I think that Mr. Whittle is being inflammatory as a tactic, in order to pursue certain ideas about abortion without arguing for his ideas in a more direct way.
His real complaint isn't how aborted fetuses are disposed of. His complaint is about abortions and at what stage of pregnancy and under what circumstances abortion is permissible. There's good reason to discard an aborted fetus by burning it. Any other method of disposal would be either impractical or hazardous, because of the potential for contaminating the environment with active biological agents. But I guess I am just being Captain Obvious--up to this point.
What are the main reasons that people have strong positions about restricting the range of permissibility for abortions? The two reasons that come first to my mind are (1) All abortions are basically wrong because abortion destroys something that is already human, and (2) All abortions are basically wrong because it inflicts suffering on an organism (the fetus) that has the capability of suffering. I won't comment on the first one (that a fetus, even at the earliest stages of pregnancy, is already human. But here is an observation from a prominent neuroscientist about the second issue. It's an excerpt from an article that appeared in Slate of September, 2012, under the title of "When Do We Become Truly Conscious?"
"Finding answers to these questions isn’t merely a matter of curiosity. In the United States, people have been murdered for carrying out abortions. In many other countries, abortion is illegal even if the woman has been raped, and some prominent U.S. politicians, including Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, support similarly harsh laws. Although such positions are usually determined by religion, a related mindset is that fetuses are already conscious and even capable of feeling pain. Indeed, this has recently been the basis states have used to further restrict a woman’s rights on this issue, with Arizona the latest state to join this group by disallowing abortions after 20 weeks.
But what does science have to say on this matter? The evidence is clear that a fetus can respond to sights, sounds, and smells, and it can even react to these by producing facial expressions. The evidence is equally clear, however, that these responses are generated by the most primitive parts of the brain, which are unconnected to consciousness, and therefore these actions don’t in any way imply that the fetus is aware. Furthermore, the fetus is deliberately sedated by a series of chemicals produced by the placenta, so even if it had the capacity for consciousness, there is almost no chance that it could ever be conscious in the womb. Consequently, it can’t consciously feel pain.
But what if the fetus is removed from the womb and its sleep-inducing chemicals? Will the fetus suddenly be conscious in the outside world? In adult humans, for normal consciousness to occur, it is now generally agreed that two sets of regions need to be intact, functional, and able to communicate effectively with one another: the thalamus, a kind of relay station in the middle of the brain that connects many regions with many others; and the prefrontal parietal network, our most high-level, general purpose section of cortex. If either the thalamus or prefrontal parietal network is substantially damaged, the patient is likely to enter into a vegetative state, with virtually no sign of consciousness.
When do these brain regions form in the growing fetus? Only after about 29 weeks are the connections between these areas properly laid out, and it takes another month or so before the thalamus and the rest of the cortex are effectively communicating, as revealed by brain waves. So it’s highly unlikely that consciousness, at least in any form that we’d recognize as human awareness, arises before about 33 weeks into pregnancy. There are therefore no scientific reasons for restricting abortion on the grounds that the fetus will experience pain, at least until very late in pregnancy. This evidence has heavily influenced my views here, and consequently I am very much pro-choice."
That is from Daniel Bor, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and the author of The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. The entire three-page article is at:
http://www.slate.com/articl...debates_.single.html
