in determining the degree, but this is an inescapable part of life--in setting thresholds and limits which sometimes elude facile demarcation. The same could be said of child neglect. Do we charge a parent with neglect as soon as its child's stomach growls [ie it hasn't been fed for long enough to develop hunger]? We all recognize the need to arbitrate degrees of "badness" and "goodness".

Not only is P2 unsupported, it is contradicted by known medical science--the D&E procedure described cannot be said to cause extended or intense pain due to its design as a terminative procedure.

P3) Now, let's say I grant yet another premise to you for the sake of argument and say, "okay, it's conscious, AND the pain is intense...cruel and unusual, etc.": it still doesn't compare to your analogy, because torture implies that we inflict a pain which is otherwise unnecessary. The necessity of abortion would have to be another premise of yours, one which denies that the mother's right to life [should her life be endangered] is somehow less than the fetus'. Conversely, there is no compelling reason for you to set your dog on fire. If you can't feed your dog, for instance, or take proper care of it, it isn't a risk of your life or an unnecessary burden to require that you take it to an animal shelter, where it can be adopted, or humanely put down if necessary. If your dog has killed someone, then you or the state have the right and the obligation to prevent that from recurring by ending the dog's life. However, you are again faced with the necessity of torture versus allowing the state, or your own shotgun, to do this job without torture.

Conversely, bearing children is an inherently dangerous, arguably-life-threatening, and painful burden upon a woman. If we deny her the right to determine whether or not she must go through this, we are denying her, potentially, the right to avoid intense pain and/or possibly death. In this sense, we often forget in the abortion arguments that intense pain is a given--it is a question of who will feel it [see P2]. Perhaps one could argue that the protracted and quite coherent suffering of childbirth does not compare to the relatively fast and less aware suffering of an aborted fetus. It seems, though, unnecessary here--P3 is falsified.

You thus have no need to torture an animal, ever. The same question of necessity does not hold in most of these situations with D&E procedures. Late-term abortions are nearly always the result of medical complications that endanger the life of both mother and child [hydrocephalus, etc]. This is certainly a compelling reason and interest: to preserve the mother's own health and safety. Abortions "of convenience" in the late term have already been outlawed via the "partial birth abortion ban". Thus, in the only case where there is no demonstrable necessity for an arguably painful procedure upon an arguably conscious creature, your question about the state's abrogation of liberty has already been answered: the state has found it necessary to do so [whether you want to argue that they were right or wrong in so doing].

I find this troubling, considering that the late term abortions "of convenience" could still be arguably necessary from the perspective of the mother--it is much less likely that she will die, or suffer intense pain, via D&E, than via childbirth. We are denying her the right to choose this option.

Conclusion: It cannot be objectively demonstrated that P1-P3 are true, they can be shown to lack merit, and P3 is flatly falsified. .: P4 is false, and .: C1 does not follow.

Legally, individuals must retain the ability to make decisions that affect their own body, health and safety, without state abrogation of that choice. The slippery slope cannot even be allowed to begin here, because this is the state-enforced loss of rights over one's own body.

Personally, I consider late-term abortions which result from simple negligence and ignorance on the part of the mother unethical. Those women who have no necessity, financial, medical, or otherwise, to abort, and choose to wait until the third trimester (or late second) must be either stupid or reckless with their own bodies. Why in the hell couldn't she abort sooner? Why in the hell did she wait until the procedure became risky to her (D&E are fairly safe, but obviously carry more risk than early term abortions) and there is now an argument that she now is inflicting serious and otherwise unnecessary pain upon a conscious creature (granting your premise 1 and 2)? Thus, in my view, an argument can be advanced that she is acting unethically.

However, even in granting your premise 1 and 2 (which is quite generous), we still find that an abrogation of her rights here means that we tell her what she can and can not decide about her own body. The same is not true for a pet. There is no compelling legal interest on your part to kill animals. There is certainly no compelling interest on your part to torture them. The compelling interest in terms of law here are "where do the rights of the individual begin and end? does the individual have complete control over their own body?"

Thus, the question, "does the individual have complete control over their property [excepting their own body]" is a "no" already. Persons can have lawful control of property without entailing torture. That's already been decided, and you can read animal rights laws for the reasoning behind it. I am not sure if we can say that our children are our legal "property", but if we allow harm to come to our infant via neglect, we are held legally culpable for that as well. In this sense, negligence and reckless abandonment are further definitional constraints of what we can and cannot do, and can and cannot allow to be done to, our own property, if our children are legally considered our property.

In the case of animal rights, the question is only one of property--what we can do with what we own: can we torture our possessions? In the case of abortion, the question involves not only the liberty to torture or harm our property, but also whether or not individuals maintain absolute sovereignty over their own bodies. The Supreme Court decided, "yes." In my opinion, they decided correctly.
________________
Technorati tags: Philosophy, Ethics, Abortion