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.

Pain in the Ass

An bill making its way through the Ohio legislature has attracted a lot of attention lately for proposing that abortions be outlawed after a fetal heartbeat can be detected - which occurs about 6 or 7 weeks after conception.  This law - HB 125 - is not only in direct defiance of Roe v. Wade (which mandates that abortion rights not be violated prior to viability, currently defined at 24 weeks of gestation), but was also recently the subject of a court case in which a pregnant woman was given a ultrasound in the courtroom when her 9-week-old fetus was called to "testify."

Similarly, many states require that a pregnant woman have an ultrasound and listen to her fetus' heartbeat prior to obtaining an abortion.  These ridiculous bills are founded on the sappily sweet "Touched by an Angel" sentiment that a beating heart on an ultrasound could never cause anything but joy and reverence.  Naturally, however, lots of organisms have circulatory organs just as complex as the heart tube found in the 7-week fetus:  the cattle and pigs we don't hesitate to slaughter for meat, for example.  Maybe McDonald's patrons should be legally required to listen to a bovine heartbeat before deciding whether to order a McRib.

As does a major myocardial infarction, fatass

What worries those of a slightly more scientific, less sentimental nature is the issue of embryonic brain development and fetal pain.  After all, no brain, no pain.  The fetal pain argument has recently led five US states (Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Idaho) to ban abortions after 20 weeks of gestation - once again, in direct opposition to Roe v. Wade.  Now, since I just finished writing a paper on fetal cortical development for my Developmental Biology course, I'll try to reproduce the gist of the argument here to dispel any and all concerns for fetal pain in abortion.

The cerebral cortex, the portion of the brain necessary for thought, language, and pain sensation, begins forming around 8 weeks post conception, when the anterior and posterior regions of the dorsal telencephalon start secreting signals to pattern the cortical layout.  From this point, cortical progenitor cells in the subventricular zone begin differentiating into glial cells and neurons, and neurons begin the process of migrating upward to the cortical plate.  Once they have reached their destination, they will undergo myelination and form synapses with other neurons, in a process which will continue throughout development and even after birth.

http://www.humpath.com/spip.php?article5287&id_document=4056

The brain of a 22-week-old human fetus

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 88% of abortions occur prior to 12 weeks of gestation.  At 12 weeks after conception, the regions of the cortex have been specified, but neuronal migration is just beginning, and will not be completed for at least another month.  The neuronal circuits that are needed for sensory perception will not form until much later, 24 weeks at the earliest.

Neurons beginning their migration

Neurobiologists are and have been in agreement that a fetus cannot feel pain prior to 24 weeks of gestation, since the circuits needed for sensation are simply not present before that time (seriously, no brain, no pain).  Less than 2% of abortions occur after 20 weeks of gestation, and abortions are performed after the 24-week mark only in the most dire of situations.  So, an aborted fetus can not and will not feel pain.  Questions answered?  Problems solved?  If only.

"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.

Dividing Cells, Splitting Hairs

In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, a treatise condemning the use of contraceptives, Pope Paul VI famously established the Catholic church's official stance on all matters procreative.  In the 40-odd years since the publication of Humanae Vitae, the Church has not budged it its contra-contraception position, and Pope Paul VI's treatise has been lauded as "prophetic"for how it anticipated today's issues of reproductive ethics.  These aren't just echoes of the "be fruitful and multiply" argument, however.  Supporters of the Church claim that the Pope's views on birth control are even more relevant given that chemical contraception is "known" to induce abortions through preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo.  Thus contraception is not a lesser, separate evil, but is tantamount to abortion itself.

http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/scireport/appendixa.asp

A life begins... OR WILL IT????

It's not just the Catholics who have voiced this condemnation of the "abortifacient" properties of birth control.  The Evangelicals who fill the ranks of the pro-choice movement are similarly quick to criticize any use of "unnatural" hormonal contraceptives.  There is the outstanding example of the Duggar family, who believe that their use of the Pill caused the miscarriage of one of their pregnancies back in the '80s, and have spent the past two decades atoning for this crime by pushing the limits of human reproductive capacity.  Just a quick Google search will yield a bevy of emotionally-charged, poorly-researched, and often blatantly deceptive websites devoted to defaming all birth control use and equating contraceptives with murder.  (Notable examples including Birth Control is a Sin, Birth Control Causes Abortions, AbortionFacts.com, and perhaps most horrifying, PoisonedByThePill).  A common thread throughout these websites is that of deliberate deception at the hands of doctors and pharmacists.   Readers are urged to "read the fine print" and "wake up" - as if the entire medical profession were aligned in some giant conspiracy to kill Evangelical embryos for the good of Science and Atheism and Richard Dawkins.

From this movement has grown a plethora of misconceptions and taboos about the "Morning After Pill" and oral contraceptives.  Many women worldwide are misinformed about emergency contraception and its mechanism of action:  some actually mistake the Plan B pill with RU486, the "abortion pill."  Pro-life lobbying on this issue has also spawned “the Pharmacist’s Conscience Clause,” a provision which allows a pharmacist to withhold oral contraceptives and the "morning after pill” on moral grounds. A recent study estimated that 6% of American pharmacists actually withhold contraception - which probably makes it pretty difficult to purchase birth control in Kansas.  This poor understanding of emergency contraception deters many genuinely well-meaning women and couples from choosing Plan B following unprotected intercourse - which, of course, is the intended effect of the religious fear-mongering. 

Now, Pope Paul VI was not a doctor or a biologist, so I was interested in how he arrived at his understanding of the mechanism of action of birth control pills and emergency contraception.  So I popped on over to PubMed to see what relevant (and unbiased) information medical researchers had discovered on the topic.

But first, a little background on early embryonic development: the human embryo typically implants in the uterine wall at the blastocyst stage, approximately one week after fertilization, when it consists of 32 cells.  To prevent a subsequent pregnancy, the ovaries begin secreting progesterone, a hormone which inhibits further ovulation.  Progesterone also inhibits the process of sperm capacitation, which enables a sperm to fertilize an egg.  In addition, this hormone thins the lining of the endometrium - just like it does during the luteal phase, i.e. a menstrual period.

Both oral contraceptives and older versions of the Plan B pill (which is essentially a higher dose of the same thing) rely on progestrin, a synthetic form of progesterone, essentially to trick the body into believing that it is already pregnant.  Thus, ovulation and sperm capacitation do not occur, and the endometrial lining thins.  It is this capacity of progesterone which has conservatives jumping down throats and splitting hairs about what constitutes prevention vs. termination of pregnancy, and losing sleep over the fate of the human blastocyst.

http://www.glowm.com/?p=glowm.cml/section_view&articleid=2&SESSID=evpji2lnn7ah65gbjah4bgnc40

So let's see what a few decades of medical research have to say on the matter.  First, newer Levonorgestrel-based contraceptives (such as Plan B One-Step) can apparently only prevent ovulation, and cannot prevent pregnancy once ovulation has occurred.  No studies indicate that Levonorgestrel has any "abortifacient" capabilities.  Thus, Levonorgestrel is only 80% effective at preventing pregnancy.  The results of studies on progesterone-based pills are a little bit hazier:  some report "with mild confidence" that progesterone prevents implantation, while others deny this to be the case.  Most review articles state that the prevention of implantation is "possible in theory," but do not provide relevant statistics.  In contrast, the post-coital insertion of an IUD has been shown to prevent implantation of an embryo; Mifepristone, the "abortion pill," can be taken in small doses to produce the same effect.

The general medical consensus:  certain forms of emergency contraception (Mifepristone and IUDs) have the secondary effect of preventing embryonic implantation.  However, the most commonly-used form of emergency contraception (Levonorgestrel), does not act in this way.  In regards to the Pill, it is possible in theory that these contraceptives prevent the implantation of a fertilized embryo, but no study to date has strongly indicated that this is the case.  I speculate that the findings of such studies are complicated by the fact that, even in the absence of birth control, at least half of fertilized human ova do not successfully implant.  Here's a little graph I threw together about the prevalence possible fetal fates in the U.S.:

Needless to say, these stats are going to make Georgia Rep. Bobby Franklin's job very difficult if he in fact intends to investigate and press charges for every miscarriage that occurs in his state.  The majority of fertilized oocytes to not make it to be full-fledged humans, even without medical or chemical interventions.  Ultimately, it is difficult to determine how often emergency contraception prevents an embryo from implanting when God Himself is already doing such a good job of it.

"Life," and other such loaded words

Does life begin at conception?

It's a ridiculous question.  It is impossible to deny that a newly-fertilized zygote is alive, simply because it is not the clear alternative.  Cellular metabolism occurs from the beginning, and replication, the classic hallmark of life, soon follows.  Similarly, one must acknowledge that an unfertilized egg is also alive.  In fact, each one of a human female's 1 to 2-odd million ova has existed in a state of "suspended animation," somewhere between Meiosis I and II, since sometime early on in her own development.  Furthermore, since every living cell is the product of a mitotic division which produces two (usually) identical daughter cells, every ovum, sperm, or neuron, for that matter, is a sister of the very first primordial cell, traceable back through an unbroken and living line, bringing the "lifetime" of that single ovum to approximately 4 billion years.  Yes, a zygote is alive.

But this is not the true debate.  A bacterium is also undeniably alive, as is a cancerous tissue (as well as the chicken to be slaughtered and served for the church potluck), yet this biological definition of life is irrelevant.  The true question under consideration is whether "human-ness" begins with the fusion of a sperm and an ovum.  This is the question currently (and perpetually) at the heart of the debate on abortion, emergency contraception, and stem cell research.  An extreme version of this debate recently waged in Colorado, where lawmakers tried to pass a piece of legislation known as the "Fetal Personhood Amendment" (Amendment 62), a measure which would confer full legal standing on a human zygote, with understandably wide-reaching implications.  Yet this bill failed, perhaps because many of us, no matter how conscientious, no matter how religious, have an inherent difficulty equating a fetus with a person endowed with all the honors of human-ness.


To many, this human-ness is nothing other than a soul, a mystical essence of being which forms (or is in some way imparted by God Himself) precisely at the moment of fertilization, and persists in the individual until a car wreck or cancer forces it out of the lungs and up into Heaven.  Fortunately, most souls do not have to wait too long to make this escape - of all fertilized embryos, 50% do not implant in the uterus, and another 30% or so abort spontaneously because of congenital defects.  Most of these miscarriages occur even before the mother knows she is pregnant.  Thus, for every one child born, there are four zygotic or embryonic souls in Heaven.

http://docinthemachine.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/embryo-brochure.jpg

This is an 8-celled human embryo.  In which cell does the soul live?

Human-ness necessitates a capacity for feeling, for thought, and most importantly, for self-awareness - all functions which require a developed central nervous system (and more than 8 cells).  This is a quality that arises gradually, through the development of sensation and cognition and the acquisition of personal experience.  One might recall Aristotle's three-fold soul (vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual), whose layers each give rise to the next, and of which only the intellectual confers humanity.

I don't eat meat, but for those who do (and those who care to validate this practice), a plausible justification for the killing of beings fully capable of sensing pain is that animals - with some notable exceptions - do not possess the self-awareness necessary to fear death.  But then how much more so is this true for the fetus?