[Peace-discuss] Re: [UCprogressives] Re: Pro-choice [wasRe: letter to my former comrades]

Tue Nov 16 13:08:45 CST 2004

The people associated with the Consistent Life position have often said
that their goal is not so much to make abortion illegal as to make it
unthinkable, because (as you suggest) anyone old enough to remember knows
that abortion was neither uncommon nor particularly difficult to obtain
before 1973, when it was generally illegal in the US. The CL people would
agree wholeheartedly with you, Ken, that "We need to DEBATE the issue and
CONVINCE people..."

But I'm not sure what it means to say that "government should not be the
driving force of individual morality."  If, as good Americans, we hold
that the purpose of government is to secure "certain unalienable rights,"
among them "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -- it would seem
that sometimes government would have to be the driving force of individual
morality (as in ending slavery?).

I'm not sure, for example, that you can make a sharp distinction between
war as a "societal level action" and abortion as "a personal level
decision," if they both involve ending human life (as I hold and you
don't).

You're surely right to point out that it's the genius of classical
Liberalism to assert a category of "personal level decisions" on which the
government should not trespass. But the argument is over what belongs to
that category.  May I make a personal-level decision to go and fight in
Vietnam of Iraq, or should I be prevented by legislation?  And I'd
certainly back legislation against meat-eating if I thought that the
killing of animals was morally comparable to the killing of humans, but I
don't. (There still may be other reasons to do it.)

Regards, Carl

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004, Ken Urban wrote:

> There are enough REASONABLE people who disagree with the Pro-Life's
> ideas, both scientifically and spiritually/emotionally, that they cannot
> be discounted.  We need to DEBATE the issue and CONVINCE people one way
> or the other, not legisislate it.
>
> He's an analogy:  I'm a vegan; I believe that all life is equally
> sacred, either created by God or evolved by Nature the same as we.
> There is a large body of scientific evidence that humans evolved/were
> created  to be herbivores.  Should the government outlaw all meat
> eating? I won't mind, but I'm not even proposing that, I think it's more
> important to CONVINCE people, and set an example for others.
>
> I think that government should not be the driving force of individual
> morality.  It should not behave immorally by executing people, or
> starting wars. The death penalty and war are societal level actions, an
> abortion is a personal level decision.  Extinguishing fisheries is a
> societal level problem, eating a fish dinner is a personal decision, so
> protecting fisheries (non-human life) is not the same enforcing
> veganinsm on all.
>
> Outlawing abortion will not change the mind of the reasonable people
> who disagree, it will only force them to use extra governmental means to
> do what they feel is proper.  (We men need to be especially careful
> here!)
>
> Ken
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Ken Urban
> Assoc. Prof., Computer Science
> Parkland College
>
> Office: B129A
>            (217)-353-2246
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> >>> <ppatton at uiuc.edu> 11/15/2004 9:12:28 PM >>>
> >
> >I agree that it's quite worthwhile to consider the elements
> of choice and
> >personal responsibility in this debate, Ken.  But your
> conclusion ("it's
> >wrong for the government to forbid abortions") depends on an
> unstated
> >premise: namely, that abortion does not end a human life.  I
> can't think
> >of many cases where you would think it wrong for the
> government to forbid
> >the taking of human (or indeed a good bit of non-human) life.
> >
> >Regards, Carl
>
> Carl-
> I agree with you that a woman's right to control her own body
> is not, by itself, a sufficient argument that abortion should
> be allowed.  I think the central issue is the question of the
> humanity of the fetus during the first and early second
> trimesters of pregnancy, when most abortions are performed.
> The question we need to ask is what traits do humans possess
> such that killing them is wrong.  Given an answer to this
> question, we can then ask whether first trimester fetuses
> possess the needed traits.  I think it is especially
> instructive to imagine what traits a non-human (such as an
> intelligent machine) would need to have before we would
> consider destroying it to be murder.  I would like to suggest
> that the valued traits include self awareness, higher
> cognition (the ability to anticipate the future is of
> particular importance, since killing a person thwarts all of
> their future plans), the ability to learn and use a language,
> and the capacity for emotional experience.  Note that I am
> not suggesting that a person must possess all of the valued
> traits, just some of them.  A person suffering from aphasia
> (the inability to use language, usually due to damage to
> Broca's or Wernicke's area of the cerebral cortex), for
> example, can still anticipate the future and experience
> emotions.  A person suffering damage to their cinguate cortex
> may exhibit a loss of emotional affect, but can still talk
> and think.  Developmentally disabled people still exhibit the
> valued human traits to a degree, and often possess "islands"
> of surviving normal human cognitive ability for particular
> tasks.  All of the valued traits that I have mentioned depend
> on the functional integrity of the cerebral cortex.  Many
> states recogize the special importance of the cerebral cortex
> by defining death as the irreversable cessation of cortical
> function.  The cerebral cortex is a late developing brain
> component.  At the end of the first trimester of pregnancy,
> the cerebral cortex is little more than a sheet of
> proliferating cells.  The entire body of the fetus, at this
> point, is smaller than a newborn baby's brain (size matters,
> because it is a rough indicator of complexity).  An organized
> cortical electroencephalogram isn't detectable until late in
> the second trimester.  I'm pro-choice because I don't believe
> it's reasonable to equate aborting a first trimester fetus
> with murdering a fully formed human person.  It's more like
> removing the feeding tube from a brain-dead patient.
> -Paul P.
> __________________________________________________________________
> Dr. Paul Patton
> Research Scientist
> Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
> work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
> home phone: (217)-344-5812
> homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html
>
> "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is
> the
> source of all true art and science."
> -Albert Einstein
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