>First, neither sperm nor ovum, and certainly not carcinoma, are a human organism.<
Just for perversity's sake, there are certain cancers - teratomas - that differentiate tissue (hair, teeth, muscle) in haphazard manners and become, in their worst manifestations, something like a parthenogenetic baby that's been passed thru the blender. Pretty gross.
But not everybody does, or should, subscribe to the pretty hard line that a zygote is a human organism - in the sense that it is a person. Is an embryo a person? I don't think so. Is a fetus a person? It's certainly BECOMING one, and by the time it would be viable ex utero I'd say Yes unconditionally.
But I see only tenuous and contrived moral justification for declaring that a zero-to-twelve-week fetus is a person.
And I don't see illegalizing or stigmatizing that belief to be a good thing for the Republic.
>There should be a reluctance to abort, and a sober deliberation
about one's reasons. What is wrong with that?<
Nothing. I agree entirely with this sentence as it is written, but I do not thing the extension to the "shame" issue. Let's say my family encounters a problem pregnancy situation, and the deliberation is completed and the answer is Yes let's abort, why use stigma (and here stigma can only mean proscription) as a disincentibve? The only reason is moral disapproval made policy. I respect your right to disapprove on moral grounds. But I would be very unhappy to have you or others succeed in establishing a climate of shame, because to do that moral preference would have to be made law. I am jealous of the right to disagree, and in this case that jealousy expresses itself in a deep distrust of the motives of those (you in this instabce) who have no problem with erecting impediments (by way of restrictive social policy) to my family's option to choose abortion when our own moral equations balance that way. What freedom is next to be deconstructed by moralists?
That is why I would ask you to abandon your remarkably backhanded, conditionalized, yea grudging "maybe perhaps compromise yield" language and come out a bit more declaratively for liberty of opinion and action. Jmo of course, and I don't require you to agree. But I do ask you to "think on it". |
