Although I'd hate it if the fetuses were too self-conscious.

I meant this to be a serious question actually.

Maybe I am too diffident and self-depreciating in the presence of such great intellects?

...that our mothers couldn't have terminated their pregnancies had they wanted to do so. People were getting abortions before 1973.

Just popped out of the womb and I'm simply mortified that I haven't got a decent thing to wear! Does this umbilical cord make my penis look small?

But they weren't getting them legally in America and they weren't getting them conveniently.
They may have had to travel to another state or another country.

A bottle Pinot Noir Blanc or Eye of the Swan + crepes resulted in my daughter. We knew when!

Women weren't getting them (abortions) safely, either.

And it totally discredits your earlier efforts. There were many fine and well thought out replies. You just chose to dismiss them out of hand. You were not seeking answers to questions so much as you were looking for people to pontificate to.

By that standard, half the people on this thread are candidates for the procedure.

Yes, there were many fine replies... too many fine and well thought out replies and I could not/would not address each and every one, hell I could not even read every word of every one. For chrissakes, degsme alone was clearly working piece-rate, blowing his trumpet and riding in circles around me.

Given the need to boil it down, those thousands of words boiled down to two themes, that you are correct in concluding that I was unwilling to accept, namely:

(1) When all is said and done, the mother gets sole discretion.

(2) The existence of the fetus as a being/human/person/plaintiff/l­ump of goo is undeterminable, but we have determined it is not at conception.

The third, fall back theme is that this how thing is somehow akin to segregation, a mass delusion that everyone is going to wake up one day and go "gee, what asshole we were."

And those two conclusions, despite their marvelous constructions and presentations, be it by logic, law, dogma, emotion, values, morals, obstinance, fear of god, partisan rancor, rational construction, platonic debate, naivetee, scientific inquiry, or 100 monkeys typing all day are not satisfying for many decent, intellegent, and thoughtful people.

THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT YOU MEATHEAD.

Hi Gregor_Samsa

I don’t really disagree with you but I would point out that my point was not that nature has its own abortions but rather that fertilization as an odd defining point for ‘alive’ given the disparity in the way we react to the loss of a fertilized egg in one circumstance and not another. If fertilization is the line it seems to me a very capricious sort of definition of life that considers the loss of a fertilized egg intentionally as tragic but the natural loss of the same as something less so. If we really believed that we would treat fertilized eggs differently than we do—we would mourn their demise, we would adopt the ones that are frozen because they are alive and we would take more care to find out if there was a fertilized egg within the womb. But we do none of those things.

We don’t consider someone ‘pregnant’ or to have conceived when a fertilized egg is transferred to their uterus—that’s what we’re waiting for. That’s why the wait is so excruciating. Pregnancy hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway I take no issue with your point and I’m not arguing that because they happen naturally we should be allowed to make that happen. I’m saying that fertilization is a rather odd dividing line and in practice we don’t act as thought that’s the line and the difference between that claim and our actions means incongruity in the application of that principle. (I suspect most people treat the fetus as ‘alive’ sometime after implantation and the development of a heartbeat but that’s just a hunch).

But women were getting abortions.

( also I defy you to defend MLK except in the overblown images of urban legend which all too often serves as the ""fiddle"" of academia upon which any feel good song or lyric can be foisted.)

I am surprised to see that you are actually taking something of a conservative viewpoint here. I fault myself for not reading your contributions more carefully. I regret to inform you however that your attempt to equate a fetus...the seed of life..with an already established individual is as delirious as it is well meaning ( just guessing on your intentions here ).

If you are to attribute any rights to life to anyone at all you still have to determine at what point those rights became active and at what point they acquire relevancy; as demo pointed out yesterday this just simply cannot be done. Having said that it is also understood that there are failed pregnancies and lost opportunities all the time. These however do not include intent despite any application of loquacious acrobatics or any amount of verbal chicanery on your part. You simply cannot bridge the gap between intent and happenstance in an effort to sponge some of the guilt away from an informed decision with subsequent actions.

As far as rights are concerned we all have them. I have the right to take your life at my leisure but I will suffer consequences imposed on me by a society that maintains a measured form of justice for doing so.. unless of course I can prove that you are really just a very advanced form fetus.

we do treat failure to implant and miscarriages too as tragic, insofar as we are aware of them.

It's that they not deliberate.

When a fertilized egg is transferred nobody treats that as a pregnancy until the beta count spikes and there’s a positive test. No doctor claims there’s life in there until things change. I don’t see many people lining up to adopt embryos over having their own or IVF—and if we believed fertilized eggs were life, people would be doing that. If we really believed fertilization was the mark we’d take greater care to be aware of it, but we don’t. I’m just saying though we may think that’s a shame when we know an embryo doesn’t implant but no doctor considers that a pregnancy or alive until later.

If we believed it was fertilization we’d really seek out whether a fertilized egg was present and we’d act differently than we do.

The incongruity between our actions and claims is kind of glaring. I don’t really know myself when it happens but most people start to act as if there’s a life in the womb when the breasts swell and tests come back positive and it really gets cemented when they get a heartbeat.

It’s just an odd definition when it doesn’t match up with most people’s actions.