Question for pro-life people: Smoking increases miscarriage and stillbirth. Should we regulate smoking by pregnant women? Should we establish a sort of OSHA for the womb?
Most fertilized ovum (zygotes) fail to implant or are rejected. Should we consider this a medical emergency and devote enormous energy to reducing this loss of human lif…
Question for pro-life people: Smoking increases miscarriage and stillbirth. Should we regulate smoking by pregnant women? Should we establish a sort of OSHA for the womb?
Most fertilized ovum (zygotes) fail to implant or are rejected. Should we consider this a medical emergency and devote enormous energy to reducing this loss of human life? Considering the vast number of yearly deaths shouldn't this trump other medical research, such as cancer research? (Let's not forget the Natural Fallacy).
The problem is the tendency to adopt extreme positions on the moral significance of zygotes and fetuses. If a zygote fails to implant does that mean a human life has ended? Biologically a strong case can be made that it has, the mistake is either to conclude the case settled, because all human lives are morally equal, or to deny anything important important happened at conception (ho hum, the DNA from to persons has knitted together and formed a new organism genetically separate from both, nothing to see here).
Consider a variation on the Trolley Problem: You are at a switch and can redirect a train about to barrel into a crowd onto either a track with a 2-year old (who will be surely killed) or another track with a tray of zygotes (they will surely be killed). What would Randall Terry do?
A morally and intellectually coherent resolution is rejected by the Democratic and Republican Parties alike, yet popular among Americans: From zygote to infant we all pass through a liminal zone where our moral importance and claim on others increases in tandem with our development and our ability to live independent of our mother.
Such a conception leads to an abortion regime widespread worldwide and supported by most Americans: low regulation on early abortion increasing to heavy regulation close to term.
Is that position pro-choice or pro-life? Both?
A practical question I have for the pro-life side: Pharmaceutical abortions are already the most common type of abortion. Abortion restrictions will accelerate the trend (check out plancpills.org), how in all practicality do you propose enforcement without resorting to a police state?
And a question for the pro-choice side: What exactly is the problem with safe, legal, and rare?
I've appreciated your comments here. The answer to your pro-choice question is, that nothing at all is a problem with "safe, legal, and rare," as long as the woman involved determines these qualities. As a committed and loving husband and father, I can't find a way to imagine that my "choice," to abort or to keep, can ever be my decision above my wife's. In the same way, I cannot imagine the presumed decision by an unborn baby can take precedence over the mother's. I have given it the most-careful thought I can give, going back to 1973, and I cannot consider any regulation at all that can put a mother into second-class relation to a father, to an unborn baby, and certainly not to government.
While I can wholeheartedly sympathize with all who hold the view that abortion is murder—not a thing about that view is inherently morally incorrect—I see no way to get past the mother—whether on the unborn baby's side or on the opposite side where all the rest of humanity stands, and judges.
____________________
When people are being slaughtered in Ukraine, more or less to prove Vladimir Putin's point, it's sickening for all the rest of us to debate whether the U.S. has ever been worse, or whether Pres. Zelensky supports nazification of Russian Ukrainians. Once abortion touches you personally, no matter the causes or the results, you will likely be sickened to listen to others, standing around, idly, debating whether some other person, not them, has a right to decide how to handle the blessed gift of a potential child.
____________________
I must again apologize for personalizing this, as I have now done here, several time. I can no longer help hearing all those anti-abortion people messing themselves up in my wife's personally-lived tragedy.
Question for pro-life people: Smoking increases miscarriage and stillbirth. Should we regulate smoking by pregnant women? Should we establish a sort of OSHA for the womb?
Most fertilized ovum (zygotes) fail to implant or are rejected. Should we consider this a medical emergency and devote enormous energy to reducing this loss of human life? Considering the vast number of yearly deaths shouldn't this trump other medical research, such as cancer research? (Let's not forget the Natural Fallacy).
The problem is the tendency to adopt extreme positions on the moral significance of zygotes and fetuses. If a zygote fails to implant does that mean a human life has ended? Biologically a strong case can be made that it has, the mistake is either to conclude the case settled, because all human lives are morally equal, or to deny anything important important happened at conception (ho hum, the DNA from to persons has knitted together and formed a new organism genetically separate from both, nothing to see here).
Consider a variation on the Trolley Problem: You are at a switch and can redirect a train about to barrel into a crowd onto either a track with a 2-year old (who will be surely killed) or another track with a tray of zygotes (they will surely be killed). What would Randall Terry do?
A morally and intellectually coherent resolution is rejected by the Democratic and Republican Parties alike, yet popular among Americans: From zygote to infant we all pass through a liminal zone where our moral importance and claim on others increases in tandem with our development and our ability to live independent of our mother.
Such a conception leads to an abortion regime widespread worldwide and supported by most Americans: low regulation on early abortion increasing to heavy regulation close to term.
Is that position pro-choice or pro-life? Both?
A practical question I have for the pro-life side: Pharmaceutical abortions are already the most common type of abortion. Abortion restrictions will accelerate the trend (check out plancpills.org), how in all practicality do you propose enforcement without resorting to a police state?
And a question for the pro-choice side: What exactly is the problem with safe, legal, and rare?
I've appreciated your comments here. The answer to your pro-choice question is, that nothing at all is a problem with "safe, legal, and rare," as long as the woman involved determines these qualities. As a committed and loving husband and father, I can't find a way to imagine that my "choice," to abort or to keep, can ever be my decision above my wife's. In the same way, I cannot imagine the presumed decision by an unborn baby can take precedence over the mother's. I have given it the most-careful thought I can give, going back to 1973, and I cannot consider any regulation at all that can put a mother into second-class relation to a father, to an unborn baby, and certainly not to government.
While I can wholeheartedly sympathize with all who hold the view that abortion is murder—not a thing about that view is inherently morally incorrect—I see no way to get past the mother—whether on the unborn baby's side or on the opposite side where all the rest of humanity stands, and judges.
____________________
When people are being slaughtered in Ukraine, more or less to prove Vladimir Putin's point, it's sickening for all the rest of us to debate whether the U.S. has ever been worse, or whether Pres. Zelensky supports nazification of Russian Ukrainians. Once abortion touches you personally, no matter the causes or the results, you will likely be sickened to listen to others, standing around, idly, debating whether some other person, not them, has a right to decide how to handle the blessed gift of a potential child.
____________________
I must again apologize for personalizing this, as I have now done here, several time. I can no longer help hearing all those anti-abortion people messing themselves up in my wife's personally-lived tragedy.
Regards,
(($; -)}™
Gozo