Read this sci-fi classic as a fulfilled prophecy of how abortionists and others degrade human life.
Since we’re not at the point yet of debating the legal status of android life as we are unborn human life, reading this sci-fi classic will help us understand how human life became devalued since the time of its first publication (1968).
Most critics focus on the plight of the androids being killed by the protagonist bounty hunter. I would encourage students to consider the plight of those human beings, like the character John Isidore, who are degraded by being labelled “chickenheads” or those humans who have schizophrenia whose lives are not as equally valued as those without that mental illness.
Moreover, in true deconstructionist fashion, much can be made of this passage, describing a “humanoid robot […] which possessed no ability to feel empathic joy for another life form’s success or grief at its defeat” (32).
While the quote ostensibly concerns “The Killers” (never identified clearly), the description applies to today’s abortionists, who have no empathy either for the mothers who are harmed by abortion, the unborn babies who are killed in abortion, or the fathers who are alienated by abortion.
That the novel is set in a futuristic 2021 makes reading Dick’s novel now as enjoyable as reading Orwell’s 1984 was in that year—enjoyable but also frightening, since human life has become more degraded now than it was in 1968. After all, besides abortion wrongs, we now have infanticide (the killing of the handicapped newborn) and euthanasia (the killing or the denial of food and water rights of the elderly and the medically vulnerable).
Thank God we humans still have empathy. Well, correction: thank God pro-lifers still have empathy for their fellow human beings. That’s something the fraud Joe Biden and others in his administration (dictatorship?) need.
It would be an ad hominem logical fallacy to conjecture that the Big Tech billionaires who own the leftist and pro-abortion companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. support abortion wrongs because they’re androids and not humans capable of empathy.
Hmmm…odd, now that I think of it, why one of those billionaires in particular looks like an an— Well, we’ll let that go…for now. Some other book review….