Monday, August 25, 2008

Just because you say it. . . .

One of the things that makes me crazy about the modern-day “conservative” movement is their seeming incapacity to comprehend just what the heck they’re saying.

For example, take the inane Pro-Life Across America [PLAA] billboards that have been kicking around for a number of years now. Here’s a typical example:

Just because you put the word are between two other concepts does not mean that the concepts are now magically identical. Embryos are smallish schoolchildren! Embryos are hard-to-see adults! Embryos are microminiaturized spacefaring bulldozers!

Dear Pro-Life Across America: Embryos are not, in fact, babies, and continuing to parrot such asinine nonsense does nothing to bolster your case. This is an embryo:

I’m pretty sure that’s not just a tiny baby. In fact, “baby” is a specific term for what you wind up with after the gestation process ends and delivery occurs. Babies are physiologically autonomous, if extremely dependent; embryos rely on the bloodstream of the mother in order to survive. Babies can interact. Embryos cannot. Babies have a functioning cerebral cortex. Embryos do not.

There is something admittedly haunting and evocative about these embryonic images.

But hanging words on them like “human” or “potential” is meaningless. Every cell in my body is human—brain cell to nose-hair follicle. And “potential” at such an early stage is a ridiculous thing to resort to. Anyone can turn out to be anything. The director of PLAA has the potential to become a murderer; should that lead to preemptive imprisonment?

The “debate,” if one can call such an emotional argument that, is constantly couched in absolute terms and nonsense equivalences by people such as these. It shouldn’t be. The crux of the abortion debate should be over the boundary between non-person and person; it should have nothing to do with species or potential or anything aside from how we define what a person is.

Biblically, this boundary occurred at birth—specifically, when the newborn drew breath. Groups like PLAA tend to point instead to Deuteronomy 12:23, which says “the blood is the life,” and point out that the embryonic heart starts beating at 18 days’ gestation (not really true; that doesn’t really get going until 35 days in or so). Using the Deuteronomy quote is disingenuous at best; that verse is talking about the Hebrew dietary laws. In full, it reads, “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.” Unless you’re actually eating embryos, this verse has no applicability.

A somewhat more telling verse is Exodus 21:22; in the King James Version, it reads, “If men strive [fight], and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow [no subsequent harm aside from the miscarriage]: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” Some English translations of the Septuagint version of the same verse make a further distinction: “And if two men strive and smite a woman with child, and her child be born imperfectly formed, he shall be forced to pay a penalty: as the woman’s husband may lay upon him, he shall pay with a valuation,” and goes on to say that if the fetus is “perfectly formed,” that the punishment will be “life for life, eye for eye,” and so on.

So the KJV considers the boundary to be birth; the Septuagint may consider the boundary to be as early as around week 18 of gestation (it isn’t until around the 20th week that fetuses really start looking the part).

In more enlightened times, the boundary was considered to be the “quickening,” that is, when the fetus started moving within the womb. This also occurred around weeks 18–21. In this century, it was determined to be “viability,” whether a fetus could survive outside the womb. With medical advances, this could wind up being as early as the 20th week.

Nowadays, we have much more insight into fetal brain development. The fetus is capable of movement as early as nine weeks, but then, movement is insufficient—functionally brain-dead patients are often capable of reflexive movement as well. In fact, full-term babies born without forebrains can smile and cry, even though they are most definitely without actual or potential cognition. Indeed, almost everything that the fetus does during pregnancy is driven by the brainstem, and not higher cognitive processes. The cerebral cortex—the region of the brain that provides higher cognitive processes—does not begin to form in earnest until the 22nd week of pregnancy.

And nowhere, in all these criteria, is there even the faintest hint of “life begins at conception” (kind of a strange statement, since the sperm and egg cannot be considered “dead” in any way). Indeed, it seems to be converging somewhere around 20 weeks or so—toward the end of the second trimester.

(By the way: Only one of those photos depicts a human embryo. Any guesses?)

Of course, PLAA is free to put whatever kneejerk sentiments they like on billboards, so long as they pay for them, and they will almost certainly continue to do so, emphasizing the thoughtlessness of the “conservative” movement.

But sometimes, juxtaposition sure doesn’t work in their favor (courtesy failblog.org):