Re: South Dakota Justifiable Homicide Bill Under Fire as Critics Say It Invites Murde
Slaves once weren't people either.
They were always people, and the evidence of that fact was never in credible dispute. The Confederates insisted otherwise because they were greedy, lazy scum whose entire economy depended on making other people work for them, but their laws showed that even they acknowledged this claim to be a lie - otherwise there would have been no point in making it a crime to teach slaves to read, and certainly no point in murdering any slave who tried. A fetus, on the other hand, is not even conscious. This is a matter of medical fact borne out by common sense and basic properties of neuronal density - something with a brain the size of a peanut is not a person to any more degree than a sprig is a tree. A grown, conscious dog is more of a person than a fetus.
A police K-9 is not a person, but if you kick one you are charged with assaulting a police officer.
You are not, however, charged with murder if you kill a police dog, because - whatever the wisdom of this view - a dog is deemed to be less of a person than a human being. I don't wish to understate the difficulty of such distinctions, but there is no difficulty at all - none at all - in saying that a fetus is not a person. A mouse is more self-aware than a fetus. Tell me you even hesitate to kill a mouse, and I'll take your position more seriously. Please understand, my position is not borne of callousness - I hesitate to kill insects, and sometimes choose to let them go because I appreciate all life - but I am capable of weighing the needs of living things, and I must ultimately say that women have the final say on their own bodies. If someone invents a technology that can remove a one-month fetus and keep it alive, and you're willing to pay for its survival and upbringing, I have no objection to laws being passed that substitute such a process in place of abortion, but in lieu of that you will not turn women's bodies into state incubators. It's that simple. Their rights are absolute, and the ones asserted by the anti-abortion community on the part of an unconscious developmental stage are at best the products of religious fantasy. Let me reiterate - you will not turn women into state incubators on behalf of your religion.
Corporation aren't persons either, but they have rights as persons just as the unborn have rights as persons.
Corporations have no such rights, regardless of what absurd privileges the conservatives on the Supreme Court have chosen to invent for their masters. And there is no such legal category of "the unborn" - any rights conferred thereon are an extension of the mother's rights alone. If a woman who lost a pregnancy due to an assault does not wish to press charges, none are filed. It is not murder - not morally, not rationally, not legally. Not at all.
SD is one state which authorizes the use of deadly force to stop a felony against your home. Surly we can all agree that a house is not a person.
The SD law is absurd, but I recognize its logic: Deadly force to prevent a crime against property. That cannot be used as a rationale for killing abortion doctors, because the "property" in question belongs to the women obtaining abortions.
This demonstrates that it doesn't have to be a person in order to be something worth protecting with lethal force.
But only things that actually belong to you. A part of a woman's body does not belong to other people, and certainly not to the state of South Dakota. Also understand that this intellectual debate only goes so far. I will assume, and request that you stipulate clearly, that you are not endorsing, recommending, or in any way attempting to rationalize taking the lives of abortion doctors. Real murders have already been committed by so-called "pro-life" groups and individuals who are activated by such arguments. Please make it explicit that this is entirely an intellectual exploration.
