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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Null Dog Ago who wrote (347)	9/6/1999 12:05:00 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

Not to put too fine a point on it, Nulldog, but even the most hardened communist would agree that a born child is alive. (So your crack about murderers must be rejected as disingenuous.) A more generous definition is that a fetus achieves personhood when it can live outside the womb without heroic life-support measures. Naturally there is a great deal of subjectivity at work here ... parents of severely disabled children who always need intensive support would emphatically say their kids are people. And I'm not going to argue with them, whoa no. But the game can be played in the other direction ad absurdum. Five out of six fertilized ova fail to implant or are silently miscarried. Is this murder? There is a continuum of "status" from ovum to born breathing baby. There is imo no obvious line at which we can point and say "okay, this is a person". But to define a zygote or a gastrula or four-week embryo as a person strikes me (subjectively and personally) as so very restrictive that I wonder what the agenda is. And invariably I find religious conservatism as the sole significant driver of this philosophical stance. I draw the line somewhere between the fourth and seventh month of pregnancy. Where exactly I cannot say ... as I learn more things I refine my opinion. Imo this gives me a leg up on the dogmatists. Curious, iddnit, how the dogmatists and the "liberals" (what we in the USA call what everyone else calls socialists) wind up on opposite sides of this fence with unusual fidelity.