February 23rd, 2009
So I assume you’ve all heard about the woman in California who has attracted a media storm because she just had octuplets as a result of IVF, in addition to her six other children. Also she is on welfare and has no partner and lives with her parents and looks oddly like Angelina Jolie etc.
I have noticed a really disturbing trend in the comments and critiques that are being leveled at her (disclosure: my data comes from browsing the so-called “mommy blogs” which I find inexplicably fascinating). On the one hand they are saying a woman should have complete reproductive control in her own life, meaning she should carry, birth, or abort as many children as she wants in whatever manner she wants, with the support of the medical infrastructure. On the other hand, they are harshly criticizing the doctor who performed the IVF for his unethical behaviour.
Does anyone other than me see the gross contradiction in there? A woman should have total control… as long as her doctor says yes? Is that really what they mean? Or do they mean women can’t make a reasonable choice so we must rely on doctors to tell us whether our choice is ethical or not? Because that’s what you’re saying when you say that the buck stops with the doctor, that he is horribly unethical for performing the procedure. How can it be that he’s unethical for doing it, but she’s not unethical for asking for it?
Frankly, it reeks. Clearly lots of people know, perhaps just on a gut level, that something is wrong with this situation – and they seem unwilling to blame the woman because to do so would be a head on collision with dearly held ethical standards. So what’s left to do? Blame the doctor! It’s bad logic and it’s procrustean.
This is what I think: if you really support a woman’s right to be in control of her reproduction, in control 100%, then you should be pleased as punch with all concerned in this little scenario. Woman makes a choice freely, seeks medical aid, receives it. Hooray for everyone. The fact that this doctor is riding heat is a clear signal that many folks are not in fact in support of a woman having 100% control over her own reproduction.
This is the other thing I have noticed in the blog storm: everyone is talking about the woman – her wishes, her rights, her body. Far fewer people are talking about the babies (and children already born in the family). My take: Whether you agree with her choice, one thing is for sure – she has doomed her children to a childhood characterized by socioemotional deprivation and then almost certainly a life of socioeconomic deprivation.
I wish there was a way to set the moral standard in such a way that we could rule in the good behaviours and rule out the bad ones, but there are no moral absolutes in practice. I think what this woman did was wrong because it harms her children, and think what the doctor did was wrong for the same reason, though I place the primary burden of responsibility on the woman. Doctors advise and provide services – it’s not for them to say what you can and cannot do with your own body.
I am still on record as being 100% in support of women’s reproductive rights. Making restrictions that would prevent the situation that happened here would unavoidably unfairly restrict the rights of other women who should not be restricted. I think less rules are better than more. And let’s face it, this sort of situation is pretty rare. Do we need to get all hot under the collar about it? No. A big clutch of poor kids who will have an utterly overtaxed and therefore inattentive mother is bad, but not really that bad, relatively speaking. At least she wants them. I wish she had made a different choice and I feel bad for those babies, but I do think it was her choice to make. And it was the duty of her doctor to respect that, because she is not mentally incapacitated or requesting treatment that will kill her when it is not her intention to die.
And making her blameless and her doctor responsible is gross patriarchy in action and I absolutely reject that.
Edit: Apparently I had some facts wrong. See comments for updated information from a commenter and my response.
I agree with you completely — Husband and I were discussing this just last night. The blame lies directly on the woman, not the doctor, though I wonder if there could be (and perhaps there even was) a suggestion/mandate that she confer with an ethicist before comitting to the IVF, similar to what women seeking abortions are often required to do.
I think what has a lot of folks riled up is that she apparently paid for the proceedure with public assistance dollars, and that the kids will now almost certainly be supported by public assistance dollars.
Given that I’m for draconian population limits (each person gets 2 Birth-rights with extremely limited exceptions allowed), I think you can guess my own opinion on this matter.
…you think she should be shot?
I fail to see how it’s paternalistic to suggest that a doctor should only implant the number of embryos that a woman’s body might possibly be able to carry to term–especially when the patient has informed the doctor that she will not reduce if multiple embryos develop.
I’m not here to judge who makes a fit parent and I don’t want doctors doing that either. The last thing I want is for doctors to ask women where the $$$ for IVF came from, how the prospective mother plans to care for a baby (or two), what the family and living situation is like…but for the basic health and welfare of the mother and her soon-to-be children, 6 embryos in a woman who will not reduce is absolutely too many.
It’s that basic.
Also, you make it seem that Nadya sought a doctor to fulfill her dream of having 8 3 ounce premies. But what Nadya wanted was one more baby. She didn’t even want the 6 that the doctor implanted her with. She took her octuplet pregnancy as a sign from God that he wanted her to have 8. Yeah, she made a choice to undergo IVF despite her large family and unstable economic situation, and it is ok to question the ethics of her choice–but we can thank an overzealous doctor for 8 babies instead of one or two.
See what happens when you give women control of their bodies, instead of letting the church mandate it?
On a side note Vex, by 100% in support of reproductive rights, do you mean total control? So, deaf children for deaf parents?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article3087367.ece
Moving beyond that, when it becomes practical to genetically modify an embryo wholesale, do you accept tinkering to create down syndrome babies for down syndrome parents? Armless babies for parents that were in utero victims of thalidomide? What about genetically designed sterile babies for parents who never want to be grandparents?
Where does your ethical path lead?
~ I.
Naaaah… just should have not been allowed to get to the point of having 14 children. Two children, max, then you’re done. No more functioning reproductive organs. I’m not homicidal, just dictatorial
When you give people a choice (ie. freedom) then you have to accept that some people will make choices that you don’t agree with. I totally agree with you vex that it was her choice to make, and any law that would have prevented this would do more harm than good. The best that soceity can do is to provide the best public schools, healthcare, and social programs so that the kids can be supported where their mother is unable to.
There are too many people on the planet – the ecology simply cannot continue to support things the way they are, much less with population growth left un-checked. One way or the other, this problem will be solved – either by rational minds taking agreed-upon action or by the inexorable grinding of physical reality.
Her choice has brought us all one step closer to catastrophe (well, technically 6 steps, if one happens to agree with zero population growth as a target). For that lack of foresight and inability to think past her own selfish desires, I condemn her choice.
I’m alright with embryo selection for whatever. I’m not really worried about deaf parents choosing to select for deaf babies – I imagine only a tiny minority would do so, but even if they all did, so what? They can sort out the ethical issues on their own, including consequences such as potential anger from the kid. We select for disability all the time, though with less accuracy, when people with any of the uncountable genetic disabilities or disease predispositions breed. Also many disabilities arise spontaneously. Disability and disease are out there. I don’t advocate discriminating against the disabled.
Ah, thank you for that information. I did not realize she received the multiple implants without her knowledge or consent. That changes things considerably! I take from your comment that what happened was she asked for a single embryo to be implanted, but the doctor implanted 8. She should absolutely have been allowed to decide herself how many embryos to have implanted. If the doctor did not inform her, or went against her instructions, then he committed an ethical breach.
I mean paternalism in the sense that an authority figure is allowed to decide for someone else what is best for them. I am assuming that the mother in this case is not suffering from a mental state or disorder that would prevent her from comprehending and assessing the risks and benefits of the procedure. If she is able to weigh the issues, then it should be her decision as to what medical treatment she would like to have. Saying that someone else should decide for her is paternalistic.
But as you point out, in this case she didn’t ask for 8 embryos. So the ethical fault for having 8 is not hers – it belongs with her doctor, who you report implanted more than she asked for knowing she would not reduce.
It appears I know nothing at all about IVF. A clarifying comment is coming on that issue…
To be fair, I don’t know that she was unaware of the number of embryos being implanted, but she’s said several times that the goal was just one more baby.
Even if the doctor had her consent to implant 6 (supposedly that’s the number implanted and 2 split)–and if the goal was one baby–should we be ok with that?
My thinking: I have a tumor in my pinkie and I go to an oncologist. She tells me that my entire arm needs to be removed just to be sure we get all of the tumor. I agree–it’s cancer after all. But it turns out the tumor was benign. I only needed my pinkie off, and any responsible doctor would have known that. I know that I consented, but it wasn’t my area of expertise. I trusted the doctor. Had I known the facts, I would have chosen differently.
If I tell my doctor that I want to have one more child, but that I wouldn’t abort if I became pregnant with more, I’m trusting my doctor to help me reach that goal safely. 6 embryos is at least twice what a reputable doctor would implant in a woman–especially a woman who has been clear about refusing to reduce. But we give total deference to doctors on these decisions.
It’s possible that Nadya still would have consented to implanting 6 embryos because she wanted an absolute guarantee of getting at least one baby out of this round of IVF. I bet that’s where we really differ:
I would say that because of the health risks of a super multiple pregnancy, I would say that a doctor should refuse to implant more than 3 or 4 embryos in a woman who will not reduce.
I bet you would say it’s entirely her choice assuming the risks are made clear to her.
IVF kind of works like the lotto. The rate of successful implantation is low, so the physician implants many fertilized eggs (in this case 8), with the hope of 1 or 2 surviving. This is standard at all IVF clinics, though the number of implanted eggs differs, dependent on many factors.
If there are numerous successful embryos, ordinarily the patient is offered selective abortion to ensure that the remaining fetuses are healthy, with a maximum opportunity for intrauterine development.
The likelihood of all 8 successfully implanting is extremely low, which is why this case has made international headlines, among other reasons.
Edit: 6 were implanted, not 8. Two of the 8 twinned.
I definitely agree that the physician is the expert. There is really only so far informed consent can go with a layperson. The danger here is that a doctor could unduly influence a patient depending on what they tell the patient and how they tell it – so perhaps the mother in this case was subtly pressured to accept more embryos than is considered safe. Maybe she was even heavily pressured – but maybe she didn’t get pressured at all, or the pressure was from her to the doctor! Does anyone know?
What is the standard number of embryos to transfer, and why? Did the doctor do something inappropriate according to his regulatory body, and if so, what is the basis of that judgment (health of mom and babies, or just an opinion about how many babies is “too many”)? Is there ever a circumstance when that number of transfers is “appropriate”? Do we really know all the details of the mother’s personal medical history? Hard to make judgments about a specific case because I highly doubt we have all the facts.
I suppose my position rests on the assumption that most people are reasonable and that with an open discussion between a reasonable expert and a reasonable patient, a reasonable plan should be able to be developed, based on the particulars of that patient’s case. There are always unusual situations that will require unorthodox solutions, and it would be a shame to prevent those by trying to regulate away freedoms based on one bad case. I really do think women should be free to make their own choices about their reproductive lives.
But – having said all that – I think your point was very good. If I tell my doctor I want 1 baby only and won’t reduce, then yes, he has a duty to try and do his best to get me there. So now the question is, based on her special medical history, were the doctor’s actions consonant with that goal? I suppose we’d have to ask a reproductive specialist doctor about that.
Good discussion here.
I definitely don’t want to see anyone’s reproductive freedoms be limited by this extreme case.
I don’t know what the regulatory situation is for fertility doctors–but we don’t see a lot of octuplet pregnancies, which makes me think that *most* fertility doctors and patients are just as reasonable as we’d like to hope.
Yes, I hope so too. Infertility is such a terrible problem to have that I hesitate to judge the folks who struggle with it, and the decisions they reach. I wouldn’t want someone telling me what to do if I had a serious medical problem.
But, I must say your comment has got me thinking more about the problem of non-expert patients, presumably very emotional and maybe lacking some objectivity, placed in the position of sole responsibility for making decisions of enormous importance all on their own. On one hand I feel it should be their choice – but on the other hand, it seems like the sort of set-up ripe for bad outcomes.
I am decidedly NOT in support of women’s reproductive rights. Maybe you find that surprising, maybe not. Because like some others have stated, there is a population issue that supercedes all other humanocentric ethical issues. We need to cut back on the baby-making until we get back under 1 billion people. If that means some people can’t have more than 2 babies, so be it. If that means some people can’t have any babies at all, so be it. How to control? How to enforce? I have ideas, but not practical or realistic ones.
I wonder if population numbers would be such a problem if certain first world countries (ours, USA) weren’t so effing resource intensive.
But then again maybe we couldn’t become or stay intensely populous without industrialization and its attendant resource utilization?
“I wonder if population numbers would be such a problem if certain first world countries (ours, USA) weren’t so effing resource intensive.”
Are you wondering if resource intensity creates a higher population or makes that population more damaging? Or both?
Well both, but in that first point I meant the latter. I don’t know all the measures, but for example on water use and garbage production and electricity use we north americans are insanely more resource intensive to raise than third world people (what the heck is the second world, anyway, and why do we never hear about it?). But maybe you can’t make a billion people all living together without industrialization? I don’t know. Does anyone know?
Dunno about the industrialization requirement, but here’s where the First/Second/Third World concept comes from; the cold war:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/150.html
Vex,
To be clear, I was asking more about tinkering with healthy embryos (as it becomes more practical), as opposed to selecting deaf ones that already exist. So am I understanding you correctly, when I assume you have no ethical problem with parents (specifically the mother) doing anything she wants to her embryo assuming she can find a doctor to do it?
So in the future, if a women wants to use IVF to implant an embryo genetically modified to be blind, deaf, limbless and sterile, simply because she finds that aesthetically pleasing, you would support it? Or rather, you would support her legal and moral right to do it?
Also, I wonder how many parents with inheritable ailments are really hoping they’ll get a handicapped child. I mean, one can try to obfuscate the truth with clever euphemisms, but the fact is, being deaf isn’t “just different” it’s a disability. It is a lack of ability relative to the human norm.
Most people understand that any pregnancy is a “roll of the dice” to a greater or lesser extent. For those seemingly clear of inheritable diseases, it may be better odds, but I think the vast majority of people are not hoping to “lose” the genetic gamble, and get kid that is farther down the genetic spectrum in terms of ability/disability. So I think your comparison to selecting for disability and realizing that it may occur spontaneously, or through possible inheritance, is not an accurate analogy.
I realize that to maintain logical consistency, people of the “reproductive rights” camp need to concede that this is where the position finds it’s logical conclusion, and thus defend it, but I think that is an indictment of the position in itself.
Designer crippled babies as morally defensible? Really?
~ I.
My take on this is based on my engineering education, oddly enough. It was hammered into our heads that the responsibility of all decisions regarding the safety of the design was on the shoulders of the engineer who stamped it. The customer can ask for ridiculously unsafe changes all they want, but they will not be the one to lose their professional license if anything goes wrong, the engineer will.
Motherhood does not require a license, practicing medicine does. Those who regulate the licenses hold doctors to a high standard, and revoke the license when the doctor performs an elective procedure that can compromise patient safety. I can walk into a surgeon’s office and request that my left arm be removed and reattached to the top of my head, but any surgeon who does that is in danger of getting their license revoked.
She did request that all 6 be implanted, but the doctor was aware of the fact that implanting 6 embryos was risky to both the mother and the children. “First, do no harm” is something that he has sworn and she hasn’t.
She’s clearly got some serious issues, and it is extremely unlikely that she will be able to give her 14 children the quality of care that they will require. is it unethical to have 14 children when you don’t have a job? Yeah, probably, but there’s no authority that can enforce that until there’s evidence of neglect. But the standards that the doctor is held to is far more straightforward.
Whoa there… where exactly did I say I support “designer crippled babies”? Because I don’t think I said that. I commented on embryo selection. And I did use the term disability – no euphemisms from me. Who are you intending to refute there? Not me I hope!
I think you’re saying it’s different if someone intentionally disables you than if you get that way by genetic accident – I agree. To the person in question. Not so much to me. Embryo selection for disability seems to me like a matter for the parents to tackle. And as I said, I suspect this is largely a non-issue. As you say, it seems very likely that most people would wish their children to be as free of disability as possible, and so I imagine in the overwhelming majority of cases that match your hypothesis, there’s no issue at all because given a choice, parents will use reproductive technology to prevent disability.
A question came to mind here – would you support abortion in the case of a woman who discovers her fetus is disabled in some way? I ask not to be cheeky (well okay, a little cheeky) but because I’m sensing an anti-disability thread in your comments. Is there something about disability that somehow makes an embryo less deserving of a chance to become a person?
An embryo is not a person. It doesn’t have any rights. The woman carrying it, however, does. It’s her choice to decide which and what type of embryo to implant. They are, after all, hers.
As for genetic tinkering to produce the deafblind, limbless and sterile baby… Here I just don’t know. I don’t know that I think about genetic engineering. It would seem to be covered by my general stance of parental ownership and control of their own genetic product, but there are probably issues I haven’t thought of. I do suspect this is, again, mostly a non-issue. I don’t think there are very many people out there who would, for purely aesthetic reasons (or any other reasons), severely disable a child. It’s an interesting thought experiment though.
What do you think the important issues in gen. engineering are?
Good points.
I still don’t know for sure though that implanting 6 embryos is risky to such an extent that the doctor’s regulatory body would consider it unethical. I don’t know anything about IVF. For all I know that’s a standard move, or if not standard, occasionally indicated when special circumstances occur. Did the mother in this case meet such a standard? Who knows. Well, her doctor does. We don’t.
Just thinking out loud here… was the risk from having 6 implanted embryos who all survive and grow worse than, say, quadruple bypass heart surgery? Or even single bypass. I don’t know how to measure the relative risk of medical procedures – the point I’m trying to make is, we do risky medical procedures all the time. Was this one extraordinarily risky relative to other procedures we approve of? Granted only bypass (not pregnancy) is necessary to live and that changes the risk/benefit calculations, but maybe having more children was really just that enormously important to that woman to make the risks worth it to her. I don’t think “risk” is a very meaningful measure of the appropriateness of a medical intervention.
And speaking of ethics, BOOB JOBS. People die of that – any time you go under general there’s a mortality risk. And it is utterly, totally, 100% not needed. I consider that way riskier relative to reward, and much harder to justify on ethical grounds when they could be using their skills on burn victims, breast reconstruction after mastectomy, finger or hand reimplantation/repair, reconstruction after a terrible car accident that smashes your face, chronic wound care, etc. Making babies for a woman who wants them, risks and all? I’m okay with that.
But I totally agree that the woman does not have the resources to properly raise all those kids and her choice utterly sucks.
Vex,
I think “designer crippled babies” is where the logic must lead if you support total reproductive rights. Not that even a large minority of people will choose to engineer the aesthetically pleasing crippled baby, but that you must maintain the rights of the even one person who may choose to do so. If an embryo is solely the property of the woman, she can do whatever she wants with it, right? It’s the moral equivalent of her arm, if she’s so inclined she can scar it up, brand it, tattoo it, chop off some fingers, whatever. She has a legal right to do it. If we come up with the technology to alter oneself on a genetic level to reprogram our skin to grow scales or whatever, so be it. It’s her body, and her property.
If this is where you stand, I think logic demands that you concede that you must also defend the right for parents to modify their embryos in all the aforementioned ways, as the technology becomes available. That most won’t do it, is irrelevant. Most people don’t commit a great many of the crimes that we have laws against. It’s obviously an issue now with selection and deafness, in so much as there is a lobby for it. Why would we think that there would be no interest in modification, when it became available?
Either way though, the logic seems to run us to at least the acceptance of the right to do that to your baby, should you so choose, under your ‘total parental rights to reproduction’ model.
Women have a right to govern their embryos in any way they see fit.
Genetically modifying an embryo is exerting governance over an embryo.
Women have a right to genetically modify their embryos.
A type of genetic modification of an embryo could possibly consist of changes that would likely render a resulting child deaf, blind, limbless and sterile.
Women have the right to modify their embryos to produce deaf, blind, limbless, sterile babies, if it becomes technologically possible.
Any problems with this syllogism?
To your question,
I do not believe that a woman has a moral right to abort a disabled fetus, given that it doesn’t constitute a significant risk to her life to carry it to term. And I am anti-disability only in the sense that I believe disabilities to be detriments. I don’t think a blind person has less inherent value, but I would say that a sighted person is “better off” than a blind person, all other things being equal.
I do believe society should help the disabled, I don’t believe society should be allowed to pro-actively attempt to breed disability into people.
Important issues in Gen. Eng.
Off the cuff,
Personhood. <— this should be no surprise.
Parents vs. Physicians vs. State <— who gets to decide?
Genetic Screening. <—- Who can do it, who can see the results.
State funded vs. Privately funded.
I can envision a scenario where the wealthy are able to ensure the best genetic care, while the vast majority of people are forced to contend with the genetic lottery of births as we now know them. Sort of a Gattaca scenario, but with a transformation of society into a socio-genetic plutocracy.
…and they say the rich have more advantages in the present day.
~ I.
Indeed. Well, I can’t logically defend it right now but my current gut feeling is that there is something different about genetic tinkering to produce disability, than mere selection for it. The latter doesn’t bother me – the former does. I am not sure why. Damn it all, it just seems wrong for the baby. I agree that disability is, all things equal, worse than nondisability.
Maybe reproductive rights of the mother don’t trump her clump of cells in all circumstances?
Does it logically follow that we must then ascribe rights to a fetus, or “clump of cells”, independent of her mother? Certainly it’s not a Mother’s rights vs. Mother’s rights issue. Perhaps a Mother vs. Other?
~ I.
In some ways, the answer to your question depends on what you mean by “industrialization”. But treating it simply as “access to significant technology”, then population and industrialization are most likely symbiotic. Certain population amounts are needed to support certain levels of technology while population is only able to reach the levels it has because of technological innovation.
Hmmm. I’m just not convinced that we can argue much for the rights of the clump of cells over the rights of the mother. It’s not a person. In what way can it be a moral agent? Does it even classify as a moral patient?
But, as soon as you start talking about the cells’ impending abilities, then there’s some sort of implication of its potential for personhood – which it has not yet achieved, but may if it survives the pregnancy. I’m not sure how to grapple with that going-to-be-a-person but currently-a-clump-of-cells thing.
In fact I’m interested to know when in the mind of a pro-lifer or Christian or indeed people in general feel a fetus has rights. If it is before it is born as a human baby, how soon before? At the time of semination? And why? Is it related to the “soul” and if so, when is the soul created? Do sperm and eggs have proto-souls and when they combine a real soul is formed? Or does the soul develop as the fetus develops? (These sound ridiculous but indeed my position is that believing in a soul is ridiculous, but that’s a different if not unrelated topic)
I wouldn’t exactly call a coronary bypass of any kind an elective procedure. A surgeon would only perform one of those if the risk of *not* having the surgery outweighed the risk of having it.
I was looking around the net after posting about this yesterday, and the guideline for embryo transfer appears to be a recommended maximum of 4 embryos, and usually only that high for women who have had difficulty bringing a child to term. Two to three embryos per IVF treatment seems to be the rule. She’s in her early 30s and had already had 6 children, so the doctor implanted double the recommended number. Of course, it’s only a guideline, rather than a hard and fast rule, so it’s a bit of a gray area.
boob jobs are risky, and … well …. stupid. But the risk that you take when you opt to have one is a risk that affects only you. Turning your uterus into a clown car affects not only you, but the children that you carry. Both the doctor and the mother should have considered the risks to the children more carefully.
Lara you are my new favourite Blogosaurus commenter.
Using the logic that you apply to plastic surgeons, how do you square this doctor helping this woman get pregnant for the 6th time when his time and resources could have been better spent helping a childless couple who have been trying to conceive for years?
Here’s a graphic illustration of Lara’s most amusing comment:
http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=2373989
Is there anything the Duggers can’t do?
Totally agree. But this is where I get into philosophical trouble. Does this mean that women shouldn’t have control of their reproductive systems? For example, should women be forbidden abortions because it clearly represents the greatest risk possible (death) to the fetus? If the rights of the fetus (or fetuses) trump the rights of the woman carrying them, well, that’s a right pickle isn’t it!
Yet clearly the babies need to be considered. And a fetus is an impending-baby. So… when does the fetus get rights of its own, independent of the mother?
I think plastic surgeons *should* do worthwhile work – but I wouldn’t mandate it by law. I might try and be sneaky and increase remuneration so that they actually have an incentive other than altruism to do something other than boob jobs, since altruism clearly isn’t getting the job done on its own, but I think they own their skills and should get to do what they like with them.
I also think it would be better for a reproductive specialist to work with the childless rather than the six-kidded, but again, I wouldn’t mandate against it. People are free to make their own choices.
Maybe the thing to do is figure out how to help people become more community minded, more altruistic, less concerned with gobs of cash and materialism. Then maybe some folks (like doctors) would make choices more in line with ethical principles instead of the principle of the bank account.
Vex,
You obviously recognize the philosophical implications of a “total mother control” paradigm. Are you ready to abandon it? Are you willing to admit that the reproductive rights of a person should be restricted in some ways? Perhaps with an eye to the potentiality of the nascent person in utero?
The fact that the abandonment of the position is practically problematic is irrelevant. If it’s a flawed position in that the logical conclusions of the position are unacceptable, then shouldn’t someone committed to logic and science abandon the flawed model, and look for a better one?
Personhood at 40 weeks – 1 day? 39 weeks? 38 weeks?
24 weeks?
Full moral status at personhood?
Either way, can you in good conscience, hold the old “total reproductive rights” position any longer?
~ I.
I now have the mental image of a uterus with masses of clowns coming out, thankyouverymuch.
(moved for more continuity)
Vex,
You obviously recognize the philosophical implications of a “total mother control” paradigm. Are you ready to abandon it? Are you willing to admit that the reproductive rights of a person should be restricted in some ways? Perhaps with an eye to the potentiality of the nascent person in utero?
The fact that the abandonment of the position is practically problematic is irrelevant. If it’s a flawed position in that the logical conclusions of the position are unacceptable, then shouldn’t someone committed to logic and science abandon the flawed model, and look for a better one?
Personhood at 40 weeks – 1 day? 39 weeks? 38 weeks?
24 weeks?
Full moral status at personhood?
Either way, can you in good conscience, hold the old “total reproductive rights” position any longer?
~ I.
I abandoned it long ago. Recall my assertion, some time ago, that third trimester abortions without medical indication are bad.
Vex,
I just checked the old conversation, and it seems that if I’m reading you right, semantically, the 24 week fetus is a victim of murder, and the 23 year old fetus is simply a case of the mother shedding a non-person from her womb, and is not murder in any sense?
24 week viability equals personhood? Or some gradual allocation of rights as the fetus gets closer and closer to delivery? I’m not sure prima facie, how the latter model could work. Can one possess a little bit of personhood? It seems either you are a person or you aren’t.
And what about this fetus?
http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0220/baby.html
Survived after a birth at less than 23 weeks. Certainly seems to meet your viability criteria, after all, baby survived on it’s own. So it seems if viability is the determining factor of personhood, we must move back our “time of personhood” week count as medical technologies increase. So, presumably, if we reach a point where 20 weeks becomes viable outside the mother, then we must should continually revise how late we can ethically perform abortions.
I don’t think we can switch up the criteria to “viability without medical intervention” either, unless you want to have it follow that babies that need medical intervention upon birth to survive are somehow not persons.
It would also seem that as soon as the technology exists to take a fetus from a pregnant woman, put it in an artificial environment, and bring it to term, that the viability question is largely solved. So if we get there, will you support the idea of a ministry of in utero child protection, wherein we mandate the removal or transfer of the fetus to willing surrogates, or artificial government run womb centers?
Viability seems to carry with it the gradual transfer of rights from mother to fetus as technology improves, theoretically to the point of conception.
It also seems rather wrongheaded to suggest that if a 23 week fetus was not a person in 1983, when it wasn’t viable, but would be a person all other things being the same, had it been conceived in 2020 where it was viable.
Thoughts?
~ I.
I think I am comfortable with not being perfectly logically airtight in my opinions. Lucky for the world I am not in a position of authority where I get to make the calls, I suppose! If technology can keep a fetus alive from week 1 and this is against the mother’s wishes I would side with the mother (ie I support abortion) but if the mother wanted to terminate after 24w without medical indication I would side with the baby. Real life isn’t a textbook problem – I’m trying to balance the disparate rights of two different individuals who may have opposing wishes when one of those individuals isn’t always an individual (the fetus) but may become one. It’s an arbitrary line but one I’m comfortable with. I wouldn’t encode it into law but I consider it a useful guideline – there is room for individual judgment I think of necessity. I am not willing to commit to a strong pro-fetus rights or strong pro-mother rights position – I think both are wrong.