Not People

The accompanying photo is of the stages of embryonic development subsequent to the fertilization of a viable egg.  Maybe they're human.  Maybe not.

Let's say they are.  Are they then photos of people?  Do they look like people?

Of course they don't.  Those eggs aren't people, and they don't have personalities.  I posit that the absence of personality is sufficient justification to deny them the status of personhood.

We hear all the time that abortion is "the murder of babies."  What we hear is that, when abortions occur, "Babies are being murdered!"  It's emotional claptrap and a kind of religious fundamentalism.  In Venn diagrams, the very same group of people who produce photos of fetuses in advanced stages of development to make their case about an alleged "abortion holocaust" show high degrees of overlap with the groups of people who want to ban any form of abortion that will involve the expulsion of the just-fertilized egg.  I would bet that a formal opinion study would find an overlap of 95% or more - so much overlap that basically the groups are identical.  Venn diagrams to measure religious opinion would surely find a significantly higher degree of firm religious conviction among the same groups.

In my mind, the conflation is religious in foundation.  The religious position is basically that human life begins at conception because that's when God supposedly bestows a soul upon human flesh.  And all human life is supposedly sacred because God prohibits murder.  Otherwise, why do we need to say that "life begins at conception?"

That's not my position and I'm also convinced that it's not the position of most Americans for whom abortion isn't an emotional topic.

All human life isn't sacred.  Your appendix, if you still have one, is human and it's alive, but it's not murder to remove it - not even in religion.  Now why is that?

For religion, it's not murder because the appendix doesn't have a soul.  It's only a part of a larger body that does.  It doesn't have its own independent existence.  For those of us who aren't religious, an appendectomy wouldn't be murder because an appendix doesn't have its own personality.  A fetus is the same way.

The personality point is huge.

Let me posit this scenario:

Let's say there's this very religious dairy farmer in Vermont who one day discovers that one of his calves is extremely intelligent - a freak calf who learns to talk.  This calf grows up to become a genius cow that people love.  The cow is funny!  She tells jokes; she tells warm stories; she gives highly useful advice - etc.  She gets her own show on TV.

Well, the farmer owns her.  The cow is a slave to the farmer.  There is no American law that prohibits a farmer from enslaving his livestock even if his animals could staff a university's professorships.

One day, the farmer and the cow get into an argument about abortion.  No matter what point the farmer wants to make about abortion, the cow has a very credible argument to advance against the farmer's points and she also makes her own points that tie the farmer's tongue.  He doesn't know how to refute her because she always one-ups him, point by point.

It enrages the farmer that he and his cow disagree and he can't beat her in argument, so he ships her off to the stockyard where the butchers slaughter her despite her protests.

I'd call that murder.  That cow, despite her DNA, would have been a person because she had a personality, but there would be no law to protect her life.  The dairy farmer could rationalize his position based on the Bible: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (Genesis 1:26).

Remember Terri Schiavo?  She was the Florida woman whose husband had medical staff remove life support in 2005 because he said, and Florida courts found, that she had made a living will to do just such a thing in case her brain was damaged so badly that she was permanently left in the kind of vegetative state she was in.

Well, despite her near-complete lack of brain activity, she looked like a person in a way that no cow ever would, no matter what kind of advanced degree in philosophy it ever attained.  Terri Schiavo, the person who had once inhabited her own body, was dead.  Her body lived on, but the person who had once been inside it was long gone.

The public knew it.  Instinctively, the majority of people saw it just that way.  They knew that Terri Schiavo, the person, was no longer of this world even though her body persisted.

The legal and political background to this story is very illustrative, and it shows where we liberals who support women's reproductive rights can regain ground in bringing more public support to our side.

The legal background to the story I touched on.  A little more: Terri Schiavo's husband had Florida courts support his claim that his wife had a living will to remove life-support in case of brain death.  Her biological family disputed the claim and lost their case.  Then politics got involved, and the dispute split down familiar partisan lines.

The Republican Florida state legislature in coordination with the Republican governor, Jeb Bush, passed a special law to try and prevent the removal of life support, called "Terri's Law."  It was a law narrowly meant to apply only to the Schiavo case and ultimately defeated in court.  Terri then died after the medical staff caring for her stopped gastric feedings.

The Terri Schiavo case went national, and it hurt the Republican Party's image pretty badly - badly enough to dash the future political hopes of then-Senate majority leader Bill Frist M.D. of Tennessee.  Frist, a physician as well as legislator, took the case to the Senate floor and made a speech in which he pronounced that it was his professional medical opinion that Schiavo wasn't that badly brain-damaged.  He was criticized by a Northwestern University medical ethicist for making a diagnosis without both a personal examination and specialized neurological qualifications, and a subsequent autopsy examining Schiavo's brain proved Frist flatly wrong.

An incumbent Senate majority leader frequently mentioned as a future presidential hopeful, Frist abruptly retired from politics after taking a heavily criticized stand against removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.  The Republican Party, as a whole, was seen as being too meddlesome in the private health decisions of American families.  Jeb Bush's public image took a big dent for his part in the Schiavo affair as well.

Public opinion in the Schiavo case wasn't just a matter of the public being opposed to government intervention in private family medical decisions, though.  It was not a "small government, private liberty" objection.  The public definitely wants government intervention on behalf of helpless individuals in cases of neglect and abuse.  It was Schiavo's special status of her being brain dead that swayed public opinion the most.

The public came down on the side of Terri's husband Michael because most people believe what I do, which is that it's possible for there to be a human body without a human soul - what I prefer to call a personality - and that it's not murder to end such an existence because there is no person who suffers death.  The very same principle extends to the human fetus, and the public can understand it in just the same way.  The human fetus is incapable of hosting a personality because its neurological capacity is just as undeveloped as Schiavo's was destroyed.

I think that other abortion right supporters would do well to argue that point.  Stop focusing almost exclusively on the women's reproductive rights arguments.  Not that they aren't important - they are - but we should also pay more attention to the philosophical debate about personhood than we do.  We must insist that a fetus isn't a person.  We can win that debate and bring more people to our side.

The photos above are those of starfish embryos.  Human embryos look precisely identical to those of much lower animals in the same stages.