Wednesday 27 February 2008

Eggs are people too? Really?

According to a former presidential front-runner, this below is a human being:

                                                         human-reproduction-egg1

Let me be more specific: according to Mike Huckabee, this  fertilised human egg you see before you is in reality an actual human being that deserves full constitutional protection "guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law." 

Just to repeat: he insists there should be rights guaranteed to "equality of justice" ... to "due process of law" ... to life, liberty and the pursuit to property and happiness ... for eggs.   That's like confusing an acorn with an oak, caviar with sturgeon, and a car wrecker's yard with a fleet of automobiles.  Talk about confusing a potential with an actual.

No wonder the Denver Post derisively dubbed the proposal before the Colorado senate as the "egg as person" amendment. [Hat tip, you know who.]  This is not "pro-life," it's pro-idiocy.  Eggs are people, evolution is a myth ... next thing you know he'll be telling us the world is only six-thousand years old and the Pharoahs were all dinosaur farmers

What does it actually mean to grant "full constitutional protection" to an egg?  To something that is merely a 'potential'?  What it would do is to obliterate the rights of actual, living human beings.  As Ayn Rand observes, "by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."

The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals. For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone's benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings.

Looks like Republican voters have saved us by a narrow margin from having a genuine fruit loop having the chance to carry the nuclear football.  Bless them.  ;^)

UPDATE: Not that the choices without the nutbar are any better.  On the question of which of the two main presidential candidate "will pose the more far-reaching threat to individual liberty," Robert Bidinotto puts the choices thus:

1. Barack Obama, who will put forth a sweeping leftist agenda domestically, fill the courts and bureaucracies with leftists, and retire from the War on Terrorism abroad -- assuming Congress will let him have his way, or
2. John McCain, who will continue the War on Terrorism abroad -- to the extent Congress permits it -- but who will hand over the U.S. economy to the environmentalists and anti-business regulators domestically, while committing the formerly pro-capitalist Republican Party to "progressive" statism?

Talk about Tweedledum and Tweedledumbarse.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

There has been some humorous comment about this around the traps - even though it's not funny.

The medieval view was that the sperm contained tiny homunculi and that all the woman offered was a place for them to grow bigger. In a way I wish we still thought that way, because then it would be the testicles which would have to be inspected for possibly dead Americans

Also the issue of non-citizen eggs and embryos. Given the wingnut anti-immigrant stance, once born the baby would be immediately stripped of its 'rights' and deported. Gotta love the Right.

Anonymous said...

That egg will have trouble finding an appropriatly sized gun to exercise its 2nd amendment rights. I also doubt it will make much use of the 1st amendment rights.

Anonymous said...

All about power isn't it?

That's you 40 years ago, however with 40 years of development under your belt you can safely define such an entity as a "non-person".

Peter Singer has been called a nutter here recently and I agree.
However, does he not define a "person" as an entity that can fend for itself.
Does he not support infanticide?

If the pictured zygote can not defend or support itself as neither can a new-born is it possible you find yourself in the same company as Singer?
======================

It's easy to argue non-person status at the microscopic level but could you please identify the point where "personhood" is awarded to a multicellular organism.

Berend de Boer said...

Or look here. This baby was, just a few seconds ago, not worthy of the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law. But could be killed at whim.

Because killing babies while in the womb is progress you know.

Andrew B said...

There is something you haven't grasped about a baby in a whom Berend, something upon which the argument hangs.

Whose womb?

We always say we're not right-wingers because we don't wish to nationalise persons. You want to nationalise the mother and make her carry on as an incubator.

And for what would you pursue this nationalisation? All for the sake of something that has not meaningfully begun the process of conceptualisation (which we maintain is the basis of Man's Rights).

Andrew B said...

Oh fuck - I meant womb, not whom. D'oh!

Anonymous said...

In other news some Canadian doctors are refusing to give unmarried women cervical smears. Conservative New Brunswick has a shortage of doctors so women have difficulty changing their physician.

Religious morality police would rather see women die. Faith-motivated stupidity is borne of a fundamental fear and hatred of female sexuality.

But tell us again how terrible Islam is...

Berend de Boer said...

How nice Andrew. Because my kids live in MY house, I can kill them at will?

Rebel Radius said...

The day that a zygote (which I consider a parasite because it relies on a host), has precedence over the rights of the host, then the host is a slave and the zygote the master.

Reason is sacrificed to the whims of the moralists who speak for the zygote which has no voice or brain and possess zero ethics or values and is nothing but a mere leech.

(sounds like something from Atlas Shrugged)

Anonymous said...

Because my kids live in MY house, I can kill them at will?

Do you even realise how absurd and just dumb that sounds?

No kid that lives in my house has ever been killed. In fact no kids that I know have ever been aborted.

Anyone trying to legislate "when life begins" is most certainly attempting to impose their philosophical belief onto others.

An egg is not a person.

Peter Cresswell said...

"Because my kids live in MY house, I can kill them at will?"

No. But you can scramble whatever eggs you find there -- with the owners' permission, of course.

Anonymous said...

Berend

A potential is not an actual.

LGM

MandM said...

Interesting

Actually empirical evidence shows us that infants are only potential people. In terms of the functions of higher consciousness infants have less actual personhood than cows or pigs.

Moreover a newborn infant lives in my house, eats my, food, etc.

So, seeing the property rights of an actual person take predence over the rights of a potential person I take it all the trendy Libz in here support infanticide and infant exposure.

The other arguments in here also suggest this conclusion as well : If we can’t have people imposing their belief about when life begins on others, then we can’t have people imposing their belief that life begins before infancy on others.

And just like a fetus or embryo an infant is going to have a hard time exercising its second amendment rights ( a baby can hardly use a gun competently) and certainly won’t be able to exercise its first amended rights (seeing it can’t speak).

Who was it who said something about having to check your premises if your conclusions were problematic. Until then I look forward to the baby killing plank in the next Libertarian manifesto.