Another Abortion Argument Crumbles Under The Weight Of Scrutiny

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
The more Harman speaks, the more warped her argument becomes:

I think the right way to look at it is that just, given the current state of the fetus, you know it's not having any experiences. There's nothing about its current state that would make it a member of the moral community. It's derivative of its future that it gets to have moral status. So it's really the future that endows moral status on it; and if we allow it to have this future, then we're allowing it to be the kind of thing that now would have moral status. So in aborting it, I don't think you're depriving it of something that it independently has.

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Every pro-abortion argument is wrapped around the same core idea — at what moment in time does a developing infant become a human with value, and thus, non-terminable? “Value,” however, is not an objective idea. As such, pro-abortion activists have tried to define "value" in numerous arbitrary ways.

The “viability” argument, for example, claims that an infant isn't a person until such a time as they can “physically survive outside the womb.” This developed attribute on the part of the infant transforms it into a human being with value. Why? Because they said so.

Harman’s philosophy is yet another developmental argument to which she has added her own wrinkle, not unlike “viability.” For Harman, a fetus isn't a human with “moral status” because it hasn't had life experience. The philosophy professor claims that only a fetus that is going to be allowed a “future” has “moral status,” and that if a woman plans on getting an abortion, the fetus does not have moral status because it will not be born, it will not grow up, and it will not gain experience.

Despite Harman’s personal spin, her argument is based on the same formula on which all other abortion arguments are based: An infant is human only after attaining (X). Of course, the definition of (X) is subjective. For some, (X) is physical “viability.” For others, (X) is the acquisition of (insert preferred stage of embryonic development). For others still, (X) is natural birth.

For Harman, (X) is “experience,” which, from the exchange she had with Franco and Michaelson, appears to mean events in which the child participates post-birth that lead to the development of a personality, traits, memories, skills, etc.


Another Abortion Argument Crumbles Under The Weight Of Scrutiny
 
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