Abortion Done Stale

Michael De Dora, at Massimo’s Rationally Speaking, makes these comments regarding abortion:

”Many will argue here that we are destroying “human life.” But as Peter Singer has pointed out, of course a fetus is human life – yet what does this do to clear up whether or not we have moral responsibilities for the object, or whether the object deserves rights? As a society, we don’t seem to generally feel concerned for the suffering or rights of other basic forms of human life – like the cells that encompass our entire body. Why is that? Because not all human life matters.”

Equating skin cells to human embryos? Well, embryos are just “objects” under Atheist reductionism

.”A person, or human being, at the very least has interests, and is usually conscious or sentient, aware of its surroundings. In turn, this person wants to be protected by rights from the state so that it can live out its life free of oppression from the state or from neighbors. But in just about every abortion performed in the U.S., the fetus isn’t conscious or sentient. So how can a fetus want freedom or rights? Even if we wanted to grant the fetus rights, why would we do so for an object which we have no reason to believe is part of our moral circle? In this vein, considering we have more moral obligation to the fully human mother than the fetus, there is no basis for society to preemptively grant the fetus rights in wanting to protect its freedom over the freedom of the mother.”

Our moral circle? Am I in their moral circle? Who is in their moral circle? Are you? I am fairly certain that I am not. And what are their morals, in their circle? OK, at least their morals-du-jour?

If morality and personhood stop at "being conscious" then killing an unconscious person is OK. Maybe even moral if you consider the overpopulation problem. Is sleep an unconscious state? Maybe so... Better sleep with an eye open; you are not a person when asleep.

For this Atheist, the morals reduce quickly to a) does the fetus feel pain? No: then it’s OK to kill it; b) Is the fetus sentient? No: then it’s OK to kill it: c) does the fetus have a right to pursue its life? Not if the mother doesn’t want it to: then definitely kill it – it’s the woman’s Right to kill her offspring, only we need to determine the outer limits of that right, and the outer limits are definitely debatable.

“Clearly, religious believers care about abortion, and as political philosopher David Miller points out in "Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction," these concerns cannot be dismissed considering how widely they are held. But secularists care, too. So we’re all in the public square together. This is not a problem; the problem is figuring out how to go forth from there. A debate needs to be had, but how will it be carried out? In this specific case, do we respond to these people with the women’s rights argument, or do we ask them to substantiate their beliefs about the soul and personhood first? I think we will find the latter is the necessary route. And in asking questions, and making the moral and legal case, we must still keep our eyes on the moral issue of women's access abortion.”
[Emphasis Added]

The quick response is to question whether the author can substantiate his own personhood, if I am in charge of the definition. But, of course, I will not be allowed to make that determination. We are not really “all in the public square together”; the politics of the past year has clearly shown that. Who, then, will establish the benchmark for personhood? Who can be trusted to decree my status as a living being with value? Should I trust a committee of Atheists with that choice, say a Committee of Public Safety as in post-revolutionary France, under Rousseauan Robespierre? Or a modern Nietzsche, Comte, or Lenin? Should I allow Peter Singer or Massimo Pigliucci or Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens to determine whether or not I am a person? Or even one of the Emmanuel brothers currently in powerful positions in the U.S. government? If that doesn’t raise the hair on your neck, what would?

As with historical Atheists, personhood is not the real issue: it is a red herring, a deflection from actual issues. When it comes to denying the right to live, Atheists have always cheerfully derived algorithms for determining who has that right and who does not. Entire cultures have been annihilated under such algorithms; estimates now of 250,000,000 or more died under such Atheist algorithms in the past 100 years alone. Yet today’s Atheists do not shy from the task, they embrace it publicly and enthusiastically. New Man humanism lives on.

So it becomes clear that the Atheist/Secularist/Materialist will be the one to determine the qualifications of the individual to secure and maintain life, at least if their rules come to dominate. And they have come to dominate in the arena of abortion and other victimology indulgences.

The next question becomes that of criterion. Can personhood be empirically measured, in terms of length, width, height, weight, temperature, energy redistribution, quantum field disturbance? Personhood is a metaphysical construct, not an empirical entity. It is therefore deniable under Materialist myopia. So there can be any number of definitions, including complete denial that personhood exists at all, along with self, consciousness, sentience and human exceptionalism. Which definition to choose, in actuality then, becomes one of convenience. What do we want to accomplish, and what definition can we choose that fits that objective? Atheist Consequentialism at work.

This presents the entire question of personhood as being ancillary to political goals well beyond the issue of abortion. Abortion, like racism, is a tool to be used toward larger objectives, such as victimology, in this case portraying the woman as the victim of the fetus, certainly not the personal ownership of sexual mismanagement, or dereliction of personal responsibility. And victimology is one of the primary tools of the Atheist Left, designed to capture entire demographics in a mire of emotional dependency and personal weakness.

Abortion is just one more step in the direction of humanist management of the herds of mankind. Personhood could well be redefined tomorrow, if the Consequentialist objectives require it to be so; it has been agilely redefined as Consequentialism required in the past. Denial of personhood at point A in human development is congruent with denial at point B, whenever it is convenient to make the change.

It is always beneficial to remember one feature of Atheist/Secularist/Materialism: there is no Truth, so therefore there are also no lies.