[if life starts at conception, then is a miscarriage a murder?]
Equating the unintended and tragic loss of a child through natural death (miscarriage) to the intentional killing of a child by starvation, dismemberment, or poisoning (elective abortion) is frankly appalling and an insult to the 30%+ of women who have endured the unfortunate natural death of their child before birth.
A natural miscarriage is no more murder than a natural disaster is genocide.
20 comments
"A natural miscarriage is no more murder than a natural disaster is genocide."
Well, that's actually true...
On the narrow point the pro-lifer is obviously right - dying of cancer is just as equally not 'murder' either.
On the wider point of whether abortion is murder, obviously not - it's lawful killing, a completely different thing.
Just shows there are idiots on both sides of every debate.
@ Warren McIntosh
The definition of lawful killing is debatable. The only killing that counts under that definition is the killing of a person. A fetus is not yet a person. It will be, at some point, but it is not. One could say it is a potential lawful killing.
This makes sense, if you accept the premise that a dot is a baby.
OTOH both miscarriages and natural disasters were deliberately caused by god, so there is a murder and a genocide.
The whole starvation, dismemberment, poisoning thing is false and most abortions happen before any of those things can happen. there is a reason abortion generally happens before the fetus is fully developed.
@Doubting Thomas
" so does "life" start at the moment the sperm is formed?"
Fundies say no because sperm is monoploid, not a human DNA set. The fertilized egg is normal human diploid, different than the parents=baby.
@Thinking Allowed
2/3 of human embryos fail to develop successfully and implant in the uterus. Source: Dr. Renee Reijo Pera, PhD, director of the Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education at Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
This leaves open the question of what percentage of sexually active women noticed that they had a period that was a few days late, followed by a slightly heavier period. In my experience, that would be just about every woman not on birth control. It's also possible for a fertilized egg to fizzle out before the woman notices any change at all. In other words, 30% is probably much too low, if you're one of the people who want to give blastocytes voting rights.
Sympathy cards for miscarriages had appeared on the market only in recent years. By all rights, if you know a pro-lifer who claims to have a good married life, you should be sending her a sympathy card every time she has her period.
But there's no functional difference. Before viability it's not going to live if it's put outside the womb. It's not alive.
See, I prefer the old standby, and that includes the biblical one, that life begins at birth. You can start restricting the circumstances for an abortion a *little* after the point of viability, when the fetus can survive outside the womb. But even then that's up to the woman and the doctor, not you and me.
But there's still going to be a limit. Almost no doctor would perform and abortion when a patient is having labor pains. That would have to be a 'they're both going to die if I don't' sort of situation, which in itself is not easy.
When people like you can prove autonomy before viability, or hell I'll give you an easy one, on the day when every child born has a home where all their needs are met, *then* we can talk about abortion and question it's necessity. If you can't even attempt that, you don't really care about the topic at all.
“Equating the unintended and tragic loss of a child through natural death (miscarriage)”
“A natural miscarriage is no more murder than a natural disaster is genocide.”
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.
