NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/talk/abortion/36677

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-15 | 3.5 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!purdue!yuma!longs.lance.colostate.edu!sa114984
From: [e-mail] (Steven Arnold)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Re: Roe v. Wade and abortion
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 15 Sep 92 23:45:51 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (News Account)
Organization: Colorado State U. Engineering College, Ft. Collins, CO 80523
Lines: 54

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Ron Bense) writes:
|> In talk.abortion, [e-mail] (Steven Arnold) writes:
|> >In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Lar
|> >ry Margolis) writes:
|>
|> >        A fetus is a living member of the human species.  On t.a, a common
|> >distinction is made between "person" and "human being" (a distinction, of cours
|>
|> Mighty big of you to unilaterally decide what goes on in t.a. I take
|> person and human being to mean one and the same thing, unless one starts
|> to use them in a fashion to describe things as one of the two for mostly
|> emotional reasons, with little validity.

    It's just a definition, Ron!  Take a sedative!  You can define
things any way you want.  When I say "human being" I mean a member of
the species homo sapiens.

|> >which I do not believe is valid).  A human being is any organism which is alive
|> >and which is a member of the species homo sapiens.  Unborn children, all of the
|> >fall into this category.  A "person" is a human being who is recognized by some
|> >group or another and by some standard or another to have human rights, includin
|> >the right to life.
|>
|> You think so. You've yet to show any reason for this except that there
|> is a good chance that they will meet the criteria given time. Baby Theresa
|> never made it to this stage, and was merely human, not really a human
|> being, although a being that was human. Semantic play.

    Baby Theresa was a human being.  A living member of the human species.
You are the one playing word games, Ron, not me.  You want to do
anything you can to avoid calling a human being a human being.
    Walker Percy, an M.D. and a novelist of distinction, has said on
this subject: "...it is a commonplace of modern biology that the life of
an organism begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the
chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that henceforth
directs the ontogenesis of the organism, producing the undeniable
continuum that exists in the life of every individual from the moment of
fertilization of a single cell.  The onset of individual life is not a
dogma of the church but a fact of science."
    Dr. Jerome Lejeune, the internationally famous researcher and
geneticist who discovered that Down's Syndrome was caused by an extra
chromosome said: "When does a person begin?...Life has a very, very long
history but each individual has a very neat beginning: the moment of its
conception."
    Dr. Malcolm Watts, an advocate of abortion rights, wrote in the
September 1970 edition of California Medicine: "...The result has been a
curious avoidance of the fact, which everyone really knows, that human
life begins at conception and is continuous, whether intra- or
extra-uterine, until death.  The very considerable semantic gymnastics
which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a
human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under
socially impeccable auspices."

Steve