Feminism is all about choice. Women should be able to have the same rights and freedoms as men worldwide. But this isn’t a totally free choice; it still necessitates some limits. It doesn’t allow a choice between killing or not killing, or between stealing or not stealing. It covers choices that affect only ourselves, none that might bring harm to another person. So I’m very accepting of women who make different choices than mine unless their choices somehow bring harm to somebody.
Restricting reproductive choices does bring harm to people everywhere. Clearly it can be argued that abortion brings harm to an embryo. So essential to my argument is a delineation of the premise that it’s acceptable to harm an embryo.
Although it’s clear to me that an embryo is a living human being because it’s alive and it’s human, that’s not enough to qualify it as having a right to live in a body that is in some way harmed by this life (emotionally, financially, intellectually, physically, or socially).
I don’t believe in souls. I believe we are a collection of memories that are held in our brains. We are governed by hormonal changes and neuron activity. If our brain is damaged significantly, we are no longer the same person. The eternal self is created by this string of memories. If the memories disappear, so does that particular self.
People with Alzheimer’s or brain damage are certainly people even though they’ve lost a lot of their memory. But in many cases, they are clearly different people than their loved ones once knew. The processes working within the brain define the self entirely.
So it follows that if there’s no brain activity to store memories, then there is no self at all. This is why I applauded the decision to take Terry Schiavo* off life-support. She was a living human being, but she was no longer a self.
Pro-life advocates sometimes claim that an embryo has some electrical activity in the brain at 10 weeks, but so does any living cell in any animal or plant. It’s not indicative of brain activity at all. Terry Schiavo would have had electrical activity. It’s not electical activity that determines thought or memory, but brain waves. Fetuses studied “have no brain waves or any other kind of signal from the cortex up to 150 or so days” or about 21 weeks. Fetal viability right now is at 22 weeks, but that number changes as technology advances. It was 30 weeks in the 1950s. So currently, almost until a fetus is able to survive outside the mother’s body, it’s not amassing memories, and there are no neurons firing. It is a living human being, but it is not a self.
Since a fetus is not a self, it cannot have the same rights to life as a self. A person on life-support with no brain activity may be kept alive if the family wishes, but may be allowed to die. Regardless how long a person’s body is kept alive, that self was gone the moment the brain stopped working. An embryo or pre-21-week fetus’ brain has yet to begin working, if it ever will. The mother should have a similar option to maintain life support from her own body or deny it.
Parenthood can’t be legislated. You can try, but people everywhere will go to great lengths to avoid this responsibility if they’re not up to it. It’s not the same as legislation for murder. Sure some people still kill even though the law says it’s wrong. But they are few and far between. And they should be arrested. Since they are willing to take one person’s life, they could try to take yours too. We stop people in society who harm others because, one day, they might harm us. It’s part of our social contract to keep ourselves safe. But women who abort are no harm to anyone outside of their own bodies; and doctors who perform abortions do so only by request, not by force. Abortion doesn’t bring a threat of harm to society in general, so any law preventing it is unnecessarily restricting our freedom.
If you’re struggling to care for four children, that fifth one coming may be the tipping point between basic survival and destitution. If you’re working towards self-sufficiency by finishing school, that pregnancy could mean a good five years of dependency on a partner of questionable reliability. If you’re just barely keeping it together day to day, the dramatic change in hormones during pregnancy could be a risk to your life.
No country advocating freedom and democracy can reasonably force women to be life-support systems against their own better judgment. A free country must allow freedom for all, not just for men.
* Some might take offense that I’m using Terry Schiavo to promote abortion. My defense is that I’m not using her as a person. I’m using a well-known example of someone who was in a vegetative state in order to illustrate an analogy. Her example is particularly useful because I, and many like me, really supported the removal of her feeding tube. To me it seemed an offense to her body to keep it going artificially when her brain was long gone. But that’s just me.
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If you want to use any or all of this argument for any purpose, go for it. Call it your own. I'm not an artiste, I'm an activist hoping to make the world a better place one post at a time.
Monday, January 22, 2007
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8 comments:
I consider myself a feminist, but I believe in doing things in the natural way. That includes family planning. I am in a very committed relationship so we have had 8 children. I have been there when one of my friends had a baby that died in utero at 6 months, and boy it scared me on how much it looked like a baby. One of my daughters died a day after birth, and boy did that ever make me think. I could never kill another woman, not matter how small. I helped found the Rose 0f Sharon Services for Young mothers(www.therose.ca) so I'd have a place to put my money where my mouth is. So many of my friends have got screwed up after their abortion. I never want any woman to have to make that choice.
Leaving the abortion issue alone, one statement from this post stuck out a lot to me. "I believe we are a collection of memories that are held in our brains." It makes more sense to me that we are a product of our reactions to those memories. For the sole reason that two people put through the same experiences, carry the same/similar memories, don't necessarily become the same person, or have the same personality traits.
So I'm thinking out loud here...if someone was robbed at night and after became afraid of the dark, if they were to lose the memory of being robbed, would their fear of the dark still exist? How much of our "self" is tied to the memories, to the experiences? And what is the deciding factor for traits that linger after the reasons become forgotten?
Like I said, just thinking out loud :)
And, for the record, I agree with post. It's well thought out and well written (as always).
this is an exceptionally interesting argument. i'd never considered this issue in that manner.
Dianne, ideally it would be nice if there were so many support systems in place that nobody felt the need to have an abortion, but there aren't. So I'm glad it's an option. When I had my abortion, I had wanted to give it up for adoption, but my boyfriend claimed he was going to take it and raise it. He was drunk or stoned most of the time, and I didn't want the baby to have anything to do with him. If I kept it, I wouldn't have been able to finish school, and I would have ended up dependent on him for every penny. And even if I could have managed alone, I would have had to let him take the baby for weekend visits. He doesn't have a criminal record, so I would have seemed a crazy-lady trying to keep my baby from seeing its poor father. That just wouldn't have been good for any of us. Whew! Thank god that choice was there for me! (Well, thank Canada.) I was able to finish school, get settled, and then have three beautiful kids when I was really ready to care for them.
Pete, I think our memories incorporate our reaction to them instantaneously. I think that no two people ever have the exact same memory because our perceptions and reactions get muddled into what we're observing or experiencing. So, reacting to the memory, in a sense, becomes the memory.
If someone had being robbed paired with darkness, then the darkness would take on that fear-response in a Pavlovian way, even if the robbery wasn't accessable by the conscious mind. But I think losing the rationale for the fear can lead to guessing the root cause. And if this happened often enough (many fears without any obvious causes), then it could be seen as a psychosis. In some people with significant memory loss, they are frightened and need constant reassuring. And losing the root causes, loses part of the conception of the self too. Perhaps the corollary of this is that finding root causes to our fears is a step towards discovering ourselves at a deeper level.
As for traits continuing after reasons for their development are forgotten - are they forgotten, or just not at the forefront of the mind? Is it that we ignore the reasons, but could dig them up if we make an effort to?
I guess some traits just become habits. Like, I make tea as soon as I get up in the morning. That's part of who I am. But if I lost my memories, I might still habitually make tea in the morning - or try to. But if we're not conscious that we want tea but just make it from habit, is it an indication of a self, or just an automatic response?
copasetic (and pete) - thanks!
I just don't have an answer, wrt "souls." I find it difficult to believe that it is something that did not exist before but comes into creation the moment an egg joins a sperm, whatever else i might or might not believe. I don't think that's really the issue, in any case. unless one is a complete pacifist in all and any circumstances (support a war, any war? it killed a lot of pregnant women and newborns, too, you realize), you realize that humans take life all the time. I think it's fair to say no one is all like, "yay! abortion! party!" and that "safe, legal and rare" is a good goal. beyond that i don't have much to say. i think an excellent way to make sure more babies -and- women die is to recriminalize the procedure; and that there are other things one can do to lower the rate--better education, contraceptives available, -better economy-, which coincidentally are good for other reasons as well.
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