I couldn’t agree more (I always wanted to win the cartoon caption contest, which I suppose I can still enter online).

In the meantime, folks here might also enjoy our blog’s take on the same pathetic post:

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2012/10/the_sillyclevers_on_the_subjec.html

Michael Currie,

Suppose a woman is in danger of death if she continues her pregnancy (as in the famous Phoenix abortion case). One may be unsure whether the embryo or fetus counts as a person, but one can be virtually certain the pregnant mother is a person. How can there be an argument against saving the one you know is a person? Isn’t that preferable to “erring on the side of life” and letting the mother die along with the unborn child?

In your backyard scenario, note that there is absolutely nothing at stake if you “err on the side of life.” There is absolutely no reason not to refrain from shooting until you are certain no one is in danger. But if you “err on the side of life,” say by not conducting embryonic stem cell research, you may be losing the chance to cure something like Parkinson’s disease.

Also, for some people who may not believe that personhood begins at conception, the question is where to draw the line. In that case, it is easy to err on the side of life by drawing the line well to the early side of pregnancy.

@David Nickol, that’s not correct, especially in light of your appeal to the history of this question. The thoughts of Aquinas on this matter, for example (a favorite reference of Nancy Pelosi), most certainly relate to whether the embryo/fetus was human – whether it was actually just a being with a more limited kind of form. At the least your statement is too broad. It was indeed unclear, in the medieval period and earlier, what sort of a being this thing was: is it a more primitive kind of organism that then becomes human later on? How can a rational form be informing a body that doesn’t have the right kind of organization for it? Must there not be a succession of forms to go with the succession of the kind of material organization? The relevance of more modern embryology is that there’s no question that this is a human thing (to leave it maximally vague) – distinctively human structure is there from the get-go.

But you are also conflating two issues when you link the personhood/consciousness idea to your version of the history: the contemporary appeal to personhood (defined in terms of consciousness or something like that) is not at all the same as the question of whether the embryo/fetus is a human individual in its own right. If you look at the classic pro-abortion articles that take that line (Michael Tooley, Mary Anne Warren, for example) they have nothing to do with whether the fetus/embryo/unborn child is an individual human. They presume (correctly) that it is an individual of the human species, and they then simply argue that that isn’t sufficient: it has to meet this functional bar to qualify as a person.

What exactly is the point of this comment? Is there some reason a writer feels compelled to mock a commenter? Why not respond to hte substance of the comment? Has blogging just become a place to vent?