ldsfaqs wrote:
What they are actually fighting for is the right to murder the innocent. .
You first have to establish that a fetus is a person and therefore has rights.
You have skipped right over that. I suppose because it would entail a great deal of thinking about philosophically difficult notions such as "selfhood", "personhood", "consciousness", "reflexive-self-awareness", the problems of borderline cases and conflicting values.
A few things a first trimester fetus does
not have:
Language.
Self-concept.
Plans or hopes or expectations.
Self awareness (or perhaps awareness of any kind).
Full blown human consciousness.
There is no self.
As far as the very best notions of what it takes to be a human being (capable of being frustrated, in pain, or frightened), a fetus is not even in the ballpark.
The neural correlates of pain are not enough as they are mere physical registrations whose subjective meaning is yet impossible lacking any human context or concept (including "awfulness"). What makes pain "painful" or "horrible" in the sense that becomes morally significant involves there being a "self" situated in a "world" full of human meaning.
Why is it that nitrous oxide can make pain into something that doesn't matter to the person? It is dissociation from the human context that deprives those sensations of their meaning and makes them mere sensations. At the extremes of such intoxication we see ego dissolution.
Now surely, a fetus is farther from being able to experience the awfulness of pain than an NO2 drunk laughing at the "pain" he feels in his teeth. There isn't even a self there recall. There are no notions of "good" feeling or "bad" feeling (kinda like a thermostat).
If this is wrong, well, you haven't demonstrated it. That would be step one: Make sure there is someone there to protect.
On the other hand, a death row inmate
is a person (albeit possibly guilty person), and knows what pain and horror is about and has a life to lose in the fullest sense of the word
life.
