The more I hear the wingnuts flailing about in the wake of their epic failures in the last two national elections, the more arguments come to my mind for debates with them. One of my favorite debates is the subject of abortion, reproductive choice, and how to define and respect human life.
This debate came up on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" yesterday. While Neal Conan and Ken Rudin often fall into the quicksand of inside-the-Beltway CW in their analyses, you can tell by their voices that both guys really enjoy doing "Political Junkie" shows, and it rubs off on me as a listener and fellow (albeit far less accomplished) talk show host.
Mike Huckabee was their guest. Of all the Republicans who vied for the presidency this year, he is the one I fear most for the havoc his charismatic, "compassionate" wingnuttery might wreak in the future. During discussion of how the GOP can come back by focusing on "values issues," one caller questioned "pro-life" support of the death penalty, and another argued that a blastocyst isn't a person even if a 3rd-trimester fetus is. The Huckster tried to use logic in the debate. That's when he got silly.
First of all, Huckster, you've been trying that horrible strategy of running on "values" issues for decades. It failed. And your positions are not as popular as you think. Even citing the defeat of gay marriage in election after election only points to your epic failures to come. Just look at the age breakdown of voters on such issues and changes in poll numbers over the course of this decade. Support for gay marriage is growing as wooden-headed bigots grow old and die and as people see the failure of the sky to fall in Massachusetts.
But I digress. Back to the "pro-life" questions.
Huckabee laid out the case that a human life is a human life is a human life, regardless of its stage of development. Allowing abortion, even in the first trimester, even in the test tube, he argued, is the first step towards allowing sick elders to be euthanized with or without their own consent. The death penalty is necessary, though, because our wonderful "justice" system convicted the condemned, and every fetus is perfectly innocent (except for that nasty "Original Sin" bit). Also, he said, executing a convict is a decision to kill someone made publicly and collectively by society (which makes it okay) whereas abortion and euthanasia are decisions made privately by individuals and families (which makes it wrong). But doing anything else collectively is Socialism.
Never mind the fact that euthanasia, execution, murder and suicide bring up a very different set of moral questions than abortion. Never mind the fact that most Americans want abortion mostly legal. What I really wanted to ask the Huckster was this:
Is crushing an acorn the moral equivalent of felling a hundred-year-old oak tree?
Nobody would answer "yes" to that question, but why? And what does this have to do with abortion? The answer is obvious if we get off our high horses and look at human beings as fundamentally similar to every other organism (even allowing for our understandable pro-human bias).
An oak will easily produce countless acorns in its lifetime. Each acorn has a unique combination of genes from parents' gametes, containing the complete genome of a unique, potentially mighty oak ready to grow since conception. Huckabee said the same thing about human zygotes in their uniqueness and unquestionably human genome. He even cited the number of chromosomes, maybe just to sound smarter.
But nature's tendencies are such that the vast majority of acorns will be eaten by animals or otherwise prevented from growing to their full potential. And the vast majority of "human beings" as defined by the Huckster as union of sperm and egg (close to 80%) will never even implant in the womb, let alone grow to the point that anyone notices them. They don't have human minds, and even those who live to be toddlers can't remember "life" in the womb.
What about those fetuses deliberately aborted because one or both potential parents saw the potential baby as a major inconvenience? Surely, a woman deciding to abort her "baby" is acting more deliberately than an oak tree whose acorns get eaten by animals in the neighborhood. Right? Choices we make seem different to us than what trees do. But I'll get back to that.
It's an old adage that the fruit never falls far from the tree. Most of the acorns that don't get eaten by animals and manage to germinate will sprout within a short distance of the mother oak. It then immediately begins competing with its parent for resources. Soil nutrients, rainwater, sunlight, and air are finite resources. An acorn which germinates near "home" will face stiff competition from its own parent, and many can't compete with their deep-rooted oaken parents. As if oaks weren't bad enough parents already, the shade of their parents' branches and leaves will make it hard for their nearby progeny to get enough sunlight.
The oak doesn't really want to abort or starve its offspring. Indeed, all living things "want" to reproduce by virtue of the chemistry that makes them what they are. But sometimes, that's just how things go. It happens that way when there aren't enough resources to support both the parent and the vulnerable, resource-hungry offspring. Tradition tells us that the life of a child is far more important than the life of its parent, but let's compare the two. The parent is decades old, home to countless other organisms, and would take decades to replace if you can truly replace a unique organism. An oak can produce countless offspring in the next few years, mostly identical at the acorn stage to every one of its siblings, having lots of potential, but easy to replace.
When humans get pregnant, and there aren't enough resources readily available to support a baby, many more children might be supported in the future if the parents' lives could go on uninterrupted for now. What is the reasonable thing to do? If we are all "created equal," as the Huckster argued regarding embryonic rights, we are most equal at the earliest stages of life. Human zygotes are all indistinguishable from one another. If they have the same parents, zygotes are fungible, even if people's emotions don't always understand that.
Back to the question of "choice." Some like to argue that human choice has some kind of magical property to it, that our "free will" somehow defies all the laws of nature and logic, of cause and effect. They claim that the choices we make should be considered as absolute and unbound by the mere physical things people use as excuses. There's more to thinking, feeling and choosing than chemicals, they argue. This mysticism about choice is why some see the human decision to abort as different from an oak starving its offspring through competition.
But these same people will acknowledge the chemical nature of our consciousness at some times. Using drugs to alter consciousness before surgery is considered appropriate. Mental illness is seen as chemical, and treating it is chemical alteration of a "God-given" sick mind to make it "normal." Others will say that recreational drugs can cause moral weakness, that mere chemicals can turn a human "soul" to the dark side. "God made him a good boy, until he started smoking crack."
I do not hold human consciousness in such paradoxically high regard. If you could dissect the physical processes behind human choice, what would you see? Compare human choice to choices made by animals, and to "involuntary" actions by plants and microbes. There isn't much difference if you apply equal standards. People often do things commonly thought of as choices without feeling they had any choice in the matter. But we see abortion as more of a choice than an oak starving its offspring by competition. As so many characters in fiction have said, "This town ain't big enough for the both of us." Nor is this forest floor, nor is this household budget, nor is the 24-hour day. Human choice is the expression of underlying physical processes with nothing mystical about them.
This leads in to what struck me most about Huckabee's argument for considering a zygote to be fully human - how much he stressed the number of chromosomes. 23 chromosomes from the father and 23 chromosomes from the mother create a unique DNA profile that makes a unique human being. Yadda yadda.
The logical conclusion of this is interesting, unless I'm making a straw-man attack. Chromosomes and DNA are understandable chemical structures. Even Huckabee can count the number of chromosomes in a "person" (even if he doesn't understand what DNA and RNA are). These chemicals, in a fallopian tube or a test tube, are a person? Nothing more and nothing less than molecular structure defines personhood? If chemistry is enough to define humanity, what a can of worms this pro-lifer has opened. Reducing humanity to chemistry is the exact opposite of what wingnuts like Huckabee or Palin mean to argue. But so bankrupt is their philosophy that they can't say a zygote has a soul without saying a soul is just chemicals. See, people are just chemicals when you need them to be so in an argument, but they're really magical bundles dropped from heaven by Jesus when you're making another point.
So they say we must ban human cloning, because a clone might not be considered a person in full? Identical twins are considered distinct persons, though. They "know" that the human soul is created at the moment of conception? Then God is the most prolific abortionist of all, killing 80% of babies before implantation. Why bother making them in the first place? Even Adam was made human by the breath of God at the last minute, not at the moment the clay base was created.
Personally, I believe that there's nothing more to the human body and mind than chemistry and physics, that there's probably no such thing as God or a soul, and that it's our complex relationships with one another that make us persons. Abortion should not be restricted because you can only have a relationship with a fetus if you want it. It's only a person if you say it is. Squirrels eating acorns aren't felling oak trees, and abortions don't kill persons unless done poorly.
Restrictions on abortion serve no logical purpose other than the oppression of women. Sure, a lot of "pro-lifers" sincerely believe that abortion is murder and don't see their ideas as anti-woman at all. But they don't have logic on their side.
My ideas could be 180 degrees from reality, for all I know. They are, after all, only opinions. But I feel vindicated when I hear people who disagree with me unable to support their ideas without resorting to logical fallacies and applying double standards. I feel like my opinions might have more to them when those who disagree seem unable to make a case without selectively ignoring commonly known facts that are just what they are no matter what you believe in.
In conclusion, the one thing really missing from the abortion debate is a serious attempt at answering the question of what qualifies as a person. As long as people are willing to grant any kind of personhood to an unwanted fetus, the wingnuts will continue to claim the moral high ground.