Morgan BellCarl Sagan - the Science of Life
October 19th 2008 10:11
selected excerpts from
“Abortion: Is it Possible to be both “Pro-life” and “Pro-Choice”?”
by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
Chapter 15
Billions and Billions :
Thoughts on Life and Death
at the Brink of the Millennium
1997
ISBN 0-345-37918-7
Really Long Link
“Abortion: Is it Possible to be both “Pro-life” and “Pro-Choice”?”
by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
Chapter 15
Billions and Billions :
Thoughts on Life and Death
at the Brink of the Millennium
1997
ISBN 0-345-37918-7
Really Long Link
Sagan's final work tackles a variety of issues from global warming to the population explosion. The book is broken down into three sections--each with a fair share of gems. The first section focuses on numbers, providing many thought-provoking perspectives on things people don't tend to think about but probably should. The second section deals mostly with environmental problems. The final portion of the book discusses a variety of topics including abortion, nuclear weapons, and Carl's final years battling his illness.
Chapter 15 on abortion is a must-read for everyone--regardless of whether you are pro-life or pro-choice. Essentially, the chapter contains a scientific look at the issue and asks all the tough questions from both sides. You aren't likely to hear all of this in any one place and certainly not from only one of the pro or con camps.
Chapter 15 on abortion is a must-read for everyone--regardless of whether you are pro-life or pro-choice. Essentially, the chapter contains a scientific look at the issue and asks all the tough questions from both sides. You aren't likely to hear all of this in any one place and certainly not from only one of the pro or con camps.
Carl Sagan wrote the following:
Once we acknowledge that the state can interfere at any time in the pregnancy, doesn't it follow that the state can interfere at all times?
This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arouse the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…
That protection, that right to life, eludes the 40,000 children under five who die on our planet each day from preventable starvation, dehydration, disease, and neglect.
Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.
The Old and New Testaments--rich in astonishingly detailed prohibitions on dress, diet, and permissible words--contain not a word specifically prohibiting abortion. The only passage that's remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there's a fight and a woman bystander should accidentally be injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine.
But when sperm cells were examined in the seventeenth century by the first microscopes, they were thought to show a fully formed human being. An old idea of the homunculus was resuscitated--in which within each sperm cell was a fully formed tiny human, within whose testes were innumerable other homunculi, etc., ad infinitum. In part through this misinterpretation of scientific data, in 1869 abortion at any time for any reason became grounds for excommunication. It is surprising to most Catholics and others to discover that the date was not much earlier.
From colonial times to the nineteenth century, the choice in the United States was the woman's until "quickening." An abortion in the first or even second trimester was at worst a misdemeanor. Convictions were rarely sought and almost impossible to obtain, because they depended entirely on the woman's own testimony of whether she had felt quickening, and because of the jury's distaste for prosecuting a woman for exercising her right to choose. In 1800 there was not, so far as is known, a single statute in the United States concerning abortion. Advertisements for drugs to induce abortion could be found in virtually every newspaper and even in many church publications--although the language used was suitably euphemistic, if widely understood.
But by 1900, abortion had been banned at any time in pregnancy by every state in the Union, except when necessary to save the woman's life. What happened to bring about so striking a reversal? Religion had little to do with it. Drastic economic and social conversions were turning this country from an agrarian to an urban-industrial society. America was in the process of changing from having one of the highest birthrates in the world to one of the lowest. Abortion certainly played a role and stimulated forces to suppress it.
Every one of us began from a dot. A fertilized egg is roughly the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The momentous meeting of sperm and egg generally occurs in one of the two fallopian tubes. One cell becomes two, two become four, and so on—an exponentiation of base-2 arithmetic. By the tenth day the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the walls of the uterus.
The criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called "viability" and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe--no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It's a very pragmatic criterion.
Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain--principally in the top layers of the convoluted "gray matter" called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn't begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy--the sixth month.
Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester--except in cases of grave medical necessity--it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life.
* these are selected excerpts - to see full text follow link at top of page
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Comment by RubySoho
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Someone called me a monster when i said something very similiar to this!
Isn't it funny how our attitudes to abortion change over the centuries? The only constant is the fact that women have them. And will continue to have them despite the best efforts of radical pro-forced birth propagandists who have the audacity to compare a living, breathing woman to an inanimate object such as a lifeboat.
Comment by Morgan Bell
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well i guess by scientific definition "parasite" best describes the symbiosis of the mother and child in the human species
i thought it was really interesting how it all started due to the technology of the microscope advancing faster than the human intelligence to interpret what they saw through it
Comment by alt_ed
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Comment by RubySoho
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Comment by Morgan Bell
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a delightful contribution as always . . .
Comment by Morgan Bell
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i think with all the scientific knowledge we have now about the development of the fetus throughout gestation it should be relatively simple to determine viability on an individual basis
with the improvements of incubators for premature babies and more thorough pre-natal monitoring viability can be reassed to be earlier in the future . . . but its definately not as black and white as declaring personhood at the instant of fetilisation
Comment by Norm
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Comment by Morgan Bell
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yes well if abortion is murder then having a wank is genocide . . . could we really criminalise being a wanker?
Comment by Norm
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Comment by Morgan Bell
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well that was a disturbing mental image . . . sounds like an OH&S risk for the female prison wardens!
Comment by Norm
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Happy birthday, mum!
Not really.
Comment by Morgan Bell
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i totally missed who originally said the lifeboat comment - ill presume it is someone absurd that claims to never ever mention religion on their posts, never EVER!
hey Ruby,
oh fill me in on the lifeboat thing will you?
is it a mass murdering lifeboat?
something like Kit the car except evil and designed to float on water?
Comment by RubySoho
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Comment by RubySoho
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"Throw the baby overboard because it is my lifeboat and I can do what I want with it."
"But you just drowned a baby."
"That is secondary to me having full control of my life boat."
Oh the stupid! It burns!
Comment by Morgan Bell
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can we allow people to throw a cell mass the size of a full-stop overboard if they dont think the lifeboat is capable of supporting it if it grows bigger?
Comment by RubySoho
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the fact that the woman is referred to as an object is no mere coincidence. The baby is a person. the woman is a fucking boat!
Comment by Morgan Bell
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yes it is certainly a lop-sided analogy . . . no wonder women get so offended by the Pro-Life movement!
Comment by RubySoho
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The woman knew she had a fetus growing in her fallopian tube. She knew it was going to kill her. They still didn't let her terminate, which would have saved her life and given her the opportunity to have another child.
But apparently dead fetuses are acceptable as long as it is accompanied by a dead woman.
Oh yes, that's how much the pro-life movement cares about life.
Comment by Morgan Bell
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that is a really sad and frustrating story - such a waste of a real independant life
Comment by alt_ed
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Comment by Morgan Bell
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ummm i dont think you should be put in charge of any lifeboats!