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From: marty1@houem.UUCP
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Re: What makes XXXX so Valuable?
Message-ID: <635@houem.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 1-Oct-86 19:06:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: houem.635
Posted: Wed Oct  1 19:06:03 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Oct-86 09:05:39 EDT
References: <963@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <houem.614>, <1093@ogcvax.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 36

In <1093@ogcvax.UUCP>, pase@ogcvax.UUCP (Douglas M. Pase) quotes me as
saying

>>...  But a fetus is not useful, and sacrificing tangible values to
>>preserve a fetus is not conducive to success.

By the way, his maunderings along the lines of

>Therefore if a majority (after all this is a democracy) agrees that the
>citizens of a certain unfriendly nation are not useful to us but their real
>estate is, we have a certain moral right - nay, obligation - to exterminate
>them and purloin their property.

are of course accurate descriptions of how some wars really start. 
Then he says

>As for fetuses being useless?  Well, all the greatest people in this world
>(at least that I know of) were all fetuses at one time or another.  That seems
>to me to suggest that perhaps a fetus is not quite as useless as was previously
>suggested.

which is supposed to carry the implication that if nobody thought
fetuses were useful, nobody would ever be born.

I submit that most people decide to have children because they would
_like_ to have children, not because they _need_ children.  I would say
that goes for me and my wife and why we had our three children. 
Fetuses, and even children, are not expected to be useful.  

Of course, that supports the idea that the parents, and especially the
mother, should decide whether a fetus should become a child.  The state
has no great interest in the matter.

M. B. Brilliant					Marty
AT&T-BL HO 3D-520	(201)-949-1858
Holmdel, NJ 07733	ihnp4!houem!marty1