Link round-up

Edited to add: apparently the story about Homeland Security hassling the college student is a hoax. *sigh*

I have a big pile of wood, a load of nails, and some concrete lying around. I want a house.
An architect just drew me up a blueprint – do I have a house yet? No? Well you just described conception. The DNA has been laid down (the blueprint), but not too much has been built.
I just bought the land and cleared it – house yet? There’s your implantation.
Laid the foundation? Put up the rafters? Rigged the electricity? Added a roof? At what point does this thing become a house?
Why is it that most people have no problem saying “The blueprint isn’t a house, the thing you sleep in at the end is, and there’s really no hard line in between,” but can’t handle that idea with human gestation?
It’s a continuum. The fertilized egg is not a baby. The screaming thing that comes out nine months later is. Everything in between is somewhere in between, with denials of human status getting more and more dicey as you get closer to the end point. But claiming that a single cell with unique DNA deserves equal status as a fully functioning human is (to me at least) demeaning to the fully functioning human you’re proposing to indenture to produce it. Building the darn thing is dangerous. I nearly died in my second pregnancy and I’m a young healthy middle-class woman with no health problems. It’s not a trivial issue, this whole pregnancy thing.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.