Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

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
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies ]


To: bondjamesbond
That's the one.
10 posted on 02/23/2004 2:26:43 PM PST by machman
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies ]

To: bondjamesbond
Great post.
12 posted on 02/24/2004 3:08:35 PM PST by Prodigal Son
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson