You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 18, 2009.
Well, it is good to see that oversimplification and deliberate obfuscation of fact is still alive and well. The misuse of scientific fact to support the don’t kiiillll baaaabeeee trope is wonderfully (mis)stated at the abortionfacts.com website. The disingenuous ‘Milestones of Early Life’ article provides a bountiful harvest of misinformation ready for dissemination by the anti-choice horde. This particular pro-life site is a testament to the duplicity of our opponents, enter at your own risk.
Milestones of Early Life
At no time in your life does more growth and change occur than in the first nine months before birth. Here are the amazing milestones of that time in your life:
Day 1: Conception: Of the 200,000,000 sperm that try to penetrate the mother’s egg cell, only one succeeds.2 At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed. All of the inherited features of this new person are already set – whether it’s a boy or girl, the color of the eyes, the color of the hair, the dimples of the cheeks and the cleft of the chin. He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become.
The first cell soon divides in two. Each of these new cells divides again and again as they travel toward the womb in search of a protected place to grow.3
“At that very moment, a new and unique individual is formed.”
Conception is a process, not a distinct point in time
“The process of conception, also known as fertilisation, involves many chemical reactions and processes. It is not an instantaneous occurrence. Look at the diagram I made:

So somewhere along that set of chemical reactions, which finally result in two cells with a unique human genetic combination (the zygote immediately after the fusion of sperm has two pronuclei – one from the sperm and one from the ovum), are we to say that a single human life has started? If so, at what point does that happen?
The fact of the matter is that conception is no less of an arbitrary ‘line in the sand’ than any other point that one picks, such as the development of the brain, birth or development of self-awareness. But there is nothing wrong per se with something being arbitrary (after all, the time when people are old enough to vote is arbitrary), so we should now look at whether there is a good reason for not using conception as the start of a human being’s life.”
“He or she is smaller than a grain of sugar, but the instructions are present for all that this person will ever become.”
Oversimplifying and anthropomorphizing a complex process to further a political agenda. Wonderful. The pro-life movement relies on clear cut definitions that are patently false and misleading. I assume their gambit is that if they repeat the misinformation long and hard enough it will imprint on the body politic as “fact”.
I am a sucker for cute dog pictures, and my own LWD (little white dog) is the topic of today’s picture post.




Your opinions…