If you’re Singerian about “personhood” will even the latest video perturb you?

Last updated on: January 22, 2016 at 8:10 am by Jane the Actuary

If you’re Singerian about “personhood” will even the latest video perturb you? 2016-01-22T08:10:32-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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If you’ve been following any of the major conservative news sites or blogs (but not the newspapers who have decided there’s nothing newsworthy), or have an equivalent twitter feed, you’ve seen that the Center for Medical Progress has released its latest video, this time not a hidden camera but an interview with a defector, if you will, from StemExpress. It’s dreadful, gruesome — harvesting organs from a child delivered intact and with a beating heart. Here’s a link to the National Review, and to The Federalist.

Now, as a refresher, Peter Singer is the “ethicist” who is most vocal and open about the belief that until a child has reached that stage of development where he begins to understand something about the world — as he puts it, they must possess “rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness” (see my post from mid-July for more) that child is not a “person” and there’s nothing ethically wrong with killing him, even if our society for the moment happens to criminalize such killing if it happens after birth.

Seen in this way, there’s nothing ethically wrong with what’s going on at Planned Parenthood. These unborn children have the moral worth of, perhaps, a dog or cat, and the apparent gruesomeness of what goes on at abortion clinics shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that there’s something ethically wrong with what’s happening there, in the same way as some forms of research on lab animals, even “human-looking” animals like chimps, might be “gross” but help provide cures.

So:

If you’re convinced of this, will CMP videos shake you, unsettle you, lead you to rethink your position? Or do you repeat to yourself, “a nonperson’s a nonperson, no matter how big” over and over again, if you start to have doubts?

And — how many prochoicers and Planned Parenthood supporters believe this? How many believe “by [my own] definition a fetus has no moral worth until [fill in the blank], so this is perfectly fine”? And how many are, instead, simply reluctant to think too hard about the matter because, in their minds, they see the impact of an unplanned pregnancy on a woman as so devastating that there simply must be a way out? (See fellow blogger Michael Novak for a reflection here.)

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