Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 23:23:42 +1100 From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au> Subject: Re: M-TH: Britain's abortion row Well, I did try to stay out of this one. I hesitate to add my own take on this - debates like this might get particularly close to some people's emotions. And anyway, Yoshie has heard it all before. But ... As some of you may remember, I'm instinctively a pro-lifer (ultrasounds 'll do that to ya - I know sentience when I see it, Yoshie, and I hold it's already there at 13 weeks - which is close enough to subjectivity to do me, James). Now, you may accuse me of all those romantic residuals that need pushing aside by the tide of proletarian enlightenment, but I feel at least that my position can be dissociated from the televangelists. I shan't repeat at length the difference between sex (half of us have wombs and half don't) and gender (the historically contingent, which imposes disproportionate responsibility and cost by way of 'motherhood'). But I point to it so that abortion too can be historically conceptualised. Pregnancy in a world where women cop a load of responsibility, moral pressure,twenty years' hard labour, and the end of all hopes of alternative self-fulfillment, is, I'd argue, a very different thing than pregnancy in a more enlightened world, where only the physical facts impose themselves - in other words, where the 'motherhood' on the part of a single anointed ceases either at child-birth or, perhaps, at weaning. Abortion in the former case is, to me, the killing of one by all. In the latter - well, we can talk about that if you want to. And I can't speak for Boddhi, but I reckon men and women are indeed morally bound (and equally so) not to risk conception if a child is not wanted. Making love, or getting off, does not require shagging (we live in a shag-obsessed culture). This ain't prudery, the menu of alternatives is extensive: I think Woody Allen once said something like 'sex is only dirty if it's done properly'. Here endeth the sex education lecture. Like Justin says, it's philosophically difficult - and I realise all I've done is add a few more questions to the plethora already posed here. Cheers, Rob. ************************************************************************ Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia. Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH) Fax: 02-6201 5119 ************************************************************************ 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill) "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital." (Karl Marx) ************************************************************************ --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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