320 Years of History
Gold Member
Bumping this thread because I am still interested in reading any allegories or analogies that anyone else can come up with to illustrate these same points.
Frankly, I think Ms. Thompson's "violinist's" allegory works just fine.
From what I can tell, it seems you place the same value on the life of a fetus as you do on the life of a a born person. Now you may not like it, but the fact is that in an environment where individuals must make choices, the life of a fetus, or even a born infant, just isn't as valuable as that of a matured adult. As much has been empirically shown by Olof Johansson-Stenman & Peter Martinsson in "Are Some Lives More Valuable?" wherein they found that "the relative value of a saved life decreases with age in a pattern that is consistent with a discounted utilitarian model, with a pure rate of time preference of a few percent."
Look at the results they obtained and reported in Table 4. Looking at it, one sees the value of a life of a ten year old is less than that of a 30 year old, but more than that of a 50 or 70 year old. In other words, the value of a human, is lowest at the start and end of a human's existence.
Now I realize a lot of folks don't care to deal with the brutally empirical nature of studies such as Johansson-Stenman and Martinsson's, but the reality is that we must, and in fact we do apply the findings in a very practical way. It may not occur to many folks but findings such as those noted in the paper are exactly what actuaries use to determine life insurance premiums. Indeed, the lack of/indeterminate value of a fetus is partly why one cannot get life insurance for a fetus.
In the violinist allegory, the person is tied to the "Violinst " by a 3rd party and without any action of risk taking of their own.
Because of that, the Violinst allegory is much more comparable to a rape pregnancy than it is a typical pregnancy that results from the risks taken in having consensual sex.
Isn't it?
Where is the component in the Violinst allegory that represents the assumption of a risk for pregnancy in a consensual act of intercourse?
The issue as goes the matter of personhood as argued from the pro-life standpoint is that I don't see that cabal standing up for the personhood right to life of all the people who actually have been born and who will die without a life contribution -- a kidney, blood, etc. -- from another living person. There are surely enough pro-life people in the world to keep all these people alive through donations every time one is needed. Why aren’t pro-lifers donating at heroic rates?
My observation is that is because pro-lifers don't actually care about life. They just care about fetuses. As best as I can tell, pro-lifers' care about a fetus' mere existence to the utter exclusion of all non-fetus' existence, sufficiency and happiness.
Once the fetus is born, pro-lifers -- not just you, every one of them with whom I've ever discussed this topic -- seem not to have given so much as a moment's thought about what happens to the child, parents, or society after the fetus "pops out" of the womb or because it did "pop out" and the parents had no alternative but to allow that to happen or what might have happened were it to have never "popped out" of the womb. I am observing the same in your refusal via multiple tacks to answer. You'll recall the questions and the reasons I seek answers to them from you are found here: CDZ - Abortion .