It’s Sunday, October 31, 2010 and I gottah respond to a blog entry I read earlier in the week.
Okay, for starts the professor in the story is a doofus. True, cold is the absence of heat. So what? It’s quite possible for the absence of something to exist. For instance, the absence of money in my pocket. Using the student’s logic, poverty is the absence of wealth, therefor poverty doesn’t exist. Just because something can not be “programmed, categorized or easily referenced” does not mean it doesn’t exist.
| 10 Hand Salutes to anyone who can say (without Googling for it) where that quote came from! |
I would have have failed these students. First, I’d have verbally cudgeled them about the head and neck, then I’d have failed them.
Jumping to the meat of the blog post.
Our system of law is designed to protect us from government and from each other. Okay, it’s supposed to be designed to do that. It seems that lately we’re seeing a rash of law designed to protect us from ourselves, but this is fodder for another shovel. The way our system works (or was intended to) is that you are at liberty to do as you please up to the point that you injure someone else. Your right to free speech for instance does not extend to the point where you may slander or libel another person. Your freedom of religion does not include dragging people from their homes to attend religious events.
The problem of course is when does life begin? Well, considering that life (human life) is not possible without a fertilized egg, I would contend that conception is at least, how it starts. Yes, yes, there are lots of things that have to be present too, but these are irrelevant sans the fertilized egg.
You could argue that a cake is not a cake until it’s been in a properly heated oven for N minutes. Therefor an embryo isn’t alive until it can survive outside the womb.
We could easily, too easily bog this down to sophistry: When is it a cake? If I handed you a handful of wheat, and said “Here’s your cake.” you’d think I was a nutcase.
I vividly recall the time when my mom was baking a cake and a fight broke out between my brother and I. Apparently, I slammed my brother to the floor at a critical moment in the cake’s development. The cake fell and I received a beating, not for fighting, not for slamming my brother to the floor, but rather for ruining mom’s cake.
There you have it, scientific proof that it’s a cake at the minimum while it’s in the oven.
My contention is that since a human being is not possible without there first being a fertilized egg, this is when life begins.
As an underdeveloped person, the embryo is absolutely the weakest member of the society. It is totally dependent on another for its every need. But this goes way beyond mere protection under the law. Our Declaration of Independence says it best:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ”
As such, these rights are protected by our laws, but they do not from there come. They come from a higher source. Of course if you’re an atheist, there is no higher source from which unalienable rights are endowed. The question then becomes; Is it okay to kill a person who has done no wrong?
Of course it’s not.
How then is it okay to abort a fetus, regardless of the stage of development?
As to the argument that legalizing abortion keeps it safe, that canine will not seek game. Using this logic, all illicit drugs should be legal so that a druggie won’t seek out unsafe, illegal meth.
As to instances of rape, incest and fetuses that will never result in a live person, this is where it gets hard. On the one hand, it’s a life, regardless of the circumstances of its creation. On the other, how is it justice to force the woman to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term? But then why should the fetus pay the price? You could go quite mad trying to work it out.
No thanks. This opens the door to the problem of: If it’s okay for blah then it’s okay for blah +1.
I know that it’s possible to retrieve embryos from the womb for storage and eventual implantation into the womb of a woman who desires to have a child. Perhaps this could be an answer to this problem?
And then there’s my favorite part of the abortion issue: The rights/responsibilities of the biological father.
At present, it’s entirely up to the woman to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy. The man has no say whatsoever in the matter. He may very well want the child, but is powerless to influence the outcome. The woman on the other hand can choose to continue the pregnancy to term and then use the courts to extract child support payments (for the next 18 years) from a man who may not have wanted the child in the first place.
By way of wrapping up, this last blog entry of October, the whole point if pretty much legally moot until the US Supreme Court, in its wisdom, decides precisely when life begins. Which brings us all the way back around the barn.
A lot of our laws are stem from because we “just feel that way.” Our Founding Fathers were people of passionate beliefs and while we’ve strayed in many ways from there intent, our legal system is cornerstoned from these beliefs. So the statement “I just feel that way is not entirely without merit.
It’s the why part of it that’s important. For instance, on Tuesday, those of us who give a damn will gather and vote on him, her, this or that. We’ve all been exposed to the same body of facts, lies and blends of each. We’ll be casting our votes based largely on: We “just feel that way.”
That’s it for today and for the month of October. Enjoy what remains of your weekend and be sure to tune in tomorrow for Where I Ate. Hoo boy, did we have some bad experiences!