The Most Important Assumption about Abortion

For now, there is at least no contention in academic circles about the idea that a unique human life begins at conception. The concerns of cloning are legitimate, but the divide between that what is human and that what is not is quite not also up for debate so we could all agree upon scientific terms that if the human species reproduces after its kind then there is no debate about the abortion argument, as far as the protection of life is concerned. After all, exceptions do not make the rule.

If we were to, like many a member of the progressive left keep identity and emotion above the threshholds of reason, then there would be debate happening but empiricism is still the abode of the conservative, in classical liberal tradition. Knowledge about the natural world can be harvested by looking at the world as a system and a minor artifact in the criticism of pure reason would be to violate the rule of Descartes, to not trust your feelings. That would be a terminal mistake to make and while it gives a conservative the high ground in a debate, there is a good chance that this effort would appear not particularly kind, fair or merciful. In trusting the effectiveness of the free market we are told that we are heartless (their alternative being to steal from the rich and give to the por), in trusting the chromosomes to stay true to the gender of a person we are told we are oppressors (they say the identity of a person is more important that scientific fact) and so on.

At least in the regime of biology, there is considerable progress (outside of the wayward fundamentalist who screams that god did not turn monkeys into human) the efforts of many a biologist have been nonpartisan, and this rush has gifted us with aneathetics and antibiotics, cures to many a disease that would have wiped away our ancestors in a flood; we are still here in large numbers due to the relentless treatment of the sciences as a free market. The raw power of the sciences should have been enough force to convince even the hardest of skeptics but there is nothing like some good fashioned simpleton trying to make a statement about ethical concerns, and the soundest of attacks on biological foundations spring forward.

• My body, my choice
  Terrible choice of argument because DNA evidence confirms that a newly formed zygote has distinct genetic material and is therefore not anyone's individual body even though it shares space with the mother.
• Don't regulate my uterus
  While my libertarian bias would want no authoritarian rule over my personal business, there is a reason some government is crucial; the limit of government being to prevent exploitation which is precisely the case here.
• Just a bunch of cells
  Easily neutered with a snide remark stating we are all a bunch of cells.

After the pandamomium that was last years election, the question of a supposed reversal of Roe V. Wade looms and it is on such occasions that we can reflect about the inherent value of human life. On legal terms, this seminal decree was not only controversial but also incoherent (Even defenders of legal abortion state harsh criticisms toward its legal reasoning, a decision spotted with non sequitors) and a possible reversal may reinstate our trust in the permanence of the constitution. The right to life is a divine permission, and that was the foundation of the American Constitution; man was not permitted to murder his neighbor dbecause each of them were made in the most sacred of designs and had a right to exist solely by the virtue of being. Even an inhumane Joseph Stalin would treat a comrade of his as his equal. A person could fully ignore this and treat his fellow men with disdain, but if each of us were to follow through it would be a wicked world indeed.

We all agree that human beings procreate to produce human beings, and by extension, each newly formed zygote is a humaan being. One could disagree, but there is no objective alternative than to silently admit what science deems so but when we talk about the unborn, these very abstractions seem to cloud our judgements. Yes, there is a part of a me that could think in terms of a gilded utilitarianism and subjective convenience, asking why it is not honorable to save a newborn child years of suffering. That same question asked rightly is this - does a poor man lose his right to life simply because of his being poor? If so, there is a dangerous precedent to be set, and a cruelty that communism could not match.

Now, Every person acknowledges that at a moment in the past he was also in a primitive state that is not optically defined with respect to common belief but it is quite radical to think of this state as a mere collection of organic forms, an utter indifference to scientific truth. At the time of Darwin, it was thought about the human cell that it was a clump of homogenous fluid but today we conclude from quite insuperable dismay that the most bloated of organisms also exhibit a level of organization that is anemic to what would have otherwise been the decision of molecular entropy. I find it tremendously difficult to belive that statements compare the embryo to hair follicles and dermal clogs. It is a dismal bit of self validation there to simply assume evidence where there is none, the same fallacy that neuroscience (the sociology of the sciences) takes for granted in the development of artificial consciousness. That the embryo is automate toward survival, that it does not have any organizational faculty, that it is not prone to evolutionary adaptation, that it is metabolically inert, that it is not responsive to external stimuli - all these are shoals of wishful thinking on the part of people who prefer ignorance to knowledge. By the standards that could scientifically define life, the mesh of human cells that reside inside the embryo exhibit every characteristic of life except for reproduction. Such judicial understandings are characteristic of many a debate around the liberty of abortion.

It is quite understandable much of the discussion seems partisan then; for no photograph of an cluster of a fertilized human ovum could assert the riposte of data. Cells look just like cells and there is little immediate reason to meditate as to why an unborn product of conception should have the same rights as a twelve year old and even the best of intentions might not be well thought. As for the labels we attach to the stages of development, a fetus or am embryo perform nothing more than stand in as assertions to a biologist. These differences are not obvious then, the pictures of embryonic development fail to convey anything more than a sphere of cells. We humans see the world around us in terms of what we comprehend with the limited involvement of a finite brain and in doing so, it is perfectly alright to judge without absolutism. Even the most absolute of skeptics display inscrutable faith to the placeholders of knowledge and seldom express doubt if what they say is in fact what somebody listens and as Kant would say, the limits of pure reason. There has been a time in all our childhoods (I am hoping. Maybe I was a little less deft than you at these empiricist games) when we looked and wondered where the caterpillar crawled away, not noticing the plumage of a brilliant butterfly nearby only to realize an important life lesson (that the little fluffy bit of cotton like capsule was not in fact as insipid as it looked) and with the little knowledge then, there was simply no telling that a ball of moss would grow into a Monarch. We have all seen caterpillars and moths and puppies and kittens and you would have differentiated the puppy on the road from your Caesar or your Marvin. What we have not seen is a homo sapien creature distinct from a person the same way you would also not have seen a fertilized embryo (unless you have seen Planned Parenthood suction out an infant through a vaccuum pump) inside a mother's womb. It is one thing to call it as not a person but another to say it is also not human. The same way, is it also not true that there was once a time when a John Doe was also just an embryo or a zygote or a fetus? That conclusion ought not to hurt, but it is only a product of the vignettes of the times. There is not a single human being who not the result of fertilization and only a finite period ago, we all were just that.

In 2003, The Human Genome Project announced that they had successfully mapped the human genome and maybe in twenty years, there could arise a systemic method of DNA visualization and maybe it could predict what kind of physiology a select DNA transcript could develop. Proponents of abortion seem to say that the process liberates women from the burdens of childbirth and it is women like these that destroy the sanctity of womanhood (because what does it mean to be a woman if not for what differentiates her from a man?) and many do not accord that the respect for women stems out of her unique ability to produce a new person (with just a little help from the man) and the entirety of patriarchy was to build a sacrament around this profound futility of the other gender and it does remain that the action of abortion does kill a lot more women than it does men. If there is a war on women, is looks thus. There is also this uncomfortable irony in knowing that a pro-choice concern is intimately all about purging the ability of an entirely different individual to make even the slightest of choices.

There have always been immoral actions performed by the evil ones at the price of the innocents. Redefining the morality of an action in terms of personal convenience is a condemnable evil on the hands of late feminism, for after all, what Hitler did was to redefine the term human to exclude every human that was not Aryan. Proponents of abortion seem guilty of the same fallacy when they say a human embryo is also not a person, because all definitions of what makes a person a person could resort to subjective judgement in itself. We are best left rebuking this extra moral authority anybody seems to claim over the dignity a person possesses by the virtue of existence. Like what Kant would have said regarding all moral law, it must pertinently be also universal. There is no debate to be had with regard to abortion also. A person is always a person. If you are one today, you are one yesterday also.