Carl Sagan’s Thoughts on Abortion

Carl Sagan’s book titled “Billions and Billions, Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium“, contains a rather interesting chapter on the topic of Abortion. (Chapter 15 to be precise).

Side Note: Interestingly enough, Carl himself never once used the phrase “Billion and Billions” in Cosmos. He did of course stress the B in Billions just to give emphases to it being a lot bigger than “million”. The phrase itself came via Johnny Carson doing a skit using the term on the Tonight show to poke a bit of gentle fun at him. Clearly Carl himself enjoyed the humour and so he used it as the title of this book.

Carl rather sadly passed away in 1996, and so this book, published in 1997, was the last he ever wrote. It is not one unified topic, but is, as you might have guessed, a collection of essays within three categories. Each chapter stands alone and covers distinctly different topics, such as global warming, the population explosion, extraterrestrial life, morality, and also of immediate interest, the abortion debate. The book itself is highly rated, very popular, and worth adding to your “must read” list if you have not yet done so.

The topic of abortion is obviously one that is highly contentious and also highly charged due to the strands of religious thinking that comes into play, and so it is perhaps interesting to see what a deeply profound intellectual such as Sagan concluded after pondering over it all.

One other thought to also perhaps consider here is that this was written almost twenty years ago in 1997.

Why return to this yet again, is it not a done deal?

Legally we know where things now stand, (the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973), but clearly there are moves afoot to change things.

The religious right are in office by proxy and so the debate will once again inevitably bubble to the surface in due course as attempts are made to row back the current position. It is worth thinking through the topic and arming ourselves with robust arguments for the inevitable debate replays that will come.

Regardless of your specific conclusions, pro-life or pro-choice, Carl’s thoughts on this is one of those “must-read” essays. It not only asks all the hard questions in one place and tests to destruction the arguments presented by both sides, but also reveals quite a few things that many are simply not aware of. Read this and you will learn a great deal.

So without any further introduction, here it is.


The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers – Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.

Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.

In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?

Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.

Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?

As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?

We believe that many supporters of reproductive freedom are troubled at least occasionally by this question. But they are reluctant to raise it because it is the beginning of a slippery slope. If it is impermissible to abort a pregnancy in the ninth month, what about the eighth, seventh, sixth … ? Once we acknowledge that the state can interfere at any time in the pregnancy, doesn’t it follow that the state can interfere at all times?

This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…

And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder. It would be a flimsy defense if the murderer pleads that this is just between him and his victim and none of the government’s business. If killing a fetus is truly killing a human being, is it not the duty of the state to prevent it? Indeed, one of the chief functions of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

If we do not oppose abortion at some stage of pregnancy, is there not a danger of dismissing an entire category of human beings as unworthy of our protection and respect? And isn’t that dismissal the hallmark of sexism, racism, nationalism, and religious fanaticism? Shouldn’t those dedicated to fighting such injustices be scrupulously careful not to embrace another?

There is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has there been at any former time… : We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; kill deer and elk for sport, leopards for the pelts, and whales for fertilizer; entrap dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; club seal pups to death; and render a species extinct every day. All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we. What is (allegedly) protected is not life, but human life.

And even with that protection, casual murder is an urban commonplace, and we wage “conventional” wars with tolls so terrible that we are, most of us, afraid to consider them very deeply… That protection, that right to life, eludes the 40,000 children under five who die on our planet each day from preventable starvation, dehydration, disease, and neglect.

Those who assert a “right to life” are for (at most) not just any kind of life, but for–particularly and uniquely—human life. So they too, like pro-choicers, must decide what distinguishes a human being from other animals and when, during gestation, the uniquely human qualities–whatever they are–emerge.

Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. Nor does human life begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain dating back to the origin of our species, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.

In some animals, an egg develops into a healthy adult without benefit of a sperm cell. But not, so far as we know, among humans. A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg–despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby–why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?

Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages? Many lower animals can be grown in a laboratory from a single body cell. Human cells can be cloned… In light of such cloning technology, would we be committing mass murder by destroying any potentially clonable cells? By shedding a drop of blood?

All human sperm and eggs are genetic halves of “potential” human beings. Should heroic efforts be made to save and preserve all of them, everywhere, because of this “potential”? Is failure to do so immoral or criminal? Of course, there’s a difference between taking a life and failing to save it. And there’s a big difference between the probability of survival of a sperm cell and that of a fertilized egg. But the absurdity of a corps of high-minded semen-preservers moves us to wonder whether a fertilized egg’s mere “potential” to become a baby really does make destroying it murder.

Opponents of abortion worry that, once abortion is permissible immediately after conception, no argument will restrict it at any later time in the pregnancy. Then, they fear, one day it will be permissible to murder a fetus that is unambiguously a human being. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers (at least some of them) are pushed toward absolutist positions by parallel fears of the slippery slope.

Another slippery slope is reached by those pro-lifers who are willing to make an exception in the agonizing case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. But why should the right to live depend on the circumstances of conception? If the same child were to result, can the state ordain life for the offspring of a lawful union but death for one conceived by force or coercion? How can this be just? And if exceptions are extended to such a fetus, why should they be withheld from any other fetus? This is part of the reason some pro-lifers adopt what many others consider the outrageous posture of opposing abortions under any and all circumstances–only excepting, perhaps, when the life of the mother is in danger.

By far the most common reason for abortion worldwide is birth control. So shouldn’t opponents of abortion be handing out contraceptives and teaching school children how to use them? That would be an effective way to reduce the number of abortions. Instead, the United States is far behind other nations in the development of safe and effective methods of birth control–and, in many cases, opposition to such research (and to sex education) has come from the same people who oppose abortions.

The attempt to find an ethically sound and unambiguous judgment on when, if ever, abortion is permissible has deep historical roots. Often, especially in Christian tradition, such attempts were connected with the question of when the soul enters the body–a matter not readily amenable to scientific investigation and an issue of controversy even among learned theologians. Ensoulment has been asserted to occur in the sperm before conception, at conception, at the time of “quickening” (when the mother is first able to feel the fetus stirring within her), and at birth. Or even later.

Different religions have different teachings. Among hunter-gatherers, there are usually no prohibitions against abortion, and it was common in ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the more severe Assyrians impaled women on stakes for attempting abortion. The Jewish Talmud teaches that the fetus is not a person and has no rights. The Old and New Testaments–rich in astonishingly detailed prohibitions on dress, diet, and permissible words–contain not a word specifically prohibiting abortion. The only passage that’s remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there’s a fight and a woman bystander should accidentally be injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine.

Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn’t look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. The Catholic Church’s first and long-standing collection of canon law (according to the leading historian of the Church’s teaching on abortion, John Connery, S.J.) held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already “formed”–roughly, the end of the first trimester.

But when sperm cells were examined in the seventeenth century by the first microscopes, they were thought to show a fully formed human being. An old idea of the homunculus was resuscitated–in which within each sperm cell was a fully formed tiny human, within whose testes were innumerable other homunculi, etc., ad infinitum. In part through this misinterpretation of scientific data, in 1869 abortion at any time for any reason became grounds for excommunication. It is surprising to most Catholics and others to discover that the date was not much earlier.

From colonial times to the nineteenth century, the choice in the United States was the woman’s until “quickening.” An abortion in the first or even second trimester was at worst a misdemeanor. Convictions were rarely sought and almost impossible to obtain, because they depended entirely on the woman’s own testimony of whether she had felt quickening, and because of the jury’s distaste for prosecuting a woman for exercising her right to choose. In 1800 there was not, so far as is known, a single statute in the United States concerning abortion. Advertisements for drugs to induce abortion could be found in virtually every newspaper and even in many church publications–although the language used was suitably euphemistic, if widely understood.

But by 1900, abortion had been banned at any time in pregnancy by every state in the Union, except when necessary to save the woman’s life. What happened to bring about so striking a reversal? Religion had little to do with it. Drastic economic and social conversions were turning this country from an agrarian to an urban-industrial society. America was in the process of changing from having one of the highest birthrates in the world to one of the lowest. Abortion certainly played a role and stimulated forces to suppress it.

One of the most significant of these forces was the medical profession. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, medicine was an uncertified, unsupervised business. Anyone could hang up a shingle and call himself (or herself) a doctor. With the rise of a new, university-educated medical elite, anxious to enhance the status and influence of physicians, the American Medical Association was formed. In its first decade, the AMA began lobbying against abortions performed by anyone except licensed physicians. New knowledge of embryology, the physicians said, had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening.

Their assault on abortion was motivated not by concern for the health of the woman but, they claimed, for the welfare of the fetus. You had to be a physician to know when abortion was morally justified, because the question depended on scientific and medical facts understood only by physicians. At the same time, women were effectively excluded from the medical schools, where such arcane knowledge could be acquired. So, as things worked out, women had almost nothing to say about terminating their own pregnancies. It was also up to the physician to decide if the pregnancy posed a threat to the woman, and it was entirely at his discretion to determine what was and was not a threat. For the rich woman, the threat might be a threat to her emotional tranquillity or even to her lifestyle. The poor woman was often forced to resort to the back alley or the coat hanger.

This was the law until the 1960s, when a coalition of individuals and organizations, the AMA now among them, sought to overturn it and to reinstate the more traditional values that were to be embodied in Roe v. Wade.

If you deliberately kill a human being, it’s called murder. If you deliberately kill a chimpanzee–biologically, our closest relative, sharing 99.6 percent of our active genes–whatever else it is, it’s not murder. To date, murder uniquely applies to killing human beings. Therefore, the question of when personhood (or, if we like, ensoulment) arises is key to the abortion debate. When does the fetus become human? When do distinct and characteristic human qualities emerge?

We recognize that specifying a precise moment will overlook individual differences. Therefore, if we must draw a line, it ought to be drawn conservatively–that is, on the early side. There are people who object to having to set some numerical limit, and we share their disquiet; but if there is to be a law on this matter, and it is to effect some useful compromise between the two absolutist positions, it must specify, at least roughly, a time of transition to personhood.

Every one of us began from a dot. A fertilized egg is roughly the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The momentous meeting of sperm and egg generally occurs in one of the two fallopian tubes. One cell becomes two, two become four, and so on—an exponentiation of base-2 arithmetic. By the tenth day the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the walls of the uterus.

  • By the third week, around the time of the first missed menstrual period, the forming embryo is about 2 millimeters long and is developing various body parts. Only at this stage does it begin to be dependent on a rudimentary placenta. It looks a little like a segmented worm.
  • By the end of the fourth week, it’s about 5 millimeters (about 1/5 inch) long. It’s recognizable now as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks rather like a newt or a tadpole. This is the end of the first month after conception.
  • By the fifth week, the gross divisions of the brain can be distinguished. What will later develop into eyes are apparent, and little buds appear—on their way to becoming arms and legs.
  • By the sixth week, the embryo is 13 millimeteres (about ½ inch) long. The eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be.
  • By the end of the seventh week, the tail is almost gone, and sexual characteristics can be discerned (although both sexes look female). The face is mammalian but somewhat piglike.
  • By the end of the eighth week, the face resembles that of a primate but is still not quite human. Most of the human body parts are present in their essentials. Some lower brain anatomy is well-developed. The fetus shows some reflex response to delicate stimulation.
  • By the tenth week, the face has an unmistakably human cast. It is beginning to be possible to distinguish males from females. Nails and major bone structures are not apparent until the third month.

By the fourth month, you can tell the face of one fetus from that of another. Quickening is most commonly felt in the fifth month. The bronchioles of the lungs do not begin developing until approximately the sixth month, the alveoli still later.

So, if only a person can be murdered, when does the fetus attain personhood? When its face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first trimester? When the fetus becomes responsive to stimuli–again, at the end of the first trimester? When it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in the middle of the second trimester? When the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own in the outside air?

The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they’re arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely human characteristics–apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn’t stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.

Other animals have advantages over us–in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought–characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That’s how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.

Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain–principally in the top layers of the convoluted “gray matter” called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn’t begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy–the sixth month.

By placing harmless electrodes on a subject’s head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy–near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this–however alive and active they may be–lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we’ve rejected the extremes of “always” and “never,” and this puts us–like it or not–on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.

It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973–although for completely different reasons.

Its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade changed American law on abortion. It permits abortion at the request of the woman without restriction in the first trimester and, with some restrictions intended to protect her health, in the second trimester. It allows states to forbid abortion in the third trimester, except when there’s a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. In the 1989 Webster decision, the Supreme Court declined explicitly to overturn Roe v. Wade but in effect invited the 50 state legislatures to decide for themselves.

What was the reasoning in Roe v. Wade? There was no legal weight given to what happens to the children once they are born, or to the family. Instead, a woman’s right to reproductive freedom is protected, the court ruled, by constitutional guarantees of privacy. But that right is not unqualified. The woman’s guarantee of privacy and the fetus’s right to life must be weighed–and when the court did the weighing’ priority was given to privacy in the first trimester and to life in the third. The transition was decided not from any of the considerations we have been dealing with so far…–not when “ensoulment” occurs, not when the fetus takes on sufficient human characteristics to be protected by laws against murder. Instead, the criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called “viability” and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe–no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It’s a very pragmatic criterion.

If the fetus at a certain stage of gestation would be viable outside the womb, the argument goes, then the right of the fetus to life overrides the right of the woman to privacy. But just what does “viable” mean? Even a full-term newborn is not viable without a great deal of care and love. There was a time before incubators, only a few decades ago, when babies in their seventh month were unlikely to be viable. Would aborting in the seventh month have been permissible then? After the invention of incubators, did aborting pregnancies in the seventh month suddenly become immoral? What happens if, in the future, a new technology develops so that an artificial womb can sustain a fetus even before the sixth month by delivering oxygen and nutrients through the blood–as the mother does through the placenta and into the fetal blood system? We grant that this technology is unlikely to be developed soon or become available to many. But if it were available, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? A morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.

And why, exactly, should breathing (or kidney function, or the ability to resist disease) justify legal protection? If a fetus can be shown to think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Do we value breathing more than thinking and feeling? Viability arguments cannot, it seems to us, coherently determine when abortions are permissible. Some other criterion is needed. Again, we offer for consideration the earliest onset of human thinking as that criterion.

Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester–except in cases of grave medical necessity–it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life.

16 thoughts on “Carl Sagan’s Thoughts on Abortion”

  1. Like most pro-lifers who take this position, this individual views pregnancy as the punishment for a woman who are sexually active. And this individual wants to make sure a sexually active woman is punished for her decision to be sexually active by being forced to carry any resulting pregnancy to term. This individual is sick.

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  2. Always an interesting dilemma, you choose to have sex (not in every scenario) because its your body and you can do what you want with it. You didn’t have any precautions to prevent pregnancy (not in every scenario and I include men in this) because its your body and you can do what you want with it. Now your pregnant as a result of doing what you you want – consequences of sex. The baby within you now has a body forming- but that doesn’t matter any more because your body is your body and you can do what you want with it, so you decide to terminate the life because its your body. But the baby is not your body, yet that’s OK? To think that everyone can just do whatever they want and there are no consequences, repercussions is beyond belief. The hearts of many are growing cold where does it end? Does anyone ever talk about the mental, psychological long term effects on women that abortions bring? Because they are real and impact all of your life. Men need to take responsibility for there actions too! As with many things, it’s complicated and laws of the land are meant to protect the innocent not the guilty. You decide then who is the innocent party and who is the guilty party? And what ever your answer, live with it.

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  3. Why not move the solution back one level, to men, and solve the problem more thoroughly and safely? Mandate all males get vasectomies at puberty. Hundreds of woman die every year from childbirth, so forcing someone to undergo something that could kill them is obviously immoral. On the other hand, nobody has ever died from a vasectomy. Then have each male be issued a card indicating their vasectomization. Store their sperm for later reproduction, of course, in multiple places for redundancy. And then, to ensure compliance, those who don’t get their vasectomy cannot vote, drive, work, inherit or get a passport. Also, make impregnation of a woman without her written consent a crime with serious punishment – a million dollars and 20 years in prison, something like that. Tada, no burden on women, no unwanted pregnancies, and the only abortions would be those to save the woman’s life after she has agreed to become pregnant.

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  4. I’m pretty disappointed here. I thought Sagan might be a bit more rigorous thinker. He ultimately retreats into the age-old picking of a specific attribute he thinks is important, and assigning personhood only to a human that attains that specific attribute. This ignores that others, well past birth, will always also be subject to gaining or losing specific qualities. Sagan latches onto “fetal thinking” without ever defining that. A person in a coma doesn’t doesn’t think at all, are they not human? A Chimp or a dolphin are intellectually more advanced than a human 4 year old. Are they people, or the human toddler less-than-human?

    In the end, each individual human person is formed at conception when two haploid gametes, (one ova from a female and one sperm from a mail), each containing one set of 23 chromosomes. At the moment that occurs, the resulting zygote is once again diploid, with the mother and father each contributing 23 chromosomes to a new and unique entity, a new organism with 46 chromosomes differing from each parent, but the exact same genetic structure that individual will have for the rest of its life. Every cell of that diploid gamete will thereafter continue to divide by mitosis until the day that organism dies; and in a predictable, continuous and organized fashion. Based on the roadmap of this unique organism’s DNA, the cells will differentiate into organs — brain cells, muscle cells, blood cells — and differentiate features according to the design inherent in those same human chromosomes. Each new day will bring further incremental development, but at no other point will there be a dramatic change in kind.

    That, rather than various capacities that may come or go at various stages of development or decline (or injury), is the only complete and distinct constant of every unique human individual. The creation of a unique human organism is the only consistent and irrefutable marker of a new human individual. Once that is dispensed with, anyone can define other human organisms into or out of the sphere of “personhood” based on any capacity, feature, or capability they wish.

    Every mother who ever looked forward to the day of birth has considered herself “with child,” Maternity wards are full of expectant mothers, not potential mothers. They wonder what the baby’s sex is, and wonder what their baby looks like. https://www.babycenter.com/ ONLY when the discussion is about the possibility of killing it does anyone use the distancing and dehumanizing medical terminology of zygote, embryo, and fetus, which are actually just stages of mammalian development, no less than infant, toddler, and adolescent.

    Given that this is unquestionably a human person at a given stage of development (as per Tom Graham here concedes) “Why don’t we just grow up and face the reality that it … is an unborn human baby?” Then we can have a discussion about whether and when it is OK to kill him or her.

    Tom thinks you can kill someone if they came into being through rape, if the child’s a financial inconvenience, or if it’s imperfect in some way.

    I think Tom is a monster. But at least he’s honest.

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  5. An excellent movie on the topic is “Unplanned.” It is well done, well documented, true story about both sides of the abortion argument. For Anyone who condiders themselves to be open minded about the pros & cons of abortion, this is a “must see.”

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  6. An excellent movie on the topic Is called “Unplanned.” It is a well done, well documented, true depiction of both sides of the abortion argument. A “must see” for anyone who truly has an open mind about the subject.

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  7. I am a woman and my body is mine to control. Nobody has the right to deny me or any other woman decisions about my self whether it be abortion, surgery, hair coloring, etc. It’s my choice alone and it is unconstitutional to interfere.

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  8. I encourage readers with a fair and objective mind to read the book “Why Pro-Life?” by Randy Alcorn and decide whether the arguments presented here are fallacious at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. A good example can be found on pages 33-34 in which Alcorn addresses Carl Sagan’s ridiculing of abortion opponents by asking “Why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?” Alcorn answers that question by saying there is a fundamental difference between sperm and unfertilized eggs on the one hand, and fertilized evgs and zygotes on the other.” The former do not have the capacity to become anything other than what they are, while a new dynamic and genetically unique human life is created by the latter. What it all boils down to for those who support abortion rights is that they shamefully view that newly formed life as less than human whether by size, level of development, environment and/or degree of dependency.

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    • The idea of being open to understanding the full conversation is fine, but unfortunately Mr Alcorn’s book is neither fair nor objective. Instead it is very subjective to his specific religious beliefs.

      It has popular support from those that already adhere to his position, but it will not persuade those that don’t.

      If you read his book you will come away with some very misleading and quite frankly dishonest misinformation …
      – Mr Alcorn clearly holds the view that life begins at conception … he declares this to be a fact, and keeps repeating this. This opinion is neither a scientific fact, nor even a theological “truth”.
      – It is perhaps understandable why he holds this opinion. He needs it to be a fact because it then naturally leads to support for his stance that those using birth control are child abusers. Unfortunately for him it is simply an opinion.

      In the context of Mr Sagan’s question, an unfertilised egg is a living cell, so why is the transformation of it into a single zygote cell the place where Mr Alcorn draws the line between human and not human? It’s perhaps an easy tempting answer to a complex question where there is no consensus and a great deal of debate. Tempting as it is to explain exactly why this argument is flawed, I’ll pass because this then becomes far too long a comment. (If curious, google “When does life begin?” and avoid all websites that have an agenda).

      One further observation concerns that phrase within the title of the book – “Pro-life”. That’s a very emotionally loaded term. Because this is very much a conservative phrase, its usage tends to also be correlated with support for both war and capital punishment, and rather ironically opposition to decent healthcare, sex education, and birth control, hence is not exactly being deployed by a demographic that is actually opposed to death.

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  9. This story actually holds the answer within.

    Infanticide only started to became immoral when society could take over.
    A mother could drop the infant on the door step of the church and no longer be responsible for caring for the child. They aborted their parental rights. It was only when the baby was needed by society that it became illegal.

    The same should be true for abortion.
    This way the argument that: A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. (A potential contributor to society)
    Stays consistent in every way, The only current difference is the mother has the option to not care for the newborn. She can abort her parental rights without aborting the life. She never has to see, touch, feed, or care for the baby in any way. She is not forced to be a mother (She can choose adoption). However she is currently being forced to gestate (She can NOT choose surrogacy). This is the issue of infanticide vs abortion. Infanticide has another option to terminate the connection. It is NOT about person-hood.

    A woman should be able to terminate her pregnancy at any time under the same consistent rules. Currently this also means the life is terminated as we don’t have the technology to transfer the fetus intact into the care of another. We should not force her to gestate. She should still always have the choice. We take the life of criminals legally because their negative impact to society outweighs their future potential positive contributions to it. An unwanted fetus generally will negatively impact the mother more than they could (if ever) positively contribute 20 years later.

    But even if the technology is invented to remove the child from the womb, it would still be an abortion (Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy and if the fetus is transferred out then the pregnancy is terminated), just with the life intact and in the care of someone other than the womb owner. In the end an Abortion would still be performed.

    Abortion should always be legal, and ONLY when this kind of termination with life intact abortion was safer than the current abortion methods should you outlaw the current methods and state that the only legal method of abortion is one where the fetus is transferred to the care of another.

    The same should also currently hold for Late Term Abortion. We should not make them illegal unless we provide inducement on request and let the incubator take over. We currently don’t allow for inducing so early because the medical costs to incubate aka society doesn’t want to step in and take over the responsibility. As such the rights of the woman to terminate her pregnancy at any time is being violated.
    Banning Late Term Abortions (the life taking kind) forces a woman to wait until the body gives birth or a doctor intervenes via induction or Cesarean.
    Unless society is willing to become the care giver via incubators and allow for voluntary induction/early Cesarean, they should NOT ban Late Term Abortion

    In the end Abortion vs Infanticide is about the willingness and capabilities of society to take over. That should be the only criteria. NOT person-hood.

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  10. Murder is illegal killing. Not all killing is murder. Killing done in war is not murder, it is defense of country. Killing done in self defense or in defense of others is not murder. Killing of a criminal by the government is societal defense and not murder.
    The Spartans thought that killing a newborn that wasn’t physically perfect was societal defense as well as humane to the child who would be ostracized.
    So even newborn killing can be considered legal killing by the subjective nature of societies. And that’s what we are talking about.
    We are all aware that biology text books state quite clearly that fertilization is the first developmental stage of human life. At fertilization a human life begins.
    If the fertilized egg does not implant in the uterus and is flushed down the toilet, a human life has died.
    If the implanted egg miscarries, a human life has died.
    If the pregnancy is aborted at any stage, a human life has died.
    This article attempts to dehumanize the developing person. Why not just say that all people under twenty two can legally be killed by their parents since their brains are still developing? That path is not a logical path to go down.
    The logical path is to recognize that it is absolutely a human life and secondly accept that it is legally okay, in our hyper subjective society, to deprive a human of that life under certain circumstances.
    Before a few decades ago, women were having abortions because they didn’t want their children born into slavery or into famine or the were raped and couldn’t bare having the child of their rapist. There are definitely good reasons for a mother to kill her unborn child.
    What this article is doing to trying to dehumanize the unborn child so it is not so horrific to accept killing an unborn human being.
    We, as humans, dehumanize those that we are at war with in order to be able to kill them without acknowledging that they are human beings.
    Chinks, Japs, Ruskies, Spicks, Wops, Kikes, Krauts, the list goes on and on. Slave owners considered black people to be property, just like cattle, to make it okay to beat and kill them, because then they weren’t really people.
    Why are we continuing to do this? Why don’t we just grow up and face the reality that it is okay to kill an unborn human baby sometimes?
    1) rape
    2) when the mother cannot afford to feed the child on her own (this takes care of all teenage pregnancies)
    3) when the unborn child has been diagnosed with a developmental disease
    But only when the child cannot live without the mother and doesn’t cost the state too much to raise the child without the mother. And yes, technology makes it earlier and earlier. This has nothing to do with morality, it is simple pragmatic scientific honesty.

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