Yet another weird SF fan


I'm a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan. Common sense? What's that?

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Yet another weird SF fan
 

Sunday, November 06, 2005

A Common Excuse for Tolerating Abortion

One of the most frequently-mentioned excuses for tolerating abortion is that a large percentage of early embryos are lost (an example can be seen in a comment on this post). That might be true at the present, but in the future we can expect pregnancies to be more reliable. Two thirds of the first three hundred billion hominid conceptions might have been lost but that will be an insignificant percentage once the population gets into the quintillions.

3 Comments:

Blogger JesseM said...

I was the one who made that comment, and it wasn't meant to be an "excuse" for supporting abortion, in fact I made it quite clear that I thought the question of what is "natural" biologically was not relevant to the moral question. It was you who seemed to argue that biological "normality" was relevant, in your comment "but an early fetus is a time slice of four dimensional object which normally has a brain"--my own comment was explaining why I disagreed. I'd be up for continuing that discussion if you would, either in the comments to that post or the comments to this one.

5:23 PM  
Blogger JesseM said...

(to clarify, I brought up the fact that 2/3 of all pregnancies terminate naturally to show why it would be inconsistent for pro-lifers to justify their position on the basis of what is biologically 'normal')

5:57 PM  
Blogger Joseph said...

This reminds me that I haven't been posting enough about SF. (I've become sidetracked with this political stuff.) I suppose I should post more on topics such as "what is normal" (complete with references to alternate universes)...

1:34 AM  

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