Smoking

There is a section of the religious community that believes that contraception using the pill is abortion, because it hasn’t yet been proven that it is impossible for the pill to block implantation of a fertilized egg. These people want the pill to be banned, therefore, along with all other abortion techniques. Now it looks like they’ll have to add smoking to their banned list of abortifacients. I’m happy to see smoking banned (except when I’m in a libertarian frame of mind), but I suspect this would be something of a hard sell.

This entry was written by Paul, posted on November 27, 2006 at 10:52 am, filed under Uncategorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

4 Comments

  1. Colonel Nikolai
    Posted November 28, 2006 at 3:00 am | Permalink

    The same argument could be used to say that since a man emits approximately 3,000,000 sperm during ejaculation, then perhaps a line of 3,000,000 women should be lined up to ensure that all possible conceptions could occurr whenever two people get it on. And other sorts of crazy stuff.

  2. Paul
    Posted November 28, 2006 at 7:18 am | Permalink

    I think the ‘magic point’ for such people comes at fertilization, so what you’re saying is a bit of a stretch. But only a bit, because the people who think that the pill=abortion often have this ‘quiverfull’ idea that we (or rather, they) should be having as many children as possible. Within the sanctity of marriage, of course.

  3. Colonel Nikolai
    Posted November 28, 2006 at 3:15 pm | Permalink

    Well, see the logic is a bit loose. Fertilization is not the point that a fetus becomes a human being in any empirical sense. We do not get our first brain neuron until the 42nd day of incubation, for instance. And one brain neuron hardly makes for the next Albert Einstein. A fetus, however, is definitely, provably a _potential_ human being. But as potential human beings go, the same argument could be said of sperm and egg, therefore my argument seems pretty sound if we’re talking about _potential_ human beings. By the way, I think I’m sanctioning state-sponsored rape with this line of thinking, too.

  4. Paul
    Posted November 28, 2006 at 3:54 pm | Permalink

    It’s an interesting topic, because there isn’t really a clear line, though so many people argue that their view is exactly that. For example, I know that the 4 year old climbing on me at the moment is a full human being, and I know that a sperm and an egg isn’t. Somewhere between there and here he switched to being a person, but I don’t know where. I’m pretty convinced that implantation is just as important as fertilization in the process, but even then they’re still not really ‘a person’.

    I guess I’m probably not going to resolve, this even for myself, in a blog comment…