Having laid out my case for the secular case against abortion in the May 5th broadcast of this series, I will now respond to ten common objections to the pro life position, beginning with five arguments that attempt to recruit certain scientific facts to serve the cause of killing human embryos and fetuses. Each of these arguments has, I assure you, been seriously advanced.

Objection one: The first of these biological arguments is that if the embryo has moral worth, so must every one of our skin cells. Each of our skin cells contains our genetic code. Those cells are human, and they are alive. Are we committing genocide every time we towel off after a shower?

Well, no. A skin cell is not an organism. It may have been human and had life, but it was not a human life. It was not a living human being. The new embryo, on the other hand, is a complete, though immature, human organism.

Objection two: The early human embryo isn't a human being because it could still split into twins. Because there could be two individuals there, there are really none.

This is like saying that a flatworm isn't a flatworm because it can be split into two flatworms. It may be helpful to think about the developing science of cloning, which uses cells taken from organisms, such as sheep, along with other biological material to create new organisms that are genetic replicas of the originals. One day it may well be possible to do this for human beings, and it will therefore be possible to create a kind of twin for each of us. It will not follow that none of us has a right to life.

Objection three: Molecular biologist Lee Silver, the author of Remaking Eden, has given us argument three, which I will quote in full:

The confusion people have is with the meaning of the words life and alive. We use the words in two very different ways, one meaning vegetative life, the other conscious life. To biologists, life in a vegetative sense simply means the life of cells. In fact, in this beaker [gestures toward beaker containing a pinkish fluid], there are living human cells. Millions of human cells. They are perfectly alive and they are perfectly human, but they are not conscious. But when you talk about human beings and persons, we are talking about consciousness.The best example of the difference that I know of is what happens when a person is shot with a bullet in the heart—he dies almost instantly. And yet, most of his body is still alive. So the person is dead, even though his body, for the most part, is alive. That is the distinction between vegetative life and conscious life. Human embryos are cells, and they are alive in a vegetative sense, not a conscious sense.

The confusions here are Silver's own. He's confusing the distinction between "conscious" and "vegetative" organisms with the distinction between organisms and parts of an organism.

The man who is killed by a bullet to the head does not go from being "conscious" life to being "vegetative" life. He becomes dead. He is dead even if particular cells, tissues, and organs retain life for a while, because those cells, etc., are no longer parts of a functioning, integrated whole. The fact that an embryo or fetus isn't conscious doesn't prove that it's not an organism—which is what it would have to do for Silver's argument to work. Even if he abandons his point about cellular life, he still has to justify making the right to life depend on consciousness (a criterion that does not distinguish between humans and animals, and excludes unconscious humans).

Objection four: I like to call this argument the brainless argument. It is a particular favorite of University of California-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. The argument starts with the observation that we treat brain-death as the criterion for death, and allow organs to be removed for the benefit of others after it has occurred. Since embryos have not yet developed brains, the argument runs, they are in the same position as the brain-dead.

The analogy doesn't work. Its goal is to show that an embryo is not a person even if it is a living human organism. But we don't treat the brain-dead as living human organisms that aren't persons. We treat them as dead.

Also, the criterion we use is the death of the whole brain, not just of the cerebrum. We don't treat people as dead, in other words, simply because they can no longer think. We treat them as dead because they are no longer organisms: because their brains can no longer do the work of integrating the organisms' functioning (at a point in development when the brain performs the primary integrating function). The embryo does, however, manage to integrate its own functioning even before a brain emerges to take over most of that work.

Objection five: Embryos and fetuses cannot develop on their own. If they're not implanted in a womb, embryos won't develop into fetuses, let alone into infants.

This is true; but it is also true that infants themselves will not develop, thrive, or even survive if they are not given suitable environments. All of us are, as Alasdair McIntyre puts it, dependent rational animals.

So much for the biological arguments. Three other arguments for abortion are based on intuitions that many people allegedly have.

Objection six: There is the objection that, as my National Review colleague Jeffrey Hart put it in arguing for embryo-destructive research, embryos "do not look like human beings." They have no limbs or hearts or faces or memories. The liberal columnist Jonathan Alter calls the pope "perverse" for wanting to protect the life of "a tiny clump of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence." Anna Quindlen calls the embryo "a cluster of undifferentiated cells." The liberal columnist Michael Kinsley says that embryos are "microscopic clumps of cells" that have less in common with you or me than a mosquito.

But of course the embryo looks exactly like a human being: It looks like a human being in the embryonic stage of development. Each of us looked like that at that age. Science has opened up whole worlds of knowledge and possibility to us. Among the knowledge that we have gained is that human beings at their beginnings look like nothing we have ever before seen. Embryos are composed of cells, it is true; but it is also true that Kinsley, Quindlen, and Alter are clumps of cells. Alter is correct to suggest that they are larger clumps of cells. But it's hard to see how size should be the difference between having a right to life and lacking one. And unlike mosquitos, but like you or me, human embryos are complete human organisms.

There is ample precedent in human history for denying rights to groups of human beings because they do not look like us, where "us" includes all the people who have the power to deny those rights. We realize, however, that our natural sentiments, instincts, and intuitions can go badly awry and have to be examined in the light of reason.

Objection seven: There is an argument from intuition that is based on the high rate of miscarriages. Kinsley argues that it makes no sense to object to the killing of embryos when miscarriages occur routinely in nature. The liberal philosopher Michael Sandel notes that we do not typically bury or have mourning rites for miscarried embryos.

The analogy between miscarriages and the deliberate destruction of embryos is a simple fallacy. It's simply an error to suppose that the occurrence of an event in nature justifies the deliberate mimicking of that event. There have been many societies in human history where infant mortality rates were quite high, but those high rates do not establish that infanticide would have been morally justified in those societies. The high natural death rate among 90-year-olds does not make it right to burn down nursing homes. The tsunami that occurred in December 2004 does not mean that it's okay to slaughter Asians.

Nor can the point about burials hold much weight. As a matter of fact, many mothers do grieve intensely over miscarriages. But there are many factors that affect our emotional responses to deaths without affecting the right to life. We may, for example, grieve more over the death of a middle-aged man than an elderly one, or of a healthy man than one who had suffered a long illness, without thinking any less of the latter's right not to be killed.

Objection eight: Another argument from intuition has been made by the recently retired Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman. She asks us to imagine a child trapped in a burning fertility clinic. Who would you save, she asks: the child or some embryos?

The question does not prove the point Goodman thinks it does.

Think about another hypothetical situation: You're in a burning building. You can either rescue a research scientist who is making great strides toward a cure for Alzheimer's disease, or rescue four heroin-addicted 58-year-old men who have spent their lives rotating through the penal system and are likely to continue to do so. Whom do you save?

Let's say you save the scientist. Are you therefore saying that it's permissible to kill hopeless old addicts? Are you saying that such people do not have the same right not to be killed that the scientist does?  Of course not.  Neither Goodman's question nor mine asks you to contemplate killing anyone. The moral question posed by the burning-building scenarios is the extent to which you can show favoritism without being unjust. That's an interesting question. But in answering it we might reasonably take account of all kinds of things—family ties, the life prospects of potential rescuees, the suffering they would undergo if not rescued, etc.—that aren't relevant to the question: Can we kill them?

To put it another way: In affirming that all human beings have an equal right not to be killed, we need not affirm that all human beings have equal claims on us in all respects.

Finally, here are two political arguments for abortion.

Objection nine: The first concerns pluralism. It starts with the observation that there are many competing views in our society about the morality of killing human embryos and fetuses, and then moves to the conclusion that government should leave people free to adopt whatever view they reach.

But the law will either treat the embryo as a human being with a right to be protected from unjust killing or it will not. It cannot be neutral in the matter. It will have to follow one of those competing views. People are, of course, free to adopt any view they want; they can take the view that five-year-olds do not have a right to life. But almost all of us would rightly reject the idea that anyone has the right to act on that view. And we would reject it even if we lived in a society where large numbers, or a majority, of people held that misguided view.

Pluralism is a good thing, but pluralism cannot be pluralistic about its own ground rules, especially the rule against killing one another. We would do well to remember that the classic expression of tolerance is the saying, "Live and let live."

Objection ten: Occasionally one runs into arguments for abortion that do not deny the personhood or humanity of the fetus. One such defense is philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous argument that the fetus does not have a just claim on the use of its mother's body and time, and can rightly be evicted from the womb.

But in abortion, the death of the fetus is often the goal of the procedure, and always the means to the end. It is a deliberate killing that usually rips apart the fetus or does some other violence to him in the womb. Trespassers, even those more blameworthy than the fetus, are generally dealt with less harshly.

Game Over - A baby starves to death while its parents play online

The Culture of Death is much more elaborate, pervasive, and intricately intertwined than you think. The blithe destruction of innocent children is not merely the result of a single Supreme Court case in a single country. It is a symptom of moral degeneration at the very core of our being, our rational nature, and this degeneration is occurring world-round.

To be human means to be able to know, to discern, to recognize, to name, to understand what things really are—in short, to grasp reality. An obvious symptom of moral degeneration is the loss of this grip on reality. When you see a series of ultrasound images of a baby developing in the womb, what more is there to say on behalf of the humanity of the unborn? That is why abortion advocates hate these pictures (especially 4D movies), and fight tooth and nail against state laws that would make viewing them mandatory for women considering an abortion. Abortionists realize that ultrasound technology opens a visual connection to a reality that, when abortion was made legal way back in the early 1970s, was hidden from view. What can a woman say upon seeing her ultrasound but “That is my baby.” The connection to reality is too strong. Her natural reaction is to want to grasp that precious reality, to hold and protect it, to love her own child.

Unfortunately, reality is in shorter and shorter supply these days. Or better, the supply is there, but demand is rapidly diminishing. And so, new symptoms of moral degeneration arise, symptoms that put a further twist to the already twisted Culture of Death. Just recently in Korea, a young couple got so deeply involved in raising a computer-generated virtual child named Anima on an elaborate internet game site, that they let their own child starve to death. The daughter on the video game was more real, more inviting, her demands more pressing, than the one left at home, slowly dying, writhing in hunger, crying alone.

The 41-year-old father seemed, even in his public remorse, to have no grasp whatsoever on the morbid reality of what he had done or failed to do. "I wish that she hadn't got sick and that she will live well in heaven forever. And as the father, I am sorry," he said. Got sick? I’m sorry? Father?

He sounds like he lost a character in a virtual reality game, not a real child. Such is the growing danger of our world culture as it becomes ever more largely defined by computers that create ever more elaborate virtual realities. Our avatars—the name gamers give to their computer generated and manipulated virtual alter egos—will displace our own real persons, our own real lives, our own real moral world of real life and death duties.

And then, what of the power of the ultrasound images of babies in the womb? They will become just one more image, far less interesting, one conjectures, than a virtual child because you can’t manipulate the real one at will or turn it off if you get bored of the game or reboot if things aren’t going well.
Perhaps you can’t, but an abortionist can. That’s his game.

Benjamin Wiker

http://www.slate.com/id/2247465/

Watch YouTube Avatar Baby Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j0hxq57Fc0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5X2zQug-Ho

Mugged by Ultrasound

Why so many abortion workers have turned pro-life.

Other converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth... After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”

The most famous abortion provider to be converted by ultrasound technology, decades ago, is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. In the early 1970s, Nathanson was the largest abortion provider in the Western world. By his own reckoning he performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. Nathanson’s exit from the industry was slow and tortured. In Aborting America (1979), he expressed anxiety over the possibility that he was complicit in a great evil. He was especially troubled by ultrasound images. When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment.

Weekly Standard

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/mugged-ultrasound?page=2

The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s

The pro-life cause welcomes, and has been greatly bolstered by, the support of many distinguished intellectuals, the same is not true of the pro-choice movement.

On the contrary, intellectuals who share their policy preferences are always raising inconvenient questions about the intellectual coherence of arguments advanced in favor of the unlimited abortion license.

For instance, Rosamund Rhodes of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine confessed three decades after Roe that abortion proponents are simply not prepared to explain “how or why the fetus is transformed into a franchised ‘person’ by moving from inside the womb to outside or by a reaching a certain level of development.”

One of the most prominent of abortion proponents, Judith Jarvis Thompson, concedes that the “prospects for ‘drawing a line’ in the development of the fetus look dim.” And of course there is Peter Singer of Princeton, who has written, “Liberals have failed to establish a morally significant dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus.” Singer concludes from this that it is therefore permissible to kill babies outside as well as inside the womb. Needless to say, his argument is not helpful in advancing pro-choice politics.

In short, pro-life intellectuals, like pro -life activists, insist on talking about the science and moral reasoning pertinent to the moral status of the unborn. So do the more honest of pro-choice intellectuals, which is why they are more hindrance than help to the pro-choice movement.

Richard John Neuhaus
First Things

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6453

Craig Venter, in a race to a tie against NIH head, Francis Collins, decoded the Human Genome and has now constructed the first synthetic bacterial cell

“For nearly 15 years Ham Smith, Clyde Hutchison, and the rest of our team have been working toward this publication today—the successful completion of our work to construct a bacterial cell that is fully controlled by a synthetic genome,” Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute and one of the paper’s authors, said in a statement released yesterday.

“We have been consumed by this research, but we have also been equally focused on addressing the societal implications of what we believe will be one of the most powerful technologies and industrial drivers for societal good. We look forward to continued review and dialogue about the important applications of this work to ensure that it is used for the benefit of all.”

Craig Venter
Science and Religion Today

http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2010/05/21/craig-venter-on-the-first-synthetic-bacterial-cell/

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