Quote:
Originally posted by matthew330
You conveniently compare the life of a week old and the life of an 8 and a half month old and acknowledge that there is a grey area in between. You acknowledge life in the 8 1/2 month old by the defination given and state that the week old does not meet the criteria. Your solution to the grey area: restrictions on abortion as the baby evolves. You don't define these restrictions for obvious reasons (i.e. - they are not defineable). My problem with this is that because you cannot pinpoint a time in which you believe the fetus is "alive", the only safe assumption is that it is alive at conception. I'm surprised that your essay acknowledges and leaves open the possibility that a human life (by your own definition) can be and is at times ended - it is murdered. And your justification for this murder is "preservation of a woman's self-determination."
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"conveniently" is a loaded word and truthfully, I don't much care for it, since it implies to me some sort of dishonesty on my part. I used the extreme ends of the spectrum to illustrate the difficulties involved in reaching an ethical consensus as to what it means to be human and a person.
I also believe I state quite clearly that the laws as they stand are a reasonable compromise to the question of when the fetus becomes a person and should not be easily aborted; i.e. no restriction to abortion in the first two trimesters and some restrictions in the third trimester.
And no one has argued that a zygote is not 'alive' in the biological sense nor that it is not uniquely human in the genetic sense, but that it is not yet a human
being in the sense of what we understand that to be (which I went on to define).
The alternative, ignoring the qualities that we attribute to persons and using your "better safe than sorry" criteria, is to grant every newly fertalized egg equal full legal status as a human being, meaning that the mother has NO ability to terminate the pregnancy, even if the preganancy was due to rape, the fetus was deformed, etc.
Is this really what you are suggesting?
Because ethically, you can do nothing else without appearing a hypocrite, accepting your own criteria for legal abortions (murder, in your words) while rejecting mine.