The anti-choice folks have struck again, holding over 60% of
the country hostage to their irrational beliefs as a price for health care
reform.  No health care reform unless abortion is made even more difficult than it already is.  If thousands die from lack of insurance, well, as Lenin said, you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Their lives are not as important as a zygote’s. But abortion is MURDER these [eople whine. 
Let’s examine that example, based on logic rather than carefully chosen
Biblical texts that ignore other longer and more detailed texts.
 

There are two critical questions  at stake here – when does a sperm and an
egg become a human being – and what do we mean by an entity being a human being
in terms of morality?

Anti-choice zealots take a ‘light switch’ approach to the
first question – first there isn’t a person, then suddenly, there is.  First there is 0% human, then there is
a 100% human in every morally relevant sense of the word.  It’s a breathtakingly materialistic
argument, but not good science or much of anything else.

In my view there are very few genuine ‘light switch’
phenomena in the world.  Even death
is progressive unless imposed from the outside, which is why people can be
resuscitated. There is no evidence that coming into physical existence is any
different.

The zygote is a potential human being, a life form on its
way to being human in all the senses that is possible.  But initially all it has that is human
is its genetic code.  It is a
potential abode/manifestation of a human being, and as a potential is not a
moral nullity, but neither does it have the claim on us that a complete human
has.

Something is ‘human’ in different senses.  What matters in this issue is the moral
sense, not the biological sense. 
If a being from another planet visits us, and demonstrates it can love,
think, plan for the future, and so on, and then some fanatic kills it, has that
person committed murder?  I would
say “Yes” in the moral sense, whatever the law might say. Certainly
it would be absurd to claim that killing our extraterrestrial visitor has the
moral significance of squashing a bug. 
But the entity murdered presumably shares less genetic information with
us and than does a bug, and in that sense will never resemble a human.

So in the MORAL sense, humanness and the genetic code are
not necessarily linked.

For people concerned with rationality and genuine morality,
what matters regarding abortion is: what is ‘human’ in the most morally
relevant sense?  I answer, a human
is a being existing in self-awareness, able to form plans, care, and be aware
of when its plans are dashed, its cares rejected or thwarted, and able to treat
other humans as Thous.  We error on
the side of caution with those in comas and we should error on the side of
caution in other cases, because e are not sure just where a dividing line is
crossed.  But the word “error” is
as important as the word “caution.”

My favorite ecological writer, Aldo Leopold, got a central
piece of it right when he observed that if passenger pigeons still lived, and
the last human died, no pigeon would care.  But when the last passenger pigeon died, a great many humans
cared. THIS, Leopold observed, was what human beings brought to the world that
was new- the ability to care about beings of no practical use to them.

Plenty of animals care about even species if they have a
personal connection – like mothers of one species raising babies of another, or
our cats and dogs and we ourselves. 
In my opinion this gives them more moral weight than we give to an
animal that as far as we can tell, lacks that capacity.  But they are not morally equivalent to
humans.  What seems to cross the
line in MORAL terms, is the ability to care for beings who have no practical
value.

The capacity to be responsible for our actions goes with
this human ability.  I suspect they
are connected.  If I have the
potential to care on such a wide basis, I have some responsibility in where I
draw the line.

There is absolutely no evidence a zygote meets these
criteria.  There is absolutely no
doubt that the mother does.  So we
have here a potential human and a human.

At some point between zygote and new born baby the organism
crosses that thresh hold. The thresh hold is mental, not physical (beating
heart) and not genetic.  Because we
are ignorant and cannot measure consciousness, let alone its quality, I am for
erring on the side of caution.

When we decide where to draw the line, we must also take
into consideration that sex is NOT simply about reproduction, and today only
the most ignorant, self-centered, and/or thoughtless people could say that it
is.  Sex serves a great many
purposes.  Consequently given our
capacity, a genuine and reasonable means must exist so that no one gets
pregnant accidentally, and any unwanted pregnancies can be terminated very
early, when no reasonable doubt can exist that a tiny mass of cells is not
morally a human being.

My choice is clear, and it is different from anti-choice
people whom I see as using scientific data chosen very selectively, data which
have no moral weight without reference to other factors that seem to me
separate from it.

At best, they make a logical error.

Why do I keep returning to abortion?  For several reasons.  First, when they dominate the discussion, the anti-choice folks’ irrational way of framing the discussion can lull the unwary into making the same errors.  Secondly, to provide a space where I and similarly minded people can help spread rational arguments.  Third, to give the anti-choice people access to reasoned discussions discussions they most certainly do not get at their houses of worship.