Monday, October 15, 2007
Unworthy to be born=unworthy to live
I was looking back over some old posts and realized I had this great post that never surfaced because the audio I was going to showcase was too long. I found a way to shorten it and link to it for all of you, so here goes. The link will take you to my Facebook page. Click on "download" and then open the file or save it to your computer.
The audio link here is from the Princeton University Podcasts series for the James Madison lectures. The featured scholar is Dr. Leon Kass, who has written extensively on bioethics. His lecture was over an hour long, but in the question and answer section, he took a question from a woman who struggle with his condemnation of abortion for reasons of defect or disability. The argument is simple. If we do a pre-natal screening for a disease or defect in a fetus, we can and maybe even should eliminate that fetus to ensure that child doesn't suffer. This is exactly the argument the woman in this audio advances. If we can prevent disability or defect, shouldn't we do so? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Dr. Kass replies that abortion for genetic defect falls under the category of preventive medicine (whether you agree that it should or not), but this is the first proposal for preventing a disease by preventing the existence of the one who suffers it!
When I was at Bethel and taking Christian Social Ethics, I butted heads with a fellow student who said she could understand abortion being justified in cases where a woman did not have the financial stability to raise a child, because the child would suffer irrevocable cognitive damage from growing up in poverty (this is if the woman did not see adoption as viable). I pointed out that this was the same argument Dr. Kass is objecting to here, that she was making a judgment on the worth of a human life based on some pre-natal condition, physical or social. This fellow student objected to abortion for physical defect, but I insisted that she could not make such a judgment with social criteria and not also logically extend it to physical criteria.
What Dr. Kass also argues in this case and what I wish I had also had the perspicuity to apply with my fellow student is that whatever disqualifies a fetus from being born also disqualifies the future person from continuing to live. In other words, if an unborn child is disqualified from life because he will have Down's syndrome, there is no reason if by some chance he is allowed to be born that he shouldn't then be killed. If an unborn child is unworthy to be born, he is unworthy to live. The criteria can't magically change just because a person thinks infanticide is wrong and abortion is okay. Dr. Kass points out that if that's what you believe, then you don't need the "extra" reason that the child will have a defect to abort it. You can abort it because you think abortion is okay and that's good enough.
This, I think, also has strong implications for those who consider rape cases to be a viable ethical exception for abortions. In that case, the way in which the child was conceived disqualifies her future life. Ultimately, many people's pro-choice stance rests on these exceptions and not on a coherent and comprehensive ethical rubric for abortion, so when we can show how illogical such exceptions are unless you self-evidently condone abortion, I think we come closer to shifting the public debate.
The audio link here is from the Princeton University Podcasts series for the James Madison lectures. The featured scholar is Dr. Leon Kass, who has written extensively on bioethics. His lecture was over an hour long, but in the question and answer section, he took a question from a woman who struggle with his condemnation of abortion for reasons of defect or disability. The argument is simple. If we do a pre-natal screening for a disease or defect in a fetus, we can and maybe even should eliminate that fetus to ensure that child doesn't suffer. This is exactly the argument the woman in this audio advances. If we can prevent disability or defect, shouldn't we do so? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Dr. Kass replies that abortion for genetic defect falls under the category of preventive medicine (whether you agree that it should or not), but this is the first proposal for preventing a disease by preventing the existence of the one who suffers it!
When I was at Bethel and taking Christian Social Ethics, I butted heads with a fellow student who said she could understand abortion being justified in cases where a woman did not have the financial stability to raise a child, because the child would suffer irrevocable cognitive damage from growing up in poverty (this is if the woman did not see adoption as viable). I pointed out that this was the same argument Dr. Kass is objecting to here, that she was making a judgment on the worth of a human life based on some pre-natal condition, physical or social. This fellow student objected to abortion for physical defect, but I insisted that she could not make such a judgment with social criteria and not also logically extend it to physical criteria.
What Dr. Kass also argues in this case and what I wish I had also had the perspicuity to apply with my fellow student is that whatever disqualifies a fetus from being born also disqualifies the future person from continuing to live. In other words, if an unborn child is disqualified from life because he will have Down's syndrome, there is no reason if by some chance he is allowed to be born that he shouldn't then be killed. If an unborn child is unworthy to be born, he is unworthy to live. The criteria can't magically change just because a person thinks infanticide is wrong and abortion is okay. Dr. Kass points out that if that's what you believe, then you don't need the "extra" reason that the child will have a defect to abort it. You can abort it because you think abortion is okay and that's good enough.
This, I think, also has strong implications for those who consider rape cases to be a viable ethical exception for abortions. In that case, the way in which the child was conceived disqualifies her future life. Ultimately, many people's pro-choice stance rests on these exceptions and not on a coherent and comprehensive ethical rubric for abortion, so when we can show how illogical such exceptions are unless you self-evidently condone abortion, I think we come closer to shifting the public debate.
Chris B., 11:07 AM
2 Comments:
Benjamin, at 11:27 AM
I think that is an excellent corollary to my post, Benjamin, really great thoughts! I think you're right that when we define what we ought to do by what we can do, we actually eliminate the need for ethics (because if your criteria for action is ability, why muddy the waters with moral justification?) We need an overarching ethic of life very desperately as Protestants because we lack one (in my opinion). My solution has been to embrace the Catholic system of bioethics, which means I'm also against birth control. But that's another story I suppose...thanks for the input.
In the work I do, biologics (a.k.a., stem cells, DNA manipulation, cloning, animals bred as organ donors for humans, etc.) is a big deal. One of the problems I see is that many ethicists insist on creating a rubric that is reliant on what is technologically possible.
For instance, one of the arguments for fetal stem cell usage is that some ways of using stem cells cannot *technologically* give rise to human embryos. At least, not in the lab, and probably not even in the womb. Therefore, some ethicists conclude, it is reasonable to use such embryonic stem cells because otherwise they would die and be useless.
I argue, however, that technological capability should have no bearing on the formation of the ethical rubric. True comprehensive systems are robust enough to account for the entire lifecycle of what is being done. For reproductive ethics, it should account for sperm and egg through the elderly. For biologics, it should account for technological capability from our current archaic systems of biological manipulation through technology capable of literally making a homo-superior from scratch.
All that to say that comprehensive ethical systems shift the debate in many more categories than just right to life. Not that you were saying otherwise.