Options for engagement on ABORTION DEBATE

...

HUMAN LIFE is not equal to HUMAN BEING.

Recently Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee debated this question. Stewart is assumed to represent a socialist-progressive (Left) position and Huckabee presents a religiously conservative (Right) attitude.

Stewart concludes that both sides "dig in" at certain points in the argument -- the Right unwilling to budge on the value of every human life & the Left pledged to the sovereignty of women over their own bodies and the necessity of freedom from government when making difficult health and well-being decisions.

A very modern phrasing of an old rivalry of political instincts.

Historically, we expect that individual sovereignty as a conservative issue -- while extending human rights to all beings involves liberal sympathies. We know that the Right prefers simplicity to consistency and happily rejects many authentic conservative attitudes (ecology, free choice on use of intoxicants).

So what is left for the Left?

We must not (apparently I have been absorbed into them) concede to the Right wing argument that "a human life IS simply a human life."

Social cooperation to prevent unwanted and unsafe pregnancies is, of course, common to both sides, but the progressive attitude must be to make better and finer distinctions. The superstitious fantasy is that a person becomes itself suddenly, absolutely, all-at-once. Yet the experience of pregnancy demonstrates stages of coming-to-presence which continue as phases of childhood outside the mother's body.

Children are for some time only partial agents who are only progressively entitled to full human citizenship. This is a legal precendent for asserting degrees of humanization.

An embryo, child or adult is always in a variable degree of human being. For safety we relinquish full human status from enemy military personnel and extreme violent criminals. The very reason that we can even debate "pulling the plug" on an extended vegetative coma victim is that we detect some ambiguity about his or her status as a human being.

However there is virtually no ambiguity about "human life." Either is has human DNA and lives -- or it doesn't. The attempt to center the debate around this apparent simplicity is another example of the classic Right wing phobia about ambiguity, its refusal to participate in the negotiated decision making process & its superstitious enslavement to the whim of biology (which it often calls "God").

Without minimizing the difficult involved terminating even a partial human being, we need to carry this debate to:

HUMAN LIFE is not equal to HUMAN BEING.

Differences in the depth of sentience, the complexity of functions, and the degree of presence in the world are constant factors in our real life estimation of how we behave with each other. In fact, disturbingly, many people may observe more "humanity" in an adult dolphin than a human fetus. We mustn't let our own sympathies or even the nation-spirit's impulse to produces as many of its own as possible prevent us from thinking our way through to a comprehensive model of variable sentience and life-value that is applicable to both humans and animals and, perhaps, yet-to-emerge AI.

This is a troubling argument but unless we assert that the value of a human being is a variable quantity distinct from human life, we will continue to lose ground against anti-abortion rights activists. They must not be allowed the false "common sense" security of their "life = life" assertion. Wherever possible its inner conflict must be exposed and contrasted to the liberal "simplicity of real experience."