Mike
qui transtulit sustinet
Medical doctor with manifestly secular-humanist leanings makes two points among others in this long interview by anti-feminist cultural commentator H. Pearl Davis:
1. The principal non-arbitrary ethical options are A. pro-life and B. no term limits on abortion plus infanticide. (Setting the term limit at three months or six months is ethically arbitrary.)
2. If you are committed to the modern Western ideals of human equality and all humans' right to life, then it follows that you must choose the pro-life option.
At ~2:15:
1. The principal non-arbitrary ethical options are A. pro-life and B. no term limits on abortion plus infanticide. (Setting the term limit at three months or six months is ethically arbitrary.)
2. If you are committed to the modern Western ideals of human equality and all humans' right to life, then it follows that you must choose the pro-life option.
At ~2:15:
When I looked at the literature on this and debated this in philosophy and things at university, you really only get two positions in ethics. You get pro-life people, and then you get people who think abortion is fine and infanticide is okay because what they say is, well, it's not really a person because it doesn't have the right mental capacities yet. And so it's only when the baby gets real mental capacities like an adult or like a child that it becomes a person and has the right to life and so those philosophers say well that's also true of newborn babies. Newborn babies can't reason. They're not like, you know, children or adults so we should be able to kill them as well. So I was faced with this choice between like pro-life or infanticide, and both of them seem kind of extreme, but there's really only two plausible options.
And so like I said for me it's fundamentally about human equality. Either you believe that all human beings are equal and have a right to life or not. If not, then that's kind of bad because you're not really -- you don't really belong super well in the western world if you don't believe in basic human equality in some sense. And so then I thought, well, okay, I believe in human equality that has to be applied to all humans and then whether a baby in the womb is a human being is just a scientific question like we can't just decide it's a human being we can't just say it's inconvenient so it's not a human being we have to look from a biological perspective from a scientific perspective is this a human being and the science on that is completely obvious. Like, it's the first thing you learn in embryology is that a human being begins at fertilization, and so for me it was really just a combination of human equality and basic science was the thing that convinced me from an intellectual perspective that this is something that is part of the human family and therefore something we have to protect and speak out about.
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