Free Medical Advice! [Serge]

Don't do this. Trust me.

Jail Time for Beasts Gone Wild? [SK]

Elephants in India have nearly destroyed a village. Why not prosecute them for destructive behavior? After all, if self-aware animals have the same value as humans, let's make the former take responsibility for damage done to the latter.

Hey PETA, it's only fair, right?

As Wesley J. Smith points out, we won't prosecute the beasts because we don't expect them to act like us:

If humans had done this to the village, it would rightly be condemned as an evil act of aggression and lawlessness. But elephants are amoral. They are just being elephants. They are indifferent to the suffering they are causing to another species.This illustrates one of the crucial differences between human beings and animals. Only we are truly moral beings understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. And we have a unique capacity to empathize with "the other." We care about them, even if they can't care about us. That is one reason we try to save elephant habitats and protect these magnificent beasts from poaching, while they will destroy villages, kill the unwary, and generally disrupt human life without a moment's hesitation. And that is a distinction between us and animals with a huge difference.

HT: Second Hand Smoke

Extrapolating the Pro-Abortion Choice Strategy [Serge]

As usual, life has been busy, but I've been working on a new strategy to confront another evil in our culture: drunk driving. In fact, here is a speech that I've written which explains the strategy in detail. I have learned much from our pro-abortion choice opponents, so maybe applying their strategy here will bring new insights.

"I am here tonight to deal with a large problem confronting our culture, which is teenagers getting injured in drunk driving accidents. I believe we can all agree that we should work to decrease the number of injuries in these accidents, and we also agree that despite our efforts, these injuries occur all too frequently. We need to do something different.

Presently, our focus right now is attempting to educate kids that drinking and driving is wrong, and they should not do it. In other words, we have an "abstinence-only" drunk driving education policy. And yet we still have this problem. Furthermore, we threaten those who drink and drive - even those who are not involved in an accident - with civil punishment including loss of their license and even incarceration! And yet this problem still exists! This is simply a remnant of the faith-based neo-con right wing religious wing nuts who believe there is objective right and wrong. Clearly, we need another strategy, and I believe we can borrow one from those involved in the pro-abortion choice reproductive freedom (to kill their offspring) movement. Let me highlight my new plan.

First, since we know that many teenagers are going to drink and drive, educating them not to will never be effective. We need to send them off into the real world with better protection. I propose that we eliminate barriers to access for improving one's chance of surviving a drunk driving accident. Specifically, I propose that we offer, at taxpayer expense, the ability for teens who wish to drink and drive to have their cars modified with roll cages, five point restraints, and driving helmets. This is a scientifically proven way to decrease deaths in accidents. If such devces can save the life of a NASCAR driver traveling at 200 MPH, why do our drunk driving kids deserve any less? We will end up saving money in the end because of all of the decreased medical bills. Them cars are much easier to put together than our teens.

Second, I find it a travesty that our kids are being "educated" merely by being told that drunk driving is wrong. What about those who choose to drink and drive anyway? Alcohol abstinance training will be a joke to them, and better education is the answer. I propose that use "comprehensive" drunk driving education. For those who agree that drunk driving is wrong - great! However, for those who choose to drink and drive - they need better education. Specifically I propose that we lay out a structured drunk-driving skills course that the students can use to practice their drunk-driving skills. During school, for those who are interested, they will be given a teacher-observed dose of alcohol. They will then be able to get behind the wheel and attempt to finish a driving skills course while they are intoxicated. This will give them a real-life skill that they can use to avoid accidents when they make the choice to drink and drive. For those who believe this would actually encourage other students to drink - well, I guess they are wrong. Or something.

Lastly, we have had a generation of kids who did not have the advantages of my proposed education program. And yet a number of them are being punished for drinking and driving. You simply can't regulate morality, and previous attempts have failed. For that reason, I recommend that we decriminalize drunk driving immediately, including clemency for those who are being punished right now for this "victim less" crime. The one thing that we can never consider is making this a crime ever again. We must decrease the number of drunk-driving deaths by education and protection, not by making criminals out of those who merely make the choice to drink at high speeds. Although I do not drink myself, and would never drink and drive, I am completely pro-choice on the question of drunk driving. We simply need to make it safe, legal and rare. Thank you."

Do you think this idea will get much traction?

Ending Abortion With A Group Hug (Jay)

I have to admit, I have read this article by Mike Adams at TownHall.com a couple of times and I still do not get his point. Mr. Adams regularly polls his students at University of North Carolina – Wilmington on what group they would most like to ban from the college campus. This year it appears pro-lifers have made that list. The reason is that groups like the Genocide Awareness Project and Justice for All bring large graphic visual displays of aborted human beings and this creates anxiety and resentment in the students, especially the students who have had abortions in the past.

I can appreciate that Mr. Adams does not personally feel as if the pictures are a good tactic, but his alternative tactic is so Utopian that it calls into question why he would bother writing it at all. Here is an excerpt.

“First, I think we can start by replacing pictures of the dead, dismembered fetus with pictures of some live ones. Instead of reminding people of what a horrible thing they did in the past when they had an abortion we can focus on what a beautiful thing the fetus is and how much more beautiful it can be in the future.

Next, we’ll need to convince the kids that if they do not want to keep their babies there are people who do. And if they cannot take care of their babies there are people who can. This is really not as difficult as we make it out to be.”

This is odd because I thought crisis pregnancy centers all over the United States were already trying to do this. I need to check with the counselors tomorrow here at the CPC where I work to verify this, but I am confident that these things come up with the 400 women a month that our CPC counsels.

But the truly bizarre part is later in the article as he writes the following:

“We take these children from very early on and love them like there’s no tomorrow. Then, after we have them firmly convinced that they are loved - because they are unique and they bring great joy to their parents who simply could not imagine life without them -we are ready to let them out into the world. Then, when tomorrow does come and the children encounter those who do not love them like their parents – those who want children to drink and do drugs and do other things children should not do – then they will not listen because the voices telling them to do bad things are coming from those who do not love them like their parents. Then it all becomes so obvious why Jesus had to speak of Satan and hell but spent even more time talking about unconditional love.

Maybe the key to not hurting those who have had abortions is stopping to remember that they are someone else’s children, too. And maybe if we would share with them the Good News of Jesus rather than the bad news of genocide, they would be convinced that we are the type of people who should keep and care for their babies. Then, I suppose everyone would be happy and pro-lifers and pro-choicers could stop trying to show each other who is morally superior to whom and why. And I guess the babies would be happy, too.”

I firmly believe the love of Christ is central to winning the battle of abortion, but I fail to see how advising us all to love children so much that they never get abortions constitutes a sound tactic. He fails to critically address the displays beyond saying that they upset people, which I am pretty certain is the point of the exhibits. Just love the kids and abortion will go away. Well we will get right on that, Mike. Let say that we also try to stop the 1.3 million legalized surgical abortions a year while we are raising the next generation of hyper loved kids just for kicks.



But for a moment lets act like this article wasn’t weird and had a point. Lets say he is arguing that we will make more tactical advances at winning hearts and minds by convincing and inspiring people to love the unborn and themselves. We need to build up, not tear down, the general public. So I am talking to a young woman who has had an abortion. I show her the beauty of the unborn. I show her the miraculous complexity of early cell differentiation and the surprisingly complete looking 8-week-old gestational age unborn child pictured here. Then she looks at me and asks, “Is that what my child looked like?” “Yes,” I say warmly smiling back at her with my best “Mr. Sensitive pony tail man” aura. “So that was what my child looked like when I got the abortion?” Uh oh. Now here is the rub. As she connects her unborn child that she aborted with the beautiful images and poetic descriptions of the unborn life I am framing my argument around, do you think it makes the reality of what she has done easier? Do you think that she will not be offended once she realizes that I am saying she had her beautiful unborn child violently vacuumed from her uterus? Or cut into pieces and extracted? Or pulled limb from limb? Or poisoned and burned with saline?

I do not often use graphic images when talking. I actually have that picture of the 8-week old pre-born projected on a large screen. Then I explain why abortionists have to wait to abort the unborn life until it is old enough to reassemble the body parts and account for all of the pieces of the child to prevent the mother from getting sick from tissue that is not properly removed. People gasp and cry and turn away. I do not shy away from graphic images,though, because the truth is that abortion is ugly. It is very ugly. You can play nice for a while, but sooner or later it comes down to 3 questions:

1 – What are the unborn?
2 – How do we determine their value?
3 – What are we doing to them?

If they are human beings with a natural right to life then the answer to number three is grotesque and horrifying. How do we not confront it? Mr. Adams, are the images untrue? Do they deceive those who see them in any way? If not, then it seems an odd concession to those who wish to protect the legal right of Americans to kill the unborn for elective reasons because it offends students. That would just be crazy.

HT: Stand to Reason

Stuff to Read [SK]

Melinda Penner: Why worldviews must account for good as well as evil:

Any religion or view of reality needs to make sense of both moral categories. That is one of the key tests to evaluate religions and worldviews. If evil needs an explanation, so does good because neither is a natural property that can be explained in purely material terms. I wish the problem of good bothered people more. I think they'd arrive at God, and specifically Christianity, as the best explanation more commonly.

Jivin J writes about misleading claims from Michigan's ESCR advocates.

Wesley J. Smith documents the move for human extinction becoming mainstream with intellectuals.

How Sad [SK]

My daughter's school sent home the following notice yesterday:

SUPERHERO DAY!

Who: 1st grade students

What: Come dressed as a superhero (no swords, guns, or other violent accessories--nice superheroes only)!

Why: To celebrate reading the story 'Space Pup.'

Each Child is encouraged to dress as a superhero.

Seriously? You mean Joshua Chamberlain, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacAarthur, George Washington, Samuel Adams, and the men and women fighting terrorism in Iraq need not apply?

My problem isn't that the school bans toy weapons. (Though I think that's sometimes ridiculous as well.) My issue is the definition of a 'nice' superhero--that is, one that doesn't fight. Well, is it 'nice' to let a sexual predator mess with your kid if the only way you can stop him is with force? What a horrible lesson to teach our kids, especially young boys who may one day be called on to defend their wives or dependent children. The only superhero this school allows is a cartoon celebrity like 'Space Pup.'

God help us.

Beckwith #8: Science and the Unborn [SK]

Previous Posts on Beckwith's Defending Life:

#1 Overview of major themes
#2 The nature of moral reasoning
#3 What Roe said and did, part 1
#4 Roe, part 2: Blackmun undercuts his own case
#5 Roe, part 3: Blackmun's viability errors
#6 Metaphysics and abortion debate
#7 Thomson's 'Equal Reasonableness' Isn't Reasonable


Chapter 4:
Before launching a sophisticated philosophical defense of the pro-life position grounded in the substance view of human persons (the subject of chapter 6), Frank summarizes what science tells us about the unborn and why popular objections to that science don't work.

The scientific case goes like this: From conception (or the completion of a cloning process), the unborn are living human organisms. Unlike bodily cells which are merely part of a larger human being, human embryos, from the beginning, are whole human entities (though they have yet to mature and grow). True, science can't tell us how to value the unborn (any more than it can tell us how to value a 10-year old), but it can give us the facts we need to determine the kind of thing that's killed by elective abortion. (You can see a summary of the scientific evidence here.)

Frank then deals with objections to the scientific case for the unborn. Three of the most popular (Frank deals with 5 in particular) are as follows:

1) Twining. Cloning advocates sometimes claim that because an early embryo may split into twins (up until 14 days after conception), there is no reason to suppose that it’s an individual human being prior to that time. Hence, early embryo research (prior to day 14) is morally permissible. The flaws in this argument are easy to spot. First, how does it follow that because an entity may split (or even recombine) that it was not a whole living organism prior to the split? As Patrick Lee points out, if we cut a Flatworm in half we get two flatworms. Would advocates of destructive embryo research argue that prior to the split, there was no distinct flatworm? I agree that twining is a mystery. We don’t know if the original entity dies and gives rise to two new organisms or if the original survives and simply engages in some kind of asexual reproduction. Either way, this does nothing to call into question the existence of a distinct human organism prior to splitting.

(FYI, Ramesh Ponnuru asks a great question: If the early embryo prior to twinning is merely a hunk of cells and not a unitary organism, why doesn’t each individual cell develop individually?)

2) Miscarriage. Abortion and cloning advocates cite the high number of miscarriages as proof that embryos are not individual human organisms, but what follows from this? Suppose miscarriages are indeed common: How does this fact refute the claim that embryos are human beings? Many Third-World countries have high infant mortality rates. Are we to conclude that those infants who die early were never whole human beings? Moreover, how does it follow that because nature may spontaneously abort an embryo that I may deliberately kill one? Admittedly, these miscarriages are tragic events. But just because natural disaster happen doesn’t mean massacres are justified.

3) Ignorance. Philosopher David Boonin discounts the pro-lifer’s claim that the newly conceived zygote is a distinct, living, and whole human organism. How can this be, he argues, when we don’t know the precise moment during the conception process at which the new zygotic human being comes into existence? Here Boonin is both right and wrong. True, we don’t know exactly when during the conception process that the zygote comes to be. Some embryologists argue that it happens when the sperm penetrates the ovum while others point to syngamy, when the maternal and parental chromosomes crossover and form a diploid set. But as Beckwith points out, although Boonin raises an important epistemological question (When do we know that sperm and egg cease to be and a new organism arises?), he’s mistaken that his skepticism successfully undermines the pro-lifers strongly supported ontological claim that the zygote is distinct, living, and whole human being. “It may be that one cannot, with confidence, pick out the precise point at which a new being comes into existence between the time at which the sperm initially penetrates the ovum and a complete and living zygote is present. But how does it follow from this acknowledgment of agnosticism that one cannot say that zygote X is a human being?” Boonin, writes Beckwith, “commits the fallacy of the beard: Just because I cannot say when stubble ends and a beard begins, does not mean I cannot distinguish between a clean-shaven face and a bearded one.”

Moreover, Boonin’s skepticism cuts both ways and serves to undermine his own case. Abortion advocates typically claim that until a fetus has value-giving properties such as self-awareness, rationality, and sentience, it does not have a right to life. But since when can we know the precise moment that those properties come to be in the fetus? That is, at what exact point in the pregnancy does the unborn become rational enough to warrant a right to life? No one can say, though abortion advocates suggest that it’s somewhere between 24 weeks to 30 weeks. Despite their lack of certitude on these questions, few abortion advocates are willing to surrender their views. However, if the pro-life position is refuted by a lack of certitude, so is the pro-abortion one.