Philosophy Now Forum

Canada's Members of Parliament representing their (preferably very large) majority constituents’ strong pro-life ideologies is basically what constituent representatives in Parliament should be doing—it’s (supposed to be) their jobs. Fair enough.
However, while they’re at it, the handful of ‘pro-life’-representative Tory MPs—supporting House of Commons free votes on conception-to-birth protection legislation or fetal rights to some degree—should also demand a guarantee that fetal right to life also include a right to a post-birth life in which the infants not be unacceptably exposed to serious sickness or even death because of their governments’ fervent, at times even irrepressible, zeal to extract and mass transport via Big Industry as much natural resources from the planet—particularly the hazard-prone elements like crude oil, coal, natural-gas fracking, etcetera—leaving Canada’s sensitive, pristine eco-systems too vulnerable to vicious contamination, e.g. Exxon Valdez by Alaska (USA).
Global warming—without any notable, solid global political will to slow it, let alone neutralize or reverse it—is currently a worsening reality facing our unborn children. It is inexcusably irresponsible to adamantly demand fetal-right protection without equally zealous demand for protecting our home planet with completely safe air, water and food for our post-birth infants to consume.

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Great post.



Point well taken.




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In talks about stuff like this it's usually better to talk about specifics. Of course, you're absolutely right that people should have the right to live in a healthy and safe environment, but I'm inclined to know how it plays out in talking specifics.

What many people forget I think about talks like this is that since the first developments of human technology we've destroyed to create and make our lives better. Once upon a time we burnt forests to provide nourishing soil for our food, and then you could argue that burning the forests was an irreversible process that would take decades to heal back to any look-alike, but in turn what we gained from it was still, for the time, a very big bonus, namely good soil and a good harvest.

Today, lots of the things we are doing, are good harvests, that while might seem bad, and certainly are bad in comparison, they may not be so bad when everybody goes down to the table and just look at what are the upsides and what are the downsides of the big picture. Both sides can equally make claims about who is destroying whose opportunities, but you don't really know before you take both sides into consideration.

And what we should be saying, what we should be asking, is whether or not the choices we are making are the best ones, and then look at the examples and weigh the benefits and downsides.