Woman's Hour featured a discussion about whether the preborn child feels pain. Just how hard does anyone have to work to believe that this is not the case? The suggestion is mind-boggling.
I can think of nothing more misogynistic than the view that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the woman's body. Is it the whole of a woman's body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?
However, some things are equally misogynistic, notably the idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman's body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition, a sort of XX Syndrome.
The war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the electoral base of the Left, the war against the social provisions for which the Left exists, and, above all, the war against women.
Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, should read my friend Ann Farmer's Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8).
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It pretty obviously doesn't feel pain at an early stage (when it's just a few cells), and it obviously does before birth. The question of when it starts to feel pain is a genuinely difficult one - it's sometime between 0 and 40 weeks. When's your best guess?
ReplyDelete"It pretty obviously doesn't feel pain at an early stage (when it's just a few cells)"
ReplyDeleteSo it's not part of the woman's body, then?
"it obviously does before birth"
Not according to the doctor on Woman's Hour, and many others like her. I mean, how does anyone think themselves into that position?
"When's your best guess?"
We must therefore assume that it does at every stage, since we cannot know that it doesn't.
That's not logically sound. You could equally argue that given we don't know it does, we must assume it doesn't at every stage
ReplyDeleteNo, that's not how these things work in any other field of clinical practice. Not even vets do it like that, with animals.
ReplyDeleteWhich other part of a woman's body would you ever consider for one moment assuming to be insentient, and why? Or are you saying that the foetus is not a part of the woman's body?
Aside of the argument whether or not a foetus feels pain. A foetus is a baby and you don't kill babies unless you want to destroy all of life.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more.
ReplyDelete