Well, this is a new low. I ran across this blog post from a few months back, discussing the Imus situation:
Anytime a person is negatively labeled because of gender or race, this affronts our shared human dignity. And we should be especially careful here, for this has not always been such an obvious evil. It took the civil rights and women's rights movements to raise our awareness, and the work is not yet finished.
Okay, sounds reasonable. So far. However, he continues:
There is another assault on human dignity at work in our midst, only this one based on geography. A whole class of persons has only provisional rights, all because of where they live.
Who is this class of people? The unborn.
Yes, the hypocrisy is astounding. While he argues that "the work is not finished" regarding respect for our shared human dignity, he's managed to strip pregnant women of any dignity at all--reducing them to simply an address. Not even a "vessel" or other flowery language like some other abortion foes--just a generic shelter.
Man, between this and Behe, my irony meter is smoking this week...
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Adding humanity to a group of people not previously considered to have it does not subtract humanity from any other group.
Do you really believe that thinking of a 24-week fetus as a person detracts from his mother's humanity?
It's not a zero sum game.
1). Where do you get that he's only referring to a 24-week fetus? His other writings make it clear that he's talking about even prior to implantation.
2). I'm not saying it's an exchange. But turning a woman into just an incubator--her pregnancy "just geography"--is, indeed, dehumanizing, and it appears he can't see the contradiction in his own views in that area.
During pregnancy, there are often occasions when the interests of the mother and those of the embryo are not concordant, and on those occasions it most definitely is a "zero sum" game. It is ingenuous to pretend that it is not.
Deciding, for example, that the moral value of a zygote is equivalent to that of the mother is making the judgement that such attributes as a working brain, awareness, memory, and the capacity to suffer add no additional value or moral significance to the bare biological facts of human DNA and metabolic activity. I think this does indeed detract from the meaning of humanity in a quite profound way.
At last, an "honest" theoconservative who is willing to say what they all seem to believe: that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant. Most of the rest of the Neanderthals hide behind euphemisms.
In Science (Vol 316, 18 May 2007, "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science") the authors note that debates about the moral issues about the use of living tissue, including stem cells, are sometimes framed in terms of whether tissues have immaterial souls.
The writer has got to be joking. If a stem cell has a right to life (and a right to counsel?) then a simple pinprick that draws a tiny bead of blood is mass murder (not to mention cheating the cells' lawyers out of their rightful winnings).
And so would be an emission of sperm: even if one (or two?) sperm made it to the egg, there would be a hundred million murders of the ones that didn't.
So then bleeding is murder, puritanical sex is murder?
Nah. These people are kidding themselves. We shouldn't let them kid us.
Do you really believe that thinking of a 24-week fetus as a person detracts from his mother's humanity?
If one wishes to argue that the mother's rights are to be justifiably compromised, well then I certainly do. Pro-lifers use nonsensical rhetoric, such as referring to a woman's body as mere "geography", so that they can justify their own unjust actions, which always result in compromising the rights of an already "living" human being -- the mother. After all, the mother has been alive long enough to experience life in all its glory, and also, in all its pain. An honest assessment of the situation would never allow for "life in the womb" to be flippantly compared to "real life", with all its difficulties. So, yes I do think that using such rhetorical absurdities is dehumanizing to the mother.
Kevin
In Texas, lethal force is authorized after dark to prevent theft.
Sec. 9.42. Deadly Force to Protect Property.
"A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property...to prevent the other's imminent commission of...theft during the nighttime...and...he reasonably believes that...the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means, or...the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury."
http://www.bakers-legal-pages.com/fastlaws/pc2004/00000049.htm
As I read that, if a vampire was going to steal your blood, you would be justified to use deadly force (during the nightime) to prevent it.
How else can a woman to prevent theft of glucose and other nutrients from her body?