Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I understand that's what you think, but that's not what he said. Without regard to the interests of the unborn fetus, he suggested that when a woman has sex -- setting aside rape and incest -- he discounts the burdens she experiences in connection with a resulting pregnancy. He's not talking about how to weigh the fetus's interests against the woman's interests -- he never reaches that question because he's pretty clear that the woman's interests don't count. He wants to know whether the fetus suffers pain, but he doesn't care whether the woman suffers pain. And so on.
I agree with you that it's hard to figure out how to reconcile the competing interests of the fetus and the woman. Club makes it easy, by excluding the latter from the calculation at all. Except in cases of rape and incest. That gets a separate equation in which the woman's interests count. (This is "intuitive," says club, and obviously doesn't reflect that the fetus's interests are different.)
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I don't exclude it from the calculation, but I know the result. Mother's pain is less than death of fetus. Sorry, I'll spell it out next time.
With rape and incest, I admitted freely that my position is hard to reconcile. I would normally choose life at all costs, but "intuitively" there seems to be something different for rape. Perhaps the "pain" part of the equation tips the balance.
