Do prolifers really believe the unborn are human?
1. Josh asks prolifers, especially on FaceBook, to not nitpick absolutely every use of language to make sure they use the utterly most "prolife" language. Example: Josh posted commented that referred to the impending birth of his son as "We're having a baby tomorrow." A guy attacked him for not being overt about the fact that the baby already exists. So please, don't be language police.
This topic goes back to interview he did with David Lee, Executive Director of Justice For All, commented that "Everybody's a little bit prochoice," meaning that prochoicers don't believe that the unborn aren't fully people, just to be able to cope with the reality of so many children being killed every day. We don't have the same gut response to the killing during abortion that we do to other mass killing.
Josh asks, "Do you think that you act as if you really believe that the unborn are persons?"
I'd say, "No, not any more than I act as if I really believe that the people being slaughtered in Darfur are persons."
Our visceral responses are hard wired, depending on how close the person being killed is to us. Those who have a loved one murdered are totally traumatized for life. Those who were friends with, but not close to, the murder victim are shocked and grieved, but they get on with their lives unaltered. Those who might have known the murder victim in passing -- say, she was the sister of an old high school classmate, and you met her once -- will be shocked and dismayed but not really grieved. Those who had no clue who the victim was, they just read about the murder on a news site, register the fact briefly then forget all about it. And the statistic about how many murders there are in a city in a year is just a subject of public policy discussion if it's noticed at all.
None of this means that we don't consider murder victims to be persons. It's just that we're not hard wired to have a gut response to it. If we were, we'd lose our minds. We'd be overcome by the massive ongoing tragedy, and we'd be unable to function.
Liz refers to Schindler's List, and how, after the dust settles, Oskar Schindler is wracked with anguish that he didn't do more to save more Jews. But, she notes, this does not mean that he wasn't recognizing that all Jews were just as much people as the Jews on his list.
Josh restates the question as, "Are we taking our Holocaust as seriously as Oskar Schindler did his?"
The discussion goes around to the natural tendency to become desensitized.
Josh then segued into another topic: A prochoice argument he'd never heard before. "Abortion is just a medical treatment for unwanted pregnancy."
Actually, I've heard that for 20 years. And Josh noted that Warren Hern, major abortionist, classified pregnancy as a disease for which the treatment of choice is abortion.
I would say that it's the distress at the pregnancy, not the pregnancy itself, that is the problem. I've blogged about this. And Liz pointed out that anxiety can lead women to kill their children. Was killing the children a legitimate "treatment" for the woman's disease?
Josh postulated this parallel: What if you'd been a German living in Nazi Germany, and you needed a liver transplant. Would it be an accepted medical treatment to have Dr. Mengele kill a Jew to transplant his liver into you?
Andrew asked if one person's pain is sufficient cause to kill another person.
I would add that lethal injection is done by doctors, and it's done in a medical way. So is that a proper medical treatment for being predisposed to criminal activity?
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