Foetal position

re: "Life is precious" (BP, PostBag, October 10, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

In his honest letter "Life is precious" (PostBag, Oct. 10), Ye Olde Theologian rightly refrains from claiming that human life is sacred in some way that other life is not. Since every living animal we kill to turn into tasty morsels of flesh was, until we killed it, at least as sentient as any human foetus at any point in a pregnancy, we must assume that Ye Olde Theologian is as radically opposed to the eating of meat from slaughtered animals as he is to abortion.

As for the argument from potential combined with the golden rule that we "do unto others as we would them do unto us," I can assure Ye Olde Theologian with absolute confidence that had any of us been aborted, we would not now or at any other time be troubled in the least by that previous event that precluded any such concern before it ever became a possibility. That a pile of iron ore fresh dug from the ground has the potential to become the body of a Rolls Royce is not a good reason to value it as we would an actual Rolls Royce body.

It is certainly true that "none of us have complete control over our own bodies." In fact, if the laws of science, known or unknown, are as true as the mounting evidence ever more totally confirms, none of have any more control of our bodies, including our brains and the minds that the physics and chemistry of our brains generate, than does an autonomous car have control of itself. But that limited level of control is enough for us to make decisions, to have preferences, plans and relationships, and thus to be persons with the right to determine for ourselves how we live our own lives save that we may not violate the equal rights of other persons.

And this is the flaw in Ye Olde Theologian's primary argument. A human foetus is not a person. It is not the unqualified case that life is sacred. It is not even the case that human life that is sacred: being human means merely having the 46 chromosomes that chemically define a living being as member of our species. If the adjective "sacred" is to have any meaning beyond mere fantasy of the murkiest mystery, it is that there is something very special about being a person. If anything is, it is the lives of actual, living persons that are sacred.

No foetus ever has any characteristic that define a living being as a person: it cannot reason; it does not have social bonds; it does not decide things; it does not have preferences; nor does it reason or make plans. There can, therefore, be no moral grounds against abortion. The dictates of despotic gods, whose primary commandment is absolute intolerance of dissent, as the Bible's Exodus 20:3 bluntly puts it: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," are never moral reasons at all, merely unreasoning orders given to human playthings.

 Felix Qui
 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

 
The text as edited was published in PostBag on October 12, 2021, under the title "Foetal position" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2196411/a-simple-test