My position is that the term murder cannot sensibly apply to mindless things. You can't murder a plant, or a microorganism. You can only kill them. You can't murder a zygote. You can only kill it. You can't murder a brain dead human kept alive on a respirator and feeding tubes - you can only kill them.
Ah, the liberal it-can't-possibly-be-murder-because-murder-is-something-else-entirely semantics game.
Okay, wilbur, would you prefer kill? How about liquidate? Erase a more palatable term?
Honestly, wilbur, all of those words and all of your pseudo intellectual pap don't change the final outcome -
dead.
And I agree China's policies are abhorrent and inconsistent with human rights, but that is because women are often forced by the government to have abortions in order to limit family size.
You didn't even bother to click the link, did you?
The presumption that pro-choicers don't value life is all too often little more than obstinate and intentional demonization.
Wow.... Let's contrast this with the following, shall we?
My pro-choice beliefs contain the assumption that life has value, but things go a level deeper than that. Not all life has value, though, just some of it. So we have to ask why life has value.
Your words, Herr Himmler, not mine.
So why does (some) life have value, while other life does not? My answer is the presence or absence of a mind.
So, you would be all for sterilizing and/or "liquidating" the mentally handicapped? Who would you place in the "untermensch" category, wilbur?
Ask a pro-lifer what makes life valuable, and you're likely to get theology about God, souls, and the like. So yes, in the end - its still mostly theology and religious belief that informs the pro-life position on the value of life.
Assume much, wilbur? What makes life valuable is
life itself, wilbur. As one who holds
all human life precious, I don't expect a pro-deather like you to understand that.
In the absence of God, it boils down to human compassion and dignity, wilbur. Not selecting who lives or dies because she's a girl.
For a number of reasons, I happen to think the typical pro-life answers as to what makes life valuable fail to actually capture the things that actually make it valuable.
Like whether or not a baby is going to be born a girl? This is not an esoteric conversation, wilbur, but one dealing directly with a woman killing an unborn child simply because of it's sex.
And this inevitably leads them to make misguided judgments that conclude that some forms of valuable life actually have little or no value, and conversely, that some forms of valueless life, actually have more value than they do.
So the Chinese model of killing girls is the one to follow? Or should we stick to what Margaret Sanger wanted and kill all of the "untermensch" in the womb?
Which is it, wilbur?
Apparently it does, because the nation has been quite divided on the issue for a long time - the slight advantage in numbers has traditionally been on the pro-choicer side, though I'm not sure what the current numbers are.
Don't fool yourself, wilbur, your side has been killing itself off for going on 40 years. Through technology, education, attrition through death in the womb, you are losing.
Thank God...
Again, I value human life - and other forms of life - quite dearly, as I explained above.
My pro-choice beliefs contain the assumption that life has value, but things go a level deeper than that. Not all life has value, though, just some of it. So we have to ask why life has value.
Let me ask you this (or anyone else)... since there has been all this chatter about gay genes and abortion. Imagine if we discovered genes that gave children homosexual predispositions. Imagine we developed completely safe gene therapy treatments that allowed us to alter those genes (in the womb) so that the homosexual predisposition was removed. Imagine that your un-bold child tested positive for those genes. Would you submit to the therapy?
How about you stay on target and not try and change the subject.