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

To: Greta Mc who wrote (5908)	2/15/2001 2:51:07 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I think a lot of people are in that same quandry. in our case, we didn't want to know whether our children were boys or girls (the second one turned out to be twins, but we didn't know that until the first one was born), so we called them Hubie -- short for human being. I don't know any pregnant woman who says "I'm having an embryo" or "I'm having a zygote" or "I'm having a fetus." They all say "I'm having a baby" or, if they know, a girl or boy. There is acknowledgment that there is a baby/person there long before birth. If you accept the theory that it's okay to abort up to a certain point because there is no person there, but not past a certain point because there is, you have to be able to say at some point "zip, this second this is not a person, but in one microsecond it will be." So far I haven't met anybody who is willing to define exactly what that point is and why their decision on the point makes sense. Proposing that the ability to survive outside the womb is the turning point doesn't do it. First, you won't know until you try to save the child. Second, each child is different in their ability to survive. Third, if you are in a maternity hospital in a big city the child may well be viable, but if you are in the exact same stage in a cabin in the Alaska wilderness it wouldn't be. Do we really want to say that X child is a protected person if the mother is in the hospital, but if the mother goes home to her cabin in the woods, zip, the child is moved back to unprotected stage? There are just too many dilemmas for most thinking people to be comfortable with.