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Professor George and I agree more than we disagree, but I continue to question his use of ‘madness’ to describe support of infanticide. Many will think he means no reasonable person can support infanticide—especially when (1) he compares it with support of slavery and (2) he claims that ‘anyone’ should ‘immediately’ be able to see that infanticide is wrong.
George admits that Jefferson Davis’ support of slavery was not the same as support of slavery today because Davis’ social order was built around principles which obscured slavery's great evil. But something similar is the case with contemporary …
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Competing interests None.
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Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
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↵i George doubts that the millions of people who support abortion rights do so because they deny that non-rational human beings are persons, but I can find very few people today who are not aware that the fetus is a fellow member of the species Homo sapiens. Most of those who are pro-choice believe that the fetus needs to develop further—develop a brain, feel pain, have a heartbeat, become independent of her mother, etc—before she can be considered a full member of the moral community. This view has also played out in attitudes toward those like Terri Shaivo, who many considered to be less than a full person because she, though obviously a functioning human organism, had irrevocably lost what made her a person.
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