Reply #55: I think the original premises are wrong.

[Cleita]

Life begins before fertilization to begin with. The sperm and eggs are alive before they are joined to create a blastocyst. Killing a blastocyst, embryo or fetus for rape, incest or the health of the mother negates the argument that they are actually killing a viable human being. If these evolutionary stages were in fact babies, then it would be wrong to kill them no matter what the circumstances were.

My approach is that the baby is really part of the mother until it's able to live outside the womb without the umbilical cord. So it really is a kind of growth in various stages of evolution that is not human life if the mother wants to terminate her pregnancy before it becomes a finished human being.

I mean I have know women who were in seventh or eighth months of pregnancy that had to have the baby removed by C-section before coming to term for the health of either the mother, the baby or both. In those cases attempts where made to keep the baby alive through incubators and other medical technology. Yet it's no different to me to removing a pregnancy at earlier stages. It's really about when is a baby able to live outside it's mother. Then it could be considered murder.

Not very well known outside of obstetric circles is that sometimes full term babies are born that couldn't live for long. Maybe they are born without a digestive tract, a brain or other abnormalities that can't be surgically corrected. In that case the baby is allowed to die even after natural birth because it can't biologically live in our world. Is this murder?