Hi there.
Just jumping in, having read nothing in a while. just generally pissed off and wanting to vent.
The darkness now begins, the curtains are drawn. Bush orders the suspension of international funding of, God help us, abortions.
I'm sick of this? I taught this subject for 12 years listening to every argument imagineable. the best argument I ever heard was that, depending on your definition of what counts as a human life, infanticide is justifiable. This doesn't mean that I could sanction infanticide, what it means is that the argument did the best job I've ever seen making you think about what it means to be a person. Think about it. My guess is that we all have an uncle or aunt or so that even now perhaps is underserving of the status as a full-fledged human being.
Here, I think, is the deal:
1] People love to have sex. Sorry. No religious claptrap will talk them out of this. It's an evolutionary, hard-wired imperative. It's hard-wired because we used to be a weak species and needed every off-spring we could get. This we've outgrown. But we have not out-grown the hardwiring of that desire and so it remains wonderful -- better by far than any drug that I have ever experienced, from which I am speaking. Say no to drugs? Easy, So long as you can have sex. So if the conservatives, whatever they are, want to keep their kids sober, teach them about sex. This they can do responsibly, lovingly and (hopefully) happily.
2] Sex results in pregnancy if you don't know what you're doing. So make damn sure you know what you're doing. Because ending a pregnancy is awful, no matter what. Fund sex education programs that don't explain merely the 'benefits' of abstinence. Why? See #1
3] Pregnancy does not mean that there's a person now alive in the woman's uterus. Personhood is a matter of degree and its full achievement is difficult. People have the intelligence to understand this in most contexts.The assembled ingredients of an entree is not yet a dinner. A bare frame of 2x4's is not quite a house. The rough draft of a story is not yet a novel. And so on. We deal with this all the time. So what's the problem when it comes to human beings? 32 undifferentiated cells is not yet a human being; nor is 1,073,741,824 undifferentiated cells, but here we're ooching closer.
The trouble is that we're often obsessed by what could have been, knowing from our own case, if we're lucky. And when we're lucky we have a hard time preempting any other lucky case. This of course is crap. We are not God. Unlike God we have no lock on the future. We can only do our best to influence that future by what ever means available. The means available includes our responsibility to make the terrifying distinction between the prevention of life and its destruction. Both are often justified, this is easy to see. We eat, we defend ourselves and we sometimes and should more often and easily (never easy?) have the ability to choose when to reproduce ourselves, even though we love to have sex. Keep abortion rare enough, legal, safe, and most of all, supported by the community of loving human beings that understands one of the essential ingredients of BEING a human being: compassion. |
