Comment on first term abortions

Ragnar ...

Let me say again that I totally respect people who have a consistent belief in the right to life.

Because the approach you take is very much like the one I took for many years, perhaps it will interest you if I explain my own take on the right to life

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Judaism teaches that the right to life is the absolute moral imperative. "Life" comes before the sabbath, hashrut, etc. I accept that. Like you, I believe that we need to err as much as possible on the side of protecting life because the slippery slope of the other side is so evident. FWIW I am almost totally opposed to capital punishment and have very strong beliefs that we, the world that is, put too little resources into being sure that children survive.

I also oppose abortions in the third trimester, except for the health of the mother or where it can be shown the fetus will not be viable after birth. I admit to being torn by cases like the trisomy 18 described above but would like to discuss that in a different thread.

I believe both sexes have the same rights to choose how a fetus is protected. This means I do not think that even in the first trimestre women have the right to terminate withut consent of the father.

Later in pregnancy, I once a life is fully viable, it seems to me that women can not have the right to terminate it. I find the idea that a woman has the right to end a six month pregnancy at will abhorrent ansd suspect we agree on that?

At the other end of life, I oppose I-1000. Even though I respect each individual's right to choose how to die, I oppose I-1000 because I do not believe health care providers should have the ability to choose between prolonging life and offering suicide. One would have to be blind not to see the likely consequences of giving a Aetna a choice between six months of expensive terminal care and offering their client suicide.

Ragnar

As I said, your reasoning is exactly the same as mine was for many years. I agree that one can interpret the science as you do.

May I offer a different interpretation?

Each of us is defined by a unique genetic code that is first assembled at zygosis when the half copy of the male's genome and the half copy of the females genome are assembled, for the first time, in one cell. The magic of this event is that it is unique and without it none of use would exist.

So is that "life?" This can get into a soert of Clintonian discussion fo when is "is" "is not?" So let me just lay out the facts and tell you how I now make my decision.

After zygosis, there are many steps that must occur of we are to develop into a "person." These include, but are not limited to: implantation on the uterus and transition to an embryo with the different types of cells "germ layers" needed to create a human being. From there, many embryos do not survive to have the characteristic features of a human because in the random errors that occur when the two genomes combined.


Moreover, while the genetic code itself does not change in this period, it is heavily modified in ways that add to the individual's individuality. These modifications are themselves inherited by our cells as long as we live and are the reason that twins are never truly identical.

This is part of the debate over stem cells. Today we routinely cure many diseases by using stem cells. These cells have much of the dame properties of the zygote and it is VERY likely that such cells can be used to clone an etnire person.

Would that clone be you? No, no more than a twin is you because the clone would have undergone its own modifications.

Put another way, we all routinely discard stem cells that could be used to develop unique individuals in much the same ways as the zygote first develops.

So, for me, the zygote is not yet an individual and it can be treated ethically much as we treat an adult stem cell.


So, that is where I come from and would very mush welcome a real discussion.