A Personal Update.

Mid-February this year my computer fried itself while looking at a landscape on Deviant Art. Already an old computer, I opted to replace it rather than refurbish it. This choice, however, led to a series of unfortunately timed mishaps leaving me largely without access to the Internet until just today. Having lost quite a bit of ground on my necessary assignments, as well as my personal commitment to the site, I will endeavor to make up for lost time. I look forward to sparking arguments again. See you there.

...about my last entry.

I had a discussion with a philosophy teacher not too long about about my last entry in this blog who pointed out a few things that I feel I should address.

Today's topic: The issue of Abortion.
Perhaps with my somewhat carefree lifestyle I had never fully contemplated the perspectives of those who stand against abortion on principle. To them, largely, abortion is nothing short of murder for the sake of convenience, akin to running over a pedestrian just because he was in your way.
I'll fully admit that, for a time, I was swayed by the argument on a philosophic level and was unable to come up with a suitable counter argument that wasn't just "no it's not." If one considered that life was being extinguished here than the case would be pre-meditated taking of a life.
A more structured argument came to me after following this train of thought, however. Having an abortion would only be considered murder if life was terminated. The termination is a given, but, as the spark of this argument knows, there is no hard and fast evidence pointing to when exactly (an important word in legal and biological circles) the line between non-life and life is drawn. That line, like so many others, is quite arbitrary. An argument could be made that life only begins at the birth of the child in question and another argument (though most might find it a bit silly) could be made that life is present even before the fertilization process (I call this thee Monty Python "Every Sperm is Sacred" defense, silly, but arguable).
Because there is no hard and fast line between non-life and full-life that we can all agree on, it comes to us as individuals to draw that conclusion ourselves; basically, opinions.
My opinion is this, if we cannot reach a common consensus that we should leave it, legally, in the hands of the women who are making the choices themselves. If they are guided by their conscience to refrain from having an abortion then no power should force them to, but if they feel it is necessary to do so than those that are anti-abortion in such situations should keep their noses out of other people's business.
As a nation of freedoms, we are also a nation of choices, and, while I do not advocate murder, I understand that the conditions that we have for labeling murder as it is are ones that we can all (for the most part) agree on. This debate, on the other hand, is still in the works, with so many different perspectives and differing arguments stemming from such varied places, it's a bit early in the game to call the winner. I feel that until we can reach some compromise, some consensus that makes all parties involved happy (to some degree) then, in order to remain a nation of freedom, we must write laws which err on the side of choice rather than prescribed doctrine. I know that there are many out there who disagree with me but the fact that there are so many opinions is the very reason that I feel we should keep choice as the law on the books, regardless of what we each individually believe.

Individual beliefs... this strikes of Moral Relativism. More on that next time.