Originally posted by Sandman
One more time... the mother gets to decide if it's a life or not.
The government is fairly consistent. If you take a life, it's a crime.
Again... it's a life when the mother says so.
Simple. No need for government intrusion. No need for an endless litany of exceptions and exclusions that come with any proposal to ban abortions outright. The mother decides.
Hi Sandman,
Simple indeed. But unfortunately it completely undercuts any coherent arguments against infanticide, or "neonaticide" as Evolutionary Psychologist Steven Pinker (Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University) chose to reframe the term for killing a newborn in his article
"Why they Kill their Newborns." [New York Times Magazine, November 2, 1997]
Pinker argued out that the only real difference (for scientists) between children in the womb and out newborns is that one has been born and the other hasn't. He argued that a mere change of address cannot possibly make them "persons" who can be murdered:
"Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. Most philosophers (to say nothing of nonphilosophers) recoil from that last step, but the very fact that there can be a debate about the personhood of neonates, but no debate about the personhood of older children, makes it clearer why we feel more sympathy for an Amy Grossberg than for a Susan Smith."Apparently Pinker wants to use the term "Neonaticide," because "several moral philosophers" (Pinker conveniently omits to name them) "have concluded that neonates are not persons," and by his very use of the term it would seem that Pinker believes that these Moral Philosophers have a point. Pinker confirms this elsewhere in the article; "It seems obvious that we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life" he says and then points out that "To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother's pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood." To complicate the already complicated issue further Pinker asks "What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed?" and then helpfully points out "No, the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say," (again Pinker fails to name these mysterious moral philosophers) "from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do." [remember, by neonates he means "newborns" he's using the term to prevent an emotional reaction]
So it would seem that according to Pinker we have good reason to believe these infants errr... "Neonates", have no more right to be called "persons" than mice do. This is inevitable seeing that, for men like Pinker, all important distinctions have to have a purely biological basis. While it would appear that nothing is capable of granting us an inherent right not to be killed, or even to be called "persons," other than his "completion of the primate assembly process," Pinker still insists on using terms that can't possibly have any meaning in his system, and setting up boundaries that simply appear completely arbitrary.
We have come to the point societally where our definitions of person and non-person, murder and morality have become completely capricious. You worry about the dangers of an overbearing government defining "personhood" too strictly, I worry that at this rate nothing will be left to stop us from stripping anyone we want to of personhood and deeming them worthy of death on the whims of the culture. At present those are the very old, very sick, and the not-yet-born but every day the defintion of "useless eaters" is widening.
One major test of whether a society is good or evil is how it treats its most defenseless members. We are currently failing, and only getting worse with time .
- SEAGOON
