rcd@opus.UUCP (03/05/84)
A fair part of the "abortion debate" revolves around the refusal of BOTH
sides to admit that they are asking an ill-posed question:
When does life begin?
This question is ill-posed because it presupposes that there is an instant
at which life begins. It turns out to be yet another instance of a logical
fallacy sometimes called "the fallacy of black and white" - essentially,
trying to turn a continuum into a binary choice.
Example: You know men who have beards and others who don't. OK, either
they have beards or not (binary choice). But how many whiskers does it
take to make a beard? Well, clearly one or two won't be enough; I don't
have a beard just because I missed a couple when I shaved today. Also
clearly, a thousand or so whiskers make a decent beard. Now we've got the
range--all we have to do is narrow it down by some well-known search
algorithm, right? Wrong. YOU may be able to pick a number, but it won't
be the same as mine, and we can spend an eternity arguing (or shoving
electrons and magnetic domains around, as we do on the net).
We've got the same thing with the "When does life begin?" business. Most
of us don't have any trouble saying there isn't life before conception;
similarly most of us have no trouble saying there is life after birth. But
the time in between is when life is coming to fulfillment, and arguing just
where it happens is as meaningless as counting whiskers.
(Aside: NO, SCIENCE WILL NOT TELL YOU "WHEN LIFE BEGINS". It depends on
what you mean by "life". If you want to know when certain biological
phenomena occur, or when certain processes begin, science may help you
there - but you're on your own as to which phenomena and processes indicate
"life".)
If you're going to get around the argument and set a meaningful law, you
have to get some reasonable consensus behind the law. I don't mean 51%, I
mean 80+% or so. That means that some people (perhaps most!) won't get the
law written exactly as they want it. Herein lies a cleverness in the
Supreme Court abortion ruling that is often overlooked: The division of
the term of pregnancy into three trimesters, with increasing protection for
the fetus in each trimester, avoids the black/white fallacy without turning
it into an unmanageable continuum. It is a reasonable approach to a
compromise - which of course means that it is periodically blasted from
both sides as either too lenient or too strict.
When we move from morality to law, the law MUST be one that most people can
accept, as I said. This isn't out of fairness or justice or anything else
so altruistic; it's pure pragmatics: If too many people don't agree with a
law, and it affects them, the law will be unenforceable. It might as well
not exist. In the present political/social climate, a law permitting
abortion freely until birth will not be tolerated by the anti-choice
faction and a law denying any abortion after conception will be widely
flouted by affected women and pro-choice doctors - with plenty of support
from the rest of the pro-choice faction.
Sigh...go ahead, light up them flames...
--
{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd