Excited about summer reading via interlibrary loan pt. 1
While I wait for MS word to un-crash (YEAH RIGHT AS IF)
sds:
“Not everybody is meant to be born. I believe, for a baby, life begins when his mother wants him.”— Abortionist Jim Newhall in a Portland, Oregon article from the Willamette Week. (via)
Disgusting but hardly surprising.
I think that this is a really interesting quote (which I would really like to see the context of, but it appears that the article is from 1995 and not actually online but if someone has a link, you know, let me know) that highlights an idea that I think is really missing from the U.S. mainstream abortion/reproduction discusson.
It seems like one of the major points of contention is about defining when life begins, a discussion where all sides couch their opinion as being rooted in some sort of truth or fact (scientific, faith based, whatev). The thing about ‘life’ in this sense, though, is that there really is no point where you can say ‘ah ha! life has begun’ because the status of being alive/being human is something that is culturally assigned.
Though babies are certainly born alive, they really aren’t born with any of the traits that we associate with human-ness and thus we often have to anthropomorphize these neo-nates until that point when they develop them. Obviously, though, this isn’t just neonates. We also do this with fetus/zygotes/whatev. And a lot of when we decide that a child is ‘alive’ is based on when a child becomes valued. Which is not to say that before they are not an entity worthy of consideration, but that there are particularly culturally/personally determined points at which we decide that they are a human being. This may be at the point of viability, it may be at the point of conception when the cells that will eventually make up a embryo become genetically distinguishable from that of either parent, it may be when a child learns to talk.
On some level, regardless of what moment you take as the moment it has to be the moment when you decide to invest value in that child, and when it can be defined as something that is wanted.
