Tag: abortion

Mifepristone, the FDA, and Abortion Activism

Posted on by Carol A Westbrook

by Carol A Westbrook

Mifepristone in updaated package

The Supreme Court is poised to make another landmark decision this year, when it determines if it will uphold a Texas Federal court’s ruling that invalidates the FDA’s (U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s) updated labeling of the abortion pill mifepristone (pronounced mi-ˈfe-pri’-stōn) , brand name Mifeprex (Fig 1). Not only will this ruling have a significant impact on abortions in the US, it will also determine whether the Supreme Court (Fig 2) has the power to modify or nullify an FDA ruling. But before we delve any further into this debate, let’s review the action of this drug on the biology of the female reproductive system.

Fig. 2. Justices of the US Supreme Court pose for their official photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC on October 7, 2022. (Seated from left) Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito and Associate Justice Elena Kagan, (Standing behind from left) Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In the early part of a woman’s monthly cycle, her levels of the hormone progesterone rise, and this causes the lining of the uterus to thicken and increases its blood supply, converting it into a state that can support a fetus. After unprotected sex, sperm are deposited in the vagina, and they begin to travel up the fallopian tubes; at the same time, an egg is released from the ovary and travels down the fallopian tube. (Fig 3) When sperm and egg unite, conception occurs. Interestingly, the date of conception does not mark the start of the pregnancy; pregnancy is actually counted from the beginning of a woman’s monthly cycle, two weeks prior to conception. The total length of a pregnancy is usually 40 weeks, or 9 months. Read more »



Monday, July 18, 2022

Fetus Fetish on the Firing Line: A Conversation

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt and Jennifer Ballengee

Human embryo at 4 weeks
Human embryo at 4 weeks

First Discussant: For anti-abortion extremists, abortion is a fetish. It’s a symptom that covers a repressed, secret, and socially unacceptable desire. What desire? I’m not sure; it’s their fetish, not mine. But whatever it may be, it drives anti-abortion protestors to scream about saving lives, to hold up posters of fully-formed fetuses (rather than the mass of cells you see in an ultrasound at six weeks or so), and to demand that we save those unformed lives. However, those images of fully-formed fetuses are a lie. They are visual metaphors which, as metaphors do, compare two unlike things: “life” in its social, meaningful context, and the bare life of any cell mass, whether an amoeba, plant, worm, or human. The “sacred” aspect of the human—which lends it the claim to human rights, or gives it its meaning in punishment or execution or “life”—is not innate but imagined. However, if we were to admit that we’re a mass of cells like any other life form, then we’d all have to be vegetarians, or cannibals.

The Respondent: I agree that anti-abortion extremism is a fetish, a form of idolatry where supplicants worship a non-sentient globule for its spiritual and even magical powers. I call this the Fetus Fetish. It’s actually more of an embryo fetish, but I like alliterations. Perhaps it’s not surprising since the vast, vast majority of extremists are very religious and typically espouse Christian notions of a divinely formed soul within every human being upon conception, leading them to entangle embryos with ideas about the sacred. That seems pretty straightforward. What grabs me is your implication that anti-abortion extremism is grounded in a form of religious speciesism. That only by replacing honest observation and rational thought with supernatural religiosity could one conclude that a tiny collection of microscopic, embryonic cells is somehow more worthy of a sacred life than an adult chicken, or that even a twenty-week old fetus, which despite the miracles of modern medical technologies absolutely cannot live outside a woman’s womb, is somehow on a par with, much less the better of, an adult cow or pig or dog. All you have to do is look an adult dog or pig in the eye to recognize you’re dealing with a mature, highly developed, self-sustaining, thinking mammal whose existence has infinitely more in common with your own than does an embryo or early stage fetus. Yes, either eat all the animals or none of them; or at least use that dichotomy as a starting point for some deep thought about your place in the universe. Read more »

Monday, November 29, 2021

Complementarity and the world: Niels Bohr’s message in a bottle

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Niels Bohr (Getty Images)

Werner Heisenberg was on a boat with Niels Bohr and a few friends, shortly after he discovered his famous uncertainty principle in 1927. A bedrock of quantum theory, the principle states that one cannot determine both the velocity and the position of particles like electrons with arbitrary accuracy. Heisenberg’s discovery foretold of an intrinsic opposition between these quantities; better knowledge of one necessarily meant worse knowledge of the other. Talk turned to physics, and after Bohr had described Heisenberg’s seminal insight, one of his friends quipped, “But Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same thing ten years ago.”

In fact, Bohr had already convinced Heisenberg that his uncertainty principle was a special case of a more general idea that Bohr had been expounding for some time – a thread of Ariadne that would guide travelers lost through the quantum world; a principle of great and general import named the principle of complementarity.

Complementarity arose naturally for Bohr after the strange discoveries of subatomic particles revealed a world that was fundamentally probabilistic. The positions of subatomic particles could not be assigned with definite certainty but only with statistical odds. This was a complete break with Newtonian classical physics where particles had a definite trajectory, a place in the world order that could be predicted with complete certainty if one had the right measurements and mathematics at hand. In 1925, working at Bohr’s theoretical physics institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg was Bohr’s most important protégé had invented quantum theory when he was only twenty-four. Two years later came uncertainty; Heisenberg grasped that foundational truth about the physical world when Bohr was away on a skiing trip in Norway and Heisenberg was taking a walk at night in the park behind the institute. Read more »

Monday, August 1, 2016

The Republican Party Platform is at least as objectionable as Trump

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

With the media choosing to pay so much attention to Donald Trump, relatively little attention has been paid to the 2016 Republican Party platform. This is in line with the tedious and reprehensible reduction of political discourse to horse race punditry. But it is a pity, since the prospect of this platform being enacted is every bit as worrying as the prospect of a narcissistic ignoramus like Trump becoming president. For those who don't have the stomach for reading all–or any–of its 54 pages, here are a few of the more disturbing highlights with brief commentary. Images

1. On prejudice and discrimination

The Platform boldly declares that Republicans “oppose discrimination based on race, sex, religion, creed, disability, or national origin and support statutes to end such discrimination.” Question for 5th graders: What is conspicuous by its absence from this list? That's right: no mention of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. A fair question, then, to ask the authors of the manifesto is: Do you, or do you not, oppose discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation? If you do, why don't you say so? You mention many other kinds of discrimination; so why not this one? If, on the other hand, you don't oppose it, why is this?

A hint of an answer (to the last question, at least) can be found elsewhere. Sexual orientation is mentioned just once in the document, when the authors protest against the attempt by Obama and others “to impose a social and cultural revolution on the American people by wrongly redefining sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and other categories.” This agenda, we are told, “has nothing to do with individual rights.” It seems, then, that freedom from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation is not a right that Republicans recognize. And I suppose that's why they don't oppose it.

While we're on the topic of prejudice and discrimination, here's another question for 5th graders. How does the above rejection of discrimination based on religion square with Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country (a proposal he has not disavowed)?

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Monday, February 17, 2014

Do our moral beliefs need to be consistent?

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

We generally think it desirable for our moral and political opinions to be logically consistent. We view inconsistency as a failing. Why?

I'm not talking here about consistency between a person's beliefs and their actions. Failing to practice what we preach is the sort of inconsistency we call hypocrisy, and it's easy to see why we disapprove of that. Hypocrites are less trustworthy and predictable than people whose actions accord with their stated opinions. Nor am I talking about remaining consistent over time, never altering or abandoning one's earlier convictions. That's the sort of “foolish consistency” that Emerson ridiculed as “the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I'm talking about logical consistency between beliefs. Why do we care about this? Exposing inconsistency is a standard move in many an ethical argument. Take the debate about abortion, for instance. A standard argument for viewing abortion as immoral is that it is essentially no different from infanticide, which, as it is the premeditated killing of an innocent human being, meets the definition of murder. Note the form of the argument: if you think murder is wrong, then, to be consistent, you should think infanticide is wrong, in which case, to be consistent, you should think that abortion is wrong. On the other side, a common justification for permitting abortion rests on the idea that a woman has property rights over her own body. Essentially, the argument runs: if you agree that a woman's body is her own property, then consistency requires you to accept that she can do with it as she pleases, and if you agree that the fetus is a part of her body, then consistency requires you to accept that she can do as she pleases with the fetus.

Or take Peter Singer's well-known argument for why all of us who can afford to should give more to help the needy. We all agree it would be wrong to not save someone from drowning just because we didn't want to ruin our shoes. Well, Singer argues, if we think that, then we should also accept that we have a duty to save human lives if we can do so by making similar minor sacrifices–and many of us can do this by donating our disposable income to charity. Whether these lives are close by or far away is irrelevant. Again, the underlying strategy here is an appeal to consistency. If you think x, then you ought, for the sake of consistency, to think y. Many other arguments about moral matters take this form.

But why do we value consistency? In science and in our everyday beliefs about the way things are, there is a straightforward answer. Inconsistent beliefs, taken together, form a contradiction: a proposition that has the form “p and not p.” We assume that reality does not contain contradictions (an assumption first articulated by Parmenides). So we infer that an inconsistent set of beliefs cannot possibly be an accurate description of the way things are.

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