Letter to the Editor Published In Alligator Today

I am well aware that abortion is not a topic that all atheists, agnostics, nontheists, or even theists agree on. I don't expect (and hope that this won't happen) the group to be uniform on such issues. Personally, I think once the fetus develops a complex nervous system, causing it unnecessary pain is, in fact, an ethical transgression. Unnecessary (medically or due to rape/incest) late-term abortions, should not be outlawed, although they inflict harm on feeling and conscious beings. The reasons are complicated, and I laid them out in more detail here. PETA laws protect conscious animals (cephalopods are included in this group as the only invertebrates) from unnecessary pain and suffering. Why should a fetus be any different? Obviously, animals and fetuses can be considered property [legally belonging to someone], but only the latter resides inside the body of an individual. The legal issue is thus in the former case whether or not we can do as we like with our property, including torturing it, while in the latter case involves an additional complexity: do we have complete sovereignty over our own bodies, and everything in them? It is on this point that the concession must be made.

At any rate, this issue is one of many I hope to discuss with you AAFSA thinkers.

Since it is the first (albeit tiny) advertisement for AAFSA, I thought I'd pass along my letter to the editor at the Alligator, which was, in part, published in response to Kornegay's letter on March 10. The full text of the letter follows. I only see one thing I wish I'd corrected, substituting "conscious" at the end of the letter for "real":

Human Life Doesn't Begin at Conception
March 21, 2006

I can only cringe inside as I read the bald assertions that abortion is equivalent to genocide, and Marshall Kornegay declaim the worn-out platitude, "An unborn child is no less worthy of life than a 4-year-old."

Does anyone really believe that?

If you are caught in a burning building with a crying toddler on one side and a zygote in a petri dish on the other, and you only have the opportunity to save one, which would cry in terror, which would scream with pain, which would be cognizant of danger, fear or pain at all?

This isn't a rhetorical question.

Do you or any metaphysical dogmatists disconnected from reality really believe that?

The commitment to the magic mantra "life begins at conception" has impeded research that may prove to alleviate the suffering of millions, all because a zygote has been placed in a false dichotomy with a suffering, feeling, crying, thinking, laughing child.

Asinine devotion to this spiritual ideology is not commendable; it's merely a pipe dream that costs real people their basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

S. Daniel Morgan
President, Atheist, Agnostic & Freethinking Student Association
6LS

Kornegay's earlier letter:

Abortion really is tantamount to genocide
March 10, 2006

Campus Rabbi Jonathan Siger believes that comparing genocide to abortion is a false analogy. "Last time I checked," he said, "there is not a great fetus civilization or race of fetuses."

I don't believe that belonging to a great civilization has an effect on one's worth. A homeless person is no less worthy of life than a university professor. An unborn child is no less worthy of life than a 4-year-old.

One's worth and membership in the human family is established at conception. Fetuses are a part of a race. Fetuses belong to the human race and represent every ethnic/racial group. Anti-lifers refuse to acknowledge that the unwanted children whose lives they seek to terminate are no different than the unwanted Jews, Native Americans, Cambodians or Rwandans in their respective holocausts.

We will never know what great accomplishments the unborn children who were aborted might have achieved, just as we will never know what the Jews killed during the Holocaust and the Africans killed during slavery might have added to human civilization.

Marshall Kornegay

5ED