For some time sexually active women had been made to mourn during their periods. For did not one quarter of pregnancies end in an early loss? And wasn't it true that no contraceptive was hundred percent reliable? These women were to wear black and attend mass funerals during the duration of their time.
These were not barbaric times in which they were living .
There was still much discussion going on, however.
Life doesn't begin at birth, here they all agreed. Life begins at conception and all abortion is murder.
"Conception?" they said. "Isn't that but an arbitrary decision?"
When does that take place? When the cells split? When one cell becomes two cells again? When the sperm enters the egg?
These questions were indeed rhetorical; Life had begun when the sperm entered the egg of course but what do about it?
They hmmmed and hahhhheddd and hahhhhheddd and hmmmed.
Eventually, after much discussion, it was agreed that a sperm and an ovum were indeed pre-people; for if conception had happened when the sperm had entered the egg, what about the split second before the sperm entered the egg? Was conception not guaranteed then? And also the split second before that? and the split second before that and so on? So, therefore, were the sperm and the egg not equally valid as life, as people?
Yea, it was agreed! Masturbation for males was decreed to be murder and all were to stop.
But, they argued, it was not enough, did not men urinate out sperm that had not fertilised a woman? What of all the life lost?
So it was agreed; all young men would be castrated at birth and all young women's ovaries were to be removed.
Of course, there were some nay sayers, but when considered against the monumental loss of life that had occurred before it was a small price to pay.
The adult men all gave sperm samples before they were castrated and the women gave up their eggs too.
From then on birth was a joyous thing, with the filling out of forms to collect spermatozoa and ovum from the vat, to have them surgically placed in the womb, for the sacred hormones to be administered, a beautiful thing indeed.
aufors note:
This is a response to a story that made me very queasy when I read it. The premise, - a great one - is that there is a truck that takes away (or "aborts") children when their parents are fed up with them. The subtext - that any abortion is the same as killing a child - is not so great. I felt so troubled by this that I felt a need to make a riposte and take things to the logical conclusion on the other side. Just to let people know that I think that abortion is a very grey area, but that, just as I believe it is wrong to say that a a tiny clump of cells is a person, I also believe it is wrong to say that a 7 month old foetus (about the time an early birth can survive) is not. There's a line in between these two that I think our law has done a good job of finding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pre-persons
