[Vision2020] Are Moscow schools shrinking?

[Andreas Schou]

On 10/13/06, heirdoug at netscape.net <heirdoug at netscape.net> wrote:
> Andreas,
>
> Do these same propositions go for the children not yet born or is it
> only for their owners to make that determination. Talk about your
> pro-choice!

Doug --

Given your rejection of all philosophical thought past the
Enlightenment, upon what standard do you assert that a human has any
rights at all? And given your acceptance of the Bible as inerrant, how
do you account for the discrepancy between Biblical penalties for
murder and Biblical penalties for causing miscarriage as illuminated
in Exodus 21:22-23? Or God promoting the use of abortifacents in
Numbers 5? Or the fact that in Leviticus 27, when values are being
assigned to people of different ages, that no value whatsoever is
given to unborn children?

Please explain, using citations from either the Old or New Testament,
any precedent or principle from the Bible that indicates the humanity
of a fetus.

In any case, there is a reasonable argument to be made that a fetus
is, at six months, worth according rights as a human being, because it
is possibly viable and possibly independent. There is no reasonable
argument to be made that an eight-celled zygote or an almond-sized
clot of stem cells is, in any meaningful sense, a "child."

If I were to accept the counterfactual that an eight-celled creature
is a human being, I agree: it would have to be granted the rights due
any human being. But the abortion debate is not one, in general, about
whether it is permissible for human beings to be killed for no reason:
that's a caricature. It's about whether unicellular life that shares
our genes should be given the same legal or moral status as actual
humans.

Here's the clincher, Doug. Would you support a law establishing the
death penalty for women seeking to procure an abortion? If a zygote
has moral equality to a human being, why not?

-- ACS