At 08:16 PM Sunday 8/31/2008, William T Goodall wrote:
On 1 Sep 2008, at 01:32, David Hobby wrote:
No, it's the honest terminology. Abortion kills children,
very young children who can't survive outside the womb, and
who wouldn't count as human at all except for their human DNA.
Now this happens to be the same term adopted by some religious
zealots, but that doesn't make it incorrect.
Here's an analogy: It's like using degrees Kelvin to measure
temperature, instead of Celsius. The melting point of water
is a pretty arbitrary place to put the zero of a temperature
scale, just as birth is an arbitrary place to start counting
a child's age. If we're going to talk about abortion, it's
only common sense to do it using a scale that starts at
conception (or the start of cell division).
So a terrorist breaks into a fertility clinic and steals a 1000 frozen
zygotes. Then they make a demand - release our compatriots from jail
or we'll kill a thousand American children!
Or as in the relatively recent (last season?) Law Order episode
where some of the frozen embryos had been put into storage by a
couple before she was deployed to Iraq in case something happened to
her there, and she was KIA and so her husband shot and killed the one
who had stolen them because that act of holding them hostage to make
some kind of protest point destroyed his chance of raising their children?
. . . ronn! :)
___
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
