Personhood and Planned Parenthood:
what we all know to be trueMake that, "what we all know to be True," with a capital "T". And strike the "all" part. In fact, strike the "know" part, too. Just strike the whole thing.
Jim Sedlak insists that a person exists from the moment of conception. Since that's a capital T, there's no reconciling my contrary view with his.
In the last congress, 100 members of the House of Representatives supported a bill that simply said:
The Congress hereby declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being.
Sound reasonable?
Of course.
No, not "of course". No, not reasonable. Disingenuous.
I eat scrambled eggs for breakfast. Though some of those scrambled eggs may bear the fruit of a rooster, they are not scrambled chickens.
I wonder how many of those right-to-life Representatives would immediately object to the use of their disingenuous bill in opposition to capital punishment? My guess would be most of them.
Mr. Sedlak is apparently a religious man. He doesn't seem to invoke God very much in his writing (he mentions God, mostly in passing, in only four of the 13 articles listed here), but it seems obvious that his world view is rooted in a firm belief in the existence of a supernatural soul implanted by a God at the moment of conception.
In contrast, as far as I'm concerned, Mr. Sedlak's is a highly implausible stance stemming from myth.
Whereas I'm content to let him be, Mr. Sedlak would impose his views on me by force of law. That's part of the reason I'm giving $910 (minus United Way's handling cut) to Planned Parenthood this year.
Ooooo, he probably doesn't know that United Way can serve as a conduit for money to Planned Parenthood. Maybe I'd better shut up lest he make trouble for them, too.
Naaaa...
1 comment:
I have to admit that it makes me queasy to eat eggs if I think too much about the possibility that there may be an embryo in there, though I have no problem eating an adult chicken properly prepared. I think I could not bring myself to eat eggs that might contain a human embryo, no matter how small, nor how unlikely the chance that the thing could be in a particular set of my morning eggs, as long as the chance was non-zero. Nevertheless, I do think that such thinking, in both cases, is superstitious.
The impact of an unwanted child on society and the mother's life, however, is not superstitious. It is very real, broadly predictable, and generally, not always, but generally destructive.
Antiabortionist's always try to shame us into their viewpoint by reciting story after story about the successful children of single parents, the paragons among them who have given much to society. But by the same token, every time a women chooses to delay pregancy by even a moment, the odds are overwhelming that a different sperm will fertilize the egg, a different person will be born, or not born as the case may be. All those extra eggs and sperm washed away unused! They could have been people, people who have now lost their hope of ever living. Is that not equivalent to mass murder, I ask you?
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