Sentiency is key

re: "Life is precious" (BP, PostBag, October 21, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

In his letter, Paul asks the right questions. They are also the difficult questions. If a human being is not in fact a person, either because it has never reached that point in development, or because something has happened to remove the personhood that had once obtained, then it cannot be murder to kill that person. If those responsible for the human being who is not a person decide it is in everyone's (every person's) best interests to painlessly end the life of the human who is not a person, how could that be wrong? It might be emotionally difficult. We might not wish to do it. We might very much wish that the human being were still a person who could make such decisions for themselves, thereby relieving us of the burden of deciding. But those wishes are not the case. Such feelings show that we are human persons with emotional attachments to other members of our species; they do not show that there is any weakness in the reasoning as to what is the best course of action.

Paul points out that "more medical evidence is coming out showing that the unborn child can feel." This is true, but Paul is dishonest. The evidence shows that the foetus can feel pain or has senses such as touch and hearing from an early point in development, as do the foetuses of rabbits, sheep and goats. Paul's willful vagueness is because the evidence for any characteristic of a person remains zero.

The Texas law that Paul cites is also dishonest. When signing it into law, Texas Governor Greg Abbott exposed the faith-based motive for the ban when be proclaimed that, “Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion”: a blatant falsehood.

If merely having a heartbeat, more accurately, a detectable murmur in the gestational sac, is evidence of being a person, then there can be no doubt whatsoever that every pig, cow, chicken or fish with a strongly beating heart that we kill to turn into a tasty meal is every bit equally a person and fully deserving of the same legal protection as the six-week old human foetuses of Texas. If that sounds absurd, it is because it is. The absurdity derives from the dishonest falsehood that equates a human foetus with a person; that dishonesty proclaims a foetus to already be a child.

There is no slippery slope that so worries Paul. Such talk of  slippery slopes is a scare tactic by those who have no sound reasons to back up their unreasoning assault on the rights of actual human persons. Society is, on the contrary, coming to care more about both actual human persons and also about the suffering of sentient living beings that are not persons.  That is why capital punishment is on the way out, albeit it not in Texas, which has few qualms about killing actual human persons. That is why animal lives are being increasing protected by legislation to prevent abuse and suffering on factory farms. That is why we are encouraged to put our suffering pets and livestock out of their misery with a quick, painless death. That is why the world has taken such strenuous steps to eradicate polio, to help those suffering natural disasters, and to rapidly develop vaccines against Covid in record breaking time.

The lives of all sentient animals matter. The lives of actual persons matter the most. Respecting the right to legal abortion on request gives greater respect to the lives of human persons.

 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 23, 2021, under the title "Sentiency is key" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2202827/monks-be-good