It’s probably a good thing that Granny Herald has turned off comments on that one.
Nice and succinct Martyn. It would be so refreshing if we were to have evidence based policy and laws, rather than based on emotion.
That’s a bit difficult though when politicians need to try and convince the public every three years to vote for them again. Appealing to base emotions rather than reason seems to work better.
Whoa Tonto..you’re up for a hell of a beating combining those two wildcards, but good on ya… they are probably the last two bastions of the great mindfuck otherwise known as democracy to be broached head-on.
Seriously, no one claiming any chops will argue decriminalisation of the myriad manifestations of the sativa. Well overdue.
.. yeah, bean counters, look at Colorado GNP or whatever you call it.
Great stuff Martyn, taking on the unwritten rules head-on, love it.
A true fiscal conservative would be clamouring for marijuana decriminalisation based on the Colorado experience, which for better or worse has been carefully designed to maximise revenue for the state.
That everyone on the right here has been silent on the issues speaks volumes.
Hi Martyn
From your column: “Those attempting to tell a woman what to do with her body in the 21st century should be outed for the misogynistic medieval glee club that they are.”
An ad hominem attack, not an argument.
Do you seriously believe that those who take the pro-life position do so because they hate women?
The pro-life position is based on a modern understanding of the relevant science and philosophy surrounding the nature of an unborn child. I am yet to see any scientific or philosophical argument that comes close to denying that the unborn child is not a human and therefore does not have the right to life.
Yes
And the evidence for your position is…?
They are hateful.
Picture a woman standing at the top of a cliff, breastfeeding her baby. She gets sick of the dependant baby and declares “My breast – my choice!” and then hurls her baby off the edge of the cliff. A post-natal abortion.
With that example, I’m illustrating how the common argument of “It’s woman’s body and therefore her right to choose” is empty, in itself. Clearly a woman can have more than her body, she can have a responsibility to someone else’s body as well.
So what is the difference between a woman aborting her newborn baby, and a woman aborting her foetus? The difference is the concern that the abortion debate boils down to. It’s the question of “When do you have a human being with human rights, and when do you have a mere protoplasm?”
Unfortunately there is no non-subjective line for where you can make that call unless you take it right back to the formation of a zygote. I do not argue that a line should be drawn at the zygote point, but it does show us the difficulty within the abortion debate.
Many people would argue that a freshly created foetus in an explicitly immature form should not be considered human. It’s just too crude they would say – barely even has a nervous system. Can we argue against that position with any certainly? I don’t believe we can. Again it comes back to the question presented in the previous paragraph, in that we can not decisively know when we have a human or an “it”.
But really, the moral question is even more tricky than that. Does something have to look like us to be as valuable and worthy of respect? It’s not ultimately humanness that counts, but the ability to be conscious and experience life that is the ultimate value to respect. And the truth is we have no objective way of measuring consciousness, which is the essence of life’s value. We only know for sure that we ourselves are conscious, and from there we simply assume that others are conscious, and on the basis that they are similar to ourselves.
So maybe that needs to be the line we draw? Maybe we should not abort a foetus at the point where it just seems too human and alive? Alas there is no other way to measure and define the ultimate value of a developing human.
Also there are the pragmatic questions. If a woman does not want her child then is it really a good idea to force her to have it? What kind of a child will they become if they are, maybe, so badly unloved and uncared for? And even if a woman adopts out her unwanted newborn, her unhappy emotional state while carrying will damage the child on its own, and the primal separation at birth will hurt the child too. The far-reaching social costs of forcing pregnancy can be serious.
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It’s probably a good thing that Granny Herald has turned off comments on that one.
Nice and succinct Martyn. It would be so refreshing if we were to have evidence based policy and laws, rather than based on emotion.
That’s a bit difficult though when politicians need to try and convince the public every three years to vote for them again. Appealing to base emotions rather than reason seems to work better.
Whoa Tonto..you’re up for a hell of a beating combining those two wildcards, but good on ya… they are probably the last two bastions of the great mindfuck otherwise known as democracy to be broached head-on.
Seriously, no one claiming any chops will argue decriminalisation of the myriad manifestations of the sativa. Well overdue.
.. yeah, bean counters, look at Colorado GNP or whatever you call it.
Great stuff Martyn, taking on the unwritten rules head-on, love it.
A true fiscal conservative would be clamouring for marijuana decriminalisation based on the Colorado experience, which for better or worse has been carefully designed to maximise revenue for the state.
That everyone on the right here has been silent on the issues speaks volumes.
Hi Martyn
From your column: “Those attempting to tell a woman what to do with her body in the 21st century should be outed for the misogynistic medieval glee club that they are.”
An ad hominem attack, not an argument.
Do you seriously believe that those who take the pro-life position do so because they hate women?
The pro-life position is based on a modern understanding of the relevant science and philosophy surrounding the nature of an unborn child. I am yet to see any scientific or philosophical argument that comes close to denying that the unborn child is not a human and therefore does not have the right to life.
Yes
And the evidence for your position is…?
They are hateful.
Picture a woman standing at the top of a cliff, breastfeeding her baby. She gets sick of the dependant baby and declares “My breast – my choice!” and then hurls her baby off the edge of the cliff. A post-natal abortion.
With that example, I’m illustrating how the common argument of “It’s woman’s body and therefore her right to choose” is empty, in itself. Clearly a woman can have more than her body, she can have a responsibility to someone else’s body as well.
So what is the difference between a woman aborting her newborn baby, and a woman aborting her foetus? The difference is the concern that the abortion debate boils down to. It’s the question of “When do you have a human being with human rights, and when do you have a mere protoplasm?”
Unfortunately there is no non-subjective line for where you can make that call unless you take it right back to the formation of a zygote. I do not argue that a line should be drawn at the zygote point, but it does show us the difficulty within the abortion debate.
Many people would argue that a freshly created foetus in an explicitly immature form should not be considered human. It’s just too crude they would say – barely even has a nervous system. Can we argue against that position with any certainly? I don’t believe we can. Again it comes back to the question presented in the previous paragraph, in that we can not decisively know when we have a human or an “it”.
But really, the moral question is even more tricky than that. Does something have to look like us to be as valuable and worthy of respect? It’s not ultimately humanness that counts, but the ability to be conscious and experience life that is the ultimate value to respect. And the truth is we have no objective way of measuring consciousness, which is the essence of life’s value. We only know for sure that we ourselves are conscious, and from there we simply assume that others are conscious, and on the basis that they are similar to ourselves.
So maybe that needs to be the line we draw? Maybe we should not abort a foetus at the point where it just seems too human and alive? Alas there is no other way to measure and define the ultimate value of a developing human.
Also there are the pragmatic questions. If a woman does not want her child then is it really a good idea to force her to have it? What kind of a child will they become if they are, maybe, so badly unloved and uncared for? And even if a woman adopts out her unwanted newborn, her unhappy emotional state while carrying will damage the child on its own, and the primal separation at birth will hurt the child too. The far-reaching social costs of forcing pregnancy can be serious.
Comments are closed.