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To: bondjamesbond
My candidate for the role would be the pro-life English writer George Orwell (1903-1950). To be sure, Orwell is an unorthodox pick. He is best known as a prescient critic of Communism, as in Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), and imperialism, as in Burmese Days (1934) and the essay "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). He was also a Socialist, as he made clear in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia (1937). And yet Orwell consistently opposed abortion, abhorring the argument that it ought to be a private decision. As he wrote in the 1944 essay "The English People," "In England of the last thirty years, it has seemed all too natural?that abortion, theoretically illegal, should be looked on as a mere peccadillo."

My candidate would be science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Famous for the books that turned into the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and many others. His famous short story, "The Pre-Persons", sums up his non-religious pro-life views quite nicely.

5 posted on 02/23/2004 1:20:44 PM PST by machman
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To: machman
I'll have to check that out. Thanks.
6 posted on 02/23/2004 1:37:39 PM PST by bondjamesbond
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To: machman
Philip K Dick excerpts from "The Pre-persons" short story in "The Little Black Box" volume 5 of the collected stories of Philip K Dick, London , Gollancz, 1990.

"I know I'm no different, he thought , than two years ago when I was just a little kid; if I have a soul now like the law says, then I had a soul then, or else we have no souls - the only real thing is just a horrible metallic-painted truck with wire over its windows carrying off kids their parents no longer want, parents using an extension of the old abortion law that let them kill an unwanted child before it came out: because it had no 'soul' or 'identity', it could be sucked out by a vacuum system in less than two minutes. A doctor could do a hundred a day, and it was legal because the unborn child wasn't 'human'. He was a pre-person. Just like this truck now; they merely set the date forward as to when the soul entered."

"Why is it, he wondered, that the more helpless a creature, the easier it was for some people to snuff it? Like a baby in the womb; the original abortions, 'pre-partums,' or 'pre-persons' they were called now. How could they defend themselves? Who would speak for them? All those lives, a hundred by each doctor a day....and all helpless and silent and then just dead... And so a little thing that wanted to see the light of day is vacuumed out in less than two minutes. And the doctor goes on to the next chick."

"This postpartum abortion scheme and the abortion laws before it where the unborn child had no legal rights - it was removed like a tumor. Look what it's come to. If an unborn child can be killed without due process, why not a born one? What I see in common in both cases is their helplessness; the organism that is killed had no chance, no ability, to protect itself." "So much easier when the other person - I should say pre-person - is floating and dreaming in the amniotic fluid and knows nothing about how to nor the need to hit back. Where did the motherly virtues go to? he asked himself. When mothers especially protected what was small and weak and defenceless?" "The whole mistake of the pro-abortion people from the start, he said to himself, was the arbitrary line they drew. An embryo is not entitled to American Constitutional rights and can be killed, legally, by a doctor. But a fetus was a "person", with rights, at least for a while; and then the pro-abortion crowd decided that even a seven month fetus was not "human" and could be killed, legally, by a licensed doctor. And, one day, a newborn baby - it is a vegetable; it can't focus its eyes, it understands nothing, not talks... the pro-abortion lobby argued in court, and won, with their contention that a newborn baby was only a fetus expelled by accident or organic processes from the womb. But, even then, where was the line to be drawn finally? When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed? The legal line was pushed back and back. And now the most savage and arbitrary definition of all: when it could perform 'higher math'." "The Church had long since - from the start, in fact - maintained that even the zygote, and the embryo that followed, was as sacred a life form as any that walked the earth. They had seen what would come of arbitrary definitions of 'Now the soul enters the body," or in modern terms, 'Now it is a person entitled to the full protection of the law like every one else'".

8 posted on 02/23/2004 1:52:42 PM PST by bondjamesbond
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