THE LAST ZYGOTE POST, I SWEAR

I’m afraid I’m still puzzled by where this line of argument is supposed to take us. Certainly not to the absurd conclusion that Andrew’s email correspondent draws, which that if we grant legal protection to zygotes or embryos, we would need “start refusing to sell alcohol to breeding-age women,” or “refuse to let them ski, ride horseback, or cycle,” because “all those activities can cause miscarriages.” (And if you disagree, you’re siding with the Taliban – which I suppose has replaced “that sounds suspiciously like something Hitler would say” as the clinching argument of choice.)

Right. And similarly, because we extend legal protection to born children, we don’t let their parents take them swimming or skiing, and we arrest parents who keep guns in the house, and also alcohol, and of course there’s secondhand smoke and all the other “activities that can cause accidental death” and that are therefore illegal. Except . . . they’re not illegal, because we make a rather obvious distinction between “activities that might accidentally harm or kill another human being in your care,” and “activities intended to directly cause the death of another human being.” So I still don’t see how the fact that zygotes and embryos die accidentally all the time bears on whether killing them is wrong – beyond the instinctive feeling that if something happens a lot without our thinking about it much, it can’t be bad.

As for why we don’t think about it that much – well, certainly Julian’s right, in a sense, that we respond differently to earthquake deaths than to accidental zygote deaths because earthquake victims have a lot of qualities that prompt pity and empathy and grief, and zygotes don’t. The zygote doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t have a personality or memories, he doesn’t have the kind of intimate bonds that are ruptured by the death of an adult human being. So the tragedy isn’t nearly as great as it would be if I were to die, or Julian, or Andrew. And similarly, not all murders are created equal, which is why I don’t think there’s any contradiction between saying that abortion is murder and should be illegal, and admitting that there are greater extenuating circumstances – because of the intimacy of pregnancy and the understandable terror associated with becoming pregnant unintentionally – and less suffering involved for the victim than in almost any other form of murder, and that the penalties for a woman who procures an abortion should therefore be minimal or nonexistent.

Yet acknowledging that all deaths aren’t the same, and that all murders aren’t equally wicked, doesn’t mean that all lives don’t deserve legal protection. If I shoot a mother of four, it’s a much greater tragedy than if I shoot a friendless bum, and you’d probably want to give me a much stiffer prison sentence. But it doesn’t mean the mom should have the right to life and the bum – or the fetus, the embryo, or the zygote – shouldn’t.

And of course, the other reason we don’t respond emotionally to zygote deaths is because we don’t know they’re happening. The “zygote intuition” argument would make a little bit more sense, in this regard, if people never felt grief over a miscarriage. Then you could argue – “look, our moral intuitions tell us not to grieve over human life before that life acquires a personality, or self-awareness, or a face.” But of course, people do feel grief over miscarriages, by and large – just as they feel guilt (again, by and large) over abortions. Which suggests, in turn, that we don’t grieve for zygotes not because we somehow intuit that they aren’t really people, but because – unlike embryos and fetuses – we aren’t aware of their deaths. You can’t grieve for something you don’t know exists.

And you can’t kill it, either. I know that the argument-from-zygotes is intended to show the alleged extremism of the pro-life position, not make an empirical claim about the nature of abortion in the U.S. – but even so, it’s worth pointing out that no abortion clinic is in the zygote-killing business. They’re in the embryo and fetus-killing business, because by the time anyone knows they’re pregnant, the zygote is all grown up. So if for some reason we decided to move to an entirely intuition-based abortion regime, our zygote intuitions wouldn’t really matter much anyway – only our embryo and fetus intuitions would.

– posted by Ross

PONNURU IN THE WEEDS

Alas, Ramesh cannot even spell “hydatidiform mole,” let alone explain why their existence renders my summary of the scientific literature incorrect. Thanks, Derb! Ponnuru describes the emails below as “idiotic,” without citing anything actually inaccurate about them. Here’s an account of hydatidiform molars:

A hydatidiform mole is a rare mass or growth that may form inside the uterus at the beginning of a pregnancy. A hydatidiform mole results from over-production of the tissue that is supposed to develop into the placenta. The placenta normally nourishes a fetus during pregnancy. Instead, these tissues develop into a mass. The mass is usually made up of placental material that grows uncontrolled. Often, there is no fetus at all.

I would infer that Ramesh argues that this phenomenon impedes the successful development of a zygote. Sure. My stats take into account all possible obstacles for the countless full-fledged human beings Ramesh believes are dying in vast numbers inside their mothers’ bodies. Here’s Wikipedia’s account of teratomas. They’re a form of tumor or benign cyst. Again, the relevance of this to the debate is mystifying. Maybe a reader could let me know how these two phenomena would affect my calculation of a ratio of roughly 8:1 natural abortions compared to procured ones. I’m jut trying to get as accurate a number as possible, however irritating it might be to pro-life absolutists.

– posted by Andrew.

ANOINTING ALITO

Yep, this is where judicial hearings are headed. Hey, this is all about God, isn’t it?

ABRAMOFFZZZZ: The Cornerites are bored by the Abramoff scandal. They were bored by the torture scandal. They were bored by the illegal wire-tapping scandal. But not all conservatives are quite as sleepy.

BROKEBACK BREAK-OUT? The Kaus-Rich argument about the box office viability of “Brokeback Mountain” has some more data to crunch. Before Christmas, Brokeback averaged a take of $58,000 per theater, compared to King Kong’s $20,000. Yes, it was restricted to very few theaters in blue states. But from the latest Variety report:

“Brokeback” gained an amazing 61% in its fourth frame despite adding only 52 theatres. Focus’ Ang Lee-helmed gay cowboy love story lassoed up $4.8 million at 269 playdates, giving it a three-day per-screen average of $13,407.
Pic expanded to just a few additional mid-sized cities and made boffo grosses in all of them, including $37,000 in Nashville, $44,000 in Columbus, and $32,000 in Milwaukee. Lowest grossing theatres are in the suburbs, where “Brokeback” is averaging mid-single digits, similar to moderately performing wide pics like “Geisha” and “Rumor Has It.”

Today, the movie moves into the redder of red states, but the New York Daily New’s critic, Jack Matthews, doesn’t think that will make a big difference. Money quote:

A studio spokesperson says the producers are encouraged by the advance buzz from red state critics. “Brokeback” has won the Best Picture award from critics groups in Florida, Dallas/Fort Worth, Las Vegas and in the state of Utah (the last presumably using a secret ballot).
According to exit polls, “Brokeback’s” audience started as women in their 30s and now is about evenly split along gender lines. Straight men may be leaving shoe-leather skidmarks on the way into the theaters, but they’re going. Like “Curb Your Enthusiasm’s” Larry David, who voiced his tongue-in-cheek objections to “Brokeback” in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, I felt that “cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat” to make me watch a pair of range riders steam up in a pup tent. But I’ve now seen the movie three times (twice with my wife, if you have to know) and it is one of the most devastating Hollywood love stories of all time.

We’ll see how this progresses – but the idea that a movie with bareback gay sex in it would have been this successful even five years ago seems unlikely to me. That bareback sex would be a way of revealing deeper love is even more astonishing.

THE LIBERACE POPE: Say what you will about his theology, but his couture is fabulous!

– posted by Andrew.

ZYGOTIC EPISODES

A reader clarifies something:

Ramesh should know a zygote is a fertiziled egg (an embryo is a fertilized egg that has divided some arbitrary number of times). Sometimes the womb is to blame, but there are lots of zygotes that are defective so they never get far into the embryo stage (let alone the fetus implanted in the uterus stage). It is not the womb or mother’s internal architecture that is defective–its the fertilized egg itself that has some sort of chromosome damage or other abormality that prevents it from going forward (could even be the father had some bad seed). When my wife and I first started trying to have children it did not happen instantly after we stopped using birth control–she felt “something” for the first couple of months of attempts that didn’t pan out into a positive pregnancy result. It may have been in her head, but then again it may have been a zygote that didn’t make it.

The reason I single out zygotes is simply because that’s what the theocons have done. Robert George insists that human life begins at the moment a new splicing of 46 chromosomes occurs at the moment of fertilization. The reason these zygotes don’t make it may be chance, environment, competition or their own genetic errors. I think the latter is what Ramesh is referring to. Some zygotes die because they’re objectively disordered, if you’ll pardon the expression. But they’re still complete human beings, according to the Pope. Just like the disabled, dying, and even gays. And they die by the millions in America ever year. According to the Pope, their deaths are no less morally significant than those of the miners who recently perished in the Sago mine. As another reader points out, the political implications of this are mindboggling:

You are on the right track with the zygote discussion. The question for lawmakers about abortion is not whether it’s a good or bad thing: it’s always bad. The question is whether it’s a bad thing government should regulate and if so, how? The reason the zygote question is important is because it’s very difficult for government to ban ordinary physical processes, and miscarriage (known in medical books as “spontaneous abortion,” by the way) is a completely natural process. We do well to remember that banning something doesn’t stop people from doing it, it just allows the government to punish those who do. In this case, if it’s not possible to determine easily whether something was natural or induced, how can the state legitimately apply punishments?
If zygotes or blastulae or embryoes become 14th Amendment persons, entitled to all the protections thereof, how do we go about ensuring their protection against say, negligent acts by the mother? Could we start refusing to sell alcohol to breeding-age women? Refuse to let them ski, ride horseback, or cycle? All those activities can cause miscarriages, and 14th Amendment persons have the right to be protected from other 14th Amendment persons’ harm, intentional or otherwise. If one objected to the Taliban, one cannot coutenance the kinds of restrictions necessary to protect zygotes from their mothers, who are quite often unaware of their existence.

This helps explain the disconnect between the rhetoric and logic of the pro-life movement and what they actually do about it.

– posted by Andrew.

SHARON, ROBERTSON, AHMADINEJAD

Here are the specific responses to Ariel Sharon’s stroke by two leading fundamentalists in the world, Pat Robertson and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Julian cites them below. Robertson:

“He was dividing God’s land. And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.”

Ahmadinejad:

“Hopefully the news that the criminal of Sabra and Shatila has joined his ancestors is final.”

The difference, of course, is that only one of these maniacs is on Karl Rove’s A-list rolodex.

– posted by Andrew.

YIGAL AMIR, SWORD OF GOD?

Bloggers such as Steve Clemons and John Aravosis have noted Pat Robertson’s grotesque suggestion that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was some kind of divine retribution for “dividing gods land.” I did an extra double take (I guess we’re on triple takes) at this, however:

And the same thing — I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead.

What’s that now? The Rabin assassination was “the same thing”? Because this “terrible thing” caveat notwithstanding, the only way I can parse that introductory bit is to read Robertson as suggesting that Rabin’s murder, too, was an act of God—which would entail that God guided Yigal Amir to kill the Israeli prime minister, perhaps even made sure the bullet found its target. Which, funnily enough, is Yigal Amir’s take on the killing as well: That he was acting under divine guidance to prevent Israeli land from being ceded. The only puzzle is how Robertson can think that divine intervention constitutes a “terrible thing.” Shouldn’t he be proclaiming these murders and cerebral hemorrhages holy, even miraculous? And if Robertson endorses Amir’s defense that he was only carrying out God’s will, will Robertson follow that thought to its logical conclusion and demand that Amir be freed?

—posted by Julian

“C” IS FOR COOKIE

On the heels of news that the NSA website had been improperly placing persistent tracking cookies on Web visitors computers, Declan McCullagh writes that dozens of government agencies have been doing the same. I’m not exactly prepared to freak out over a few cookies, but it is, apparently, illegal.

—posted by Julian

WOMBS—NATURE’S LITTLE ZYGOTE ABATTOIRS

I don’t think Ross’ post below gets at what’s of primary interest about “nature’s waste” when it comes to zygotes. The point is not that personhood is somehow a function of survival rates (as he points out, the death rate is always 100 percent eventually), nor that hey, nature kills ’em so why can’t we—indeed, I’d love to see conservatives in general resist the urge to conflate the natural and the normative. What’s key is, as he suggests, the question of personhood, and I think our reaction to learning about “nature’s waste” is at least a handy intuition pump in this case.

Our reaction to a genocide is, obviously, different from our reaction to an earthquake that kills millions. Still, anyone with a moderately well developed moral sense reacts to the earthquake with horror and sadness. And if someone is unmoved, we can articulate at least somewhat clearly what’s gone awry: If it’s a failure of empathy because the victims are far away, we can focus attention on how the victims suffered just as you and your neighbors would, had plans and hopes in many ways like yours that have been destroyed, and so on.

Now, my response to learning this fact about nature’s “waste” of zygotes is not anything like my reaction would be to learning that some plague had wiped out millions of people I’d never met. (For the reactions to be similar, among other things I would have to feel as though it were extremely important to change our public and private medical research priorities, ranking spontaneous miscarriage of zygotes higher than just about every other illness.) Maybe that’s a theory-laden intuition, and people’s response to this fact just tracks pretty well their position in the abortion debate. But if, as I suspect, most of us do not now feel as though we are daily surrounded by little killing machines, I think that shines a spotlight on the morally salient features that are missing to account for that relative lack of concern. And I think it comes down to the things I suggested we’d appeal to earlier to show someone who failed to react to the earthquake properly—facts about mental states and related features absent by stipulation.

Now, Ross might say that even if I’m right about people’s common reaction to this, that’s a merely intuitive as opposed to logical argument. But when we get to questions like “what is it about people that matters, morally?” we’re down at the ethical equivalent of accounting for the rules and operators of logic themselves. The foundational question, in each case, can’t be answered within the system except in a kind of rule-circular or coherentist way. That’s not to say a raw, pre-reflective intuition ought to carry a whole lot of weight in itself, but they’re also ultimately the brute facts we’ve got to work with. Maybe we just need our intuition reconditioned by a bit of reflection and abstraction, as in the case of the bigot or the man unmoved by far-off disaster, but it may also draw our attention to the lack of the raw material with which we’d ordinarily do that work.

—posted by Julian

ZYGOTES

Andrew writes:

If you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, there are almost no environments more dangerous for humans than inside their own mother.

Well, sure – but if you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, you could just as easily argue that the safest environment for a human being, at that stage of its development, is inside its own mother. Yes, it’s still a pretty dangerous place – but so was the environment outside the mother’s womb, until the last hundred years or so. A kid born in Chicago in 1870, for instance, had a fifty percent chance of reaching the age of five. But that didn’t make him any less of a human being.

And it’s not quite true that, as Andrew puts it, “comparing the scale of what humans do to the unborn with what nature does is like comparing a high tide with a tsunami.” It’s more like comparing a middling tsunami to a major one. There are about 4 million births a year in the United States, and if we suppose that only a third of zygotes make it through to birth, that means that about eight million human lives perish naturally in utero. This is obviously a lot more than the between 1 and 1.5 million abortions that have taken place every year since the mid-1970s – but not so much more that the latter statistic fades into insignificance.

And even if it did, so what? “Nature” kills everyone, eventually. The death rate for people in the stage of development we call the eighth decade of life is probably around eighty percent or so. That doesn’t make it less of a crime if someone bumps my grandmother off. We don’t have laws against murder because we want to lower the death rate to zero – we have laws against murder because we accept that 1) everyone dies, but 2) it’s not okay to kill them.

Obviously, nature’s waste is a strong intuitive argument against the pro-life position – i.e., if zygotes and embryos perish in such great numbers, how can they be that important? If we don’t know these lives exist, and don’t grieve when they’re accidentally snuffed out, why isn’t okay to kill them? But I don’t think it makes for a very strong logical argument. The crux of the abortion debate is whether there ought to be a legal distinction between human lives (which zygotes and embryos and fetuses obviously are) and human persons – defined variously by brain activity, ability to feel pain, level of self-awareness, possession of language, ability to survive independent of their mother’s body, or what-have-you. And intuitions aside, I don’t think even the most ardent pro-choicer wants to start defining “personhood” based on survival rates. You won’t like where it takes you.

– posted by Ross

UPDATE: I simply want to echo every single point of Ross’. There’s a distinction between wilfull taking of human life and nature’s toll, beyond human control. The argument about zygotes does not logically alter the absolutist pro-life case, but it does, I think, provide context for an intuitive sense (echoed by Aquinas) that it’s too extreme a view. The tsunami-tide metaphor may be excessive. But the ratio of natural abortions to procured ones is still around 8:1. As for “personhood,” Ross is right again: that’s a separate question. I deal with all this in the book. The blog post was designed to nail down a fact.

– posted by Andrew.