Jesse M. is relying on a good deal of assumptions that he brings to the argument. For one, the assumption that “organism” equals “being” or “animal.” One wouldn’t cut the paw off of a lion and then point to the paw and say, “There is a lion,” precisely because we are able to distinguish the attributes that make up a lion, of which paw is only one. Note that these attributes are objective. We don’t look at a lemur and say, “sharpen it’s claws a bit and give it some fangs and it could be a lion.” Which is to say, we don’t impose some generic attributes or subjective sense in our definition of “lion.”

The other assumption Jesse brings is a more common one, that being the confusion between stages of development and objective being. In some regards this is the whole defense of the “person” argument, in that one can arbitrarily draw a line through any stage of development and plant a flag that says “person” on one side of it. If “organism” though is a fuzzy concept (and it’s not, as any good dictionary will show – http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/organism) then the concept of “person” is nearly meaningless, except as a free-flowing line that some “people” can use to write off others.

Matt McIrvin’s suggestion, just above, has been addressed by Ponnuru (and others) on countless occasions. It is pointless to use spontaneous abortion or the failure of the zygote to implant in the uterine wall as an excuse for abortion. The difference is the deliberate act of ending life as opposed to the natural process. To paraphrase Ponnuru, the likelihood of the death of elderly people is quite high but that fact is not a moral reason to justify deliberately killing them.

Alara Rogers reiterates a common recent argument that equates abortion with removing a person who has been attached in some way to another person as a “life-support system” without their consent. There are several problems with this line of reasoning. First, in all cases of pregnancy outside of rape or incest, consent is implied. There is a difference between consent and “intent.” Pregnancy is a natural outcome of sex. Indeed, as the parents in a consensual relationship bear the responsibility for the creation of the unborn child, it is doubly treacherous for them to destroy that life simply because they made a mistake. If we are to somehow accept the strange notion that pregnancy is some kind of punishment, can we not at least accept that people should pay for their own mistakes, rather than their children.

Second, one must weigh the moral consequences of “separation.” If the cost of separation is the death of one of the individuals, it can legitimately be argued that cost is too high in comparison with the limits to freedom and the relative risks of carrying a child to term. We do not allow people to kill others for convenience or liberty for a number of reasons, but in this special case, the life of an individual depends upon it.

Third, gestation is a temporary situation. The moral conflict in the unlikely example Alara offers diminishes significantly if the person in question needs only support for a limited time.

Together, these objections severly outweight the notion that pregnancy (rape and incest objections excepted) is the result of someone being forced to become life-support. It is however notable that the unborn child becomes the “other” in this view, with no rights beyond the will and freedom of the individual who bears them.

Finally, Holbo adds “(Rather, it is to hinge on the question of what is a living human organism.) And I’m inclined to think that’s not just wrong but basically a non-starter. ”

There is no real answer here, other than a self-serving assertion that the position of the right to life based on “personhood” is superior to Ponnuru’s alternative position. However, Holbo offers no real substance, precisely because the argument from personhood is totally subjective, based on a collection of characteristics that shifts as it needs to in order to protect the “right” of choice. Ponnuru’s position is superior because it is an objective and fair approach to human rights. We call them human rights, instead of “person rights” for a reason.

If a zygote is a person with full human rights from the moment of conception, we have a much larger problem on our hands than the need to outlaw artificial abortion. The most common cause of death by a huge margin is then the natural failure of the zygote to implant in the uterine wall, and another major cause is spontaneous abortion of the fetus not long after. The majority of human beings, then—the majority of people with human rights—pass their entire brief existence as miniscule organisms almost invisible without a microscope and completely unknown to the outside world, and die in unseen accidents. Homo sapiens is primarily a tiny invertebrate organism, with a bipedal vertebrate phase that is all too atypical.

The implication is that we need to make major changes in society: the beings in whose interest society primarily has to be organized are not the ones we thought, since the normal state of a person is to be a defenseless zygote, and the minority of people who actually develop so far as to have such things as brains and skeletons are simply a lucky elite, in a relatively safe position, morally obligated to devote whatever effort they can to the well-being of their microscopic fellows. We need to reorganize most of our medical research into a vast project to prevent as many implantation failures and spontaneous abortions as possible. Currently, we don’t even note that most of these people exist—we can’t even tell when an egg gets fertilized until considerably after the fact, so something has to be done to change that state of affairs, presumably involving intrusive instrumentation to be implanted near the ovaries of every woman of fertile age (unless that would itself endanger the zygotes).

It might instead be easier to prevent this horrific death toll through the total prevention of conception in the first place, which I guess would imply that David Benatar’s proposal for wiping out the human species is not quite radical enough.

Wolves are much harder for humans to live with than domesticated dogs, and few people try.

If the words don’t mean anything to you then you can either answer at random or refuse to answer, depending on the test instructions and how carefully you want to follow those instructions.

For instance, the issue was raised that a human cannot live naked in the Arctic. Very true, but the alternative to living naked in the Arctic is not living in the stomach of a sentient polar bear who has loudly expressed that she does not want you there. It is living in non-sentient clothes in the arctic, or living in a non-sentient biome that is more hospitable to life. Likewise, the quadriplegic (in modern society, at least) has a wheelchair and does not require a human being to carry him around everywhere he goes… also, his ability to locomote doesn’t directly pertain to his ability to live.

A better analogy would be: A person suffers heart failure. There is no way to implant an artificial heart. The only way to save that person’s life is attach them to another person, who will pump the blood for them. If the person does not consent, is it moral to do that? What if the person didn’t consent but you attached the person with the heart failure anyway? Would it now be acceptable for the “heart donor” to detach the person with heart failure, even though doing so would kill them?

What if you woke up and found that your long-lost teenage son who you’d never met had needed this procedure done, so while you were sleeping someone came along and surgically attached you to him? You didn’t consent to his creation, although you did have the sex that caused it. You didn’t consent to being his life support. You caused him to exist by having sex, but you didn’t actively choose his existence and you never consented to being his life support. Now he’s attached to your back drawing off your blood supply until he’s strong enough to get a heart transplant. Of course by the time he is strong enough to do that you may possibly be suffering heart failure yourself, but that’s the price you paid for having sex fifteen years ago.

Would this ever be acceptable? Would it ever be acceptable to tell a man in this situation “You have no right to cut your teenage son off your back! He is a person and he deserves to live! You are totally selfish for wanting to have a life that doesn’t involve a human being being a physical parasite on your body! Your odds of heart failure are lower than his odds of death if you are separated, so if you want to remove him to save your own health or simply because you can’t go about the normal business of your life with a teenager attached to your back, you are prioritizing your convenience above his life!”

What if all the discussion about this situation centered around the teenage boy’s right to life, and no one ever brought up your right not to be the life support system for a kid you never met? And in fact you were told you were selfish for not wanting to be a life support system? Or angry, because you pointed out that in fact the real issue here is not whether the teenager deserves to live but whether you deserve to be forced to provide the heart that he needs for life?

If a person cannot live without another person providing their life support, physically, then they do not have the right to live without that person’s consent. I’m sorry, they don’t. It is actually a law in many states that hospitals, who only spend money to keep people alive, do not have to keep people on life support indefinitely when the money runs out. (In fact people in Texas who very much wanted to live were killed for this reason.) There is a good moral argument to be made for the idea that money can never be the reason for killing someone, but your body? Your health? Possibly your life? We don’t compel anyone to give up parts of their body, for any reason, so how can we compel anyone to be a life support system?

This is why I find any argument that centers on the personhood of the fetus pointless. It actually doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person or not. What matters is if the fetus’s human life support system wants to be their human life support system or not. Analogies to “masters didn’t care what slaves thought” are ridiculous because masters didn’t keep slaves alive; in fact the work the slaves did brought great benefit to the masters, whereas the only benefit anyone gets from pregnancy is emotional. (I say this as someone who has voluntarily had two kids. I’m not knocking the emotional value of having a baby… but aside from being adorable bundles of love, babies do not do jack for you.) In fact the implication that the idea that the woman’s opinion re the fetus is more important than the fetus’s opinion is equivalent to the master’s opinion being more important than the slave’s opinion is offensive, for two reasons: fetuses don’t have opinions, because they can’t think, while slaves do; and if there is a master/slave relationship between a mother and a fetus, it goes the other way around. The mother is temporarily enslaved to the needs of her fetus.

If we had a system of jurisprudence that routinely demanded that parents give up their kidneys for their children, that people who cause car accidents be forced to donate organs to the victims of said accidents, and that men who rape women and get them pregnant be forced to donate their organs to the mother so she does not suffer poor health outcomes from the pregnancy, then it might make sense to discuss the personhood of the fetus. But our legal system does not ever compel you to give up parts of your own body to keep another alive.

(BTW, the analogy to the draft was a good one but more comparable to rape than forced pregnancy. If you are drafted, you may be forced to fight in a war, and if forced to fight you may have to kill and you may die. You’re not, however, directly being forced to keep anyone alive; you’re forced into committing actions with your body that you may find immoral, distasteful, or mentally destructive, and you may suffer permanent physical harm or death. I consider the draft to be the state-sanctioned rape of men and oppose it for the same reasons that I oppose rape and forced pregnancy. But when we talk about the draft no one actually forgets in the discussion that men, who might die, are what we are talking about. This is more similar to rape, where we never forget that we are talking about women who were raped (although we often forget that someone actually raped them, and simply forget to talk about the rapist at all), than abortion, where the right’s favorite tactic seems to be to forget that the woman is there at all and only talk about the fetus.)

It’s a questionnaire. You say what you want, completely independent of how you’d know whether you got it.

Would you rather have a President who gives you a big war, or a President who gives you a big recession? You can make your choice on a questionnaire without any way to guess which candidate will do which.

We often argue government policy without consulting those who’re most affected. We argue Welfare without consulting anyone who is on welfare, we argue criminal justice without consulting any criminals, we argue what to do about iran without consulting any iranians including the iranian government, etc. (How do we make the iranians do what we want without talking to them? Pretty much only by punishment, right? Probably have to attack them….)

Once you decide that women who want abortions are criminals—intentional murderers—then of course you won’t want to consult them about abortion. You’ll only want to consult women who want to prevent abortion. And there are pretty many of those, for whatever reason.

My wife says she would not get an abortion for any reason at all. I have to respect that and hope she’ll change her mind if it’s really necessary. She gets disgusted at the idea, and she doesn’t want it to be illegal for the very unfortunate people who need to make that choice.

I figure, in the long run people who reduce their own genetic contribution to the population are their own punishment. Let them. I quarter-seriously suggest allowing abortion up to the age that children are economicly self-supporting. If Bush’s mother had aborted him at, say, age 30, when it was clear what she was getting, we’d all be better off.

And assuming that dogs can be independent-minded, and relate to their owners as a friend and an equal, is this incompatible with being extremely loyal and not warming up quickly to strangers? Could not a dog, by independent thought, arrived at the political position of extreme loyalty and suspicion of strangers? Perhaps the dog concluded it is better to only offer the paw of friendship once someone has proven themself, and then stick to said person through thick and thin, rather than have a swarm of shallow friends of unproven worth?

Personally, when it comes to dog breeds, I prefer mutts as my vet relative says they tend to be healthier and more intelligent.

Also I agree with her comment that you can’t just say, “All fetuses will, if not aborted, inevitably become persons” because it’s not that easy – as if the woman were an E-Z-Bake Oven. Even for the most wanted baby in the world, things go horribly awry and the woman miscarries, or even worse, has no choice but to abort – whether it’s to save her own life or because the child is no longer viable. So we don’t really have the luxury of looking at the subject of abortion or fetal personhood as this philosophical problem with no real-life consequences.

I’m not arguing that men should have no say in the discussion (I’m talking about discussion, not law) because they’re men, but that you should be aware that it’s not directly your business, and so you’d better pay attention to the people whose business it is. In particular, trying to “clarify” the issue of abortion by clarifying the woman right out is doin’ it Rong.

We collect taxes unevenly and we have big disagreements about what “even” means. We like to collect “sin” taxes, from people who do things we don’t much approve of—alcohol, tobacco, etc.

And the people who feel they’re being unfairly treated naturally squawk about it.

Small business owners naturally complain about government regulation and taxation. They have to spend lots of time dealing with government when they could be doing business. Criminals complain about how unfair the system is but nobody has any sympathy for them because they broke the law. So they deserve to be raped in prison.

Of course there’s some attempt to be fair. Or at least to get the same amount of squawking on both sides. But fetuses don’t get any say in it, so self-appointed spokesmen stand up for them, and who can say how well they do? Not the fetuses.

We generally say that every interested citizen should have the right to lobby for his position on any legislative proposal. Why not, after all? The one big exception is that criminals get no say at all in what criminal law ought to be. People figure that if they’re criminals they get no rights.

Saying that men should have no say in abortion law because they’re men is like saying that middle-class people should have no say in taxes on the rich, or that civilians should have no say in military spending. That just isn’t the way we do things.

I can’t think of any reasonable definition of “organism” in terms of functions like the ones you describe which would lead us to conclude that the egg cell to suddenly converts from non-organism to organism at the moment of conception.

Recently a family member was admitted to hospital and had a teratoma removed. As is my wont I googled, both regular Google and Images. Holy-moly. Some of these creatures are unbelievably weird. Apparently the random stem-cell development often results in a few neurons added to the mix, and they’ve even had some of these tumours respond to stimulus, I believe. Then there’s the hair and teeth and everything else. Until the 60s, the Roman Catholic church required these things be baptised.

http://www.geocities.com/hotsprings/falls/7780/images/teratoma.html

I couldn’t help thinking of the standard “pro-lifer” talking point: “Do you know your baby has hair, teeth, fingernails…” And neurons as well. Fascinating (and not a little creepy). Where would a teratoma sit on the human/not human continuum, since it’s clearly made up of human stem cells, is alive, and some are capable of response? It can never develop into a full human being. But “pro-lifers” wouldn’t abort an ancephalic foetus either, so what’s the difference?