CalvinDude.com

This article was sent to me recently and I was asked to provide my opinion of it. The article is written by Dr. Richard Parker, M.D. and it’s titled “A Physician Comments on Abortion and the Morning After Pill.” As might be expected, Parker’s position is pro-abortion. However, his philosophical failings become immediately apparent in the first paragraph. Parker states:

I was recently confronted in the Emergency Department with a situation I rarely encounter: a woman requesting “the morning after pill.” Since I practice in a largely conservative state, for a few minutes I introspectively debated whether I should provide her with such a prescription (italics mine).

The portion I emphasized above demonstrates Parker’s first problem. He is looking at this issue as a political issue. But while the issue has been used by politicians, determining the ethics of abortion has nothing to do with politics. Therefore, the fact that Parker lives in a “largely conservative state” ought to have exactly no bearing upon his actions from an ethical perspective. (It might be relevant if he was dealing with a legal issue; but since the so-called “Morning After Pill” is legal in the US, that’s a non-issue here.)

Secondly, Parker displays his ignorance of the rights of man when he writes:

The anti-abortionist position also fails to recognize that human beings are granted rights qua man’s status as a rational animal, not qua animal.

There are several problems with this. Let’s start with the fact that if we consistently hold to this, then we MUST say that those people who are “more rational” than others have more rights. That is, under this theory, an imbecile does not have the same human rights as a genius. In fact, the smarter one is the more rights a person must have.

Furthermore, it means that adults will by and large have more human rights than children, as most adults are far more rational than most children. As a result, our ethical conditioning to save children before adults in the case of fire, for instance, is not only wrong but evil. If an infant and his mother are caught in a burning building, the ethical choice for the firemen is to save the more rational of the two. Let the infant burn, rescue the mother. But this obviously goes against most of our common ethics (regardless of whether you hold to a Biblical world view).

Further, rationality must be measurable in order for it to have any meaningful usage in Parker’s dictum. But this presents a problem for Parker because whatever tests we use to determine rationality would have to occur when he is conscious. If Parker is asleep, we cannot test his rationality—he would score exactly the same as a non-rational rock! Therefore, if I kill him while he’s asleep I have not killed a rational human being at all under his definition. Therefore, if we are consistent with his ethic, no murder has occurred.

Finally, Parker’s claims about the rationality of the person are identical to the views of those who defined slaves as non-persons. Black slaves were considered less-rational than whites, and therefore whites could own them. If we take Parker’s position that rights come about based on something that is not linked to our humanity but instead to some other ontological feature, then human rights cease to be human rights and instead become whatever rights the ruling political class allows. In Parker’s case, human rights become rational rights. And as soon as we change rights in this manner we can begin to exclude whomever we deem unfit.

Additionally, I must point out that the Christian response to Parker is that human rights are not “granted” at all, but exist due to the fact that humans are created in the image of God.

Parker also tries to make a distinction between the actual and the possible. He writes:

In reality, the potential is not the actual, nor is an entity’s parts the same as the entity itself and rights can only be granted to actual rational entities.

Again, Parker treats human rights as if they can somehow be “granted.” But if they are granted that implies a grantor. What grants those rights to us? If he says it’s the law, then all that needs be done is that we modify the law. If the law grants rights, we can change the law to say, “People named Parker can be executed” and that would not be unethical. If it’s the consent of the people, we can still get enough people together to say, “People named Parker can be executed.” Is that not what every oppressive regime does? Hitler’s Germany decided Jews had no right to life, so they could be killed. How is this a violation of the rights of Jews unless the “grantor” of the right is something beyond either communal law or the consent of the governed?

Also note that Parker’s claim is that a fetus is potentially rational. (Again, this requires us to assent to his idea that rationality is what determines rights—something we’ve already shown above to be flawed.) This comes to fruition when we read:

Individual rights should not and cannot be granted to potentialities because they are metaphysically distinct from actualities. The potential and actual therefore have distinct moral and political implications.

Let us use his reasoning here. If human rights come about because of the humanity of the object, rather than Parker’s invention of “rationality” then we see that the fetus actually satisfies the requirements above at gaining “individual rights.” A fetus is a human being. This is a scientific fact. Human beings have human fetuses. Humans cannot have cat fetuses, humans cannot have walrus fetuses; humans have human fetuses. The fetus is human from conception, and this is scientifically undeniable. Therefore, if rights come about due to the humanity of the fetus rather than due to the rationality of the fetus, we have proven using Parker’s own methodology that the fetus actually has human rights because the fetus actually is human.

Parker then continues:

Another flaw with the anti-abortionist view is the failure to acknowledge the proper metaphysical relationship between mother and the unborn fetus. The fetus is physically within the mother and connected to her via the placenta and umbilical chord. It is directly physically dependent on the mother for all of its life sustaining needs-oxygen, energy and safety from the external environment. The relationship between mother and fetus is not that of two distinct human entities, but rather that of an independent human being (the mother) with rights and a dependent physical appendage, something that is physically within and part of the mother and therefore cannot have individual rights.

Note that Parker is arguing that rights are not just dependent upon rationality (his original claim) but also upon the location of the individual and also the relationship of that individual to another individual. As I did before with his “rationality” argument, I want to examine the outcome of this thinking.

First of all, Parker is flat out wrong when he says “The relationship between mother and fetus is not that of two distinct human entities” because scientifically, it is exactly that. The fetus is a distinct human being and the mother is a distinct human being. It is true that the fetus is dependent upon the mother, but dependency does not affect rights! If it did, parents ought to have the right to kill all their dependants. Infants cannot live on their own. They require nurture. Under Parker’s theory, it ought to remain moral to kill infants.

Furthermore, as a doctor I’m sure that Parker can think of several cases when a person is under anesthesia. That person is now completely dependant upon the doctors for his well-being. Is it morally justifiable for a physician to kill a patient under his care because the patient is now completely dependent upon the doctor? Of course not. A person does not lose his rights simply because he is dependent upon others for his well-being.

Likewise, Parker has determined that the location of a human being can determine whether or not that human being has rights. But what is the rational basis for that argument? This is an ad-hoc claim, completely unsupportable. How does the location of the fetus change the rights of the fetus? How could the fetus have no rights when, if he was moved just a few inches away, he would have full rights? How is such a thing justifiable ethically? Parker cannot simply assert that it is the case that the fetus has no rights based on location: he must prove this claim.
Parker continues:

Individual rights cannot be granted to the parts of human entities-to do so would make a surgeon a murderer when he removes a healthy kidney from a patient for an organ transplant, an internist a murderer when he poisons a tapeworm to achieve its removal from a patient’s intestine, a dermatologist a killer when he removes a mole from a patient’s face.

But of course a fetus is NOT a “part” of the mother. The fetus is a complete human being distinct from the mother. That is the point. If the fetus was a part of the mother, the fetus would remain a part of the mother after birth. Just as the removal of a kidney does not transform it into some other person, so removing a fetus would not transform the fetus into some other person. If Parker wants to play that game, he’s proven himself irrational…which means I can ethically kill him.

Parker continues:

The basis for individual rights lies in man’s nature as a rational animal, as a living being with a volitional consciousness (free will). The concept of individual rights can therefore only be properly understood in the context of a rational independent entity, not in the context of a living thing with rudimentary sensations.

We’ve already addressed this earlier, but note that nowhere does Parker actually argue for this. He merely asserts it as if it were true.

Finally, Parker says:

The metaphysical act of birth, when the unborn makes the transition from mere potential to an actual human being and successfully separates from the mother to become a separate metaphysical entity, an actual living being with a volitional consciousness, confers the moral and political concept of rights.

Birth is a metaphysical act? Moving a few inches down the birth canal changes the metaphysical nature of a fetus?

If one thing is obvious, it’s that Parker has no philosophy degree.

Even if we pretended metaphysics changes at birth, his reasoning is still completely wrong. Before birth, the fetus is distinct from the mother. This is self-evident because you can locate the fetus! The fetus is therefore a separate entity from the mother. That the fetus is connected to the mother does not make the fetus any more equivalent to the mother than the fact that my touching another human being makes us the same person. The fetus is also alive before birth. What is an abortion if not the killing of the fetus? You cannot kill what isn’t alive. Regardless of how you look at it, the fetus is most certainly a living organism, distinct from rocks, gasses, and all other non-living objects. Furthermore, if the fetus has a “volitional consciousness” at birth, it most certainly had it moments before birth too. The act of birth does not create the “volitional consciousness” of the fetus, nor does it animate the fetus. These things were already in place before the birth occurred.

In point of fact, the only thing the act of birth does is confer political rights. But political rights are not the same thing as moral rights. Politically, it was okay to own slaves in 1800. Morally, it was not okay to own slaves. Politically, it may be okay to kill unborn human beings; morally, it is not okay to do so.

Parker says: “This is the reason why I provided this patient with the morning after pill and the reason why I am not a murderer.” But a murder is someone who takes the life of an innocent human being without proper justification. And “because the mother wants to” is not proper justification for taking the life of an unborn human being. Therefore, Parker is a murderer. Not in the legal sense, of course. But not all who are murderers are legally murderers.

I just read this article about a family who tried to abort a “weaker” twin who refused to die. Now I could go on about certain aspects of that, but what I want to focus on here is this stupid statement by the mother:

It really is a miracle. Doctors carried out an operation to let Gabriel die - yet he hung on.

Did you catch that? “Doctors carried out an operation to let Gabriel die“…to let him die????

I suppose if I ever kill someone I can stand before the judge and say, “Your honor, I simply pulled the trigger/cut the throat/poisoned the food of the victim to let the victim die. I didn’t actually do anything. It was all passive.”

This statement by Mrs. Jones is nothing but a rationalization of abortion by making it seem passive instead of admitting it is the active killing of the unborn. We see the same exact terminology used in euthenasia cases too. “We’ll pull the feeding tube and let the patient die. It’s what they would have wanted.”

All this begs the point that anyone who deprives another person of food will CAUSE that person die. Anyone who engages in activities that will cause the death of another human being is not “letting” death occur, it is causing death to occur.

Words have meaning. The fact that this woman felt pricked in her conscious enough for her to twist her words from an active killing to a passive allowing of a death demonstrates that she knows in her heart that what the doctors were doing was wrong. If the doctor’s decision is not morally suspect, there is no reason to pretend that what the doctors do is to permit a death instead of causing the death.

I was just reading through this article about how Democrats don’t have a spine and cannot act like Democrats because if they did they’d lose, and read this quote:

Democrats and pro-abortion-rights Republicans blocked most of those [anti-abortion] measures, but in the process they alienated a vital group of voters — religious moderates who support, in principle, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide but who are morally squeamish about terminating pregnancies.

I’m thinking…huh?

How do you support “in principle” Roe V. Wade and yet be “morally squeamish about terminating pregnancies”?  How is this possible?  Is that like supporting legalized marijuana, in principle, but being morally squeamish about anyone inhaling?  Is that like supporting, in principle, the NRA, but being morally squeamish about anyone owning guns?  How does this work?

From this article (my comment at the end in bold):

“People can’t tell other people what to do and make decisions for them,” said Jan Nicolay as she told other people what to do and made decisions for them.

Daniel Morgan wrote a post on abortion on his blog.  Unfortunately, the comments section truncates after a certain length.  I already put forth a short response (basically just putting forth the logic of the Prolife position without defending any of it yet) and Daniel responded in the comments.  Since my own response will necessarily be lengthy, I’m going to post it here (and provide the link to Daniel).

First it would be best if I went ahead and demonstrated the Prolife argument that was put forth since both Daniel and I have/will be referencing it.  I wrote:

P1. It is wrong to take the life of an innocent human being without proper justification.

P2. Abortion takes the life of an innocent human being.

P3. While there are possible circumstances when this is justifiable (such as when saving the life of the mother), the vast majority of abortions are not morally justifiable, especially “abortion on demand.”

C1. The vast majority of abortions are immoral.

The first thing I should note is that the above argument is a legal argument, not a religious argument.  This will help clear up some confusion, especially in P1 where I mention “innocent human being.”  In this argument, I am refering to legal innocence and not moral innocence (the difference being that someone can do something morally evil without necessarily breaking the law, and thus be legally innocent).

This answers Daniel’s objection that: “There are no ‘innocent human beings’ in your total depravity worldview.”  When talking about moral innocence, Daniel’s statement is correct; when talking about legal innocence, Daniel’s statement is incorrect.

I should note that if Daniel would like me to argue from the religious perspective, I can certainly do so–but that would entail me bringing forth my presuppositional argument once again :-D  Therefore, it is probably better to replace the pharse “are immoral” in the conclusion with the phrase “ought to be illegal” to help maintain the legal aspect of the argument, so from now on I will refer to C1 as:

C1. The vast majority of abortions ought to be illegal.

Now with the issue framed, let us look at Daniel’s objections.  I shall stick to his objections that are dealing with the legal issue since A) it probably wasn’t apparent that I was only making a legal argument originally so it’s not fair to argue against Daniel when he speaks of religious stands instead of legal stands; and B) it would take too long to put forth the proper foundation for the moral argument here.

Daniel said:

…I think it is also equally immoral to enforce upon others some restriction of what they can do to their own bodies, and anything which depends directly upon their body’s CNS/circulatory system/liver/etc. for life support.

I agree in principal with the above, but with the following caveat: basic human rights (including the right to life) are more important that the rights of someone to do what they want to “their body” (and the unborn is not part of the woman’s body anyway).  As such, when there is a conflict, the basic human rights ought to take precedence legally.

Daniel wrote:

We all differentiate “killing” based on some concept of the organisms’ value. How do we evaluate a creature’s life potential?

An organism’s “value” is not equivalent to its “life potential” though.  For instance, human rights are based on the organism’s humanity.  Similarly, animal rights (which Daniel also speaks about in his post) are intrinsic upon the organism’s ontological animal-ness.

Human rights are ontological rights.  They depend on the being of the creature.  The reason that these rights are thus linked is so that all men and women are viewed equal under law.  This equality can only be due to the equality of humanity that all people share.  If it is linked to some other aspect (like consciousness, as Daniel suggests) then human rights vary according to the degree that that aspect is present.  In the case of consciousness, people who are awake would have more human rights than those who are asleep if human rights are determined that way.

In point of fact, most of the rationals for abortions do not enable us to have consistent human rights.  For instance, someone might argue “The fetus is really small–you can’t even see it!”  In this instance, he is making the claim that larger humans have more rights than smaller humans.  Someone might argue (as Daniel seems to be): “The fetus is inside the woman, therefore it doesn’t have the same rights as a human outside the womb.” In this case, human rights depend on the location of the human. 

Finally, there is the issue of “self awareness” (which Daniel also mentions).  For instance, he said:

We have to use those criteria [to evaluate life potential] which make some sense–self-awareness implies that an organism will know it is dying, wish not to die, and have an intense experience of pain in death. Because these creatures have a volitional opposition to us killing them, we afford them rights.

In this instance, then, animal rights and human rights ought to be identical.  Under the above, any animal that fits the description has just as many “rights” as any other animal.  However, under the law humans have more rights than animals do, precisely because human rights are based upon ontology–the fact that they are human.

Daniel’s argument then shifts to an issue of citizenship when he says:

Legally, if we don’t give people the option to prevent their own physical pain [when that option is available, obviously], so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of other citizens [which our own constitution defines as someone BORN here, so fetuses don't count, but once they are born, then yes, they have rights], then we have basically eroded liberty.

But this is not correct.  Citizenship has no bearing over human rights.  That is why you will still be prosecuted if you kill an illegal alien, despite the fact that the alien is not a citizen.  Human rights do not depend on citizenship, but on the ontology of being human.  The right to life is, again, a human right, not a citizen’s right.

Daniel then states:

I have tried to lay out a systematic method of appraising the legality of an abortion, when it is presupposed that a fetus is intrinsically the property of the woman carrying it, and her body is her sovereign property, and granting that we cannot, contrary to protests to the otherwise, do “whatever we wish to our own property” [we can't torture it - implying "it" is a conscious organism].

I would argue that a human being cannot ever be property.  Even if a human could be property, a human being does not become the property of another person simply because of the location of that human (being inside the womb). 

Furthermore, simply because any thing is in the woman does not make that thing her property.  For instance, if a woman steals a diamond and swallows it, the diamond does not become her property even though it is in her body.  Likewise, if a woman were to force someone to donate a kidney, the kidney would not become hers (it is only hers if the original “owner” of the kidney relinquishes it willingly).

Daniel then asks a pertinent question:

In defining a fetus as a “human being,” we must ask, “what is a human being?” Just something with human DNA?

The answer to the second question in the above is obviously “no.”  My skin cells have human DNA, but they are not human.

So what is a human being?  A good definition would be: “a self-contained homo sapien sapien that typically begins as two cells joined together (sperm and egg–although perhaps genetic modification will alter this part) and develops from there to naturally progress through the various stages of humanity (such as the fetal stage, infant stage, childhood, adolesence, adulthood, and elderlyness).”

Daniel then asks:

Do human beings lose their rights upon brain death?

No, they do not.

Does this mean we shouldn’t “pull the plug”?  Not at all.  It is not a human right for a machine to breathe for us, for example, and thus it is not a violation of human rights to turn off the machines.  What would be a violation of a human right is actively killing someone who can live apart from machines with only the normal care necessary for all human beings (for example, food and water).  Thus, a respirator or heart machine is not a basic human right, but a feeding tube is (not a tube per se, but the food and water it brings are a right; the tube is simply a means to deliver them).

Daniel asks:

Do we humans have the right to have life support, even as citizens? Obviously we do not. In that sense, even ER workers, when they attempt to revive a victim, are rendering aid, but once it is established that the person’s heart will not start on its own, they do not have the obligation to hook you up to a heart-lung machine, or continue doing chest compressions ad infinitum. WHY?

Again, because it is not a human right to have a machine breathe for us or to cause our heart to beat for us.

Daniel then says:

In the same sense, a woman’s body is life support for a fetus.

Actually, it is in a completely different sense.  The woman’s body provides nutrients to the fetus–but food and water are basic human rights.  (I know that the mother also “breathes” for the fetus–but in this case, the oxygen comes in the blood as a nutrient; the fetus does not breathe at all.)

Based on all the above, I would still argue that legally the vast majority of abortions should be outlawed.

Fox News is reporting that South Dakota’s senate passed a bill outlawing all abortions except for those where the mother’s life is endangered.  At least as far as the article outlines the law, I am in full support of it.

Abortion, as you may know from some of the old articles (which will hopefully be relinked soon) on this site, is the unjustified taking of human life, and as such should be outlawed in all cases (including rape and incest cases).  I do, however, support the distinction that abortion be allowed when the mother’s life is in danger, but only because the intent in such a case isn’t to kill the child but to save the mother’s life, and the child’s life is inadvertantly taken in that process.  Such cases are, of course, extremely rare.  Virtually every abortion done today is because of convienence and has nothing to do with the health of the mother, despite the ploy abortionists to make it into a doctor’s and woman’s private health concern.

At the very least, this law should help bring the discussion back into the public forum where pro-lifers will have the opportunity to be ignored by the press yet again because their arguments are too well thought out.  But perhaps some may be convinced even yet.

Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, said:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

It makes me wonder.  If the Civil War was God’s punishment for our institutionalization of slavery, what do you suppose would happen for the near 50 million victims of abortion?

Not that I think there’s going to be a 1:1 correlation.  In fact, I would argue there won’t be.  America will either be judged, though, or else America must come to repentance.  God is longsuffering, but He only waits so long (for the sake of His elect).

The 9th Circus Court ruled Partial-Birth Abortion Bans are unconstitutional. Not to be outdone, the 2nd Circus Court (in Manhattan) did the same.  What’s particular about the second one is the following:

[T]he 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan issued a similar decision, affirming a 2004 ruling by a judge who upheld the right to perform a type of late-term abortion even as he described the procedure as “gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized.”

And people doubt the depravity of man?  How is it that we can legalize something “gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized”?  Let’s put this in a little perspective:

Hitler killed Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesireables.”  These actions would most certainly qualify in anyone’s book as “gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized.”  Let’s therefore use the same logic and make it legal for people to kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, or any other “undesireable” they choose.

Rape is “gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized.”  So let’s make that legal too.

Of course, we could really stick it to the liberals–torture is “gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized.”  So tell me why you have a problem with Iraq again?

And then we can deal with the second excuse: “the measure is vague and lacks an exception for cases in which a woman’s health is at stake.” Okay, let’s suppose that it’s true that it lacks an exception for when women’s health is at stake.  Can you please show me how a woman’s health is anymore at stake if she delivers a child all the way except for the head than if she delivers the child all the way?  Please explain that one to me, because that is what the procedure is.

But of course abortion isn’t about women’s health.  It’s about “choice.”  It’s about “convenience.”  It’s about “covering up the icky little mistake.”  Well, make no mistake about it, these excuses demonstrate nothing more than our depravity.