Tag: Cathy Young

Genetic Engineering and Abortion

Cathy Young wrote an interesting analysis of the debate surrounding genetic engineering, Monkeying Around with the Self, for Reason magazine. Young basically argued that while we should not give in to the extreme opponents of genetic engineering, neither should we fail to realize that there are genuine moral quandaries raised by genetic engineering. But what intrigued me about the article was her discussion of recently announced plans to clone a human being.

Two Italian doctors, Panos Zavos and Severino Antinori — neither of whom are strangers to reproductive controversies — announced that they will attempt to create a viable cloned embryo and find a woman willing to bring the embryo to term.

Many people oppose such cloning, but mainly for reasons that are rooted in a misunderstanding of what cloning entails. Typically people think that a clone will be identical in every way to the donor of the genetic material, but in fact a cloned baby would be just another baby. There would not be anything more remarkable about a cloned baby than there would be about genetic twins who also share identical genetic material but are hardly exact copies of each other in terms of behavior, personality, etc.

There is one enormous problem with trying to clone a baby at this juncture, however. Scientists still are not very good at cloning animals. Most cloned animal embyros have so many birth defects that they spontaneously abort. Of the few that don’t spontaneously abort, a large percentage are still born or die within a few days after birth. Of those who don’t die shortly after birth, most have severe genetic defects including a tendency toward excessively large organs.

The number of cloned embryos who make it to relatively healthy living animals is exceedingly small. This is not much of an issue when dealing with animals, but presents a huge moral quandary when attempting to clone human beings. It strikes many people as morally repugnant to create a human being that is almost certain to have the sort of debilitating birth defects that are all but unprecedented in traditional sexual reproduction. Certainly sexual reproduction does carry such risks, but the odds of such a large collection of severe birth defects in one infant are almost negligible compared to the near certainty that a cloned infant would suffer from such defects.

As Young sums it up,

The real ethical problem of cloning, as REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues, is that at present, mammals cloned from adult cells appear to be at a high risk for congenital abnormalities. It would be immoral to expose a human infant to such risks. But if the procedure is perfected in nonhuman mammals to the point of being safe, cloning won’t change the basic character of human beings.

I agree with Young’s view, but wonder what effect grappling with these ethical issues will have on the abortion debate.

At the heart of the pro-choice movement, especially the pro-abortion views of many radical feminists, is the view that people do not owe any moral obligations to fetuses. Want to abort a fetus in the 8th month? No problem. Smoke crack right up until the hour before you go into labor? Don’t you dare call that child abuse. Feminists and pro-choice advocates rise up to smack down any attempt to infer that people could possibly moral obligations to fetuses.

And yet if you agree with Young that it would be unethical to expose an infant to the sort of risks that cloning currently would entail, that view is completely incompatible with the claim that there are no moral duties toward fetuses. After all the clever opponent of abortion will ask, “If it’s unethical to create a fetus that likely has a lot of birth defects, why is it okay to turn around and kill that fetus on a whim?”

Any answer to that question inevitably raises the spectre of potentiality. The reason it is unethical to intentionally create a human clone under current conditions is because the fetus will potentially be born with birth defects. But if people owe moral duties to potential persons, abortion gets ditched out the window since it presupposes that, in fact, we don’t have moral duties to potential persons (since every fertilized zygote is a potential person), unless someone wants to maintain that a fetus has an interest in not being born with birth defects but has no interest in being born, which seems bizarre on its face.

Although I am a supporter of abortion rights, both the standard legal and moral justifications of abortion remain extraordinarily deficient — which is why the pro-life movement is making strides while the pro-choice movement flounders.

Not that I have any great solution. I just wish abortion activists would sit down and actually think through these issues rather than simply launch ad hoc attacks that, taken together, don’t represent a consistent ethical position on abortion.

Sources:

Monkeying Around with the Self. Cathy Young, Reason, April 2001.

Baby cloning plans under fire. The BBC, March 10, 2001.

Human cloning: The ‘terrible odds’. Donald Bruce, The BBC, March 9, 2001.

Cathy Young on Bush’s Ending Abortion Subsidies

George W. Bush outraged pro-abortion groups by blocking federal funds to international groups that provide abortion counseling. But is support of abortion subsidies really a consistent pro-choice position?

The National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood and the other usual suspects were outraged when, after only two days in office, George W. Bush issued an executive order blocking federal funds from going to international family planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. But is supporting government-funded abortion really a consistent pro-choice position.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Cathy Young argues that federal funding for abortion is wrong “both as a matter of principle and as a matter of strategy.”

As Young writes,

The most powerful pro-choice argument is that a woman’s decision about something so personal as whether or not to bear a child should be free from governmental interference. A fundamental belief in individual rights has led a majority of Americans, however uncomfortably, to support legal abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. But asking the government to finance abortion is a very different matter.

In fact it is absurd for pro-choice activists on the one hand to argue that an abortion is essentially a decision that must be solely left to a woman and her doctor, but then drag the rest of us along into the doctor’s room by demanding we open our wallets to subsidize other people’s choices.

If a woman wants to have an abortion, I have no problem whatsoever with that, but I do have a problem when NOW and Planned Parenthood says I should be required to pay for abortions.

This sort of hypocrisy highlights one of the main problems at the core of big government feminism. On the one hand we are told that women are independent and capable of making their own decisions, thank you very much. In the next breath, of course, NOW and others inform us that women’s independence can only exist so long as women have access to a whole bevy of government programs.

Which is it — are women independent creatures or are they wards of the state?

Personally, I don’t think Bush went far enough. He should have forbidden all federal funding of abortion, period. That’s the only consistent pro-choice position.

Source:

Choice Yes, Subsidy No. Cathy Young, The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2001.

Cathy Young on Women’s Studies Program

Cathy Young wrote an excellent summary of the problem with women’s studies departments, Propaganda discredits value of women’s studies.

The bottom line: studies of sex and gender are indeed important, but are undermined by the explicit political agenda of many women’s studies departments. By limiting discourse to only one predtermined outcome — typically radical feminist in nature — women’s studies dpeartments today do as much to hid the reality of women’s lives as academia’s male-centered focus did for the first half of the 20th century.

“What’s wrong with women’s stuedies?” Young asks,

The courses, critics say, tend to stress political indoctrination and personal experiences rather than scholarship; dubioius tehories and facts are presetned as gospel; male villainy is endlessly preached; and young women are trained to regard themselves as perpetual victims.

Source:

Propaganda discredits value of women’s studies. Cathy Young, The Detroit News, November 10, 2000.

Should Men Have A Right to Choose Too?

Cathy Young has a very long, very well written piece in Salon.Com about an idea originally propounded by the men’s rights movement that is likely to be tested in courts within the decade — do men have unequal rights when it comes to issue of abortion that should be solved via a legal remedy?

The basic argument simply turns pro-choice argument on its head. If women should be able to have control over entering in to parental obligations, why not men as well? The idea seems inane at first, but most of the arguments against it, in one way or another, rely on claims that abortion rights activists already say are preposterous when used by pro-lifers. Typically feminists reply that if men don’t want to have to pay child support they should keep their pants on, which is a crude version of an early argument against abortion — if women don’t want to get pregnant, they shouldn’t sleep around. As Young notes, there is a “willingness to liberate women but not men from the unwanted consequences of sex…”

Young quotes from a Planned Parenthood pamphlet, “9 Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal,” which says, in part,

At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. … Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children?

Young essentially wants to know that if they are serious about the rhetoric, why shouldn’t men have the same opportunities. And if not, why not?

Most people of the folks who support the so-called men’s right to choose typically have some scheme whereby either parent is able to forego parental obligations — women can obviously abort a fetus as a remedy, and typically the remedy for men would be to renounce parental obligations during the pregnancy.

Does this sort of thinking make sense? Up to a point there are some important insights to be taken away from this sort of argument, but ultimately it has no chance of being accepted by courts and is suspect morally. The problem for feminists, however, is that the reason most people will find the men’s right to choose arguments fallacious is the persistent sexual stereotypes which see men as economic providers for children. The idea of father simply being able to renounce their parental obligations is probably revolting non-feminists and feminists alike (who, when contemplating it, might get a hint of how pro-lifers feel about the idea of a woman being able to abort a fetus) largely because of expectations society has of fathers.

Personally I think that’s, on balance, a very good thing. Besides technological solutions on the horizon such as the male birth control pill are likely to put men and women on more equal technological footing when it comes to controlling reproduction, and a massive change of the sort proposed by those advocating for a man’s right to choose would be a very bad idea.

On the other hand there is a subset of cases of forced fatherhood which Young cites which probably does deserve additional looking into. Namely, how should the law handle the responsibilities of a man when he is forced into being a father thanks to nonconsensual sexual activity?

Young finds a couple of doozies that are stunning. In one case a woman seeking to get pregnant took advantage of a male co-worker who had passed out drunk at a party, and subsequently bragged to friends that she saved a trip to the sperm bank. In another, a woman had oral sex with a man and requested he use a condom. Afterward, unbeknownst to him, she used a syringe to retrieve semen and inseminate herself. In both cases, the mothers sued for and won child support payments from the involuntary father.

And of course there was a much-reported case of a woman convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 12 year-old. Even though the state concurred that this was in fact a criminal sexual act, the young boy was forced to pay child support when he was 18.

Some sort of legal remedy is in order for those sorts of bizarre cases, but otherwise dramatic legal changes in the way parental obligations are established would be a very bad idea.

Source:

A man’s right to choose. Cathy Young, Salon.Com, October 19, 2000.

Cathy Young on Women’s Health

Some days I think I could just replace this web site with a page saying “go read Cathy Young.” She really hits her stride in a Salon.Com article, Medical gender wars, which deflates a lot of the myths put out by individuals and groups that the medical establishment fails women due to sexism (the “patriarchal medicine” myth).

Young really drives home the hypocrisy of this claim in that activists can’t even decide amongst themselves whether a given health care approach is good or bad for women, leading to a damned if you do, damned if you don’t result.

What’s more, with some activists, “patriarchal medicine” can’t win no matter what it does. First, male doctors are accused of doing too many hysterectomies and gratuitously cutting up women’s bodies. (While hysterectomies are far more common in the U.S. than in Western Europe, this difference seems to reflect less gender bias than the overall scalpel-happy attitude of American physicians; it is just as stark with regard to male-specific surgical procedures like prostatectomy.) As a result, HMOs try to curb questionable hysterectomies and are accused of denying care to women. First, a highly politicized breast cancer movement claims that a terrible disease that affects only women has been neglected. Then, in 1999, a women’s health exhibit at the Maryland Science Center blames our society’s fixation on breasts as a “symbol of women’s sexual desirability” for a disproportionate focus on breast cancer to the exclusion of some other diseases that pose a greater threat to women.