Hastings BIOETHICSFORUM Comments on my Comments

The Hastings Report posted my entire response to Dr. Lindemann's opinion on the South Dakota legislation banning abortion except to save the life of the mother, along with her responses to me.

Please note, I don't equate women who don't want to be mothers with Ted Bundy (or Andrea Yates, although Dr. Lindemann did not comment on that possibility). I equate anyone who would kill another human being and justify it by redefining human beings according to their feelings and circumstances with Ted Bundy and a lot of other serial and/or mass killers of humans. (Can't call it "murder" because of the redefinition, above.)

I would like to read a discussion as to the difference between Andrea Yates' killing her infant and toddler - who weren't persons by so many modern ethicists' definitions - and a late term or even 2nd trimester abortion. (And then, we can move by increments back to fertilization.)

The older children could understand what was happening. They could experience fear of death and harm and relate it to their mother's actions and communicate their fears to her and others. However, in the eyes of so many ethicists and pain specialists, the younger children wouldn't have even been able to demonstrate pain as in "a subjective sensory and emotional experience that requires the presence of consciousness to permit recognition of a stimulus as unpleasant." (JAMA, quoted by me back in August, 2005.

It is time to recognize that when enough independent and widely separated observers make the same observations and note the same data, we come as close to "facts" as we're going to get. It is a fact that each individual life begins at the moment when there is a recognizible organism. Usually, that's when the sperm penetrates the zona pellucida and the zygote's metabolism initiates the processes leading up to mitosis. Sometimes in nature, the individual life is actually divided and twins, triplets or quadruplets develop, but their lives began at fertilization, too.

For those of you who clicked over here before I finished this correction, sorry for the ugly double posts. I'm a physician, not a techie. But I try and, as a result, I learn something new. Often.