re: Cleveland Clinic Performs Its First In Utero Fetal Surgery Stolen from O.T.

HeroHank is white knighting for the abortion industry.



He'll say he isn't though.

FWIW, fetal - in utero surgery has been performed in the US for 20-25 yrs. The Fetal SBR surgery was simply the first performed in Ohio. But . . . . meh . . . . American medicine.

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At what point does the umbilical become "its" and not "hers"?

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The question did not indicate whether the fetus was male or female. Thus, are used a neutral term.

THIS trivia what you get excited about?

No wonder of substantive discussion is essentially impossible here

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The question did not indicate whether the fetus was male or female.

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The question did indicate your correct association of the umbilical with the infant, not the mother. The same umbilical present for months in utero.

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Guess at least one good thing happened in Ohio.

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Meh . . . can't spell Ohio without a couple of zeros.

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No wonder of substantive discussion is essentially impossible here

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Look at 2 STD Hank protesting ITT.

We believe you, Simple Jack.

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Abortion is murder and the millions of people that support it are ghouls.

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It's sad how desensitized our society has become. Killing a fetus with a heartbeat is murder, no matter how you paint it.

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First, I have reached the conclusion that the abortion analysis is inherently a balancing of rights, as between the pregnant woman and the developing organism resident in her uterus. As such, we are not simply analyzing the “rights“ of the embryo or fetus, but also balancing those rights against the coexistent rights of the pregnant woman. When someone is considering abortion, it would seem that those rights are in conflict and some balance must be reached.

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I agree with this, and It's my belief that only the mother's life (self-defense, in essence) is the only moral allowance to take the life of another. Anything else unbalances the rights, since the most fundamental right anyone has is to live, for all other rights are contingent on you being alive to assume and enjoy them.

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Sapience is the level of development one step above sentence. Sentience basically involves a certain amount of minimal self-awareness and awareness of one’s environment. Sapience takes the next step into the realm of higher thought processes, analysis, and reason.

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Interesting. I've honestly never heard anyone go as far as to remove value from (or not assign positive value to) a human life due to sapience. I've heard sentience as that designation, but not sapience. Sapience seems to be even more radical since newborns aren't sentient, much less sapient, and it can be argued that the sapience of a toddler or even a three year old is not sufficient to consider them "valuable" by that standard, depending on that seemingly subjective scale. I think that's a very dangerous standard to hold to.

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If there is some objective, measurable unit of sapiens, I am not aware of it. I have never said otherwise. It is something that develops over time, on a sliding scale, not something that either exists or does not ... beginning or ending at a given point in time.

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If you cannot measure it, how can you base value of life on it? The standard, itself, seems very arbitrary to me (why use sapience instead of sentience, viability outside the womb, a heartbeat, or conception?), but then it gets even more arbitrary to determine where one finds themselves on that sliding scale with no particular well-defined points to compare yourself to.

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It is, of course, true that a newborn infant is not yet fully sapient. Neither is a two-year-old toddler. That is not the question. The question is when do we make a societal decision that the developing sapience of the offspring will override the self determinative rights of the woman. That is not a question which can be answered by science. It is a philosophical question, and for legal purposes can only be answered through the political process.

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Considering you've admitted that we can't measure sapience, I don't know how we can really assign value to it. Both the scale and the assignment of value on that scale becomes decidedly arbitrary. How, then, can we expect to determine such a standard for balancing rights with such a foundation? Is it possible for that standard to change? If so, how do we know?

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The answer to your third and fourth questions would be entirely dependent upon your definition of “right to life.“ I see that as being a negative right not to be killed, and inherently a right which must be balanced against the rights of the pregnant woman.

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It seems to me that there is no basis for determining "right to life" (whatever that means) on a scale that cannot be precisely defined. If a "right to life" has a starting point on that scale, we need to know when or where that is. It seems to me that you are saying that the scale itself is relative with no definitive points, but that each stage in human development has a relative level of sapience compared to other stages of development. I'm just curious how we use that sort of scale practically, since this discussion isn't just philosophical in nature, but it has practical implications.

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For instance, a pregnancy which will (guaranteed) kill a fully-sapient adult woman should, in my view, I ALWAYS be terminated if necessary to preserve her life. She is fully sapient, and the fetus is not. It is that simple. On the other hand, the same is not true for a purely elective/convenience abortion. The level of infringement upon the rights of the pregnant woman is significantly lower than the loss of her life, so the “burden of proof“ (if you will) to preserve the fetus is also lower.

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Question: if we cannot quantifiably determine how much sapience belongs to a fetus and how much sapience belongs to an adult woman, how can we accurately compare the two to understand where those rights are balanced? In addition, if the sapience of the mother is vastly greater than that of the fetus, what does it matter that the fetus is killed out of convenience? If value is based on sapience and a fetus has none (it's not sentient, much less sapient), then why can't it be killed for any reason, including for convenience?

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By way of further example, let us look at a 30 week fetus. If necessary to preserve the life of the pregnant woman, I would submit that the fetus should always be terminated. If necessary to preserve the physical health of the woman, I would probably argue much the same, depending upon the degree of health risk. I would argue quite the opposite if the woman’s only reason for abortion at 30 weeks is inconvenience.

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Again, why? Why wouldn't the woman be able to "terminate" the fetus out of convenience if the fetus isn't sapient at all? If value is based on sapience and a fetus has no sapience at all, then it must be concluded that it has no value at all, and therefore the woman can do with it whatever she wants to do with it without any moral repercussions.

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In answer to your fourth question, and as briefly addressed above, the level of sapience in a normally developing fetus (and later child) would indeed increase with each of the time points that you have listed.

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By how much? Is it a weighted (hockey stick) scale with more points being attributed in proportion to the level of development, or is each additional place on the scale given the same amount of points as the place before it? Also, is there a point on that scale when "life" or "value" begins? Or is it not such much about life or value existing but how much life or how much value is given based on position on the sapience scale?

The reason why I ask is that if the rights of parents to do as they please without being financially, emotionally, or psychologically burdened by raising children is in conflict with the rights of their children to be kept alive and cared for, at what point does imbalance come into the question? Does having two "fully sapient" parents burdened by a single, less sapient 2 year old allow for the parents to kill the child if they desire?

Bottom line: "sapience" as a standard seems 100% arbitrary and undefinable, making it impractical to develop policy and law around and irrational from a philosophical perspective (due to it's arbitrariness).

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it is so difficult to have an objective and analytical discussion regarding this issue

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says the person who ran away from the discussion when his silly ideas were challenged

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Science outed the Bible a long time ago

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link?