If it is reasonable to suggest that inflammatory political rhetoric can inspire murder, is it not reasonable to suggest that scientists who publicly dehumanize young children can inspire infanticide?

Tantalus Prime and I have been discussing abortion. Tantalus takes exception to my observation that human life begins at conception. He believes that the humanity of a human zygote/embryo/fetus isn’t a scientific fact, but merely a matter of linguistics: The exact moment at which a fertilizing egg becomes human… is a horrible scientific question! Is asking the exact size beyond which a stream becomes a river a good scientific question? Of course not, because this is not an empirical problem but one of definition. Define the term human however you want, but don’t pretend it is an empirical question to be solved. Scientists can’t even agree on what constitutes a living organism, so what makes you think pinpointing the demarcation Read More ›

Joshua Rosenau — the National Center for Science Education’s Program and Policy Director– and I have had a spirited discussion abort human rights and abortion. On abortion Rosenau hews to the materialist/Darwinist code of ethics: human rights belong to the autonomous and to the strong. Not to children in the womb. But even Rosenau is skittish about the manifest venality of the pro-abortion argument: “First, nothing I’ve written should be taken to suggest that fetuses (especially in the third trimester) don’t have moral status as people.” Huh? Rosenau asserts that it is moral for the mother to kill her unborn child… if she doesn’t want him. Could there be a more explicit denial of moral status to a person — Read More ›