Saturday, February 4, 2012

some possible key terms and questions worthy of consideration


Stephen Wan's suggestions to study some potentially relevant key terms and situations:

(1) Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness discusses about her concept of and opinion on:
-sacrifice?
-hierarchy of rational values
-selfless love?
-disinterested love?
-life the source of all values?
-situations such as emergencies

(2) Other than insisting on "right" to mother and/or to the foetus, what else and what other perspectives may be considered?
-choice only? whose choice prevails? private only?
-one's life, who owns?
-a foetus' life, who owns?
-should owner dominate and have final say without any constraint?
-what about if the foetus should be the owner but a silent owner at the same time who never can resist any violence? Then who decides? Should a distressed owner be free to "kick-away" a temporarily deaf, dumb and blind tenant (even if we take up Judith Thomson's owner-tenant analogy)?

(3) Death is a dead end without recovery. If in court, capital punishment (i.e. death penalty) can never be imposed on any murder defendant should there be any reasonable doubt, why then we should volunteer to kill helpless and crime free foetus by encouraging and accepting abortion when most people (men and women) still find a lot of doubt about such killing (capital punishment or death penalty on the foetus)?

(4) Is a foetus an attacker assaulting a mother? If not, how to come up with justification of mother's "self-defence"? If only the pregant mother finds the foetus irritating as a nuisance, the mother should seek counselling advice and help from social welfare department, rather than seeking assistance to kill and remove the life of the foetus. It should perhaps be the foetus to look for "self-defence", not the mother.

(5) A foetus may be a deformed foetus absolutely without potentially healthy and conscious development, and some may endanger the life of the pregnant mothers at the same time. Then such foetus becomes very much like a tumor or cancerous organ which must be removed by surgical operation at once. Then it should be classified as emergency surgical operation and probably should not be classified as abortion.

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