There is one question I would like to see asked of all serious anti-abortion politicians in public debates: what period of incarceration is correct for a woman who gets an abortion under their proposed laws? They all say that they see women as victims whom they seek to protect. They say that this is a smoke screen question which sets up straw man who wants to treat the woman as a criminal. However as an earlier link from maha, http://www.visionforumministries.org/issues/life/why_the_life_of_the_mother_is.aspx, shows, these are real men, not straw men. Someone needs to create a confrontation on this issue.

I once heard a radio talk show with an anti-abortion host taking calls from the public. One guy called in and said that women should be locked up for life if they had abortions, saying that it was no different from hiring a hit man to whack your child on the playground. The host, a soft-spoken woman) was clearly taken aback by the harshness of this caller’s point of view, but it is a logical entailment of the “abortion is murder” position. So why do we not hear people ask “OK, how long should the woman go to prison for?”

As ShortWoman noted in the initial comment here, Colorado will have an amendment on the general election ballot which confers legal personhood on zygotes. Another issue (seldom brought up but pertinent) is that the proportion of fertilized ova that go to term is less than 50%. The physiology of implantation is complex and iinefficient, what with the need for the blastocyst to arrive at the endometrium at just the right time. The number of acts of unprotected intercourse that result in established pregnancies is well under 50%, though exact figures are hard to come by. I expect to be accosted at the supermarket by a petitioner and will have to ask them about this issue. It is not brought up in public debate nearly enough.

If the propagandists intended the box = fetus analogy, their logic is even more out of whack than I’d previously thought. Not only are they blind to the difference between potential and actual, they fail to grasp the distinction between objects and the processes that affect them.

That would be “consciously”.. The makers of the video are Catholics, and as such thier beliefs are that woman was made from man for man. They can sweeten it up with all kinds of loving, caring, and being an equal being type rhetoric, but the bottom line in their beliefs is that woman is created to serve as an object to please and serve man. It was not good that Adam should be alone..so he got a help-mate…. A toy, a tool,chattel,property, an object for his sexual gratification and desires.. and a cook and a maid.

“Women know thy place!”… and put on your invisible burka.

Except for the wingnuts, of course.

The argument is that we don’t really know for sure when a bit of biology starts being a person, so it is morally best to err on the side of life. The argument has some weight for late-term abortions when there is no major medical problem. And some people use that argument as the start of something absolute, giving the possibility of personhood the full weight of personhood. But that’s an abuse of the argument. The good of the definite person outweighs the good of the maybe person. And for things like stem cell research, let’s get real - people have organs. A cluster of undifferentiated, unimplanted cells is not even maybe a person. Because personhood means something. Something real and intimately tied to the body, not some tacked-on soul. Defining exactly what it means can be complicated, but… On a cloudy day, you can’t pinpoint the moment of dawn, but midnight is still night and noon is still day. A woman is a person. A fertilized egg is not.

What is left out of the equation is the part of Pascal’s wager that says that if you accept Christianity and it turns out not to be true, then you have lost nothing, since your non-existent soul will suffer no harm from a non-existent God. But in the case of abortion, there is the pro-choice argument that restricting abortion does cause harm, and that there are stakes on the other side of the equation (with Pascal, the stakes on the other side are equal to zero).

I would not be going over this except for the fact that mahablog is more nuanced than the average blogger. I still see the video very differently from most viewers at this site.