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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: freedom/responsibility
Message-ID: <1153@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 4-Jul-85 01:33:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.1153
Posted: Thu Jul  4 01:33:08 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Jul-85 07:35:17 EDT
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Organization: Whatever we're calling ourselves this week
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>>>Every freedom carries responsibility with it.  If you want the freedom,
>>>you had best be ready for the responsibility.
>>>				Jean Marie Diaz

>>I've heard this unsupported assertion all over the place, and I have
>>no idea why people keep on saying it.  Please tell me:
>>
>>1)  What is your evidence that every freedom possesses a corresponding
>>responsibility?

>   Spare me.  What do you want, a professional study?  I won't have the
>   tools for another 4 years or so.

Spare *me*.  Barring the results of that objective study, do we just take
certain people's arbitary word for what responsibilities they associate
with given freedoms.

>>2) Why should a freedom be so linked?
 
>   Because otherwise, *my* freedoms collide with the equally valid
>   freedoms of *others*.  It's the old "my freedom to swing my fist
>   ends where your nose begins" example.  Perhaps we should change 
>   it to say "Every freedom carries with it the responsibility not 
>   to encroach on the freedoms of others."  Can you agree with that?
>   Comments, anyone?
  
Yeah, that seems to go along with what I've been saying in twenty other
newsgroups, that one person's rights end where another person's rights begin.
(I never claimed it was original.)  But what you've got me wondering is what
that statement has to do with the issue at hand.  What was being talked about
was the notion that having sex means responsibilities to the fetus that might
be created as a result.  Which is equivalent to saying "Abortion is wrong
because abortion is wrong."  Not a very substantive argument.  Since that
fetus is in fact not a living organism in that it cannot sustain itself
outside of the womb, the obligation or responsibility would seem to exist
only because you say so.

It never ceases to amaze me.  The real center of the abortion controversy is
"Are the fetuses living things, the termination of which would be 'murder'?"
Having lost that central issue, the only real basis for claiming the
so-called wrongness of abortion, anti-abortionists bring up the other
ridiculous non-issues of "responsibility" (in their eyes), "convenience"
(whihc makes it wrong in their eyes), and Samuelson's "Look what they're
doing to the 'dead babies'?", as if that central issue's resolution was
irrelevant or as if the reverse of the resolution IN THEIR FAVOR was a given!
-- 
Like a vermin (HEY!), shot for the very first time...
			Rich Rosen   ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr