Logic & Fallacy

Confronted with any one of the many justifications for abortion, a crisis pregnancy center or other pro-life entity will have some quick, ready-made, and single-minded response at hand.    If a fetus is severely genetically deformed, a clinic protester would proclaim that it is better to suffer as long as "God sees fit" than not to live at all.  If the mother is simply unprepared or unwilling to have a child, the CPC would insist that the "baby" would still prefer to live, regardless of the conditions it would be born into.

 

Obviously, a 2-month-old fetus cannot choose anything, so a fully-developed human can only retroactively make this "choice."  In essence, the pro-life argument is that regardless of the quality of one's life, it is always better to come into existence than not to do so.  Philosophically, the water that this argument holds is pretty likely to break.  Haha. 

If my mother were, by chance, not pro-life - and the fact that she gave birth to me does not automatically negate that possibility - then I would not be conscious to regret that fact.  Now that I already exist, I suppose that I am grateful for the events that made my birth possible, but that in no way implies that the world would somehow be worse off if I had never been conceived or born. Given that a hypothetical person who does not exist is ambivalent of that fact, non-existence cannot really be a negative.  Pain and unfortunate life circumstances, however, are decidedly less neutral states of being.

The absurdity of this line of reasoning was highlighted much more aptly by everyone's favorite atheist, biologist, and sometimes pro-choice philosopher, Richard Dawkins.  Even though I think Dawkins is often unnecessarily confrontational (not to mention overly arrogant for a biologist who has essentially no significant scientific findings to his name) I have included the following fairly brilliant article below, with full rights to Dick.  Enjoy.

The Great Tim Tebow Fallacy

Q: The conservative Christian group Focus on the Family is sponsoring a pro-life ad, featuring football star Tim Tebow, during Sunday's Super Bowl. Should CBS show the ad? Should CBS allow other faith-based groups to buy Super Bowl ads promoting their beliefs on social issues? Is a major sporting event, or a TV ad campaign, an appropriate venue for discussing such vital and divisive culture-war issues like abortion?

I gather that Tim Tebow is extremely good at football. That's just as well, for he certainly isn't very good at thinking. Perhaps the fact that he was home schooled by missionary parents is to blame.

The following is what passes for logic in the Tebow mind. His mother was advised by doctors to abort him, but she refused, which is why Tim is here. So abortion is a bad thing. Masterful conclusion.

It is a version of what, following the great Nobel-Prizewinning biologist Peter Medawar, I have called the Great Beethoven Fallacy.

Versions of the Great Beethoven Fallacy are attributed to various Christian apologists, and the details vary. The following is the version favoured by Norman St John Stevas, a British Conservative Member of Parliament. One doctor to another:

"About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic. The mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?"

"I would have terminated the pregnancy."

"Then you would have murdered Beethoven."

It is amazing how many people are bamboozled by this spectacularly stupid argument. Setting aside the simple falsehood that Ludwig van Beethoven was the fifth child in his family (he was actually the eldest), the falsehood that any of his siblings was born blind, deaf or dumb, and the falsehood that his father was syphilitic, we are left with the 'logic'. As Peter Medawar, writing with his wife, Jean Medawar, said,

"The reasoning behind this odious little argument is breathtakingly fallacious . . . the world is no more likely to be deprived of a Beethoven by abortion than by chaste absence from intercourse."

If you follow the 'pro-life' logic to its conclusion, a fertile woman is guilty of something equivalent to murder every time she refuses an offer of copulation. Incidentally, 'pro life' always means pro human life, never animal life although an adult cow or monkey is obviously far more capable of feeling pain and fear than a human fetus. But the profoundly un-evolutionary nature of this terminology is another story and I'll set it on one side.

The sperm that conceived Tim Tebow was part of an ejaculate of (at an average estimate) 40 million. If any one of them had won the race to Mrs Tebow's ovum instead of the one that did, Tim would not have been born, somebody else would. Probably not such a good quarterback but - we can but hope - a better logician, who might have survived the home schooling and broken free. That is not the point. The point is that every single one of us is lucky to be alive against hyper-astronomical odds. Tim Tebow owes his existence not just to his mother's refusal to have an abortion. He owes his existence to the fact that his parents had intercourse precisely when they did, not a minute sooner or later. Then before that they had to meet and decide to marry. The same is true of all four of his grandparents, all eight of his great grandparents, and so on back.

Religious apologists are unimpressed by this kind of argument because, they say, there is a distinction between snuffing out a life that is already in existence (as in abortion) and failure to bring life into existence in the first place. It's not a distinction that survives analytical thought, however. Look at it from the point of view of Tim's unborn sister (let us say), who would have been conceived two months later if only Tim had been aborted. Admittedly, she is not in a position to complain of her non-existence. But then nor would Tim have been in a position to complain of his non-existence, if he had been aborted. You need a functioning nervous system in order to complain, or regret, or feel wistful, or feel pain, or miss the life that you could have had. Unconceived babies don't have a nervous system. Nor do aborted fetuses. As far as anything that matters is concerned, an aborted fetus has exactly the same mental and moral status as any of the countless trillions of unconceived babies. At least, that is true of early abortions, which means the vast majority.

The fact that the Tim Tebow advertisement is a load of unthought-through nonsense is no reason to ban it. That would infringe our valued principle of free speech. The best that the rest of us can do is point out, to anyone that will listen despite our lack of money to pay for such advertisements, that it is nonsense. As I have just done.

"Population," or "The World Is Not Enough"

When the Supreme Court delivered its famous Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, it upheld a woman's right to choose based on the Constitution's guarantee of a right to privacy.  This makes perfect sense:  the prevention or termination of pregnancy is, and should be, a private matter, and thus the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman alone.  I contend, however, that the opposite does not hold true:  the decision to give birth is not a matter of privacy.  A woman who has an abortion affects only herself; bringing another human being into the world, on the other hand, immediately impacts the mother, the newborn individual, the larger community, and the very fate of the planet.

The concept of a population's carrying capacity is something we all learned about in high school.  The idea is that a population of organisms will increase in size until it reaches a set number, determined by resource availability and competition pressure.  After this point, large scale death will prevent further population growth.  population size will oscillate around the point of the carrying capacity, but increased death rates and reduced reproductive fitness will not allow population size to increase further.

http://www.goldiesroom.org/Note%20Packets/22%20Ecology/00%20Ecology--WHOLE.htm

We usually discuss such concepts of population in relation to yeast cells, mice, deer, etc.:  organisms to which we have no particular emotional attachment.  We have to be a lot more careful, though, when talking about the growth of the human population, since most of what we do is already an effort to deny that we are, by definition, animals, constrained by biological precepts.  The notion that we are somehow different from yeast cells, mice, or deer is enforced by the observation that our population's growth curve currently shows no indication of approaching a carrying capacity limit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/aqa/evolution/humansrev1.shtml

The fact that our population's growth curve has so far been uninhibited by starvation or disease seems to be testament to our high level of "success," reproductively speaking.  Nevertheless, though our world population will reach 7 billion this year, hunger, disease, and conflict are still taking their toll, killing millions each year even as new births more than compensate for this loss.  A little less than half of the world's 7 billion people currently live on under 2 USD a day.  And these are the communities whose populations are growing the fastest.

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins advanced the idea that exercising moderation in reproduction could actually be evolutionarily advantageous.  Producing many more offspring than can survive under certain environmental conditions is, evolutionarily speaking, wasteful.  Likewise, reproducing at an unchecked rate will quickly deplete resources and is also a terrible evolutionary strategy.  For these reasons, the population of a certain organism will stay relatively constant over time, and when population pressure begins to increase, the organism will (unconsciously, of course) curb its rate of reproduction to avoid a dangerous scarcity of resources somewhere down the line.  

Human reproduction, however, has proceeded at an explosive rate, which Dawkins attributes to modern medicine, the welfare state, and complete failure to look to the future.  We may have been reproductively successful during the last five hundred years, but that is small change in the span of evolutionary time.  Our current reproductive strategy is, to say the least, unsustainable, and may prevent us from seeing another five hundred years.  As Dawkins says, "The one thing animal populations do not do is go on increasing indefinitely."

http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/ballantine-books/14

Unfortunately, population discussions are not politically correct, and tend to conjure up dystopian images of calculated killings and mass sterilization programs.  Furthermore, the discomfort with the issue belongs to those at every stage along the entire political spectrum.  Regardless of the environmental or societal impact, argue conservatives and liberals alike, the human right of reproduction is too sacrosanct to curtail.  Thus we talk about population growth in positive, rather than normative terms:  "How will we emend farming techniques and colonize other planets to keep up with the human race's inevitable increase?" Yet the human population has the potential to double in less than a hundred years; we can't afford to be so magnanimous forever.  In a stand-off between biology and political correctness, biology will always prevail in the end.