[Vision2020] The Pro-Life Position is Very Poorly Argued

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

This morning the host for "Morning Mix" on KRFP FM 92.5 announced that the Palouse Pundit was "not available," even though I had sent the MP3 to them yesterday.  I hope Nancy Casey can air it tomorrow morning at 8 and at 9:30.

I've actually written two columns this week, one for Labor Day, which I will post soon, and this one for the Idaho State Journal, where there has been a running blog debate about abortion all this past week.  Here is my response to that debate.

Nick Gier

THE PRO-LIFE POSITION IS VERY POORLY ARGUED

Two recent columns on abortion by Richard Larsen (Aug. 30) and Craig Bosley (Sept. 1) are so poorly argued that they cry out for a response.  

The phrase "pro-life" is deeply ambiguous, because those who use it don't give any good reasons to distinguish between the life of the early fetus and all other animal lives.  

Animal fetuses have heart beats and brain waves; the pig fetus is indistinguishable from the human until 31 days; and my students mistook the chimp fetus for a human all the time. See www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/ape.htm.

To say that humans are valuable because they are humans is the fallacy of circular reasoning.  One has to give a reason why there is a moral difference between us and animals. 

Something remarkable happens during at the beginning of the third trimester, the point at which the fetus has legal protection. Fetal brain cells that were not connected at 25 weeks have millions of connections by 33 weeks; the neo-cortex, where most of our higher mental functions reside, has only one layer at 25 weeks, but has the full six layers at 33 weeks.  See fetal brain slides at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/fetalbrain.htm.
 
Craig Bosley wants to know when abortion is murder, and he complains that no one has given an answer to his question. The 17th Century jurist Edward Coke, whom Thomas Jefferson read in law school, held that abortion is not murder until the fetus is a "reasonable creature," the traditional definition of a person.

Richard Larsen thinks he has English philosopher John Locke on his side, but he does not realize that Locke also believed that a human person must have a significant mental life. This is the position held by the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who was declared infallible by Pope Pius IX.

Larsen makes questionable allegations against nurses at a Chicago hospital, and he should have given us the complete story. The Illinois Department of Public Health reported that "the allegation that infants were allowed to expire in a utility room could not be substantiated, and all staff interviewed denied that any infant was ever left alone."

Some Illinois legislators overacted to these allegations, and they tried to pass a poorly worded bill that would have given any fetus born alive the status of a person. Obama objected to the bill, and Larsen draws the illogical and politically vicious conclusion that Obama not only supports but encourages infanticide.

In opposing the bill, Obama's main concern was that it was unconstitutional and that it undermined Roe v. Wade. Obama also argued that the bill was unnecessary because "existing Illinois law already requires doctors to provide medical care in the very rare case that babies are born alive during abortions." 

Later Obama said that he would have supported the federal version of this bill, because it did not have any language granting personhood to the early fetus and thereby undermining a woman's right to choose.
 
Pro-lifers do not like people to know that 91 percent of all abortions occur during the first trimester long before the fetus has a significant mental life and long before it can feel any pain.  On this topic see www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/FetusPain.htm.  

Larsen also brings up the "partial-birth abortion" issue, even though most doctors find the term inflammatory.  Dr. Douglas W. Laube, President of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, states that "the courts were correct each time they struck down such ill-conceived and unconstitutional restrictions on physicians' ability to provide patients with the safest possible medical care." 

As I wrote in an earlier column this year (Jan. 29), pro-choice policies coupled with solid sex education programs have reduced abortion rates to 11 per 1,000 European mothers, while American and Latin American rates are 26 and 37 per 1,000 respectively.  See www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/abortion2.htm.

At least Latin Americans allow abortions in the case of rape or incest, but GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would not allow any exceptions at all.

The road to fewer and safer abortions is clear. We can reject abstinence programs that don't work (even in Palin's own evangelical family), ramp up our sex education programs, and remove all obstacles to a woman's right to choose during the first two trimesters.  

If a McCain/Palin administration still pushes abstinence and overturns Roe v. Wade, then the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrial world will only increase and America's expectant mothers will be put at great risk.