Abortion: Not Cessation of Life

Brandi Slavich

Politics, religion and sex; three taboo topics you are never supposed to bring up.  For that reason, when they do get brought up, you should run, not walk, away from that conversation because things tend to get very heated.  However times are changing making it seem that we should, now, add abortion to that list.  Abortion is a topic that has quickly grown becoming more public.  Still being debated, pro-life advocates tend to argue that “[if] life is present from conception, [then] abortion amounts to cessation of life.”  However this is not a valid argument because life is not present from conception and even if it was abortion is, still, not cessation of a life. Classifying an abortion as murder poses numerous and insurmountable philosophical problems.

It seems indisputable that the main crime concerning abortion is the crime against potentialities.  Be that it may, if someone were to try to dispute this fact a serious question would arise;  what is the philosophical difference between aborting a fetus and destroying a sperm and an egg? Well, for one thing, …

These two contain all the information [or, all the potential] and their destruction is, philosophically, no less grave than the destruction of a fetus.  The destruction of an egg and a sperm is even more serious philosophically: the creation of a fetus limits the set of all potentials embedded in the genetic material to the one fetus created.  The egg and sperm can be compared to the famous wave function (state vector) in quantum mechanics – the represent millions of potential final states (millions of potential embryos and lives).  The fetus is the collapse of the wave function: it represents a much more limited set of potentials.  If killing an embryo is murder because of the elimination of potentials – how should we consider the intentional elimination of many more potentials through masturbation and contraception? (Vaknin)

Cessation of life or the prevention of a future the acts look the same but, murder is the intentional termination of the life of a human who possesses (at the moment of death) a consciousness and, in most cases, a free will, especially the will not to die, which neither the zygote, embryo or fetus have.  Abortion is the intentional termination of a life which so happens to have the  potential to develop into a person with consciousness and free will. However, philosophically, no identity can be established between potentiality and actuality… A cluster of cells a human makes only through the agency of Nature.

The Human embryo has a very long tail and branchial arches resembling gills.  First forming a parallel to a fish like kidney, then later, discarding and replaced it with a mammalian kidney.  Consequently, in many respects an early Human embryo more mirrors a fish rather than a Human Being.  That being the case, when are we considered  human beings?  Clearly, when able to live outside of its mother given the support of available medical knowledge, with a functioning heart and brain, with pain and pleasure sensors, the baby in the mother is indeed a human being and deserving of the right to live. (Potter) Whereas when it comes to zygotes, embryos and fetuses the answer to that question is unclear.  Incidentally many people have used multiple explanations from Immanuel Kant’s work as a starting point. For instance…

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant clearly defines ‘person’ as a moral agent; as a being with certain cognitive capacities, ‘a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws.’ (Manninen 73)

Unlike a child, already born, that has a mind and therefore has begun its development of rational nature, whereas zygotes, embryos and fetuses lack rationality because they have not begun that development.

It is impossible to attribute moral status to a [human embryo] on grounds of its physical characteristics alone – even when its potential is considered – because there is no point in the process of ontogeny at which a scientific finding can be made, as it were, that a glob of protoplasm is now sufficiently endowed with moral freedom that it has become a responsible agent or sufficiently endowed with cultural, aesthetic, and ethical capacities that it has become a human being. (qtd. in Manninen 74)

Other philosophers may even show that embryos or fetuses possess human knowledge (difficult, given Kant correlates this control to certain cognitive capacities), or claim that, at conception, human knowledge is somehow united with the empirical self (a Kantian immediate animation).  However they cannot protect the embryos and fetuses are people, like you and I;  thus not providing a strong argument why humanity applies to embryos and fetuses, losing their theoretical grounds against experimentation.

People who oppose abortion choice would have to argue that, unlike any other person, a human fetus has a moral right to instrumentalize a person for sustenance even against the latter’s wishes. (Manninen 80)  In spite of this even if we were to consider the fetus as a person from conception it does not follow that others, namely a pregnant woman, have an obligation to provide the fetus with whatever it needs to survive, especially if someone’s body is being used against her will.

The right to be born crystallizes at the moment of voluntary and intentional fertilization. If a woman knowingly engages in sexual intercourse for the explicit and express purpose of having a child - then the resulting fertilized egg has a right to mature and be born. Furthermore, the born child has all the rights a child has against his parents: food, shelter, emotional nourishment, education, and so on.

It is debatable whether such rights of the fetus and, later, of the child, exist if the fertilization was either involuntary (rape) or unintentional ("accidental" pregnancies). It would seem that the fetus has a right to be kept alive outside the mother's womb, if possible. But it is not clear whether it has a right to go on using the mother's body, or resources, or to burden her in any way in order to sustain its own life. (Vaknin)

The right to be brought to life, to become or to be pertains to no one. If this right existed, it would imply an obligation or duty to give life to the unborn and the not-yet conceived; however no such obligation or duty exists.

We do not, as a society, compel individuals to donate blood or bone marrow, even if this means people will die as a result of not getting these vital bodily fluids, and certainly nine months of pregnancy is a greater bodily sacrifice than  donating blood or bone marrow… As a society, we recognize the moral imperative to treat all persons as ends in themselves and that all persons are worthy of intrinsic respect. And we recognize that this imperative applies even if respecting it in one person entails the death of another…

I can grieve the lives lost as a result of bone marrow or blood shortage and yet still maintain that donations must be voluntary - that no one can be strapped down and have their marrow or blood forcibly extracted…

I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life... I am arguing only that a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body – even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would. (Manninen 80-83)

Nonetheless, even when an old person is sick and dying we do have established rules when death has occurred or when it is considered acceptable to “pull the plug.”  Perhaps the same rules that apply to the end of life should be applied to the beginning. If the analysis of brain activity shows no conscious thought then life is considered over. This suggests that life begins with the formation of a brain and the initiation of conscious thought. (Potter)

Still, there is no conflict between the rights of the mother and those of her fetus. Abortion involves loss; loss of hope that various parties may have invested and loss of something valuable in its own right. Respecting something is to appreciate the value it has and claims it introduces to us. Even if the fetus were considered a [human] person from conception, it does not follow from this alone that others, particularly a pregnant woman, have an obligation to provide the fetus with whatever it needs to survive, especially when this entails the unwilling use of someone’s body. [Therefore] if a woman does choose to abort, it is a decision that should be reached with care, judiciousness, and ideally in situations where the woman has other moral obligations that parenthood would render it difficult or impossible to fulfill. (Manninen 75-85)  Thus, even though life is not present from conception, abortion cannot be treated considered of a life. Abortion is, if anything, a crime against potentialities.

Works Cited

Manninen, Bertha Alvarez. “A Kantian Defense of Abortion Rights with Respect for Intrauterine Life.” Diametros 39 (2014): 70-92. PhilPapers. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.

May, Simon Cabulea. “Principled Compromise and the Abortion Controversy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33.4 (2005): 317-48. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.

Potter, Steve. “Is the Killing (Abortion) of Human Embryos Always Murder?” Eveloce Science Blog. WordPress, 25 July 2011. Web. 6 Nov. 2014.

Reader, Soran. “Abortion, Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority.” Hypatia 23.1 (2008): 132-49. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.

Vaknin, Sam. “Abortion - The Aborted Contract and the Right to Life.” Samvak Tripod. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2014.

Pro-Choice Abortion Quotes

"There are differences between a child and a fetus insofar as a child has a mind and therefore “rational nature has already begun its development."

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"If a woman does choose to abort, it is a decision that should be reached with care, judiciousness, and ideally in situations where the woman has other moral obligations that parenthood would render it difficult or impossible to fulfill."

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"When I suggest that the woman should not be compelled to subordinate her interests to those of the fetus, I sometimes meet with the response: “But if she is allowed to have an abortion, the fetus is subordinated. It is just a question of who shall be subordinated to whom.” In a sense, of course, this is correct. There is a conflict of interest between the woman and the fetus, and someone is going to lose. But that is true in every Samaritan situation. There is a conflict between the distressed party’s need for aid and the potential rescuer’s desire not to give it. The point is that our law generally resolves this conflict in favor of the potential Samaritan."

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"Burgeoning human life, we might put it, is respect-worthy. Abortion involves loss. Not just loss of the hope that various parties might have invested, but loss of something valuable in its own right. To respect something is to appreciate fully the value it has and the claims it presents to us; someone who aborts and never gives it a second thought hasn’t exhibited genuine appreciation of the value and moral status of that which is now gone."

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"It is impossible to attribute moral status to a [human embryo] on grounds of its physical characteristics alone – even when its potential is considered – because there is no point in the process of ontogeny at which a scientific finding can be made, as it were, that a glob of protoplasm is now sufficiently endowed with moral freedom that it has become a responsible agent or sufficiently endowed with cultural, aesthetic, and ethical capacities that it has become a human being."

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"Even if we fully grant fetuses the status of persons, akin to that of any other person, this alone does not necessitate the moral impermissibility of abortion. This is because no one person’s right to life entails that another person must forcibly submit to unwanted bodily intrusion with the goal of sustaining the former’s life."



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"Imagine that an ailing violinist needs to stay hooked up to your kidneys for a certain amount of time in order to survive a rare affliction. If you choose to unplug yourself, the violinist will surely die. According to Thomson, if you have not consented to this dependency relation, you are free to terminate it, even if doing so results in the violinist’s death. Thomson does not deny that the violinist is a person with rights, including the right to life. Rather, she questions what obligations such a right imposes upon other human beings. It is not the case, she argues, that the violinist’s right to life necessitates that another person has an obligation to provide him with whatever he needs to survive. Analogously, even if the human fetus were considered a person from conception, it does not follow from this alone that others, particularly a pregnant woman, have an obligation to provide the fetus with whatever it needs to survive, especially when this entails the unwilling use of someone’s body."

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"I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life... I am arguing only that a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body – even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would."

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"Even granting that embryos and fetuses are persons, however, this alone would not entail the moral impermissibility of abortion rights, mainly because prohibiting abortion, and compelling women to gestate, violates the formula of humanity against them."

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"People who oppose abortion choice would have to argue that, unlike any other person, a human fetus has a moral right to instrumentalize a person for sustenance even against the latter’s wishes."

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"In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant clearly defines “person” as a moral agent; as a being with certain cognitive capacities, “a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws.”

In his Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant argues that the human capacity of “personality” is the source of our dignity as rational creatures, and he defines it as “the susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive of the power of choice.”

And, once again in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant specifically defines the term “humanity” as “the capacity to set oneself an end – any end whatsoever.”

It is clear from these passages that Kant correlated the capacity for free choice and moral agency with humanity and personhood. The problem for Kantian pro-life philosophers who argue that conception is the moment when a new human person first comes into existence is not just that embryos and fetuses lack moral agency and free will, but that Kant was clear that it was impossible to correlate the acquisition of freedom, and therefore humanity, to a physical or biological event."

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"We do not, as a society, compel individuals to donate blood or bone marrow, even if this means people will die as a result of not getting these vital bodily fluids, and certainly nine months of pregnancy is a greater bodily sacrifice than donating blood or bone marrow… As a society, we recognize the moral imperative to treat all persons as ends in themselves and that all persons are worthy of intrinsic respect. And we recognize that this imperative applies even if respecting it in one person entails the death of another... I can grieve the lives lost as a result of bone marrow or blood shortage and get still maintain that donations must be voluntary - that no one can be strapped down and have their marrow or blood forcibly extracted."

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"Viewing fetuses as patients independently of the women who carry them correlates with the increased dehumanization of those same women by transforming them into environments or containers for the unborn patient...More concerning is that “nowhere does the [federal guidelines] section on fetal research cite maternal safety as a consideration."

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"Given the correlation between single motherhood and poverty, it is quite understandable that this is a lifestyle to which women would choose to not be tethered, especially since it presents a formidable obstacle to growth and self--improvement."

America is Behind in Weather Forecasting

Brandi Slavich

Weather is important. We all experience it on a day-to-day basis and getting warnings out in time saves lives yet our country, the United States of America, is behind compared to other nations. The issue begins with the people who argue that the U.S. inferiority in numerical weather prediction really does not matter. Despite the facts that compared to other countries the United States has third rate status in numerical weather prediction some assume that since we have access to the superior forecasts of the models of the European Center (EC), the UK Met Office, and others that that is enough.

The technology of weather prediction has improved dramatically during the past decades as faster computers, better models, and much more data (mainly satellites) have become available. The problem is that the U.S. global model is number 3 or number 4 in quality, resulting in our forecasts being noticeably inferior to the competition (Mass, The U.S.). Consequently, even though we have all the potential to be on top and have the most destructive weather in the world, the U.S. is settling with substandard forecasting. With this in mind, a major contributor to the United States inferiority is that we have inadequate computers/lack of computer resources. The European Center for Medium range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) is running models with substantially higher resolution than ours even though we can afford the processors and disk space is definitely part of the problem. The U.S. does not have enough computer power available for numerical weather prediction and the U.S. modeling inferiority is costing us big bucks. For example, if you read the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast discussion online you will notice that they frequently depend on the ECMWF, not the U.S. models.

Time and again, we’ve learned the value of improving the “resolution” of our numerical models, say, describing the weather on a grid where the points are separated by 15 km instead of 30 km. But that’s computationally expensive. [Yet] typically when we increase the resolution, the change permits us to notice deficiencies in the model that we didn’t worry about before. A number of companies and U.S. entities are paying hundreds of the thousands of dollars EACH to get European Center model output. (Hamill)

Europe has the advantage with models that have twice the resolution as ours. To illustrate, the NWS has two computers that are not even on the worldwide top 500 list while the ECMWF has two machines that rank 37th and 38th worldwide; each with 24,546 cores and a computational ability of 0.75 petaflops while the NOAA’s Fairmount location only has 0.38 petaflops. Furthermore for the past twenty years the U.S. has been using Three Dimensional Variational Assimilation (3DVAR) while the European Center, the UK Meteorology Office, and our Canadian neighbors have upgraded to 4DVAR. In fact, a Professor in Atmospheric Sciences asserts “the lack of computer power and poor coordination between research and operational weather communities in the U.S. has crippled our ability to move forward towards the high-resolution weather prediction capability” (Mass, Second Rate). Hence why resolution is considered a key aspect for weather prediction.

        Under those circumstances, when it comes to research the U.S is on top, having the largest meteorological research establishment in the world; however we are not taking advantage of it. The Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) continues to be reluctant when it comes to using models and approaches developed by the U.S. hence why the interactions with the research communities are bounded. Similarly, not only has the EMC been isolating themselves and has become known for their “not invented here” attitude, the NWS is not innocent either. Due to the fact that the NWS’s budget has been under pressure, university research has been the first thing they seem to cut out.

The government weather research is NOT in the NWS, but rather in NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].  Thus, the head of the NWS and his leadership team do not have authority over folks doing research in support of his mission.  This has been an extraordinarily ineffective and wasteful system, with the NOAA research teams doing work that often has a marginal benefit for the NWS… The folks in NCEP [National Centers for Environmental Prediction], NWS, and NOAA leadership have been willing to accept third-class status, providing lots of excuses, but not making the fundamental changes in organization and priority that could deal with the problem.  Lack of resources for NWP is another issue...but that is a decision made by NOAA/NWS/Dept of Commerce leadership. (Mass, The U.S.)

The result is inefficiency, there is no group to coordinate the research and development of the U.S. research community so the progress of pressing problems is slow and money ends up wasted. Likewise, the NOAA/NWS polar orbiter acquisition program has been characterized by mismanagement for years, not only delaying the next generation satellites, but again costing the nation billions of dollars.

        All-in-all the most disturbing part of this is story is not that we are behind the Europeans and others, but that we are well behind what this nation is capable of (which is far beyond ECMWF). Our inferior computers, poor management, lack of effective leadership, and inability to tap the large weather research community are just some of the issues that makes forecasting in the U.S. inferior. We may have the potential to be at the top but nothing is going to change until people begin to see that weather prediction is an incredibly complicated enterprise. NOAA deploys satellites, weather balloons, radar data, and more. Our data assimilation algorithms synthesize this data. Our models and our supercomputers crank out the numerical guidance 24/7. Our forecasters are always on the job and bust their humps in ways you could not believe when severe weather is on the way. All of this costs taxpayers pennies a day. And the data is free to all and free to you without advertising (Hamill).

Overall, although the weather enterprise has a great deal going for it and “the large U.S. meteorological community has made significant strides in weather diagnosis and prediction, progress has been slowed by a lack of cooperation, coordination, and pooling of resources” (Mass, Uncoordinated Giant). It is time to incorporate all our strengths together. We need to regain our stature as a world leader in research and operational meteorology so that U.S. meteorologists can better serve and protect our nation.

Work Cited

Hamill, Thomas M. "Has the US fallen behind in numerical weather prediction: a response from a NOAA scientist." ABC 7: Storm Watch 7 Weather Blog. Allbritton Communications Co., 5 Apr. 2012. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.

Mass, Clifford. "Second rate U.S. numerical weather prediction: Why you should care." The Washington Post 26 Feb. 2013, Local: 1. The Washington Post. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.

- - -. "The Uncoordinated Giant: Why U.S. Weather Research and Prediction Are Not Achieving Their Potential." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 87.5 (2006): 573-84. EBSCO. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

- - -. "The U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Numerical Weather Prediction: Part I." Cliff Mass Weather Blog. Blogger, 18 Mar. 2012. Web. 7 Mar. 2014.

Miller, Petter. "Why Are Europeans Better at Predicting Weather?" National Geographic 7 Mar. 2013: n. pag. Print.