[extropy-chat] Famous author self destructs in public! Film at eleven.

[John-C-Wright at sff.net]

Or perhaps not so famous; or perhaps a polite difference of opinion rather than
an act of public self destruction. 

Mr. Beauregard is alarmed that my manners have been displayed with less than
grace in public. Allow me to reassure him that the result is not so terrifying
as he fears. 

It seemed to me as if I were making a logical argument, followed with what I
admit was a heated rhetorical flourish. Let us glance at the argument one last
time, and then at the flourish.

The argument, as it stands, is unexceptional. The first axiom is that parents
have a duty to care for their children, which means, to protect and love them,
and safeguard their health. As far as I can tell, no one disputes this axiom. 

The second axiom is that to will the result implies to will the means necessary
for that result. This axiom is based on the nature of cause and effect. A duty
to produce a given effect, logically implies a duty to effectuate the cause
leading to the effect.

Children pass through a foetal stage of development in the womb. The health of
the child at a later stage is dependent on the health at the foetal stage. 

If the foetus is safeguarded by proper prenatal care, a healthy child might be
born. If the foetus is aborted, a healthy child cannot be born: indeed, the
preventing of the birth of a healthy child is the sole purpose of an abortion.
Again, as far as I can tell, no one disputes this.

Prenatal care is logically implied from the duty to care for the child. This is
a direct deduction from my first two axioms. Prenatal care and abortion are
mutually exclusive. One cannot kill the foetus and bear a healthy child. Indeed,
the child after abortion is as unhealthy as it is possible to be: namely, dead. 

Therefore the duty to safeguard the health of the child logically excludes the
option of aborting the child. QED. 

I can see how this argument might provoke honest disagreement; I do not see how
one can honestly conclude the author of it is suffering a mental breakdown. 

To dispute the argument, one must either dispute the common notions on which it
is based, or detect an error in the reasoning. Merely insisting on one term as
opposed to another in the chain of logic does not affect the outcome. It does
not matter whether you call the child a “product of conception” or “foetus” or
“a mass of cells” or a “banana.” One can substitute x and y values for the terms
in the equation, but if the values point to the same object in reality, the
outcome of the equation is the same. 

Now it is with some embarrassment I turn to my heated rhetoric. Obviously not
everyone who supports aborticide gets a sick thrill from it. Some are reptilian
in their callousness, some are sincere and innocent. So the comment was
impolite, and, what is much worse, illogical. To bring up the motives of the
opposition in a debate is argumentum ad Hominem. Ad Hominem is an informal
logical error. I confess. 

In case the point of my little story was not clear, let me emphasize it. I was
not an antiabortionist at the time a doctor approached me and tried to persuade
me to extinguish my son (or, if your ears are too delicate to hear things called
by the right names, let us call him the mass of cells having the potential to be
my son). What the doctor was asking me to extinguish, in effect, were all those
golden days in which I now rejoice. Had I heeded his counsel, those days would
have been lost to me. 

All my joy would have been lost.

And I never would have known the degree of the loss. My son’s first footstep,
his first word, or for that matter his last word, or any grandchildren I might
otherwise enjoy, would have also been aborted from my life. 

Now, just to make this clear, let me repeat that I would have lost all those
things from my life whether or not my son was a human being or was a person or
was a foetus at the time the abortion was contemplated. Obviously, had he been
extinguished at an early stage of development, all the later stages, including
the rest of his life, would have also been extinguished. The loss to me would
have been the same, no matter at what stage, early or late, the extinction took
place.  

So even if it is outrageous for me to impute a sick motive to those who promote
aborticide, I nonetheless submit to your candid judgment that there is a sick
atmosphere to the argument, in that it degrades the seriousness (the sacredness,
if you will) with which we cherish human life, born and unborn. 

The other point of my little story is that my wife is a heroine: but the
pro-abortion argument spits at her sacrifice and bravery. Mothers facing birth
are as soldiers facing battle or sailors facing a storm at sea: it is a labor
which will call upon her deepest reserves of courage and fortitude, perhaps at
the cost of her life. To tell mothers that this sacrifice is being made for a
non-person, and to tell her it is a reasonable alternative to sacrifice her
child to her own self-interest, robs the labor of any honor. Birth labor is now
merely pain suffered for the sake of a non-person, which is as much to say, for
no real reason. 

There is also something ghoulish about the whole topic.

You see, I sometimes wonder what they do with the bodies. I am not talking about
abortion in the first week to ten days: I mean abortions in the seventh or ninth
month of pregnancy. I mean the fully developed babies whose only crime is that
they are not yet out of the womb. 

Where do they heap up the bodies? 

Are they in a pile somewhere, with little blue arms and legs sticking up at odd
angles, tiny fingers and toes motionless, toothless mouths and eye sockets
swarming with maggots? Do they inter them in a graveyard? (I assume they do not
inter them: the ACLU sued to prevent the burial of aborted children in at least
one jurisdiction.) I assume the bodies are disposed of as medical waste, put in
little plastic bags, and dumped in a landfill. 

Now, logically, if we accept the premise of the abortion argument, that these
are not the bodies of persons, not the bodies of human beings, then there can be
no moral objection to disposing of them as we would any other livestock. If
humanity or personhood is a characteristic acquired after birth, then anyone
deprived of life before birth has no claim on that status, even if he is
otherwise fully developed, and his corpse need not be treated with the
melancholy respect we normally bestow upon the beloved departed. 

Theoretically, there should be no moral objection to grinding them up and
serving them as Soylent Green.  

Now then, reasonable people can disagree on this point. The argument on either
side is not so certain as to compel universal consent. 

And to soothe Mr. Beauregard's fret, let me hasten to add that reasonable people
can even buy and read books by eccentric authors, no matter how distasteful the
author's opinion is on unrelated topics, provided he can still tell an
entertaining tale. 

My disagreements here are with ideas, not with people. My goal should be to
disagree without being disagreeable. 

JCW