[Peace-discuss] Ending human life

[C. G. Estabrook]

Guest commentary: Ending human life is never the right answer
Sun, 06/14/2015 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette <http://www.news-gazette.com/author/news-gazette>
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By C.G. Estabrook

A recent book on the last presidential campaign quotes President Obama as saying, "Turns out I'm really good at killing people ... Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine." (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, "Double Down: Game Change 2012.")

In fact he is continuing to kill thousands — including U.S. citizens and hundreds of children — in his drone assassination campaign alone.

But what makes ending human life wrong?

Death is a bad thing because it deprives people of all the experiences, activities, enjoyments, projects that would make up their future personal life. A premature death is a bad thing because it causes the loss of future experiences, etc.

But fetuses also have futures like ours, with all the experiences, activities, enjoyments, projects that would make up their future life. Abortion is wrong for the same reason that ending other human life is wrong — it deprives the fetus of a future like ours.

The question of when a fetus "becomes a person with rights” (conception? twelve weeks? birth? later?) is arbitrary, because a fetus always has a future like ours. We should be opposed to things that end human life - murder, war, capital punishment, abortion, and euthanasia.

The Irish Republican leader James Connolly (so badly wounded in the 1916 Easter Rebellion that the British had to tie him to a chair to execute him) wrote at the outset of the First World War, "One great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been their willingness to kill in defence of their power and privileges. Let their power be once attacked either by foreign foes, or domestic revolutionists, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill, and kill, and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionists to shed blood" (James Connolly, "Conscription," 1915).

C.G. Estabrook is a retired visiting professor at the University of Illinois. He conducts a political discussion program, "News from Neptune," on Urbana Public TV (and YouTube).

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