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From: brianp@shark.UUCP (Brian Peterson)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: re: old "society&abortion" article
Message-ID: <974@shark.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Aug-84 20:39:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: shark.974
Posted: Fri Aug 10 20:39:54 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Aug-84 01:44:33 EDT
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 71

X   Ah, Brian, but you didn't keep asking why!
I got nothing for a long time, and then long articles.

X   Now you are off and talking about ``society defining itself''.
X   Where did this come from? I can tell you one thing -- soceity does
X   not go about defining itself -- somebody makes some generalisations
X   about society, publishes them, and that gets to be what society is
X   about.
(200 million people will simultaneously say "our society is ..."  :-)
What can define society?  Something external to it, like our anthropologists
describing >other< societies.  Who describes us?
Subsets of ourselves can be describers, as you say.  Society as a whole
can define itself, in the same way that society as a whole can exist,
in the same way that society as a whole can act, can have characteristics.
The definition is not neccessarily >explicit<.  It is revealed by the
actions of the society.

X   Is there really ``the ME generation?'' what about ``the silent generation''?
X   William Buckley says that he is a member of the silent genration, and he
X   sure isn't silent.
You expect 200 million people to be alike?  We are not clones.  That
is not what it means to be a society.

X   So we need a definition of society. How about this:
X   
X   	A society is a collection of individuals who are held
X   	together either by force or threat of force by certain
X   	ruling individual(s), or by voluntary association.
X   
X   Not that that was not an ``xor'' up there. Now you have a definition
X   of society which does not go about asking whether every individual is a 
X   member. You can assume that all teh members of a society are there
X   either because they are forced to be there whether they want to or not,
X   or because they want to be there. 
Almost anything can be a society.  A cub scout pack, a bridge club,
a radical political group on campus, all humanity, etc.
I infer that to be a member in your "society", there must be some
explicit quality which can be easily detected.
Fetuses aren't "voluntary", and they aren't threatened with force,
so they aren't in a "society" of your definition.  Aborting a fetus
places it in a "society".  But WHICH "society"?  One of aborted fetuses?
That raises the question of different "societies".
>Society< is a very fuzzy term, and a loose definition trying to be 
more explicit doesn't help.

X   I do not know about the Unites States, but in Canada it
X   was calculated (by someone I do nopt recognise and who may
X   be lying) that if all the money that was spent by the various
X   provincial public health agencies was combined with the
X   money which the Pro Life groups have spent on promoting their
X   cause there would be enough money to raise every aborted fetus
X   in Canada, with a good bit left over.
Is this raising them to 18 years old?  What about everyone's health?
--> Why aren't the pro-lifers spending money adopting and raising
those fetuses NOW?  Why are there unwanted children, poor children,
homeless children?  The pro-lifers should finish with the ones we
already have, before asking for MORE!!!  <--

X   Of course, the figures will we as inexact as such figures always
X   are, but it makes you stop and wonder. How much are those
X   unwanted fetuses actually going to cost us anyway?
X   Laura Creighton
X   utzoo!laura
If you think in $$$, the cost is whatever it takes to raise one baby to 
healthy adulthood, able to support itself.  If you think in terms of
ecology (long term), it is the cost of overpopulation.  What about
the social costs?  Can we assure that more than twice the babies now
born can find a nice place in the world, and >get along with< other
people??

Brian Peterson {ucbvax, ihnp4, }  !tektronix!shark!brianp