From: gagrawal@cs.tamu.edu (Gopal Agrawal)
Subject: Re: Arrogant Indians and Susan Forgach
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Texas A&M University
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 22:07:36 GMT

In article <92250.091118RIPBC@CUNYVM.BITNET>, RIPBC@CUNYVM.BITNET writes:
|> 
|>       This is why  the postings of  Susan Forgach have  been an enormous
|>  comfort to me.  Her position is more strict than mine, but only because
|>  she is ALWAYS willing to put morality before pragmatism.
|> 
|>       Rohit Parikh

Yeah! I have been following her postings too for some time. 
She's the typical Bible thumper.  All her psuedo morality comes 
from the verses.  They are only limited to the foetus. What about 
the moral obligations of the society towards the `about to be' 
mother.  Susan's all for saving the baby irrespective of any 
dire consequences that the mother may have to face later.  

some stuff deleted ...

|>      Moreover,  abortion  is  now  legal  also  in India, and routinely
|> advertised on Indian trains.  It seems  to me that every time that  the
|> West has  a moral  disease, then  they call  it progress,  and Indians,
|> anxious to `enter the 20th century' are only too happy to catch it.

How is abortion a western concept ? Indians have been practicing 
it since ages.  Go to any rural village and we will find unique 
methods of abortion unheard of in any western society.  Abortion 
has probably been developed in every society. The Arabs developed 
it, the chinese developed it, the Romans developed it and a whole 
lot of other cultures did so too without necessarily aping each 
other.  

In a society like India's where an illegitimate child (& his/her 
mother) has a very dim chance of getting the opportunities like 
other normal children, abortion becomes the only way out. I think
it is about time that GOI imposed mandatory abortion on couples 
with a certain number of children and below the poverty line. 
Most of India's problems stems from the overpopulation.


|>       Pro-choicers might  not be  aware that  they, while  attacking the
|>  fundamentalists, are RELYING on  the Old Testament.  In  Hindu-Buddhist
|>  theology, all life is sacred (Krishna says explicitly that animals have
|>  souls, and Buddha's record is well known) and so the argument, that the
|>  foetus is not  a person and  so we can  treat it with  contempt, has no
|>  standing at all.  An acceptance of this seems to be in the offing  with
|>  respect for whales - so why not include unborn pre-humans?

The above argument may not have any standing at all. But I doubt if that
is the argument that pro-choicers use.  Even if the pro-choicers recognized
the foetus as a soul, It wouldn't change their decision to allow one soul
(the pregnant woman) her choice of letting another soul (the baby) enter 
her life. 

regards,
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