I'm certain that all the full time abortion sycophants for Planned Parenthood donations in the Democrat party will never bring it up.

But there is a sitting time bomb in the Obama candidacy. He sought immunity for abortionists to committ infanticide for any abortion that was careless or unsuccesful in a late term abortion.

He worked for five years for that law, sponsored it and pigionholed any opposition. There were actually several abortion screwups taht occurred in which at least one live baby was simply flushed down a toilet and another simply locked in a closet to die. And he actively opposed a Illinois initiative that would protect a baby born in those circumstances. So in essence he supports the Chinese Infanticide method of "Birth Control."

As much as I would love to see Hillary and the Clinton machine destroyed, Osama is fatally flawed.

Dafydd,

I can accept that you (or others) disagree on the whens of personhood, as you call it. And I find your position reasoned and reasonable, even if I disagree on the first part. And I will even go so far as to say I can live with (though not LIKE) laws that go with your interpretation and not mine.

In fact, I find the whole matter a bit of a side issue to that of personal responsibility. It's one more nannystate law aimed at allowing citizens to practice considerably less than solid responsibility in their sexual habits. We have more than a few good methods of birth control that should make the need for abortions very small. But somehow with the development of those methods the per capita incidence of abortions has trended upward. Because they are availble sexuality is freed from historical constraints since there are methods of avoiding pregnancy available, yet clearly too few use those methods while freely participating in that more free sexual activity.

So we're treating symptoms... again. That's my largest beef.

But it usually is. Our government is very good at avoiding real causes (because it mostly dare not admit them for political reasons) and dealing only with the effects... the symptoms.

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, how do you feel about starting a movement to do away with the highly dangerous English majors? We know those studies have historically lead to a high incidence of suicides, and now, in this century, it appears that is progressing (hey, they ARE progressives!) to mass murder-suicide! I think we need to nip this trend in the bud.

(Just think of the potential competition we can eliminate!)

Dan S:

You may think this bizarre, but what I really would like to see is a group of private philanthropists, perhaps augmented by some government grant, offer a bounty to any woman willing to give birth to a baby and put it up for permanent adoption. (And to change the laws to prevent the birth-mother from changing her mind after, say, 90 days.)

1. We need more babies born here -- just as we also need more immigration;
2. There is a large, heartbreakingly large, group of married couples who desperately want children but cannot biologically produce them, and who would make wonderful parents to adopted children;
3. Such a bounty would discourage a lot of women and girls from getting abortions.

I'm just not sure if such a program would be practical; it would depend upon how many females would go for it, and how much money that would require every year.

Dafydd

Well, I disagree with you in two parts, Dafyyd.

I disagree with your premises in supporting abortion. But then, it doesn't seem to be either here or there in relation to the point of the post.

I also disagree with your solution of bounties for adoptions. There's already the stereotype of the "welfare mom" who turns her uterus into a factory farm to make money off of the government. How much worse do you think that might become? To pro-lifers, you end up with a host of women who now hold hostages: Give me my money or the kid gets it!

First, let me thank you for a reasoned, intelligent argument on the merits of your beliefs concerning abortion. I strongly disagree with you on this matter, but hey. So what. Wrong point, wrong post.

Your points on Partial Birth Abortion are right on... and I heartily applaud your stance. I haven't read the ruling today, so I'm not sure what it says, just what the headlines say... but any ruling that removes this obscenity from Medical Practice has a potential to be a great ruling, if only because I agree with the result alluded to in the headlines.

As for a bounty... think it through. Whatever you support financially, you create more of. Basic supply and demand. What happens if malnurished mothers who do not take care of themselves or their unborn children decide to stop being responsible in their lifestyles because if they get pregnant they can always sell the baby?

Do you then create prerequisites for the bounty? Health, size, length of term, addictions...? What happens when you decide to NOT pay; are you breaking a contract?

Maybe it could work, if it was absolutely NOT publicized. If, during a visit to a doctor a young mother is seriously considering an abortion, the Doctor says "there is a private group who will pay for your child..."

No... put it that way, and it is 'way too creepy. I know you have great intentions, but really... it just would not be a good idea in practice. Even if it was the Government paying for the baby... I just can't see it.

Daf,

My sister (and her hubby!) have adopted two of the babies of one of these irresponsible sorts of biological mothers. While those two kids (great kids now, they were in bad shape early on though) got a great deal, loving, responsible parents who are seeing that they will have a great chance to become real citizens (as opposed to dole-kids/mothers/aged), I'm not sure anything that would validate their mother's choice of lifestyle can be considered productive. Isn't she and those like her (and her "partners") already getting a bounty from the gummint for exactly the role you describe?

Sure, done privately it might work better. But it's done now on the public's tab, and that isn't working out so well. Should we expect THAT much improvement?

The only good news here is that instead of aborting, the mother had the babies and agreed to put them up for adoption. She's done it more than once. That's what happens.

Personally, I'd prefer to see a return to some sort of penalty for this behavior (instead of punishing the resulting child, by killing it, as I see it). Especially repeat offenders. There's just no excuse today with the available (and paid for by you and me!) options to avoid pregnancy.

But we really are off topic, aren't we? As a ruling, what I've seen of this one makes sense within the context of the law. The whole Roe vs Wade one is another kettle of worms.

I'd just rather see it be a far smaller issue because all sides preached responsibility to potential biological mothers and fathers. But the progressives tend to see ANY limit on what is allowed in this area an attack on all of it. I think they would be better served to take your position.

Good post, Dafydd. As for the question of when human PERSONHOOD begins, there is an interesting Christian argument, not widely used or known these days, because it is based on early church tradition, now partly forgotten, and arguably never really understood at the time.

The Bible doesn't record the date of Jesus' birth, but the early church commemorated an event called Christmas i.e. "Christ sent" on December 25. The problem is that this date does not fit with the scanty birth date evidence in the Bible; shepherds would not normally be out in the fields with their flocks at this time of year. However, there is ANOTHER occasion that was commemorated by the early church, though it is now mostly forgotten, that WOULD fit: Michaelmas i.e. "Michael sent" on September 29. Michael the archangel seems a good candidate to have been leading the "heavenly host" that Luke records as announcing Jesus' birth to the shepherds.

But if Jesus was really BORN on Michaelmas, "Michael sent", September 29th, what happened on Christmas, "Christ sent", December 25th? Well, as it turns out, December 25th is almost the ideal human gestation period prior to September 29th, so Christmas would be the celebration of Jesus' CONCEPTION, which after all was the really miraculous event, His birth being rather ordinary. It is also unlikely that the early church would simply "make up" two such dates that just HAPPEN to be the right number of days apart and just HAPPEN to have appropriate names even though in short order they forgot which date commemorated what.

But if Christ was "sent", incarnate at the moment of CONCEPTION not merely from the moment of birth, wouldn't that mean ALL humans receive their souls at the same point, thus achieving "personhood" at the same point?

When added to the unquestionable scientific FACT that human LIFE begins at conception, this makes the pro-abortion position essentially impossible for a believing Christian no matter how INCONVENIENT it turns out in practice to be.

FredTownWard:

Well, er, ah, there's another possibility, FTW...

Christmas, or the Mass of Christ, just happens to coincide with the winter solstice -- which was already a pagan holidy that the people were used to celebrating and bound and determined to continue celebrating. (The symbol was the Yule log.)

Michaelmas just happens to correspond to the Autumnal equinox -- another quarter day -- and was the single most important holiday on the pagan calendar, because that was the day to celebrate the harvest... you know, "food for all the world to eat," and all that.

Once again, nothing the early Church could do would stop the peasants from celebrating wildly at harvest-tide.

So a canny marketeer might decide to plant important Christian holidays squarely on the holy days the peasants (and pagan nobles) intended to celebrate anyway -- and tell them that they were really celebrating the mass of Christ, the mass of St. Michael, and so forth.

Hm... what are the other two quarter days? Well, they would be the spring equinox (end of March) and the summer solstice (end of June)... which by sheer coincidence happen to correspond nicely to Lady Day and Midsummer Day, both of which were certainly celebrated in British churches, and I suspect elsewhere, too.

Besides the quarter days, there were the cross-quarter days. In Britain, those were Imbolc, beginning of February; Beltane, which was May Day; Lughnasadh, beginning of August; and Samhain, beginning of November. (Pronunciation guide: Ee-milk, Beltyin, Luna-sod, Sow-un.)

Amazingly enough, these correspond exactly to Candlemas, Walpurgis Night/May Day (the Maypole, and all that), Lammastide, and All-Hallows Eve/All-Souls Day.

Do we detect a pattern here?

(It is a coincidence that human gestation correlates pretty well to a span of the four quarter or cross-quarter days: If you get preggers on Lughnasadh, you'll pass through Samhain, Imbolc, and give birth around Beltane.)

Dafydd

Dafydd, in his first comment, touched upon something that is left out of the abortion debate. Besides the relative individual rights of the mother and the unborn baby, there is a legitimate right in a society to value children. And that societal interest is just as legitimately weighed against the burden imposed on the mother. Governments do better when they follow such a "utilitarian" approach in their jurisprudence instead of discussing abstractions such as privacy, liberty and morality.

It's really splendid to see a post lay out the actual basis for disagreement between the two sides so cleanly. Either the fetus is a human, and it may not be killed; or the fetus is not a human, and the law may only _manage_ how and when we may kill it. So, well said! (I must add that I disagree with your conclusion on this topic, but no matter; I'd prefer to have your thinking rule on this issue than the current non-thought.)

Of course, as you implied, partial birth abortion is not abortion at all; it's infanticide, by any reasonable rule.

I also found the "precedent" arguments to be bizzare. For years we've been getting court rulings that have said that restrictions could be made if they met certain criteria (such as having exceptions for the health of the mother); now that one such law is actually tried and found adequate, it seems that precedent is being _met_, not rejected.

...but I still think the best solution is to overturn Roe and have our current Democratic Congress pass a law explicitly defining abortion rights and restrictions. Yes, I, a pro-life poster, want an actual law -- because a law can be modified as the nation's beliefs and technologies change. A court ruling can only be changed by, in essence, packing the court. We've clearly proven that this issue is an issue of regulation, with adjustments needed often. See Canis Iratus for a brilliant and IMO amusing look at this.

Nice try, Dafydd; however, neither Christmas nor Michaelmas ACTUALLY coincide or correspond with the winter solstice or the autumnal equinox. They are just "close". (Michaelmas actually matches up with the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles, which might explain the choice of wording in John 1:14, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt (literally tabernacled) among us") If someone is going to simply "make sh*t up", why not go for the ACTUAL dates instead of just "something close"? Remember, almost EVERY ancient civilization knew how to calculate THESE events to MUCH closer than a whole day because of their critical relationship to agriculture. And to answer your next objection, there is no known calendar error that could rationally explain it, either. In addition if you give yourself the leeway to "make up" dates at a LATER period, it is less likely that you'd make the, to modern eyes obvious, switcheroo of a screwup regarding conception date versus birth date.

A far better argument would be to simply accept September 29 as the actual birth date of one Jesus of Nazereth, never mind the "God" part, and claim that the date of conception was simply calculated BACK from that date rather than being based on the somewhat outlandish claims of His mother about being impregated on such and such a day by the Holy Spirit. However, again having the leeway to "pick" the winter solstice, why not do it? Why settle for "close"?

In any event these arguments, however interesting they might be to some, are somewhat off the point, which was, if you'll recall, the thorny matter of the beginning of human PERSONHOOD rather than human LIFE. Both are matters of objective FACT; however, only the LATTER is subject to scientific proof.

If one does NOT believe in an immortal human soul, the FORMER can be chosen for convenience. Thus what Rush Limbaugh likes to call the Femi-Nazis choose the moment the baby's ENTIRE head exits the mother's body, except in Illinois where a more "Spartan" rule applies, thanks in large part to the exertions of Senator Obama, where it is the moment the ENTIRE afterbirth exits the mother's body, allowing those involved a quick look at the child and the opportunity to LEGALLY strangle him or her with his or her own umbilical cord.

If on the other hand you DO believe in an immortal soul that enters the body at some point, you are under some responsibility to honestly calculate that point and act accordingly. In that light it SHOULD matter what the Judeo-Christian Bible has to say on the subject. Forget Jesus; forget the entire New Testament. Just note how many times in the Old Testament an important person's CONCEPTION is referred to, followed by reference to his or her BIRTH.

The Biblical implication that a person was a PERSON from CONCEPTION rather than merely from birth is thus rather strong, and as with the similar argument over the beginning of LIFE, nobody has REALLY come up with a logical, rational MIDPOINT. You are pretty much stuck with choosing "conception", "birth", or something in between that can always be rationalized to "birth" when doing so would be more "convenient".

My objection to partial-birth abortion is from the pro-choicers own ground - it is more hazardous to the mother than either vaginal birth or having a Caesarian section. It is more hazardous because PBA is both procedures at one time. Hence, the complication risk from PBA is at least additive of both the C-section (to get at the head) and of an induced vaginal delivery. Moreover, the procedure takes more time than a C-section birth and hence has more blood loss and physical trauma.

Justice Kennedy has it right: show me where a PBA is unavoidably necessary.

chsw

Lizardman,

As has oft been said, "There's no such thing as being a little bit pregnant."

That said, I think what passes for debate begs the question, to wit:

If you believe that parents have the right to kill their unborn, why stop at birth?

Why not extend this right until the child reaches his majority? Surely this would have salutory effects on our society! Think how much better behaved Johnny would be if knew that Daddy REALLY CAN KILL HIM!

And, why should women have all the fun?

Indeed, if we are to embrace multiculturalism, there are many societies that expect families to take care of (so to speak) their own.

Dafydd

Your belief as to when ensoulment occurs is interesting, however the belief that that we have souls is a religious belief and in a secular pluralistic democracy civil laws cannot be based solely on such beliefs. The fact that a fetus is a human being is undeniable. In fact it's life is teminated by the abortion procedure precisely because it is a human being.

I am unabashedly pro life. I believe that if you can rationalize killing the most innocent and vulnerable of all human beings you can rationalize just about anything. At the same time I do not think we can significantly reduce the number of abortions except through education and moral suasion rather than through force of law.

Although I believe that life begins at the beginning I recognize that any law must be a compromise. The state has every right however to forbid abortion after the point of viability.

Kennedy's Judgment graphically describing the PBA procedure ought to be required reading for any young woman wishing to indulge in unprotected sex.

As for your suggestion of paying women not to abort their babies, it is , with great respect, Daffy.

FredTownWard:

Nice try, Dafydd; however, neither Christmas nor Michaelmas ACTUALLY coincide or correspond with the winter solstice or the autumnal equinox. They are just "close".

FredTownWard, if that sort of precision is important to your theory, if you won't accept the merely "close," then one might note that human gestation actually averages 266 days.

But between December 25th and the next September 29th is 278 days. (No leap day, of course.)

How did the Church leaders in A.D. 330 know that Mary was 12 days late? Divine inspiration?

For heaven's sake, FTW, the two apostles themselves who wrote about Jesus's birth, Matthew and Mark -- who knew Jesus personally and traveled with Him for several years, preaching His gospel -- could not even settle upon the year He was born. But you believe that Church leaders three centuries later could know His exact date of conception, down to the very day?

Even today, we rarely know that datum... except in cases of artificial insemination, of course.

I'm sorry, this is all rather extraordinarily unconvincing.

So let's move to ensoulment, where you rely upon what Christians call the Old Testament, and which Jews call Tanakh:

If on the other hand you DO believe in an immortal soul that enters the body at some point, you are under some responsibility to honestly calculate that point and act accordingly. In that light it SHOULD matter what the Judeo-Christian Bible has to say on the subject. Forget Jesus; forget the entire New Testament. Just note how many times in the Old Testament an important person's CONCEPTION is referred to, followed by reference to his or her BIRTH.

The Biblical implication that a person was a PERSON from CONCEPTION rather than merely from birth is thus rather strong, and as with the similar argument over the beginning of LIFE, nobody has REALLY come up with a logical, rational MIDPOINT.

Yet the Jews, who most people believe do know something, at least, about Tanakh, historically believed (based upon "the Old Testament") that the soul entered the human body sometime between a month or so after conception and when the baby takes its first breath after being born.

This is why Jewish law has typically allowed abortion under some circumstances, and has never treated the death of a foetus with the severity it treats the death of a person. See, e.g., Exodus 21:22-25:

(22) When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman's husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning. (23) But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, (24) eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, (25) burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

(The same passage is found in the KJV and the New American (Catholic) Bible at the same verses.)

Also, note Genesis 2:7, which in Tanakh reads:

(T)he LORD God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.

While the case of Adam may well be unique, being the first, here clearly Adam's body (including his nostrils) exist before God breathes into him "life," that is, the soul. Again, this passage is in the KJV and the Catholic bibles as well.

You really are on shaky ground, FredTownWard, claiming (caps and all) that, "The Biblical implication that a person was a PERSON from CONCEPTION rather than merely from birth is thus rather strong." The only Tanakh passage that even implies a prenatal existence of the soul is in Jeremiah 1:5:

Before I created you in the womb, I selected you;
Before you were born, I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet concerning the nations.

But a close reading shows only the recognition that God knew in advance that Jeremiah would be born and would grow up to be a prophet in his 20s. It says nothing about when, precisely, during his mother's pregnancy, he was ensouled.

After all, God explicitly says He knew, consecrated, and appointed Jeremiah "before" He created him "in the womb." Do you argue that a person becomes a "PERSON" even before conception?

Dafydd

Kind of surprised you took this tack, Dafydd. I would have guessed you would support Justice Thomas's concurrence, in which he implicitly stated that he would support a Commerce Clause-based challenge to the legitimacy of the law. Thomas favors a pretty narrow reading of the Commerce Clause (hence his dissent from Gonzales v. Raich), and I have to say I agree with him. I'm certainly happy with the outcome, as a pro-lifer, and do agree with the reasoning used, but I also think that an appeal based on Thomas's (correct, imo) reading of the Commerce Clause would result in the ban being stricken down.

But that would in turn mean that Congress doesn't have the right to regulate abortion that doesn't involve interstate commerce. Which would invalidate even Roe, and send the issue back to the states. I guess that's why the pro-abortion side didn't want to argue that way, even though they had to know Thomas would have agreed with them.

btw, something that's always bugged me: Why do you have AOSHQ listed among the milblogs in your blogroll? Ace was never in the military.

Mrs. Peel:

btw, something that's always bugged me: Why do you have AOSHQ listed among the milblogs in your blogroll? Ace was never in the military.

You don't have to have been in the military to write a milblog; you just have to have a blog that lots of military people read regularly and that often discusses subjects of general interest to military people. I could have put Belmont Club in the MilBlogs category, but I put it in Favorites instead. (Big Lizards is a political blog, even though neither Sachi nor I has ever been in politics, in a professional way.)

If Tom Clancy had a blog, and if I chose to blogroll it, I would put it in the MilBlogs category.

As for the rest of your comment... uh, what? Although I do sometimes play a "Sea lawyer" in my own mind, I'm not really an attorney.

I sort of understand that you're saying that Thomas would have voted to strike down the law on the grounds that it goes beyond Congress's authority to regulate things, as enumerated in the Constitution, but that's as much as I can parse from your argument!

Dafydd

well, ok. Not the same definition I think most people use, but it does make sense.

Oh, sorry. I am not a lawyer either - I'm just a logical engineer - but I did happen to read Thomas's dissent in Gonzales v. Raich. That was the medical marijuana case, when Angel Raich was growing marijuana in her backyard for her consumption, which is legal under California law (where she lived). She got prosecuted under federal law and argued all the way up to the Court. She lost 5-4 (I forget what the grounds were), but Thomas dissented, because he argued that the Commerce Clause, which is the part of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, did not give Congress the power to regulate a situation that was neither interstate nor commerce. I forget exactly how he put it, but basically he said that if the Commerce Clause regulates that situation, it's hard to see what it doesn't regulate.

So in his separate concurrence to Kennedy's opinion on this case, he noted very specifically that this particular argument did not address the applicability of the Commerce Clause, thus implying he would have supported striking the ban down on the grounds that he doesn't believe Congress has the power to regulate abortion (obviously, an abortion that does involve crossing state lines would be an exception).

I had just sort of suspected that you would agree with Thomas's narrow reading of that clause given your more libertarian leanings. Particularly in Raich. I'm certainly no supporter of marijuana, but I agree with Thomas that Congress doesn't have the power to regulate Raich's situation. That's entirely up to the states, per the 10th amendment.

There was some more intense discussion of Thomas's separate concurrence at Volokh, but I didn't understand those guys. I should go post some comments full of jargon about solid-state electronics and see what they say.

Dafydd:

Mostly agreed, but Exodus 21:22-25 isn't as unambiguous as you imply. The words sometimes translated "a miscarriage results" seem to literally mean "the child comes forth" (I don't know Hebrew; the phrase is "w˚yase û ye ladêhâ", and the words are "yeled yasa"). One other place this is used of a miscarriage (but in that place the miscarriage is known because of the horrific context); everywhere else it's living thing coming forth (although usually specified as living). Read that way, this verse would establish a fine for causing a premature delivery by violence, with huge physical penalties for any damage: and it doesn't seem to matter who the damage is caused to, the mother or the child.

The arguments from the Bible don't really have sufficient power that I can see. Even if one believes that the Bible is holy Scripture (which I do), the support for either view is extremely equivocal. (I can't claim the previous verse as evidence for a high value of preborn life, because I don't know whether that's a valid reading; I'm not a Hebrew scholar. It's convincing to me, but others clearly disagree, and I'm not educated enough to distinguish.)

-Billy

Uh, Dafydd, YOU were the one claiming a link for Christmas and Michaelmas to the solstices and equinoxes, not me, so "that sort of precision" is important to YOUR theory, not mine, which is why I brought it up.

Next using the AVERAGE human gestation is also barking up the wrong tree. To quote my source, "The actual number of days between the two dates is 278, which is the IDEAL period of human gestation." (emphasis added) Dispute him about whether 278 days is IDEAL if you can, not about whether it is longer than AVERAGE.

This criticism of yours is also rather odd:

"For heaven's sake, FTW, the two apostles themselves who wrote about Jesus's birth, Matthew and Mark -- who knew Jesus personally and traveled with Him for several years, preaching His gospel -- could not even settle upon the year He was born."

What ARE you talking about? NOBODY in the ENTIRE New Testament made ANY claims about the year He was born (or the date for that matter), which is why both are and have been in such question based on the scanty clues that ARE available in the New Testament. Nevertheless, His BIRTH date would SURELY have been known by the people who knew Him personally. As for His CONCEPTION date, the date CLAIMED for it by His mother could also have been known to His followers. That's why the early "fixing" of these two festival dates by Christians is potentially so interesting, especially since, as you admit, they DON'T fit so neatly into the solar calendar. Church TRADITION is obviously not nearly as reliable as scripture, but it isn't always wrong, either. Neither I nor my source are claiming this theory as PROVEN, merely that since there ARE strong indications that early Christians were celebrating Jesus' CONCEPTION date, Christians TODAY have little excuse for considering abortion at any point anything other than the taking of a human life, which, as with the already born, is sometimes, but not all that often, justified.

By the way I WAS aware of the passage in Exodus you referred to, but as someone pointed out before I did, it does NOT mean what you think it means. "When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results..." This is (rather obviously I should think) a case of negligent homicide involving an unborn child ACCIDENTALLY killed during a fight. That the punishment for this was not death is hardly surprising since the Mosaic penalty for ACCIDENTALLY killing a MAN was being forced to hot-foot it to a city of refuge and remain there until the death of the high priest. You certainly cannot conclude from THAT passage that abortion would have been "OK".

Your quote from Genesis is, if anything, even less convincing. Yes, Adam's BODY, just formed by God Himself, physically EXISTED before God "blew into his nostrils the breath of life", but as the passage rather clearly indicates, Adam's body wasn't ALIVE until God MADE it alive by blowing "into his nostrils the breath of life". As you state, the case with Adam (and arguably Eve) was unique, after that all babies were produced by the combination of UNQUESTIONABLY LIVING sperm and egg cells.

As for Jeremiah 1:5, I would certainly agree that it is the CLEAREST, most INDISPUTABLE Old Testament proof of "prenatal existence of the soul". And proof of the prenatal existence of the soul justifies abortion HOW, exactly? Of course it doesn't PROVE that the soul enters the body at CONCEPTION but neither does it PROVE that the soul enters the body sometime between a month or so after conception and when the baby takes its first breath after being born.

As for THIS question of yours, "Do you argue that a person becomes a 'PERSON' even before conception?" Well, ALL Christians would argue that about JESUS, obviously, the whole religion rather depending on that point, and of course it goes without saying (so I'll say it anyway) that if such IS the correct interpretation of Jeremiah 1:5, it would better fit MY contention of "ensoulment" at conception than YOURS of "ensoulment" sometme later, wouldn't it?

I won't dispute your claims that Jews "historically believed (based upon 'the Old Testament') that the soul entered the human body sometime between a month or so after conception and when the baby takes its first breath after being born.", but I will point out two problems with it. First, there would appear to be, if anything, LESS Biblical support for THAT position, or at least none you could find to quote to me. Second, how could you reliably KNOW that date in a given pregnancy in order to determine whether you would be aborting a fetus or a killing a baby? It is, as I claimed it would be, just another unworkable "midpoint" that can and WOULD be rationalized into allowing abortion at any point prior to birth.

So if I turn out to be wrong, all that happens is that some clumps of tissue I would spare get "ensouled" sometime later than I think they do. If you turn out to be wrong, you've ended up sanctioning murder, not ANYTHING CLOSE to the numbers the Femi-Nazis sanction of course, but some, nevertheless.

Are you SURE you are entirely "OK" with that?

FredTownWard:

Are you SURE you are entirely "OK" with that?

Yes, quite... because there are competing liberties.

But as to the rest of the argument, it's abundently clear that neither of us is going to convince the other; so we'd best leave the unresolvable questions unresolved <g>.

Cheers,

Dafydd

That's fine with me, Dafydd. I always knew that this ancient Christian festival date-based argument was a peripheral one; I only brought it up in the first place because it is one of those things that makes you go, "H'm....".

However, the issue of "competing liberties" or "competing rights" is the same old argument that has been used by every pro-choicer to justify every abortion they ever chose to justify, and my respones is always the same. The right to life MUST trump all others; and if there is ANY doubt about the "personhood" of the fetus in question, the victory MUST go to the fetus NOT to the mother.

Once upon a time a large number of mostly decent, honorable, and honest (especially in comparison with THIS generation) people had convinced themselves that black Africans weren't quite human so things could be done to them that couldn't be justified if done to Europeans. It wasn't that they were especially evil; it was that they were mistaken in their belief of subhumanity. But that mistake LEAD them to the doing of evil and was used by them to justify continuing to do evil.

FredTownWard:

The right to life MUST trump all others; and if there is ANY doubt about the "personhood" of the fetus in question, the victory MUST go to the fetus NOT to the mother.

Which is, of course, the same old argument that has been used by every pro-lifer to justify changing the law to suit his own personal religious belief...!

Once upon a time a large number of mostly decent, honorable, and honest (especially in comparison with THIS generation) people had convinced themselves that black Africans weren't quite human so things could be done to them that couldn't be justified if done to Europeans.

True, but a non-sequitur. Many decent, honorable, and honest people convinced themselves that women were not quite human, and the issue they might bear was so dreadfully important, that things could be done to the women -- locking them up, refusing to educate them or allow them any decision-making role in society, and putting them totally under the control of their husbands, even allowing him to beat them to bring them into compliance with his will (or kill them to restore his family's honor) -- that could never be justified if done to a man.

Which is also a non-sequitur: The fact that doofuses many decades or centuries ago held foolish and immoral ideas about other people neither proves nor disproves the thesis that a human zygote is a person.

The Jesuits used to have an argument that ran thus:

1. Suppose the existence of the biblical God, as taught by the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century, were unlikely; suppose it were very unlikely, say only one chance out of a million.
2. But if He does exist, then the consequences of not believing in Him are infinitely bad, since denying God results in eternity spent in hell.
3. But even the smallest finite fraction of a possibility that such a God exists multiplied by the infinitely bad consequences of not believing in Him is still infinitely bad, since any finite number multiplied by infinity still equals infinity.
4. Therefore, logically, one must believe in the Jesuitical God of the 1500s, because not to do so is infinitely bad.

They thought it a very clever argument. But of course, there is one terrible flaw that spoils everything: The exact, same argument can be made for believing in Allah, Moloch, or Cthulhu, as well. Thus, one must believe in every god that threatens eternal torment for disbelief, no matter how unlikely one thinks it that such a god exists... even one chance out of a trillion, or one chance out of a google.

And since each such god demands exclusivity, you're literally damned if you do and damned if you don't!

If the zygote/embryo/foetus is a person at the time you abort it, then you have committed murder, or at least negligent homicide or depraved indifference to human life.

But if it is not a person, and you nevertheless use it to forbid the woman control over an integral part of her own body, then you deny her essential liberty. Life and liberty are equally integral to humanity (see Henry, Patrick, et al).

Ergo, the law -- which is the law for all -- must make a choice and stick to it as to when personhood begins, and it must do so on the basis of the consensus of society... not by insisting that logic compels, willy nilly, the rest of the world to accept the pro-life position. Any other decision obliterates essential liberty.

(This for the same reason that Moslems cannot morally compel the rest of us to live under Sharia law, no matter how firmly they believe that not doing so leads to eternal damnation.)

Dafydd

Dafydd wrote: "Ergo, the law -- which is the law for all -- must make a choice and stick to it as to when personhood begins,"

Ah, but that is PRECISELY the problem, Dafydd. This isn't exactly a new idea for "solving" this particular question; the problem has been that as a practical matter, NO ONE has come up with a workable concept. Trimesters were a non-starter in part because of the difficulty of determining same when dealing with a mother and/or a doctor willing to lie. "Ensoulment" isn't measurable scientifically. Viability is moving continuously, and besides Femi-Nazis cannot be trusted not to kill the "live ones". (When you look at it honestly, partial birth abortion was merely a vicious but completely effective way to prevent "live baby syndrome" in late term abortions.)

The "pro-life" position at least is easily defined and workable laws can be based on it: if you are pregnant, you are dealing with another human being, PERIOD, and must act accordingly. The same can be said about the "Femi-Nazi" position: "anything goes" until the ENTIRE baby (or in Illinois the ENTIRE afterbirth) exits the mother.

Those of you who insist that a middle choice exists are going to have to PROVE it by DEFINING one, one that is DEFINITIVE, MEASURABLE, and DEFENDABLE against the arguments that the Femi-Nazis will bring against it. Or in other words you will have to come up with something that would prevent AT LEAST ONE abortion currently permitted if you want pro-lifers to take you seriously. Absent such a well-defined middle choice, all you can POSSIBLY accomplish is to give cover to the Femi-Nazis who will use YOUR views to help bolster THEIR arguments for abortion on demand until the moment of birth.

If you can come up with something, be my guest; if not, what is the point? Sure, it is nice to learn that partial-birth abortion turns your stomach enough to cause you to support outlawing that particular TECHNIQUE, but there are other still quite perfectly legal ways to kill a full-term fetus in less blatantly infanticidal ways. Unless you can come up with something that would actually PREVENT some abortions, why bother trying to stake out a position in the middle?

FredTownWard:

Or in other words you will have to come up with something that would prevent AT LEAST ONE abortion currently permitted if you want pro-lifers to take you seriously. Absent such a well-defined middle choice, all you can POSSIBLY accomplish is to give cover to the Femi-Nazis who will use YOUR views to help bolster THEIR arguments for abortion on demand until the moment of birth.

I reckon you must have missed the part in the post above where I wrote:

I believe there is a fairly clear point where the cortex activates, and it's usually somewhere around the 26th week (around the end of the second trimester). I would allow abortion for any reason before cortical activity rises to a certain point, and afterwards, disallow it for any reason except to save the life -- not the "health" -- of the mother... and even then, every effort should be made to save the baby, even if that puts the mother at some increased risk.

I realize I said that readers didn't have to read the stuff inside the indent... but it's not forbidden, either.

Dafydd

I certainly read it, Dafydd, but it frankly strikes me as a somwhat fuzzier defined and therefore somewhat less legally useful definition than "no third trimester abortions except to save the mother's life," and I have serious doubts about the enforceability of THAT even assuming the SCOTUS would accept it. (One shudders to think what Planned Parenthood's hired scumyers could do with "cortical activity rises to a certain point"). Is that really something that can be measured accurately by an abortionist wishing to comply with the law? BEFORE performing or refusing to perform an abortion? Heck, can we even measure trimesters that definitively? And what about proving a case against the abortionist (perhaps even the mother) who willfully violates it?

One can easily question the wisdom, especially from a libertarian point of view, of our various age based laws: drinking, smoking, voting, driving, buying a gun, consenting to sex, etc., but at least they are rather easily ENFORCEABLE because birth dates are required on photo ID's and ignorance is not a valid excuse, "I SWEAR, your honor, she looked 18 to me!" But unless she only had sex ONE time (or an Angel of the Lord overspread her on a given date), not even an honest woman can know her conception date with that much certainty, and for this to work fetal cortical activity and/or age has to be easily and unarguably determinable with enough accuracy to be useful.

If it CAN be, you at least have a starting point. If it CANNOT be, your proposal is DOA, except as another arrow in the pro-abortion quiver.

FTW:

Is that really something that can be measured accurately by an abortionist wishing to comply with the law? BEFORE performing or refusing to perform an abortion?

Yes, actually, with a PET scan. But in the vast majority of cases, it's not necessary: Such activation would almost never occur before, say, week 23, and would almost certainly have occurred (except in cases of terrible and fatal deformities) by the end of week 27.

So the law would allow abortion for any reason before week 23, would disallow it except to save the life of the mother after week 27... and for abortions in between, would require a PET scan first, unless it's to save the life of the mother. If the PET scan shows the cortical activity above the established limit, no abortion.

(My understanding is that the jump in cortical activity is quite significant, quite swift, and impossible to miss.)

This would forbid nearly all of the many 3-T abortions currently allowed.

But unless she only had sex ONE time (or an Angel of the Lord overspread her on a given date), not even an honest woman can know her conception date with that much certainty, and for this to work fetal cortical activity and/or age has to be easily and unarguably determinable with enough accuracy to be useful.

The easiest way to date conception is to note the date of the last menstrual period and add two weeks. This depends upon self-report, of course; but so do many things. If a doctor thinks it's close, there are other ways to determine foetal age: Inexpensive and noninvasive ultrasound does a good job of revealing at what stage a pregnancy is.

If it CAN be, you at least have a starting point. If it CANNOT be, your proposal is DOA, except as another arrow in the pro-abortion quiver.

Let me break this to you gently, FredTownWard: The United States will never, ever, ever declare that human personhood begins at conception and outlaw all abortions. It will not happen.

So in fact, it is your position that is "another arrow in the pro-abortion quiver"... because if you continue to insist upon all or nothing, then you will force the American people to choose "nothing."

(This is the same mechanism by which Rep. Tom Tancredo's absolutist anti-immigrant position leads instead to McCain-Kennedy... after helping the Democrats capture Congress in 2006.)

Either you compromise -- or be prepared for the Groningen Protocol. Pro-life absolutism is going nowhere and will save not a single life.

Dafydd

I just want to clarify how abortion works in Jewish law. It is somewhat different from Christian and secular law.

Under Jewish law, a fetus is considered a person after 40 days (when it starts to look like a person) and abortion is not allowed under most circumstances. This is based on an alternate punctuation of Genesis 9:6, which can also be translated "Whoever sheds the blood of man in man, his blood shall be shed." The Talmud interprets "man in man" as a fetus in its mother's womb.

Abortion is permitted to save the mother's life. This is not because of a lack of "personhood" or "soulness" on the part of the fetus. It is because the fetus is considered a "rodef", one who pursues others in order to kill them. The mother, as an act of self-defense, is allowed to kill her pursuer. Another human being, to saved the pursued, is also allowed to kill the pursuer. This would be true of an adult pursuer as well.

OK, Dafydd, I'm willing to take your word for it, that this can be measured as easily and precisely as you say; however, where the rubber hits the road will be if the courts are willing to take somebody's word for it. If not this will all go the way of the infamous "health exception", which as you well know was originally a well-intentioned provision seized upon by clever Femi-Nazi's as a neat trick with which to completely invalidate any abortion restricting law containing it.

However, I have to take issue with the following: "The United States will never, ever, ever declare that human personhood begins at conception and outlaw all abortions. It will not happen."

Uh huh, and you KNOW this because...? Any reason other than the fact that you happen to AGREE with it? Frankly you sound a little bit like those people who said, "C'mon the fill-in-the-blank will never, ever, abolish all black African slavery. It will not happen. Can't you just settle for abolishing the slave trade?" To which the answer was, "Absolutely... for now."

If you'd really been paying attention, Dafydd, you'd realize that it is we pro-lifers who are the incrementalists while it is the pro-choicers, yourself and a few others excepted, who are the absolutists. Any law and any politician that restricts ANY abortions gets our backing, but we make no promises about stopping our attempts to convince voters to go for MORE restrictions down the road. After all WE are asking the SCOTUS to overturn Roe v. Wade, which won't outlaw a SINGLE abortion, merely give the American people the chance to decide an issue that was taken away from them "by their betters". It is just that with the political winds more and more to our backs now, we wish to avoid anymore unworkable gimmicks like the "health exception" that would take years to expose.

Convince us that your proposal could actually work, and we'll back it... for now. It might make about as good a test case as a third trimester restriction in nudging the SCOTUS in the right direction.

FredTownWard:

However, I have to take issue with the following: "The United States will never, ever, ever declare that human personhood begins at conception and outlaw all abortions. It will not happen."

Uh huh, and you KNOW this because...?

For the same reason I know that the U.S. will never, ever, ever decriminalize drugs (illicit and prescription) -- and that's something I would support, on grounds of fundamental liberty. Thus, it has nothing to do with my wants or desires.

America has a national character which is more than simply the collection of the characters of each individual. It has a group identity, personality, and character that can be described.

Not every American follows every element of our national character; but it's a national character nonetheless.

One element of that character is a national abhorance of religious extremism (or irreligious extremism, for that matter): Americans, by consensus, recoil from any one religious sect or small collection of sects demanding that its views be enacted into law... as when, say, the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel demand that all movie theaters be closed from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset.

Local cities and counties and even (small) states are much more likely to enact, e.g., blue laws, ban porn movies, or erect a Ten Commandments plaque; but not the nation as a whole.

Like it or lump it, the view that "all abortions should be outlawed" is considered a religious view -- and it's a small, minority, religious view. Many, probably most, Americans personally believe that abortion is wrong; but that is a far cry from believing they should be outlawed nationwide.

FTW, you can't even get any substantial number of people to demand that Roe v. Wade be overturned, let alone ban abortions. Despite 30+ years of agitation on the part of pro-lifers, there is no great groundswell demanding that abortion be outlawed; the numbers have stayed extraordinarily steady.

If Roe were overturned (which I hope for as fervently as do you), a scant handful of states would ban abortions (three, maybe four); but the vast majority, in which about 90% of the American population resides, would leave the procedure legal, if perhaps a bit more regulated.

You are in a small minority -- people who want all abortions outlawed nationwide -- and it's not growing larger. Nor does anything in the future look to change that.

Dafydd

Dafydd, EVERYTHING you say about about the impossibility of outlawing all abortions was once said about outlawing all slavery, and over the long haul I think you will be proven wrong for the very same reasons. Though continuously urged to settle for "half a loaf" and though always willing to settle for "half measures" that actually moved the ball in the right direction, abolitionists stubbornly persisted for, depending on how you choose to count it, WELL over a CENTURY in demanding ultimately that slavery be utterly ABOLISHED Why? Because of their firm, logically defensible, and RELIGION-based belief that black Africans were HUMAN and that therefore slavery was WRONG, no matter what difficulties facing that truth must lead to. (Atheistic evolutionists in the 19th Century were if anything, part of the problem, with their to modern eyes totally ludicrous attempts to explain white superiority and black inferiority through evolution.)

It was also stubborn people with similarly "extreme" beliefs who got abortion outlawed in this country the FIRST time, when in the 19th century, abortion first became a (relatively) safe and effective medical procedure. This totally legal procedure was preached against, campaigned against, and gradually over several decades first restricted then largely outlawed. As was the case back then, wise pro-lifers realize that outlawing abortion will have to come LAST, after we have won the debate, AGAIN.

As with slavery the battle will be fought over the definition of what is human and what is not, and though abortion opponents don't have quite as obvious proofs of their subjects' "humanity" as abolitionists did, that doesn't mean they don't and won't have the better of the argument. The chink in the armor of pro-choicers is their fundamental inability to logically explain how something they admit as "human" comes from something they claim is "not human".

This is where the old, now largely discredited "Recapitulation Theory" would have been so useful to pro-choicers. In 1866 Ernst Haeckel first espoused the idea that "ontogeny", the embryonal development process, "recapitulates" "phylogeny", the species' evolutionary history. If you are old enough or younger and your school system benighted enough, you may remember being taught this. BRILLIANT hypothesis at the time, but as even the hardest-core evolutionists have been forced to admit, the stages of development are not functionally equivalent. Oh, they will insist that there are still SOME useful connections between ontogeny and phylogeny and will insist to a MAN that it is "unfair" for creationists to use this in order to poke fun at them, but as an argument for it being "OK" to abort unborn children because they haven't "become human" yet, it is now useless.

YOUR attempt to use measurable higher brain function as the determining factor, while it might (or might not) prove useful in breaking the anti-intellectual logjam at the SCOTUS over Roe v. Wade, will NEVER hold up over the long run as an ethical or moral cut-off. CESSATION of higher brain activity has become more and more accepted as an indicator of death for ONE reason and one reason ONLY: as a rule people don't recover from it. (There have been exceptions, but whether these were misdiagnoses, genuine miracles, or the first glimmers of some future medical breakthrough cannot now be determined.) Therefore, it is more and more recognized as cruel to FORCE people into using (and paying for) "heroic measures" that just don't work, though it is equally cruel to deny those who wish the opportunity to try. Should a breakthrough come, though, "brain death" will go the way of cessation of breathing or cessation of heart beat, once widely accepted indications of death but today indications that it is time to START CPR.

The problem is that the situation in a human embryo is not only not analogous, but it is very nearly the OPPOSITE. For a pre-third-trimester embryo lack of detectable higher cortical function is NORMAL and only if something happens to interfere with the growth process: abortion, miscarriage, accident, etc., will detectable higher cortical activity NOT occur, right on schedule. (Perhaps the secret to defeating "brain death" in the already born will be found in better understanding how an embryo "grows" a brain.)

Thus while pulling the plug on those whose brains CEASE higher functioning is a perfectly reasonable bow to current medical reality, pulling the plug on human embryos whose brains haven't STARTED higher functioning is a fairly transparent attempt to fool others and ourselves about what we are actually doing and thus unlikely to withstand too many more decades of logical and scientific scrutiny, much less religious scrutiny, IMHO.

Ruth G wrote: "This is based on an alternate punctuation of Genesis 9:6, which can also be translated "Whoever sheds the blood of man in man, his blood shall be shed." The Talmud interprets "man in man" as a fetus in its mother's womb."

I have a bit of a problem with that interpretation of Genesis 9:6 because it seems to take it completely out of the surrounding context, which is the so-called Noahic Covenant, the first designated "covenant" (Hebrew: berith) in the Bible.

In Genesis 9:1-17 God lays out a number of things in this "covenant" between Him and us as the descendants of Noah and all the animals as well. It is everlasting (16), the Earth will never be destroyed again by water (11, 15) (Didn't mention FIRE though, notice that?), the consumption of meat but NOT of blood is specifically authorized (3,4) and capital punishment for taking human life is specifically authorized whether said life is taken by an animal or by another human (5). To suggest that what is more commonly read as the crystal clear restatement of the capital punishment authorization in verse 6 somehow applies specifically to abortion (or to causing a miscarriage) seems a bit of a strain to me in part because I would submit that only our most sophisticated moderns would have dared to presume that an unborn human is NOT.

FredTownWard:

I read your comment but stand on my previous arguments.

Dafydd

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)