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From: tdn@cmu-sei.ARPA (Thomas Newton)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: The Status of the Fetus and Its Rights
Message-ID: <204@cmu-sei.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 22-Aug-85 00:45:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: cmu-sei.204
Posted: Thu Aug 22 00:45:03 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 19:33:10 EDT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 396

> And still, despite our newfound knowledge, we have a person's age beginning
> at birth.  Ever see the books "The First Twelve Months of Life" or "The
> Second Twelve Months of Life"?  Can you take a guess as to when the first
> 12 start?  That's but one example of how we determine when a human life
> begins.

Old habits are hard to change.  And it is still true that we can measure the
date of birth more easily than the date of conception.

>>> the fact that the person is only an autonomous living being once it
>>> is BORN,

> Newton, it's amazing how you can attempt to twist someone else's words to
> try to make a point, and fail miserably.  It is a person, an autonomous
> living being ONLY once it is born.  Did *I* make references to a "person"
> in the womb?

Yes, if inadvertently.  Your statement implied "person before and after birth,
autonomous living being after birth".  Perhaps you ought to use language more
precisely in the future.

> No, people had known that for some time (despite bogus non-science that
> still perpetuates to this day).  In fact, it was precisely because they
> wanted to get rid of the hypocrisy, because they knew there was no moral
> way to support it.

But many of the people who believed in the restrictive definition were not
convinced.  There were probably a fair number of slaveholders who actually
believed the stuff they were spouting.  But this did not make slavery right;
it was wrong even though there were people who did not know it was wrong and
who believed that they had a right to hold slaves.

> There is no such hypocrisy here in our debate.  At least none coming from
> me.

But if abortion is wrong, does everyone need to believe that it is wrong in
order for it to be wrong?  That is to say, there may be some people who need
to be stopped from performing actions that *they believe* would not harm other
people but which *actually* would harm other people.

> Because it's a stupid thing to go by.  The demarcation point of life is at
> birth.  It is you who wants to stretch it.

On the contrary, the demarcation point of life is at conception.  You have the
same DNA that you had when you were a fetus.  It determined the color of your
hair and skin, your sex, and various other things.  It organized your growth
from a single cell to an infant to a child to the person you are today.

>> After all, there have been lots of atrocities committed on "subhumans" who
>> were later found to be human after all.  I haven't heard of any atrocities
>> that resulted from going the other way:  assume human until proven
>> otherwise.

> By this logic, we should never remove the heads from department store
> mannequins.  After all, they might be human.

Come on now, you expect us to believe this?  Even a most rudimentary
examination will show you that mannequins are not living organisms and
do not belong to our species.  Fetuses are living organisms and do belong
to our species.

> The fact is they weren't "later" found to be human, they were already known
> to be human; it was foul bigots who in their personal insecurity blame other
> people for their problems who label some people "subhuman".

I'm not labeling fetuses as "subhuman"; you are.  Be careful, or you'll end
up insulting yourself.

>> Go ahead and kill all the tapeworms, bacteria, and viruses that you want.
>> But don't kill other human beings.

> I'm not proposing that we do.  I'm proposing that similar organisms in the
> body (like fetuses) be dealt with in the same way if the person wants to.

Tapeworms, bacteria, etc. don't belong to the species Homo sapiens.  Fetuses
do, and this difference is a major one as far as rights are concerned.

> Unless you can prove that these are human beings

The fact that they are living, that they belong to our species, and that it
has already been proven that seven-month-old fetuses can live outside of their
mothers (suggesting that we'll get proofs for younger ages as our technology
advances) SHOULD suggest something to you.  Also note that every adult who is
living today was once a fetus with the same DNA, and that no adult who lives
today was once a cancer, tumor, etc. -- the "fetus=cancer" argument is BOGUS.

> Unless you can show how they can exist in a physically autonomous separate
> state from the bodies they inhabit.

This has been shown for seven-month-old and older fetuses.  The environment
provided by the human body is better than the one provided by hospitals, but
this is hardly surprising.  After all, the human body is the end-product of
hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

The difference between seven-month-old fetuses and six-month-old fetuses is
one of degree, not one of kind.  In fact, if you keep looking back you will
discover that the 'difference of kind' occurs when you cross the boundary of
conception.

>> As to the first part of #2, clearly everyone does not agree with you.

> You mean some people are DEMANDING that women remove the fetuses within
> them?  Care to substantiate that?  Or are you referring to "parasitic
> nature"?  Who doesn't agree with that, and why?

What were you saying about twisting words?  I was referring to:
       >>> ...given wht it does to her body, surely her wishes take precedence
       >>> over anything usurping nourishment from her and causing changes to
       >>> her body against her will,

>> and we don't hold infants to be responsible for their actions.

> Meaning we never punish children for wrongdoing in an effort to educate
> them and set them straight.  (Some punish just for the hell of it, out of
> some pleasure of power over the kids.)  This is clearly not true.

Notice that I said infants.  What do infants do that deserves punishment?

>> Also note that it is logically impossible for fetuses to cause their own
>> conception, since they don't exist before that point.

> To which I say:  So?  What relevance does this have to the argument?  All
> the adults you refer to were once fetuses, and THEY didn't cause their own
> conception, thus (by your logic) THEY shouldn't be held responsible either.

More word-twisting.  You were not responsible for your OWN conception, but
that says nothing about any conceptions that you cause.  After all, in the
first case one doesn't have any control over the situation, whereas in the
second situation one does (except in cases of rape).

>> The grounds for granting an exception to a fetus is that it is human, it
>> is alive, and it is not reponsible for its presence in the womb.

> If it's human, why must it occupy another person's body?  What if someone
> kidnapped you, hollowed out your skull, and chose to live in your head.
                                              ^^^^^
The fetus doesn't choose to be conceived; two people conceive it.

> Could you have him evicted?  How?  He's not "responsible" for that act,
> obviously he is not of sound mind.  What kind of bogus argument is that?

What am I have supposed to have done that resulted in placing him there?  In
the case of fetuses, the mother and father placed the kid(s) in the mother's
body.  It would be a little bogus for me to place a lunatic inside my head and
then claim a right to have him evicted at the cost of his life.  That's why I
don't place lunatics in my head or even invite them to come live there.

> Clearly it does not qualify as a physically autonomous being at all, because
> it cannot live outside the environment it occupies.

Clearly this is a bogus statement, because seven-month-old and older fetuses
can live and have been shown capable of living outside of the womb.  There is
good reason to believe that younger fetuses can live outside of the womb given
an appropriate environment -- the trend has been towards showing that younger
and younger fetuses can live outside the womb.

> A better example:  people who have lost their jobs and have no money are
> evicted from their apartment for not paying their rent.  Are they exempt
> from eviction because they are not "responsible" for their predicament?

I suspect (a) that the landlord didn't put them in there, and (b) they were
competent to handle their own affairs, unlike fetuses, infants, and children.

>>> 3.  inability to survive in the open world as an autonomous living being:
>>> if a woman has the right to remove things from inside her body,

>> Not everyone thinks that this applies to fetuses.

> Then remove them from the woman's body and see if they survive.  I think
> this would be far more inhumane than abortion by any standards.

That's not what I said.  Not everyone believes that your standard that "the
fetus must be able to survive in today's world with today's technology outside
of the mother's body" (is this close enough?) applies to fetuses.

>>> and if we cannot find a valid reason why fetuses should be an exception to
>>> this rule,

>> But we can.

> YOU can, based on your bogus assumptions and preconceptions that I think
> I've dismantled here and elsewhere, but which you persist in re-asserting
> in the spirit of contempt for the argumentative process.

That's funny.  Not a single pro-lifer disagreed that the fetus is alive.  But
I distinctly remember Sophie telling you that you shouldn't resort to lies to
'prove' your point.

>> Most cannot survive given current medical technology, but this does NOT
>> prove that fetuses are necessarily dependent upon other person's bodies.
>> Remember the people who said that heavier-than-air flight was impossible?

> Then what I said above applies:  take the fetus of the body of the woman who
> doesn't want it inside of her and do with it what you will.  Put up or shut
> up.

Sorry.  The fact that we don't have extremely advanced technology today does
not mean that fetuses aren't human.  Given that I would protect their lives,
and you would not, it is up to you to prove that they are not human.

>> The humane thing to do is to let them live, i.e. don't abort them.

> The humane thing is to let tapeworms live, too.  After all, don't they have
> rights, too?

Not very many rights in my eyes.  Whatever species the tapeworm belongs to, it
doesn't have anywhere near the rights of Homo sapiens, or the rights of
chimpanzees for that matter.

> Late-term fetuses, as you call them, are beyond the scope of legal abortion
> in any case.  Yes, they can be saved.  And in the cases where the mother has
> carried the fetus to term with the intent of giving birth, every attempt is
> often made to do so.  But this has little to do with the arguments about
> legal abortion.

It has a lot to do with the arguments about legal abortion; the fact that
late-term-fetuses can survive outside of their mother's bodies shows just how
bogus it is to say that birth is the starting point of life.  And it raises
obvious question:  "if these fetuses are human, what makes these others not
human, if anything?"  I don't see anything sufficient to call them "subhuman".

> If you are seeking "hard proof", why not do what I suggested above:
> remove a fetus from a woman's body during the early part of pregnancy, nd
> do whatever you like to sustain it, and take responsibility for any
> grotesque deformities that occur, causing a barely functioning human at
> "term" (whenever and ifever "term" is, and if indeed it would be human at
> all).

I would not do this to a seven-month-old fetus, even though I know that such
fetuses can survive outside the womb, because the risk to the child outside
the womb is currently greater than the risk to the child inside the womb.  I
suspect that any doctor with a proper sense of ethics would refuse to do such
an experiment if you approached him/her with it.

>> Why?  What's so special about depending upon plants and animals?  The whole
>> ecosystem is just one huge web of dependencies.

> I'm not occupying an animal's insides for sustenance.  Furthermore, if I
> was out there seeking my own food from animals, do I have a "right" to do
> this?  Is the animal powerless from stopping me from using it for food?

We raise lots of animals each year to be slaughtered.  And in large part,
they are powerless from stopping people from using them for food.

> Is a woman "powerless" to choose to have a fetus removed from her body?
> Same rules apply.

Hardly.  I'm sorry if this offends you, but I believe that humans have more
rights than dogs, cats, tapeworms, and plants.  I treat other human beings
quite differently from the way that I treat insects, and I don't see anything
wrong with it.

>> But not everyone would agree with your premises, or with the premise that a
>> person has UNLIMITED rights to control of their body.  If someone has
>> absolute rights to control their body, what right do you have to prevent
>> them from strangling someone else?  After all, they were just exercising
>> their right to close their fingers, and if they happened to be around
>> someone else's throat at the time, too bad...

> Ever hear "your right to swing your fist ends before it hits my face"?  You
> have the right to your OWN body, not to others.  Something anti-abortionists
> could learn a little about when trying to impose their will on others.

Your right to control your body ends where the other human being you placed
inside it begins.  Abortion is imposing your will on the fetus.  In fact, I
can't think of any law that doesn't impose someone's will on someone else.

>> Did everyone catch that?  Now you not only need to be independent from
>> other human beings, but from MACHINES as well for Rich to consider you to
>> be aliving human being.

> Indeed.  If you are connected to full life support because your body does
> not pump blood or perform bodily functions, the law says you are dead.  And
> in fact you are.  To claim that you are alive (in this case) is to claim
> that a sewage or irrigation system or an airconditioning system is alive.
> There is a big difference between a living person temporarily using machines
> to recuperate and get back to a fully functional state and a person (or
> fetus that cannot function without machines and has no hope of ever
> functioning without full life support of machines.

I didn't say FULL life support.  Note that a dialysis patient is as fully
dependent upon the machines as a late-term fetus, if not more so.  If the
dialysis patient is deprived of the use of the machines for even a fairly
short period, the poisons in his/her blood will kill him/her.

I notice that you have avoided saying outright whether or not a dialysis
patient is human, and have claimed that a late-term fetus is not a human
being even though it can live outside it's mother's body.

>> Tell me, Rich, is an adult who uses a dialysis machine not a 'living human
>> being'?  If doctors connect a patient to a heart-lung machine during a
>> major operation, is the patient not a 'living human being' during the
>> operation, and thus subject to being killed by any random who wants to kill
>> him/her?  If not,then how do you justify calling seven-month and older
>> fetuses not human, even by your definitions?

> 1) I answered most of these questions in the previous paragraph.  2) I did
> not call any fetuses human above.(A blatant and foul misquoting by Newton).
> What I did say was:
>>>Yes, there is surely a point at which a fetus is close enough to being a
>>>living human being that it *could*, with medical assistance, be sustained
>>>through the end of the fetal period TO THE POINT WHERE IT COULD BE
>>>DISCONNECTED from supporting equipment, and THUS be a living human being.

1) You are evading the question:  Is a dialysis patient human?  First answer
YES or NO.  Then justify your answer.  If your answer is NO, you will have a
lot of work to do to convince us that dialysis patients are not human.  If
your answer is YES, explain why you continue to say that late-term fetuses
are not human, in light of the standards that you set for other human beings.

2) In my response to the paragraph, I did not 'accuse' you of calling any
fetuses human.  True, you earlier referred to fetuses as persons, but that
seems to be a case where you were being inconsistent.  I said that you were
claiming that late-term-fetuses were "not human".  How else is one supposed
to interpret

    >>> close enough to being a living human being

?  Again, if you say that dialysis patients are not human, you will have one
hell of a fight on your hands.  If you say that they are human, how can you
possibly justify calling late-term fetuses 'close enough' (which implies that
they are not quite human) rather than acknowledging their humanity?

>> Or could it be that treating fetuses consistently would
>> force you to the conclusion that younger fetuses might be human also?

> Or sperm cells?  Or ova?  Or individual body organs?  Note again that I
> did not say that fetuses, older or not, are necessarily human.  That occurs
> at birth.  After all, what is birth is not the fully grown fetus saying
> "I'm ready, let me out", metaphorically speaking.

If dialysis patients are human (and you haven't claimed that they aren't, or
answered my question), HOW can you claim that late-term-fetuses are anything
BUT human, even going by the 'criteria' that you have put into your posts?

>> Under your definition, a dialysis patient is not human, because the support
>> equipment never goes away.

> Even if one were connected to it permanently (most kidney patients need it
> at intervals), enough of one's other body functions are taken care of by
> the person's own body that he is of course still human.  Even an artificial
> heart serves such a purpose.  In fact it becomes a part of the person's
> body.  Does the mother become a part of the fetus' body?  Vice versa?

Now you finally get around to answering the first question with a few
qualifications.  Now answer the second one:  How can you maintain that
late-term-fetuses are not human if you acknowledge that dialysis patients
are human?  The 'take away the machine and see if it dies' criterion is
now definitely OUT.  What's left?  Dependence on the care of other human
beings?  But infants and other hospital patients also exhibit this trait.

>> Dependence upon a person or a machine isn't the right measure.  A closer
>> approximation would be "does this person have any non-brain-dead life
>> left? Fetuses, healthy children or adults, and people on dialysis machines
>> do.  A person in a coma who is expected to snap out of it also does.  A
>> person is brain-dead doesn't.

> But since a fetus is not a person in that it has not functioned
> autonomously, this does not apply to them.  This is not an assertion of the
> type that you persistently make ("a fetus IS a person, it IS, it IS, it
> IS").  Physical autonomy is one of the fundamental pieces of the definition
> of "living" in the context we are using it.

This does not apply to them because you don't want it to apply to them?
Bogus!  Why is physical autonomy so important?  If an infant goes straight
from the delivery room to the operating table, would you claim that the child
is not human until the operation is complete?

And notice that I referred to the fetus as a person.  Your bogus assertions
that "The fetus is not alive.  It ISN'T!  It ISN'T!" to the contrary.

>> But if a late-term fetus is as much a human being as a newborn infant (and
>> I don't think anyone can rationally dispute that), doesn't it suggest that
>> earlier-term fetuses might also be human?

> Newton, shut it.  Nowhere above did I even imply that the fetus, even in
> late term, qualifies as a physically autonomous human being, yet you insist
> that I did so as to screw around with my argument.  A late term fetus is not
> "just as much a human being as a newborn infant", it merely has much more of
> a chance of surviving a disruptive removal from the womb (say, due to an
> accident) and will eventually be weaned off of medical equipment to become
          ^^^^^(I may have scrambled two words here in breaking the line)
> human.  Please desist from such twisting in the future.

It is you who are doing the twisting.  Did you even read the last half of my
message?  In it, I did not say that you claimed that fetuses are human.  I
*did* ask for you to explain how you could possibly arrive at the conclusion
'dialysis patients are human; late-term fetuses are not' if indeed that was
your position.  You didn't answer my questions directly, but since you did
answer some of them in response to later parts of my post, I have been able
to deduce that 'dialysis patients are human; late-term fetuses are not' is
indeed your position.  But you have not provided any rational justification
of this position.  "Newton, shut it" is not a rational justification.

                                        -- Thomas Newton
                                           Thomas.Newton@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA