Many, many people (including me) support the availability of abortion even though they dislike it very much and wouldn't choose it for themselves. This is because women will put themselves into extremely dangerous situations in order to get an illegal abortion. They have since the beginning of time, for whatever reasons seem important enough to them.

I hate abortion-- I think it is awful. I wouldn't have chosen it for myself. But i will not agree to forcing a young woman to put her own head on the chopping block in order to solve what she thinks is an untenable situation.

I cannot get out of my head the images of women who died as the result of a botched abortions. If anyone has known a desperate friend who is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, it is truly harrowing to think such a person may be forced to give birth.

Megan isn't the first to make the slave-fetus analogy though; years ago, this analogy was made by an African American pro-lifer (whose name I forget).

Let me just add that what we're really fighting for is not full personhood for the unborn, but just the bare minimum. Nobody's asking for the unborn to hold property, enter into contracts, be taxed, etc. What we're saying is that really the most basic right anybody can have, the one without which all other rights are meaningless, is the right not to be killed. If society still lets people kill you and suffer no consequences (or even be paid for it out of the public coffers), then you're lower than a dog.

Also, you want to fix this:

Whereas the fight against abortion [not slavery] begins with pro-lifers asserting the rights of embryos, the fight against slavery doesn't begin with the abolitionists, but with the Africans themselves who resisted.

lebecka, don't you think that it's central to the debate, because some people think embryos at any stage are equivalent to you or I? Or is it irrelevant because you think it's obvious that they are not? I thought that was essentially what this was all about. (Although, the anti-abortion rhetoric can tend to include demonization of any woman who seeks an abortion, as if it's a frivolity.) If the fetus or embryo IS a person, then it would have rights which are not necessarily subordinate to the mother's own rights. I'm not really sure it makes sense to consider a fertilized embryo as a person who is being murdered in an abortion, but it isn't obvious to me.

And finally - vocab alert! manumit. to emancipate from slavery. I have never, ever heard of this word before.

Which I would have thought was a Libertarian ideal. I guess I don't know that much about that philosophy. However, I am highly disturbed by Megan's logic that seems to justify murder in cases where individuals somehow think that their political views are not being heard by the government. At least that was how I read her argument. But I'm not a fan of Megan.

i realize that i've oversimplified the anti-abortion stance here, as per adamnvillani's comment - it's about some degree of personhood, but the point still stands.

In addition, the argument over slavery also involved the question "Does inequality between people justify slavery, even if we agree Blacks and Whites are not equal?" As you well know, not all abolitionists and free-soilers believed in racial equality. Lincoln himself stated that he believed the Black Man to be inferior to the White Man, yet insisted that inequality between people did not justify slavery. Lincoln even pointed out that since not all white people were equal, the logic of slavery advocates led to the conclusion that a superior white man had the right to enslave an inferior white man. He ndticed of course that pro-slavery advocates were not willing to accept this conclusion.

Right, but I'm not arguing that embryos don't have personhood--I'm arguing that the fight against slavery was not simply a fight for black personhood, and thus it's not a particularly useful analouge. In the post I point out that quite a few slaveholders believed blacks were people--albeit inferior people. That doesn't mean they thought they were wrong for owning them.

Not the same thing as far as I can tell. We can end slavery, but controlling one's own fertility is necessary for civilization. That's going to include people wanting to end pregnancies, and finding the means to do so, no matter what the law says. Even in Nicaragua, where doctors are forced to report women they *suspect* of having abortions, and those women can be jailed if they're found to have had one, women are still getting abortions, illegally, and putting their lives at risk to do so. That ought to tell the anti-choicers something, right there. Women are willing to risk dying rather than have to give birth sometimes.

But beyond that, removing abortion from the context of the US's history with contraception awareness and the law is a fools errand - we do live in a country where the people making the laws restricting abortion access are the same ones making the laws that remove contraceptive choices. You can't unplug the abortion issue from that. Even if there's a anti-choicer out there who claims to be "OK" with contraception like Sarah Palin, the anti-choice movement and ant-choice politicians are the ones who're by and large quashing efforts to make access birth control easy to get, free, and to educate people about it.

We seem to be getting away from the abortion-personhood debate here. which i'm rather weary of myself, although i wouldn't be if i strongly believed that life (not just technically but life as we know it, 'ensoulment') begins at conception. it's a mystery.. i guess i am almost necessarily intuiting this, but i just don't see it that way. we know that lots of fertilizations take place, lots of implantations on the uterine wall take place, without developing into what can be termed a pregnancy, that they fail and just get sort of washed out with the next menses, but does anyone consider this some great famine-level tragedy? that isn't really a strong argument, i know, it's just one piece of what makes me think the way i do on this. i gotta think on it some more.

But there is something important here. Ante-bellum Southerners understood the humanity of their slaves but enslaved them anyways. Literacy, for example, was legally restricted. I've wondered about the logic of such laws -- if slaveowners believed there was an "inferior race", then the inferiority of that race obviates the need for antiliteracy laws. I mean, we don't have to pass laws banning literacy for dogs, cats, or wombats.

I didn't think it through to the conclusion. Now I understand. Obviously there's no justification for slavery. Case closed long ago. But those who sought to justify it using variations of "the inferior race" and "people in their proper place" arguments CLEARLY knew they were spewing BS because of the place in which they lived. Blacks married, were baptized, gave gifts, became Christian, sang spirituals, etc, as part of the ethos of the South. Everyone knew.

I honestly didn't think I could feel even worse about slavery. Now I do. Stupid me.

they knew that they were people, alright. people you could have people-sex with, not bestiality-sex.

they were just people you could treat any way you wanted.

thanks for this post, tnc, it makes an excellent point about why abortion and slavery really are not very useful analogues of each other.

That would be a side-step of this particular debate, although I think it would be more important, and would involve some of the stuff that the culture-war over abortion is about - women's sexuality, societal 'standards' of sexual behavior, the desire of some people to control and limit that behavior in a way that walks back a lot of the changes that have taken place in the past few decades here, etc. When we get to where pregnancies *actually come from*, the debate tends to get a bit out of control.

The thing is, they don't accept the idea that there's a moral difference between an embryo and an adult human. So yes, pro-life vigilantes do believe they have (former) embryos raiding with them. There are also at least a couple of people within the pro-life movement who were children of "failed abortions" - they survived the procedure. Gianna Jessen is probably the most prominent of these.

QFT

we all know that the constitution was the result of some hard fighting between pro- and anti-slavery factions at the convention.

the pro-slavery factions eventually got their way, enshrining their language in several places in the constitution, e.g. article I section 2 (the 3/5 compromise), article I section 9 (safeguarding the slave-trade until 1808), article IV section 2 (the run-away slave provision).

in all of these places, slaves are referred to, euphemistically, as "persons".

and that's how the **pro-slavery** people referred to them. that was the language that **they** insisted on.

there was no debate about the person-hood of slaves. that is a fantasy brought to you by the anti-abortion industry.

I know this is assumed but I wanted to clarify anyway. "Some" should be understood before each of these examples, e.g.,

"Some" Slaves married.

"Some" Slaves and masters exchanged gifts on Christmas.

"Some" Slaves were allowed to hire themselves out and buy their own freedom, etc.

For those of us who havent studied antebellum slavery in depth.

If only most people thought this way, gay marriage would be legal.

It's the woman who is biochemically altered and her flesh fed upon. She shares her bloodstream, calcium is leached from her bones, her kidneys and thyroid stressed to possible permanent reduction of capacity, it goes on for months and ends with something we rightly call "labor". It's often life-threatening -- throughout history until about 100 years ago, childbirth was *the* leading cause of death for women of reproductive age. Women endure this to serve the needs of another.

If I were to inflict any of the these conditions upon a neighbor against her will -- if she didn't want to serve my needs in such a way -- we all know which of us any jury in the land say was the one being enslaved.

I think it was even more complicated than that. Recall Lincoln's argument that blacks are not equal to whites but are still deserving of basic human rights.

I've had a child. I've had a miscarriage. I've also had an abortion.

I've been thinking about this debate this week, especially since several of my friends have become pregnant. When I place my hands on a pregnant woman's belly, I feel somewhat possessive because she's bringing forth another member of my society, a person who may someday nurse me on my sickbed. It's an acknowledgement of the communal experience of procreation.

However, I ain't in that woman's drawers every month before that, when she's sloughing away her uterine lining (which may or may not have contained spontaneously aborted embryos). It's not my business to be in her fallopian tubes before the doctor removes her maladapted ectopic pregnancy that threatens to kill her. It's simply nothing to do with the rest of us until SHE makes her choice.

If dudes could get pregnant, this wouldn't even be a debate.

Until that fetus can survive outside the woman, it has no rights. Maybe science will come up with a way to diagnose pregnancy within days of conception and we could harvest the unwanted embryos and implant them into fecund Operation Rescue members. Until then...

It would be one thing if I were witness to a pro-life movement that was pro-life and pro-children in all aspects. But it is simply the best wedge issue conservatives have going, and they will milk their following on this issue for political advantage till the cows come home.

Here's the teachable comparison to slavery. Is is life altering work to bear a child inside one's body for nine months and then be default responsible for its raising for the next two decades? Would it be so if it was always from time immemorial to all future understanding be one particular group of humanity who is thus responsible? Then take it one step farther--do it all at the bottom of the economic food chain. The pro-life movement, by and large, is a pro-slavery movement upon whom women and those women who are poor will carry the burden.

I get the philosophical debates in the abstract, but legally...and I'm glad to debate this with anyone...legally "personhood" starts on your BIRTH day.

And that has nothing to do with Roe V Wade.

If I am a slave with an elderly master who would die without my labour, this does not mean that I have an obligation to continue to serve as his slave. I am a person, and I can choose what to do with my body and my labour, even if it means that another person will die. The analogy to a woman with a fetus feeding off of and growing inside her body is, I hope, clear: even if one accepts the personhood of a fetus (I don't, but that's a separate issue), enslaving women to serve as their incubators is indefensible.

That's the issue at the heart of this: not Roe, but Griswold. For men like Randall Terry, it's about controlling women's sexuality, not saving babies. He said back in the 1980s that if he was successful at banning abortion, Operation Rescue would turn its focus to banning all forms of artificial birth control with the exception of condoms, because that's the only method that cannot be used "in secret" by the woman (i.e. you may not know your wife is on the pill, but it's pretty difficult to have sex and not know you're wearing a rubber). Birth control that is used by men = biblically approved, birth control used by women = a sin.

Again: we are who we thought they were.

The argument gets even more complicated when the popular "rape or incest" clause is thrown in...so then abortion is murder, but it's ok to commit that murder if it was the result of rape or incest? Regular murders don't tend to work that way, noting importantly that murder is pre-meditated, and so is abortion. In fact, the only person I can really think of who was found innocent in rape situation is Dante Stokes, who gunned down a priest who had molested him. So taking this view, one is passively saying that abortion is less than murder.

The points you bring up to refute McArdle are very good points, but it bothers me that you have to argue on her ground--I know in this case you opted into this one, but I feel that the pro-life movement has really shaped how we talk about this issue. It's the same reason one can't be a "liberal" anymore--the right took that ground. Even now, I'm being very careful about what I write; every time this issue comes up, I feel like people are shocked by how pro-choice I am, even other pro-choice people.

Let's get one thing clear that someone else already mentioned, but I feel I have to mention for the aforementioned reason--no one likes abortion. People really don't like late-term abortion. However, reading the letters on Sullivan's blog, it's often not a matter of choice--how did we ever get to the point where women who are in a pregnancy that could very well kill them, a pregnancy of a child who has such a severe birth defects that they will likely die shortly after birth, is somehow a flippant murderer? Or in this case, how is that person equivalent to a slave owner?

I just think that in the end, Pro-Choice people may have conceded too much rhetorical ground. I don't even really see how this is a church issue, but that's beside the point, because we just can't win that fight. A child is something that forever changes one's life--and, though no one seems to want to admit this, it can be devastating for the woman giving birth to it. Furthermore, abortion will always happen. And if people want to see what the alternative is to safe, legal abortion, go see the brilliant Romanian movie "4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days." Absolutely terrifying.

I think that there's this whole other world of logic going on in other places, about the relationship between those who serve and those who are served. I don't really understand it, but it has to be there...how else to explain people living in such close quarters with each other, justifying allowing this young girl's world to be made entirely of serving other people?

Slavery in the U.S. was just one manifestation of it, but it's still happening in other places, and I think it's a kind of old logic that developed over a really really long period of time. It's bizarre.

Because people will put themselves into extremely dangerous situations to kill female relatives who have dishonored the family, we should therefore make honor killings legal to remove that danger.

I hate honor killings-- I think it is awful. I wouldn't have chosen it for myself. But I will not agree to forcing a young man to risk his own life to solve what he thinks is an untenable situation.

(Note: I don't actually support honor killings. Just pointing out that your logic also supports legalized honor killings, and other sorts of murder which puts the would-be murderer in physical danger.)

Suppose your elderly master requires your labor not due to age, but because of the consequences of a risky act which you chose to engage in. You knew the consequences, but you chose to engage in this act because it was fun.

Under such circumstances, I'd find it very defensible to require your continued servitude.

The analogy to a woman who *chose* to take the risk of pregnancy is, I hope, also clear.

(Like your post, mine also assumes fetal personhood.)

Abortion is a debate between two groups over the ultimate fate of embryos.

There's something really crucial about the difference between, on the one hand, abolitionists supporting black people's own vocal struggle for freedom, and, on the other, pro-life activists' efforts to get voiceless entities recognized as persons. At the risk of saying something much worse than TNC would handle it, again: at some level, a lot of white abolitionists were sanctimonious busybodies who worked out their own emotional issues by riding off to save the poor defenseless negroes. You're always going to have some of that dynamic with moral activists. And it's very important in any moral cause that the egotism driving a lot of benefactors be counterbalanced by the actual voices and interests of the people they claim to be acting for.

In the case of abolition, things couldn't go too far wrong because the white abolitionists were working to help black people who were pushing to free themselves, acting and speaking in their own interests. They were responsible to real, self-interested people. One problem with the pro-life movement is that the activists aren't responsible to anyone, because fetuses can't talk. We don't know what they want. They can't really be said to "want" anything. That makes this, for a moral outrage-drummer-upper, the perfect cause. There are no troublesome beneficiaries who might start criticizing you or decide you don't know what you're doing or push you out and start doing things their way.

This only applies to pregnanices that are the result of consensual sex. What about pregnancies that are the result of rape and/or incest?

In addition, pregancy does last for 9 months, and a person's life situation can change in that amount of time. A woman may discover during the course of her pregnancy that her unborn child has serious birth defects that will be too difficult a burden for she and her husband to bear, particularly if they have other children already. Her husband may lose his job, making the prospect of raising another child financially unviable. The woman may discover that she has a serious health condition that pregnancy will exacerbate to a life-threatening point. Are you suggesting that because a woman didn't foresee, she must be condenmned to carry a pregancy to term in spite of these negative consequences?

Rape obviously means that no assumption of risk has occured and adds the fact that being forced to carry the child is a form of continued victimization to the mothers side of the equation, so I think abortion becomes permissible here. Similarly extreme birth defects or retardation of the child means that the child's quality of life, length of life, and therefore interest in life drops, similarly rebalancing the moral scale in the mother's favor.

Anyone who admits that there is a competing set of rights and wishes to disagree with my analysis based on their own set of rights weighting I will respectfully disagree with. But people like Black Magic Woman who assert either that the child has no rights or that the woman has not engaged in the assumption of risk I have no respect for.

If your objection is solely to the idea that the unborn child is being punished for the sins of its parents (for engaging in improperly protected sex when they weren't ready to bear the consequences of unintended pregnancy), then how about if the pregnancy is aborted by non-lethal means? Suppose science develops a way of aborting pregnancies through non-lethal means (i.e. a pregnancy can be easily terminated by a medical procedure that surgically removes the embryo or fetus fully intact from the mother's womb, and places the removed embryo or feturs in a machine that will serve as an artificial womb). Suppose most women opt for this non-lethal method, thus achieving the Bill Clinton goal of making abortion safe, legal, and rare. Would you still opt to place legal bans on abortion, even if the method was non-lethal?

Look Sex is pleasureable. It sucks that such enjoyable behavior carries such a weighty consequence as children. The desire to decouple the risk factors from enjoyable activities is understandable. But we would not countenance murder for fun in any other area.

Look, I don't know where I fall in this debate of whether a fetus is a person or not. What I do know is that my cousin fully believed in her unborn daughter's personhood -- and that it was this belief in, and honoring of, her daughter's humanity that led her to the difficult and merciful decision she made.

One does not have to deny the personhood of the unborn in order to recognize that abortion can be an ethical, moral choice.

But if I argue on your own assumptions:

Rape obviously means that no assumption of risk has occured and adds the fact that being forced to carry the child is a form of continued victimization to the mothers side of the equation, so I think abortion becomes permissible here. Similarly extreme birth defects or retardation of the child means that the child's quality of life, length of life, and therefore interest in life drops, similarly rebalancing the moral scale in the mother's favor.

Who 'weighs' these considerations. You? A court? A doctor? As an abstract ethical debate, this might be worth discussing. But on the ground? It's opening a door to the kind of paternalistic, woman-shaming quagmire we had before Roe. Are we going to have to prove that the woman was raped? Does she have to say 'no?' Does she have to have bruises? What happens if it's a date rape, she chooses not to report it, and she ends up pregnant three months later? These things don't happen in a vacuum. These are real women's lives.

I think you severely overestimate the risk of becoming pregnant in the average sexual encounter.

So your only objection to abortion as it is currently practiced is that it results in the death of an unborn child. If that is the case, then your whole argument about the assumption of risk is IRRELEVANT. Assumption of risk only applies when your main concern is about making someone bear the foreseeable negative consequences of eariler decisions, and that concern would still matter even if abortion was non-lethal.

JD,

It is flippant statements like that which make pro-choicers doubt that pro-lifers are arguing in good faith. It's one thing to argue that the negative consequences of an unintended and/or unwanted pregnancy are a lesser evil than the killing of an unborn child, or even to argue that abortion is used to evade taking responsibility for unwise actions. It's quite another thing to imply that a woman would put herself in such a gut-wrenching situation as a lark.

You are missing the point. You seem to think I mean that people get pregnant on purpose. I am saying that people have sex without considering the consequences and then complain that they had no choice and should not be held morally accountable for their actions which is BS. And people do have sex on a lark. It is one of the main reasons have sex.

the personhood of slaves was enshrined in the constitution from the very start.

the very constitution that the slave-owners crafted.

the very constitution that brought us the dred scott decision.

even when slavery was contentious, the personhood of slaves was not.

The point is that when negative the consequences of earlier actions is weighed against the death of an innocent then the fact that the consequences were a direct result of actions you chose to take matters. It matter because competing interests are being balanced. You remove the competing interest from the other side of the scale than of course we the conclusions will be changes.

Why don't you say something useful to the point at hand, rather than trying to come up with clever arguments to impress all of the other clever people you know.

Actually this is interesting in that it bleeds over into the Death Penalty debate. How can a Culture of Life argument co-exist with a pro-Death Penalty? Well when one holds the Old Testament view that the only answer for murder is the murder of the murderer. However, we do have legal alternatives involving trial, conviction and incarceration.

The willingness of some Pro-Life radicals to leapfrog these and entertain vigilante tactics, terrorism and murder undermines any morality they can claim.

I think you are being a little glib.

I would hope not. I would hope any person who acted thus might rightly be considered not only a hypocrite of the first order, but a homocidal criminal, not given any benefit of political rationalization.

You might want to argue that these calculations are immaterial, but since you rely on probability of risk to make your argument about the tenability of abortion in cases of severe deformity (though interestingly, not the life of the mother), I think that it's fair game to point out how far off your assumptions about "probability" and "reasonable" risk are. You also might want to argue that because the gravity of the impact of the consequences of generally low-risk intercourse, is so great that mere calculations of probability are not enough to decide the queston, but there again, your argument for the extenuating circumstances re: severe deformity fall down. Making the bright lines that you attempt to draw quite a bit dimmer.

But beyond this tinkering with the mechanics of your argument, I think there is a more profound issue at hand. The contempt that you show for the real lives of actual women is vicious in its omission from every calculation you have made.

One fact that you, and many people who consider themselves pro-life refuse to grapple with is that the "consequence" of pregnancy falls disproportionately on the woman who would bear a fetus to viability. Her health and well-being are not separable from that of the fetus' for at least 20 weeks. If she ceases to breathe, the potential inside her ceases to be. This does not obtain the other way around. That does not mean a fetus is nothing more than a collection of cells, but it is a fact that should give those of you who are so certain of the absolutely equivalent personhood of mother and fetus some pause if you are being intellectually honest. Even if a fetus is a person in a philosophical or spiritual sense, which it very well may be, in a physical sense, the non-viable fetus is a potential person with no brain function and no independent physical capacity. This is akin to being brain dead and on life support -- life support provided by the fully independent, agentive, and whole woman who carries the fetus. These two entities -- woman and fetus -- may indeed have competing interests, but those interests are not equivalent.

One can hold the position that a fetus, as a potential person ought be accorded rights, including a right not to die, which must be respected, but it is not the case that these rights have to be weighed 50/50 with that of the woman carrying the fetus. This is because the fetus is literally a part, of a piece, with the woman until it is viable. That means during the time of this strange one-way dependence, the woman's physical interest is the only concretely calculable interest. The fetus' interest is hypothetical even though it is probable that the fetus will develop interests as a physiologically independent person in due course. To interrupt that course may be a grave intervention, but it is quite literally an intervention in to the body of only one individual.

This fact of assymetry points to a need for a subtly of argument that you seem determined to avoid. A pregnant woman is not half of a two headed entity. She is the whole entity, what she carries within her is potential. Perhaps a blessed, miraculous, 'innocent' (as opposed to her what, guilt?), human potential, but a probablity rather than a certainty nonetheless.

It seems to me that her interests should play not only a partial role, but a determining role in what happens to her as a whole, concrete, physiologically independent entity. A fifty percent share is not enough.

This issue is not black and white and pretending that the argument you champion can be based simply on abstract logic is disingenuous as well as disrespectful to the actual choices that real people must make in this world -- this illogical, improbable, surprising, tragic, complex, and liberating world. Reason and logic are beautiful things, but even they cannot deliver us from the heartbreaking messiness of the real. That messiness may not dictate your position, but it at least deserves your respect.

JD,

Wrong. If it is a matter of competing interest (the interest of an unborn child to live versus the interest of a mother who does not want to bear the burdens of a taking an unwanted pregnancy to term), it does not matter how the competing interest came to be. What matters is whether one competing interest is more compelling than the other. If your objection is terminating a pregnancy is because it kills someone whose life you feel should be protected by the law, then it does not matter what choices were made by the now pregnant mother beforehand. That is why your assumption of risk argument is BS.

Your assumption of risk argument only carries weight when your paramount concern is not with protecting the life of the unborn, but rather with punishing a pregnant women for getting herself into the situation of unwanted pregnancy, and making sure she bears the consequences for her unwise actions.

Everybody knows that pigs are smarter than a 3 year old human. Yet they have no rights compared to a young human because of the "potential" argument. A pig is not allowed to turn around or see day light because he or she does not have the potential to one day develop the intellectual skills to say vote or for complicated math. Similarity - blacks were not considered to have so much potential as whites. That is why Civil Rights were necessary despite a Civil War.

In the case of blacks one could prove that they are full human beings with the same IQ potential as whites - being able to do the same jobs. In the case of embryos - the same is true.

Why I still agree with TNC is that slavery and abortion arguments are logically very different. With abortion - nobody gets hurt by definition but there is a missed opportunity. With slavery - everybody gets hurt by definition. There is no "real" personhood discussion when it comes to abortion - not in the sense of blacks or animals.

Adult blacks and adult animals both have developed brain connections and nervous systems compared to 8 week old black embryos or days old animal embryos. There is no real person hood discussion from a "scientific" point of view when it comes abortion - just a philosophical one regarding "what could have been".

Animal domestication, by the way, was not a simple process. Human slaver, after the introduction of animal slavery, was simple and "natural". The two development are much more related than we imagine. The term holocaust used to mean animal sacrifice. Then the Nazi's used the first factory farming methods for those jewish pigs. Blacks were beast. As Malcolm said - on the level of cattle. The mistake here is not that blacks are not on the level of animals but that whites are not above it!

This is why Pythagoras, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Leonardo Da Vinci and others called animal "domestication" the roots of all evil.

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude toward those who are at it's mercy: animals. And in this respect, human kind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

You however are not dealing in fact--the abolition of slavery was not going to destroy the southern economy, in fact the forces of history (the leap to industrialization) were going to destroy the southern economy; still, the south was stubborn about making the leap for a wide host of reasons and it took the bloodiest war in American history to get them to concede.

Furthermore, after slavery, the slaves did not en masse cease to pick cotton. In fact, many of them were put into the soft shackles of sharecropping and continued picking the same cotton on the same plantations for a modicum of pay, which they were often cheated on.

The attempt to compare slavery to abortion falls short AGAIN.

You pro-lifers really need to find a better example.

Slavery disappeared because of the humanist movement in philosophy. It didn't do so right away (humanism began with people like Erasmus around 1600) but philosophic ideas take a while to sink in to the way the average person thinks.

Once one recognizes that what sets people apart is certain mental faculties then the exclusion of blacks from that category can only be justified by racism. The idea that something similar is going on in excluding fetuses from personhood is farcical. That is what Coates is undercapturing in his point about fetuses not being engaged in the fight. The reason for this is precisely that they lack the faculties that categorize personhood, and any attempt to include them as persons actually obscures the argument against slavery.

After all, one cannot include fetuses in the category of persons without removing notions of reason, choice, free will from the idea of personhood. The same issue occurs with animal rights issue.

Another point of commonality is that as a practical matter one cannot extend rights more broadly without effectively limiting the rights of persons. In the case of animal rights these limitations would fall broadly across society. In the case of fetuses it falls exclusively on women of childbearing age. But because rights always have tradeoffs it is not enough to say we should be safe and extend rights as broadly as possible. One needs to actually try to get it right.

A grown animal knows if he or she is free or not - if she or he feels pain. An 8 week year old embryo - animal or human - does not feel pain by our understanding. It's brain and nervous system is not developed yet. It is still an "it" compared to an adult human or animal. It is alive like a vegetable but it is for the time being still an object and not yet a subject. As stated above - it has the potential to become a subject one day. A grown animal, as Charles Darwin explains, only differs in degree and not kind from grown humans!

The analogy between animal and black slavery however holds beautifully. Please visit the museum. One is based on racism and the other on the roots of racism - speciesism.

If I were pro-life - I would first march the streets regarding an end of the death penalty. Those are fully grown adult human people - right? And we are a Christian nation. Then I would march maybe against killing animals for entertainment and taste alone? Once this is all achieved I might turn to those "people" who cannot feel yet but might have potential...? But why start the other way around? Please explain!

You should get a blog. Seriously.

No matter what Aristotle claimed about seven-month quickening,my first child's father saw her move from two feet away at 11 weeks.

The one who wakes early now slept rarely then.

The one who sings now danced then when I sang--and smiled twelve hours after birth when I started her already-favorite song.

The calm one then is the laid-back one now. After the non-sleeper, that part was quite a surprise.

Loud noise upset them all in the fifth month. From brief exploration of the nerve development process, I find it plausible that they felt discomfort and could have felt pain by then, and possible that they did a bit younger.

They were becoming part of us, getting closer to being us every day they grew.

Too many posts above make the equation sound simpler than it is, even though I agree with the pro-choice bottom-line.

Again, I'm pro-choice, so I'm playing Devil's Advocate somewhat here--I don't see "trial, conviction, incarceration" is really an option if you are pro-life. Abortion is legal, it even has zoning protections in some states. No state can outlaw it, they just restrict it. But apparently, restricting isn't enough if you think thousands of innocents are dying.

So you're really left with two options--protest, pray, argue, campaign to make abortion illegal in all it's forms. Or you could find a stop these abortions by more direct means: killing doctors and bombing clinics.

Rather, the relevant point is that fetuses are not the kinds of things that are developed enough to have desires of that sort one way or the other. And it is a mistake to think that what the fetus wants is directly rated to what the fetus will come to want when it develops the faculties needed to have such desires. It is not a question of our not knowing what the fetus wants, there is no fact of the matter as to what the fetus wants which could be known.

It is probably true that in some cases fetuses have deformaties which make it likely that they would be better off not experiencing the pain that is all they are capable of experiencing. But even that is a different thing from saying they want to die.

When you mentioned 6 weeks, it reminded me of something. In many cultures, children aren't even named for a month or more. Or baptisms are left until theres some reasonable surety of infant survival. Other cultures, over time, have allowed and even required early infanticide to keep the population from overrunning the resources and thus killing everyone through the tragedy of the commons.

It is still a mistake to think that animals are not deserving of ethical consideration (just as it is a mistake to think that fetuses are not deserving of ethical consideration) but that is because morality does not reduce to negative rights.

Also, if you want to make the child/pig comparison you need to lower the age to at least 2. By 3 my daughter was showing a working knowledge of Modus Ponens, and conversational implicature, and even knew the difference between something being actually true and being perceived to be true. And while my daughter may be exceptional (ok, of course my daughter is exceptional) 3 year olds already have complex thought patterns, even saying 2 year olds may be pushing it.

There does still remain that 1 and under crowd that do remain a problem for those who want to define personhood as I am doing it. But by 3, the problem is already gone in most cases.

You said below "The logistics are important because the Abortion should be properly thought of as the competing rights of A) A child who does not want to die and B) a woman who does not want to have the child."

I think a significant number of unwanted pregnancies occur in households where if the child were born, s/he might have a TERRIBLE childhood. I wish that the pro-life contingent would consider the fact that while every life is sacred, it might be a good thing that some children aren't born into horrible circumstances.

I'm not sure every single person - when reflecting back on the circumstances of his/her childhood is glad to have been born. Regardless, we are all at the mercy of our birth parents - in the short term or the long-term. We hope our mothers want us to be born and take care of their bodies so we can be healthy. We hope our families protect us as children so we can grow up safely. Women who are not forced to give birth are more likely to produce healthier children and healthier living environments for their children.

This goes hand in hand with appropriate conception that functions effectively and clear sex education.

I gather TPM is hosting blogs now so maybe I will manage it. Particularly now that I have my first blurb to put on top.

Furthermore, I reject the notion that sexual activity is some sort of necessarily risky and indulgent behavior rather than a natural part of life. It is perfectly possible to be a sexual being who takes every contraceptive precaution and still has something go wrong. It is further implicit in this construction of sexuality that every time a woman has sex she is taking a needless risk, while men are just...having sex.

The fact is that the burden of unintended pregnancy is disproportionately borne by women. Certainly some men and young men are willing to step up and share those costs, and I commend them, but many are not and do not. In cases where they are not willing to enter indentured servitude, to follow this thoroughly depressing analogy, it is, IMO, ridiculous to tell the girl that she deserved it, knowingly put herself at risk, and should shut up and take the consequences.

I think it's probably not very controversial to say that it is impossible to write a legal code refined, specific, empathetic, and flexible enough to encompass all of this variety and specificity. So then you are faced with a choice: outlaw abortion, and risk that some women who really ought to be able to abort their pregnancies are not able to, and suffer for it (along with their children); or allow abortion, and risk that some women will choose to have abortions when it may not be what "we" view as strictly necessary or correct.

The tipping point for me here is that women as a group are not stupid, they are not selfish, they are not flibertigibbets, and they do not underweight the meaning and importance of motherhood. I have not been pregnant, but every description of the experience I have ever read or heard has made it quite clear that one is very much aware of and connected to the life attached to one's own. Legal abortion does not allow a tidal wave of frivolous, hysterical, selfish women to start aborting willy-nilly and ignore condoms. Will a very few behave this way? Yes. Are they irresponsible and reprehensible? I would say so. But I would be very surprised to learn that their numbers come anywhere close to equaling the women who, in the opposite case, would be forced to carry their pregnancies to term at terrible cost; and under legal abortion, their numbers pale in comparison to those of women who did not want to get pregnant, for whom pregnancy will thoroughly derail life plans, and who are deeply "inconvenienced" (ugh ugh ugh) by continuing the pregnancy, but who do so anyway because they feel a moral obligation to do so for their children.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether you trust women, in the aggregate, as moral actors competent to make good choices or not. I do. Therefore I support legal abortion.

The Stephens quote is fascinating: what actually changed to prompt the intellectual and moral distinction between Jefferson and Stephens?

My guess is that it is a case of interest driving ideology. Between the cotton gin and the abolition of the _overseas_ slave-trade, slaves change from being captive labor (in Jefferson's time) to owned capital (in Stephens). As such, the ideology of slavery undergoes a sharp revision over half-a-century as slaves themselves become the slaveholder's equivalent of the 401(K).

It's an interesting point in and of itself, but the historical context also casts a pall over McArdle's comparison between the debates over abortion and the debates over slavery -- at least to the extent that we accept debates over abortion as purely ideological and disinterested.

Yes and no -- the U.S. slave system was distinctive because slaves became a form of capital on a large -- 'industrial' -- scale.

Increasingly I'm thinking that abolition did go far wrong in its resort to war. The problem was that the military logic of the Civil War overrode the ideology of abolition. Further, the ensuing desperation for peace long postponed prospects for a reconstruction of the South.

I keep wondering whether a North American 'Cold War' would have been a better solution. Would the South have fallen in the way that East Germany fell?

Too much of the discussion (including Justice Kennedy's recent supreme court ruling in a case whose name I don't know) work on the offensive assumption that women can't be trusted to make important decisions for themselves. The pro-life side really would give their arguments more credence if they were on the front line of providing contraception and accurate sex education information to help prevent unwanted pregnancy.

I don’t think that’s a good example for a number of reasons. 1. Six weeks is incredibly early on. When a woman miscarries at six weeks, which is likely before the first OB appointment, and right at the borderline of where the embryo is or is not discernable on ultrasound, it is highly probable that the only verification she’s received that she is, in fact, pregnant is from a store bought test of the hormone levels of her urine. These tests, because there makers are pushing their R&D departments for earlier detection are much more regularly detecting what’s called a chemical pregnancy. Scientists estimate that somewhere near half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. It’s just that the vast majority of them occur so early in the process that most women are unable to confirm (or necessarily have any idea) that they were pregnant in the first place. This is the dilemma with your six weeks timeline. It would be a better example to push it beyond the point at which the presence of an embryo in the uterus has been established (usually a week or so later in the pregnancy).

Still, all of that is beside the point. And here’s where we get into the semantic argument. To say that an embryo is a living human being is not an extraordinary statement. All it means is that an embryo an individual member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens and that it has vital functions. It is absolutely not the same thing as saying the embryo is equal to a child who has drawn its first breath. Personhood is a philosophical question.

“I don't think that answering the personhood question ends the abortion debate”
I think you’re absolutely right, but I think the acknowledgement of human being status informs the debate. I do think many on both sides of the debate think it is the silver bullet. “Pro-lifers” repeat it ad homonym because it drives home the moral implications of the act, while “pro-choicers” deny it because, well, because it drives home the moral implications of the act, and they fear giving up ground they took a long time ago. Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of abandoning positions that have become, or will soon become counterproductive. Conceding points when I’m wrong, or even could be wrong. Yes, “pro-lifers,” on average also favor the death penalty for whatever reason. That is simple hypocrisy. On average, most of the more vehement “pro-choicers” oppose the death penalty. That’s hypocritical, too. But so what. As you pointed out, we can rationalize both hypocrisies away by focusing on either guilt or innocence or, in the “pro-choice” position whether the state should have the right to withhold life (they would also be against the state carrying out forced abortions). At any rate, these are little hypocrisies that are really beside the point. To the point, on the topic of contradiction and hypocrisy within the relevant debate, for my money, it is the “pro-choicers” who are most regularly guilty of adopting overtly contradictory positions. Here’s an example: An embryo is just a clump of cells, akin in many ways to an organ, parasite, or tumor that is of little significance but which represents a lifetime of burden analogous to enslavement; minutes later, no woman approaches the question of whether or not to have an abortion lightly. (I hope it's clear that I am not really directing that at you, as such.)

“I am willing to grant that embryos are some sort of a person, but that women's ability to control their sexuality and reproductive lives are a greater principle.”
I don’t think most “pro-lifers” believe that a woman should not have the ability to control her sexuality or reproductive life (even if they do not approve of some aspect of her sexuality or how she expresses it). I simply think they consider that control best exercised when a woman plays an active role in determining whether or not she becomes pregnant in the first place. That becoming pregnant (at least when it is through consensual means) is a the direct result of a woman exerting control over both her sexuality and her reproductive life. And that upon conception, a woman has biologically accepted the responsibility for the life of her embryo, just as a mother is responsible for the care and life of her child. Mothers have the same rights as women without children. They simply have greater responsibility.

1. You are arguing, at most, for making abortion illegal (or finding it immoral) in circumstances where the pregnant woman chose to become pregnant. If she was raped, or if she took reasonable precautions against pregnancy sufficient to rule out a finding of negligence, she is free to abort.

2. You argue that someone who owes a debt to another can be forced to pay that debt back with their body in the most invasive, dehumanizing way imaginable. If a woman can be forced by the state to serve as an incubator because of the legal obligation she has to the bundle of cells in her uterus, then men and women who owe unpayable debts can be made sex slaves to their creditors.

We do not allow infants to be killed; children who have been born are considered people. Before this, there are many ways to keep a child from being born, from sexual abstinence to a vasectomy to condoms to birth control pills to abortions. We require potential parents to exercise their options before the child is born, not after. That's a reasonable place to draw the line for a number of reasons.

You seem to believe that conception is the magical moment at which a legal person is created. I've always been curious: is it the moment that the sperm cell breaches the ovum cell membrane? The moment of chromosomal pairing? Which chromosome, specifically? And does this mean that a fertile woman who had sex last night is guilty of reckless endangerment if she gets drunk tonight, or takes medication that may lead to non-attachment of the fertilized ovum?

I agree with this. A number of the extreme pro-life also regard the birth control pill as murder, or the morning after pill. People who just disagree with me about when personhood begins are easier to find some common ground with.

That said, Megan's analogy is awful. There was much excuse making of the "they don't reason like us and we need to guide them" variety, explicitly analogizing blacks to children and whites to adults, but enslaved blacks or Africans were never not people--rather obviously they could interbreed with all the other races.

In abortion I don't view an individual cell, or disk, or tube as a person. I think the development is really neat and fascinating, but if a cell is a person I don't see why every egg and sperm is not also a precious individual life--all it needs is one more step, fertilization, to distinguish it from the "people" who are single cells. Why draw the line there?

The line will be murky, so I put it somewhere in the second trimester when the nervous system is getting hooked up. Arguing that an 8-month fetus has rights I can see; arguing that an unimplanted cell (or individual sperm, who just needs an egg, a womb, and 9 months) is also a person leaves me blank.

Arghhh! Again it's women, women, women, women that have all the responsibility!!!
And yet men feel that they get make the decisions on whether or not abortion is acceptable!!!! You are just not getting the point are you?
Your own choice of words gives you away.

I think this statement gives a lot of undue credit to pro-lifers. Certainly there are some pro-lifers who feel this way, but I have no real way of knowing how many. That said, I think it's fair to say that the anti-abortion crowd have not been great defenders, and often have been opponents, of birth control. I haven't known the pro-life camp to be outspoken proponents of condoms.

I greatly respect the desire to fully comprehend the other side, and deal with them on their terms. But one can't take the most simplistic arguments of pro-choicers and then match them up against the most broad-minded of pro-lifers.

Calexical's point really changes the argument from a legal one to an ethical one. No one does have the right to demand "blood and organs" from another person in order to stay alive. (Yes, this may acknowledge a level of personhood I don't necessarily agree with for a fetus or embryo, but I'll play along) So when you establish that simple right, all of a sudden the question is now one of personal ethics--it's almost similar to deciding whether to give up a kidney to save a friend. If you extend that metaphor enough, the national transplant list probably correllates with the adoption process more than pro-lifers would like to admit.

In the end, that men are jerks who don’t have to carry the baby is hardly a strong argument in favor of choice. It’s just an attempt to quash debate.

Can I just pipe in late say that the entire comparison of abortion to slavery is utterly idiotic?

Slaves never lived parasitically inside a master's body.

The abortion debate is not about whether a fetus is a person or not. That's completely beside the point. The abortion debate is about which person has more value: the woman carrying the fetus, or the fetus itself. Whether it is more important to protect a developing brain and body, or to protect the quality of life of an already developed and autonomous brain and body.

People who don't believe in reproductive options don't like to admit that, because it forces them to admit that sex, pregnancy and abortion are much more complicated than "you play, you pay."

I think you both miss the point of personhood vis-a-vis the justness of the law of the land. Legally, infanticide is murder precisely because it is the killing of a person before the law and protected by such. If someone kills a baby, no one questions that a murder took place. That is why the slavery comparison is apt. A chattel slave is regarded as property before the law and thus not a person and vulnerable in ways a legal person is not. This was true in the Roman empire millennia ago and it was true in America far more recently. Today, the "part of the body argument" on the status of the unborn implies they are essentially the property of the mother in that she "owns" her body. So again, before the law, the personhood of the fetus is at stake. It is far from farcical regardless of what philosophical means personhood is established or disestablished.

I think it’s reasonable to read the concept of sexual and reproductive freedom as a state of being in which the woman is not forced or coerced into having sex and is therefore never forcibly impregnated, nor forced, by the state or anyone else, to have an abortion. To say that reproductive freedom extends to the willful termination of healthy pregnancies resulting from consensual intercourse is definitely one interpretation of the phrase. It’s just not the only reasonable one.

I don't think so, as Jess below says. The mother is greater than the child. I've met plenty of folks whose words for the unborn would make you wince. They didn't seem like the crazies. Just normal folks with a strong feminist bent.

As for the converse, pro-choice anti-cap punishment...

For me the financial argument is part of it. The other is the State ignoring a margin of error that results in the death of innocents.

With the pro-choice issue its about an individual woman settling an unsettled question (when does life begin in the womb?) directly involving her own health and body and life commitments, and not the state.

So if the question is, should the State play God and decide a) who lives and who dies, even if collateral damage is involved and b) should the State play God and decide who is born and who isnt, then I answer no on both counts.

Whether it involves a pre-emptive unnecessary war that kills innocents (Iraq), the Death Penalty (any margin of error kills innocent men and women, unacceptable), Eugenics (sterilize these unfit citizens, promote the birth of boys over girls, restrict the size of families, etc.)

I just dont think the State should have that kind of power.

That said, my wife and I read, learned and experienced a lot about pregnancy and fetal development with our child and that also had a profound effect on me. Mostly emotional really. Between miscarriages and the stresses on my wife from the pregnancy, I learned a lot. I became more pro-choice-ish especially towards the beginning of pregnancy and conception. George Carlin joked that since sexually active women not using contraception actually pass the majority of fertilized eggs with their menses, they were serial killers. Stuff like confirmed what my moral compass was telling me.

I am not saying there aren't a portion of pro-choice individuals who discount the ambiguity about personhood vis a vis the unborn; however, the complete and abject categorization of pro choice advocates as murderers without cosidering the moral underpining of the prochoice perspective is almost unanimous among prolife advocacy, and this inability is the basis for the intransigence on the quarrel in our nation.

Get a grip. Let me say that again. Get a grip on the real world that we live in. You are arguing about philosophical unrealities. The world you are talking about doesn't exist except in your own idealized thoughts.

In the real world, young girls allow themselves to be pressured or romanced into making bad decisions, young women who are not economically or socially responsible enough to parent get pregnant (yes, because they are not perfect and made a bad choice perhaps), and some _will_ choose to abort, whether or not they are legally allowed to. They will put their lives in danger by going to a hack who will use dangerous methods to abort the baby. Some of them will die or be rendered sterile.
And where are the men while all of this "mistaken" behavior is going on?

Enjoy your idealized world-- i'm gonna live right where I am, and fight for my fellow women in the face of a group that wants to shove them back into the stone age of reproduction.

In the current back and forth, I am simply making the point that a particular phrase used by somebody arguing in favor of abortion rights has reasonable interpretations that, like those of the phrase “pro-choice,” lay outside the users particular interpretation. Indeed, my point is that similar phrases are used by both sides of the debate to claim moral high ground and to avoid actually making any attempt to understand the broader view of those with whom they disagree.

You do this. You’re doing this right now. The Stone Age? What the hell are you talking about? Abortion is not a modern marvel created for your convenience. It’s not Velcro or Wi-Fi. It is a tragic medical procedure in which a woman, for whatever reason, submits to having a doctor remove her unborn and developing offspring from her womb, thereby killing it. I’m not sure what kind of idealized world I’m supposed to believe in if I recognize the necessity of that.

What I said was farcical was not that a fetus is a person, I think that is wrong but don't want to dismiss it as ridiculous. What I said was farcical was the idea that denying that a fetus is a person is similar to denying that a slave is a person. That may sound like a pedantic point, but sometimes pedantic points are important.

Hugo Pottisch could not make the animal-slave link work because they really are very different in precisely the way that seems most relevant, mental capacity so he had to slide over the difference between actual potential and alleged potential.

Similarly it makes no sense to say that only prejudice could lead one to believe that a fetus is not a person in the way that only prejudice could lead one to believe that a slave is not a person. It may be wrong to think that a fetus is not a person, and I am open to arguments on that point, but the idea that the same kind of mistake is being made really is ridiculous. In fact the opposite is likely true, the people dismissing slaves and including fetuses are in each case making essentialist arguments about kinds, rather than looking to the relevant features of slaves and fetuses. But I do want to make clear that I was not calling the pro-life position farcical, only one argument made by some pro-life supporters.

I mentioned in the message you posted after, although not really the one that you were responding to, that the infant case is the hardest one for what I think is the right analysis of situation. It is the hardest not on philosophic grounds, but on rhetorical ones. I think your second comment captures why we treat infanticide as murder. We have a visceral reaction to the killing of infants, and where the mother's right to control her body does not come into play, there is no reason not to honor that visceral reaction by treating infanticide as murder. But I do think there is a real difference.

When I hear about a 5 year old dying I think about the tragedy for that child. When I hear about an infant dying I think about the tragedy for the infant's parents. My children are young, so I remember the development period you are talking about well. It was on that basis I criticized Pottisch for where he was drawing the line. But there is a reason that most people do not respond to the desperate teen that kills her infant in the same way they do later murders. (As probably an irrelevant point, Kant, who believed that almost all murderers should be put to death regardless of the consequences to society made an exception for the case of the mother who kills her infant to hide her preganancy. There is something about this case that has seemed different for a long time).

“The embryos are a side argument at best, given that such an overwhelming percentage of them never develop into viable fetuses in the first place.”
What does it take to be an overwhelming percentage? A lot? A simple majority. It’s true, scientists do estimate that about half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. That’s an impressive percentage, to be sure, but overwhelming. I guess it could overwhelm ones expectations. Still, how does that make the fate of an embryo a side argument? Is it because you don’t want to talk about the fate of an embryo? From where I stand, the fate of the embryo/fetus stands front and center in the abortion debate.

“The debate is over whether an individual woman has the right to decide whether or not she will carry a pregnancy to term or if the government will determine that for her.”
There are a number of ways to frame the debate. Here’s another way to frame the very debate you cite: The debate is over whether an individual woman has the right to decide whether or not to kill her unborn and developing offspring, or if the government should have the authority to prevent her from doing it. Mine is the very same argument. I simply do not adopt euphemisms.

“That's where the slavery analogy works best, in my opinion--banning abortion results in forced pregnancy for women, and in at least some of those cases, pregnancy against the woman's will.”
This analogy only works in terms of nonconsensual sex. If a woman is not forcibly impregnated (either by violence or coercion), she is not even arguably forced into pregnancy. It’s true, a prohibition would require that a woman carry her baby to term, but that by itself has very little to do with slavery.

Please see my reply to you at 3:25 (in the earlier thread where you point out my emotional irrationality). i really have nothing else to say to you on this point.

I do think it's an emotional argument you're making. You're "tired of being lectured at by men who don't have to bear any of the burden, and who have thought it was just fine for centuries to jam what they decided was best for women down [your] throats." Now, if we are to be both reasonable and fair, nobody here has crammed anything down your throat for hundreds or thousands of years. Likewise, nobody here seems to even be arguing that it's okay to cram anything down your throat. I haven't read the full series of JD threads. I figured the sheer volume of them were the reason TNC shut the comments down initially. At any rate, nothing I said should be read as a defense of his arguments.

My point is and has been this. You speak of a burden. I do not deny that pregnancy is a burden borne mainly by the woman. I assure you, over the last three years, I've become pretty well acquainted with the burdens of pregnancy and parenthood. Still, the burden alone cannot be used to justify the procedure. The argument cannot be that it's simply not fair that women got the short end of the stick when it came to reproductive duties. That rationale sounds petty, and you and I both know there are far stronger arguments in favor of abortion rights/choice.

Likewise, to treat everybody with whom you disagree as if they are the enemy really isn't all that helpful. If I entered into this portion of the thread in too brash a manner then, again, I apologize. Still, you are going to have to accept that this is a topic on which reasonable people can disagree without regard to gender. Whether all of us try to exercise it or not, most of us have the power to empathize and to sympathize. Most of us understand the various dilemmas faced by women and young girls, and I'm pretty sure just about everybody in here is "pro-choice" to some degree or another. But even if that wasn't the case, I think we should make some kind of an effort to respect the fact that everybody's got an opinion and everybody has a right to their opinion. The question should not be do we agree with one another. The question should be do we have a genuine understanding of one another. It is my belief that for the most part the answer is no and that most of us barely make the effort. I think we should be trying to do better, but what I think a lot of the posts that have driven these threads go to show is that it isn't a universally held belief. Even in what I think is a pretty good and intellectually curious (and honest) blog.

At any rate, if I genuinely offended you, I am sorry. It was not my intention. But if you're tired of being challenged by men on this topic, you should bring the pain. What you should not do is break out the kung fu that relies too heavily on tired memes of adversarial gender politics. It's weak.

I mean, you told me to get a grip, but made no clear reference to any clue you'd discovered that I'd lost my grip? In fact, you spent four graphs talking down to me without displaying any proof that you had either read or comprehended the post to which you were replying. Why was this? The sort of obvious interpretation would be that you are incapable of having an adult discussion on this topic with someone who disagrees with you. Indeed, you can't even accept it when somebody who generally agrees with you makes an argument that seeks to understand a position with which you disagree. This interpretation tends to point one to the reasonable conclusion that your default MO, rather than attempt to understand, is to condescend and to be generally nasty.

So yeah, you're arguing with somebody. But it had literally nothing to do with anything I had said. If you want to argue with me, and I assure you that you probably don't, you're going to have to bring more than this. It would be nice if what you brought was a bit more than generally, arguably on topic. But yeah, bring more than this. I don't get offended, or shaken when an anonymous stranger says mean things to me on the interweb.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to have an adult back and forth, I would be more than pleased. We could let bygones be bygones. I am genuinely interested in hearing what you would have to say. Otherwise. Over and out.

Paradox

You who think the embryo
has a fully human soul,
you who call abortion sin --
hear the paradox of twins.

In the caverns of the loins
a sperm and egg have joined.
Soon the cell divides;
the cluster grows in size.

A future member of our race
drifts towards its nesting place.
What's this? The cluster splits,
separates in equal bits.

Strange, but true --
what was one is two:
two tiny particles,
genetically identical.

You who claim to speak for God --
don't you find it rather odd
one egg became two twins?
Tell me when the soul begins.

At the moment of conception,
before their separation,
was there one soul, or two?
Does this problem puzzle you?

Was this a miracle:
two souls in one particle?
Or did one soul split
and half go in each bit?

Or do you think that sperms have souls?
Will you banish birth control?
Does it make you squirm
when I mention sperm?

Monks chanted "Te Deo"
as the Church judged Galileo,
but the earth still revolves,
and humanity evolves.

Peter H. Desmond

Originally published in the Spring 1995 issue of As We Are, this poem won the 2004 Cambridge Poetry Award in the category “political poem.”

You have issues.

Hugo Pottisch could not make the animal-slave link work because they really are very different in precisely the way that seems most relevant, mental capacity so he had to slide over the difference between actual potential and alleged potential.

I could not make it because you do not want it - that is all. Not because common sense or rationality is not there. Again - if you believe in evolution - then you have to think about Darwin's: "there is no fundamental difference between humans and animals. If there is a difference it is in degree and not kind."

I do not need Kant to tell me that my dog or any pig has ALL the mental capabilities that I have or you have. They feel as we do emotionally and they think as we do albeit with smaller "hard disks".

Again - the only reason why my animal-slave analogy failed with you is the same reason why Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman failed with Mr Thomas Taylor.

The sad lesson here is that despite all the case studies from history - that children do not feel pain, that black mothers do not love their children so much... we still are waiting for "them" to "equal our imagines superiority" before we display basic ethics. That is so scary.

We know that animals feel like us. That they have free will like us. That I love and suffer. That they need autonomy to be happy. They are after all anima. We even know that animals are smart and think like us. What on earth do you need to allow them to move around and to see daylight?

Aristotle was the beginning of the end for Greece. Descartes was a byproduct of true enlightenment and not a root force. When it comes to animals - we are intellectually and philosophically as weak as ever. Ironic - as we have no other roots. All our thinking and philosophy which is not in touch with these roots is worse than burning money as it leads to evil outcomes. The only reason why we are not in touch is our inferiority complex, our need to feel better than other and to be superior and feared and respected.

PS: show me how you are capable of more complex thought than my dog and I shall invite you for a barbeque where we will eat him. By complex I do not mean what meta level you can reach due to our human terabits instead of the few gigabits of animals. I am seeking difference in type and not degree. If you can show this to me - I will light the fire.

The blackbird
lives in a
country like
a rose in the
dreamland,
and even a
pleasure declares
in a moment
that intention
of love.

Francesco Sinibaldi