Secondly, I agree with both of you that technically the pro-abortion argument has become the assertion that the adult is "more" human than the unborn child. However, I still think that the average person who believes abortion should remain legal hasn't looked at this question closely enough to have developed that distinction. The people that argue for legalized abortion on a regular basis may be making that distinction, but they don't represent the average person who feels uncomfortable even thinking about the issue. I freely admit that I don't have any real data to support my view. This is just a "sense" that I get from talking to people. I would welcome any data you have showing that most people are making the distinction that you explained.
WFTR
Bill
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I still think that the average person who believes abortion should remain legal hasn't looked at this question closely enough to have developed that distinction. |
The average person can afford to be wrong about the science. She can easily admit to being wrong or continue in ignorance.
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The people that argue for legalized abortion on a regular basis may be making that distinction |
These folks cannot afford to be wrong on the science, lest they be laughed out of existence.
Antonin Scalia and His Critics: The Church, the Courts, and the Death Penalty What the "pro-choice" American does not believe is that a human fetus is as fully a human life as Uncle Charlie.
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I freely admit that I don't have any real data to support my view. |
Scalia says "does not believe." The pros "do not want to believe." So, having lost the scientific debate on when a human being begins, they hope to win the supposed philosophical debate on personhood .
no person-no unborn child-has a right to access the bodily resources of an unwilling host. Unborn children may have a right to life, but that right to life ends where it encroaches upon a mother's right to bodily autonomy.
Human Embryo Research After the Genome The Orwellian terms "pre-embryo" and "potential human being" no longer have any scientific validity.
Statement - On Human Embryos and Stem Cell Research...
One of the great hallmarks of American law has been its solicitous protection of the lives of individuals, especially the vulnerable. ...–one of the great achievements of the modern world–is founded on the conviction that when the dignity of one human being is assaulted, all of us are threatened.
Current law against funding research in which human embryos are harmed and destroyed reflects well-established national and international legal and ethical norms against the misuse of any human being for research purposes. Since 1975, those norms have been applied to unborn children at every stage of development in the womb, and since 1995 they have been applied to the human embryo outside the womb as well. The existing law on human embryonic research is a reflection of universally accepted principles governing experiments on human subjects–principles reflected in the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and many other statements. Accordingly, members of the human species who cannot give informed consent for research should not be the subjects of an experiment unless they personally may benefit from it or the experiment carries no significant risk of harming them.
...the Supreme Court has never prevented the government from protecting prenatal life outside the abortion context, and public sentiment also seems even more opposed to government funding of embryo experimentation than to the funding of abortion. The laws of a number of states–including Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah–specifically protect embryonic human beings outside the womb. Most of these provisions prohibit experiments on embryos outside the womb.