That thing in the Dumpster--and he refused to call it human, let alone a baby--was nobody's business but his and China's. That's what he'd told his attorney, Mrs. Teagues, and his mother and her boyfriend,and he'd told them over and over again: I didn't do anything wrong. Even if it was alive, and it was, he knew in his heart that it was, even before the state prosecutor represented evidence of blunt-force trauma and death by asphyxiation and exposure, it didn't matter, or shouldn't have mattered. There was no baby. There was nothing but a mistake, a mistake clothed in blood and mucus. When he really thought about it, thought it through on its merits and dissected all his mother's pathetic arguments about where he'd be today if she'd felt as he did when she was pregnant herself, he hardened like a rock, like sand turning to stone under all the pressure the planet can bring to bear. Another unwanted child in an overpopulated world? They should have given him a medal. (623)
In T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Love of My Life", passage above, we begin to see that there is no regret for the choices made by the characters. Jeremy whose voice we hear in the passage can't even refer to his child as something human. Jeremy views his and china's creation as an IT and he can't seem to grasp the concept that he has done something immoral and wrong. Mistakes are made by many couples and they most likely will choose to deal with them without any outside help some problems need other. Problems begin when the people in the relationship forget to realize when to draw the line and focus on what is truly important, which unfortunately to them might not always be the other person relationship or the relationship itself. When a problem aris...
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...serve it? He still couldn't understand. That thing in the Dumpster--and he refused to call it human, let alone a baby. (622-623)" Jeremy had formed the opinion in his psyche that he had done the right thing by getting rid of his child, he began to make justifications for his action in saying that it was just another unwanted child in an overpopulated world. These rationalizations seem to only give Jeremy and China more reasons to not see what they had done as wrong.
Consequently at this same time Jeremy is also beginning to discover his relationship has had a severe change which he realizes when China calls him and ask--"I want to see it," she sobbed. "I want to see our daughter's grave."(623)" The mere utterance of this statement seemed to freeze interpretation.
Boyle, T.Coraghessan. The Collected Stories of T.Coraghessan Boyle. London: Granta Books, 1998.
In A Defense of Abortion (Cahn and Markie), Judith Thomson presents an argument that abortion can be morally permissible even if the fetus is considered to be a person. Her primary reason for presenting an argument of this nature is that the abortion argument at the time had effectively come to a standstill. The typical anti-abortion argument was based on the idea that a fetus is a person and since killing a person is wrong, abortion is wrong. The pro-abortion adopts the opposite view: namely, that a fetus is not a person and is thus not entitled to the rights of people and so killing it couldn’t possibly be wrong.
It can be concluded that one would not kill an infant due to it lacking self-awareness, therefore Lee and George makes an effective point through the use of logic.
The adoption process can take more than one year and cost a family up to $18,000. Couples wait anxiously for the government’s approval, then the government assigns them a baby. Couples are given nothing more than a picture of the baby. They don’t have the child’s medical information, who the parents are, etc. Finally, three days after the arrival in Beijing, the couples get to meet their baby for the first time. Under Chairman Mao in the ‘50s and ‘60s, China’s population exploded. By 1980, Mao’s successors limited families to having only one child. Sometimes, families were allowed to have two. This was the largest human population control effort in human history. China’s population is coming under control, but there are consequences no one intended. Couples feel that they must have a boy because boys often carry on the family name, provide work and they stay with their parents at old age. Possibly, over 100,000 baby girls are abandoned every year. Many of them will end up in an orphanage. Today, 1in 4 children adopted overseas come from China. The babies adopted by Americans are only a fraction of the millions of girls believed to be missing from China’s population. While the number of girls are being giving away, the number of boys are becoming way out of proportion. Today, boys greatly out number girls and its only getting worse. This relates to cultural relativism,
Marquis takes a different approach to the topic of abortion than most other people, he doesn 't try to establish that the fetus is a person, but instead tries to establish a reason for why killing us is wrong, and show that the reason also applies to fetuses; and thus
Thomson’s main idea is to show why Pro-Life Activists are wrong in their beliefs. She also wants to show that even if the fetus inside a women’s body had the right to life (as argued by Pro – Lifers), this right does not entail the fetus to have whatever it needs to survive – including usage of the woman’s body to stay alive.
One’s selfish actions can lead to the destruction of important relationships and regret for one’s past desires. During Richard’s younger years, he had always felt close to his family, speaking the same language, and sharing commonalities. As he grew older he distanced himself from his family because he wanted to feel like an outsider. Richard states, “Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it” (40). In this passage Richard states that ...
Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” describes her justification that abortion is not a fundamentally wrong action for a mother to undertake. By forming a distinction between being genetically human and being a fully developed “person” and member of the “moral community” that encompasses humanity, Warren argues that it must be proven that fetuses are human beings in the morally relevant sense in order for their termination to be considered morally wrong. Warren’s rationale of defining moral personhood as showcasing a combination of five qualities such as “consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity of communication, and self-awareness” forms the basis of her argument that a fetus displays none of these elements that would justify its classification as a person and member of the morally relevant community (Timmons 386).
The standard argument against abortion claims that the fetus is a person and therefore has a right to life. Thomson shows why this standard argument against abortion is a somewhat inadequate account of the morality of abortion.
...e open to all women at any point of pregnancy, and that the woman reserves the right as a fully conscious member of the moral community to choose to carry the child or not. She argues that fetuses are not persons or members of the moral community because they don’t fulfill the five qualities of personhood she has fashioned. Warren’s arguments are valid, mostly sound, and cover just about all aspects of the overall topic. However much she was inconsistent on the topic of infanticide, her overall writing was well done and consistent. Warren rejects emotional appeal in a very Vulcan like manner; devout to reason and logic and in doing so has created a well-written paper based solely on this rational mindset.
By critically examining Thomson’s (1971) three analogies; the Violinist, the Henry Fonda analogy and the People Seeds analogy, all three analogies fail to show that it is not unjust to deny the foetus the right to the mother’s body. Therefore, the foetus has a right to not be killed unjustly and have the use of the mother’s womb.
Joyas Voladores In the essay, “Joyas Voladores” by Brian Doyle, the author comments about the way we live and how we love through the use of metaphors. The author uses comparisons about the way we live through the hummingbird’s fast paced heartbeat and the tortoises slow paced heartbeat. The blue whale on the other hand has a big heart to show how we love compared to mammals, stressing that human life is precious. Doyle is inspired to write on the topic of love and the human heart because his son was born with three out of the four chambers of the heart.
To ascribe an entity with moral status ― whether an adult human, infant, foetus, or non-human animal ― is to declare that its treatment by other moral agents is mo...
I glanced to the women now pregnant with child. She looked at me with curiosity but yet also sorrow. “So the great Cypruss was put in his place,” X commented. “Oh X you are dealing will one of the most powerful men that just got pissed off. His taunting him really the best idea,” the scientist advised. “He’s right brother plus Cypruss is the father of the child that I’m allowed to bring to full term,” Y added. “Wait so you have been pregnant before,” I asked. “Yes but I was forced to have abortions,” she explained. That hit me like a sword to the chest, abortion was the thing I hated most about the modern world. Women got pregnant and decide instead of have the responsibility of raising a child they would rather murder their own innocent child. For Y, she did not have a choice in the matter, “I promise this child will be born health and happy nine months from now. I won’t let anything happen to you or child. You have my word and my word is one you can trust.” Before she could answer back Brackish walked back into the lab, “Cypruss it’s time for us to catch our flight.” “Come to Fossilsalive if you ever need help,” I said in a hushed voice. She nodded receiving my
For instance, the victim in the violinist example is free to leave after nine moths, but during a pregnancy, a mother can not simply leave her child after labor. This disanalogy is often ignored for it only strengthens Thomson’s argument. Nitpicking between small differences offers no compelling logic to defeat the thought experiment. Similar to how opponents of Thomson’s rationalization carefully attack the smallest details, a distinction cannot be made of what life is more valuable. Fundamentally, in either case, both the violinist and child die. All life is equally valuable and such distinctions offer no tangible contradictions to trump Thomson’s example. Additionally, an actual pregnancy has vastly different effects on a woman’s physical and psychological condition than simply being attached to a well known artist. This further justifies having an abortion, a position Thomson firmly stands by, especially during the case of nonconsensual sex. Moreover, a mother does not necessarily have more responsibility towards their offspring than an artificially connected violinist. To some women, a fetus is a stranger and a personal connection is not evident, even if a biological connection is. Furthermore, pregnancy takes a huge toll on a woman’s body and not all women have the desire to withstand such a situation. Also, the
To fully understand this passage you must first have an understanding of what exactly brigandage is and according to the Webster’s dictionary it is one who lives by plunder usually as a member of a band or essentially a bandit. With the background knowledge from our first honors seminar and an understanding of the dynamic of Alaric and his gang bandits that eventually sieged Rome we can find several significant details in this passage one is the crucial meaning of the message as well as the significance it would have had in the time period indirectly referencing those who destroyed the Romans well loved city. Around the world and throughout different societies there are several different working definitions of a justice system but while all