Seth's politics

[Sethomas]

Why make the exception for when the mother's life is endangered? It's not like we would condone bombing a village to contain an epidemic, even if it would save more lives in the long run.

Well, I'm not saying that someone would HAVE to sacrifice their child for the sake of their own lives, but from a utilitarian perspective it's just one life over another. I don't think it's the State's right to declare what lives are worth more than others. Historically mothers died for their children with chilling regularity, but also historically they didn't have the choice--it was either die by surgery and have a child or die by complications and see two deaths.

What do you consider the moral status of the fertilized egg? Is it a 'potential' human life or already a human life? Do you oppose morning after pills/embryonic stem cell research?

I avoided the question of morning after pills because my views on the subject are, I confess, murky and metaphysical. I consider the fertilized egg a human life, but from a religious perspective only God has the prescience to know whether or not it's has a soul. The reason I don't simply equate the morning after pill with abortion at the religious level is that such a high percent of zygotes are destroyed naturally by their phase in the menstrual cycle in the same manner as the hormone overdose incurs.

So, even though I believe life begins at conception, I'd say that life shouldn't be defined by the State until it has established its viability in the womb. I'm sure you know better than I do when that lines is crossed, I've never taken an embryonic development class. My point is that this is indeed very early in pregnancy, my guess is maybe a week? At any rate, it's in most cases long prior to the present legal allowance for abortion.

As for embryonic stem cell research, if babies are going to be aborted they may as well serve some purpose in the long run. However, the corruption I see in the system is that there has been a very lucrative business for abortion clinics to sell the remains to laboratories, which violates my principle that abortion clinics should be economically neutral.

If we want to be counterfactual, obviously if abortion were banned at present I wouldn't support embryonic stem cell research. I think that there's reason to be optimistic that, by the time (if and when) abortion becomes illegal, technology will be sufficient that we may obtain viable stem cells from other sources.