liveonearth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
liveonearth) wrote2011-11-09 07:32 am
liveonearth) wrote2011-11-09 07:32 am
Life Begins When?
This morning I awakened to a story on the radio about the "Personhood" initiative. Some well-meaning folks are seeking to have states pass laws saying that "life begins at conception" and to ban all abortion and all uses of human cells. I appreciate their purism and their willingness to take this value to its logical end. At least these "lifers" are not hypocrites! But unfortunately for them, their initiatives are falling like flies under a flyswatter. Why? People are unwilling to force women to have babies they don't want. It is problematic. If you MUST give birth to any conceptus that sticks, do you still then have to mother it? Or can you ignore and abuse it? Well it turns out, you CAN ignore and abuse it. If the government notices how bad you treat your kids, it takes them away and they get treated even worse. These people who wish that every conceptus become a child are neglecting to consider the logical outcome of their actions. MORE unwanted children helps create a desperately sick society that doesn't respect life at any age.
But back to the question of when life begins. Life "began" when a bunch of chemical components somehow found themselves able to do something that they couldn't do separately. And somehow they became able to spread, expand, and later to reproduce. Since then life has been continuous. We are an extension of the life that began in the slime. Tentacles of life reach out all the time, in every direction. We are host to more living cells that are NOT us than to cells that ARE us. Life is a network, a collage, a confusing interconnected amazing self-promoting thing. Cells die but life goes on. Skin cells. Stomach cells. Sperm cells. Egg cells. The idea that a sperm cell + an egg cell is somehow sacred because it is more alive than any other cells is exaggerated. The web of life goes on. The boundaries of death remain.
But back to the question of when life begins. Life "began" when a bunch of chemical components somehow found themselves able to do something that they couldn't do separately. And somehow they became able to spread, expand, and later to reproduce. Since then life has been continuous. We are an extension of the life that began in the slime. Tentacles of life reach out all the time, in every direction. We are host to more living cells that are NOT us than to cells that ARE us. Life is a network, a collage, a confusing interconnected amazing self-promoting thing. Cells die but life goes on. Skin cells. Stomach cells. Sperm cells. Egg cells. The idea that a sperm cell + an egg cell is somehow sacred because it is more alive than any other cells is exaggerated. The web of life goes on. The boundaries of death remain.
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It's *so* tempting to take our "enlightened" position and dismiss the other group, but their position is not less well founded than our own.
The sorry truth is that their position is actually *more* logically correct than ours. Because... What we are doing is often engaging in equivocation and line drawing. To say "viable" fetus which is the case in late term abortions... Well, that's pretty much a person, take it out of the mother and it'd live. "partial birth abortions" for example make a specific effort to kill the infant, which frequently survive if the proceedure is botched. So now we get into the delightful task of "line drawing", where we try to figure out which day of the pregnancy translates to that being a person in there. I can't claim much moral superiority at this point.
What I *can* claim is that I personally view slavery as a worse crime than murder. So regardless of anything else, whether or not the zygote is a person, I don't care, I remain pro-abortion because if I have to choose between ending one life and wrecking another, I will take the ending.
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On the abortion front, there is *one* thing that I would like to see changed (other than leaving it to the states). That would be the *male* abortion. The man should have a legal recourse to abrogate *all* further responsibility for that child. Pay a fee equivalent to the cost of an abortion, which the woman can use for either an abortion or whatever, and boom, no further parental rights or responsibilities *ever* apply to that man as regards that kid (or not).
I want that because the current system is *unequal*. The woman has many options for pre-sex birth control and a few after. The man has 2, condoms (unreliable) and abstinence. After the fact, the woman has options that begin with the morning after pill, then transition to abortion. The man has none. On the societal side, how many unwanted fatherless babies would not be born if it were *known* that the father wasn't going to be contributing?
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