Only a Potential Person?

 

Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

 

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes Too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World

Planned Parenthood: An Unmentioned Ethical Issue

In the wake of the Center for Medical Progress’s first two sting videos against Planned Parenthood, pro-lifers have focused mostly on the barbarism of crushing and crunching, and on the fact that the very utility of fetal liver, hearts, lungs and heads for medical research proves the humanity of the unborn. Ross Douthat, for example, wrote in the New York Times: It’s a very specific disgust . . . a fetus’s humanity . . .

Though those points are well-taken, it seems that many of the public are inured to barbarism; and even pro-choicers who are willing to grant the humanity of the unborn offer some justifications for a right to dispatch those humans beings that, if not quite convincing, are fairly strong. And if the baby is going to die anyway, the argument goes, why not harvest from it anything useful.

But “if the baby is going to die anyway” is where the argument for a market in the body parts of those aborted babies (genteelly referred to as “fetal tissue”) hits an ethical snag, unless one considers abortion to be 100% innocuous. Because if it is permissible to market any valuable commdodity, the production of that commodity will be incentivized. Abortion will be incentivized for anyone who wants the commodity and anyone in a position to share in the profits from the sale to the person who wants the commodity. Those in a position to share in the profits from the sale might include the pregnant woman herself, her boyfriend, her abortionist, various middlemen, and even, for instance, suppliers of operating tables and sopher clamps to the abortionist.

As the most glaring example, a woman might go into business getting pregnant purely for the sake of aborting and selling the body parts. Yet if abortion is 100% innocuous, there should be no objection to such farming entrepeneurship.

Even many who believe that a woman should have a legal choice to abort consider abortion to be in some way undesirable, hence the laws that prohibit profiting from the sale of fetal tissue, and the strong support those laws have historically had. And in the wake of the videos, pro-lifers have of course not failed to reiterate such considerations. [Edit: In a 2016 Washington Post article, David Daleiden himself was quoted as saying, “The big problem, when we talk about the harvesting and sale of fetal tissue from abortion, is you’re creating a market. You’re introducing this extra new level of demand for abortion.”]

Unmentioned Issue

However, there is also a dimension of this ethical issue that I have not yet seen mentioned. For anyone who wants the commodity and anyone in a position to share in the profits from the sale, not only will individual abortions be incentivized, but abortion rights will also be incentivized. Many Americans already support abortion rights, but not many support late-term abortions. Yet the more gestated an unborn baby is, the more valuable its parts. Suppose that StemExpress is allowed to profit, and suppose they are receiving parts orders that they can’t fill. They will feel that as a loss and will have an incentive that there be more abortions, and will be more incentivized to lobby against abortion restrictions, especially restrictions on late-term abortions, which are solid gold to them. Tissue researchers as well will have an incentive that there be more abortions and will be more incentivized to lobby against late-term abortion restrictions. Abundant abortions will ensure that good-quality brains are always available at a cheap price.

If profit is permitted, I don’t see how any amount of regulation will successfully eliminate all the incentivizing of abortion and of abortion-rights lobbying. Even many pro-choicers admit that a moral issue exists, and would not want our laws on abortion to be determined by money.

And if trafficking is permitted even without profit, as under the present legal regime, there will be a black market. Even if trafficking is prohibited, there will be a black market, but the black market, and the consequent incentivizing, could at least be minimized by banning the trafficking.

So it would be misleading to say, “The fetus is dead anyway.” It is dead at that point, yes, but some of them would not have been killed in the first place.

P.S.: To try for a broader perspective, though, perhaps no one said it better than a fooball player, Ben Watson of the New Orleans Saints:

As horrific as it is, the issue isn’t really the sale of human parts. It’s the legal practice that allows this to even be a possibility. Killing children and simply discarding the leftovers is not any more acceptable than profiting off of them.

Aug. 13, 2015 update: Now the Center for Medical Progress has released its sixth video, featuring, like an earlier video, Holly O’Donnell, a former employee of StemExpress, one of the middlemen companies, or “biomedical tissue procurement companies,” who receive body parts from Planned Parenthood and sell them to researchers. In this video, O’Donnell says that some of PP’s patients at heart do not want to go through with the abortion. O’Donnell says that she would not pressure women to get abortions, and that if they did proceed, she would not pressure them to consent to the use of the child’s body parts if they were reluctant. But she says her StemExpress supervisors were unhappy with her about such lack of drive. She recalls that one time when she let a woman decide against abortion, a supervisor told her, “That was an opportunity you just missed.” O’Donnell continues, at 8:35,

Like, I’m not going to tell a girl to kill her baby so that I can get money. And that’s what this company does. Straight up, that’s what this company does.

Aug. 18, 2015 update: Another mechanism by which the incentivization of abortion can take its eventual toll: a woman named Nancy Tanner has come forward with this account of a mechanism that actually came into play and caused her to have an abortion she would not otherwise have had —

Lawmakers recognized that the option to consent for fetal tissue donation was something that should only be offered AFTER the woman had already consented to have the abortion. They recognized that to tell a woman that is still “on the fence” about having an abortion that she would be doing something good for the advancement of medicine by donating her fetal tissue, is akin to providing her with a moral incentive to terminate her pregnancy.

Nancy claims she was given that incentive.

Women with unwanted pregnancies looking for a moral excuse to abort will have their excuse.

© 2015

 

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World

What Did Cecile Richards Apologize For?

Deborah Nucatola, a high-level Planned Parenthood official, was caught in an undercover video discussing how they crush unborn children in one way during a normal abortion, but crush them in a different way when they have to fill an order for certain organs — livers, hearts, lungs or intact heads. Meanwhile, she eats lunch and sips wine. After the abortion, Planned Parenthood ships the orders to research companies or the middlemen thereof, receiving compensation in order to break even or possibly “do a little better than break even.”

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, quickly apologized for Nucatola’s tone. To the public, what had been upsetting about the tone was the lack of compassion for unborn children. But what exactly, according to Richards, was wrong with the tone?

Richards said:

Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide. In the video . . . one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion. This is unacceptable, and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements.

The strange thing about this is that Planned Parenthood’s compassionate care, even as advertising, means compassionate care for the woman only. Little of what Nucatola said (except implicitly, perhaps, what she said about altering abortion procedures for the sake of better specimens, which is not a question of tone) reflects lack of compassion for the woman. Americans were shocked by the lack of compassion for the child, not any lack of compassion for the woman, and Richards knew that.

Richards seems to have been trying to mollify that outrage about the child. And yet she could not say, “one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect compassion for the child,” because that is not how they frame abortion. She may have considered saying “one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect compassion for the clump of tissue,” but understood how that was problematic. So she said —

Our top priority is the compassionate care that we provide [to women]. In the video . . . one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect . . . compassion [for the unborn child, she wants the public to understand, so that they will feel mollified — but she leaves “child” unspoken so she can’t be held to account for admitting that there is a child]. This is unacceptable . . .

— apparently hoping that the short attention span of her listeners would not allow them to notice the segue.

© 2015

 

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World

The Ghost in the Garbage Can

 

Courtesy of Life Matters Journal. This poem was published, with an illustration, in Volume 4 Issue 3 — February 2016.

 

The Ghost in the Garbage Can

There’s a dumpster near my place
That smells bad
But it’s shorter to the 7-11.

When it’s dark
Misting a little
I hear a voice.

“I was small.
I was out of sight.
And I wasn’t very smart.”

It’s always the same.

“I was small –
Like our earth from a space probe.
Invisible –
Like your hopes when you’re deep asleep.
Not smart –
So what can I say?

“I wish – well –
If I had of been big
Like Serena Williams.
They wouldn’t have messed
With Serena Williams.”

It was fading.

“If I’d had some money…”

I rubbed the mist on my face
To come to my senses.
I always hear that voice in the garbage can.
That choice in the garbage can.

Acyutananda
28 April 2015

© 2015

Abortion as Problem-Solving through Might Makes Right

 

Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

 

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

Evolution, and the Humanizing and Uplifting Effect on Society of a Commitment to the Unborn

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes Too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World