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Entry: Bloody kansas Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/bloody_kansas#7969 Post contents: @Sid It is not a question that Aristotle might have defended child killing. He just accepted it as a fact of life that did not deserve to be commented on. Athenians dumped unwanted babies in the trash, mainly girls, if they did not fit into their household economy, and Aristotle was content with that. There is indeed an analogy between slavery and abortion, the attitude of those who said "If you do not like abortion do not have one", which is comparable "if you do not like slavery do not own a slave", in both cases, an appeal to let those who were opposed to an institution to keep it going for the sake of those who believed in it. It involved the same argument "It is my body and I do what I want with it", and "It is my property, and I do as I want with it". Both appeals to the Supreme Court rulings. Both involved cultural relativism, one that said that whether slavery was right or wrong depended on geography, and one in which we may end up with the same result with abortion, some places where it is OK, and some places where it is not, all based on the capricious detail on where one happened to be. Of course, there is the difference that the descendants of the slaves are around us, and they have issues, which may or not be worthy, but by the fact that they are around have to be paid attention to. There are no descendents for aborted children, so they can be more easily ignored. Thus is seems to be a good idea to use the analogy to have a set of descendants feel sympathy for a group that did not have descendants to speak for them. Sent at: 2008 07 09