Its not so much about whether or not a foetus is human, rather, what is its capacity for suffering? This is a question that can be answered by science and must be adressed whenever this touchy subject arises.

I’ll have to reflect on that. But at least we can say that God evidently doesn’t cherish them particularly.

On other reflection, the biblical “thou shalt not kill” evidently doesn’t apply to sinners of various sorts, including children disrespectful to their parents – but that’s exclusively Jewish (and not practised by all today). There isn’t an age set but it looks as though you can apply non-lethal force first, so only when the kid is to big for that does a community sentence apply, i.e. you get the community together to kill the brat with rocks. In God’s eyes, you can’t just murder your little children to shut them up. I think.

Example: My old mum watched [Taggart], the Glasgow-based police show, and so if I visited then I had to watch too. One episode that involved someone bleeding to death disturbed me hugely and it took me a while to think of a reason, which was that on another recent visit I’d found the folks struggling with a nosebleed of dad’s that wouldn’t stop – he was around eighty then, I think. That had ended up with dad in hospital getting something-or-other cauterised. So I think that was it. However, I ought to add that [Taggart] is a hideous, horrible show anyway, snuff movie territory, and this may have been one of the ghastlier episodes of it.

Now never mind contraception, is it true as I’ve been informed that in the natural course of events when sperm fertilise ovum, the embryo promptly drops out of the end of the lady’s plumbing anyway, more often than sticking to the side as it is supposed to? Which would be more than a nuisance if the Holy Ghost had already provided it with its own little soul. My main difficulties with that factoidette are that I don’t remember any of its provenance and I’m not sure how you’d reliably tell – examine menstrual material for failed embryos, I suppose. Or do in-vitro fertilisation on animals (probably animals) without a known fertility problem. But otherwise, it sounds like a guess or made-up, perhaps to console women with a fertility problem or after miscarriage or abortion. But in which case, however provocative, it is not a true and valid argument. Not unless it’s actually true. If it is though, then God who made the reproductive system would be doing more abortions than births. And supposedly the embryos all have souls.

1. I think the acorn-oaktree analogy is better than the egg-chicken one. You can see an acorn change slowly into a tree and have endless philosophical fun deciding exactly when it’s right to call it a tree. Moreover, nobody minds if you take home an acorn or two from a country walk – even if they have started to sprout – but they’ll soon call the cops if they see you cutting down a tree.

2. As a GP, I also had to circumcise – without even local anaesthesia – new-born (gentile) babies in Australia, ‘coz it was the done thing then. Of course, they screamed but I bet they don’t remember it. I bet they don’t remember all those hours of squeezing through the birth canal either, even though it’s often tight enough to distort their little skulls. It was even routine in those days to do other relatively minor surgery on new-borns without anaesthesia. I know that it sends their stress hormones up a bit and makes them marginally more sensitive to injections but it doesn’t, in any meaningful sense, cause them suffering. (NB I’m not arguing for – or against – male circumcision.) So all that ’silent scream’ stuff (of which the Hand of Hope is just the latest variant) is just emotive nonsense and I’ve always found the circumcision argument quite good for discomfiting the milksop tendency among anti-abortionists.

3.The fact that some contraceptives – both oral and intrauterine – work by destroying tiny unborn Beethovens before or after implantation deserves more prominence. The Vatican has known about this for years but only rarely mentions it. Yet if they were really concerned about even the tiniest of potential Beethovens, you would expect them to be much more outraged about widely used techniques that might be destroying a Beethoven (or, of course, a Stalin) once a month for years on end than they are about much less frequent Beethoven-destroying techniques that happen a few weeks later in abortion clinics.

Logically, they should be protesting about these monthly massacres much more loudly than about changes to the Abortion Act. In fact, they hardly ever mention the issue and their leaders tend not to reply when asked to comment. Try writing to them if you need a little entertainment on a rainy afternoon. When it comes to the crunch, hardly any of them are politically stupid enough to call for the coil to be banned because they know that whatever the Pope says, most people can’t get worked up about acorns. Or even small saplings.

Yes, calling a mother who miscarries through no fault of her own a murderer is just plain stupid and, if one wanted to be thin-skinned, offensive. A natural miscarriage is a natural death, not murder. Miscarriage through reckless lifestyle (drinking, smoking, drugtaking) when one is in full knowledge of the pregnancy is, of course, negligence. If such a lifestyle killed a child outside the womb I don’t think you would have a problem condemning it (would you?).

Foxnsox:
I’m doing no-one a disservice, and i think saying that is just being antagonistic for the sake of it. I’m trying to keep responses succinct and to the point, but you do raise some points worth responding to. If a child is conceived through rape, the biology is still the same, and as I stated I’m trying to keep any discussion i have here focussed on science. If you must have children conceived through rape aborted, then do so without denying they were children in the first place. Call it ‘justifiable homicide’ if you have to. But don’t pretend that being conceived thru rape makes them less than human. On the point of denying life to those who have illnesses or disabilities … well, that’s called eugenics and, again, it is one of those things that people would be rightly horrified by if we were talking about doing it outside the womb.

As for the mother’s life being threatened by preganancy, abortion is not a treatment. If the child’s death is incidental to the treatment the mother receives, then that is one thing. But to go out of one’s way to kill the child in the name of the mother’s health is another entirely. It is the difference between removing a feotus early and giving it a slim chance of survival, or dicing it up in the womb and giving it no chances at all.

All these difficult circumstances are, of course, used to justify what is essentially abortion-on-demand and the majority of abortions aren’t carried out for these reasons, anyway.

There’ve been a lot of responses directed at me which i could reply to but i think i’m taking up too much space already. Someone else’s turn now!

Well the reason we should do this philosophical navel gazing is because the words people use are often loaded way beyond their technical meaning. You actually illustrate this perfectly, by sliding from a discussion of what ‘human’ means to saying “we oughtn’t kill people”. ‘People’ and ‘humans’ can have different implications – being human is arguably not the same as being a person (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood for a bunch of contested accounts of personhood).

A couple of specific points – you accuse me of mentioning souls in terms of when life begins, when I actually didn’t, I was referring to foetuses being morally worthy of the same treatment as born humans. Anyone who thinks life begins at some point after conception is either wrong or trying to use a non-standard definition of life (I think this is to be discouraged). But that isn’t what is at issue. Should the fact that a foetus is alive mean that killing it is morally bad? Should the fact that a foetus is human mean that killing it is morally bad? These are the important points, but you haven’t yet addressed them thoroughly.

I don’t exactly see how you are keeping the debate ‘down to earth’. If humans don’t have natural rights (such as the right to life) then what is the reason for not killing them even when they aren’t wanted, or may cause massive complications in people’s lives? You’ll have to give an account of why all humans have a non-natural right to life even in these circumstances. This seems extremely difficult without some kind of metaphysical baggage. You quite possibly have have hidden metaphysical assumptions lying behind your assertion that “we oughtn’t kill people”, but you haven’t told us in any detail why you think that (saying “fair’s fair” is not going to be adequate), so we can’t really argue with you about that.

As for your final “so what?” – well, a metaphysically queer proposition is one that we should avoid taking as true (unless there are other, non-queer reasons for taking it as true), so if you say something based on metaphysically queer assumptions, then we have no reason to take it as true. It’s the best reason for not taking religious statements seriously for example – they rely on metaphysical entities we have no evidence of.

Again – tired, so sorry if this isn’t well written (or seems crabby).

One thing I can say with certainty, though: there is no ‘o’ in fetus.

So it is not enough that a given foetus resumble a baby in some way, it must resemble it in the exact way that makes killing a baby not allowable. This will not be the same for every moral person, but there are societal normals on the issue.

At this time they seem to include many factors including viability, sensitivity and impact on the mother. Species isn’t as far as I can tell, very much to do with it–it is a straw baby. No one has ever argued fetues are not genetically of the human species and it is baffling to think this is at all contested.

“I think fair’s fair and we oughtn’t kill people. If that’s metaphysically queer, then so what?”

Sounds simple and laudible, but I think you are weilding Occam’s razor a little too readily.

The arguements are well rehearsed and I am sure you are aware of them – rape victims, danger to the mothers life, severe illness or disabilities for the child. And certainly, each of these have their counter arguements as well. You do not arrive at a ‘fair’ solution by simply diregarding all other aspects, and to try to simplify a complex issue involving social/ moral/ religious/ scientific considerations to a single statement, you do your own intelligence and that of all those you write to a disservice.

grimreader, you seem to be playing semantic games here. Of course a human foetus is human as opposed to horse or dog. The question is to what extent a human foetus or embryo qualifies for the same rights and protections as a human baby or adult – i.e. to what extent we consider it to be a ‘human being’. If you try and take an absolutist line e.g. ‘from the moment of conception’ then you run into tricky issues such as whether a mother who miscarries is a murderer. (Think that’s stupid? How about if you can identify a lifestyle factor that increased her chance of miscarriage? Etc etc.)

Fergus, don’t apologise for being blunt. Thanks for getting to the point.

I don’t see why there needs to be philosophical naval gazing over ‘what does human mean’. When scientists are classifying species, i don’t think they spend time pontificating over ‘what does horse mean’ or ‘what does dog mean’. Granted, the question ‘what does human/horse/dog mean’ is an interesting one, but it isn’t important for categorizing those things according to their characteristics. What is important is what a human/horse/dog *is*.

For example, if you were given a tissue sample and were unsure where it came from, you could test the DNA and determine whether or not it is human, horse or dog. You do not need to have pondered the meaning of life and the basis of our existence to do this.

Getting back to the issue of the humanity of the unborn… Given that a fertilised egg has the full complement of human DNA, and from that moment onwards is directed toward its own growth and development, it makes sense to define conception as the beginning of that human being’s life. No need, Mr Greenan, to bring souls into this. Defining life as beginning at a later point is arbitrary, and requires an explanation of the rationale behind it.

I do realise that law and science are two distinct realms, but law should be based on facts and objective evidence where possible. If we were to be legislating on when human life begins, this is the kind of evidence we ought to be looking at. I don’t know if humans have natural rights or not, and again that seems to be trying to sneak a metaphysical aspect into the debate when i think it ought to be kept down to earth. I think fair’s fair and we oughtn’t kill people. If that’s metaphysically queer, then so what?

Anaesthetic drugs do penetrate the placental barrier, so yes by anaesthetising the mother you are also anaesthetising the foetus. However, the blood supply of the mother and foetus do not actually mix. This is quite important, as you often have 2 different blood types operating, so if they were to mix it could kill the foetus.

Camilla Batmangheldjh was one of my real heroes How could she get involved with someone as nuts (and stupid) as Nadine?

Sigh

Or could it possibly be because the baby is receiving the mother’s anaesthetic? A fetus is part of a woman’s body and not – as most anti-abortionists seem to believe – a fully fledged separate entity who just happens to be hanging out in a womb.

Truly depressing that a woman this thick could be an MP