I guess the conclusion of whether the doctor's telling is a touching example of saving lives, an attempt at rationalization for taking them, or somewhere in between depends on which values one uses in their thinking. That is to say: 1. How much is a fetal human "worth" compared to a born human; 2. What are the odds of death involved for the parties in the situation; 3. How much is quality of life worth compared to life?
While we probably could not seriously find an objective and true value for the above, perhaps (BIG perhaps) if we as a society could at least talk about it in these cold terms, we could be able to sit down and really hash out mutually agreeable and beneficial solutions (ex. all sides could express support & provide funding for programs that would increase post-natal quality of life instead of being afraid that any collaboration would be a "concession" to "the other side"). As it stands, our politicians and lobbyists will probably continue to create villains & heroes, thereby mobilizing & polarizing voters while doing nothing to actually better the situation for anyone involved.
1. Not very if you have heath insurance or an adopter lined up to pay your bills. Way too costly if you're alone and one of the working poor for whom insurance is a pipe dream and you have to pick and choose which bills to pay late based on how close each one is to the collections office. Maybe food stamps, WIC, welfare can help out here. 2. See 1. 3. If you want to hand the baby over to THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, or any number of private agencies, I think you can get a pretty decent amount of money to pay for care, assuming you are young, healthy, don't have any genetic disorders and are white. Also assuming that the baby turns out healthy, free of birth defects and white. Even if you did this, it's assuming that you can keep your job during pregnancy, (which, for me anyway, would not be an option-some of the chemicals I handle are mutagenic and teratogenic, so I'd be just as compassionate to have an abortion, rather than a stillbirth some months later...) or find a comparable job before you get visibly pregnant and people stop considering you once they lay eyes on you.
Re: Purely talking about "cost" in terms of money,
(I understand that Massachusetts is currently revolutionizing healthcare for the people who "chose" not to buy it before the mandate, but, we're just one state.)
Re: Purely talking about "cost" in terms of money,
Unless your unwanted child goes straight to a loving couple in the place of its birth, there are additional monetary costs. And we haven't begun to touch the human costs.
The human costs are trouble, because it's *so* dependant on situation.
I'm pretty sure you can find agencies who will basically "buy" your pregnancy, that is, the agency charges $50,000 or so to the adoptive couple, who foot the bill for pre-natal care, birth services and what-not. Of course, then you're just a baby-gestating machine, and heaven forbid you develop some kind of fondness for the spawn in your gut, you're left either facing a crushing separation or financial ruin which will prevent you from giving the child a health life.
Oh, and I forgot the most common option- go without any form of prenatal or birth care, have the baby in a public restroom and drop it off in the nearest fire station, hospital or dumpster. There's worse things you can do to that "product of conception" than abortion at 8 weeks, like throwing it out a 4th story window, or leaving it in the rain to starve or freeze after a proper gestation...
Agreed that the questions you list are important. What I would add is that if the nation could reach some point of consensus on what responses to the previous moral questions of worth mean, then, as a society, we would be in a much better position to collaborate on managing the economic cost, such as those you list.
In other words, if enough people agreed that it is unacceptable to have millions of people continually suffer from a lack of social justice that leads the fear of violence, economic ruin, etc., to trump the rights of life, liberty, etc., (creating a situation akin to Sophie's Choice), then the subsequent resources allocated could benefit all those involved, with much less division or animosity than is usually found.
1. Pregnancy cost - can be almost nothing (additional food & clothing, minimal doctor's visits WITH good insurance) up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (high risk pregnancies, needing to take long unpaid leave, etc.)
2. Rearing an unwanted child - depends on how "unwanted". If the kid is bounced around the system for a couple of years (ie. totally unwanted), the cost skyrockets, because they will have learned bad habits from their parents and foster parents, and may need constant supervision to prevent them from hurting themselves or others. On the flip side, private agency adoption is really expensive, so a lot of couples who WANT to adopt can't afford that route and are scared by the risks posed by the foster care system.
3. Giving a child up for adoption - can vary from "adoptive parents pay YOU" to the normal costs of pregnancy & birth; not to mention emotional costs.
You're not a very imaginative thinker if you can't imagine fates worse than death, and you aren't very good at statistics if you think your own experience as an American is normal.
You might have been conscripted, raped, and beaten into becoming a child soldier in the Congo, for instance. Throughout much of human (pre)history, you'd have had a fair chance of dying from infection from some wound inflicted by the villagers 5 miles away.
If you're addressing the immediately previous comment, then I'm at a total loss to understand your comment.
However, if your referring to the tone of the entire conversation, I can see what your saying (though I must say your interpretation is off). Many here (not just me) have only been talking about this in terms of outside pressures (money, social justice, violence, etc.,), as if the people involved were not active moral agents.
I think this was done so as to focus on what could be changed to better the situation for those who wish it were different; if someone would get an abortion no matter what, then there is probably little that increased assistance, etc., would do to change that.
Actually, now that I think about it, the article itself seemed to set the tone (that of lack of agency) for the resulting conversations; it makes it seem as if only the doctor could do anything to help those involved.
(I really wish I could edit posts, but not enough to spend money)
Thirdly, per the analysis in Freakonomics, those who are aborted due to the economic circumstances of their parents would, previously, have grown up to disproportionately become violent criminals. Consequently, the legalization of abortion in the United States was responsible for a remarkable decline in crime when those legally aborted children failed to reach maturity.
Man, I loved Freakonomics! Anyway, while said book did state that legalized abortion certainly reduced crime, it also stated that it is an extremely inefficient way to do so (even without considering moral issues):
[1% of the 1.5 million fetuses aborted/year in the U.S.] is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one one-hundredth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and lower crime is, by an economist's reckoning, terribly inefficient." - p.144
So I think it would still depend on how one does the calculus.
The only thing any of us ought to know is that using invectives & dogma hinders true progress and that it's best to be honest and approach the issue from as many angles as possible: moral, intellectual, social, etc.,
Simply because I and many others, including pro-abortion-choice people, arrive at a non-zero value for the fetus doesn't mean it's due to an defect in any of the above.
Weasel. You know a fetus isn't the same thing as a person, yet are deliberately choosing language to distort that dissimilarity. And then, you have the temerity to accuse -me- of semantics.
You read the article... so, you tell me... how many women dead of septic shock is a fetus worth?
1. The reason why I have tried not to use the word "person" is so as not to invite extraneous connotations (i.e. semantics); if the use of "person" implies which humans have rights, than its use would serve to beg the question in this situation.
2. The quote first posted & that I responded to was not about therapeutic abortions. The main point of me posting was not to debate abortion itself, but to question our reactions to how we think about it, and how people could work together to make "safe, legal, and rare" a reality. If a similar tale of a priest changing a woman's mind about abortion and saving her fetus made the rounds, many of us would probably think *cough* "bullshit" *cough*, while others would make some less-than-kind comments about the lack of moral authority anyone in the church has nowadays. I was merely trying to apply the same eye I would hope to have about the priest's story to this one.
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Fetal Calculus
That is to say:
1. How much is a fetal human "worth" compared to a born human;
2. What are the odds of death involved for the parties in the situation;
3. How much is quality of life worth compared to life?
While we probably could not seriously find an objective and true value for the above, perhaps (BIG perhaps) if we as a society could at least talk about it in these cold terms, we could be able to sit down and really hash out mutually agreeable and beneficial solutions (ex. all sides could express support & provide funding for programs that would increase post-natal quality of life instead of being afraid that any collaboration would be a "concession" to "the other side"). As it stands, our politicians and lobbyists will probably continue to create villains & heroes, thereby mobilizing & polarizing voters while doing nothing to actually better the situation for anyone involved.
The real issues
2. How costly is rearing an unwanted child?
3. How costly is giving a child up for adoption?
Purely talking about "cost" in terms of money,
2. See 1.
3. If you want to hand the baby over to THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, or any number of private agencies, I think you can get a pretty decent amount of money to pay for care, assuming you are young, healthy, don't have any genetic disorders and are white. Also assuming that the baby turns out healthy, free of birth defects and white. Even if you did this, it's assuming that you can keep your job during pregnancy, (which, for me anyway, would not be an option-some of the chemicals I handle are mutagenic and teratogenic, so I'd be just as compassionate to have an abortion, rather than a stillbirth some months later...) or find a comparable job before you get visibly pregnant and people stop considering you once they lay eyes on you.
Re: Purely talking about "cost" in terms of money,
Re: Purely talking about "cost" in terms of money,
Some times, compromise is death and one party in a debate is 100% correct.
re: 3
Re: Careful, now
I'm pretty sure you can find agencies who will basically "buy" your pregnancy, that is, the agency charges $50,000 or so to the adoptive couple, who foot the bill for pre-natal care, birth services and what-not. Of course, then you're just a baby-gestating machine, and heaven forbid you develop some kind of fondness for the spawn in your gut, you're left either facing a crushing separation or financial ruin which will prevent you from giving the child a health life.
Oh, and I forgot the most common option- go without any form of prenatal or birth care, have the baby in a public restroom and drop it off in the nearest fire station, hospital or dumpster. There's worse things you can do to that "product of conception" than abortion at 8 weeks, like throwing it out a 4th story window, or leaving it in the rain to starve or freeze after a proper gestation...
Re: Careful, now
Re: The real issues
Very costly.
Worth vs. Cost
In other words, if enough people agreed that it is unacceptable to have millions of people continually suffer from a lack of social justice that leads the fear of violence, economic ruin, etc., to trump the rights of life, liberty, etc., (creating a situation akin to Sophie's Choice), then the subsequent resources allocated could benefit all those involved, with much less division or animosity than is usually found.
Re: The real issues
2. Rearing an unwanted child - depends on how "unwanted". If the kid is bounced around the system for a couple of years (ie. totally unwanted), the cost skyrockets, because they will have learned bad habits from their parents and foster parents, and may need constant supervision to prevent them from hurting themselves or others. On the flip side, private agency adoption is really expensive, so a lot of couples who WANT to adopt can't afford that route and are scared by the risks posed by the foster care system.
3. Giving a child up for adoption - can vary from "adoptive parents pay YOU" to the normal costs of pregnancy & birth; not to mention emotional costs.
Re: Fetal Calculus
Party X is shooting Party Y. Party Y is not shooting Party X. Party Y claims to be against murder.
I only need to listen to X... or start shooting Y.
Re: Fetal Calculus
Re: Fetal Calculus
Cartoon or poet, I guess the only rebuttal one can offer is to say that they're glad their parents were mean enough to not be as kind as Homer.
Re: Fetal Calculus
You might have been conscripted, raped, and beaten into becoming a child soldier in the Congo, for instance. Throughout much of human (pre)history, you'd have had a fair chance of dying from infection from some wound inflicted by the villagers 5 miles away.
Re: Fetal Calculus
Re: Fetal Calculus
Re: Moral Agency
However, if your referring to the tone of the entire conversation, I can see what your saying (though I must say your interpretation is off). Many here (not just me) have only been talking about this in terms of outside pressures (money, social justice, violence, etc.,), as if the people involved were not active moral agents.
I think this was done so as to focus on what could be changed to better the situation for those who wish it were different; if someone would get an abortion no matter what, then there is probably little that increased assistance, etc., would do to change that.
Re: Agency in the Story
Re: Agency in the Story
Re: Agency in the Story
Re: Agency in the Story
Re: Agency in the Story
Re: Fetal Calculus
Thirdly, per the analysis in Freakonomics, those who are aborted due to the economic circumstances of their parents would, previously, have grown up to disproportionately become violent criminals. Consequently, the legalization of abortion in the United States was responsible for a remarkable decline in crime when those legally aborted children failed to reach maturity.
Re: Fetal Calculus
Man, I loved Freakonomics! Anyway, while said book did state that legalized abortion certainly reduced crime, it also stated that it is an extremely inefficient way to do so (even without considering moral issues):So I think it would still depend on how one does the calculus.
Re: Fetal Calculus
Re: Ought
Simply because I and many others, including pro-abortion-choice people, arrive at a non-zero value for the fetus doesn't mean it's due to an defect in any of the above.
Re: Ought
You read the article... so, you tell me... how many women dead of septic shock is a fetus worth?
Re: Language
2. The quote first posted & that I responded to was not about therapeutic abortions. The main point of me posting was not to debate abortion itself, but to question our reactions to how we think about it, and how people could work together to make "safe, legal, and rare" a reality. If a similar tale of a priest changing a woman's mind about abortion and saving her fetus made the rounds, many of us would probably think *cough* "bullshit" *cough*, while others would make some less-than-kind comments about the lack of moral authority anyone in the church has nowadays. I was merely trying to apply the same eye I would hope to have about the priest's story to this one.
Re: Language
Re: Language
Re: Language
Re: Language
Re: Language
Re: Language