Youngest person ever to testify before committee. I like it. So should everyone–it gives the voiceless a voice. It makes the invisible in our society visible. If we were talking about the homeless or people with disabilities or any other disenfranchaised group, everyone would be thrilled:
The video and heartbeat recording of a nine-week old foetus is expected to be used as ‘testimony’ today by a Christian pro-life group in support of an anti-abortion bill. The testimony will consist of projecting an ultrasound image of the pregnant woman’s uterus onto a screen in the Ohio courtroom. The image will also show the foetus’s heartbeat in colour.
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In reference to abortion I am continually struck by the words that refer to abortion as a ‘personal and private decision between a woman and her doctor’. Abortion is not a decision. It is the decision to terminate a pregnancy. It is neither personal nor impersonal, private or public. It is just the decision to terminate. It is good to get to the point of knowing what we are talking about. This ‘testimony’ by the youngest witness ever is one more moment wherein society is getting closer to actually talking about ‘abortion’.
I don’t care about the heart. It’s just a pump. A very good pump, I will give it that, but still a pump. This constant obsession the pro-life movement has with the heart is nothing but cheap emotional manipulation, exploiting a cultural attachment to an organ which really deserves no place in the debate.
Ooohhhhhhhhh Suricou, how you do miss the point. Almost Every Time. Do you have a cultural attachment to your own heart? Because the point here is–or should be–that its beating is a symbol, as it were (and doctors might even think it goes beyond the symbolic) of your life. It’s not a publicity stunt, it just beats. And so I can sit and type this. Sigh.
No, wait. Perhaps Suricou has a point. This little life is just as valuable when it’s a zygote, or an embryo as it is after we hear the heartbeat. There’s really no point in time, other than fertilization, when he or she ‘becomes’ something or someone else. Before fertilization there is an egg and a sperm. At fertilization those two things fuse together to become ONE entity – a totally new human being, starting out in life just like you and I did. And I ask you Suricou, at that point, if it’s not a human being just what is it?
Jeannie: I don’t think your test is ideal either, but it’s still better then watching the blood-pump.
I don’t know myself when would be a good time to recognise an organism as human for moral purposes, but do know which I would consider the wrong answers. Whatever the answer, it has to involve the brain in some way. All the qualities which make humans so different from all other animals have their origin in that organ.
Genes, interesting as they are, don’t actually do anything directly. They just contain the information to make the structures which are of interest.
Sounds to me like you have a sentimental, cultural attachment to the brain, Suricou.
If you’re going to get attached to an organ, might as well make it a good one. Better than a pump.
“Whatever the answer, it has to involve the brain in some way.”
What you are really referring to here is the human capacity for higher mental functions, or rationality. But this capacity does not have to be immediately exercisable for a human being to deserve full moral respect. Otherwise, we would all be in trouble when we get drunk, or fall asleep. Similar considerations apply to someone who is in a coma, or to someone who is at the earliest stages of his or her natural development.