Americans and others hold a wide range of abortion views, ranging from what is called pro-choice to pro-life. Some of these views go to extremes.
Abortion encompasses a broad field of subjects — psychology, economics, anatomy, physiology, behavior, religion, philosophy, health, sociology, etc. It’s a very complex and divisive topic with a lot of factors to be considered.
We present some different considerations.
First we look at two categories of abortions — spontaneous (called a miscarriage) and intentional.
Miscarriages can occur “naturally” on the female side for various reasons. Causes may be disease, genetic or anatomic abnormalities, drug use or abuse, or poor environmental conditions to name some believed to be the most common by the current medical field. They may also be caused by some abnormality in the embryo or fetus itself.
An intentional abortion is the removal via human-directed means of conception products from the uterus to stop development — either embryo-related or fetus and placenta, depending on the pregnancy duration.
(For those not familiar with the terminology, biologists have designated an embryo as that organism in the human growth phase which develops after implantation of the early conception products in the uterus and exists for about 8 to 10 weeks. A fetus follows the embryonic phase to term.)
An intentional abortion may be performed by any of several processes — maybe a pill early, and either a saline injection into the fetus or a surgical manipulation later.
The two basic reasons for having an intentional abortion are therapeutic and elective.
The therapeutic may be decided by consultation with a doctor for the female’s physical or mental health. Carrying an embryo or fetus can put the female at risk of a variety of problems. These risks may range from extreme stress to disease or death.
The elective abortion may be decided solely by the female for personal reasons, and this is where most of the controversy originates.
A female may believe an elective abortion necessary for many personal reasons:
– Economics — e.g., she can’t afford to support a/another child
– Human relationships — e.g., she may be having marital or other problems
– Crime — e.g., she may have been raped
– Convenience — e.g., it would interfere with her desired lifestyle
– Fetal abnormalities — e.g., the fetus has some likely fatal issue, or will be severely handicapped to prevent it from leading a “self-fulfilling” life
There may be other reasons which seem valid to her. We can’t predict or speculate on all the possibilities.
Having mentioned the female perspective for an elective abortion, what about the male perspective? Once the male sperm fertilizes the egg, the female’s body takes over. The male’s portion now depends mostly on the relationship between the people involved. There could be legal or other implications. We won’t discuss those issues here.
But there is another possible perspective.
A third perspective which we don’t hear much about and might need to be considered is that of the embryo or fetus. This entity has no voice in the decision. Does it have any desires in this matter?
You might want to refer to two previous blogs death and beforelife for more background on that possibility.
This consideration necessarily leads us into a discussion of consciousness. We really don’t have a good understanding of what it is, but we know it exists. Does the embryo or fetus have awareness or consciousness?
From a material perspective, neuroscientists and others have theorized when a fetus might develop consciousness. They don’t consider the embryo as having any capacity because there is no neural tissue. They tend to believe that after the brainstem develops by some amount the fetus would be capable of simple awareness of the body and the surroundings — that you need the neural tissue to achieve this level. Greater awareness and consciousness appear over time as the brain develops further and the fetus matures.
But there may be another embryo-fetus consideration. In the first of the blogs mentioned above, we mentioned out-of-body experiences, where the conscious “soul” appears dissociated from the body.
One type of reported out-of-body experience has occurred where a person has been badly injured in an accident. They report being out of their material body, observing events from another vantage point, and feeling no pain from the injured material body. When they re-associate with the material body, however, they feel or are conscious of the pain from their injuries.
This raises questions: When does the soul associate with the body initially? Does it associate at conception or some later time? Once associated, does it remain with the intended material body until death? Or can it separate like mentioned above in an accident? Does something like this vary by individual or is it the same for everyone?
We don’t have clear answers to these questions, but they should be considered and answered individually by the people involved in making such decisions.
Whether sooner or later, the fetus in the womb has essentially full consciousness. If an abortion were to occur, would the conscious soul just end its association with that future would-be material body — similar to a death as discussed previously? Or might it be like those in an accident out of the material body where there is no pain, but suffer pain when re-associated with what exists of the material body at that point?
We need more open-minded research in this area.
We’ll examine the two sides of the elective abortion rationale for these positions in our next blog.