Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.abortion Subject: Re: Laura's system, and back to abortion Message-ID: <3716@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Mon, 2-Apr-84 08:13:04 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.3716 Posted: Mon Apr 2 08:13:04 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 2-Apr-84 08:13:04 EST References: <3682@utcsrgv.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 75 Peter presents 2 arguments. The first is that not allowing abortions infringes on a woman's freedom. The question is, where is a woman's right to freedom derived from? Is it an arbitrary decision, based on the whims of certain people who would like to be free (and thus no more reasonable than the whims of certain people who would like to set up a dictatorship) or is the `right to freedom' firmly based in reality, and thus is *real* regardless of the desires of certain people who do not want freedom for others (or themselves)? If it is an arbitrary and irrational decision then we are back to `whoever has the biggest stick wins'. Morality is therefore an opponent of humanity and not needed by him -- and it is opposed to his desire to impose his will on other people. If this is all that morality is then morality is only a measure of who has the power in a given society, nothing more. Clearly (or at least I hope I have been clear) I do not believe this. I believe that one's right to freedom is a basic truth. Man must choose to live. We therefore are free whether we wish it that way or not -- it is part of the given of existence. The right to be free is the right to make decisions which have a direct outcome on one's own life. The right to be free is the right to choose which values one will actualise. But the right to freedom is predicated on life. Rock are not free. Their existence is purely `given' -- there are no decisions for a rock. Plants are hardly more free. Animals are much more free and human beings are at the pintacle of the whole structure. What does this mean for the fetus? That, if it is a humn being, it should have the same right to freedom as any other human being. Killing a human being takes away all his freedom whatsoever. Unless the mother's life is threatened, a pregnancy does not have that total an effect on her freedom. (It is also useful to remember that pregnancy does not strike one down in the prime of health like cancer. Except in the case of rape it is clear that at some point the woman exercised her freedom to choose to persue an act which is known to produce fetuses with some statistical regularity.) If rights are irrational whims then there is no point in defending them save that you might have a whim to enforce them. If rights are *not* then to do anything against them is to work against one's own rights, since the rights should be uniform over a common humanity. Thus to kill a fetus is to undermine the very underpinnings of human freedom (if the fetus is human) by decreeing that certain people have the right to decide that other people should die for no crime other than their very existence. Existence is not a crime. Any ethics that proposes this should be abandoned as being anti-life, and thus anti-value, since values are predicated on life. (why do we choose to value something? because it furthers or maintains one's life. If we were all demonstrably immortal then teh action of shooting holes in a person would not be considered an evil -- it is because of its effect on human life that it is deemed to be evil). The other statement is that banning abortions will cause people not to look for other solutions. I fail to see the logic in this. Indeed, I belive that the converse is true -- if you legalise abortion on demand then you will immediately cause the pro-abortioners to believe that the problem has been solved. It may be that as long as you keep anti-abortion laws on the statutes there will be anti-abortioners who will consider the problem solved, but since they are by and large arguing from the position that human life takes precidence over human convenience it seems more reasonable to assume that they can look at poverty, disease, and people throwing themselves down stairs as evils against human life. I do not see how the pro-abortioners are necessarily going to see the same things, since they may simply find that it is as or more inconvenient to do anything about these problems as it would be to spend 9 months pregnant. Clearly, certain pro-abortioners will not see it this way but I see no logical necessity in this. -- Laura Creighton utzoo!laura "Capitalism is a lot of fun. If you aren't having fun, then you're not doing it right." -- toad terrific