Sunday, June 8, 2008

Abortion and the Golden Rule

Do onto others as you'd have them do onto you. This sounds pretty dang reasonable to me, and to billions of better quality people than i. If you avoid polluting a stream you'd like other hikers to do the same. If you don't play loud music at 0300hrs you'd like your neighbors to avoid noise pollution too. If you're polite to others you don't want them screaming obscenities at you. The list is endless.

So how does that golden rule apply to abortion? Well to me it seems the obvious is

If you wouldn't have wanted to be aborted by your parents you shouldn't support other parents killing their kids.

A long time ago before he started running for president and had to give up his pro-life stance Jesse Jackson said that his mother almost aborted him and that if abortion had been legal he probably wouldn't be around. Now as you might guess i'm not a big fan of Jesse's political positions but i'm glad he wasn't aborted; he made it obvious he was glad too. I know that i'm glad my parents didn't kill me so i can't see my way clear to do anything but try and protect those kids whose parents are trying to kill them.

There are kids who have survived botched abortions--the only time screwing up a surgical procedure results in the patient living-- and they seem glad to be around. Similarly people who have handicaps aren't eager to be killed, if you'd asked them in the womb they wouldn't have opted to be hacked to pieces. But aborting the unborn if they may be handicapped--even though the tests are wrong about 20% or more of the time--is considered a great thing. By the way if anyone could prove that 20% of the people on death row are innocent i suspect we wouldn't have any more executions.

In fact i can't think of any group of people, other than the clinically depressed who need our help, who would say that they'd be cool with their parents killing them.

So if no one wants to be killed in the womb doesn't the golden rule say we should protect the unborn?

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