[Peace-discuss] Citizens of Empire and other remarks.

[Morton K.Brussel]

First, I want to most strongly recommend a book: “Citizens of the 
Empire” by Robert Jensen, published by City Lights Books (San 
Francisco). Jensen is an Associate Professor of journalism at the U. of 
Texas, Austin.

The book is short, only 144 small pages, and easy to read. I think it 
has much to contribute to members of an organization such as AWARE. It 
is obvious that I was much moved by its clarity of thought and its 
analysis of the place of an individual dissident to our militaristic 
corporate ridden society. The book also seems apropos to the dilemmas 
posed by Cynthia Peters in J & D Kruse’s recent peace-discuss 
communication.


Next, I want to immerse myself in the troubled (murky) waters that 
resulted from Lisa’s addition to Carl’s news-of-the-week report of the 
“March for Women’s Lives”  in Washington.  Carl scoffed at Lisa’s 
remark, and has followed that up with an article on the immorality of 
abortion.

Ricky has already responded to that article with arguments I find 
compelling. I only want to add a little more.

It is clear that the author of this article and the man he reviews have 
philosophical academic bents, for they talk of “morality” as if it has 
an obvious definition, without qualifications, and purports to appear 
objective and rational. But I find the discussion rather puerile, one 
that does not see the forest through the underbrush. The discussion 
centers on “the moral status of the foetus” and why it is wrong to kill 
“an innocent human being”. These are standard anti-choice 
ratiocinations.

The thrust of the article is that the moral status of a human foetus 
derives from its potentiality to become a human personage, and that to 
kill it is equivalent to depriving an adult human being of life. Quote: 
“When I die, I’m deprived of the value of my future”. Equivalently, a 
foetus, embryo, (or sperm plus ovum) is deprived, if “killed”, (i.e. 
aborted) of the value of its future. This seems nothing so much as a 
tautology, to wit: to be killed is to be deprived of life. Is this a 
novel insight?

In such discussions, anti-choice folks often pose the presumed dilemma 
that killing a foetus near birth is like killing the baby after birth, 
and then they extrapolate to the embryo and even to the Petri dish 
where sperm and ovum may be brought together in-vitro fertilization. So 
they talk of killing the embryo as if it is “killing a baby”. They do 
so willfully, knowing it may strike an empathetic chord. What they fail 
to appreciate, or refuse to recognize, is that although there is indeed 
a continuum in the development of a human being from conception to 
birth (to old age and death), this continuum has "poles". In physics we 
learn, for example, that there are such things as electrical insulators 
and conductors with properties diametrically opposed insofar as 
practical effects are concerned, but in fact there is a continuum in 
the electrical conductivity of materials, so that it is not possible to 
define absolutely where an insulator starts or a conductor ends. Yet, 
glass is radically different from copper insofar as electrical 
conductivity is concerned. Insulators and conductors are two poles of a 
continuum.  Similarly, an embryo is totally distinguishable from a baby 
even if we cannot specify precisely, except formally, the moment when a 
baby emerges from an embryo or an embryo from undifferentiated 
embryonic cells.

The Supreme court recognized this when they made the Roe vs. Wade 
decision.

But what the article most importantly left out, and is relevant to the 
discussion, is the woman bearing the infant. She never enters the 
calculus of embryo-baby--full fledged human being. Indeed, 
anti-choicers posit that the foetus or embryo is equivalent to the 
woman, just as they believe that the embryo is equivalent to the baby. 
They thus degrade the woman.

A baby freed of its mother does become more individual, and is granted 
individual "rights". Whether it has the same value or “rights” as the 
mother as far as courts are concerned can only be resolved in the 
context of particular cases. It will always be a matter of opinion, 
although some would say that there is a higher moral authority (whose?) 
to which we must adhere.

The authors of Carl’s piece claim to argue on a non-religious basis, 
but the rigidity of their arguments—unwilling or unable to distinguish 
between embryo, mother and their respective “rights” reflects religious 
faith; their morality seems to have been dictated from on high—priests, 
pope, or god.