On May 16, 2005, at 1:29 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
From: "Warren Ockrassa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The point is, most Americans believe that abortions should be illegal some of the time. Most Democrats support the legality of all abortions, even for development beyond viability.
One quibble here. Even after being born, you can't really argue convincingly that a human infant is "viable". Without active, constant nurturing it's dead, and that need for nurture goes on for about two years, at minimum, after birth.
OK, then you are arguing for a different dividing line. I was thinking of
viability as a biologically independent organism (no direct, continuous,
connection to the bloodstream of another), and you seem to be arguing for
being able to carry one's own weight. If one wishes to argue for the
rights of a mother to kill their one year old, then that would be
consistent with arguing for the right to kill a post-term undelivered
fetus.
I'm not arguing for that at all; I'm just suggesting that the test of "viability" is somewhat vague.
Are there better tests? Possibly. Maybe an EEG that confirms what we could call consciousness can be used. I really don't know *what* kind of test would suffice.
What I'm pretty sure of is that there's a lot of arbitrary thinking afoot when discussing pregnancy and birth. There are some who contend that life begins at conception, and yet they celebrate birthdays as being *genuine* anniversaries of the beginning of someone's life. That to me is an example of how an arbitrary idea clashes with observable behavior, which suggests at least one intellectual inconsistency.
To me abortion is a personal decision. I don't expect it to be an easy one when we're talking about a fairly anatomically developed fetus, and I am proximally sure that legislatures need to keep their mitts out of the oven entirely. We can't even agree, in many cases, on what basic terms mean, such as "life" or "viability" (or "self-sufficiency", to look at it another way), and of course there's the elephant in the room -- what "human" actually means, when it starts, etc.
These problems only indicate, to me, that consensus will *not* be reached easily, and might *never* be reached, and since laws require either consensus or submission to arbitrary decisions made by others, there would be no benefit to be found in illegalizing *any* kind of abortion.
It makes a lot more sense to me to address the causes of unwanted pregnancy and strike at the root; the causes could be social, personal, or may other things, and probably are fairly intricate, not the kind of thing that can be addressed by a single law or any other simplistic solution. But once the horse is in the barn (to twist a clich�), it's too late to ask what to do about the open door.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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