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From: beth@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Beth Christy)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Planned Parenthood, Jurisdiction over Morality
Message-ID: <1152@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Sep-85 11:39:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.1152
Posted: Mon Sep 30 11:39:08 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Oct-85 07:25:23 EDT
References: <1768@pyuxd.UUCP>, <-145727658@sysvis>
Organization: U. Chicago - Computation Center
Lines: 73

[What's all this fuss about murals?  Murals are lovely, murals are ...
 What?  Ohhhh, that's very different.  Never mind.]

From: george@sysvis, Message-ID: <-145727658@sysvis>:
>[Story about a girl who had a severe reaction to "Pill"s obtained from a
>PP Center]
>I have no objection to PP centers, in the form of family
>doctors, who are CAPABLE of being responsible for this sort of thing. Morali-
>ty is not the question, life is the question.  I could include some other
>scenarios about abortion clinics, but the main issue is that life is not
>handled with idealistic dogmas or committee decisions.  All scenarios can
>only be handled by responsible people, making their own decisions.

My uncle went to hospital to have a moderately serious test run on his
kidneys.  They strung up an IV with some kind of dye and watched as the
dye circulated thru his kidneys.  All was well until the got to the third
bottle of dye.  Turns out it was The Wrong Stuff - his kidneys shut down,
he went into a coma and d*mn-near died.  After several weeks on the
critical list, he had a kidney transplant.  He recovered from the "routine
test" 10-12 months later.  Does this example, and the many others like it,
mean we shouldn't go to hospitals to have our medical tests done?

You can quote bad examples all day...and you won't get anywhere.  What
determines the worth of an institution/organization/program is the *ratio*
of positive experiences to negative ones.  How many teenage, unwed
pregnancies have the PP clinics prevented?  How many abortions has the
easily-accessable birth control prevented?  Yes, you should be aware of
what might go wrong.  Yes, you should do everything you can to prevent
problems.  But when problems arise, don't compound the tragedy by throwing
away an entire, mostly beneficial program.  The last sentence quoted above
is true - responsible people making their own decisions is where it's at.
But we have to give the responsible people options to decide between.
That's what the PP clinics are for.

>The very minute that some self-righteous bigot in the guise of morals,
>government, religion, good-of-the-people, ideal-answer, etc. steps in
>we immediately have an improper imposition on the lives of PEOPLE.  People
>ARE self-responsible in this world (except for those that are verifiably
>sick) and ARE capable of making the correct decisions within their own
>contexts.  Which one of you self-righteous people is going to solve other
>people's lives for them?

Delightful...when we're talking about individual decisions.  But there are
decisions that people are forced to make that are *not* "within their own
contexts".  One example would be national defense (specifically "Star
Wars") issues.  But Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics are examples
too.  If we want to let responsible people make their own decisions about
parenting, they have to have something to decide between.  Clearly they
could decide between having sex and not having sex.  But those aren't the
only options.  The decision that people in government have to make that
isn't "within their own context" is:  Do we arbitrarily decide that those
are the only two choices we're going to give to teenagers (and others)
regarding parenting?  Once the question is raised, it's there and it will
be decided - by neglect, if nothing else.  It doesn't go away, and it
isn't within anybody's individual context.

>Moral
>decisions are not the responsibility of either the government or any church,
>they are the responsibility of those involved in the situation.  Neither
>of you is being posted in the papers as the world's ne-plus-ultra example
>of personal living morality, so forget trying to interfere with others.

As illustrated above, situations do exist which extend beyond any one
individual (or small group of individuals).  And they're often not
issues of interference (although they occasionally are); rather,
they're issues of whether or not to offer choices.
-- 

--JB        (Beth Christy, U. of Chicago, ..!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!beth)

"What if the after-effect of the terrible bomb is unusual beyond belief?
 Wouldn't you rather the whole population had listened to somebody like
    the old Indian chief?"   (The Roches)


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