Dear miraculously palpitating cardio vascular sustained sentiencies:
Pehaps the most surely agreed upon facet in this issue is that it is fraught with complexities, alternating, mitigating, and harsh.
As like as not, most contributors to this discussion are aware that, globally speaking, approximately 35,000 children perish, every 24 hours, of malnutrition.
This is a solemn fact for which, until further notice, there is no easy solution.
Anti-abortion postures - especially as applied to impoverished '3rd world' cultures, condemns 35,000 children daily, to malnutritive death, before age five, while the same policy alleges to disallow abortion out of 'respect for life'...
Ergo: Insist that a chilld be born, only to proceed to post natally starve to death within five years. Is it not a tortuous premise to condemn a child to a birth, commencing a five year lifetime of consuming nutrients which, in a more realistically balanced control of births, would allow a controlled number of non-aborted children to live, where and when, otherwise, death by starvation is imminent?
(Re: the law of diminishing returns.)
Is there not an element of ' passing the buck', here - forsaken responsibility regarding the relativly more humane alternative of early
abortion, to minimize the number of otherwise doomed children birthed with the foreordaninment of slow death and correspondng suffering to Mother,
family and friends?
These are not easy issues. No consummate polemics or egress implied or intended here.
Truly yours does not pretext any specific solutions, but I do think it's a mighty sobering reminder of parallel, ironically irrresolute, often highly emotional alternatives - neither one of which in the presented context - beats the prematurely imposed reaper at the locus of this notoriously intense theme. Whereas, in such qualified cases, the so called 'respect for life'
decision is an empty - questionably honest gesture of what amounts to
further extending an unavoidably pejorative demise.
The dilemma includes the necessary choice of alluding to 'repectfulness of life' and being 'pro-life' - dissenting against most forms of what is often, otherwise, legal abortion (pro-choice; an acknowledged euphemism).
In some cases abortion is not left as a legal option, even to forcibly raped, consequently impregnated women. Even that issue brachiates from the demonic source of the seed to the innocent results of the ensuing fertilized egg and resulting foetus and what it connotes as an individual 'unrelated' to the circumstances of it's conception...
By some definitions forced upon the involuntary 'mother'. Her violation becomes a burden imposed on her through the ordeal of child-birth and 18 years of imposed - enormously life changing - responsibility; often resulting in the schizoid results of being obliged to love and care for a human life you are
forced to incubate, birth, care for, often accompanied by a real or imagined 'guilt' for having - perhaps inevitable - 'mixed feelings' about
such a child.
Regarding (1st trimester) abortion, such a victimized woman may feel, or be perceived as guilt ridden, damned if she does, and damned if she doesn't.
. .......................
Then there is the pensive argument that an amputated digit or limb is indeed human, but it is not 'a person'. Neither is it experientially
programmed with any particular experience (have a favorite color, song, artform, hobby, preoccupation, goal in life, sense of past, present or future, etceteras...)
............................
With regard to whether life begins at conception or at birth: generally speaking, Western (European) Civilization recognizes the beginning of life as commencing at the moment of birth - when you breathe your first air, independent of oxygenation provided by pre natal, umbilical physiology.
On the other hand, Eastern - Asian - perspective generally recognizes a life as commencing from the moment of conception.
My Mother was 2nd generation American Mongolian; she 'resolved' (in fluent Mongolian and Englsh) that most anyone could reasonably argue either side of this quasi-perplexing issue.
Notably, when the generally Western perspective of when the life of an individual begins, is corroborated with the Eastern perspective, then, each individual has in fact, two 'birthdays'.
The Eastern perspective of conception, nine months prior to the Western perception of life's beginning at actual birthing, of the nine month gestated, fully trimester developed result of the original moment of conception.
Meaning that, in this sense, any European - Western Civilization - originated person, may compute their Asian birthday to be nine months prior - in cases of full trimester gestation - to moment of their first breath of air, exposure to variations of light, and heat, etc. While Asians are left with the option of a converse computation, also bequeathing two birthdays per individual.
Thank you for reading this missive.
Kudos to Volconvo for their cordially extended invitation to join this interesting and educational forum.
Sincerely, Kent Benjamin Robertson
World's Number One Einstein Groupie.
Kraziequus@yahoo.com
Vini. Vici. Entiendo.