Posted on 12/13/2001 10:02:59 AM PST by Brian Kopp DPM
Your not the only ones.
To say that something which is ALREADY a baby, is not, that is a lie, and a grave one. Birth, is nothing more than a "change of address." It was a baby before birth, it is a baby after birth.
Likewise, from the moment of conception, it is a viable human life. Implantation is just a change of address.
It is human life at birth, before birth, at implantation, and at conception.
To hold forth otherwise is a lie and a deception, and IMHO, sinister to the point of demonically inspired.
One of the primary difference between the life and choice sides is when you think a fetus is a baby. To me until there's at least a 50% chance of survival outside the womb (ie premature birth) it's not a baby because any miscarriage would terminate the pregnancy without a child.
It doesn't really matter what I think about what word to use to describe or refer to certain human beings because the actual nature of a living, existent, human being-in-fact does not change based upon how we refer to that human being.
I guess that can be considered degrees of death. But we are a society that believes strongly in degrees of death (hence why we have 4 classifications of murder plus the civil court oriented "wrongful death").
In law there are degrees of culpability for causing the death of another human being, but there are not degrees of death as far as the victim is concerned.
So insofar as abortion (in the sense we are using the term here) is the deliberate killing of a live human being, the issue is not whether whether we use a latin word, fetus or English words such as "baby" or "child" to describe him. The issue is whether or not there exist some human beings who do not have human rights and some human beings who are "less equal" in terms of intrinsic human dignity than other human beings, and who can therefore be manipulated and killed with impunity by others more powerful than they.
The answer is no. Every human being has the same human nature that you and I do. Human beings do not derive their inherent worth from how other people value them or how other people evaluate their survival possibilities, or any other extrinsic consideration. People have intrinsic human dignity simply by the fact of their human nature. That is what is meant by The Declaration's "all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...". Anything less as an ideal is a frightful prospect for all of us.
Cordially,
It has been my experience that everyone is in complete control of his/her own destiny - except when he/she isn't. Let's be real, shall we. In an ideal world what you say would be true. But the world is far from ideal. People make mistakes. People get down. And, of course, experienced people use inexperienced people before the inexperienced people realize what is going on.
I'm not suggesting we ban the pill. All I'm saying is that it is wrong to dis-associate conception from sexual behavior. And I'm also saying that the primary beneficiaries of such a dis-association are the men. The entire sexual dynamic changes when it's possible that the woman could get pregnant. And the normative case is for a woman to be far more interested in sex as part of an intimate, permanent relationship and the man to be far more interested in sex as a fun game with no long-term implications. Societies are more stable when the former approach is encouraged and the latter is discouraged.
As for the advent of the Pill, there are those of us out there who may need and use this for medical purposes. There are certain imbalances and conditions that can be controlled with the pill. Not every single woman who is out there and taking the pill is a promiscuous heathen.
Not even every single woman who is using The Pill for birth control reasons alone is a promiscuous heathen. But then, not every person using The Pill is a saint, either. There's no question that hormonal regulation can be a good thing. But every good thing can be abused. We should have established a better understanding of sex and sexuality before developing The Pill. The Pope tried to warn us. But, as has been the case since the beginning of man, we never want to listen to G-d's advice when the alternative seems more fun.
Shalom.
Human will is not a stochastic process. In order for good choices to become the norm, the human will has to tend toward the good in a deterministic fashion. History has shown (IMO, of course) that this is not the case.
Shalom.
You are the one that resorted to insult and ad hominem. I'm just sharing my own reflections and reasonable opinion. Take it any way you like. But your umbrage does not lesson its truth. A baby is a baby. Period. To promote any other view is sinister, and only and always a rationalization for that which cannot, and should not, be rationalized.
Absolutely true when refering to the base essence of how things work. But we don't make decisions down there, we make decisions based on how we see things. And there's a very tight tie in between what we call something and how we see it, and that governs what we think should be done with it. For the prolife person everything that can become a baby is a baby (to put it crudely and not very well). While I understand the position I don't agree with the position. Maybe it's because of the large number of miscarriages in my family history (wombs in my family are not safe places, the good news is those of us that make it out are very tough, never get sick and live a long time). To me that causes a very obvious distinction between fetus and baby. My mom was pregnant 8 time for one kid, from where I sit it's very obvious that the 7 fetuses that never made it weren't babies, I can tell because I have no siblings.
It probably seems wierd to you that I focus so much on miscariages but that really is the source of my definitions. If a fetus can be "not born" with no interference from man I simply can't define it as a living human being, it makes no sense to me. While I can follow your logic I cannot accept your initial assumption. I can only hope I have presented my position well enough for you to be able to do the same.
Have you never attended the funeral for a miscarried baby???
Friends here suffered two miscarriages, a year apart. Each time the child was at about 4 months in the pregnancy.
The mother and father carried the casket into the church, a brilliant shining perfect little casket, the size of a shoe box.
The father, a burly tough man, sobbed uncontrollably. I have never attended such sorrowful funerals as those of a miscarried baby.
You apparently have never held a miscarried baby. My wife and I mourned our baby lost to miscarriage at three months. I can assure you, we did not mourn "a lump of tissue" we did not mourn "something which might become a baby," we mourned the death of one of our children, a gift from God that we only possessed for several months, but a gift from God and a baby none-the-less.
You insult the suffering of these parents by insisting that "a baby is not a baby." And you reveal your blindness to the very simplest of truths, and your refusal to see, even while men and women of good will try earnestly to help you open the eyes of your heart.
Bless your mother's heart. I am sorry for the trauma she experienced. Your 7 siblings are no longer alive, but they once were. Perhaps she may have expressed her grief to you over them, and her joy over you. Ontologically and scientifically speaking though, the only thing that does make coherent sense is the truth that they were living human beings (what else could your mom have been pregnant with?) who unfortunately died before birth, while you terminated your mom's pregnancy by being born.
I had a son who died suddenly at age 2, and he never made it to manhood. Does that mean that at one time he was not a living human being? Not at all. But be that as it may, let me tell you that I'm glad you made it out alive and have survived to tell the tale, and that we are both here to discuss it:-)
Cordially,
Thank you. I owe a lot to the dear nun who put up with such abuse back in 1973.
The real debate, however, has to do with the libertarian fallacy. I'm considering writing an article on the subject. If I do, I'll try to remember to ping you.
Shalom, and have a great weekend.
My outlook is far more positive than yours. Human knowledge and progress build upon themselves and are cumulative. Free societies and free markets that encourage individual choice and initiative and independent thought and entrepreneurship have a decisive competitive edge in improving living conditions and the happiness of the people involved in them. Sure there may be wars and other setbacks, but progress does occur.
In the case of the United States (and more broadly "western civilization"), the past century has seen exponential gains in technology and medicine and standards of living and individual opportunities that have far eclipsed anything in all of previous human history. Alternate political systems such as Communism and Fascism have proven themselves comparative failures. Alternate ideological systems (such as militant Islam) that strike out at us in their frustration are in the process of getting their asses kicked because of our overwhelming superiority.
Our civilization is far from perfect. In this country we could be so much freer, politically and economically, than we presently are. There are bad trends intertwined with the good. But I would not care to have been born in any earlier period of history or in any other country. And I am even more hopeful about the future and the wondrous possibilities it promises than I am about the present.
So yes, it is my opinion that good choices tend to result in good outcomes and become self-reinforcing. And that this is indeed the lesson of history.
No. Don't know anyone that ever had a funeral for a miscarriage. My family is very into internalization, and it's possible that their internalization is what causes me to think differently about fetuses than babies. Of course the majority of the miscarriages in my family were before I was born, I was mom's last pregnancy, while my aunts (who both have two kids) have a 50% success rate one went through her pregnancies on the other side of the country and the other had become estranged from the rest of the family during that time period (she's back, her kids are spoiled rotten, we really need to bring spanking back the resulting kids of the nonspanking America are whiney idiots).
And diamond clearly your son (a terrible thing and I appreciate your candor in bringing it up and the feelings that must have brought forth) was a human being, he was born. Born baby = human being, no problem there. That's actually one of my basic problems with the partial birth abortion, we're to the point there that we're quibling about a couple inches, to me those are all born babies, just because they have been completely extracted yet doesn't mean they aren't born, most of the way out is good enough for me. But not born = not baby = not human being. Could have been a human being, all fetuses have that potential, but it frequently doesn't happen. If you track all the way down to the fertilized egg, most of the time it doesn't happen.
Most of these kind of "when" (when is a puppy a dog, when is a boy a man) questions have no meaning which is why they can be fun to discuss. Unfortunately they don't have 1 answer. I know you guys think it does but that's not the case. I know folks involved in the prolife movement that do not consider a fertilized egg that has not implanted on the uteran wall a fetus/ baby. Those that decry the pill as an abortificant (notice I actually got this all the way back to where it started) do. People like me don't consider a fetus a baby. People at Planned Parenthood don't consider anything that might reduce their donations. I'm sure there are people that think every egg fertilized or not is a baby. Everybody thinks there right and can point to tons and tons of "evidence" to it. But in the end it's a matter of faith, you believe what you believe, you really don't need evidence for the belief, you really won't pay attention to contrarian evidence, most of your evidence is probably circular (you see stuff as proof of your faith because it looks that way from your faith, those without it don't see it that way and never can), and that's just how it is.
That's why the life/ choice battle is so viscious. Very few people ever have or ever will change their mind. Your view on this comes from core beliefs not surface beliefs, it comes from the part of you that doesn't change very often in most people, that actually never changes at all in many. And the outward expression of the opinion is a no brainer based on the core belief. If you have the core belief that potential humans aren't humans prochoice is the only possible position. If you have the core belief that potental humans ARE humans anything other than prolife is diabolical.
Your outlook could be more positive, or your historic eyesight could just be shorter.
I am not of the opinion that our civilization is any better (in the sense of 'goodness') than the Roman civilization. Yet the dark ages came between then and now when all that goodness was lost. It was lost because of the 'yitzar harah' or 'evil inclination' of man. We forget the reasons we want to do good and start to behave in selfish, self-destructive ways. There have been other great civilizations in history before the Roman, yet all have come to the same end. Over time we tend toward the bad without some external influence.
The Roman civilization took over 500 years to fall. Western civilization has been at it for close to that long now. And IMO we are headed in the same direction. Of course, it doesn't look like that from many of the material metrics. But Rome didn't look like it was about to fall either - right up until the "moment" it did.
You are right about the wonderful technology we have today, but we have no ethics to help us deal with it. Do you remember the promise of TV when it was brand new? (I remember when TV was brand new.) How about the promise of electric appliances and the freedom they would bring. What about the utopia of the French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? All have failed to live up to their potential, and the pace at which new ideas lead to destruction has only increased as our technology has increased. How long did it take for the Great Society to create a permanently poor underclass by destroying the family?
I could go on, but the examples are not important. The concept at the base is important. Choice is a result of human will. Human will is not a random variable. And the human will tends toward destruction.
There is an answer. Technology is not it.
Shalom.
I think the human will tends towards achievement, not destruction. So I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, although perhaps we can at least agree to hope that I'm proven right and you're proven wrong.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.