The Colorado Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for an anti-abortion group to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person.
The court approved the language of the proposal, rejecting a challenge from abortion-rights supporters who argued it was misleading and dealt with more than one subject in violation of the state constitution.
If approved by voters, the measure would give fertilized eggs the state constitutional protections of inalienable rights, justice and due process.
“Proponents of this initiative have publicly stated that the goal is to make all abortion illegal ”” but nothing in the language of the initiative or its title even mentions abortion,” Kathryn Wittneben of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado said in a statement. “If that’s not misleading, I don’t know what is.”
Fertilized egg = zygote.
Hence, the headline should be about zygote rights.
So would this legally define an identical twin as half a person? And that’s one of the less weird transformations an early embryo can go through. Starting from the embryo, by this definition an baby could be varyingly a fifth of a person, half a person, two people, half of two people, a majority one person and a minority a previously existing person(the mother)…etc.
The above is a little facile, but it’s necessary to point out that individuals at the embryo stage do not perfectly map to what the law considers individuals at birth. I’m skeptical about assigning pluripotent cells personhood. It’s not quite a baby if it can reproduce by fission (though that would have solved Solomon’s problem). Recent studies have shown that a sizable minority or perhaps even majority of individuals are not composed of a single cell line, but have cell lines from their mothers, twin siblings, children, and even aborted fetuses in their body.
In addition, this initiative seems like it would tend to mandate a Latin American Catholic “sucks to be you” approach to ectopic pregnancies, and possibly create awkwardness in the treatment of things like teratoma as well.
The zygote certainly has potential to do all those things, Neziha. Of course, the zygotes given over to research get an opportunity to be replacement organs if current hype is to be believed. There are other options than zygotes and blastocysts et alia for human stem cell research that do not require human sacrifice, placental and umbilical cells, for instance.
Providing protection to the fusion product of sperm and egg merely protects the human from its inception rather than from its legal origin.
I don’t see how recognizing the growing embryo as a person would stop emergency surgery for ectopic pregnancy. In this case, we have two people, the mother and the child. The child will die and cannot be saved. Failing action, the mother will die also. The operation is performed to save the mother. As far as I know Roman Catholic religious authorities do not disapprove of this.
This is another opening for businesses like Snowflake Embryo Adoption to flourish. It is all about family formation. When you see Snowflakes think Focus on the Family. These routes to create children and families are stunningly innovative. The children produced in this way are without voice… and the most imposed upon in this whole procedure.
Read CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man…”Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.”
The child… who, God willing, grows into an adult… that is also the prisoner.
Neziha and Katherine,
“However, if medical treatment or surgical operation, necessary to save a mother’s life, is applied to her organism (though the child’s death would, or at least might, follow as a regretted but unavoidable consequence), it should not be maintained that the fetal life is thereby directly attacked. Moralists agree that we are not always prohibited from doing what is lawful in itself, though evil consequences may follow which we do not desire. The good effects of our acts are then directly intended, and the regretted evil consequences are reluctantly permitted to follow because we cannot avoid them. The evil thus permitted is said to be indirectly intended. It is not imputed to us provided four conditions are verified, namely:
* That we do not wish the evil effects, but make all reasonable efforts to avoid them;
* That the immediate effect be good in itself;
* That the evil is not made a means to obtain the good effect; for this would be to do evil that good might come of it — a procedure never allowed;
* That the good effect be as important at least as the evil effect.
All four conditions may be verified in treating or operating on a woman with child. The death of the child is not intended, and every reasonable precaution is taken to save its life; the immediate effect intended, the mother’s life, is good — no harm is done to the child in order to save the mother — the saving of the mother’s life is in itself as good as the saving of the child’s life. Of course provision must be made for the child’s spiritual as well as for its physical life, and if by the treatment or operation in question the child were to be deprived of Baptism, which it could receive if the operation were not performed, then the evil would be greater than the good consequences of the operation. In this case the operation could not lawfully be performed. Whenever it is possible to baptize an embryonic child before it expires, Christian charity requires that it be done, either before or after delivery; and it may be done by any one, even though he be not a Christian.”
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01046b.htm
Katherine: The Catholics don’t consider abortion to save the mother’s life permissible. In certain countries like Nicaragua, all abortion is banned, due to the principle that, as here, the fetus is as much of a person as the moither.
The last time the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith took a look at the ectopic issue (about a hundred years back, when it was the Holy Office) it returned an unequivocal no. Dwstroudmd, search for ectopic in that link.
There’s a consensus among modern -theologicians- that Catholics can remove ectopics, through they require a procedure where the tube is cut out from around the embryo for reasons I’ll go into below. This is only Catholic teaching in the same way that, say, Limbo was.
IMHO it’s a pretty obvious weasel way out. The double effect is meant for cases like cancer, particularly cancer of the reproductive organs, where the mother is seriously ill and treating her will kill the baby. Catholics aren’t supposed to do things like kill the baby during a difficult labor to save the mother.
The Catholic vaguely approved method requires the fiction that the tube itself is “diseased”, and killing the fetus is only a side effect of treating the tube, when really the problem is the fetus and placenta, the removal of neither of which is supposed to be permitted. If the fetus is spontaneously aborted, which often happens in ectopics, often the tube will be fine. Chemical abortion, or slicing the tube open and removing the fetus are -not- permitted despite better efficacy and less chance of recurrance of an ectopic pregnancy, because they’re clearly abortion instead of, well, weasel abortion.
I’m not sure anyone on the Catholic side actually wants to upset this careful status quo. It’s a modern tiptoeing aroung the fact that Catholic women are expected to die for the sake of their offspring, viable or otherwise.
Neziha, I’m not a physician. I would be interested to know if American Catholic authorities consider an operation to end an ectopic pregnancy an “abortion.”
Katherine: The favored procedure is considered at least indirect abortion, through tortured logic that (as above) don’t think is particularly honest. Other less invasive procedures to remove the ectopic fetus are considered abortion.
Neither of you read very carefully do you? I suggest rather than asking or misrepresenting that you go to the link I provided and read what the CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA actually says.
dwstroudmd: From your link – “After these and other similar decisions had been given, some moralists thought they saw reasons to doubt whether an exception might not be allowed in the case of ectopic gestations. Therefore the question was submitted: “Is it ever allowed to extract from the body of the mother ectopic embryos still immature, before the sixth month after conception is completed?” The answer given, 20 March, 1902, was: “No; according to the decree of 4 May, 1898; according to which, as far as possible, earnest and opportune provision is to be made to safeguard the life of the child and of the mother. As to the time, let the questioner remember that no acceleration of birth is licit unless it be done at a time, and in ways in which, according to the usual course of things, the life of the mother and the child be provided for”. Ethics, then, and the Church agree in teaching that no action is lawful which directly destroys fetal life. It is also clear that extracting the living fetus before it is viable, is destroying its life as directly as it would be killing a grown man directly to plunge him into a medium in which he cannot live, and hold him there till he expires.”
Current Catholic theologicians argue that a salpingectomy is covered by double effect, and it doesn’t directly destroy fetal life. IMHO, that’s nonsense. Well-intentioned nonsense, but nonsense. It’s not like a cancerous uterus. The problem isn’t with the tube(at least before it bursts) it’s with what’s in the tube. Otherwise Catholic women wouldn’t be praying for the issue to resolve itself via a spontaneous abortion.
And the Catholic church in El Salvador, for instance, successfully pushed for legislation forbidding treatment of ectopic pregnancy until the tube bursts. I need to check on Nicaragua’s similarly Church-pushed legislation, but I think it’s similar.
“Ethics, then, and the Church agree in teaching that no action is lawful which directly destroys fetal life.”
“Current Catholic theologicians argue that a salpingectomy is covered by double effect, and it doesn’t directly destroy fetal life. IMHO, that’s nonsense.”
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, Neziha. Are you stating that on the basis of your opinion everyone else is a priori wrong? Because you are going to have to produce a few more credentials for your authoritativeness.
When the goal is to save the mother’s life and the process requires removing the tube due to bleeding, the intent is to save the mother’s life NOT to destroy the embryo. It is indeed unfortunate that the embryo is indirectly killed in the process of saving the mother’s life, but it is a licit action.
“* That we do not wish the evil effects, but make all reasonable efforts to avoid them;
* That the immediate effect be good in itself;
* That the evil is not made a means to obtain the good effect; for this would be to do evil that good might come of it—a procedure never allowed;
* That the good effect be as important at least as the evil effect.”
This scenario is different than that of women wishing for a spontaneous abortion (16-25% of PGcies with variations in age and timing) to end a PGcy so that they do not utilize an evil effect as a means, don’t you think?
You seem to conflate two categories of action under one.
They’re not merely removing the tube due to bleeding. (That’s fairly clear double effect). They’re removing the tube pre-bleeding, on the ground that the tube is in and of itself a threat to the mother’s life in the absense of the embryo. and the problem isn’t with the embryo in the tube. However, if the embryo mysteriously disappeared between examination and surgery, they’d leave the tube there. It’s very unlike the situation of a bleeding tube, or a cancerous uterus, where the thing needs to go whether there’s a baby in there or not. Saying the problem is the tube and not the growing embryo before it bursts is intellectually dishonest.
Not that there aren’t very good reasons to remove the tube before it bursts, they just IMHO aren’t good Catholic reasons, and like I mentioned the consensus in the States isn’t followed by, say, El Salvador.
But to get this closer to the topic, I think it’s interesting to consider El Salvador here, because they recently pushed through a constitutional amendment defining people as beginning at conception, with the support of the Pope. They also fairly uniquely use police and such to defend the rights of the unborn.
Well, Neziha, you certainly seem to have an interest in El Salvador. Perhaps you could publish links with the material you reference for review by those whose evaluations you solicit. Mine had best be in English since I have no formal training in Spanish.
People do begin at fertilization – when the egg and sperm merge – just like puppies and kitties and elephants and dolphins all begin with the union of the gametes. Those zygotes then travel through the fallopian tube and implant in the endometrium of the uterus (technically this is defined as conception in the ACOG). The zygote plus CH2O and O2 and nutrients from the environment produces the various multicellular stages of the embryo until implantation (“conception”) allows the development of the receipt of nutrients from the endometrium via various stages. At no point does the zygote undergo any transubstantiation into another being. The fetus crossing the vaginal introitus or abdominal incision is the grwon up zygote. You are a grown up zygote. Congratulations on surviving to this point.