By Neil the Ethical Werewolf
My biggest problem with William Saletan's support for requiring women to view fetal ultrasounds before having an abortion (see Amanda, Scott, and Jessica for attacks from other angles) is that it gives women actively misleading information. What are you going to learn from an ultrasound that you didn't know already? Well, obviously you already knew you were pregnant, so all ultrasound adds is the visual experience of your fetus squirming inside you. This visual experience is apparently of great moral significance to Saletan -- "Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we."
Of course, nothing is morally significant about squirming -- ours or the fetus'. What is significant is whether the fetus has a mind like ours. If it has no mind, or a mind of such a primitive level that it can't even feel pain, there's no reason to have attitudes of moral concern for it. The neural hardware for pain perception only starts to show up around week 23, and isn't in place until week 30 of the pregnancy. So having moral concern for a first-trimester fetus on the basis of the squirming you see in an ultrasound is a mistake.
