John,

I’m a little busy monitoring Frances, but I did mean to address the abortion points also. Many years ago I did pay attention ot the abortion debate. One of the millions of arguments put forward, both for and against, ended up clarifying the issue in my mind at least.

The argument, which was made by a doctor, was that it could often be very difficult to medically determine exactly when a person died as they went through the process of dying. Since the person sooner or later ended up clearly dead, except in rare cases such as a person on life support, determining an exact definition for death had no moral imperitive.

In birth the transition from a single cell to a baby was a gradual process. He argued the same difficulties in defining exact benchmarks for the end of life — for example brain waves, body temperature, heart beat, etc. — existed for defining the beginning of it. However, since this process led from nothing to a child the exact definition of when life began was weighed with moral baggage.

He did not presume to provide a moral answer as to when life began. Rather he pointed out that the debate was being waged with out real regard to the realities of the egg, the zygote or the foetus. That inspite of all the trappings it was frequently wrapped in, it was largely a social matter.

I think a baby a day away from birth is still a baby, and I think a fertilized egg is just a single cell. A line has to be drawn somewhere in the gray between the two, but I’m more than content to let other people push that line back and forth.

By the way, in Florida there is a brain-dead woman who has been hooked to tubes for years. Her husband wants to disconnect her, while her parents don’t. The courts and legislature are both involved, and have been for years. On both the ends of life the puzzle over what is a live human and what is not persists.