Supreme court overturns Roe v. Wade

The Sandbox Political Topics
2046

I love that they had to amend the bill to say “patient” instead of “woman” or “pregnant woman”, because they realized this would allow pregnant trans men to not have their privacy invaded.

In the unamended version the patient would have to list their top 3 reasons for abortion, if more than one reason applied. So the woman would have to decide “I guess the threat of dying is slightly more important to me than the fact I was raped?”

It’s also interesting to see possible reasons for abortion that they struck from the bill. Things like “The woman does not feel mature enough to raise a baby” was struck out. More interestingly, “the woman fears that such woman would neglect or abuse the baby” was struck out.

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2048

I’m late to the party, but I know that excess zygotes/embryos can be donated. I was recently speaking with a couple who had two kids via IVF and donated their remaining embryos. So they have biological kids running around that aren’t actually theirs. Not entirely unlike putting an already-born baby up for adoption.

A woman can be capable of carrying a pregnancy to term while either lacking a male partner, or her male partner’s sperm cannot successfully fertilize an egg, or maybe her own eggs are bad but her uterus is fine. Not my area of expertise, but that’s my understanding.

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2049

I mean, I think the stats are similar with sex. Sex produces fertilized eggs that don’t implant in the uterus all the time.

I don’t think the moral problem is the fertilized eggs that are inserted in the woman in the hopes that they’ll implant but don’t make it. That’s pretty normal.

I think the bigger issue is that they extract X viable eggs, they attempt to fertilize X-Y eggs, X-Y-Z eggs are successfully fertilized, then X-Y-Z-W eggs are inserted into the woman’s uterus. Then she successfully gets pregnant on the first try.

The W fertilized eggs that are not needed may then be discarded.

Any of X or Y or Z or W may end up being 0, because there is so much uncertainty. But when W ends up not being 0 that’s an ethical issue for many pro-lifers since it’s a fertilized egg we’re talking about and if we’re purposely trying to kill it (rather than trying to give it every opportunity to grow into a full fledged human) then that’s potentially bad.

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2050

Well, if you’re Christian then all but one. I mean, he did die, but it was just temporary.

2051

In that case, it seems wildly immoral to allow sex (under anti-choice logic.)

It’s my assumption that if the stats for successful first-time IVF, which is performed almost entirely on people with fertility issues, and sex are similar, then IVF on a normally-fertile woman would be significantly more likely to implant.

Under that logic, unprotected sex has a significantly increased chance of producing and then killing a human being with rights and a soul. I’m finding various stats, but anywhere from 15-50% of unprotected sexual intercourse will produce and shortly thereafter kill a human.

Under IVF, any leftover embryos can be re-implanted into another woman. There would be no need to throw away any excess.

2052

Just to level set, here’s how i think IVF typically works. People who have actually been through it or have medical knowledge, please correct me.

1: the woman undergoes painful and risky hormonal manipulation to simultaneously ripen several eggs at once. Her risk continues for a while after the eggs are removed – i just spent a dance weekend organized by a woman who couldn’t dance at it, because her ovaries were still swollen from this procedure, and the doctor didn’t want her to engage in anything that jostled the ovaries.

2: ripe eggs are extracted with a needle, using some kind of imaging.

3: the eggs are fertilized with sperm that was collected in a way that’s icky, but not dangerous or painful to the man. :wink:

4: the resulting zygotes are examined to see if they look healthy. Any that look good are frozen.

Freezing kills some of the zygotes. But the success rate using defrosted zygotes is higher than with fresh ones, and apparently, it’s basically a wash in terms of total viable zygotes. Last i read, it was felt that freezing was a decent proxy for testing the viability of zygotes.

5: the woman undergoes different painful and risky hormonal treatments to prepare the womb for implantation.

6: when the time is right, if all looks good, a zygote is defrosted and popped into the oven. The woman is then instructed to lie on her back for a while “to let gravity do the rest”.

They used to insert multiple zygotes at once, but i think it’s now considered unethical to implant more than 2 at a time, and most places do 1 at a time, at least among my friends.

After than, it’s pretty much like a normal pregnancy with a lot of monitoring.

The remaining zygotes can be stored in the freezer for a long time.

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2053

Traditionally, Christians believed that the fetus was ensouled around the time of quickening. Buddhism teachers that souls look for fetuses to inhabit, and move in sometime after quickening and before birth. Judaism teaches that the newborn is ensouled when it takes its first breath. (Because that’s how God ensouled Adam and Eve.)

I think it’s kinda a stretch to believe that a zygote, or a culture of human cells, for that matter, is a container that can hold a human soul, whether you think the soul is a separate metaphysical thing or a metaphor for what makes us human beings, and not just a lump of matter.

2054

Considering what earlier people knew of biology it isn’t unreasonable for them to associate quickening with ensoulment. However, quickening is when the mother notices the child, not a change in the child itself.

And there is no need for a metaphysical thing like a soul to have a certain (or any) size at all.

2055

They didn’t understand biology like we do, but had a broad, sophisticated model of the soul. I believe Thomas Aquinas speculated that an animal soul was responsible for early human development, and that this was eventually replaced, or maybe extended, with a rational human soul. I don’t know any more details than that, but I assume they were familiar with different levels of development due to miscarriages.

This sophisticated view included considering the human body as an integral part of human nature. Both Augustine and Thomas would both say that the “soul” is not the person. The person is the soul combined with the body. The soul needs the faculties of the body to function.

It seems hard to imagine how a soul could function in a zygote. This is how I interpreted Lucy’s statement about its “size”, not as the extent of spatial extension.

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2056

That depends on whether you imagine the soul develops as the body develops. I’d say the soul is what people considered the animating principle of the being. I don’t think the discussion among theologians is whether the body has a soul, but whether is it an (hemi) eternal soul.

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2057

Suppose the soul is animating “force” behind the person.

Then the soul would need a body to animate. And the person would be this combination, the body and the force of animation.

Conversely, if a body cannot behave in a human way, even in principle, then I do not know how it makes logical sense to say it has a human soul. Could a rock have a human soul? It has no potential ability to do anything human, to display human “animation” as you called it. I don’t think a rock could have a human soul.

What about a zygote? I don’t know of any uniquely human behavior of a zygote, either. It is certainly alive. I think it behaves pretty much like any other mammalian zygote, maybe even like a sea urchin zygote for a while.

This is very different from a newborn baby. The baby does not have the full self consciousness of an adult (or even of a 3 year old), but sets about building that consciousness in uniquely human ways.

2058

That doesn’t follow. That’s like saying gas is what makes a car go. So, if a car isn’t capable of going, it doesn’t make logical sense to say it has any gas in it.

2059

They can be, but they often are NOT. I believe they are considered the property of the female who produced the egg (maybe also the male who produced the sperm? Not sure about that.) and it is at her (their?) discretion whether to donate the leftovers or not.

2060

Right, in that example I’m using anti-choicer logic. In this world, life begins at conception, and it’s murder to throw away those embryos. The only acceptable choice is to make certain those ensouled human beings with rights find a womb. This is more important than any given woman’s right to not carry a baby.

2061

Do you mean that you think it’s a stretch to believe that the zygote is more than a container that can hold a human soul? It doesn’t seem like a stretch to believe that it is a container (which is what you wrote but not my understanding of your own moral position on early abortions).

2062

Wow, you know what an easier assumption is?

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2063

I wrote something long about how it was interesting to have a long discussion about souls that begins with “suppose the soul is” and then proceeding, but eventually deleted it.

2064

What you’re saying is: You cut yourself with your own Occam’s Razor?

2065

I would say gas is a necessary ingredient for the mechanism, the car, to go. The car doesn’t have any agency of its own.

We have to step into a different outlook with this idea of the soul. The human has agency. The are able to live (animate) in ways uniquely human. The soul is not the cause of that. It is that ability. It is that potential agency that a person has.

This is not the same as treating the human body as a mechanism and saying soul is the fuel that runs it, or the external force that moves it.

2066

Sounds like you have an a priori assumption about birth being a dividing line. Can you expound on the differences in a newborn baby and a newborn chimp? Or are the differences more about what a parent does with the baby? The zygote grows in human ways because it is a human zygote. Sure, human life looks very different at that stage, but life changes over time.