Posted on 02/27/2006 2:46:42 PM PST by dukeman
Huh, now that you mention it ...
In favoring the mother over the unborn child, they are favoring the powerful over the powerless, a reversal of the lefts usual position. Their claim that an unborn baby "isn't human", just doesn't pass the smell test, especially with late term pregnancies.
The second hypocrisy is hammering this as a "right of privacy" for the mother and her doctor. While not supporting the "right of privacy" for men and women to control their own bodies regarding drug usage. The constitution clearly gives us a "right of privacy" to control every action of our bodies, or it doesn't. Pick one.
Really interesting.
A common philosophical misconception (no pun intended). Just as there is no point along the continuum of humanity, there can be no point at which the sperm and egg have fused, only a smaller compressed continuum. Once you understand this, you realize that development of human features is what makes life meaningful, features like neurons to feel pain, human form, etc. These are (in my opinion) developed in the 8-10 week timeframe. Of course by specifying them, I am specifying a "point" in the continuum and violating my philosophy. But I believe that morality is derived from empathy and empathy comes from human form and function. I have very little empathy for a cell.
-Responding to Saletan, Pollitt accuses him of offering no real rationale for why abortion should be seen as "so outrageous, so terribly morally offensive, so wrong."-
Another idiot woman wannabe who can't see past her vagina. Abortion is narcissism of the worst kind, but it's a result of other social ills and not a cause in itself. In the great scheme of things, women who kill their own offspring, no matter how "difficult" the decision is, reveal the bitter coldness of our current society. Any woman who is pro-abortion just plain isn't qualified to talk intelligently about the matter. They can't face their own demons, speak in euphamisms, and can't be honest even with themselves.
Most abortions are performed between 6 to 12 weeks, well past the "cell" stage. Of course liberals still claim at 5 months that the baby is just tissue or a lump of cells.
Bad analogy. A fetus is not an adult any more than an acorn is an oak tree. But fetus and adult are both human just as an acorn and an oak tree are both oaks.
You might find this of interest, considering your position on the subject.
ping for later
The liberals who deny the humanity of a 5 month fetus have either lost their empathy or have supressed it with dogma. Either way, it's unhealthy.
There certainly is a point where sperm and egg each contribute 23 chromosomes to make the human compliment of 46. It occurs at conception. If you don't want to call that fusing choose another word but that's what it means.
There is no one single point in time where that occurs. It is a continuous process of fusing already overlapping with cell division and development. My point was to not choose a word or a point, but rather use the human emotion of empathy for another human. That empathy is naturally built up continuously from conception until it is becomes an overwhelming moral force when the fetus takes on human characteristics and emotions. But basing a morality on a particular imagined point in time is a metaphysical choice, not a moral one.
Sure there is. There is a point at which, when a sperm enters an egg, the outside of the egg changes to permit the entry of no other sperm. While you can argue that that process does not happen in zero time, there is a line in time at which the process becomes a foregone conclusion, just as at the end of life, every cell in a body does not die at once but at which their collective death is all a foregone conclusion. Essentially, there is a tipping point between one state and the other. That tipping point is a line and exists, even if we can't discern it with scientific instruments.
Once you understand this, you realize that development of human features is what makes life meaningful, features like neurons to feel pain, human form, etc.
Actually, it's not that difficult to prove that this thesis isn't true, at least to the extent that it doesn't explain a lot of mainstream views about life, death, and so on. In fact, if you look at how we define death and rate the severity of crimes and tragedies, you'll notice that the future actually matters much more than the present does. Would we pull the plug on brain-dead people if they could recover from their injuries? Given a choice between saving two people inside of a burning car, would most people save the infant boy or an elderly man? Is shooting a person slowly dying from painful wounds to put them out of their misery the same a killing a similarly wounded person who can be saved and fully recover to put them out of their misery?
In the case of a brain dead person, that they will lack features in the future (a working brain) matters more than if they currently have those features. In the case of saving an elderly person over a child, the elderly man likely has more of the features that make us distinctly human than the infant, yet many would consider the infant more deserving of rescue. In the case of a mercy killing vs. a murder, you are killing a person with the same capabilities -- all that differs is their future prospects.
What makes life "meaningful", to the extent that it should be protected, is the promise of more life in the future. If you want a futher example, there was a good example in the original Star Trek series. Aliens turn two crewmembers into little foam polyhedrons. They crush one of the polyhedrons blocks of foam and restore the other to life. Did they commit murder by crushing the polyhedron blocks of foam?
Your philosophy can't properly address that scene, at least not in the way the authors could expect the majority of the audience to respond to it. The foam polyhedrons had no human features, no neurons with which to feel pain, no human form, and so on. They were innert foam blocks. Yet for that scene to work as intended by the writers, the audience needs to empathize with those foam blocks as people. The audience had to feel like crushing a block was mudering the person who had been turned into that block. What made the act of crushing the block murder, rather than the act of turning them into blocks in the first place?
The fact that they could be people again in the future, restored by the same technology that turned them into foam blocks. If they had been turned into foam blocks and could not be restored, then the act of turning them into blocks would have been murder. But because they could be people in the future, crushing the innert foam blocks that looked nothing like people was readily interpreted by the audience as an act of murder, even though the foam blocks looked nothing like a person, could sense nothing, could not think, and could feel no pain. What distinguished life from death, murder from imprisonment, had nothing to do with body form, neurons, or pain and everything to do with future prospects.
Science fiction, yes. But science fiction and fantasy is full of situations like this and if your claims that having, at any particular time, particular human features is what makes life meantinful, then it makes no sense to feel empathy without human form and function, then these sorts of scenes wouldn't work. Fiction, yes, but it needs to be plausible and in tune with conventional morality for it to work for an audience and for the audience to find it plausible and care about what happens.
These are (in my opinion) developed in the 8-10 week timeframe. Of course by specifying them, I am specifying a "point" in the continuum and violating my philosophy.
Nothing develops within that timeframe that is significantly different from what develops in another mammal during a similar timeframe yet doesn't make it a person. The form and function of a monkey fetus is essentially identical to the form and fuction of a human fetus during that timeframe. What's the difference, looking only at their present features?
But I believe that morality is derived from empathy and empathy comes from human form and function. I have very little empathy for a cell.
So the value of a person's life depends on whether other people feel empathy for them or not? And what happens to the ugly, deformed, or unpleasant in your brave new world of morality if nobody feels much empathy for them? Sounds like a recipe for euthanasia, too, to me.
You might also want to visit a fertility clinic where couples get pictures of their children sometimes from the point when they are an individual cell or clusters of cells and see how much empathy the partents have for them before conception (yes, this is before conception -- look up the definition of "conception" and contrast with "fertilization"). In fact, if you look at research into the role of empathy in the realm of moral decision making (this paper is a really good place to start), you'll see that it's incredibly subjective and uneven.
But basing a morality on a particular imagined point in time is a metaphysical choice, not a moral one.
The "imagined" point in time is as real as "imagined" emotions like empathy are.
First, conception is not fertilization. Conception is the start of a pregnancy (i.e., implantation). Fertilization is the joining of sperm and egg.
Second, palmer is using the fact that fertilization is a complex chemical process with lots of moving parts that takes place over some short period of time to claim that because it's a process that takes place over time, it's not a single point in time. That only works if you ignore the fact that there is a clear tipping point and that tipping points are perfectly fine and valid lines, even if you can't point to the exact tipping point under a microscope.
Using that sort of definition of an ongoing process, you could argue that a person who shoots a gun at another persons heart didn't actually kill the person by pulling the trigger because the pull of the trigger wasn't what killed them, nor did the bullet kill the person because they didn't die instantly from their heart being shot, nor can we define a specific point in time when the person died. They were only really dead when we feel they no longer deserve our empathy and it wasn't pulling the trigger or the bullet that killed them but the blood loss and so forth. Silly hair splitting, in my opinion.
I saw my child's heart beating at 7 weeks. I always thought that it didn't happen until 10 weeks and was quite surprised to see the beating heart on the ultrasound at 7 weeks.
Empathy for a block of foam is entirely possible if you know that the block was a human you had empathy for and has the potential to become a human again. Speaking of potential, I don't think empathy is strictly based on it. I empathize with the pain of an old person who is dying as much as a young child with a fatal disease. If anything I empathize more with old person who has a life of humanity built up in him. It is not at all true that my empathy would lead to euthanasia.
The monkey fetus is an interesting point. Obviously my moral structure is based on empathy but is built by reason. The only way I can compare the pain of an animal being killed with the pain of a starving human is a higher level value judgement based on reason. I have empathy for both, but would obviously choose to give food to the human. My own choices are somewhat hypocritical as I am not starving, could live on vegetables, yet choose to eat meat.
But back to the monkey fetus, I think one answer could be in the appreciation of the humanity of the human mother and child together. A deformed child or deformed fetus will gain more of my empathy as I feel some of the same pain. Again, I don't believe that can lead to euthanasia unless there are higher level interests forcing a certain outcome or a poorly developed sense of empathy. Again, it's incredibly important to learn and be taught to empathize.
A fully human life is formed when the sperm joins the egg. Any parsing or dancing around that point is a prelude to justifying the destruction of that helpless human.
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