Monday, April 19, 2021

Abortion Boundaries

I am bringing in this update because with this amount of turnover on this one-stop-shopping, "all your intellectual stimulation in a bag" AVI site, even a week can be a long time and you aren't going back to read about abortion boundaries. Unless I make you.

It is interesting to contemplate the emotional and intellectual conflicts that arise on the pro-choice side when we contemplate the Mendelian conditions that all the chattering classes assume anyone with any sense would want to abort, and whether they are fertile in the next generation or not. If they aren't fertile anyway, as with Down Syndrome, then what's your issue?  Why abort?  It's a self limiting problem, right? Bring them in, be a compassionate society, care lovingly for all who exist. Yet these are among the first to go in genetic selection, aren't they? Why would that be, unless the goddess of Time has decreed that the present is everything and the future is a mere incantation to get what we want for ourselves now?

If one wants to make the argument that it is different for those who can pass on deleterious genes, and for the good of humanity we should nip those in the bud with prenatal death, there is something to that.  I think I could win that argument, but let me at least acknowledge that it is a different argument. It is also an argument that precisely no one on the pro-choice side is making, so far as I can see. 

I don't think that squares well with other liberal claims.

1 comment:

Korora said...

We've seen where that road leads--directly off a moral cliff.