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From: csdf@mit-vax.UUCP (Charles Forsythe)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: Who's Life Anyway?
Message-ID: <293@mit-vax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Jul-85 07:34:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-vax.293
Posted: Mon Jul  1 07:34:13 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Jul-85 03:12:34 EDT
References: <556@bgsuvax.UUCP> <283@vaxwaller.UUCP> <710@ihlpg.UUCP> <983@homxa.UUCP> <504@gitpyr.UUCP>
Reply-To: csdf@mit-vax.UUCP (Charles Forsythe)
Distribution: net.abortion
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 64
Summary: 

In article <504@gitpyr.UUCP> tynor@gitpyr.UUCP (Steve Tynor) writes:

>It seems to me that since the fetus of 1 minute and the child of one
>month differ only in the amount of time since conception.  

This is wrong. There's a lot of difference. Millions  of cells worth.
Months of developments worth. If I handed you a fetus of one minute, you
would wipe it off your hand with a tissue and say "Eww, gross! What's
your problem?" 

>They
>share the same genetic information, and are thus the same person. 

All the cells in your body carry them same genentic information. Are
they all versions of you? I hope you're not circumcised (sorry about the
personal nature, I'm making a point) because the doctor killed thousands
of you. If you declare genetic information sacred, then perhaps you
advocate that all who die should be cloned to preserve this information.
Only special chemical selectors differentiate your cells. Flesh and
blood do not a human make, it's very complex.

>What if the medical sciences
>advance to the point (and I'm sure it won't be long) where a pre-3month
>fetus can be kept alive and brought to term?  Do we still have the
>right to kill it, just because a law says we do?  (ah, you say, but
>if that's the case then the mother wouldn't have to bring it to
>term, she could off load to the artificial womb.

Right on! But we CAN'T (right now). So what are we to do? 100 years ago,
if a soldier was shot badly in the leg, they cut it off. Nowadays, they
can probably save that leg. It's too bad all those soldiers lost their
limbs, but what were they to do? Analagously, in the year 2000, they may
say,"Too bad all those women aborted their fetuses when now we can
artificially incubate them." It remains to be seen whether or not these
future people feel we were wrong.

>I ask you, how
>different is this from adoption? )

Very. The mother is not pregnant for 9 months. I've been told it's
neither easy or fun. Today's working woman can't afford to take the
time. (Then why did she risk getting pregnant? It's not always the
woman's fault! Consider rape!)

>The point is, it's dangerous to define such things as the beginning
>and end of life on the state of medical technology.  Technology
>changes, but should ethics have to change with it?

Society today is suffering a lot from changing technology and stagnant
ethics. The "I hate commies" attitude that brought on the cold war has
brought us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Nationalism (an old
ethic) should have been replaced by Global Understanding (a new ethic),
but it wasn't and hasn't and now we're in a big mess. The point is: A
one minute old FETUS must live off it's mother -- she controls any
rights it has. A one minute old BABY can live off a foster mother, it's
the state's responsibility (another can of worms.) Until the fetus can
be safely separated from it's mother, it is part of her body (whether or
not it has "cute little toes") and is beyond the law of the state.
-- 
Charles Forsythe
CSDF@MIT-VAX
"The Church of Fred has yet to come under attack.
    No one knows about it."
        -Rev. Wang Zeep