Sklansky on Abortion

[ QUOTE ]
I did try to avoid saying potential person = actual person, because thats not really what I think. I was more driving at the idea that potential person = valuable enough to preserve.

[/ QUOTE ]

I believe luckyme & I both think that you and others with your views would have a much more firm argument if you would stick with this. A potential person has value. I agree. Then we can discuss how much value, and what rights it has. Once we can agree that a zygote is not a person with the same "right to life" as a person, then we can discuss what rights, if any, a zygote has. And probably, rather, what protection we want to give them because of their value.

I agree that embryos are valuable. We shouldn't treat them the same way we treat tumors. One of my views is that I think the quality of life of people is more important than the quantity of people. A million starving kids is not better than 1/2 million well-fed kids (for example). To that extent, I think we would be remiss to want every embryo to become a person. In fact, I could forsee the day where technology allows almost 100% embryo retention (currently, I believe it's much much less than that -- I've heard 50%). Then, if society deemed it proper that every embryo become a person, then all mothers would have to use this technology (which could possibly consist of extra-utero gestation) to ensure the embryo becomes a person.

I think this would be very bad, actually. If anything, I'd lean more toward not having any embryos become people unless that embryo will be able to have a good environment in which to be raised. Obviously this would be very hard to enforce, so I think a good alternative is to have readily accessible and affordable abortion methods available to parents that don't think they are ready to raise a child.