To all those readers who might have read the author's last article, hello again. If this is your first time the author urges the reader to scroll through the previous scribbling and enjoy it at your leisure. Once having done so, the reader will have a better understanding of the author's obsession with referring to himself in the third, fourth, or even fifth person. Why, the reader might ask, does the author do this? Perhaps it's a way of feeling semi-godlike. A way of passing the blame, perhaps J. No, neither one of these is the case. It is just a way that the author attempts to provide a medium that might make the reader's journey through the author's incessant dribbling more enjoyable.

Now the author finds himself in the same predicament as before, though the blink-blink-blinking is a little bit more on the annoying side this particular evening. The author sits here and ponders many a ponderable thing. The author realizes that pizza is quite possibly the laziest food ever created. A chef that claims a specialty in pizza making is not a chef but a pimply faced teenage working the ovens at the local pizza shack. Think about it reader, take your favorite food and quite possibly it could make a great pizza topping. All the reader really needs to make this happen is some cheese, bread, and a little tomato sauce and 'hey presto' (a phrase that reeks of Italian dishes) you have a pizza. Now the author is sure that the reader is sitting in front of their monitor trying to think up all sorts of disgusting toppings, but the reader has to admit that for the most part it is true. The laziness is further exemplified by the fact that the ingredients don't mix. They just sit there in an oven reaching almost 400 degrees and they don't swirl, mix, or do a jig Irish style with little pepperoni tap shoes.

Ah, but all culinary discussions aside, the author must digress into other realms of discussion. The author had a chance to read on CNN sometime back that in a wrongful death suit, an Arkansas court declared a foetus a person. Well, this author believes that this was a long time coming, but all that aside doesn't the word foetus by it's very definition mean the unborn young of a mammal from the time the major features of it's body appear? That alone brings into the play the whole abortion question of when is a baby a person. When, in the gestation of the human body, is it a human? Regardless of the reader's personal beliefs, foetuses are humans. The definition identifies a foetus as an unborn member of the very species it hopes to join. Major features are developed and it's only a matter of time before it steps from the womb of the parent into the light of the world. A minor check on the checklist of development.

The incident the author writes about is one in which a doctor performed a series of 'bungles' to say the least, during the delivery of the baby, whereby the mother and the baby both perished. A wrongful death suit ensued. Obviously. The father/husband took it to the courts to make it the wrongful death of two people rather than one. The doctor evidently was on the other side of the issue, making the stand that it was just one person. Now, reader, this is a doctor, with a degree in medicine and other insanely detailed biological studies, and the author himself possesses only one in Anthropology/Archaeology. So given this, what could the author know about 'foetuses', apart from to realise that the doctor should have known better. But that is not the argument. The point the author is trying to make is the fact that it took so long for the Arkansas state court, let alone any other court, to pick up a simple dictionary and look up the word! That alone, should embody the verdict and make the point a moot one. It was a great day for the anti-abortion activists as the court finally recognised a foetus as a person.

The author once saw a film on an abortion during Sunday school. A woman went in for an abortion late into the pregnancy and was summarily knocked out for the procedure. What stuck in the author's mind was the fact that, after the woman was knocked out, she had to be strapped in to a contraption that resembled an electric chair. After injecting a saline solution into the mother's womb, they rammed what amounted to being a Hoover vacuum inside the woman and began sucking the foetus out. The woman summarily convulsed and jerked as the baby was ripped from the mother. Now what made the biggest impression on the author, was the bag in which the baby was put, ripped to shreds might be an added detail that would benefit the reader. The doctor pulled out miniature hands with all five fingers visible and feet with all five toes. It was a person by every definition. Possession of digits, movement, tactile responses in the womb were all present.

The author wishes to point out that his feelings on the matter are swayable and at times unclear. The author believes that everything in the world needs to be taken into account with individual cases in mind but the argument still stands; when is a person a person? The word 'foetus' by its own definition in the English language, the language that we all speak, is a person lacking only the one aspect of breathing air and not amniotic fluid.

Any thoughts from my fellow researchers?


Until then, my friends Godspeed and I will be looking forward to hearing from you and about all your exploits.

Aaron O'Keefe

12.07.01. Front Page

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