I hear what you are saying. For arguments sake, what would you say if this thing in the bushes was about to, unknowingly, push you off a ledge to certain death, and the only way to stop it from killing you was to shoot it? Is it justified then? (You can create any scenario here you wish, the details arent the point.)
But even in that scenario the abortion case is more complex because, no matter what you think about when life begins, the moral "value" of the fetus is something less than the mother because she is clearly a person, and the fetus is... something else. This is probably a point worth discussing.
The right to choice group of course, takes the extreme view that the mother's right to decide what to do with her body outweighs any rights that a fetus has. I disagree with this extreme view, and also with the other extreme, giving full personhood status, and the rights associated with it, to a conceptus.
In the meantime, when people ask me if I’m pro-life, I say I am, not because I claim to know when the human life/spirit begins, but because I don’t. If I was out hunting and saw something moving in the bushes but couldn’t make out what it was, would I say to myself: “Well, I can’t be sure whether it’s a human or not, so I might as well take a shot at it”?
Fred
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Received on Wed Apr 29 12:52:36 2009
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: Wed Apr 29 2009 - 12:52:37 EDT