Election 2004: The 5MV District

[Anonymous]

[Edited to add Wowbagger's name at left. - Z]

Vedra, sorry if I sounded cross with my direct question to you. I figured you were most fit to answer that question, as the only person who had struck me as endorsing the legality of most abortions. Not trying to flame you (is that the correct use of the verb?).

Valium, I respect your right to choose to say "foetus," but I would never choose to do so myself. After all, I speak, like, American, you know, whatev?

Oh, so much to say, so little time to waste online doing so.

1) Zeke, perfectly said. I would not use contraception. My religion opposes it, and I happen to agree with the religious argument against it. However, there is no secular argument against it that I can find.

2) Abortion, a red herring? I must disagree. Yes, a reduction in teen pregnancy rate would be great for a lot of reasons in addition to the reduction of the abortion rate. However, the teen abortion rate is about half that of the abortion rate among woman 20-24, and equal to that of the 25-29 bracket. As the Allan Guttmacher Institute's handy Tablemaker tool shows, abortion is not just a teen problem.

3) When we begin to talk about Gatac's "meaningful correlation" or maraplanauta's "sentience," we have crossed a very fine line from science and the legal realm into philosophy and religion. Who was it who recently said that we could draw the line at viability, or birth, or being able to care for itself, or the development of language, or puberty, "with progressing silliness of the argument?"

(EDIT: Found that quote, by Gatac:

Wowbagger: Define independant. Is it being geneticall different from it's host organism? Then it's conception, yeah. Is it having an own circulatory system? Early pregnancy. Recogniseably human? Late pregnancy. Physically disconnected from the mother? Birth. Able to care for itself? Eh...I think we're looking at a few *years* after birth with progressing silliness of the argument.

)

Why is this silly? Seriously. Why is one member of homo sapiens as important as another? Is this a question for the courts, or for any man, to answer? I should say not. However, this thread has slipped to the philisophical, so I shall follow the discussion into the fever swamps of politics.

The points I am about to make are based closely enough on a single article to merit a citation. This it is (Yoda!):

Joyce, Robert E. "The Human Zygote is a Person," The New Scholasticism, 52, 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 97-109.

A person is a being with the natural potential to know, love, desire, and relate to self and others in a self-reflective way. There are a lot of different ways to say that, but one of the keys in that definition is natural potential, as distinguished from functional capacity. If, as some argue, one must have the functional capacity to be do those things, then the comatose, senile, retarded—even sleeping—humans would no longer be persons. This, as Mr. Joyce points out, seems out of step with our consciences (though, with the advent of euthanasia in the Switzerland-Norway-Netherlands area and China's Draconian one-child policies, perhaps it won't be for long).

The obvious counter to that, as any developmentalist will argue, is that we should rule that anyone who has, in the past, fulfilled that functionality should receive the protection of society. This seemed to be the position of the American Supreme Court, until it ruled in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey that anyone can kill anybody else in its infamous "Heart of Liberty" clause.

I would say, however, that a person is not merely an individual with a developed capacity for reasoning, loving, etc., but is any individual with the potential for those things. Individuals may never attain or may one day lose that functional capacity to fulfill their human nature, but this inability does not destroy the nature itself, although it is then harder for us to appreciate.

Neither a human or a rabbit embryo can functionally reason or love. Neither will write a treatise such as this, nor be as long-winded. But the radical difference between the two is that the human embryo has, within itself, the (some would say God-given) natural capacity to do so. To directly quote, "For all its concerns about potentialities, the developmentalist fails to see the actuality upon which these potentialities are based."

Every potentiality is in itself an actuality. The potential of a black "3/5 of a person" man to cross the street is an actuality that the tree next to him does not have. A woman can give birth, which is an actual potential a man simply does not posess. The potential of a human conceptus to think and talk is an actuality. This actual potential (don't you love how I put the important terms in italics, like in high school textbooks?)—not just logical potential—is a much more reasonable ground for affirming personhood than some subjective standard of sentience.

Whoa. I think that covers most of my philisophical underpinnings. Sorry about the length; my friends often complain that my opinions get too long, especially on abortion, and they're probably right.

A couple of clarifications:

4) An extreme view would not have masturbation or wet dreams or menstruation as mass murder. Sperm (Spermatozoae? or is it 2nd decl. neuter? or is this irrelevant?) and ova are not potential persons, they are potential causes of persons. You could leave an ovum in a womb for a millenium and that would still be all you had (actually, you'd probably have a dead ovum). If you combine a sperm and an ovum and leave them there, the two will destroy each other and form something new, which will change into an adult, reproducing human in 9-18 years, depending on gender and genetics.

5) As I've said, I don't believe that any of this discussion of personhood is necessary. The law really ought to avoid endorsing any single philosophy (as it does with religion), and give the fetus/foetus the legal "benefit of the doubt," so to speak.

6) I have said that allowing abortions in cases of extreme jeopardy to the mother's physical health would be acceptable. I repeat that here.

7) Finally, and startrekprof makes an excellent lead-in to this, I speak on abortion not as a woman, but as a former fetus. I was one of those high-risk fetuses. When Mom got the shingles or what-have-you (dating myself here!), and the tests started coming back badly, "they" started predicting that I had a sizable chance of being born blind or, more likely, dead. "Others" advised abortion. As you might guess, Mom did not follow such advice. My little sister, now a wonderful ten-year-old, had about 9 chances in 10 of being born with Downs. Again, Mom chose life. The point of this is that there are personal stories from both the mother and fetus's points of view.

startrekprof, why bother ending the rant when ENT comes on? I've just been saving and quitting on MS Word on-and-off for about 36 hours now, as necessary.

Guns: I live in Minnesota. 'Nuff said, except for this thought for you political junkies out there: "How do you ask a goose to be the last goose to die for a campaign stunt? How do you ask a goose to die for a photo op?

This isn't well-edited, cause I just finished, don't want to work on it any more, and need to go right now and watch DS9 with my other sister.

Really, I am going to comment on the War on Terror and on "Iraqistan."

Soon.