Abortion Terminates Life or: Don't terminate Pregnancy

[Chirios]

Evarr.

Abortion Terminates Life

Sigh

Abortion is one of the moral issues that has become the breath and bread of our modern society. Ethical aspects of abortion swivel around two main distinct issues namely; whether a fetus has the right to life and whether the rights of the mother ever override the fetus’ rights. Other important questions that we need to take into account include; are embryos/zygotes persons worthy of legal protection? Is there any point at which abortion may be acceptable?

Many who argue that abortion is right do so from the perspective that a fetus is not a person. However, personhood of a zygote is pretty much debatable because the definition of personhood is not universally agreed upon. A person means different things to different people. Those who argue for abortion such as Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and professor at the University of Melbourne, claim that a person is a self conscious being with a temporal awareness. Zygotes are believed not to have consciousness hence the conclusion that they are not persons. Therefore abortion is acceptable.

I have a problem with this view because when one is asleep one has no self consciousness and temporal awareness. One is simply a vegetable. Would it follow then that I would be justified to kill one who is asleep because one would not be a person in the sense that one would be without self consciousness?

The other argument for abortion is based on the rights of the woman who carries a baby. Under some circumstances, it is argued, these rights may override those of the zygote or embryo. One of these rights is that a woman has ownership over her body. Therefore she may do whatever she wants with it. This view is held by Judith Thomson, a professor of Philosophy in Massachusetts. She gives a scenario where you wake up in the morning only to find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious famous violinist who has a fatal kidney ailment. His circulatory system has been plugged into yours because you are the only one with his blood type. Unplugging yourself from him would be killing him.

Personally, I feel that her analogy is irrelevant because the fetus is rightly the woman’s child, her own flesh and blood not a total stranger. There is some higher degree of connection between her and the fetus.

Besides, the woman who wishes to commit abortion ought to remember that she is because of, with and through other people as Dr Gaie, a lecturer at the University of Botswana would charge in Botho Ethics. An individual as the center of the community is not important on her own but derives her importance from her relationship with the community. This draws my attention to the issue on the rights of the woman as one who has the civil liberty to do anything with her own body.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) an English philosopher talked about rights beginning with a discussion on the state of nature where each person would have a right to everything and this would make life short, brutish, poor, solitary and nasty. This is portrayed by a society without morality. In this case, abortion would therefore not be a problem in the society because people would have natural rights to do it. However such a life is fearful as Hobbes argues and in order to flight this state of affairs the society jointly enters into a social contract to establish a civil society.

This means pregnant women have also yielded their natural rights for the sake of establishing a moral society. They have a mutual agreement to a social contract with other Batswana which stipulates moral values and principles. In the context of our own Setswana culture these values and principles are designated in Botho which is also our own criterion of determining right and wrong as Dr Gaie has argued. In Setswana ga se botho go senya mpa and it is wrong to kill a baby. I do not even think that Batswana make that distinction between a zygote and an embryo and a baby, as long as conception has taken place life has being created.

Abortion would also be wrong because according to Botho one is a person when one is an ancestor. A totally different notion of what I have already discussed earlier about personhood. The pre requisite for being an ancestor is the demand that one should have great grand children. Abortion militates against having children because it destroys potential human life which is imperative for one to be an ancestor. Therefore my opinion is still that abortion is wrong and should not be acceptable or legalised.

As we forge ahead towards Vision 2016 we should not turn our society into this one big body without a soul. Imagine women who commit abortion through traditional doctors normally in unsanitary conditions.

Finally if you think abortion is right and should therefore be acceptable ask yourself how it would have been, if a law that could have prevented you from being born was universalised. Do you then wish to deprive a fetus of all that potential life? Let it live because somebody has left you to live.

Note: Abortions are still illegal in Botswana. Opinions like this is why.

Note 2: When she [the author] says; "according to Botho", she is referring to a cultural phenomenon expressed as "Motho ke Motho ba Batho", tanslation, "I am a person through other people". This is a distinctly African phenomenon, the idea that your humanity is directly linked to your part in the community. It's one of the many reasons why the extended family is still so important in 21st century Africa.

[Simon_Jester]

What's interesting here, I think, is that we're looking at a different cultural frame of reference. "Your humanity is tied to your part in the community" is, at a very basic level, foreign to the Western concept of citizens as autonomous units, with all social interactions being contracts or agreements imposed on those basic autonomous units afterwards.

That idea has its roots in the 'state of nature' as described by various Enlightenment philosophers: people who considered it a useful thought experiment to strip away all the rules of society, start with isolated individuals wandering around in the wilderness, and then figure out what social conventions should exist from first principles.

And yet it is far from the only existing mental model of how civilization ought to work.

When you define human beings as elements of a community, rather than as totally autonomous individuals (who 'start out' as hermits and only later choose to enter into association with other people)... well, it changes the perspective on a lot of individual-rights issues.

It's kind of a shame that pro-lifers in the US don't argue this more often, because at the very least it's not as intellectually bankrupt as trying to assign independent personhood to a twelve-week embryo.

And because the social implications for other areas of human existence would be interesting: just try combining libertarianism with the sort of communitarianism this article expresses, and fitting the two together into the same political platform, for instance.

[Chirios]

It's strange because, in all other avenues of life the Batswana don't desire that kind of thinking. When it comes to, for example, economics, they heavily favour the idea of individual exceptionalism over Batho; but, when it comes to thoughts about society people favour the community over the individual constantly.

Personally, I think that it's just normal conservatism in a different packaging. Batswana (and Africans in general really), have had their societies affected by Western ones for so long that they use Batho (or Ubantu for the rest of sub-saharan africa) as an excuse to maintain their cultural "heritage". My cousin, for example, was sent to the Headteachers office for asking the teacher: "How did Jesus have two fathers?" The reason? The teacher said he was being blasphemous. True, Christianity isn't a natural part of our culture, but because of a perceived lack of Christianity in the west, and because Christianity was so effectively instilled into the collective consciousness, anything that is perceived to be against Christianity is also perceived to be against Batswana, or against African culture in general.

[Serafina]

What's interesting here, I think, is that we're looking at a different cultural frame of reference. "Your humanity is tied to your part in the community" is, at a very basic level, foreign to the Western concept of citizens as autonomous units, with all social interactions being contracts or agreements imposed on those basic autonomous units afterwards.

A lot of people, including myself, define a lot about themselves like that. For my self, i do not strive for a lot - i strive for caring for others.
It's basically the same thing. The difference is that my definition of community is different, because i do not live in a fixed community. This is IMO mostly a result of modern society, which has greatly increased flexibility in housing, communication and moving between social layers - and hence broken up fixed, neighborhood- or familiy-based social communities.
I agree completely with the following statement:

Besides, the woman who wishes to commit abortion ought to remember that she is because of, with and through other people as Dr Gaie, a lecturer at the University of Botswana would charge in Botho Ethics. An individual as the center of the community is not important on her own but derives her importance from her relationship with the community. This draws my attention to the issue on the rights of the woman as one who has the civil liberty to do anything with her own body.

But i disagree with the argument. It certainly is a new (for us) line of argument, but it is not necessarily more coherent or logical, so i disagree with Simon_Jesters claim that it is not intellectually dishonest.

I have a problem with this view because when one is asleep one has no self consciousness and temporal awareness. One is simply a vegetable. Would it follow then that I would be justified to kill one who is asleep because one would not be a person in the sense that one would be without self consciousness?

Does this person has any idea what sleeping is all about? Your brain is quite active, and your consciousness does register some of it in the form of dreams.
This is either pure ignorance or intellectual dishonesty - regardless of the cultural framework.

This means pregnant women have also yielded their natural rights for the sake of establishing a moral society. They have a mutual agreement to a social contract with other Batswana which stipulates moral values and principles.

It has not been demonstrated how abortion leads to an immoral society based on the moral framework presented here. It is merely stated as a fact, the strawman-appeal to Hobbes does not change that.

In the context of our own Setswana culture these values and principles are designated in Botho which is also our own criterion of determining right and wrong as Dr Gaie has argued. In Setswana ga se botho go senya mpa and it is wrong to kill a baby. I do not even think that Batswana make that distinction between a zygote and an embryo and a baby, as long as conception has taken place life has being created.

This just completely ignores the distinction between an embryo and a possibly self-sustaining baby. No argument is presented that allows us to ignore that distinction, other than "we do not make that distinction".

Abortion would also be wrong because according to Botho one is a person when one is an ancestor. A totally different notion of what I have already discussed earlier about personhood. The pre requisite for being an ancestor is the demand that one should have great grand children. Abortion militates against having children because it destroys potential human life which is imperative for one to be an ancestor. Therefore my opinion is still that abortion is wrong and should not be acceptable or legalised.

This is just a copy of the usual "we have to protect the potential of life". It's just shunned one generation backwards (onto the grandchildren), but it is in no way different than the usual "it's a potential human being"-argument.

Finally if you think abortion is right and should therefore be acceptable ask yourself how it would have been, if a law that could have prevented you from being born was universalised. Do you then wish to deprive a fetus of all that potential life? Let it live because somebody has left you to live.

This just proves what i just said: "Think of all the potential". Again, i fail to see how this different, community-based moral framework justifies such a statement.

Based on that framework (if i understand it correctly), i would instead make the argument that the potential of the community must be enhanced. Abortion does not stand in the way of that - in fact, a planned child born to parents who have the resources to care for it is far superior in reaching that goal.


Bottom line:
This is just a carbon-copy of the usual anti-abortion crap. The only thing it accomplishes is shifting the focus away from individual rights and to a community-centered morality. This is legitimate, but it does not present any legitimate argument why abortion is bad for a community.

[Simon_Jester]

It's strange because, in all other avenues of life the Batswana don't desire that kind of thinking. When it comes to, for example, economics, they heavily favour the idea of individual exceptionalism over Batho; but, when it comes to thoughts about society people favour the community over the individual constantly.

Personally, I think that it's just normal conservatism in a different packaging. Batswana (and Africans in general really), have had their societies affected by Western ones for so long that they use Batho (or Ubantu for the rest of sub-saharan africa) as an excuse to maintain their cultural "heritage". My cousin, for example, was sent to the Headteachers office for asking the teacher: "How did Jesus have two fathers?" The reason? The teacher said he was being blasphemous. True, Christianity isn't a natural part of our culture, but because of a perceived lack of Christianity in the west, and because Christianity was so effectively instilled into the collective consciousness, anything that is perceived to be against Christianity is also perceived to be against Batswana, or against African culture in general.

I understand the logic.

It would be interesting to see a culture that really was communitarian, in which the minimum-sized social unit was a small community rather than an individual- a molecule rather than an atom, if you will. Potentially, it could be a very different place from the kind of individualist society we see in much of the world.

But yes, I recognize that this kind of communal value is usually discarded as convenient by its advocates- they want other people's roles in the community to be comfortably restricted, while their own roles are as free and flexible as possible.

As to the actual arguments in the article, yes, most of them are a carbon-copy of arguments against abortion we're all familiar with in the US and Europe; it was the one at the bottom about communal values that drew my attention because that is something a bit novel (to me at least). And I do sometimes wonder what a communalist society would look like in the modern era- if there's a way to have modern technology without totally atomizing people into autonomous individuals whose default state is assumed to be "go through life alone."

Because that attitude of "I am an autonomous, autarkic being, I owe nothing to anyone, by default I go through life alone except for the specific interactions I freely choose to have with specific people..." that is now poisoning the West, in the form of laissez-faire anarcho-corporatism. Whereas communal sentiments like "it takes a village to raise a child" are disdained, and even the very concept of "public interest" seems to be under siege in some quarters.

So, again, I do wonder once in a while if there's a way to bring some of that communal attitude back, without having to go back to the Iron Age to get it. We may have thrown a baby out with the bathwater by abandoning it.

[Chirios]

Personally, I think that it's just normal conservatism in a different packaging. Batswana (and Africans in general really), have had their societies affected by Western ones for so long that they use Batho (or Ubantu for the rest of sub-saharan africa) as an excuse to maintain their cultural "heritage". My cousin, for example, was sent to the Headteachers office for asking the teacher: "How did Jesus have two fathers?" The reason? The teacher said he was being blasphemous. True, Christianity isn't a natural part of our culture, but because of a perceived lack of Christianity in the west, and because Christianity was so effectively instilled into the collective consciousness, anything that is perceived to be against Christianity is also perceived to be against Batswana, or against African culture in general.

I understand the logic.

It would be interesting to see a culture that really was communitarian, in which the minimum-sized social unit was a small community rather than an individual- a molecule rather than an atom, if you will. Potentially, it could be a very different place from the kind of individualist society we see in much of the world.

But yes, I recognize that this kind of communal value is usually discarded as convenient by its advocates- they want other people's roles in the community to be comfortably restricted, while their own roles are as free and flexible as possible.

As to the actual arguments in the article, yes, most of them are a carbon-copy of arguments against abortion we're all familiar with in the US and Europe; it was the one at the bottom about communal values that drew my attention because that is something a bit novel (to me at least). And I do sometimes wonder what a communalist society would look like in the modern era- if there's a way to have modern technology without totally atomizing people into autonomous individuals whose default state is assumed to be "go through life alone."

Because that attitude of "I am an autonomous, autarkic being, I owe nothing to anyone, by default I go through life alone except for the specific interactions I freely choose to have with specific people..." that is now poisoning the West, in the form of laissez-faire anarcho-corporatism. Whereas communal sentiments like "it takes a village to raise a child" are disdained, and even the very concept of "public interest" seems to be under siege in some quarters.

So, again, I do wonder once in a while if there's a way to bring some of that communal attitude back, without having to go back to the Iron Age to get it. We may have thrown a baby out with the bathwater by abandoning it.[/quote]

Batho is useful. I moved to the West and I can see the difference. Take for example the way people raise their children: if you had a young(ish) child and you wanted them to stay at a sister/brothers house, without warning, there wouldn't really be any issues, but in the West it seems like their would be. My little sister lives in the US with her mother, and there she usually has to make appointments to stay round a relatives, or a friends, house. Something that would be ridiculous back home. And when a child stays at another parents' house, the implication is that that child has to follow the other parents rules, something which at least appears to be different in Western nations.

But, that said, Batho doesn't really apply here.

Whenever a person makes a serious argument, they have to consider not only the opinions of their peers, but also reality. Let's ignore for a second that what the author paraphrased is completely different to what Thomas Paine actually said, the fact is that abortion was legalised in the west not out of some desire to destroy the family unit, or out of some desire to destroy conservative values, it was legalised because it was recognised that when you make abortion illegal, you force women who would otherwise lead normal, healthy lives to seek unlicensed medical practitioners, who use strange methods that lead to various life-threatening illnesses.

Edit/Note: "ga se botho go senya mpa" = you are not a person (part of the community) if you walk away from it."

[Simon_Jester]

Well, if you had a really communal culture, the differences wouldn't just be in family life; they'd be political, because there'd be no sense of social-Darwinist competition between citizens. "I've got mine, screw you ingrates" simply wouldn't be in the cards, except for a handful of clan/family/village/whatsits that were uniformly prosperous. Everyone would simply take for granted that the more successful people in a "social molecule" support and assist the less successful ones.

There are obviously going to be drawbacks and tradeoffs to this. Again, it's something I like contemplating because I'm so sick of watching socially-atomized neoanarchism rot my civilization from the inside out.

[Darth Fanboy]

As someone who empathizes with the sentiment of being anti abortion due to the unique preciousness of life, I could never in good conscience however say that my personal feelings on the matter* come anywhere close to important enough to justify overriding individual rights.

I am curious as to the logic being used with regards to communities. If a woman was going to have a child that for some reason she could not concievably care for, wouldn't having that child be a drain on said community?

(*Summary on my opinion = While I find abortion in cases other than rape or incest distasteful I fully support a woman's right to choose. I do not believe that any government's jurisdiction should ever include a woman's body and I hope that anyone reading this will recognize that whatever misgivings I have about the procedure should not be construed as opposition to abortion.)

[Broomstick]

All children are initially a drain on the resources of other people, be that family or society. The idea is that you invest those resources and the child becomes a productive adult that is no longer a drain on anyone and is ideally productive enough to cover the next generation, old people, disabled, etc. with their contributions.

[Samuel]

It would be interesting to see a culture that really was communitarian, in which the minimum-sized social unit was a small community rather than an individual- a molecule rather than an atom, if you will. Potentially, it could be a very different place from the kind of individualist society we see in much of the world.

And I do sometimes wonder what a communalist society would look like in the modern era- if there's a way to have modern technology without totally atomizing people into autonomous individuals whose default state is assumed to be "go through life alone."

So, again, I do wonder once in a while if there's a way to bring some of that communal attitude back, without having to go back to the Iron Age to get it. We may have thrown a baby out with the bathwater by abandoning it.

Communal values only work if you have small communities. Once you have larger scales it becomes impossible for everyone to know each other. This reduces the incentive to work for the good of the community and makes free riding more rewarding.

Attempting to build a small community in modern society runs into the same problem. Individuals are willing to subsume their desires to the good of their family. However, larger sizes run into the problem that the people who are most likely to join a community are those who are least likely to contribute.

It is possible to have this start up again. I remember a science fiction story where you could join up with a group that dispensed gifts anonymously to other members. The control was it was all controlled by an AI that could tell what people wanted - people who fullfil requests get more of their desires for gifts fullfiled. So how it worked was you got a text on your cell from the AI asking you to bring something to some place and later in the day when you were tired from a walk someone would show up with a drink for you.

Of course, the story was about one guy involved in this running into a bug- namely the AI was using these to annoy an FBI agent who was trying to break up the group because some of the gifts were large value and taxes for them weren't paid.

So if you can create a method where individual contributations are tracked and rewarded, than you can eliminate the corrosive effects of free riding and make communitarian based ethics feasible.

[Simon_Jester]

I find it very difficult to understand why someone would throw a hissy fit over a statement of the obvious; it strikes me as the mark of a very silly mind. I find it even harder to understand why someone completely different would throw a hissy fit over someone else's questioning of the hissy fit...

As to Samuel, that does seem to be the problem, but I would very much like to see what a modern-ish civilization would look like that had at least preserved the idea that your status as a member of society is defined in large part by your interaction with other people, what you give to and take from your community.

That idea doesn't seem to be faring well in the modern era.

[Faqa]

Getting back to the interesting discussion(i.e, not Fanboy):

The problem is that community-as-atomic-unit isn't really something reached out of moral enlightenment. It's what people HAD to do, once upon a time. As technology empowered us to be individuals, we RAN with it. That's how humans work.

You want a system where people are measured by what they give to the community?

Shit, we have a system that's supposed to do that. It's called capitalism. What you give is what people in society decide you're worth. To the dollar.

This system is broken to shit, of course. All it was ever supposed to do was provide a game where humans acting like selfish shitheads could get more for themselves by following the rules of said game. And what did we do? Why, we found loopholes in the game, of course. We're playing the game for itself instead of for it's greater purpose.

Fix that(fuck me if I know how), but don't sell the system short.

[Broomstick]

A statement that bothers me in the passage quoted in the OP is

one is a person when one is an ancestor. A totally different notion of what I have already discussed earlier about personhood. The pre requisite for being an ancestor is the demand that one should have great grand children.

This is not defining oneself by one's position in the community, or ones relationship to others, it's defining oneself by reproductive success. Now, throughout most of human history reproductive success was extremely important to the community. Between infant mortality and the hazards of life it was essential to produce children just to maintain the population, much less grow. It's not an inherently bad meme. This isn't talking about reproductive success as one aspect of being a person, it's the definition of person. If you don't have kids you aren't a person. Actually, it's worse than that, because if your kids don't go on to have kids you aren't a person. That's... horrifying on a certain level. Doesn't matter what else you do for the community, how much food you might provide, how many lives you might save, what great things you might do for your community or mankind at large - if you don't have kids you aren't a person.

So no, the person in the OP is not defining people in relation to the community, he's defining them based on whether or not they have grandkids.

Another problem is that in such societies as defined in the OP the tendency is to value women solely on their fertility, usually by number of children they have. While cranking out babies was a survival advantage 500 or more years ago in today's world that leads to all sorts of problems, and we see some of the worst of this in Africa. It would now be to the benefit of society if women only had 2-3 children at most, yet if a woman's only worth is her children that means, by her society's measure, forcing her to be worth less than her maternal ancestors, and also leaving vast swathes of her life empty of anything society values (that is, the time before and after raising her 2 children). Such a woman will be seen as a burden to her society, as she isn't producing in accordance with her role, and such societies usually have few if any roles for women outside of wife and mother.

This is probably why education helps drops the birth rate - it gives women something to do outside of making babies. It makes it more likely for them to be able to contribute in ways beyond just babies, which makes fewer babies more acceptable to society, and a woman with fewer children is more acceptable if she's perceived as an asset (because of other contributions, like income from a job) rather a liability. Don't fool yourself - even in societies leaning to the extreme of community-based and without money there's still a tally sheet in everyone's head. Some members are considered more valuable than others - that's why in extreme times of hunger it's the old people, disabled, and other such who are left on the ice floes or declare "it's a good day to die" and walk out into the woods never to be seen again. Some of those folks might have been civic-minded enough to make the sacrifice willingly, but some were probably "encouraged" to an extent we would find appalling.

Which brings me to a pitfall of the community-definition of personhood. Taken to an extreme, that means you have no worth other than what others grant you. That may be fantastic if you're the head man/chief/town president/whatever... but if others see no role for you other than floor scrubber or stable mucker maybe not so wonderful. What if a young girl is given the role of town whore? What if a young man is designated the punching bag for the town bullies?

A more individualistic system gives the option of leaving and going elsewhere if one's natal community isn't working out for you, which would be appealing to someone on the shitty end of the community.

Neither extreme is good. People are both indivdiuals and social animals.

[SCRawl]

Useless posts split out. Fanboy, let's try to be less of a tool going forward, yes?

[Simon_Jester]

Very much a fair point- that side of communal identity was rightly abandoned and the only real shame is that civilization couldn't abandon it sooner.

I just cannot help wondering if there was anything to be missed about the system, something to wish we still had. So many human affairs are tradeoffs. I'd think the social atomization of the modern era almost has to be one, and I do wonder what we gave up in order to get a system that does, in theory and a fair portion of the time in practice, acknowledge the basic rights and personhood of everyone else involved. Because taking the proposition to the extreme other end of the spectrum (I am an autarkic individual who owes nothing to anyone) leads to utter foolishness, simply because we are part-social animals.

[Broomstick]

As i said, we need both memes in society. There's no question that family and community are important - look at what we see happen over and over again in times of natural disaster, when friends, family, and community (which can even extend to a global community) extend aid and comfort to the victims, frequently with no expectation of any form of compensation. On the other hand, individual achievement is important as well. Individual profit drives people to do more than the minimum to get buy (perception of greater status can also have that effect as well, but you could argue than in such circumstances status is a form of profit)

Community-based society works best on a small scale. Let's say... under 100. Probably under less than that in most cases, but it's why family and extended family tends to have a community-type structure rather than the capitalist/ferengi/randroid approach. For larger societies - large village up through nation-state - individualism has greater and greater assets. The more wealth and resources an individual has the more appealing individualism tends to be, and likewise the less wealth an resources a person has the more appealing communalism is.

That's not a hard an fast rule - nations do lend assistance to other nations, after all. And within a family individuals have different interests and may well have different levels of wealth. It really isn't healthy to have just one or the other at any level. Both strategies for society building have their strengths and weaknesses and an adaptive society can shift the balance as needed to optimize the society under changing conditions. In hard times more community is usually better, in good times more individualism.