Is a Fetus an Appendix?

Max B. Sawicky sawicky at bellatlantic.net
Wed Aug 18 01:15:03 PDT 1999


I promised I'd shut up on PEN-L, but not here, not just yet.

This post is too awful to ignore, not in its intentions, rhetoric, or logical coherence, but in its flinching from a basic moral issue. There's some kind of underlying philosophy here that I find really repulsive, though I'm not sufficiently informed to know the name of what it is I am quite sure I don't like. (No personal offense intended.)

I always read the periodic philsophical excursions from assorted parties which purport to transcend elementary questions about

morals, ethics, or whatever you'd like to call it, and never been the least persuaded. It all strikes me as an apparatus held in reserve to rationalize awful crimes, in the sincere interest of averting what are viewed as even greater crimes (i.e., stalin as an improvement over Russian feudalism, tho neither has explicitly come up in these threads). I should say I can't recall any association between CW and my perhaps overheated extrapolation of what I see below.

A few more direct responses:

From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at tsoft.com>

-------------

. . .

Abortion and infanticide are as old as pregnancy and birth. As far as I
>>>

mbs: If you are saying abortion = infanticide, then you have answered my question. A fetus is an infant, and abortion is murder. If you are not, then there seems little point in the statement. Slavery and much worse things are old too.


>>>
. . . It rarely occurs to anyone in these debates that they are enacting and reproducing power struggles between themselves and the institutions of authority that in the concrete, absolutely control them. They consider it a moral dilemma over choice. But the choice is not theirs to deliberate. It is always, already been decided by institutional authority.
>>>

mbs: Hard to see the sense in this. Clearly choices are in doubt, else there would be no cause to debate whether "choice" should be expanded or contracted. There is also some flavor of all our behavior is determined by forces beyond our control, in which there really is no point for things like this list. If this is not the meaning of the statement above, then there seems to be no meaning at all.


>>
I don't like Butler's approach to ideas and I loath her style, but in this case, much of what she has written in Psychic Lives, applies to this debate. That is, this debate reveals, displays, recapitulates the psychological dialectic between authority and its charges.

Consider that the Church and the State preempt all authority over the means and fate of human life in principle.>>

Meaning, for the sake of argument, but not really?


>> Such a presumption is their
universal founding declaration as institutions of power. With the development of a vast medical establishment (and its newer bio-tech brethren) which together assume dominion over the body, then we have the perfected means to exercise that institutional authority down to the molecular details of the living stuff itself. This is not to mention that simultaneously these means are also the vehicle of an absolute economic exploitation and a whole other dimension of oppression and control.

These are the horrors in my mind. These are the economic and political, the material dilemmas we should be going over.>>

mbs: These strike me as the elements of excess paranoia.


>> And, I might
add that, the moral theater we have been practicing in arguing over whether a fetus is a appendix or soul is obfuscating nonsense.
>>

mbs: Actually nobody, including you, has directly ventured a serious opinion on what a fetus is. The exception is Carrol, who says it is an appendix.


>>>
We really should know better by now.

Hopefully the slope of this debate, that is how it so easily falls into absurd conundrums like, is it appendix or soul, should create suspicion that these arguments are void of determination. The problems and their solutions lay elsewhere.
>>>

Nobody raised the issue of soul. That's deeper than necessary for me. I'd settle for animal, vegetable, or mineral.

This could all be settled very quickly if you would just admit that abortion is infanticide, and it is always justifiable if the infant in question has not been born yet because the mother's interest overrides that of the baby. Take away the word "always," and I'd agree with you.

mbs



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