Chinese advertisements

[kirisutogomen]

The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)




And another for the same service from a competing provider:



These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"

And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.

Comments

[jmandresen.livejournal.com]

I tend to feel that a fetus at any stage has the moral status of a lint ball, but I feel the same way about a six-month-old infant. As early human brains (and skulls) grew bigger over hundreds of thousands of years, it was a selective advantage to be born before development is complete. (Big head through small pelvis equals dead baby and dead mother.) A six-month-old human infant is about as functional on most "human" traits as an eight-month-old fetus. Comparative animal studies also support this.

I'm not arguing for legalizing abortion on demand for six-month-old infants. I'm just pointing out that birth is not a watershed for moral standing. It's just a convenient place for a safe maximum upper bound to ensure society never allows termination of an individual with even the tiniest shred of moral standing. That's how I get around the seeming paradox of "sudden" moral standing for a newborn. We're just being conservative and generous by giving each newborn infant its own stylish carrying case.