I fully agree with Michael - the burning IVF clinic (or building with a random box of embryos in it) scenario is a complete non sequitur. What if instead it was a choice between two babies, but only one of them is yours? Would that prove that the other child doesn't have 'sufficient' moral worth, and therefore we should be open to it being legal for their mother to kill them? Of course not.
Or what if it was 2 babies, one of whom you had met a few times before? I wager that most people would save the one they recognise, even if they have no familial obligations. Does that mean we can kill the other one? Cousin vs aunt? Bryan Caplan vs Michael Crone? They're all non sequiturs.
BONUS: what if the choice was between a baby and the last 500 fertilised embryos on earth (for which artificial wombs had been fully prepared elsewhere), and you and the baby are the same sex and are the last remaining born humans on earth? Would you choose the baby and let humanity end, or the embryos and keep the human race alive? Again, if somebody chooses the embryos, does that mean the baby's parents should be legally allowed to kill it?
I do not mean to be too harsh, especially since I really like Bryan. However given that he seems to be trying to stake out some 'middle ground' position on bringing death to masses of innocent human beings, I believe the ridicule is wholly justified.
Edit - apparently I don't know what the word non sequitur means. Hopefully the reader who is smarter than I should be able to interpret the way I was intending to use it
Thank you both on this, good read and response. I especially found the Malawi framing novel and never thought about it that way. And I'm not even a secular pro-lifer, in fact I'm a legamoron spiteful pro-choicer to the point I'm legally ok with abortion up until the seventy-first trimester though morally I'm a religious pro-lifer.
The percentage of frozen embryos who end up being born is on the order of one in 10. It still seems monstrous to choose a box of 500 embryos over one child.
I agree. But I'm also pretty disgusted at assigning them so little value that those that wrongfully destroy them against parents wishes don't have any punishment. If I went through IVF and the clinic killed my embryos against my will I'd be pissed.
That's just a variant of the trolley problem where the trolley doesn't have a 100% fatality rate AND it's riders are centenarian invalids with stage 4 cancer. The secular abortion argument has always fundamentally been, in modern times, when does a river become the ocean in a world of oceanphile ocean supremacists because water is irrelevant.
Does Crone ground belief in the personhood of embryos in the idea that they become ensouled at conception? If not, I wonder what his opinion would be in a thought experiment where we have a bunch of test tubes which each contain a single sperm swimming towards a single ovum, but the distance is large enough that fertilization won’t happen if the tubes aren’t rescued from the fire. Also assume that if they are rescued, there is a very high probability of fertilization, and all the resulting zygotes can be easily extracted and placed in artificial wombs.
turnaway-study, a landmark longitudinal study that followed nearly 1,000 women who either received an abortion or were turned away because they were past a clinic's gestational limit.
Women who were denied an abortion and subsequently gave birth:
By the end of five years, 96% of women who gave birth after being denied an abortion reported that they no longer wished they had had the abortion.
It’s not about the value of embryos or fetuses; it’s about the future and the consequences of the decision.
Abortion is morally wrong but why should that dictate what a woman must do with her own body? Why should it be unlawful (or unjust) for a woman to terminate her pregnancy? The libertarian conclusion based on women (all individuals) owning their own bodies makes it her right to end the life of the fetus. This doesn’t make it the morally correct choice. Morality doesn’t control human actions or just laws.
There are countless thought experiments that illustrate this point. Not saving a drowning child in a shallow fountain would be immoral but not unlawful. Having a choice (the right to make a decision) doesn’t make it morally correct to take action, but it does make it a free choice. Liberty isn’t about prejudging individual choices by the probable outcomes; it’s about protecting the freedom of individuals to choose and to live with their outcomes—good, bad or neutral.
Re: embryos and “artificial wombs”. I would agree that embryo preservation would be much more compelling in an era of functional artificial wombs. In fact, imo there would be no further need for abortion per se. Unwanted pregnancies can simply be transferred to such “wombs”, and the state can do whatever it sees fit with these future babies (ie either way, no longer the pregnant woman’s problem).
But since such artificial wombs aren’t currently an option, that argument against Caplan’s hypothetical treatment of embryos (and by extension, the argument against abortion) has no bearing on today’s reality.
Re: Turnaway study: I wonder if the results would be different for women who obtained their abortions long before the peri-cutoff time frame. I’m also not sure how prevalent or accessible mifepristone was during the study timeframe.
I don't agree with that, it's the same false point-of-viability argument many pro-abortionist make. Morality isn't based on the technical capacity of the moment IMHO. One can make other moral arguments around abortion but not that one as intent is what matters morally speaking.
My position on abortion is entirely based on viability.
When the only living being in the universe who can sustain a fetus (ie not even anyone’s “god” can contribute diddly squat) is the woman (ie prior to the point of viability), I’m 100% her body her choice. Why should the state be able to obligate a woman to be a fetal incubator when it can’t do the job itself? That’s why I’m fine with abortion on demand up to the point of viability.
But this changes if you have an “artificial womb”. Now the state can take over the job from day 1. In such a reality, there really would be no need to ”abort”….any woman who doesn’t want to be a fetal incubator can simply transfer said fetus to said incubator, and walk away. It does imply that “the state” assumes all responsibility for the fetus, financial and otherwise, thereafter.
I take a more techno-futurist view: At some point, we will have artificial womb technology. Removing the “results of conception” for indefinite preservation and later incubation will be a relatively frivolous and inexpensive task.
Within a few generations of living with this technology, all other things being equal, the most likely outcome is that people will regard abortion as a barbaric, misguided, and currently-unnecessary-except-in-emergencies practice, the same way as we view leeching and trepanation.
That latter analogy IMO is particularly informative: trepanation is still *done* today in some situations where it can relieve cranial pressure. We just do it for scientifically based reasons, not ones founded in old ignorance like “humors” theory.
I fully agree with Michael - the burning IVF clinic (or building with a random box of embryos in it) scenario is a complete non sequitur. What if instead it was a choice between two babies, but only one of them is yours? Would that prove that the other child doesn't have 'sufficient' moral worth, and therefore we should be open to it being legal for their mother to kill them? Of course not.
Or what if it was 2 babies, one of whom you had met a few times before? I wager that most people would save the one they recognise, even if they have no familial obligations. Does that mean we can kill the other one? Cousin vs aunt? Bryan Caplan vs Michael Crone? They're all non sequiturs.
BONUS: what if the choice was between a baby and the last 500 fertilised embryos on earth (for which artificial wombs had been fully prepared elsewhere), and you and the baby are the same sex and are the last remaining born humans on earth? Would you choose the baby and let humanity end, or the embryos and keep the human race alive? Again, if somebody chooses the embryos, does that mean the baby's parents should be legally allowed to kill it?
I do not mean to be too harsh, especially since I really like Bryan. However given that he seems to be trying to stake out some 'middle ground' position on bringing death to masses of innocent human beings, I believe the ridicule is wholly justified.
Edit - apparently I don't know what the word non sequitur means. Hopefully the reader who is smarter than I should be able to interpret the way I was intending to use it
Thank you both on this, good read and response. I especially found the Malawi framing novel and never thought about it that way. And I'm not even a secular pro-lifer, in fact I'm a legamoron spiteful pro-choicer to the point I'm legally ok with abortion up until the seventy-first trimester though morally I'm a religious pro-lifer.
The percentage of frozen embryos who end up being born is on the order of one in 10. It still seems monstrous to choose a box of 500 embryos over one child.
I agree. But I'm also pretty disgusted at assigning them so little value that those that wrongfully destroy them against parents wishes don't have any punishment. If I went through IVF and the clinic killed my embryos against my will I'd be pissed.
That's just a variant of the trolley problem where the trolley doesn't have a 100% fatality rate AND it's riders are centenarian invalids with stage 4 cancer. The secular abortion argument has always fundamentally been, in modern times, when does a river become the ocean in a world of oceanphile ocean supremacists because water is irrelevant.
Does Crone ground belief in the personhood of embryos in the idea that they become ensouled at conception? If not, I wonder what his opinion would be in a thought experiment where we have a bunch of test tubes which each contain a single sperm swimming towards a single ovum, but the distance is large enough that fertilization won’t happen if the tubes aren’t rescued from the fire. Also assume that if they are rescued, there is a very high probability of fertilization, and all the resulting zygotes can be easily extracted and placed in artificial wombs.
turnaway-study, a landmark longitudinal study that followed nearly 1,000 women who either received an abortion or were turned away because they were past a clinic's gestational limit.
Women who were denied an abortion and subsequently gave birth:
By the end of five years, 96% of women who gave birth after being denied an abortion reported that they no longer wished they had had the abortion.
It’s not about the value of embryos or fetuses; it’s about the future and the consequences of the decision.
Abortion is morally wrong but why should that dictate what a woman must do with her own body? Why should it be unlawful (or unjust) for a woman to terminate her pregnancy? The libertarian conclusion based on women (all individuals) owning their own bodies makes it her right to end the life of the fetus. This doesn’t make it the morally correct choice. Morality doesn’t control human actions or just laws.
There are countless thought experiments that illustrate this point. Not saving a drowning child in a shallow fountain would be immoral but not unlawful. Having a choice (the right to make a decision) doesn’t make it morally correct to take action, but it does make it a free choice. Liberty isn’t about prejudging individual choices by the probable outcomes; it’s about protecting the freedom of individuals to choose and to live with their outcomes—good, bad or neutral.
Re: embryos and “artificial wombs”. I would agree that embryo preservation would be much more compelling in an era of functional artificial wombs. In fact, imo there would be no further need for abortion per se. Unwanted pregnancies can simply be transferred to such “wombs”, and the state can do whatever it sees fit with these future babies (ie either way, no longer the pregnant woman’s problem).
But since such artificial wombs aren’t currently an option, that argument against Caplan’s hypothetical treatment of embryos (and by extension, the argument against abortion) has no bearing on today’s reality.
Re: Turnaway study: I wonder if the results would be different for women who obtained their abortions long before the peri-cutoff time frame. I’m also not sure how prevalent or accessible mifepristone was during the study timeframe.
I don't agree with that, it's the same false point-of-viability argument many pro-abortionist make. Morality isn't based on the technical capacity of the moment IMHO. One can make other moral arguments around abortion but not that one as intent is what matters morally speaking.
My position on abortion is entirely based on viability.
When the only living being in the universe who can sustain a fetus (ie not even anyone’s “god” can contribute diddly squat) is the woman (ie prior to the point of viability), I’m 100% her body her choice. Why should the state be able to obligate a woman to be a fetal incubator when it can’t do the job itself? That’s why I’m fine with abortion on demand up to the point of viability.
But this changes if you have an “artificial womb”. Now the state can take over the job from day 1. In such a reality, there really would be no need to ”abort”….any woman who doesn’t want to be a fetal incubator can simply transfer said fetus to said incubator, and walk away. It does imply that “the state” assumes all responsibility for the fetus, financial and otherwise, thereafter.
I take a more techno-futurist view: At some point, we will have artificial womb technology. Removing the “results of conception” for indefinite preservation and later incubation will be a relatively frivolous and inexpensive task.
Within a few generations of living with this technology, all other things being equal, the most likely outcome is that people will regard abortion as a barbaric, misguided, and currently-unnecessary-except-in-emergencies practice, the same way as we view leeching and trepanation.
That latter analogy IMO is particularly informative: trepanation is still *done* today in some situations where it can relieve cranial pressure. We just do it for scientifically based reasons, not ones founded in old ignorance like “humors” theory.