As a practical matter, your proposal of six weeks would essentially outlaw abortion. Many women do not have periods regularly enough to know they're pregnant at week six. I knew a girl who once went 98 days between periods (I'm not sure why she shared that with me since we never had sex; I guess it was a matter of pride).
Athletic women frequently suffer from amenorrhea, which means it's not unusual for them to go without periods for months. Unless they have some kind of other physical indication of pregnancy, such as morning sickness, they'll never have a clue they're pregnant until they have significant weight gain. Some women have even gone to term without realizing they're pregnant.
Rather than just picking numbers like six and ten out of a hat, we should base limits on abortion on something meaningful. What difference does it make whether the heart is beating, or there is a brain? Earthworms have brains and beating hearts. The real question is whether the fetus is a person.
We have standards for determining whether someone is alive when they've suffered brain trauma. We call it brain death, but it's really a test of personhood. What it boils down to, is there enough brain function that something of that person still remains? Do they still have their memories and their personality? Can they breathe on their own? Can they recognize and communicate with loved ones? Can they still think?
Many religious people reject outright the notion of brain death. They want to keep brainless corpses on life support forever, in the vain hope they'll wake up some day. Certainly there are instances of people who are in a coma, or locked in silence, who are still in there. We should do everything we can to help them recover. But brain scans will reveal whether there is any chance of recovery. If there is no brain activity, you are dead. The recent case in Texas in which a hospital was keeping a brain-dead woman on life support because she was pregnant with a non-viable fetus is an example of how misguided these "pro-life" laws can be.
The anti-abortion crowd's stance that life begins at conception is demonstrably false. Life begins before conception. Egg and sperm cells are as alive as any fertilized ovum: sperm cells can swim! For centuries the Catholic Church held that every sperm was sacred; man was the source of the child, he planted the child in the woman. Her womb was just an incubator, and man was the creator of life, just like god.
It was only when we understood the science that they had to back down, admit the primacy of the woman's role in childbearing. Men produce sperm by the millions; almost all of them just die off in the epididymis if you're celibate, or elsewhere if you're not. The woman's egg and womb provide everything for the fetus; the sperm is tiny compared to the egg, providing just a squirt of DNA. The male of the species can be totally dispensable: some complex creatures can reproduce by parthenogenisis (virgin birth), including snails, some reptiles and sharks, and even a few turkeys.
If you look at a fetus at various stages of development, it's clear that a zygote is not a person. It's just a blob of stem cells. As it develops the fetus resembles various creatures: worm, tadpole, possum, salamander. At 44 days the fetus still has a sizable tail. It's not until 60 days that the human fetus actually looks like a human.
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| Pig, bull, rabbit and human fetuses |
Some of Haeckel's drawings were inaccurate, and claims that human and animal fetuses were "indistinguishable" were false: there are extremely subtle differences that more astute observers could discern. Haeckel used these comparisons as evidence for Darwin's theory of evolution. Anatomical comparisons have also been used for the same purposes (humans and horses have pretty much all the same bones in their bodies, they're just rearranged.)
But the key point is that the brain in all these fetuses is tiny. Our immensely huge brains give us the capacity to be persons. Until the brain is sufficiently developed, a human fetus simply does not meet the criteria by which we judge someone to be a person.
Thus, the question is not "What is life?" but rather "What is a person?" The answer to that is a human with a functioning brain. (Though that question may become cloudy if we ever develop self-aware computers.)
The general test for whether an abortion should be legal has been whether the fetus is viable outside the womb. The chance for survival is zero percent at 21 weeks or less. It rises to about 50% at 24 weeks. The reason is clear: before that the fetus is not an independent organism; it has human DNA, but it is not a separate person in any meaningful way. It is totally dependent on the mother for providing oxygen, nutrition, antibodies and waste disposal through the umbilical. It is essentially another organ, an egg that has taken up residence outside the ovary.
Some day preemies may survive being born even earlier. That would require artificial wombs that provide sustenance through the umbilical, rather than the primitive incubators we have today. This technological development would require new legal definitions: it should be based on brain development. A fetus is a person when it has a brain that is sufficiently large enough to function as a person's brain.
This is the inverse of being brain-dead. A fetus has no memories, no personality, no emotional connection to other people. There is really nothing there to call a person. At some point, however, it will have a large enough brain to be capable to form memories and a personality, even though it may not have one yet. At that point I would call the fetus a person, and would accept an abortion ban at that stage.
I don't know what week of development this equates to; that requires research. Premature babies can suffer permanent brain damage (causing autism among other things) because brain development is interrupted. That may suggest that the 20-24 week period is the turning point in fetal brain development. Which means that the current viability deadline may just happen to coincide with brain development.
Some states have passed laws banning abortions at 20 weeks because fetuses can feel pain. This is a bogus argument. Animals feel pain, yet we slaughter them by the billions. Inmates on death row can feel pain, but many anti-abortionists have no problem killing them. The "innocence" of the fetus is also cited frequently. But many abortion opponents favor stand-your-ground laws, where you can get away with shooting anyone who you think might harm you, even if that person is completely innocent. They call killings of innocent victims by gun-toting fraidy cats "unfortunate accidents."
The motivation behind abortion bans has nothing to with the personhood of the fetus. The tone of Mark's post shows what's really going on: it's moral outrage against people perceived as promiscuous and lazy. People want to hold dagger at women's throats to force them to be more careful. They want women to pay for their mistakes. They want women to be more responsible.
But getting pregnant is not just a matter of being forgetful, lazy, licentious or irresponsible. The pill can fail. Condoms can tear. Diaphragms can slip. Vasectomies can fail and men can lie about having them. Men get women drunk and have sex with them while their judgment is seriously impaired or they're unconscious. Women are forcibly raped.
Responsible women can get pregnant through no fault of their own. Why do we want to force them to bear children they don't want?
In the final analysis, having an abortion when you're in no condition to raise a child is being responsible.
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