6 ms·

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would th

The saddest part to me is that two women are going to face prison time, effectively ruining their lives. Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.

sp527 4y ago
> Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient". The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  Because all of these other than the last one describe living cows which most people think it's ethical to kill and eat?
- washbrain 4y ago
  For me, personally, I believe that human pregnancy is unusual. Most mammalian mothers can self terminate pregnancy if desired, by cutting off the flow of resources to their fetus. Humans are somewhat unique in that they can't. Our fetuses are parasitic, and attempt to force the mother to carry them to term through endocrinological trucks. Except... We can now disrupt that parasitism and join every other mammalian species in giving mothers the authority over whether their bodies supply resources to a developing clump of cells within them. We choose, however, in some parts of the world to not give women control of the resources in their body and instead tell them, "this fetus could become a human, so you are required to use your resources to make it so." Until the fetus is viable on its own, it's literally in a parasitic relationship with the mother. It might have human-like traits, but until it's capable of surviving outside of that parasitic relationship, I'm inclined to give the mother the authority to say whether they want to play host.
  - sp527 4y ago
    Setting aside that thinking of pregnancy as a "parasitic relationship" is a somewhat deranged perspective that very few people likely share, we have a rather robust toolkit for dealing with this problem that doesn't have to tread on moral gray areas: contraception, plan b, pregnancy tests. I'm also not saying pregnancies shouldn't be terminable by choice, to be clear. I'm inquiring about how we justify placing the line where it is in the usual standard.
    - washbrain 4y ago
      The parasitic placenta is not my thinking, it's a fairly widely understood, perhaps not anodyne, scientific description of the relationship. See: https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-archive/press-releases/pr9938.html#:~:text=The%20human%20foetus%20and%20placenta,particular%20diverting%20blood%20and%20nutrients https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-archive/press-releases/pr9938.... It's a topic of much, much discussion, and I don't believe that it's deranged to discuss how human pregnancy is particularly unique in the chemical and hormonal ways the placenta interacts with the uterine wall. Edit: for instance, human embryos attack and digest the urine wall, paralyzing the cells there and pushing growth hormones to the blood vessels to increase the blood supply to the placenta. Other mammals don't operate this way, the mother controls access to nutrients. Human embryos are so aggressive in seeking blood they typically leave behind clumps of cells throughout the mother's body, making the mother a generic chimera. In other mammals, the placental wall is not breached, so a failed or terminated pregnancy doesn't have the network of paralyzed and intertwined arteries that a human pregnancy does, making it much more dangerous for human mothers. The human embryo is nearly unique in it's aggression in seeking out arteries. One effect of human gestation is that the fetus has direct access to the mother's bloodstream, and injects hormones to regulate the mother's behavior - again, this manipulation is fairly unique - increasing blood sugar and blood pressure to serve the fetus even at the expense of the mother. A fetus may spend up to 25% of its protein intake on hormonal regulation of the mother (which, by the way, the mother's body tried very, very hard to shut down.) It's a complicated and hugely messy affair, and in humans represents a literal fight for resources.
    - didibus 4y ago
- didibus 4y ago
  There's no good way to draw a line. Morally, arguments are just as strong in terms of the fetus putting the mother at risk, or the obligations on society to force the mother to behave in ways that care for the fetus and later for the child itself, with limited support or assistance. Similarly, you can claim that life is life even if it obligates others to sacrifices of their own. Both arguments also have their equal share of counterpoints. The thing is, it's a decision, similar to deciding that suicide is a crime. You believe what you want, and choose what you'd prefer the rules to be, but society must kind of all agree to those decisions so we can coexist in harmony, find some compromise amongst ourselves. For a lot of things, people tend to agree more easily on what they'd prefer. Would you rather have the right to kill others, but it means you could in turn be killed by others, or would you rather lose your right to kill and similarly have others prevented from killing you? What if something lives inside you, drains you of energy, blood, minerals, food, could cause health complications, and will require lifelong time and financial support and commitment. What if you didn't consent to this thing living in you, maybe it was rape or accidental? Would you rather be allowed to choose to care for it or not? Or would you rather that had it been you living inside a host, you'd have the right to live no matter the choice of your carrier and to their sacrifice or to the circumstances of your conception? Some people feel at that point, little would be lost to them, so they'd rather get to choose to carry or not. Others feel differently. Everyone might have their own reasons. There are other options as well, often not discussed, because people are just trying to get their way most of the time. Men don't have this problem at all, so it is less surprising when they think that the carrier should be forced to carry, since they will never be the one in the "being forced to carry" position themselves. Complicating the matter even more, since we're not all as impacted by the issue itself. So often a compromise has to be found in practice. A middle ground looks like allowing it but not past some time, gives you enough time to decide what you want, but wait too long and the choice is made for you. Exceptions can be made for special cases, those can be listed. You'll find people unwilling to compromise as well on both sides. It's how it goes. The point being, there is no science to draw on for the cutoff, unless you contextualize it with other arbitrary criteria, and even then, a lot of those criteria are subjective, like "consciousness", that's not a scientific concept, we cannot observe, prove or disprove it, understand nothing of it's mechanisms if it exists, etc.
  - 4y ago
rcoveson 4y ago
> Could the fetus have survived? Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that. > Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.
- washbrain 4y ago
  And you have sufficient information about the parents in this case to say there were no complications factors or social challenges that may have caused those numbers to deviate from "normal"? My point is you cannot apply the average case to each individual case. You don't have enough data to confidently say "more likely than not" for this case.
  - rcoveson 4y ago
    "More likely than not" is already an uncertainty. There's no need to qualify it with further uncertainty. I'm working with the same information you are. All we know is that it was 28 weeks. That gives it a > 50% survival chance if delivered in a hospital in the US. You might come to a different number if you used different sources, or if you had more information. But "we can't know for certain" is just a truism; nobody's saying we know anything for certain. We're just estimating the probability based on what we do know.
  - dgfitz 4y ago
    I guess the obvious response to this is something along the lines of: newborn babies get adopted quicker than houses were bought during covid. Of course that is hyperbole as there is an adoption process, but if the baby was not wanted she could have had all of her medical bills covered and given the child to a family that desperately wanted to raise said child. I’ll just pick a side, 28 weeks is too late. 12, ok. Maybe I could be talked into 15 even. 28 is just too late. Hell my wife and I would have raised the kid if that was the alternative to an abortion so late.

sp527 4y ago

> Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient". The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
Because all of these other than the last one describe living cows which most people think it's ethical to kill and eat?
washbrain 4y ago
For me, personally, I believe that human pregnancy is unusual. Most mammalian mothers can self terminate pregnancy if desired, by cutting off the flow of resources to their fetus. Humans are somewhat unique in that they can't. Our fetuses are parasitic, and attempt to force the mother to carry them to term through endocrinological trucks. Except... We can now disrupt that parasitism and join every other mammalian species in giving mothers the authority over whether their bodies supply resources to a developing clump of cells within them. We choose, however, in some parts of the world to not give women control of the resources in their body and instead tell them, "this fetus could become a human, so you are required to use your resources to make it so." Until the fetus is viable on its own, it's literally in a parasitic relationship with the mother. It might have human-like traits, but until it's capable of surviving outside of that parasitic relationship, I'm inclined to give the mother the authority to say whether they want to play host.
- sp527 4y ago
  Setting aside that thinking of pregnancy as a "parasitic relationship" is a somewhat deranged perspective that very few people likely share, we have a rather robust toolkit for dealing with this problem that doesn't have to tread on moral gray areas: contraception, plan b, pregnancy tests. I'm also not saying pregnancies shouldn't be terminable by choice, to be clear. I'm inquiring about how we justify placing the line where it is in the usual standard.
  - washbrain 4y ago
    The parasitic placenta is not my thinking, it's a fairly widely understood, perhaps not anodyne, scientific description of the relationship. See: https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-archive/press-releases/pr9938.html#:~:text=The%20human%20foetus%20and%20placenta,particular%20diverting%20blood%20and%20nutrients https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-archive/press-releases/pr9938.... It's a topic of much, much discussion, and I don't believe that it's deranged to discuss how human pregnancy is particularly unique in the chemical and hormonal ways the placenta interacts with the uterine wall. Edit: for instance, human embryos attack and digest the urine wall, paralyzing the cells there and pushing growth hormones to the blood vessels to increase the blood supply to the placenta. Other mammals don't operate this way, the mother controls access to nutrients. Human embryos are so aggressive in seeking blood they typically leave behind clumps of cells throughout the mother's body, making the mother a generic chimera. In other mammals, the placental wall is not breached, so a failed or terminated pregnancy doesn't have the network of paralyzed and intertwined arteries that a human pregnancy does, making it much more dangerous for human mothers. The human embryo is nearly unique in it's aggression in seeking out arteries. One effect of human gestation is that the fetus has direct access to the mother's bloodstream, and injects hormones to regulate the mother's behavior - again, this manipulation is fairly unique - increasing blood sugar and blood pressure to serve the fetus even at the expense of the mother. A fetus may spend up to 25% of its protein intake on hormonal regulation of the mother (which, by the way, the mother's body tried very, very hard to shut down.) It's a complicated and hugely messy affair, and in humans represents a literal fight for resources.
  - didibus 4y ago
didibus 4y ago
There's no good way to draw a line. Morally, arguments are just as strong in terms of the fetus putting the mother at risk, or the obligations on society to force the mother to behave in ways that care for the fetus and later for the child itself, with limited support or assistance. Similarly, you can claim that life is life even if it obligates others to sacrifices of their own. Both arguments also have their equal share of counterpoints. The thing is, it's a decision, similar to deciding that suicide is a crime. You believe what you want, and choose what you'd prefer the rules to be, but society must kind of all agree to those decisions so we can coexist in harmony, find some compromise amongst ourselves. For a lot of things, people tend to agree more easily on what they'd prefer. Would you rather have the right to kill others, but it means you could in turn be killed by others, or would you rather lose your right to kill and similarly have others prevented from killing you? What if something lives inside you, drains you of energy, blood, minerals, food, could cause health complications, and will require lifelong time and financial support and commitment. What if you didn't consent to this thing living in you, maybe it was rape or accidental? Would you rather be allowed to choose to care for it or not? Or would you rather that had it been you living inside a host, you'd have the right to live no matter the choice of your carrier and to their sacrifice or to the circumstances of your conception? Some people feel at that point, little would be lost to them, so they'd rather get to choose to carry or not. Others feel differently. Everyone might have their own reasons. There are other options as well, often not discussed, because people are just trying to get their way most of the time. Men don't have this problem at all, so it is less surprising when they think that the carrier should be forced to carry, since they will never be the one in the "being forced to carry" position themselves. Complicating the matter even more, since we're not all as impacted by the issue itself. So often a compromise has to be found in practice. A middle ground looks like allowing it but not past some time, gives you enough time to decide what you want, but wait too long and the choice is made for you. Exceptions can be made for special cases, those can be listed. You'll find people unwilling to compromise as well on both sides. It's how it goes. The point being, there is no science to draw on for the cutoff, unless you contextualize it with other arbitrary criteria, and even then, a lot of those criteria are subjective, like "consciousness", that's not a scientific concept, we cannot observe, prove or disprove it, understand nothing of it's mechanisms if it exists, etc.
- 4y ago

rcoveson 4y ago

> Could the fetus have survived? Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that. > Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.

washbrain 4y ago
And you have sufficient information about the parents in this case to say there were no complications factors or social challenges that may have caused those numbers to deviate from "normal"? My point is you cannot apply the average case to each individual case. You don't have enough data to confidently say "more likely than not" for this case.
- rcoveson 4y ago
  "More likely than not" is already an uncertainty. There's no need to qualify it with further uncertainty. I'm working with the same information you are. All we know is that it was 28 weeks. That gives it a > 50% survival chance if delivered in a hospital in the US. You might come to a different number if you used different sources, or if you had more information. But "we can't know for certain" is just a truism; nobody's saying we know anything for certain. We're just estimating the probability based on what we do know.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  I guess the obvious response to this is something along the lines of: newborn babies get adopted quicker than houses were bought during covid. Of course that is hyperbole as there is an adoption process, but if the baby was not wanted she could have had all of her medical bills covered and given the child to a family that desperately wanted to raise said child. I’ll just pick a side, 28 weeks is too late. 12, ok. Maybe I could be talked into 15 even. 28 is just too late. Hell my wife and I would have raised the kid if that was the alternative to an abortion so late.