I would like to, for a brief moment, talk logically about the act of abortion.
Do we mass exterminate billions of insects and vermin with vicious poisons? Do we kill millions of cows and chickens a year for food? Have hundreds of thousands of people not been killed in Darfur and the Congo? Have 64.000 people not died as a result of our actions in Iraq? Does the United States not kill hundreds of people a year under the premise of "capital punishment" even if any number of them are innocent?
Don't we kill a whole lot of things? But not the children. Oh hell no not the children! But, wait, wait, there are millions of starving children in this country and billions more across the globe. Aren't we, by not helping them, also killing them indirectly just as laws allowing abortion are allowing fetuses to be killed?
It's all semantics isn't it. We don't REALLY mind killing each other so long as we can justify or ignore it. So what are a few more.
Seriously, any one of the categories of people we kill/let die mentioned above are more pressing than abortion. These are conscious beings. There is a distinction, granted between human murder and animal murder. FDR once said that "there is nothing to fear but fear itself." He was right. It is the fear of certain death and the fear of having the power to kill that makes murder morally objectionable, not the actual killing. It's the difference between court ordered murder and getting shot in the head at random. The fear in lieu of immediate death.
Fear then begs the question: What is moral? Perhaps we should substitute moral with empathetic. We are not empathetic towards cattle because we are addicted to the slow death of fatty meats. Starving people starve because they refuse to help themselves in this nation of infinite opportunity. And the criminal did wrong and deserves to die. All these justifications are just ways to suppress our empathy for the person.
Again, when it comes to fetuses and animals, who are ambivalent of their impending death, we install our own empathy into their situation. That is, our own fear of death and fear of the power to kill puts us in their position. We feel sorry for them on some level. Obviously, this is not logical thought, it is emotional.
Logically, fetuses, as well as cattle and plants too I suppose, are not conscious of their impending deaths therefore do not have the heightened sense of fear that we automatically associate with death. They will continue to exist up until the point where they don't. Nothing more and nothing less.
So why are abortion rights increasingly eroding? Man feels guilty because of misplaced feelings of empathy. They give consciousness to something that doesn't have one.
Therefore, I say we have to correct this hypocrisy. Either we stop all "killing." We learn to coexist, stop eating meat, and feed the poor or we leave abortion well enough alone because really in the grand scheme it is one of the smallest "human rights" issues facing this world today. Or we can learn to identify the difference between killing something with a consciousness and fear with something that clearly doesn't like fetuses and cattle and then stop killing those who are conscious.
There is something we can do though. The US government could throw off the binds of sexual Puritanism and provide comprehensive sex education to all children so that the need for abortions will decrease. We could stop treating the symptoms and start treating the disease, ignorance.
Do we mass exterminate billions of insects and vermin with vicious poisons? Do we kill millions of cows and chickens a year for food? Have hundreds of thousands of people not been killed in Darfur and the Congo? Have 64.000 people not died as a result of our actions in Iraq? Does the United States not kill hundreds of people a year under the premise of "capital punishment" even if any number of them are innocent?
Don't we kill a whole lot of things? But not the children. Oh hell no not the children! But, wait, wait, there are millions of starving children in this country and billions more across the globe. Aren't we, by not helping them, also killing them indirectly just as laws allowing abortion are allowing fetuses to be killed?
It's all semantics isn't it. We don't REALLY mind killing each other so long as we can justify or ignore it. So what are a few more.
Seriously, any one of the categories of people we kill/let die mentioned above are more pressing than abortion. These are conscious beings. There is a distinction, granted between human murder and animal murder. FDR once said that "there is nothing to fear but fear itself." He was right. It is the fear of certain death and the fear of having the power to kill that makes murder morally objectionable, not the actual killing. It's the difference between court ordered murder and getting shot in the head at random. The fear in lieu of immediate death.
Fear then begs the question: What is moral? Perhaps we should substitute moral with empathetic. We are not empathetic towards cattle because we are addicted to the slow death of fatty meats. Starving people starve because they refuse to help themselves in this nation of infinite opportunity. And the criminal did wrong and deserves to die. All these justifications are just ways to suppress our empathy for the person.
Again, when it comes to fetuses and animals, who are ambivalent of their impending death, we install our own empathy into their situation. That is, our own fear of death and fear of the power to kill puts us in their position. We feel sorry for them on some level. Obviously, this is not logical thought, it is emotional.
Logically, fetuses, as well as cattle and plants too I suppose, are not conscious of their impending deaths therefore do not have the heightened sense of fear that we automatically associate with death. They will continue to exist up until the point where they don't. Nothing more and nothing less.
So why are abortion rights increasingly eroding? Man feels guilty because of misplaced feelings of empathy. They give consciousness to something that doesn't have one.
Therefore, I say we have to correct this hypocrisy. Either we stop all "killing." We learn to coexist, stop eating meat, and feed the poor or we leave abortion well enough alone because really in the grand scheme it is one of the smallest "human rights" issues facing this world today. Or we can learn to identify the difference between killing something with a consciousness and fear with something that clearly doesn't like fetuses and cattle and then stop killing those who are conscious.
There is something we can do though. The US government could throw off the binds of sexual Puritanism and provide comprehensive sex education to all children so that the need for abortions will decrease. We could stop treating the symptoms and start treating the disease, ignorance.
2 comments:
Thought-provoking. You should do a follow-up sometime about the last paragraph...I would like to hear your thoughts/angry rants
Hmmm.... perhaps sometime.
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