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To start off I’d like to thank Evil Slutopia for bringing this tomfoolery to my attention. I have not commented on the pro-life movement because most of the time their antics speak louder than anything I could write.
I think if the delusional pro-life crowd ever decided to do anything productive I might have a shred of respect for them. Fortunately, I don’t expect to have this worry anytime soon.
I’m not one to pull punches here at DWR, but sometimes you gotta farm out the smack-down. What Pedgehog from Anti-Choice is Anti-Awesome has to say about the people protesting at the clinic. Read the whole post here.
“[…]Also, one thing I want to set straight – you guys are not saving babies. I have worked here for over two years and I’ve never seen one woman change her mind because of the protesters. Some of them change their minds, of course, but for their own reasons. The closest the protesters come to changing minds is when women drive by and are too intimidated or scared by the protesters to come in. If that’s how you want to “save” “babies”, by bullying women into continuing pregnancies, then congratulations. You are absolute scum. […]”
Good show Pedgehog, we appreciate you manning the front-lines against the induhviduals who wish to denude women of their reproductive freedom.
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”.
Pro life advocates claim that conception is the beginning of human life, making it the point at which human’s become morally relevant. Birth is just some event that happens later and has no bearing on things like rights. Thus, blastocysts deserve full legal protection that adult humans get and the death of a zygote ought to be weighed equally as the death of people outside the womb. It’s been repeatedly pointed out why this is either incorrect or irrelevant but this has failed to sway most pro lifers. So today I shall explore the implications of pro life reasoning were it actually sound.
What happens if we up the accuracy a bit and apply pro life reasoning? And by ‘up the accuracy’ I mean that we look at the actual beginning of a human’s life cycle. Pro lifers claim that its conception. But any high school biology student could tell you that there is a lot that has to happen before that. An egg has to be released by the female, which must then float down a long tube. During the brief period when this is happening, a sperm cell must travel from the male, through the birth canal, and meet up with the ovum. Only then can conception begin to take place. Thus, human life has an earlier chapter that pro lifers currently ignore.
Now you could point out that each of the gametes only have half the required chromosomes that ‘actual’ people have, but the response is the same as when its pointed out that blastocysts have no brain. According to Pro lifers such things are purely developmental issues, that have no bearing on person-hood. Physiology is nothing to base moral worth on, after all.
In fact any argument you could possibly come up with to say that the gamete is NOT a person, but a zygote is, there is a synonymous argument saying that the zygote is not a person, but a birthed human is. And since, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I’m granting the pro life position that the latter wouldn’t work, then I must also grant that the former wouldn’t work either.
Gametes fulfill the pro life criterion for human life and therefore moral worth. They are 100% human cells and their sole purpose is to develop into a separate human being, they are merely people one step back from zygotes. Conception is just some event that happens later and has no bearing on things like rights.
Can we go a step further? Well, I suppose we could look at oogonia in females and spermatagonia in males (the gametogonium that develop into their respective gametes) , but my grasp of biology starts getting hazy about that point, and so gametes are as far back as I can go right now. No matter, it is sufficient to reveal the absurdity of pro-life arguments.
I am regularly humbled by the brilliance that is out there on the ‘Net but the eloquence of this post deserves a repost. The article in question is about Palin and her somewhat unjust treatment. The section on the pro-life movement was particularly interesting to me and I will quote that section.
The entire article can be found at madamab’s the Widdershins blog.
Thank you madamab. She says:
[…] “Legislatively speaking, the pro-life movement has done its very best to make it impossible for women to control their own reproductive organs, and they continue to do so at every opportunity. From attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade and return us to the days of the coathangers and back-alley abortions, to their latest crusade against contraception (falsely conflating it with abortion) and pushing abstinence-only education (which, ironically, has led to more unwanted pregnancies and STD’s), to the heartless lies the Pope recently told about condoms and AIDs, to the senseless murder of Dr. Tiller (which the lovely Ann Coulter has characterized as “termination in the 203rd trimester“), the pro-life community has been utterly consistent in its refusal to see the massive amounts of harm it is doing to its own sisters and brothers; real, fully adult sisters and brothers who have to live with the consequences of their moral myopia.
I honestly do not see how in the world a woman can call herself a feminist, and still reserve the right to meddle in and ruin the lives of other women (and the men who love and support them). Bearing an unwanted child can be immeasurably harmful to a woman, especially if it is a child of rape. (One in every six women will be raped in her lifetime in America, so please do not tell me this is a rare occurrence.) By contrast, despite the pro-life community’s attempts to “prove” that abortion causes mental and physical harm to women, no scientific study has actually done so. I am very sorry that the pro-life movement sees abortion as murder, but it’s not. I am very sorry that the pro-life movement values the potential life of the baby over the life of the mother; however, to say I think this is ethically wrong would be an understatement.”
I am humbled by the concision of the article and particulary this passage. The internal links will be jumping off points for further discussion I am sure.
Joyce Arthur on her post from the Pro Choice Action Network made quite few relevant observations about the abortion debate. Here she frames the issue in terms of a woman’s rights and the prevalence of abortion.
“Anti-choicers insist that the key question in the abortion debate is whether a fetus is a person or not. If so, abortion is murder, they say, and therefore obviously immoral and illegal. That is not the key question at all, of course – anti-choicers are committing the “fetus focus fallacy.” The practice of abortion is unrelated to the status of the fetus – it hinges totally on the aspirations and needs of women. Women have abortions regardless of the law, regardless of the risk to their lives or health, regardless of the morality of abortion, and regardless of what the fetus may or may not be. On average, abortion rates do not differ substantially between countries where it’s legal and countries where it’s illegal.[2] Which reveals a more pertinent question: Do we provide women with safe legal abortions, or do we let them suffer and die from dangerous illegal abortions?
Some anti-choicers argue that even though women will have abortions regardless, that doesn’t mean we should make abortion legal, since we don’t legalize murder just because some people will commit murder anyway. This analogy fails because everyone in society agrees that murder is wrong and must be punished, but there is no such consensus on abortion. Second, very few people commit murder, but a majority of women will either have an abortion, or would have one if they experienced an unwanted pregnancy. As we learned from Prohibition (of alcohol), criminalizing behavior that large numbers of people engage in has disastrous consequences for public health and law and order.”
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