My Mother Is A Fish

Where does the divide between the prolifers and the prochoicers come from, finally? The prochoicers claim that the right lies, at bottom, with the owner of the body of the (or: the more) adult and human being (or something close to this). The prolifers claim that it lies with the owner of the body of the being whose claim is held to be superior in something like importance.

It seems that prochoicers generally do not dispute the claim of the prolifers as stated above. Rather, they dispute whether the being petitioned for—the fetus—is properly characterized as a person, and thus, endowed with rights. On the other hand, it seems that the prolifers generally do not dispute the claim of the prochoicers as stated above. Many of the same people maintain, in other topics of politics, that animals do not have rights: ie, they are not persons. Rather, they dispute whether fetuses are persons.

At what point can we bring the contention to light, then? In the concept of ownership. Legal-prolifers--to coin a term to mean those who intend to use the law against practitioners of abortion--must perhaps, to be logical and honest, maintain that rights ultimately are held by humans only in trust to a greater—superior—being, such as a god but not restricted to that. Legal-prochoicers (those who hold that it is unlawful to prosecute an abortionist for murder) perhaps must conversely hold—whatever their beliefs in the existence of and relations of humanity with higher-order beings—that rights are fully held by the human in question.

Enough said on that for now, even if the point is vague or distorted at present.

Continuing: Can a legal order justly impose itself on people who do not believe in certain basic premises of the laws to be enforced? Perhaps I may be jumping too far and too wide, but consider what I understand vaguely to have been the operation of the church as against the infidels: church law applied to those within so-called Christian Europe (or whatever the more apt term is for it) and not to those outside it.

The conclusion I wish to reach is that, whatever the makeup of a political order, the legal order must reflect the answers to questions like the last one raised here. It is not a cop-out (so to speak), it is not a mere profession that each must live by his own personal beliefs and tolerance be elevated above the other (or the true) virtues, to hold that a man (woman) must not be tried in court for murder who repudiates the premise that rights are held in trust and whose action is to have, from his perspective, only asserted his own rights against those of another. My words are imprecise; the point is that it is perhaps/almost more of a tort than a criminal suit.

I must go. This is almost okay enough to post.