Posted on 10/25/2006 10:21:35 AM PDT by freepatriot32
Michael J. Fox is a famous TV and movie star. He is witty. He is charming. A few years ago, we learned he has Parkinson's disease.
PD is a slowly progressive neurological disorder, characterized by tremors, shuffling gait, a masklike facial expression, "pill rolling" of the fingers, drooling, intolerance to heat, oily skin, emotional instability and defective judgment (although intelligence is rarely impaired).
PD is currently incurable, although there are several methods to slow its advancement, including drug therapy and surgery.
PD is tragic, particularly in Fox's case, because it rarely afflicts persons under 60 years old.
Yet everyone faces tragedy at one time or another, in one form or another. A person's moral fiber is revealed in tragedy.
So we learned through Fox's affliction that he has either extremely poor judgment or a diabolical character flaw. He supports human embryonic stem-cell experimentation, thus contending that some humans are subhuman and expendable for others' personal gain.
We know there is nothing new under the sun. So Fox's character flaw is not new, just a variation of the worst of human behavior throughout history.
Slaveholders thought those whose lives and deaths they controlled were "property," as the U.S. Supreme Court determined in the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Hitler thought Jews were evolutionary mistakes. The Islamic government of Sudan currently has it in for black Christians.
Different day, different holocaust.
As is always the case, the powerful determine the fate of the powerless, and if the powerful don't hold the view that all humans are created equal, then the powerless end up enslaved or dead.
Some may think I'm going over the top to compare Fox to slave owners or Hitler or the Sudanese government. "Fox is a nice guy, and he's sick. Be nice."
If you think that, your sympathies are misplaced. Fox advocates killing certain people to experiment on them "for the greater good" simply because those people don't look like we do – yet. This is odd, because some day Fox won't look like most people either.
If Fox wanted to kill a football stadium full of toddlers to experiment on them, I doubt anyone would think he was normal, and I doubt anyone would bear with his barbaric rambling to be nice.
But using Fox's logic, experimentation of 2-year-olds should be acceptable. Toddlers are certainly far less developed on the human continuum and don't look at all normal by adult standards. The reason they are called "toddlers" in the first place is because their oversized heads and bellies cause them to "toddle" when they walk.
Scientifically speaking, a human is a human from the instant of fertilization, no matter what phase of development. "Take that single cell of the just conceived zygote, put it next to a chimpanzee cell, and 'a geneticist could easily identify the human. Its humanity is already that strikingly apparent,'" said Randy Alcorn in his newly released book, "Why Pro-Life?," quoting from "Preview of a Birth."
I'll worry about Fox's feelings after he stops using his considerable influence to convince the American public to support taxpayer-funded human embryonic stem-cell experimentation. Fox is not only pushing an ideology on me that advocates the destruction of human life, but he also wants to force me to pay for it. What gall.
I feel sorry for Fox's kids. Flashing them either forward or backward in one of Fox's "Back to the Future" movies, they are in lose-lose situations.
The future Fox wants to create for his three daughters looks bleak. No longer will only hens lay eggs for human consumption if Fox has his way. His daughters will be exploited for their eggs, too, because the only source of these pre-embryos is women. It is foolish to think technology will be sated by the availability of today's orphaned embryos, as is now the spin.
And in an altered past, Fox would have allowed the dissection of his days-old embryonic children so he could surgically ingest them in an effort to cure his own ailments – high tech cannibalism.
It's funny that Fox calls himself a vegetarian.
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Jill Stanek fought to stop "live-birth abortion" after witnessing one as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. In 2002, President Bush asked Jill to attend his signing of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In January 2003, World Magazine named Jill one of the 30 most prominent pro-life leaders of the past 30 years. To learn more, visit Jill's blog, Pro-life Pulse.http://www.jillstanek.com/
The difference, of course, is that some folks are eager to assign different values to the different stages of human life in order to promote a utilitarian argument. By acknowledging that a blastocyst is a certain stage of human development, one acknowledges the possibility that it might have intrinsic value as human life. This is an important point, when considering a utilitarian argument.
One can then go on to argue about the intrinsic value of this particular form of human life, if one wants to. I, however, am of the opinion that this value is ultimately unknowable, and thus must be divorced from utilitarian analysis.
To extend it to your weather pattern analogy, if somebody declared all rainy days of little worth, and got hold of Karl Rove's Weather Machine, and set about eliminating rainy days because he found sunny days to be of higher value, then we're getting into the same territory. The counter argument that a rainy day weather pattern may be as valuable as a sunny day weather pattern would start with the acknowledgement that they are both weather patterns, and both connected to a larger whole, and may both have similar intrinsic value.
If one just says that rainy days are not sunny days and that sunny days are better, one misses the point.
Sorry for the premature snorting. It is good to have you back.
Are you implying that metaphysically, a gamete is the same kind of being as a 25-year old?
Cordially,
Actually, he was refuting my argument with that statement.
I was not implying that, metaphysically, either. See my post a few lines above for a continued discussion of this point.
Obviously, a gamete does not have even the same genetic structure as a human. So an argument to draw a line there is stronger. Though the Pope might differ!
No, not at all. I was engaging gridlock on the implication that all stages of human development must be assigned equivalence, which I thought was his contention when he stated in an earlier post that a blastocyst "is a certain stage in human development, kind of like a four-and-a-half year-old.”
Certainly. But utilitarian arguments are not intrinsically improper. Indeed, I would suggest that they are a necessity.
It is not a particularly easy task to draw a scientific "off limits" line when dealing with pre-implantation reproductive cycles. For example, artificial implantation of blastocysts has some considerable success in generating term pregnancies, which would not occur if manipulation of blastocysts (with the concomitant percentage loss of blastocysts generated and used in artificial settings) was forbidden.
I think we have to realistically recognize the ubiquity of pre-implantation reproductive cell generation as a utilitarian matter, or otherwise consign to the dustbin a great many reproductive advances in both viability and health.
25 years old is also an incidental property of of the essence, "human being", but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. In other words, it is not essential that a human being be 25 years old to be human. There are human beings that are other ages. Some human beings are 14 days old, for example. Hence, the property of being 25 years old is an incidental feature of humans. That having been said, a gamete and 25 year old are two very different kinds of incidental categories of human.
Cordially,
What do you favor basing a viability test on? Roe v Wade based it on an arcane survivability/trimester formula that has long since been obsoleted by medical science.
It seems to me the "is it a human yet or not" or "is it a alive yet or not" pro abort arguments are basically dishonest justifications for what they really advocate. It is clear that a fetus is alive, genetically distinct from its mother, and genetically human even at the multi cell stage.
What is truly advocated at heart by both abortion advocates and fetal cell advocates is that the death of one unique human organism is justifiable homicide because of the benefit to another unique human organism.
A society can justify the killing of an attacker, a convicted offender, or an enemy soldier, and absolve the killer of shame and guilt, because such acts are seen to benefit society more than the preservation of the same life. Even so do the abort crowd seek to lay off the cost of their moral choice through a variety of justifications, such as "medical benefit to victims of horrible afflictions" or "mental well-being of the pregnant woman".
In most historically accepted cases of justifiable homicide, the person killed bears some responsibility for the situation. For an unborn human, this is never the case, hence the reluctance to call the killing of the unborn exactly that. By their euphemisms ye shall know them.
Its difficult, painful and unpleasant to critize Fox for his statements.
There but for the Grace of God go I.
Yet Fox alone is not entirely to blame. He is a product of the hedonistic, self-centered, me-first, instant gratification generation. The generation to whom duty, honor, self-restraint and self-respect have no meaning.
A society whose culture is directed by high-priced harlots in Hollwoood who have the temerity to refer to themselves as "Entertainers".
Utilitarian in this context implies that a decision is made by some people with power over other people without power with respect to the human dignity and worth of the latter.
Either all human beings have rights, or only some human beings have rights. Is there such a thing as a human being without human rights?
If all human beings have rights, then either all human beings have rights simply because they are human beings, because such rights are intrinsic in human nature, in the human essence, in the human being, or all human beings have rights because some other human beings say so. There is no other logical possiblity. If the Preamble of the Declaration is any guide, the wrongness of the utilitarian approach lies in the arrogant and false presumption that human wills determine human rights. Human nature does not change, but human wills do. There is no security for any rights at all based on a conceit of some human wills saying today that all humans have rights saying tomorrow that only some have rights. History is filled with the sordid misery of that ethos.
Cordially,
Are you contending that a blastocyst, for example, has rights? If so, is there any stage in the reproductive cycle where discrete cellular development is without rights?
Such advances make me uneasy, I will confess. But, at the end of the day, people are using technology to mimic what happens naturally. The many of the blastocysts formed the "old fashioned" way fail to implant and are lost. So there is a certain logic to that.
But I don't think that it is proper to extend that logic to medical experimentation. Creating life in the interest of creating life is one thing. Creating life in the interest of medical experimentation is another.
It is a different utilitarian argument. In one case, a woman is doing something to maximize her own utility by becoming pregnant. Whether she does this in bed or a lab does not make that much difference, really. In the case of medical experimentation, the whatever-it-is is being destroyed in the interests of societal utility. So, whereas in the first case the issue centers around indivudual freedom, in the second, the issue centers around trading off one unknowably valuable life to serve another, or perhaps many others.
Well, first, I'm not sure that "viability" is the proper inquiry. There is too often imbedded in viability arguments the notion of survivability independent of the mother.
I tend to view uterine implantation as the demarcation point. Of course, post-implantation there remain a large number of natural fetal development failures, but it seems to me that post-implantation there should be no artificial inducements of failure. In short, I think the very definition of the term abortion is artificial termination post-implantation.
There are, obviously, problems with even this apparently bright line. In the implantation process, enzymes in the trophoblast of the blastocyst effectively break down the uterine lining, and this erosion of both the superficial epithelium and the deeper, cellular connective tissue is a process that takes several days. It is really only after the blastocyst is completely buried that cell differentiation commences within the inner cell mass. So you have a period of time between commencement of implantation and successful implantation during which there is arguably no inititation of fetal development, and in fact a period of time during which natural failure rates are fairly high.
That said, there is a definable moment when the implantation process commences (even if it is difficult to ascertain) and hence a definable bar to artificial de-implantation processes, including those that would interrupt the implantation process once commenced.
Indeed. One could logically point out that a three year old could likely not survive without a nurturer providing food, shelter and protection from harm.
What is your opinion of medical experimentation that artificially sustains and grows the blastocyst and induces later stages of development that normally occur after implantation without implantation? It is a fairly straightforward problem to keep the blastocyst developing in a laboratory setting, getting differentiation and such, without the tissue every being implanted in a womb.
Certainly it is reasonable to assume that before too many years pass, medical science will permit us to grow fetuses all the way to the point of birth, or decanting, as Aldous Huxley called it. Should such a child have rights as an individual, even though it was never implanted?
But at four-and-a-half, they have a shot! (just kidding!)
Is the blastocyst a human being? Then, yes. They have human rights. It is unethical to experiment upon human subjects without their consent and where the experiment is likely to cause their injury or death.
If so, is there any stage in the reproductive cycle where discrete cellular development is without rights?
"Reproductive cycle", and "discrete cellular development" are too ambiguous for me to be able to know precisely what you are asking. Perhaps you could give me an example.
Cordially,
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