Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
I doubt anything insightful will come from it (remember your 3 jokes in one thing, which actually were, as I said, just 3 meaning one joke?), but hey, give it a try.
Yeah, you are right. Electric Companies want to provide electricity to me because I pay good money for them. So, yeah, lets apply choice to that.
Same with the other three. I have money, they want it. All very pro-choice. No one forces them to provide food for me, I just do something they like enough to give me food in return (pay money).
I propose then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it:
Every person has a right to life, so the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body, everyone would grant that. But surely, a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed, an abortion may not be performed.
It sounds plausible, but now let me ask you to imagine this:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist—a famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records, and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. Therefore, they have kidnapped you, and last night, the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.
The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months—by then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you."
Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years, or longer still?
What if the director of the hospital says, "Tough luck, I agree, but now you've got to stay in bed with the violinist plugged into you for the rest of your life, because remember this: All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons; granted, you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body, so you cannot ever be unplugged from him."
I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.
That is the point; is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation, even if it was done against your will?
What if you had taken precautions so as to not be plugged into the famous unconscious violinist? Would it be morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation then?
9 months of hospital bills would certainly cut deeply into the profits I'd get once I auctioned the Strad. Still, one did sell for 3.5 million and private deals have been said to be even higher.
For the same reason that opponents of Pro-Choice hold the woman responsible for the life of the fetus; because the fetus is plugged into her, and to remove the fetus would be kill it.
"Because remember this: All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons; granted, you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body, so you cannot ever be unplugged from him."
What of instances in which she is not at all responsible? More importantly, what does the relationship of one to the other have to do with whether or not the right to life of one is more stringent that the right of the other to control what shall happen in and to his or her body?
Sense you guys are going to treat abortion as a capitalist argument, ("my body")you need to go back to economics 101.
The relationship between parent and child is undertaken for the same reason and with the same value-value symbiosis as a business contract between a producer and a consumer. The violation of a contract after a single party has paid its dues is called fraud and is a variety of the initiation of force, rightly prohibited by law. Is it then not fraud to deprive a futuristically-certain human being of its life after it has already been created? Within conception is implicit a particular expectation from the child-to-be. While it may not always be fulfilled-just like a product one purchases may not necessarily turn out to be as practical and ameliorating of one's life as one might have envisioned-that does not nullify the exchange itself. There is also a "full refund" option-commonly known as adopting out the child-which should even be encouraged in cases where his remaining in his original homestead will subject him to the misery of parents who do not love him and his parents to the misery of living with a child they do not love.
What, one might ask, should occur if the contract were undertaken without express knowledge by all parties of the consequences involved or of the benefits they should expect from it? In a similar manner, a customer may purchase an unnecessary product out of sheer unthinking whim, but that does not nullify the consensual nature of the exchange already undertaken. If anything, such a mistake will serve to persuade the erring party to be more prudent in its further analyses. Reality punishes the man who misuses his rational faculty, as a further reinforcement for man's need to discover and apply reason. If a couple decides to engage in physical intercourse but does not wish to give birth to offspring, then artificial preventive measures are its reality-applicable solution.
Thus, in any situation of unwanted conception, the parents are to blame for negligence and are not liable for compensation as a result of their capricious defiance of the laws of reality and of the metaphysical properties of physical intercourse which-when unamended by technology-result in the development of a futuristically certain being of volitional consciousness. The only genuine victim is the innocent little human who is to be sacrificed to the irrational.
__________________ I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell. --Harry S Truman.
Your all failing because you keep citing extreme examples...most people who are having abortions ARE of age, were NOT raped and are NOT in danger of death during pregnancy...they just dont want a baby...
As the old dictum states, "extreme cases make for bad law".
I'd have to say rape. It doesn't really, that's why your analogy wasn't without merit, as allowing only rape victims to have an abortion, would make the "it's a life; it has rights" argument rediculous.
KMC Community Forums
Dec 25th, 2007 02:17 AM
