From: bskendig@netcom.com (Brian Kendig)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Re: I had an abortion two days ago
Date: 4 Oct 92 17:36:50 GMT
Organization: Starfleet Headquarters: San Francisco

Peter Nyikos writes:
>Most pro-choicers on this net consider the unborn to be human life.  Most
>of them consider sperm cells and all other cells from a human body to
>be human life.  

I'm a pro-choicer; I consider the unborn to be human life.  No problem there.

The reason that sperm/eggs keep getting pulled into the discussion is
that a pro-lifer will assert that a fertilized egg is "worthy of moral
consideration," to use Mr. Gorr's words.  Then a pro-choicer will ask
what the big difference is between a fertilized egg and an
unfertilized egg that makes the one important enough to chain a woman
to, and the pro-lifer will typically assert that sperm/eggs aren't
human life.  Too often, I hear this assertion being used as a
convenient way to defend a belief that can't be supported in any other way.

>Pro-choicers draw a sharp distinction between human life and human
>*beings*, but I am still trying to find out what exactly their definition
>of a human being is.  Some might say a member of *Homo Sapiens*, but
>none of them seems to have asked a *zoologist* just what they classify
>as members of a given species: sperm, fertilized ova, embryos...

I don't use the term "human being"; my argument focuses on "human
life" versus "person".  A philosophical definition of "human life" is
every bit as worthless as a biological definition of "person" --
"person" is a wholly philosophical thing, while "human life" is wholly
biological.  Neither is a subset of the other.

>Pro-choicers prefer to center their talk on *persons*.  Some of them
>flatly take the word synonymous with "Those protected by the 14th
>amendment."  Since the Supreme Court has ruled that the unborn are
>not so protected, they figure they have an open-and-shut case here.

I don't use any legal definitions in my argument.  To me, a 'person'
is a living, thinking, self-aware entity.  You're self-aware, I'm
self-aware.  Animals generally aren't self-aware -- they just react to
their environment; they don't have the intellectual capacity to have
hopes or dreams.  A fertilized egg cannot in any sense of the word be
said to be 'self-aware'.  Neither can a fetus be, up until its brain
begins to develop in ways that the brains of animals haven't developed.

>Others are willing to admit
>certain close-to-birth unborn children into the august company of
>persons.  Elizabeth Bartley is perhaps unique among the
>pro-choicers in consistently
>arguing for a phenomenological criterion.  In her beautifully 
>apt words, personhood is when there is "someone home."

This is my position as well.

>Only she
>seems to have gotten hold somewhere of a theory that this takes
>place only when myelination takes place, ~23 weeks, whereas I 
>believe it takes place by the time brain waves occur, i.e. at 
>6-7 weeks, and possibly before.

Animals have brain waves, but they aren't people -- this is why I feel
that your definition has little merit.  Besides, calling the brain
waves of a seven-week fetus "thinking" would be the same as taking a
bin full of bare metal wires, and running a current through them, and
calling that a 'circuit' -- the nerve impulses are completely random
and erratic, and continue to be so until the myelin sheaths develop on
the neurons.

-- 
_/_/_/  Brian Kendig                             Je ne suis fait comme aucun
 _/_/  bskendig@netcom.com                de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire
  _/                            n'etre fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent.
                             Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre.
                                                                 -- Rousseau
Newsgroups: talk.abortion