Reply #13: How dare those little brats "yawn, blink, suck their fingers and

[DemBones DemBones]

seem to cry and smile." Don't they know that could hurt the "pro-choice" cause?

Look, gang, Rupert Murdoch's having an agenda does not mean that fetuses don't act like babies do after birth. Photos of fetuses doing these things existed twenty-five years ago, if not earlier, and that was well before Photo Shop and all the computer techniques of altering images that exist today. And it wasn't Murdoch or any RW or even pro-life group that discovered this. It's a wonderful, exciting thing to see how fetuses behave in the womb. Sometimes it seems, from the tone of your arguments, that pro-choicers hate babies, before and after birth. The slogan is about "right to choose," not "undesirability of pregnancy and childbearing in any circumstance" but too often the rhetoric seems to advocate the latter.

Are pro-choicers today still holding onto the outdated assertions that an embryo/ fetus is just a blob of tissue, (not really "human", not really "alive")? I thought sonagrams and intrauterine photos had put that, er, misconception to rest. By the time a woman knows she is pregnant and gets an abortion, the embryo/ fetus is beyond the "few cells" stage.

The argument you should make is that the woman owns her body and her rights trump those of any child she conceives. At this point, little is known about fetal consciousness (or infant consciousness, for that matter) so you can adopt Peter Singer's stance that it's permissible to kill humans that aren't fully sentient, though I'm guessing most of you don't agree with Singer that it's morally permissible to kill a baby anytime from birth until after its second birthday. He takes it too far, seeing no sentient behavior in toddlers, but that doesn't mean consciousness isn't something to be considered.

I wouldn't argue that an embryo has consciousness up to three months, (though I suspect consciousness develops in the second trimester) so it's fortunate that the majority of abortions are performed then. (At least, I suppose that nothing has changed recently, that most abortions are still first trimester abortions.) Most spontaneous abortions (AKA miscarriages) occur in the first trimester as well.

Someday, maybe we can get beyond the "sides" and help women (and men) avoid unplanned pregnancies, thus eliminating most of the need for abortion at any stage. You know, really make abortion "safe, legal, and rare" rather than "safe, legal, and common." That would be progress that would save many women from having to undergo a potentially dangeous, often costly procedure. It would also prevent both fetal deaths through abortion and maternal hardships that would result from continuing an unplanned pregnancy. It seems like a win-win solution to me.

DB DB