Abortion should be restricted to the ages of 11-19.

"elicited in response to goading from pro-life campaigners"
Are there pro-life campaigners in Britain? How quaint, pesky little devils.
By the way how do you become a "professor of Bioethics"? What books do you read? The Bible or gallup poll results.

This speaks to my point in the last abortion discussion. Any line that you draw in the human lifecycle to define them as a person is arbitrary. Defining personhood at the beginning, at conception, is the only way to avoid this dilemma.

It's interesting that Harris basically agrees with the pro-life faction, i.e. that birth itself makes no change in the human status of the baby. If taken seriously, that's a major win for the pro-life point of view because, as the article indicates, it forces you to either legalize child killing or assign citizen status to the zygote.

AOG:

Yes, this is a reductio ad absurdum argument against the abortion position. I'm just surprised he was unwise enough to admit it. Since he declined to specify an age limit, it might be reasonable to conclude that he would favor homicide at any age if there were "sufficient" reason. And why stop there? If some group were deemed genetically flawed, might not even genocide be permissible?

Quick--someone ask Clark how he feels about this!

Robert:

There are 32,000 abortions/yr due to pregnancy & incest. Presuming you allow them to abort their pregnancies, then how do you handle that dilemma?

Or, for logical consistency, do you prefer forcing them to carry the pregnancies to term?

AOG:

I hope you are right and it looks that way now, but might that not be simply because the idea is so new we are still at the appalled stage and cannot believe it would go anywhere? Imagine the following occuring over the next twenty years:

A)A radical Singer-like academic writes a book called something like "The Social Animal" which argues that social interaction is an essential aspect of our humanity and points out that babies can't really respond to us in any social way until about six weeks;

B)One or two high-profile infanticide cases involve very badly treated and/or unstable women and result in jury nullification;

C)Several studies emerge to "prove" how children "destroy" parental intimacy (see the Barbara Kay article below) and that billions of dollars are "wasted" each year in treating postpartum depression;

D)The argument is made that modern medicine "imposes" burdens on modern parents that their ancestors didn't bear because sickly or disabled babies wouldn't have survived.

E)The "overpopulation" crowd gets a new popular lease on life and points out how infanticide is practiced in other countries and that we must not be cultural imperialists and condemn because, while distasteful, it must be said to be "effective".

All the above become hot topics in undergraduate seminars and round and round they go through the talk show circuit. Meanwhile, more and more "professional" ethicists sign on to the argument that birth makes no significant moral difference (which is a sound argument, after all). Guys like Jeff and the pro-abortion lobby keep hammering about rape and incest victims and backstreet abortionists, so following the logic backwards is politically impossible.

Will the sense of horror survive? Could be, but it didn't on a lot of other issues.

Since we seem to have abandoned the old ideas which supported a social sense of guilt or shame regarding premarital pregnency while we have taken on a more utilitarian view toward the social problems of the past, I say, apparently along with Jeff, the good "ethicist" quoted within, and others, "...more incest and more abortions, partial birth or post birth, whatever works".

Jeff
I am willing to sacrifice logical consistency in order to acheive a higher good, and if allowing an exception for rape and incest is the only way to achieve a broader ban on abortion, I would be for it.

However, your point makes an awfully large assumption: that, having suffered a terrible trauma by being raped and impregnated, a woman's suffering would be mitigated by terminating the pregnancy. Isn't it possible that by encouraging the woman to destroy the fetus, you are adding another trauma on top of the rape? The fetus is her child, after all.

In these cases, I believe that the state should spend whatever resources it needs to to encourage her to bring the baby to term, including paying her living and medical expenses, mental health counseling, and adoption related expenses if she decides to give the child up.

Robert:

You are right, it is possible. But it is just as possible that precisely the opposite would occur. And who are we to judge?

I bring this up because the wide variety of circumstances makes blanket solutions practically impossible. I would be all in favor of banning any abortion that serves as nothing more than an alternative form of birth control.

But that is far easier said than put into practice.

Perhaps the best thing is to do what you say in the concluding sentence, but make it so for any woman with a problem pregnancy. I'll bet adoption agencies could easily charge enough to cover most, if not all, the costs.

Leave women with the choice, and give them a reason to choose correctly.

Peter, Tom:

This may come as a shock, but good Christians (and those of every other religious persuasion) have exposed unwanted babies for centuries. Check the derivation of the surname Esposito.

Jeff:

How shocking. I sure hope you aren't going to tell me there were also Christians who robbed banks or my beliefs will be shattered for good.

And the point you are trying to make with that little historical nugget is...?

Robert, yes, or just possibly as late as the 8-cell stage, though as a practical matter you couldn't tell the difference.

Since the problem of defining when life begins is so difficult, I advocate starting at the other end. There is not nearly so much of a problem to defining when it ends.

Then count backward, by cell divisions. You get Robert's result. There is, as Guy says and the professor say, no obvious stopping point, is there?

I believe Jeff may have been getting at the fact that despite what traditonal moralists may have said they believed, every human society that I know of -- Christians not least -- considered infanticide OK.

What you do shows what you believe, not what you say. Otherwise, vote for Kerry.

Ok, Harry, point me to the time infanticide was legal and widely seen as acceptable in the West.

It was always widely acceptable but not legal. Laws are not a good guide to morality. The relationship is, if anything, inverse.

Sumptuary laws being the classic examples.

For an exhaustive history, see Boswell's "Kindness of Strangers," which makes the point that attitudes to child saving and child killing in the the Mediterranean/European societies did not change fundamentally when Christianity took over. Our bahaviors today are pretty much the same as what the pagan Greeks and Romans did.

Harry:

From the good professor's mouth: "Most abandoned children were rescued and brought up either as adopted members of another household or as laborers of some sort."

Not exactly what we are talking about here, is it?

Harry:

That was my point, exactly.

Peter:

In Europe they were often put in foundling homes, where the fatality rates were appalling. In Tuscany, of the 15,000 babies left at the Innocenti foundling home between 1755 and 1773, 2/3 died before reaching their first birthday. Similarly, of the 72,000 infants abandoned in Sicily between 1783 and 1809, roughly 20% survived.

I think it is precisely what we are talking about.

Jeff:

OK, I think I see the point. Many children were given up by poor parents in the past and died in overcrowded orphanages in the era before modern medecine, so we shouldn't get upset when modern people in the richest societies in history suggest it may be morally acceptable to kill them.

Peter:

No, you don't get the point. Some suggest that abortions are a symptom of terminal moral decay in our society.

Well, that might be.

But, given the full historical background, abortion may well be indicative of nothing more than it is the same as it ever was. (And rich parents were also well represented.)