Re: Toning down the rhetoric
I have never in my life seen the former statement made. That a fetus is a rapist.
I agree that a developing human life shouldn't be called a parasite.
1. The "fetus-as-rapist" position is a legal argument made famous by law professor Eileen McDonagh in Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From choice to consent (1996) (
Breaking the Abortion Deadlock : From Choice to Consent: From Choice to Consent - Eileen McDonagh Associate Professor of Political Science Northeastern University - Google Books.
Her key point is to deal with the issue of legal consent in relation to the right to abortion whether or not the zygote/embryo/fetus is considered a person. First, she dispenses with the notion that consent to sexual intercourse is consent to pregnancy. She then considers why a separate consent to pregnancy is an issue, by considering the area of law that allows the use of deadly force if necessary as part of self-defense and defense of others against threats to life and threats and acts of such felonies as rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, and robbery and other areas of law where a person's consent is the only difference a crime and a legal act.
The fact that the only difference between consensual sexual intercourse and rape is consent is one of the starting points of her case - she points out that you have a right to defend yourself or others against the threat of sexual penetration with deadly force if necessary even if the assailant is legally insane (and of course you can do so if sexual penetration has occurred and you're trying to end it).
Her anti-choice critics have addressed her argument with references to "the prenatal rapist." However, if the government criminalizes abortion, it is more comparable to a rapist, in that it consciously uses its force to keep the embryo in a pregnant woman in order to obtain the satisfaction of obtaining a new person after the birth.
I actually like McDonagh's argument as much as I like Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical argument involving comparison to being medically hooked up to a violinist against one's will to save his life in her essay, A Defense of Abortion (
http://www3.nd.edu/~brettler/ethics/Abortion1.pdf). But lots of anti-choice people are enraged by it.
2. As regards "parasite" rhetoric -
In biological ecology, biological symbiosis takes several forms of relationship between organisms: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, amensalism, and synnecrosis. Though these are most commonly discussed in interspecific terms, in fact there are both interspecific and intraspecific forms of symbiosis, including biologically parasitic relationships.
Mammalian pregnancy rarely biologically benefits the pregnant organism, always biologically affects that organism, and always does some biological harm to that organism, but it rarely results in the deaths of both pregnant female and embryo or fetus. Hence, of the forms of symbiosis, only parasitism provides an accurate description of this relation of pregnant female and embryo or fetus.
The trophoblast implants and uses some of the endometrial tissue along with some of its own to form a placenta at the interface with the endometrial wall, and an embryo on the other side of the placenta. The placenta on the side with the attached embryo emits a chemical cloaking device to hide the alien DNA from the woman's immune system so that it will not reject the placenta+embryo. This device is neurokinin B with phosphocholine, which is also used by parasitic nematode worms to avoid rejection.
The placenta also produces (based on the embryo side) the enzyme indoleamine 2, 3-dioxygenase to catabolize the local L-tryptophan in the woman's body. Since certain of the woman's immune attack T-cells cannot live without L-tryptophan, an amino acid essential for life, this catabolization starves those cells, which go into latency to survive and can no longer fulfill their function to protect the woman's body against invasive viruses and infections. If this did not occur, those T-cells would reject the implantation and cause spontaneous abortion, as experiments with non-human placental mammals have shown.
The placenta rechannels local blood vessels so as to access oxygen, nutrients, and antibodies of the woman's blood to transfer to the embryo.
Despite the cloaking device, and the enzyme's starving of the particular T-cells and causing apoptosis or cell death in some of them, the woman's blood complement, a part of her immune system that usually attacks infections, still attacks the placenta and embryo, but not strongly enough to reject the implantation.
The placenta has itself recently been termed "a neuroendocrine parasite" by one scientist (see: P Lowry, The placenta is simply a neuroendocrine parasite, 2008 (
The placenta is simply a neuroendocrine pa... [J Neuroendocrinol. 2008] - PubMed - NCBI). However, all of its parasitic behavior serves the embryo, it arises on the side made from trophoblast tissue, and the embryo, not the placenta, further develops using the woman's blood oxygen, nutrients, and antibodies.
Some people call the embryo/fetus a parasite on this basis. Certainly, the woman's body goes through self-cannibalization to provide the necessary nutrients for the embryo/fetus - hence, pregnant women can lose bone calcium during pregnancy, experience head hair loss, and have various other negative health changes. Morning sickness itself develops as compensation for a suppressed immune system.
You can find medical references that indicate that the relation of the embryo or fetus and pregnant woman is one of parasitism going back to the late 1800s and in earlier 20th century editions of Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body (
Gray, Henry. 1918. Anatomy of the Human Body). There was a shift in the 1960s from viewing the embryo or fetus as "a perfect parasite" that takes only what it needs from the woman's blood to seeing it as an imperfect parasite, thanks to the many cases where thalidomide taken by the woman to combat disease produced seriously deformed fetuses.
But the issue is not whether or not a developing human life is "a parasite," but that its biological mode of living from implantation to birth is clearly parasitic.
Anti-choicers hate this fact. They want to say that the relationship is symbiotic in the sense of mutualism, where both organisms benefit, or commensalism, where one organism benefits and the other is neither benefited or harmed. They will claim that the woman benefits because her genes are transmitted to a next generation. However, that does not benefit the woman's body biologically at all - it merely benefits the genes that are replicated. There are quite a few detrimental effects of pregnancy on the body of the woman, e.g., see:
THE LIZ LIBRARY TABLE OF CONTENTS.
So unless the woman actually wants to get pregnant and stay pregnant and give birth, and therefore gets whatever psychological compensation she thinks it provides, it's really hard to argue that the embryo or fetus isn't parasitic.
Together, the consent argument of McDonagh and these facts basically legitimate the claim that any voluntary induced abortion of an unwanted pregnancy is a form of self-defense of basic rights of bodily autonomy and health care.
