July 16, 2013
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Impending Fatherhood and Texas
Impending fatherhood affects one’s perspective in several ways. Let me walk you through a personal example.
At 4 weeks — 5 out of 6 pee-sticks agreed that we were pregnant.
At 5 weeks — Jess went for a very early sonogram. We saw a tiny-white-blur-inside-a-tiny-dark-blur, with the former being the baby and the latter being the amniotic sac.
At 6 weeks — Another sonogram: we could see a pulsing that was the baby’s heartbeat. (An embryo’s heart is pumping blood through a closed circulatory system by 21 days after conception.) Facial features start to form. Buds form that will become arms and legs.
At 7 weeks — We could *hear* the heartbeat on the sonogram machine. The heartbeat at this point was about twice as fast as an adult’s. By this point, with the right equipment, we could have detected his or her brain waves.
At 9 weeks — We watched the little minion kick his or her legs. He or she had a head, feet, arms, all the usual things. Eyes are visible. By this point, he or she has all the equipment necessary to feel the sensation of pain.
By 11 weeks — The baby looks very baby-shaped. The baby also reacted to the feel of the sonogram, bouncing and kicking off the walls. He or she also gave a smile of sorts, probably just a grimace as he or she experiments with muscle control, but still. Typically, genitals begin to develop by this point.
At 13 weeks — We watched the baby suck his or her thumb and “wave.”
At 14 weeks — The little minion starts forming his or her own fingerprints.With me so far?
Then I find out that all this fuss in Texas is about whether the deadline for an abortion should be moved from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. Knocking it back from 24 to 20 is being spoken of as a gross violation of rights.
Wait, what? Come again for Big Fudge?
24 weeks is still over two months away for us. We’ve known about this little minion for months already. If this was *not* something we wanted, if we were pro-choice and wanted to abort this baby, what possible confluence of circumstances would lead us to wait that long?
By 24 weeks, he or she can hear, can swallow, has a startle reflex, has a hairline, has a sleeping-and-waking cycle, makes faces, can respond to the sound of your voice, can survive delivery with today’s medical technology… If she is female, she already has begun developing her own uterus and ovaries… Not that these things add or subtract intrinsic value to a human, but to wait even 20 weeks seems unnecessarily cruel.
I believe that open dialogue leads to understanding of the other side of an argument, even if disagreement continues. In this case, however, even assuming the pro-choice postulates, I still do not understand the pro-choice conclusions. If I was not pro-life before, impending fatherhood has made me doubly so.
Comments (13)
Understood. That’s where I am. Babies form so quickly. Don’t abort it… Look into other adoptions, such as adoption. You may even be surprised to find out that your own family members would willingly adopt it for you to keep you from selfishly sacrificing it’s life. The moment the heart starts beating is proof enough to me. I say at that point, it’s murder in my eyes. But to each their own, I guess? *sigh* It’s just such a sad thought for me to think about.
It literally makes me sick to my stomach when I think that people are fighting to murder helpless babies just because they are still in the womb. If you’ve read anything about how abortions are performed, it’s even worse, as these procedures are not quick or painless for the victims.
I agree with you. Abortion is an interesting and important ethical topic… I wish not everyone was so offended all the time. Some of the advocates see it as a violation on women’s rights and speak of theorcratic male supremacy, while others talk about heartless ‘militant feminists’. what no one gets is that perhaps they just disagree on the core issue: when is a life a life? If I assume it’s just a cell-system without emotions (e.g. fear), and maybe even eat dead aimals, it makes sense to say it’s a ‘right’ to abort it. If I assume it has feelings and consider how I don’t want to be ‘euthanized’ when my cognitive and physical functions severely decline, and have the standart to not do ANY harm to anything that possibly feels something, it make sense to say abortion is terrible. People take their point of view for ‘granted’ and then they get so pissy. In my opinion abortion shouldn’t be allowed that late. 12 weeks are enough time. I saw an interesting movie the other day it was called ‘in your hands’. A female priest was working in a prison. She was pregnant. There was a ‘mysterious’ inmate named Kate who was said to have healing powers and who first ‘discovered’ the preganancy. The priest looked into her file out of interest and saw that she was in jail for letting a baby starve to death, while she had been busy gettig drugs. She was shocked. She found out that there was a 10% chance her child might be disabled, and even though she was over the dead like (no pun inteneded) for abortion, the doctor suggested it… it’s allowed to abort them if they are ‘defective’ in many countries. (In my opinion that’s a crime on humanity.) Kates ‘secret’ came out because the nerve-wreked priest yelled at her, and the other inmates threatened her. She killed herself. The priest was struggling with the decision and in the end she agreed with her husband to abort it.
To counter: what gives you the ethical right to force another individual into existence and thus subject it to the pain and suffering that await it in an earthly life? The worst thing that happened to all of us was to be born. Since it’s better never to have been born, it follows that anything that could possibly prevent an individual from being born should be encouraged, and that includes abortion for the full duration of pregnancy. Ideally there would be no more pregnancies at all (and thus leading to the extinction of the human race, which is the best thing that could happen to the human race) but that’s not feasible so the mode of least harm is to abort all pregnancies in early stages, but even so late-term abortion is still a lesser harm than live birth and being brought into this world. ”Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad – and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people….We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child – pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.” – David Benatar; Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. @akarui_mitsukai - What’s selfish is subjecting another poor innocent individual to life on earth. That’s what’s truly selfish. Forcing life on another potential person is the most selfish thing anyone could do, so don’t even go there. @Pepin909 - I know very well how abortions are performed. It could hardly be considered murder since a fetus is not sentient. And, read my response to the OP above for why it’s worse to bring a potential person into existence rather than terminate a pregnancy.
Congratulations on the baby! I wish you and your growing family every happiness. I have never commented before, but I read your blog occasionally, and enjoy doing so.I guess one thing that one sometimes doesn’t know at 14 weeks but finds out at 20 weeks is whether your developing child has major fetal abnormalities which might lead to suffering and death:http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/07/texas_abortion_ban_after_20_weeks_prenatal_testing_reveals_birth_defects.html(You may not trust the source, but it did seem to check out with some other sources.)Of course, if one has a philosophical principles which lead one to oppose abortion (e.g. a moral belief that full personhood begins at conception), then this is perhaps irrelevant. But I take your post to be posing the question: “even if I try to imagine myself as someone who doesn’t believe abortion is ‘just always wrong’, I still don’t understand why, if I wished to have an abortion, I wouldn’t do it much earlier than 20 weeks”. One possible answer is that only at 20 weeks do you discover that you are carrying a child with Patau syndrome or holoprosencephaly; then (if you were a person who didn’t have strong moral objections to abortion) you might seek one, even at 20 weeks gestation, probably with great heartbreak since you would already have passed some of the milestones you mention without realizing that anything was wrong.
I think the Texans are adopting the same strategy that Progressives have used for over a century: achieve great change over time by chipping away small pieces off the rock.Abortion, gay marriage, unwed motherhood, living off government largess, etc., were once unthinkable.Now they are the norm. Maybe one day a Christian civil society will again be the norm and unborn children will be safe from the butcher’s cleaver.
@secretbeerreporter - Since God, Himself, suffered greatly in his human life, suffering is a condition of great blessing. From a secular point of view, suffering teaches man wisdom since there is great suffering in ignorance.Suffering teaches us to tame our passions and change our foolish ways.The intense and seemingly gratuitous suffering from things like war, cancer and senseless accidents teach us how precious are peace, civil society, good health, virtue, and compassion.Suffering teaches us the difference between right and wrong; the right way and the wrong way.Your belief that life should have no suffering is a clarion call to profound, ingrained ignorance and mental illness, and to hell on earth.
@ImNotUglyIJustNeedLove - What a joke. You know, your “God” could have prevented all of that by not placing the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden (assuming that story is remotely true), but chose not to. Therefore your “God” is a repulsive entity. The fact that existence necessitates suffering is precisely why it’s better never to have been.
@secretbeerreporter - Sane, healthy people accept life the way it is and then proceed to deal with it the best they can.Blaming God because he doesn’t act the way you think he should is an example of hubris (excessive pride).People with hubris always suffer the most tragic, horrible ruin. I would surmise that your life has been heading downhill for a long time and you’ve recently just been crippled as you traversed a cactus grove. Don’t worry, there is much worse to come.Homer wrote about your affliction in the Illiad, the first great work of literature in our Western Heritage.I highly recommend the Great Books, of which the Bible is one. They are a repository of wisdom, the antidote for foolish pride.
@secretbeerreporter - I don’t know if it’s a proper “counter” if you are operating from initial postulates so divergent from my own. Nor, for that matter, if you can use a premise that is not widely held to craft logical arguments without first defending your premise. I might as easily say:”Since all bloggers are in awe of me and my reasoning, and since you are a blogger, logically you are in awe of me and my reasoning.”Logically sound, but rhetorically ineffective, since anyone who disagrees with my conclusion will disagree with my premise as well.Benatar is correct that no harm befalls the nonexistent. He neglects to mention, however, that no joy befalls the nonexistent, no pleasure, no love. Being born opens one up to the potential, even the inevitability, of harm (though this is not the same thing as saying that being born is harm itself), but it also opens one up to the potential of many other things–things which some would say are worth the potential for harm.Relationships are much like being born, in this matter. Every love affair, every friendship, every acquaintanceship, has an equal potential for hurt–and an inevitability of hurt–equal to its measure of comfort, passion, or fulfillment. (This is why we feel of the loss of an acquaintance less sharply than the loss of a close loved one.) But to say this is a far cry from saying that it is better not to engage in human interaction, better not to form any kind of relationships. To start any relationship is to open up potential, to engender possibilities–and along with that, the potential for harm, the eventual loss of the relationship through death or rejection or the slow decay of time. This does not mean that to start a relationship is to cause harm.Birth does nothing but open up possibility. In preferring nonharm to harm, your stance really prefers non-potential to potential.I reject the idea–implicit in both your words and Benatar’s–that nonharm is the greatest good. On the contrary, I believe that at times great good can come in the midst of pain, sometimes in the midst of the worst pain. (You remind me, in fact, of the Bene Gesseret “humanity test” in the novel Dune.)Pain is a motivator. We have the pleasure of taste, but if we did not also have the pain of hunger, would we eat enough? If holding one’s breath did not cause discomfort, would humans routinely die of accidental asphyxiation from forgetting to breathe? Pain is nothing but a biochemical warning sign, a red Danger strobe, which motivates us to not do the thing that causes us pain. And while at times it can be maladaptive, a human without any sense of pain would quickly die from a variety of causes.My son or daughter, even assuming a healthy birth, will feel pain. He or she will suffer. Eventually, he or she will die. Such is life. But in addition, he or she has such potential–to love and be loved, to feel and taste and see and know, to revel in the joy that is life–even in the midst of its necessary pain. This is as it should be. To shun all suffering is to live one’s life in fear, and I refuse to do so.
@OutOfTheAshes - Joy, love, etc. doesn’t matter. If an individual doesn’t exist then it’s not deprived of such things. In that light the only way in which existence would be preferable to non-existence would be if life was perfect. All pleasure, no pain. Even if life was 99.9% pleasure and 0.1% pain it would be preferable to never exist because of that 0.1% pain. I would even argue further that joy and love don’t exist in and of themselves. They are but the absence of pain (much like dark is the absence of light, so are feelings of happiness, contentment, etc. nothing more than the absence of pain; so that there is no such thing as a positive experience, but either neutral or negative). For the record: I also fall in the “better never to have loved at all” camp and thus I avoid forming relationships with other people in any capacity. I have no friends, no family (I’m estranged from them by choice), no significant other, and it is this way by choice. I also very much resent my parents for bringing me into existence and after I have my little bit of fun this year (a life that’s already started might or might not be worth continuing, but it remains that no life is worth starting) I’ll be blowing my brains out, following antinatalistic doctrine through to its logical conclusion.
@secretbeerreporter - If the individual that doesn’t exist is not deprived of pleasure, neither does the individual that doesn’t exist escape pain–since both deprivation and escape are qualities of existence. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Nonexistence is an absence, and thus only can be spoken of in terms of lack. The nonexistent, like the dead, lack potential, lack ability to affect change, lack the ability to enjoy or not-enjoy. I assert that because a nonexistent life is pure lack, any life is always preferable. The life that is 99.99% pain and 0.001% neutral, with no pleasure, is still preferable to nonexistence even because of that 0.001%, because nonexistence will always be 0, nothing, and the scales swing away from the empty plate.Would a truly antinatalistic philosophy not better be served by a life spent dedicated to the prevention of suffering in others? I do not know if your iteration of this philosophy is truly representative, but if it is, it seems frightfully myopic. (Remember that there is a reason the original Shaker colonies died out.)
@OutOfTheAshes - I am admittedly doing a terrible job explaining. If you really want to know in greater detail where I stand read the book I referenced above. David Benatar is a professor of philosophy at University of Cape Town in South Africa. Alas, even Aristotle, regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, once mentioned that it would have been better never to have existed. I reject the notion that life has any inherent value. The value of life itself in a perfect state would be zero. None of us have any value whatsoever and any value we assign is artificial at best. In that light, since nonexistence has value zero, and all lives thus have pain, it follows that all lives have overall negative value and zero is greater than all negative real numbers so that nonexistence is preferable. The only solution to human suffering is human extinction, hence why I said extinction is the best possible thing that could happen to the human race. For individuals who already exist, the only solution to their suffering is death, which is why I support the right to die and the right to commit suicide without the state intervening and trying to save a person’s life who has attempted suicide.