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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (5877)	2/15/2001 11:32:51 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

The human rights movement generally gets tied up in religious trappings so that the pro life position gets tarred with the "religious right" brush, while in fact there are innumerable people of quite liberal persuasion who see the wrong in abortion but tend to be cowed by liberal political correctness to remain silent. "Human rights" gets abused, just like any other term. In the Reagan era, the human rights movement, or at least the phrase 'human rights", was mostly just used as another cold war slogan. It was somehow used to justify the rather brutal wars in Central America, at least in the official rhetoric of the time. I don't think the wars in Central America were any nicer than the wars in the Balkans, and the percentage of the civilian population killed was probably higher, but we were on the side of the primary killers in Central America, so it was different, I guess. Nobody thinks abortion is a nice thing. It's particularly ugly when it's used as a primary method of birth control, as was the case in Russia for a long time, but the 'pro-life" movement isn't much into promoting alternative methods. If we take W's early actions as a guide, they'd rather cut off the primary providers of alternative methods to prove a point. Saying that 'human life begins at conception" is a theological position. An alternative view would be that if you outlaw abortion, maybe pass Ashcroft's amendment, you may force a lot of women to give birth at bad times and eliminate the children they might have given birth to in better times. Yes, a fertilized egg is a potential life, but all the unfertilized eggs are potential life too. The degree isn't all that much less until you layer a lot of other stuff on top of it; the Roman Catholic Church holds that it's bad to put anything in the way of the sperm on its own potential path to life, and the only morally acceptable thing to do is bear children or "just say no". I don't think the pro-life movement in general is all that much more reasonable on sexual matters than the RC church, though the preaching takes many different forms. Maybe they could come up with a modern version of Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League.