04 2 / 2012
Abortion Tactics and Conflicted Moral Ambivalence
If the Republicans had wanted to prevent abortions, they would have…
- Funded a thorough and mandatory sex education initiative from the earliest grades in all schools and combined it with the distribution of free contraceptives in all high schools, public and private (religious schools included)
- Legislated generous family leave for both mothers and fathers
- Provided federally funded day care as a national priority
- Expanded adoption services, including encouraging gay parents to adopt children, and they would have encouraged gay couples to marry and adopt
- Provided a generous tax incentive to have children and direct financial assistance and educational opportunities for all families, including single parents
- Raised taxes to pay for these programs
- Never have equated stem cell research with abortion, much less with murder, thereby making the anti-abortion position patently ridiculous
- Above all, they would have addressed the injustice of the growing gap between the superrich and everyone else and fought to raise the living standards of poor people. (Forty percent of all women seeking abortion live on $10,000 a year or less.)
01 12 / 2010
"A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you’ve committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let’s say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it’s morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics."
Sam Harris, on stem cell research. (via cocknbull)
Well put.
(via tanya77)
Orgasmic.
(via thecranium)
