Mark Stewart responds to an abortion-"rights" argument: My response to a defender of abortion....Suppose i wake up one day and I'm attached to a famous violinist with a fatal kidney problem, whose survival depends on his staying attached to my circulatory system for the next nine months. There is no other way to save his life; if i unplug him, he will die. The poser of the question, one Judith Thomson, believes i have a right to unplug myself. I believe she thinks it's an easy answer (that's why she made the analogy)..
My answer is...no, i don't. This is a human being. And for the next nine months, I have to take this man with me everywhere i go. He'll sleep in my bedroom, he'll have to be in the bathroom while I shower, I can't go skiing, I can't go swimming. When I go out to eat, there's YoYo, wh has to sit in the booth next to me.
I can do that. And our moral code, or the moral code we once had says i MUST do it. Even if not a famous violinist. Just an ordinary guy, a man who'll die absent human effort by me.
Not super-human effort. It's a little sacrifice. Bad luck to me. I'll overcome the burden.So by comparison, the woman who wakes up attached to a baby, and will be attached for at most nine more months, is not superhuman. It's done all the time.
Or maybe it's good luck. I have the opportunity to save a life. Without dying myself, or even harming myself. And similarly, the woman who wakes up attached to the baby is blessed. She can do a beautiful thing, a heroic thing, by caring for the baby in her womb, and giving the baby to a couple who will take good care of the child. She's not only keeping the baby alive, she's enhancing the life of two adults a dad and another mom who can't bear children on her own.
Nine months of inconvenience; (more like 5 months). And then a day or two of pain in labor.Judith Thomso, and much of a whole two generations believe that that small burden isn't worth saving a life. They are wrong. And here's where they are coming from:
Her very question presupposes: that SHE is God. Why say "famous violininst?" As if an unaccomplished American doesn't rate. And that is what's behin the killers' argument. That they have the power to decide the worth of another human.
And it's no just the power to send them to a different school, or to restrict them from smoking. It's to live or die. Judeo-Christian morality doesn't give that power over innocent people. Extinguishing a soon-to-be born baby NOT in your control.
There's a standard, and it's fellow human. Potentially its a human who needs protection. So there's no questio that I take care of the good person who'se next to me for nine months. There's no question if that human is a child who can't protect himself. And there's no question when its a soon to be born human. We sacrifice some, because that's what makes US human.
I have a harder question, which I'll pose in the next video.
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