Comment on Uncle Jerry's post

Uncle Jerry - As a law student who gets into these discussions regularly in classes and among my diversely opinionated acquaintances, and someone who reads a lot about the issue in general, I'd agree with my father's clarification about the present-day debate over when life begins.

As my Dad said, mainstream philosophers' understandings and Church teaching on the beginning of life has advanced beyond Aquinas, who wrote in the 1200s when virtually nothing scientific was known about the biological development of the human organism. All they could rely on then was the mother's perception of the "quickening" of the baby to know life had begun. Now, science is very clear on the matter of the beginning of a unique human organism at fertilization, though people continue to debate the moment when human personhood begins. Some, like Peter Singer at Princeton, argue that personhood doesn't begin until an infant matures enough to be able to reason, and thus they can justify infanticide. [ Incidentally, I've heard it said that if we're not persons if we can't exercise reason, and it's justifiable to kill non-persons, human beings ages 14-18 would quickly become an endangered species ... I never would've made it this far...]

It may well be that it's not representative of your position on this, Uncle Jerry, but I'm pretty certain the vocal majority of the pro-choice movement today is not promoting an individual's choice about whether or not to consider the fetus a human being (and presuming the choice to view the fetus as a non-human being, inferring the freedom to choose to "interrupt" its development before it becomes a full-fledged person with human rights warranting societal protection). Rather, faced with incontrovertible scientific evidence about the beginning of human life, the woman's choice that pro-choicers advocate is whether or not to continue to be responsible for the care, before and after birth, of another human being who has imposed physically, emotionally, economically on the woman's life in a way she did not plan.

That's my take on the subject of the controversy. I swear I tried to be objective.