The Morality of Abortion

...I think the author has made his point...

...Some human errors should be prescribed by law, some should not...

...According to its author, John Klotz, there are many reasons for the ecological crisis among which are overpopulation (though, it seems to me, that the author is unsuccessful in establishing a nexus between overpopulation and environmental decay), an upsetting of the balance of nature re-resulting from an inordinate and indiscriminate introduction of dangerous chemicals into our environment, the exploitation of natural resources and the scientific world view...

...It is expressed in the familiar terms of so-called geometrical projection, always referred to by Fraser as "exponential expansion...

...Ehrlich maintains that the environment is probably the greatest threat to individual liberty that has ever existed...

...A BraveNew World may be dawning, fellow Alpha's and Beta's, a world shaped by the frightful possibilities of the "fearful (continued on page 14) 14 The Alternative December, 1971 By John Klotz Concordia, $2.75 This work is an attempt to resuscitate man's sense of responsibility for what has been entrusted to his stewardship...

...There are"too many" people...

...Yet the abortion question has subtleties usually glossed over by those terrible simplifiers whose arguments center around "the butchering of women" or "a woman's right to do as she pleases with her own body," and this excellent collection of essays delves into the underlying issues...

...After one week's development the organism attaches itself to the mother, using a "lifeline" composed of its cells...

...Ehrlich thinks that our right to live the "good life" and pass that right on to whatever childern we do have is more important than maintaining the right to unlimited reproduction, pollution and destruction...

...Neither did the slaves seem to be human to many of the slave-holders...

...If you aspire to an understanding of the abortion issue, lay aside the glossy mags and buy or borrow Noonan's outstanding book...

...Then, from time to time, during the recounting of the pollution facts, we are reminded of the "problem" with a statement like: "Every hour we are adding 8,000 people to the human race...not just births, but births minus deaths...

...John M. Finnis, professor of law at Oxford, notes that the maternal death rates (per capita) from all abortions were not statistically different in England, where abortion was generally illegal, and Poland where abortion had been '"liberalized...

...The unborn child has an underdeveloped brain, so do others...

...After adopting rather permissive abortion statutes, Denmark and Sweden both experienced an increase in legal and illegal abortions...

...Ironic, isn't it, that many of the same people who are eager to defend seal pups and baby bears and salmon eggs from harm see nothing wrong with the killing of embryonic human beings...

...Fraser, after briefly acknowledging this bit of reality, does not face it...

...before the killing or altering of inconvenient or imperfect members of the human species becomes accepted by the law, those who favor this course should acquaint themselves with the arguments of their opposition...

...every cell which develops from the fertilized egg will carry this unique, human, genetic specification, clearly distinguishing the organism from its mother...

...If it is "'merely a part of the mother," like a hangnail or an appendix, then of course she has the right to have it removed...

...The "problem" is simply stated to exist...

...Paul Ramsey, a professor of ethics at Princeton, directs much of his essay to this question...

...When survival is threatened, the measures used to survive can only be speculated...

...Imagine how it would be received if the Joint Chiefs of Staff justified war as another population control strategy ! ) The abortion advocates have been skillful propagandists...

...The coyness begins with the subtitle, "What You Should Know About Growing Population and Vanishing Resources" (you're supposed to tack on, "But Were Afraid to Ask...

...The fetus is highly dependent, so are other human beings...

...these formal elements are already determining the organic life to be not only generally "human' but also the unique indwidual human being it is to be...

...We recognize that it would not be right to force a human being into an environment in which he will die (throwing a non-swimmer into deep water, for example), except under special circumstances, even if such a human being had proven to be a grave inconvenience or embarrassment, or seemed "too deformed...

...What rights could they retain...

...Noonan and his contributors discuss the moral quandaries which result from acknowledging the claim that the fetus has human rights, and they differ on some of the borderline cases: the deformed, the products of rape or incest, the children of the mentally retarded...

...Hence, this justifies so drastic a method of popular reduction as abortion...

...Mostly it's about pollution and the misuse of resources...

...Why would one prefer a system of rules which gave lessthan the greatest happiness possible...

...The Alternative December, 1971 13 The book begins with a statement of the problems followed by a discussion of population studies and nomenclature...

...If I hear another proponent of legalized abortion tell me "you can't legislate morality," I may scream...

...One supposes that his students, for students' reasons, have encouraged him to believe he is witty...

...The "problem" is people, in the view of Fraser and others like him...

...Why choose the unborn for death rather than the aged, the less fit or the willing humanitarians...

...Because many traditional constraints on human sexuality seemed illogical, all came to be questioned...

...As reported above, the book scarcely deals at all with the actual "problem" alleged by the title...

...The fetus doesn't "seem" to be a human being...

...Of special interest to me is the author's notion that the scientific world view has contributed to the ecological crisis...

...Ramsey's italics...

...He may be criticized for specific issues and taken to task for poor references and statistics, but his thesis is correct...

...What kind of thing is a human embryo...

...many people, outside academia, equate "it's illegal" with "it's immoral" and "it's legal" with "it's moral...

...At the end of eight weeks, the organism becomes a "fetus," and although it is only an inch long "there is readable electrical activity coming from the fetal brain...

...Laws against killing, stealing, raping, mugging, defranding, extortion, etc...

...Fraser does do us a service by titling his book as he has...

...In New York, on the other hand, the fetus may now be killed at the mother's discretion...

...If all abortions were legalized, there would thus probably not be a significant decrease in deaths to women from abortion, while the number of unborn children killed would increase...

...Perhaps "rights" are, in the final analysis, rules governing haman behavior which if followed would lead to the greatest happiness to the greatest number...

...they don't have to be perfect deterrents to be worth having...

...A political advertisement for a Massachusetts politico who favored abortion legalization carried the voice of one of his supporters saying, "I know it's a human being, but...

...Yes, we all know that men and women go to bed with one another solely to produce offspring, never to express love, or because it's an intense pleasure...

...The risk of death from even a legal abortion multiplied by the number of women who seek abortions indicates there will still be women's deaths, and there will be situations in which women decide to have abortions by non-professionals...

...The heavy hand (and the shallowness)shows in a statement like: "Today's wars are over far more serious matters (than the wars of ancient Greece), such as which of two groups of scoundrels shall rule and rob a natiorl that, by and large, could not care less...

...Anyway, few arguments have been made on behalf of abortion which could not be extended to the killing of others, such as infants...

...We have adopted the attitude that we can manipulate nature with impunity and force it to do our will...

...all agree that the mother has the right to abort her child to save her life...

...Haven Bradford Gow ABORTION (continued from page 13) symmetry...

...Sources in Noonan's book indicate that eighty to ninety percent of the illegal abortions are being p~formed by M.D.'s already and that legalization can be expected to increase significantly the number of women having abortions...

...that those measures might be extreme cannot be denied...

...Aldo Somers, M.D...

...As a result, instead of trying to interact with our environment, we indulge in a ruthless and unthinking exploitation of our natural resources...

...Terms like population explosion and population control always were too abstract...

...The law educates...

...In short, the fetus is a complex, genetically human organism which is biologically dependent upon the mother as a "'parasite...

...it is certainly not a serious examination of the alleged "problem" referred to in the title...

...Although, some people profess to see a great difference between the child bern and the child as yet unborn, it is hard to grant that eight months after conception a child born prematurely has full rights to life, but his counterpart still in the womb does not...

...If the unborn can be killed, what else can be done to them...

...it is persons, individual persons, who are to be "controlled...

...As the biological sciences give mothers and other persons the ability to alter biological characteristics of the unborn (see, for example, "The New Genetics," Time, 19 April 1971), we may find the results appaUin_g, J.BIS...

...Legalizing abortion opens a Pandora's box of problems, ethical and practical...

...The law limits the state and its minions, whose motto (the Bureaucrats Law) often seems to be "all that isn't forbidden is compulsory...

...We should read the book criticaliy and then look for good solutions to the problems, though we need not necessarily ascribe to his solutions...

...of the genetic double helix and the awesome power of the chemical balances which do so much to shape the fates of men...

...Haldane, a British geneticist, has suggested that we might breed legless humans for use as astronauts...what if Morn wanted you to be an astronaut...

...As incentives to produce were weakened and production failed to keep pace with population growth and rising expectations, those who once told us America had a "'distribution problem" (rather than a "production problem") now are telling us that we have a "population problem...

...Nor does he deal with other realities, such as: What happens to a co tmtry with so successful a people-control program that it ends with an "old" population and a few young men to run things (apparently Japan is now con...

...Once one understands the nature of the unborn child, one must ask to what degree such an entity qualifies for the rights accorded a human being...

...Well, it does seem likely that a baby today stands a better chance of living to be a hundred than did his grandfather, but he has no better chance of living past that age...

...Others have remarked on the Manichean bias of people-control zealots...

...Finnis looks at the results of the restrictive and permissive approaches to controlling abortion in various countries...

...Legal abortions are now available in New York for anyone with the wherewithal to make it to Gotham (97,881 abortions were performed there in jtist eight months), and other states are now liberalizing their abortion laws...

...Fraser's book is marked not merely by shallowness and the Manichean spirit, but coyness and heavyhandedhess, too...

...Douglas Cooper Lightweight, no more than a compilation of material garnered from a handful of books and clippings from a few magazines (Sciende, Sdience News, The Sdiences, "Ameri(an SCientist, Sdientific Amerwan), Dean Fraser's book is another recounting of the better-known facts regarding pollution, and these recounted on a superficial level...

...are all attempts to "legislate morality...

...That's suitable...

...Legalizing abortion will obviously not save the lives of the aborted and may not even decrease the number of deaths to women from abortion, which have been at a level of about 500 Americans per year...

...For implicit in our willingness to exploit and cause havoc to our environment is, I believe, the scientific world view which provides us with an intellectual justification for our deeds...

...This should be kept in mind while listening to the claims of the coathanger-brandishers that opponents of complete legalization are "dooming women to die...

...Fraser reveals his not only by his title hut when he can remark, for instance, that social attitudes are less lenient regarding premarital sexual intercourse than mere necking because "the difference (between the two) is quite simply that hand-holding does not bring babies, fornication does...

...What universal rule can be made to determine who warrants protection as a human being and who does not...

...Ehrlich then makes proposals that might help us avoid the most extreme solutions...

...It is not until four to eight weeks after this that fetal movements are felt by the mother, an event called "quickening," which has been the source of some traditional distinctions regarding abortion...

...That is, the doctors have already extended life expectancy to the near-limits of the human life span and a lot of folks who, a few decades back, would already be dead, are going to be dying pretty soon...

...Three to four weeks following fertilization, while the woman is wondering whether or not she might be pregnant, the embryo "has a head, rudimentary eyes, ears and brain, a body with a digestive tract, heart and bloodstream, simple kidneys and liver....The differentiation is sufficient for heart pumping to occur...

...All show a level of insight lacking in the "you can't legislate morality" school of thought...

...Three powerful currents of contemporary thought have swept aside the contern for life: the sexual revolution, women's liberation and the population crisis...

...But what...

...At present, the fetus has a number of legal rights: the fetus can inherit, can be the subject of negligence suits and has a legal right to support, enforceable by a guardian...

...The scientific hubris leads us to believe that the gods of science and technology will -- when the chips are down -- rescue us from our sins...

...From the moment of conception, the fertilized egg, unlike either the sperm or the unfertilized ovum, has a full complement of chromosomes which are uniquely its own (unless duplicated in an identical twin...

...Fraser is identified on the book jacket as a virologist...

...This is not the time to nitpick...

...What if Morn wanted a docile child or a hyperactive achiever or a drone to help with the housework...

...At present the state has the equipment to restrict liberty...

...Whatever the nature of rights, those who advocate legislation should discuss its consequences and compare them with the consequences of not making such legislation...

...One gathers that he regards people, and the "problem" they are said to present, in the same spirit with which he would consider the viruses in his electron microscope and the troubles they cause...

...Legislation has several purposes...

...Ramsey, Finnis and Noonan each deal with the problem of when it is advisable or right to make a wrong act a crime...

...This world view causes us to assume that man exists apart from nature, indeed, that man is above nature...

...Harvard professor George Hunston Williams proposes a new framework for viewing the interests of the community, the mother and the fetus...

...if abortion is illegal, one cannot be ordered to get one even if your local social worker thinks it a dandy idea that your "undesirable" or "superfluous" child not be born...

...The next section is devoted to exploring the limits of the earth...

...Ecology Crisis is recommended to those who want to read a serious book concerning the eco]Fogical problem, one that is 'free from the paranoid rhetoric of the ideologues...

...Punishments generally deter by raising the risk or "cost" of certain acts, yet they are never perfect deterrents...

...Because many burdens are unfairly borne bywomen, some think that any burdens unique to women are unfair...