Sunday, December 26, 2004

On the Slippery Slope



And here we go again:

A man who was arrested for assaulting his pregnant girlfriend was being held on a murder charge Sunday following the death of the fetus the woman was carrying, police said.
The 25-year-old woman was 18 weeks pregnant when the male fetus was delivered dead Saturday, said San Jose Police Sgt. Steve Dixon. She was hospitalized early Saturday after she told police that her boyfriend, Clifford Beane Watkins, allegedly choked her and kicked her in the stomach at a local motel, he said.


The next stop on this slope is pretty obvious to everybody. I have many thoughts about the philosophy behind this backdoor attempt to define human beings as beginning at conception, but I'm not ready to write about them yet. Except that the conception is a totally artificial point in the process we call life, and the only reason it's picked is so that everything that will be fought over happens in a woman's body. (The birth is also an artificial point, but it has the benefit of defining life by independence from other bodies.) Women's bodies are not in general accorded much value by the pro-life movement; well, perhaps some as a basket for carrying the human life that matters. Or so it seems to me.