On Aug 31, 2008, at 8:47 PM, William T Goodall wrote: > So does celibacy. So not breeding as fruitfully as possible is > murdering children?
I think that would be a fairly extreme interpretation. However .. there's a lot to be said against the logic of unilaterally equating terminating a pregnancy with murder, especially during the part of gestation when the zygote or fetus cannot possibly be expected to be viable outside the uterus. The fertilized egg looking around for a place to implant* may be a "potential life", but it has no viability outside the environment that supports its development until it has divided, differentiated, and matured to the point where it would be viable as a premature infant .. and even then survival is questionable and involves fairly heroic life support and monitoring in a NICU incubator for weeks at least. Viability seems to me to be the best measure of the dividing line between "potential human life" and "actual human life", and to me, a pregnancy that has not actually reached the stage where the fetus is viable as an infant (the grey area being the span between earliest possible viability with heroic life support and the boundary between "premature" and "normal" term) should be legally terminable if the mother chooses to do so. (Many states' existing laws on abortion follow roughly this rule, incidentally, and most ban or severely restrict third-trimester abortions, which I'm comfortable with .. it's not like 6 months is any kind of an unreasonable deadline for the decision.) And, IMHO, that should *only* be the mother's decision, and I feel it's reasonable to expect factors like her own personal health (physical and mental), and the number of children she already has, to weigh into that decision. There are very serious issues of manipulative social control in this debate that aren't often discussed (and, when they are, are often dismissed as "anti-religious propaganda"), but are critical to the debate, and I feel that placing that choice in the hands of the person most impacted by carrying a pregnancy to term, *especially now as we're approaching the 7 billion mark*, best addresses those issues. (*Speaking of implantation, treating fertilization as the standard of the beginning of life would legally define treating ectopic pregnancies as "abortion". Fertilized eggs don't always implant in the uterus, and when they implant somewhere else, the consequences can be fairly serious for obvious reasons. It's theoretically possible for an ectopic pregnancy to carry to term, but it would be very dangerous to attempt, and I wouldn't dare suggest forcing a woman to do that. But this is the kind of insanity that we get into if we accept the notion of an egg that's just been fertilized as a "baby" that would be "murdered" if it wasn't allowed to implant wherever it landed.) "Grotesque oppression isn't okay just because it's been institutionalized." -- Toby Ziegler _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
