Several weeks ago The Economist had an issue titled "Gendercide."
The lead article documented the increasing practice of selectively killing girl children, mostly through abortion. EO recently ran across another report that indicated the practice of selective abortion is illegal in India, where they are "missing" up to 10 million girl children as a result of deeply rooted cultural antipathy toward girl children that causes a disproportionate number of girl-child abortions.
Here's the difficulty: How can something be "Gendercide" if it doesn't involve killing people?
If abortion does not involve killing another human being, and simply involves making a choice about your own body, then how is it wrong to choose to surgically remove one type of "tissue" you don't like, and leave alone another type of "tissue" you prefer?
I think if you want to deplore "Gendercide" it has to be a "cide" of some sort, first, like "Infanticide" or "Homicide" or "Genocide." Otherwise, the moral position seems incoherent. If girls have a right to life, it must be because they are human, not because they are girls. "Girlness" doesn't have any meaning apart from an underlying humanity.
And if baby girls are human, then so are baby boys. Right?
And we shouldn't be killing any of them. Right?
Just checking the logic. Let me know if I've missed something.
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Yea, I percieve that the only "point" you may have missed is: the presumption that logic had any relevance to the writer's position. Again, I maintain that the majority of adults living today (and by default therefore, their children),have banished the use of logic to mathematicians and engineers. That "majority" mindset has accepted as fact the notion that, "logic has no place in the human experience, except when building or fixing things, since it is not warm and fuzzy enough" Case in point: Mr. Spock of "Star Trek" fame. He was most favorably recieved when he got off his "logical high horse" and forayed into emotional decision making.
ReplyDeleteThis is somewhat similar to a story I heard about an emotionaly disturbed boy, who killed his dad's pregnant girlfriend. The media was raving that the boy had actually taken two lives
ReplyDelete...
Except that an unborn child isn't alive right?
The problem with most people is not so much their neglect of logic, it's that fact that it's not popular to think. If people can get away with not thinking about things, they will. That's even the basis of abortion. Our country couldn't let the life of an unborn child be ended when we guaruntee "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", so the courts said that said life does not exist and abortion is justified, mainly because abortion seems like a convenient answer to our problems. Now, clinics can perform abortions without thinking about moral implications, because the court already did that. So why should they bother questioning things when the mighty courts already questioned them?
This leaves us people who take the time to think about things to look on helplessly.