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Existential Ethics – The Right To Life But What About The Right To Choose?

Issues: … abortion … right to life … ethics … Old Ethics … ethics and technological advances … the individual … the state … the group … ethical choices … laws … nature … accidents … killings …

Recently I was reminded by an old friend how I had helped out in the younger days when he and his wife wanted the phone number of a reliable abortion giver. This person was not a doctor but had the supervision of a doctor if needed.

I had used this abortion giver myself in my first marriage when my wife and I had chosen not to have children then when she was pregnant.

We never did have children. I was sad about that years later, but in life if you exercise choice you are naturally subject to making mistakes in life.

One cannot judge the outcome of a choice after the choice and the effects are in, because it is too late in the sense that the choice has already been made and the consequences come in.

Is Contraception Wrong?

What difference is there, if any, between a woman regularly taking a hormone pill so that she can freely have sex and yet not conceive a child, and between aborting a child embryo once she has been tested and knows she is pregnant?

• The difference is that with abortion you are killing a life that if protected in the womb would mature and come out of the mother a baby to be protected.

With contraception you are preventing life forming when sperm and egg come together in a natural act of sex.

• Yes, not letting life be conceived when it would be conceived if the natural process were not interfered with seems like denying life to me.

The statistics are that a million people a year are killed on the nation’s highways. Correct me if I’m wrong, please ….

• Is this murder since such a big amount of killings can be cut in half or even prevented?

1. Does every person who drives a car or other vehicle share some responsibility for that million victims killed each year?
2. Are people upset at abortions performed each year as upset about the adults killed on the nation’s highways?
3. Terrorists per year kill how many Americans? Very few. Yet how much national treasure and inconvenience is created in the name of preventing any terrorists killing Americans or citizens of other countries?

It doesn’t make sense, does it?

The irrational amount of emotions projected onto some types of killings is far greater than with other types of killings.

Thus it is not death itself, the taking of a life, that is what evokes different levels of abhorrence, is it?

What am I to suggest to a young woman or couple who wants an abortion because they have had great sex together but judge themselves not ready to become a family?

What I do suggest is that if you have the abortion, judging from other women’s experience of their own abortions, you will never feel good about it. When you have an abortion, you are taking a human life, the life of your own unborn child.

It does not matter emotionally how you or others try to define when life starts for a human being, the reality view is that you are stopping a life from further development into a human being through having an abortion.

Do you freely make that choice?

You have rights as a young woman, and maybe man, to not become a mother to this child. Just know what you are doing. It is a consequence you live with the rest of your life. What you choose is what you become.

The Wayward Married Mother

One young mother with one child told me she was recently pregnant with her husband’s child but she did not tell him and got her abortion on her own.

1. What right was she exercising?
2. What right was the medical person giving the abortion exercising?

Modern Ethics Analysis

In terms of ethics the abortion-giver is killing an unborn embryo, but not a person. The physician is carrying out the choice of the mother to have an abortion or not. The pregnant woman has the conceived embryo inside her and so this embryo is more of a person to her, evoking for the embryo the right to personhood and protection from life-threatening harm.

In a car accident, it is the car doing the actual killing, not the driver, whom we assume is not acting deliberately but has made a serious or terrible mistake.

Human beings are imperfect and thus we let fellow human beings drive the public highways, which will lead each year to one million car deaths.

An accident is not deliberate and therefore not intentional.

If you do not intend harm or life with your actions then you are not operating ethically.

No one else can judge someone else ethically. Only the person chooses for him or herself, and so makes The Ethical Choice. Without individual choice involved there is no ethics. There may be law but no ethics. Ethical choices are made by individuals according to their chosen standards.

Behavior by law is the group imposing its will on the individuals it holds to itself as members. Laws are made for unconscious people, as my analyst, Dr Elizabeth Howes, used to say.

Groups of individuals can band together to punish members of the group, but this is not conscious ethics at work. Crime and punishment are the effects of breaking laws that groups of people make, even if they call themselves a religion or a government body.

Conscious ethical choices are made only by the individuals involved. The individual alone sets up the standards and chooses how they live by them or not. This is ethics.

Conceiving a child is mostly not deliberate and therefore not intentional.

Therefore an act of sex that conceives an embryo in the womb, and is accidental, is not intentional.

Unintentional acts are not consciously intentional and therefore not ethical because not consciously chosen.

Abortions are the stopping of embryo development. Abortions are intentional acts formed to deal with accidental acts not intended. Therefore abortions cannot be judged ethically because they deal with unethical acts. You have to ethically evaluate both the action and the reaction to it as ‘of the same whole’ and not separate. Abortions are as much ‘a fact of nature’ as are conceptions.

Since choice was not brought to the act of sex that led to conception, the pregnant woman asserts the right soon after to make the act intentional. She will not allow herself to get pregnant accidentally. She will abort such conceptions, or now reverse herself and choose to have a baby.

It’s choice brought to nature, not ethics. You either choose to have a baby because you have conceived one, or you don’t. It is personal choice after the fact of conception.

Ethically, when the range of choice and its consequences is extended to specific human behaviors, then a different code of ethics seems to prevail.

Ethics and Technology

Developments in technology make possible abortions, artificial insemination, in vitro conception,  condoms organ donations and transplants, and so on.

1. Technology gives a greater range of choice over fundamental human activities.
2. With greater choice the influence of ethics is lessened.

Hitler and his Germans were able to have so many Jews killed because the bureaucrats of a number of countries gave to Hitler’s killers lists of Jews and where they could be found if they did not voluntarily surrender to the Germans and their allies.

We remember the story of Anne Frank and how the Dutch handed her and her family over for transport to a concentration camp where she died.

But enough of this horrid Hitler and his mass crazed people. Back to that which is ongoing: Taking a life in an abortion or not?

The Old Ethics

The Old Ethics went with what nature was doing. You had sex. You conceived a child. You raised that child. You followed Nature’s laws and parented your babies.

In the Modern Age choice largely replaces ethics. Choice is existential, designed for specific situations and how to solve the immediate problem.

1. Laws are designed to regulate societies as a whole, such as politically and in religions.
2. Ethics are for conscious individuals running their own lives as aware and responsibly as they can.
3. Choice is the ability to use what the greater technological effectiveness gives us.
4. 
   

The Illegal Abortion-Giver

I was sought after in my young adult years because I had an abortion person who had solved the problem of giving safe abortions.

• I made an existential decision that if abortions could be done safely then why not certain people do them since many pregnant women did not want to become mothers at the time they were pregnant?

Since abortion was illegal still in the United States, showing the prevalence of the Old Ethic, largely from the Old Religion, Christianity, this created much suffering causing a great deal of young women to go to bad abortion-givers who infected some of these women and left them bleeding and dying in many examples.

Thus even ethically, it was better to connect a pregnant young woman with a safe abortion-giver than leave her to the evil of going to criminal abortion-givers who took money and even lives.

What is an embryonic human life worth?

It was worth less than the life, suffering and death of a young mother who did not want a child, or another child.

Anti-abortionists do err and seem to become righteous in their ‘right to life’ stances. They think that somehow their ethic is the truth, God’s law, and so on, when it is simply part of the Old Ethic based on following nature’s course and attributing purpose to it.

Yes, people still attribute purpose to Nature and call such God.

There is no commandment written in stone anywhere that says having sex and conceiving an embryo is God’s law, is ethical, is good. This is the ego of certain people saying so. Have sex and you follow Nature’s law of procreation. Where is there an intentional God in this?

A Modern Existential Ethic

A different kind of existential ethic is more designed for modern times in which humans are given greater range and effectiveness of choice through advances in technology and law hopefully.

The ethic is more experiential. The methodology more effective. The awareness less religious and more scientific and conscious.

It is the Old Ethic people who seem to have simplistic thinking in a modern world.

Ethics is determining and placing values on experiences in such a way that the humans involved can make informed and realistic choices regarding the values attributed to those experiences.

The reason that many people believe one way called ‘the right to life, and many people believe the other way called ‘the freedom to choose,’ is that with modern ethics everyone has the responsibility and right to choose for themselves as best they can in this life.

However, the Old Ethic people still believe they have the right over individuals to decide what is right and wrong behavior for individuals, and will seek to use the group to punish transgressors.

Haven’t we said that laws are made for unconscious people?

You will not see conscious people going around and killing and robbing others, including business men and women who at least do rob others of their wealth, including society as a whole, as the wealthy do certainly.

There are far too many people in prisons these days. Maybe they need to be contained this way, but I am inclined to think that many people are in jail because they were never taught how to think ethically for themselves, rather than secretly break laws and exploit others.

The Irrationality Of Humans Killing Humans

Human beings do a large variety of killing each other, only some of it roundly condemned and punishments meted out for what are then defined as crimes.

1. How is it some are executed for murdering another while many others are awarded hero’s badges for killing civilians and soldiers in wars?
2. How is it so many are allowed to be killed in accidents on the nation’s highways?
3. How is it poverty is allowed to happen to human beings while others live in riches, thus one side helping kill off the other side?
4. How is it that medical mistakes and treatments are allowed to kill off many patients, all in the name of helping them heal?
5. Has no one evaluated society and its behavior on the basis of a practical and realistic ethics?
6. How is it that ineffective and self-righteous people are allowed to have so much power in the world?

The Right To Abortion over The Right To Life is only one part of Ethics In The Modern World.

Here is an interesting dilemma: If an embryo or child does not have the capacity for choice and maintaining a self-governing life, then do its rights come first before the rights of others?

A pregnant mother has the capacity for choice and self-governance and the embryo does not. Therefore the rights of the mother existentially come first and are preferred in conflict with the rights of the embryo.

But who would buy this position?

Ethics Example

A mother has a baby but abandons the child in a safe way for the child. Should government authorities try and force the birth mother to take care of her own child?

No, ethically the mother has exercised her right to choose freely as a self-sustaining adult. The government should immediately take care of the abandoned baby and give it up for adoption if possible.

Ethics Example

A young mother gives birth to a helpless baby who will never take care of itself, so distorted in body is it. Does the mother have the right and obligation to give up such a handicapped baby to a government agency which has better resources to take care of the handicapped baby?

Yes, the handicapped baby should be given up to the best care provider because this is what is best for the handicapped baby who will never be able to take care of itself. Biological mother-love should not be allowed to prevail over effective care and love. Would you possibly agree?

Children are either ‘owned’ by their parents or by agencies of the state set up to give the best care possible. The one who can provide the best care has possession of the child.

Ethics is the evaluation ability to make the best choice between conflicting alternatives.

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