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From: mark@uf-csg.UUCP (mark fishman [fac])
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Beginning of Personhood
Message-ID: <207@uf-csg.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Oct-84 06:34:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: uf-csg.207
Posted: Sun Oct  7 06:34:01 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Oct-84 05:55:28 EDT
References: <345@hou2b.UUCP>, <2716@ucbcad.UUCP>
Organization: Univ of Fla, Computer and Information Science
Lines: 25

<>
>...the only way is to take a poll.

The question of what constitutes a person is not empirical, but definitional.
Hence your poll can manage relevantly to elicit only the tautologous
observation that a "person" is that in which the "right to life" inheres.
Those who want to bestow that right on insentient fetuses will define them as
"people."  Others won't.  It isn't a scientific question.
     It is, however, worth pointing out that Occam's razor mandates the
simplest explanation for the constellation of beliefs typically exhibited by
so-called "right-to-lifers."  If that simplest explanation were, in fact, that
these people were pre-eminently concerned with the preservation of life, then
they would be protesting also the increasing propensity in the world to starve
and to kill human beings who've already been born.  This clearly isn't the
case, since most "right-to-lifers" enthusiastically endorse a right-wing,
militaristic political stance, that steals from the poor and enshrines weapons
of destruction as a great good.
     A simpler explanation (that accounts for otherwise seemingly contradictory
beliefs amore economically, and thus satisfies Occam's razor) is that such
people want to control the minds, and especially the bodies, of other human
beings.  This is a scientifically more economical theory that accounts both for
right-wing ideology and for the desire to control the bodies of inadvertently
pregnant women.