One could argue with the same logic, that a human embryo is a human
life. That argument is important in the debate over embryonic-stem-cell
research. Apparently, stem cells can now be “cultivated”
from other sources than embryos; and the research can be done without
raising the philosophical issue of “destroying human lives”;
but mentioning this further argument is of value because the process
of development from zygote to embryo to foetus is continuous.
A foetus has some hope of independent survival if taken from the womb
where it is growing. The continuum from embryo to foetus to baby is
just that?a continuum?it is not a set of discrete categories. Somewhere
along that continuum, “spontaneous abortion” becomes premature
birth and “induced abortion” becomes infanticide. No point
where that change happens can be specified. Mathematically, and thus
logically, the point is indeterminate?the “termination”
of an “intrauterine” life becomes gradually more murderous
as the zygote becomes an embryo and then a foetus and finally a baby?all
of which categories are merely words for portions of the continuum from
the merger of a human ovum and a human sperm, to the full readiness
of a baby to be born?and which portions not only have no identifiable
beginning and end-points, they overlap.
Modern Canadian law allows a woman to direct a medical practitioner
to terminate her pregnancy and kill the [embryo or foetus]. It denies
that power to a father (and here it should be noted in qualification
and elaboration that in many cases, there is no way to know short of
genetic assessment of foetal tissue, who is the sire); and it denies
that power to the State. In past human societies, States and fathers
have been given that power. One could say that Canadian pregnant women
have life-and-death power over the lives they “carry”, but
those lives have priority over the State's and sires's interests; while
in some previous societies the priority ordering put State or sire first
and foetus or woman, last.
Many Christian churches would put foetus first, as an innocent and
vulnerable human life.
Some past societies, (and imaginably some societies extant today) permit[ted]
infanticide in its 19th Century meaning of killing a baby after viable
live birth. Though birth is a discrete event, there are important ways
in which this acceptance of infanticide constitutes an extension along
the continuum of development, “past parturition”, of social
permission to kill a human being . A society that permits induced abortion
to any pregnant woman who demands it, is but a short logical step away
from accepting infanticide.
“Societies” in the form of “States ”, also
claim and sometimes exercise the power to put young adults to death,
(and other than as punishment for crime.) Some modern societies permit
the “conscription” of young people into military service
for which they would not freely volunteer, and which military service
includes the risk of death. Seldom are soldiers ordered to accept certain
death; but very often, they are ordered to do things which will bring
death to some unknown fraction of their number, which individuals cannot
be named in advance. In the conscription case, the State is given priority
over the lives of young men (but very rarely over the lives of young
women).
Prohibition of “child soldiering” brings into the conscription
problem, a continuum-issue similar to the embryo-foetus-baby continuum,
with the reverse consequence that a boy is protected [a foetus is not]
but when deemed a young man, that boy becomes subject to involuntary
mortal risk [while in Canadian law at least, a newborn is not]. Conscription
brings not the certain death of “induced abortion”, but
a risk too great to be trivial .
Soldiering and conscription entail another distinction in human value:
Gender. Prime Ministers, especially of the Liberal Party, and many other
political leaders at various levels, have said in various English and
French phrasings that violence against women is intolerable. (Anathema
would be the analogous term in religious doctrine.) I do not believe
i have ever heard any political leader say that violence against men
is intolerable. Men are in some cases legitimate targets of violence,
and not just in war1;
women, never? Conscription laws are consistent with this conclusion,
except in a very few States of which Israel is the best known, which
conscript women2.
If we were to go further and ponder the end of the ordinary human
lifespan, questions of “extreme measures to delay death”,
“palliative care”, dementia, and whether someone well into
retirement age should have drastic and costly surgery to treat a condition
which might shorten her or his life by a few years or perhaps, only
a few months, we might encounter still further issues about the value
of human life; but they are qualitatively different from questions about
the first half of the mortal human lifespan. Suffice here, to say that
if human life is eternal (or even indefinitely long) that eternality
differs miraculously from the mortality of the natural human body ;
and for the purposes of any practical decisions about human life protection,
a mortal body with a normal span of 70-100 years should be the context.
In that context, the survival or death of a foetus, a baby, or a young
adult is a larger concern than the extension of a life in decline.
So have we come to a juncture in Canadian legal philosophy, where the
innocent child is sacred, and her mother, provided her mother decide
to let her be born, nearly as sacred, or perhaps more so? But yet, if
that expectant mother decide not to allow her foetus to be born, the
same human life that would be a sacred baby and then little girl, has
neither rights nor value?
Such a distinction is too heavy for an arbitrary set of categories
imposed on a continuum, to carry.
Then there is the problem that, if the child be born, but a boy, he
is a legitimate target of violence in some circumstances, but if she
be a girl, never! Never! The gender distinction in allowable violence
fits well enough with social conditions in which women and girls live
mostly in the protection of a household while men and boys go out into
the world to take risks and bring home the meat course for dinner. Such
was the gender division of labour in hunting-gathering societies; and
in fishing, herding, horticultural, and agricultural societies,
Conscription and the Dziekanski death are two examples of a man's life
being less valued than a woman's. Are we at a point in Canadian social
philosophy, where a woman's life is sacred and a man's is not? If so,
this latter is not so new as the lack of foetal rights. For a long time,
women have been better protected than men, and in two years and a few
months, we will commemorate the sinking of the Titanic, in which tragedy
the lifeboats were loaded according to a principle used in many other
emergencies, and made the title of a book by one Michelle Landsberg:
Women and Children First.
If men have no countervailing privileges, then
the privileges granted women add up to gender inequality. If
women have life-or-death say over the unborn but genetically and anatomically
competent members of our species, to the point where the unborn have
no value until “Mother Says” they do, and father has no
standing nor much existence except perhaps as a source of money; then
Feminism is not about liberation but about take-over,
about the next generation being neither egalitarian nor patriarchal
but matriarchal, and about the power of Mother being at least as arbitrary
and potentially cruel as Father's ever was.
“Some leading Feminist” wrote, quite a few years ago now,
“we have become the men we wanted to marry”. Perhaps some
Feminists have gone beyond that, to become the men they condemned, whose
children prudently fear their wrath and whose spouses, should they have
any, stifle themselves and do what they are told.
Notes
1
Note, for example, the use of the so-called "Battered Women's Syndrome"
to partially excuse women's murderous violence against men. Society
also tends to treat women's violence against men as humorous or inconsequential
(editor).
2 albeit
not for front-line duties.
A few References
Davis, Elizabeth Gould, 1971 The First Sex. NY: Putnam, 1971; Penguin,
1976
Hrdy, Sarah B. 1981 The Woman that Never Evolved. Harvard Univ. Press.
Lloyd, Barbara, and John Archer, eds., 1976 Exploring Sex Differences.
London and New York: Academic Press.
Archer's concluding chapter notes some differences: energy or activity,
259; aggression, spatial, language, 256 citing Gray and Buffery but
argues, as do Seward- Seward, that these do not provide a basis for
role differentiation. Note his assertion that small groups of hunter-gatherers
were the evolutionary environment.
Morgan, Elaine 1973 The Descent of Woman. NY: Bantam.
Seward, John P., and Georgene H. Seward 1980 Sex Differences: Mental
and Temperamental. Toronto and Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books.
Stannard, Una 1970 "Adam's Rib, or the Woman Within" Trans-Action
8:24-25
Tavris, Carol, and Carole Offir 1977 The Longest War: Sex Differences
in Perspective. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch
Tinbergen, Niko 1968 "On war and peace in animals and man"
Science 160: 1411-1418
