More Heartwarming Misogyny From the Right Wing
Cardinal Egan, supremely obnoxious Catholic Archbishop of New York, has an essay up on some Web site, complete with the standard handwringing condescension and heart-tugging photos, declaiming how desperately we need to take control of women’s bodies and impose forced pregnancy as a matter of law and culture. Its contents are typical of this well-worn genre: a lame argument about whether a human fetus is a “human being”, willful elision of the difference between biological identity and moral status, sweeping moral declarations grounded on nothing but his unreflective certainty, and of course obligatory references to Hitler, Stalin, and Dred Scott.
The heart of this superficial and nonsensical (or perhaps it could be said: “a-sensical”) piece is a photograph of a 20-week fetus – a photograph which, Egan declares, proves by itself that abortion is wrong and it is utterly worthless to even consider the actual moral issues raised by the question.
Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.
Why it is that the moral attack dogs of the right wing are always so eager to proclaim their own lack of comprehension I don’t know, but it is no longer surprising as a practical fact, and still less in light of the product of their “reasoning”. But ask yourself: who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture of an organism affected by this subject that moves me in some way, so I refuse to think about it carefully or read what the best thinkers on the subject have said, and that justifies both my unsupported, idiosyncratic religious beliefs about it and my intention to impose them on everyone else in the country!”? Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?
But the lack of comprehension, and the vast evasions and logical gaps, Egan’s supposed “discussion” shows are par for the course, from this source and the anti-choice brigade in general. It’s hardly worth bothering with. What catches my eye in this piece – literally – is that photo, and the way it is used. Egan seems sincerely convinced that photos have moral meanings. (” Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully. . . . The matter becomes even clearer and simpler if you obtain from the National Geographic Society two extraordinary DVDs . . . entitled “In the Womb” . . . [and] “In the Womb—Multiples”.) Now, all activist groups use photographs to illustrate their causes, and to manipulate the viewer emotionally. But they usually do the courtesy of providing some sort of argument for their position. Egan declares that none is necessary – the fetuses in the photos almost literally speak for themselves. And that fact illustrates the most important thing about the anti-choice position.
To be anti-choice is, in a fundmental and particularly vicious way, to be anti-woman. It is to declare that women may have no control over their own bodies with respect to their reproductive functions, or over their entire lives as affected by those functions – and that society, invariably men, may declare to women in what circumstances they may make their own choices and follow their own paths in life, and in what circumstances those paths will be dictated to them against their wills. And, more practically, it is to put the life of every woman on earth, before and during her fertile years at least, and afterwards as a result of that earlier constraint, entirely and completely on a contingent basis, subject to conditions determined by others (men), and forever out of the control of the women themselves. Everything any woman does, wants, or plans for can be derailed in a moment by a trivial accident of biology – a condition that can be dealt with easily, safely, and cheaply by means that men choose to criminalize to prevent women from making their own choices about. There is nothing in any woman’s life that can be depended on or confidently planned for, because everything any women chooses can be disrupted or swept away, not by being pregnant, but by being pregnant and forced to remain so against her will, physically prevented, and prohibited by law, from acting on her own choices on that matter. And every woman who lives in a misogynist society, which is to say every woman in the world (with the only partial exception of women in pro-choice countries), must live with that knowledge every minute of every day – must know that anything she thinks about or plans for more than a few months into the future of her own life can only be hypothetical if men who hate her choose to make her their prisoner, by way of her own body.
To be anti-choice is to take women out of their own lives in a fundamental way. It is longstanding principle and practice of the right wing that women exist as functionaries for men – they are important insofar as they are fulfilling the roles that have been appointed to them as wives, mothers, sexual servants, housekeepers, purity symbols, or what have you, but they may not choose their roles for themselves, and they may not choose roles outside their position of inferiority to those who dictate those roles. (Slight exceptions are made for women who use their public positions to keep other women down.) Women’s lives, under misogyny, are tools for men’s comfort, and women are what men decide they will be. The anti-choice position takes this perspective to a sickeningly literal extreme. Invariably, anti-choice literature and arguments are focused entirely on the fetus. Indeed the degree of fetus-worship on the religious right is unsettling, and often very creepy. (One Catholic group stole aborted fetuses from a hospital, baptized them, and buried them in a religious ceremony in explicit violation of the instructions of the women who had aborted them. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and his wife took a miscarried fetus home in a box, named it, and made their other children hold it. Anti-stem-cell-research advocates paraded their own children before Congressional committees dressed in T-shirts reading “Former Embryo”.) Invariably, there is no mention of actual women in anti-choice discussions of abortion. Women are simply not part of the issue of abortion, for the right wing. Abortion, for them, is only and entirely a question of something happening to a fetus – which they invest with full moral standing for virtually incoherent reasons almost always grounded on sectarian religious beliefs – with no question at all of what it means for the woman who is pregnant against her wishes, a woman of actual moral standing, with a full life well underway, plans and projects hanging in the balance, moral interests to be taken into account, and moral agency of her own that should vest her with control of that life and those plans and projects. She literally does not exist, in almost any right-wing discussion of abortion.
And Egan, with his airily articulate photo, makes this ludicrously plain. The photograph of his morally magical fetus proves that the fetus is indeed magical in one way: it exists outside any woman’s uterus. The strangely pristine and carefully-arranged fetus in this picture floats against a plain backdrop with no hint that it should be connected to, let alone that it lives inside, the body of a thinking, feeling, reproductively mature woman actively engaged in her own life, with thoughts and desires about how that life should go and whether or not she chooses any particular path for it. (There is a hint of umbilical cord and the fetal side of the placenta, but of course they don’t attach to . . . anything.) The fetus that speaks so eloquently to Egan has no visible connection to the woman who could actually speak, and articulate her own decisions about her own body, if she existed at all, which she does not in the picture Egan says tells us everything we need to know about abortion. And when Egan contemptuously dismisses the concept of “person” with scare quotes, because it would “cast sand” into his eyes to consider the difference between this fetus and the actual person whose body it is living inside, that person whom Egan declares has no power to choose whether anyone or anything can live inside her own body, he again sets real persons at nought, in favor of the fetus whose interests (so to speak) stand unopposed by those of the non-existing woman it lives within.
It takes some trick to remove women from pregnancy, but the Catholic church has that one down pat. In his 1,300-word paen to forced pregnancy, unembarassed by any actual thinking, he manages never once, in any context, to use the word “woman”. He does, of course, work in “mother” – 10 times. Women, for Egan, do not exist – only mothers do. A pregnant woman is a mother – there is no distinction for Egan. She is certainly not a woman who faces a choice whether she wants to be a mother, or whether she will or can become a mother. And women who are not mothers, apparently, don’t exist at all – they simply live their lives knowing that nothing they choose or want can stand against their eventually becoming a “mother”, when Egan has decided that is what they are, whether or not they want to. Remarkably, fetuses do not exist for Egan, either: not a single use of that word. Every reference to the fetus employs the phrase “human being” (it appears alone 9 times; “innocent human being” 16 times). Egan has already embraced ignorance of the difference between “human being” and “moral person”, so perhaps he thinks he is saying something when he says that, but notice that “human being” is never used in reference to a woman (pregnant or otherwise). Only fetuses are human; only mothers are women, and women are only mothers; women are not human. That’s all you need to know about abortion.
Unless, of course, you take women seriously – seriously enough at least to notice that they exist, but more importantly seriously enough to acknowledge they are moral agents and have interests and values that demand respect in their own right. If you think women matter, and that women are part of the question of abortion, and if you are even passingly aware that women care about their own lives and the direction and contents of those lives, you might bother to put women into the equation, at the very least.
Or you could be a smarmy, anti-intellectual, contemptuously misogynist asshole. There’s plenty of company for you there.
[NB: Cross-posted a Sufficient Scruples, my bioethics blog.]
Thank you!
I agree with you to a certain point, and your analysis of Egan seems spot on. But the rank and file anti-abortion folks aren’t in this category. They simply believe life begins at conception, therefore a one-celled zygote = human being. The two greater examples of cognitive dissonance are:
1) If abortion = murder then how come all the anti-abortion folks aren’t out killing doctors and bombing clinics? If you think millions of babies are being murdered shouldn’t you be doing something other than voting for the same feckless conservatives who give you nothing but excuses on why they haven’t actually pushed their ‘human life’ amendment in the last 20 years? If your going to use language like ‘holocaust’ shouldn’t you get off your self-satisfied asses and actually take some kind of meaningful action?
2) No matter how much you hate sex, wouldn’t it be better if those who had sex used birth control so they would have the unwanted pregnancy? Unless of course you don’t really care that much about the embryos and you just think this is the proper way to “teach women some responsibility” by making sure sex is as risky and as dangerous as possible.
I noticed you didn’t have the moral backbone to post the picture…?
In so doing {or not doing] you managed to dodge the question entirely. How convenient.
The position you hold is nothing but pure cowardice and hatred disguised as enlightenment.
More Heartwarming Misogyny From the Right Wing…
Bookmarked your post over at Blog Bookmarker.com!…
Shorter Cardinal Egan: I know what I saw, don’t confuse me with facts.
(By the way, is there any emotional manipulation in the fact that the fetus in the picture appears to be over 1.5 times life size?)
Oh, and Scaliger? The picture is at the link, doofus. Anyone can see it.
…invariably men, may declare to women in what circumstances they may make their own choices and follow their own paths in life, and in what circumstances those paths will be dictated to them against their wills
The anti-choicers would claim that the woman made the choice when she “chose” to get pregnant, or at least chose to roll the dice. (Rape victims, etc. excluded).
As much as I hate to admit it, this argument is not totally preposterous, assuming it is applied logically (again, no rape victims, pregnancies that risk the health of the mother, etc.). Basically, it’s an adaptation of “you do the crime, you do the time.”
The real issue is that to the hardcore conservatives, that’s not a somewhat muddled extrapolation; it’s literal. As long as hardcore conservatives see sex as tantamount to “a crime” they will continue to preach that the only responsible and moral stance is to support “doing the time.”
Their logic, though absurd you to and I, is quite linear with their overall morals and worldview. As long as that’s what’s running the show, the difference between a fetus and a human are academic, as the fetus/person is, first, the manifestation of the “time” that needs to be done. Dwelling on the science of fetus vs. person is conflating symptom and disease.
Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?
That’s easy. 99% percent of the baseball community, who still feels it is productive to bunt in more than 2% of circumstances and that an offensive line of .300/.330/.400 makes a productive offensive player. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
As long as hardcore conservatives see sex as tantamount to “a crime” they will continue to preach that the only responsible and moral stance is to support “doing the time.”
Well, exactly. And, you’re right that certain conclusions follow from that, but you can always derive some sort of conclusion from false premises. The problem – aside from the violence they do to women and their lives and freedom – is that their premises are simply nutty.
Of course, in the end, it’s a question of values whether you have insane and perverse ideas about sex or not, but it’s more than mere personal preference whether you get to impose your phobias on everyone else. And there’s something deeply wrong with the hostile and fearful view of sex that drives the right wing. It’s not a neutral choice to adopt that point of view, and it’s not something we can remain neutral on when they advance it as a basis for mandatory policies.
Congratulations, by the way, on being the first person in history to turn an abortion thread into a discussion of baseball!
Basically, it’s an adaptation of “you do the crime, you do the time.”
I usually describe it as “you play, you pay.” But the irony here is that for all their hand-wringing about how a baby is a blessing, a wonderful thing, etc., that doesn’t stop them from simultaneously describing it as the “consequences” of your “sinful” actions. It’s yet another bit of cognitive dissonance that they simply can’t see.
The only problem that I have with KTK’s anti-abortion posts is that it puts so much of the blame on men; not that I think men aren’t to blame, but the fact is that women are statistically no less likely to be anti-abortion (at least politically) than men are. To imply, as this logic does, that these women are somehow manipulated into this position by misogynistic men is in itself a wee bit misogynistic, in my opinion. It dismissively waves away the possibility that these women — and there are a LOT of them — came about their anti-abortion position of their own volition and for their own reasons.
who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture…”
Before Roe vs. Wade, what exceptions, if any, were given? Could rape victims still get an abortion? What about a woman whose life was in danger? Did her ob/gyn have the power to make that decision, or did she have to get approval from someone else? And what kind of odds did the woman have to have before the pregnancy could be deemed too dangerous?
I am fortunate to have two beautiful, wonderful children. Both were born by c-section. After the second child, I had to have surgery to repair my damaged abdominal muscles. My doctor warned me that I would not be able to have more children because my body would not be able to endure being stretched out again. (I am quite small, and both of my kids were average size.) I have made sure that pregnancy is not possible, but what if abortion were made illegal and I somehow still got pregnant again? Am I supposed to just risk it for the sake of the fetus, taking the chance that I could die and leave my kids without a mother?
Who would decide? With my first baby, my insurance (Aetna) refused to cover the cost of the c-section, claiming that I should have had a natural birth even though I had a proportionately large baby stuck in the breech position. So it was some paper-pusher’s opinion vs my licensed and experienced doctor’s opinion. If Row vs Wade were overturned, who would determine which women could have an abortion and which women could not?
(As far as I know, the insurance company never reimbursed my doctor. They at least did cave in on their initial refusal to pay for the anesthesia for the c-section; at first I was told that the anesthesia was “medically unnecessary.”)
Elaine:
Excellent questions
Before Roe vs. Wade, what exceptions, if any, were given?
That’s complicated. First, there was a slow movement toward easing abortion laws in the more liberal states prior to Roe, so it was possible for some women to choose a legal abortion under their own autonomy.
In states where it was more restricted, or banned, however, hospitals had “pathology committees” that would meet to decide whether each particular case met their criteria for “medical necessity”, and to consider disciplinary action against doctors who performed emergency abortions that the committee then later determined were not necessary. The woman’s doctor would first have to apply to that committee for permission. So women with a “real” health need for an abortion could be treated, but what qualified as an acceptable need depended, first on how her doctor felt, and second on whether the hospital committee would agree. Patients shopped around for compliant doctors and hospitals, but there was severe pressure not to grant permission in most places, and in more conservative areas it could be almost impossible to find anyone to agree to perform an abortion, sometimes even under emergency circumstances.
(Note also that some influential figures, particularly the Catholic church, held that even in a life-and-death emergency you could not perform an abortion to save the woman’s life, but must put the life of the fetus first and let the woman take her chances. That doctrine was eased – slightly – after Vatican II.)
Could rape victims still get an abortion?
No. Not in any of the states that banned them.
[Update: Let me be clearer: Some states banned abortion entirely and did not make such exceptions. Some states restricted abortions to "medical necessity", as described above, and in those states some did, but many did not, allow pregnancy from rape or incest as a possible ground for approval. Some states allowed women to make their own decisions about abortion, and that number was growing slowly by the time of the Roe v. Wade decision.]
What about a woman whose life was in danger? Did her ob/gyn have the power to make that decision, or did she have to get approval from someone else?
As above, it had to be approved by the hospital’s “pathology committee” – a group of OB doctors that reviewed each abortion case beforehand (or, in emergency cases, after the fact) and decided when the circumstances warranted abortion.
And what kind of odds did the woman have to have before the pregnancy could be deemed too dangerous?
It was up to the judgment of the committee. I don’t think most of them used a concept of numerical odds of death – they simply decided if the pregnancy was “too dangerous”, or was unlikely to result in a live birth anyway. (I suspect most of them just asked themselves “Would I have recommended an abortion for this woman if she were my patient?” and acted accordingly, but I have no evidence how they actually proceeded. It’s a great question.)
what if abortion were made illegal and I somehow still got pregnant again? Am I supposed to just risk it for the sake of the fetus, taking the chance that I could die and leave my kids without a mother?
According to the people who are working to take that decison away from you: Yes.
Who would decide? . . . If Ro[e] vs Wade were overturned, who would determine which women could have an abortion and which women could not?
It’s likely that most states would return to some form of the committee process that used to exist. The Supreme Court has so far insisted that restrictions on abortion must contain an exception procedure for cases in which the woman’s life is in danger (but not necessarily “only” her health, or for other reasons), so there would be justification for abortion in cases of medical necessity. However, some states keep trying to pass laws with no such exception: Louisiana has done so, and bills to that effect have been offered in Ohio, South Dakota, and other states (either as an attempt to encourage the Court to gut Roe v. Wade or as so-called “trigger” laws that would go into effect if Roe v. Wade were later overturned). If a conservative Court were to go so far as to authorize abortion bans with no exceptions whatsoever, your only alternative would be to die.
“Note also that some influential figures, particularly the Catholic church, held that even in a life-and-death emergency you could not perform an abortion to save the woman’s life, but must put the life of the fetus first and let the woman take her chances. That doctrine was eased – slightly – after Vatican II….”
Catholic Church doctrine cannot change (or “ease”). The Church has always taught that abortion is intrinsically evil, and that an evil must never be performed in order too reach a good effect. However, every effort must be made to save the life of both the woman and the unborn child.
Hmmm, lets take your pro-abortion argument and apply it to euthanasia:
Everything any woman does, wants, or plans for can be derailed in a moment by an elderly parent becoming infirm and unable to take care of themselves. A condition that can be dealt with easily, safely, and cheaply by means that men choose to criminalize to prevent women from making their own choices about having to take care of them – namely euthanasia on demand. There is nothing in any woman’s life that can be depended on or confidently planned for, because everything any women chooses can be disrupted or swept away, not by having elderly parents, but by being forced to take care of them and prohibited by law, from acting on her own choices on that matter by having them killed. And every woman who lives in a misogynist society, which is to say every woman in the world (with the only partial exception of women in pro-choice countries), must live with that knowledge every minute of every day – must know that anything she thinks about or plans for more than a few months into the future of her own life can only be hypothetical if men who hate her choose to make her their prisoner, by way of her own parents.
bob,
It looks like you’re one of those folks who can’t tell the difference between a person and a clump of cells. But hey, that doesn’t even matter! You’re comment is foolish and meaningless anyway.
(1) Elderly parents can’t exactly come as a surprise. Heck, most of us knew about our parents ever since we could remember!
(2) Last I heard, it wasn’t common for parents, elderly or otherwise, to take up residence in one’s abdomen. While it is slightly more common for them to use a child’s blood supply, that’s still pretty rare.
(3) There doesn’t seem to be any large political lobby that wants to restrict which options a child of elderly parents can legally use to care for those parents. In fact, we have this thing called “Social Security”, which is a form of nation-wide insurance specifically designed to partially cover the economic burden that elderly parents put on their children.
(4) I don’t think there are any known cases of fetuses expressing any opinions about the financial burdens they place on their parents. On the other hand, there are these neat things called “living wills”, which allow an infirm elderly parent to participate in the decision of what to do with them when they become a burden. Now, even though any decision by the parent to choose euthenasia must be quite explicit, there are lots of places that do restrict the parents’ choices about how to affect their children.
So, um… yeah, KTK’s argument is so amazingly close to how euthenasia works.
You lose. Please play again, but bring a brain next time.
“bob,
It looks like you’re one of those folks who can’t tell the difference between a person and a clump of cells. But hey, that doesn’t even matter! You’re comment is foolish and meaningless anyway.”
Its not “above my pay scale” to tell that picture is not a “clump of cells”.
“(1) Elderly parents can’t exactly come as a surprise. Heck, most of us knew about our parents ever since we could remember!”
Last I checked, when you have sexual relations there is almost always the possibility of impregnation (unless one or the other is sterile).
“(2) Last I heard, it wasn’t common for parents, elderly or otherwise, to take up residence in one’s abdomen. While it is slightly more common for them to use a child’s blood supply, that’s still pretty rare.”
You miss the point. Whether the unborn child resides in womb, or the elderly parent has to move into the daughter’s house, either way it is an inconvenience to her and they must be eliminated.
“(3) There doesn’t seem to be any large political lobby that wants to restrict which options a child of elderly parents can legally use to care for those parents. In fact, we have this thing called “Social Security”, which is a form of nation-wide insurance specifically designed to partially cover the economic burden that elderly parents put on their children.”
Exactly, euthanasia is now a legal option due to judicial activism and a large political lobby has not formed yet to try and restrict its use. As you state, SS only partially covers the economic burden and this situation has only become worse due to the aging of baby boomers. Don’t think it can happen? Ask someone 50 years ago if they would believe we could murder almost 50 million unborn children.
“(4) I don’t think there are any known cases of fetuses expressing any opinions about the financial burdens they place on their parents…”
That is why abortion is so evil, it is the murder of innocent children THAT ARE UNABLE TO DEFEND THEMSELVES.
“On the other hand, there are these neat things called “living wills”, which allow an infirm elderly parent to participate in the decision of what to do with them when they become a burden. Now, even though any decision by the parent to choose euthenasia must be quite explicit, there are lots of places that do restrict the parents’ choices about how to affect their children.”
Euthanasia has now been legalized and the decision of the family caretaker can now trump any living wills, if they even exist. Terry Shiavo anyone?
(1) They’ve invented these neat things called condoms. And “The Pill”. And several others. What century are you living?
(2) So, another neat invention are these things called “nursing homing”. Actually, they kinda suck, but not as much as turning one’s own home into a hospice. As to missing the point, living in somebody’s house is not exactly similar to living in their body.
(3) Ask somebody 50 years ago if they though those uppity blacks would be allowed to share our drinking fountains… No, using the insanity of the past doesn’t even pass the milk test. By the way, exactly how many unwanted euthenizations have their been?
(4) Terry Shiavo anyone? HAHAHAHAHA!! Let’s see, she had no living will, the meager evidence showed that she would have supported the euthanization, the drooling husk of her body wasn’t a person anyway, and the vindictive family hated her husband and had a financial incentive to oppose everything he did. Oh, tell another one!
Kevin – Thank you for the very informative reply. It sent cold shivers down my spine. Being from Tennessee, I would bet that my state would be one of the ones that would outlaw all abortions. Of course, if that were the case and I got pregnant, I would just fly to Europe or somewhere to get an abortion. Many women don’t have that option. Making abortions illegal only makes it so that poor women are stuck either having the baby or going to some back-alley abortionist. Of course, if the women don’t have health insurance and have complications from the pregnancy, they are just s— out of luck.
Exceptions for the health of the woman are so subjective. Any time a woman is pregnant, her life is at risk. I have two friends who ended up pretty close to death as a result of pregnancy and delivery – one friend had a close call right before the baby was born and then ended up in ICU a week later from an entirely different complication. I am terrified by the notion of a person like me (who is under greater risk) being told to go through with a pregnancy just because the hospital staff is feeling pressured to reduce the number of approved abortions.
(1) They’ve invented these neat things called condoms. And “The Pill”. And several others. What century are you living?
If they are so effective, why is so many unwanted pregancies?
(2) So, another neat invention are these things called “nursing homing”. Actually, they kinda suck, but not as much as turning one’s own home into a hospice. As to missing the point, living in somebody’s house is not exactly similar to living in their body.
Remember it may be you stuck in a nursing home someday because your children adopted your attitude. Yes, a pregnancy is over in a mere 9 months, an infirm parent living in your home is indefinite.
(3) Ask somebody 50 years ago if they though those uppity blacks would be allowed to share our drinking fountains… No, using the insanity of the past doesn’t even pass the milk test. By the way, exactly how many unwanted euthenizations have their been?
Comparing the past struggle for black civil rights to abortion is rather ironic considering abortion takes away the right to life of an unborn child. Not to mention this would be just as offensive to blacks as comparing their past struggle to homosexuals demanding the right to “marry”.
(4) Terry Shiavo anyone? HAHAHAHAHA!! Let’s see, she had no living will, the meager evidence showed that she would have supported the euthanization, the drooling husk of her body wasn’t a person anyway, and the vindictive family hated her husband and had a financial incentive to oppose everything he did. Oh, tell another one!
Awful. The meager evidence? Their was no evidence except for the word of a man who fathered another child while still married, and yet still wanted to claim guardianship to her. A man so full of spite he was willing to starve his devout Catholic wife to death rather than easily relinqish care to her parents. Just in RoevWade, yet again we have a judge determining the right to life.
bob -
I will say only that I am not at all impressed with the vacuous, ignorant, uninformed non-arguments of someone who knows so little about the topic he imagines he is addressing that he can’t even be bothered to spell the person’s name – that is, Terri Schiavo – correctly.
If anyone wants to know my own thoughts about that whole business, go to this link. Scan down past the first few posts there, which merely contain references to earlier ones.
Right. Enough feeding the troll.
Fortunately, KTK already has an excellent explanation of the important matters: http://sufficientscruples.com/blog/?page_id=42
Here is a thought experiment for those on the fence about when personhood begins.
You’re in a fertility clinic on the eighth floor and you hear the fire alarm ringing. You’re in a lab where there is refrigerator that you know holds forty recently fertilized human ovum. There is also the four-year-old daughter of one of the lab technicians visiting her dad on a “bring your daughter work” field trip.
The flames are rapidly working their way down the corridor. The young girl is crying and asking you to help her. You know that you can carry the refrigerator or you can carry the girl but not both and still make it to safety.
Do you pick up the girl or do you pick up the refrigerator? Forty versus one, which do you choose?
I am not actually looking for anyone’s answer here, but this was the question that sealed my moral outlook on the question.
“Do you pick up the girl or do you pick up the refrigerator? Forty versus one, which do you choose?”
Picking the girl does not negate the right to life of the fertilized ovum, anymore than picking the girl over an elderly woman weighing only a little more negates her “personhood”. All efforts should be made to save every life.
Richard,
Videos like this help to seal my moral outlook:
http://www.durarealidad.com/
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