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

To: Edwarda who wrote (920)	9/7/1999 6:22:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6418

Germination and birth are analogous events. A fetus is akin to the seed. Conception in the plant begins long before there is a seed - a flower receives pollen. A seedling is a born baby. There are only two obvious delineations in this debate - conception and birth. There are more indistinct intermediate milestones: implantation, early neural function, theoretical viability ex utero. But these are not nailed down either by science or by common sense. The abortion debate centers on the status of the embryo/fetus before birth but after conception. It is necessarily so. How each of us arrives at a decision regarding the admissibility of doing an abortion has to do with a variety of value judgments. We've heard many of these here. But there is a big difference between regretting or opposing an abortion of one's own and telling someone else what she may or may not do. Killing a born child is murder. Preventing a pregnancy is plain common sense. Between conception and birth, the act necessarily contains elements of each. Imo only a psychopath would abort a healthy seven-month fetus, and only a fanatic would forbid the abortion on patient's demand of a five-week embryo. Somewhere in between is the spectrum of personal cutoff points as to where prudence ends and murder begins. I don't want someone passing a law telling me it is entirely out of my wife's or daughter's hands. More strenuously, I don't want this law to be based on what the black robes tell us about sanctity of all life. And while Michael has said he knows people who oppose abortion on grounds free of a religious component, I am incredulous. I haven't spoken to or even heard of one. Always we come back to articles of faith. And my faith is libertarian.

To: Edwarda who wrote (920)	9/7/1999 6:44:00 PM
From: E	Respond to of 6418

Your question is a reformulation of the truism that sometimes transitions are gradual. We live with that in life, and try to apply common sense and the desire that the world have the most happiness and the least misery in it, and draw lines. My line for abortions is someplace close to the first trimester. I certainly know it is not five weeks, because I miscarried at approximately that time, and by no stretch of the imagination was the blood clot and gristle in my hand a human being. It would have become one, had I been luckier; but it hadn't, yet. It is, as we have seen, possible to stipulate that a tomato seed is a tomato, and a tomato plant is a tomato, but try a BLT with a tomato plant, and you will know you had better be more careful with your stipulations. And try sleeping on an acorn. See, it's fine with me if you want to stipulate that anything is anything and you yourself live by it. What I don't like is you stipulating that a divided cell, or a cluster of cells, is a human being, because that is an article of mysticism, and I resent the imposition by government on those who are not mystics. Substitute religion for mysticism in the sentence; same thing.