Better Definition, Or Sophistry

The great gap that separates medicine and morality is as deep as the difference between faith and science. And the medical definition of "abortion" is a classic example to this great divide.

LOTS of misunderstandings are avoided when people know where the others came from. In a way of speaking, they must be on the same page.

Lots of misunderstandings too surround the RH Bill. Opposing camps simply are not on the same page. And, apparently it is on the term “abortion,” grossly misunderstood.

I was watching the movie Spy Game, starring Robert Redford, when this realization came to me. Sniper “Boy Scout” (Brad Pitt) was in a mission to assassinate an unofficial American enemy when an enemy copter obstructed his line of shot, looking for them. The enemy knew.

Boy Scout’s sidekick urged that they abort the mission. But the sniper stayed on, and took the killing shot.

Merriam-Webster defines “abort” as “to become checked in the development so as to degenerate or remain rudimentary.” (Unfertilized sperms or ovum, for example, are rudimentary materials.) However “development” is not only an act or a result but also a process. Meanwhile, “abortion” is “the termination of pregnancy accompanied by the death of the embryo (fertilized egg) or fetus.”

This definition assumes that the development of a child ready for birth begins with the fusion of the ovum (female seed) and the sperm (male seed).

But is this the complete development (process) that a child becoming ready for birth goes through? [Read more.]

This article appeared in Sun.Star Cebu on 29 June 2011.

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