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To: wagglebee; GourmetDan; betty boop; exDemMom
Heart breaking and outrageous that any would value birds over humans.

Here's another, Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor of Psychology (a "soft" science) - recognized by the National Academy of Sciences with the Troland Award for an evolutionary basis for language - obviously influential and respected - rationalized infanticide in this New York Times article:

Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother's pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood.

What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? Animal-rights extremists would seem to have the easiest argument to make: that all sentient beings have a right to life. But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.


622 posted on 03/20/2012 9:27:43 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.

People like this disgust me!

625 posted on 03/20/2012 11:27:30 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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