-Ren

And even if it did, that would not give it the right to live off of a woman as a parasite against her will. I fully respect the right of women to have children and think that it’s absolutely great for women who want to. But it lives off of a woman’s body. Intelligent women who want to be pregnant recognize that much. I am under no moral obligation to let anything feed off my body and drastically change my life for 9 months. Period.

A woman does get moral authority because it’s her body. You can judge it all you like, but that doesn’t make it immoral. People judge others for lots of things that aren’t immoral, and questions of what is and is not moral is different for everyone.

The point here is that we are comparing a woman with a life, with friends, family, consciousness and a future, to an 8 week old embryo that has less brain activity than most small animals and certainly less physical function. It is smaller than my thumb and could very easily be flushed out of my system naturally. Yes, I do value my own life and the life of my friends and family and some guy walking down the street that I’ve never met before more than something than my uterus is capable of killing. Quite honestly, I value my cat and most other animals more.

And if you don’t like that, it’s fine. It doesn’t bother me. You can hate me for it, go right ahead. When the embryo is in your body, you get to make that choice and I would respect it as much as I respect a woman who chooses to have an abortion. That’s what being pro-choice is about.

But when it comes to the legal system, we have a set of rules. And those rules coincide with the majority opinion of our society, that born human beings are more valuable than an unborn fetus that could not live outside of the womb. I am extremely thankful for that and hope that it never changes.

It’s interesting, though, that as someone who thinks that all human life is equal, whether an embryo or a full grown adult, you don’t have a problem that the “murder” of the embryo got a harsher sentence than the murder of the woman. If you truly do value all human life equally, shouldn’t you be angry that the judge ruled one as more important than the other? I never said that there should have been no sentence for killing the woman’s embryo, so why aren’t you outraged along with us? Seems like a bit of intellectual dishonesty to me.

My question was not about rights, it was about the value of life. How can we make determinations about the value of a life without being unfair?

A fetus is alive in the biological sense. And, a fetus is a human being, albeit in its earliest stages of development. This wasn’t your point but I felt that if I’m going to talk about fetuses I should address this. Trying to redefine human life so that it doesn’t include the human fetus is trickery.

The human fetus is in fact a human being. If we choose to end the life of the fetus, we end a human life. The only value to redefining life as beginning at birth, or in the third trimester, is the psychological value of being able to abort without feeling the guilt normally associated with ending a human life. I don’t know if it’s wrong, but I know why people argue for it being right.

We give full fledged rights to a baby once it’s born, that is a matter of fact. But it’s not a reason. The fetus depends for its life on the mother, but that doesn’t necessarily confer any rights on the mother over the fate of the fetus. It gives the mother power over that life, but not absolute moral authority.

Anyway, I’m sincerely interested in trying to understand the reasonable limits of our ability to measure the value of human life, and although I found the spirit of this discussion repulsive, I thought there were some interesting comments.

But you’re cute. Really. I love it when people think that they can out-clever me without actually making an argument. It’s fun.

Do you think that the jury would have given him less years if he had beat the baby after it was already born?

Also, if he had beat the baby and the woman separately, after it was already born, should he have gotten more or less years overall?

I wonder if the jury realized that it was treating women in an unjust and unequal way when it decided on the sentence.

Bonus question. If it had been an old man and a baby girl that he beat to death, which death should have carried the heavier sentence?

Also, if you were on the titanic, would it be women and children first? Or children first, then men, then women? I don’t know. Somehow it seemed relevant.

See, I’m just really confused about the hierarchy of value you’re alluding to here.

Why is a life more valuable because it’s been alive longer, or if it’s not, why not?

Hey I’m happy they gave him something for the baby, but killing his girlfriend should have gotten him more then 16 years. I say life in prison would be better, and I mean life, not the “they will be out in 5 years thing” the system does.

These same people are the disapproving fuckheads who will later shake their heads and make tsk-tsk noises when they see teenagers pushing baby carriages.

These people – the Planned Parenthood protesters and the people responsible for sentencing this man – don’t really value human life at all. They value the helplessness of fetuses (is that the correct plural?!) but they’ll abhor the screaming child who’s throwing cereal boxes in the supermarket, three years later. They’ll tell you that they wish YOU’D been aborted and have no concept of their statement’s irony.

I’ll say it again because I think it gets at the issue: they value the helplessness of the fetus and they are scared of their own lack of power over the woman who carries the fetus. They attempt to legislate that power into existence.

Often, I think they are also frightened of the process by which the fetus came to exist – sex – because their sexually fucked up brains picture an assortment of both enjoyable and awful sexual circumstances. To “the establishment”, all forms of sex aside from that of the married, hetero variety are unacceptable. However, as we see from Republican senators and congressmen over and over again, they’re often rather obsessed with varieties of sex that aren’t… erm… WEREN’T taught in middle school Health. The circumstances that brought about women’s pregnancies, wanted or unwanted, freak them out. Hot sex! With or without the will of God! And they had no power to stop it! They have to deify the pregnancy, legislate it and control it because they couldn’t control the act that created it.

That deification of pregnancy, the romantic obsession with a fetus’ helplessness and the disrespect for women that has already been covered all combine to come up with these rather arbitrary figures of 16 and 20. You know what else is vaguely interesting? At eight weeks, my mother didn’t even know she was pregnant with me.

This is far more than I meant to write. Thanks for reading.