Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site gatech.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!gatech!owens From: owens@gatech.UUCP (Gerald R. Owens) Newsgroups: net.abortion Subject: Re: alternatives... Message-ID: <6349@gatech.UUCP> Date: Fri, 20-Apr-84 08:51:26 EST Article-I.D.: gatech.6349 Posted: Fri Apr 20 08:51:26 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 21-Apr-84 07:28:00 EST References: <830@psuvm.UUCP> Organization: Georgia Tech School of ICS, Atlanta Lines: 89 *****************START of QUOTE************************* > >" human infanticide is too widespread historically and geographically > >to be explained away just as a pathology or the peculiarity of some > >aberrant culture." > > But please consider: if a practice is > >so widespread among so many forms of life which either were created > >by God or evolved over many millions of years, is it not possible > >that this practice might answer some real need? >0********************************** > Some further conclusions that can be concluded (:-) > The majority of societies in history believed in a god. Ergo, that > fulfilled a need, so we should too. > The majority of societies in history neither had representative > government nor a bill of rights. Ditto. > The majority of societies in history were run by kings. Ergo, we'd >better get one too. Your suggestions (:-) refer to means rather than needs: the need to relate to and explain the universe can be satisfied by religion (many kinds) or science. The need for social structure (common to all social animals) can be satisfied in many ways: humans do it with constitutional democracy, kingship, tribal councils, empire, and many other ways; animals have oligarchies, matriarchies, 'pecking order' etc. If they do not rise to the heights of constitutional democracy, they don't descend to the depths of empire & slavery either. I have never heard of a successful anarchy among humans or animals. The need I had in mind was that of correlating the number of offspring with available child-care resources. ***************END of QUOTE*************** Yet, in your article, you fail to show how the "means" of infanticide to answer the "need" is different from the suggestion of my "means" to accomplish those "needs". *******************START of QUOTE*************************** I had hoped to show that the *alternative* to abortion is very often neither happy adoption nor preventive birth control, but neglect, abandonment, or death for great numbers of infants and young children; and that that pattern is widespread and of long standing - not easily eradicated with a law and a lecture on ethics. Over 2000 years ago Aristotle advocated abortion as better than the common practice of infanticide; due to lack of medical technique it was never done. One of my quotes that you didn't repeat was "40 million abandoned children in the Western hemisphere". That is a here-and-now alternative to abortion; are you really sure it is better? *******************END of QUOTE********************* How about trying to love them??? How about developing the compassion to take care of them??? I note that you mention "Western Hemisphere". Why not be more precise about it, and say "south of the Rio Grande", where strictures on birth control methods, poverty, and the damnable Macho man mentality that makes the use of the rythmn method difficult to practice has contributed to the large population of abandoned children there? More precisely, why advocate a method that supposedly is adopted in emergency conditions, without the benefits of contraception, in order to preserve the species, as a policy for a land with a stablized population, that invented contraception, and whose main health problem is overweight? One does have the right to kill someone if that person is actively threatening your physical life, but if the person is killed apart from the active threat, then it potentially murder since the preconditions did not exist to make the act justifiable. Also, if one wishes to point out quotes not repeated, why didn't you answer my contention that this is just a "bandwagon" argument? (Everyone else is doing it, so why not us??) In another vein, let me ask: what IS the difference between a fetus and an infant, that makes infanticide so abhorrent that abortion is preferable, when the only difference apparent is that the first is younger than the second, and the first is unseen while the second is visible? Also, what in the argument presented prevents someone from advocating that those 40 million abandoned children be killed (er terminated), because society cannot support them?? How about the aged? The defective? One has opened a veritable can of worms when one says that "it is expedient that one man (or group or class) should die that the nation not perish." Survival on those terms may not be worth living. Gerald Owens Owens@gatech