Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 19:12:14 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Historicize the Fetus (was Re: M-TH: Britain's abortion row)


And now to Bob ...

>OK Rob. I think your Duh, have'nt got the slightest idea is honest, but at
>best naive. I would argue that this stuff is very much connected to
>religion, "Mary, mother of god" stuff..A modern day left over which has
>taken some rather bizaar forms..

I predicted I'd get stuff like this.  My position is a variety of humanism,
I'd have thought.  No more and no less.  I suppose my definition of 'human'
is at issue.

>Then maybe again it ain't religion driving this debate. Maybe its a deep
>underlying fear of the males on this list seeing their instrument of
>reproduction being taken out of their control.. Perhaps the "holy father"
>role is much deeper embedded in the boys connected to the sexual feeling of
>being impodent! Dr. Frued where are you? You are needed on this list!

What you're being is impudent.  As the owner of a regulation-issue
instrument of reproduction, I've never entertained the notion it afforded
me control over reproduction at all.  In my personal take on life, and in
my imagined future, only the owners of wombs may ultimately decide if
conception may be attempted or risked, and with whom.  Being a boy grants
me a freedom (no womb) and imposes on me a constraint (no womb).  That's
nature as I see it.

>You know the old growing up and  having a "family" stuff which is embedded
>in both sexes in very very different ways..I will not come out and say that
>this is so so blatantly but I certainly get the feeling that our very clever
>arguers on the list certainly are being motivated by something very far from
>any kind of communist reason..

I agree.  You shouldn't come out and say this blatantly

>Just goes to show you by the way that all the textbooks in the world can not
>change the material and ideological foundations of this society. Only a
>Leninist party with a powerful communist womens movement are going to be
>able to transcend and destroy all forms of oppression of the female half of
>our common class.

The class is objectively becoming a common one, I think - with the
proletarianisation of women.  I just happen to think one's sex may have a
hand in determining the nature of some of one's freedoms and constraints.

>In fact I would go even futher and say that Rob's line if I understand it
>correctly is that women and there sexuality have no stake at all in Rob's
>future society. It is despite all the words the same as usual even though
>Rob admits it is wrong on principle.

Where do I say I am wrong in principle?

>So to Rob I say what good is a
>principle if another higher principle in this case the question mark of a
>fetus becomes so profound to you without ant serious ideological
>clarification which you even admit.

If a 13-week-old human foetus is a person, there can be no higher
principle.  There can be tortuous, perhaps insoluble, conflicting goods,
but some of those will survive any social revolution, I'm sure.

I'm sure Carrol has closely watched ultrasound screens too (unless he
fathered his children before the technology came along).  How he can
honestly say he sees the moral equivalent of waste tissue, I don't know.  I
see a sentient human being, who chooses its positions, chooses whether to
suck its thumb or not, and reacts to pressure on mum's tummy (seemingly
more actively and reactively than I do when I'm asleep).  It's not even an
argument from potential for me.  Only a human foetus can become what the
rest of this list chooses to call a person.  Because that's what it already
is.  A person who requires certain conditions to live (our problem being
that these conditions constitute another person), probably a person who
doesn't know there are other people yet, but one who recognises a face when
it gets to see one.

Just the real possibility that this might be the case seems to me of some
importance.

>Joshie's question deserves and honest answer on the sudden profound interest
>found in the fetus not only by society but on this list. Until then the
>defenders of the "holy" fetus stand only on a "marxist" interpetation
>adapted to the position of the church and state who see in this question
>profound and deep moral issues to lord it over women..And naturally being
>raised in this society with its moral, material and social values probably
>we all need a good couch to lie on and do a bit of fantiscising for the
>nearest nut doctor. Unfortunately there ain't any around in Frueds class
>these days..

I dare say we all need that couch, Bob (although I've less faith in Freud
than you profess).  But I don't think I'm evincing any greater a need for
one than anybody else.  And by the way, any religion in my background has
always been confined to background noise.  Had I been conscious of it
impinging on me, I'd have rejected it.  I've always been a secular
humanist, and now I think I might be a marxist secular humanist.

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)

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