I've been following this blog for the past week.It is not a unique blog,though. Over 7+ years of blogging and online diary-writing, I've gone through unplanned,unwanted pregnancies and ultimately abortions with many online "friends" and blogged my own a couple of years ago. I did so non-anonymously and was shocked at the amount of support given to me by people who had previously made their positions on abortion clearly anti-choice. When a human,real,up close and personal face is given to the circumstances, it gives people a more realistic sense of what it's like to go through the process, beginning to end.

i am new to the blogging world, i just started using the internet for more than reading newspapers and checking my email and i just wanted to say i love it this post and blog, its amazing and i wish i had access to it before

Oh God, nice to see SOMEONE who actually is going through this is the one talking about it.

I go to Catholic School and sophomore year one class spent a whole quarter on anti-choice teachings. It just irritated me because it was all presentations from high school students based on sources provided by the school and I wonder when I look at the boys doing a presentation on "Pro-Choice" arguments all I could think was, "Well, how did you deal with your unplanned pregnancy?"

If this is the same one that's been discussed on Pandagon, some suspect it may be a hoax and that she's going to change her mind.

(One explanation being that it's not exactly the same thing as mommyblogging - that abortion isn't really a drawn-out process that one can blog.)

I really don't know. If it's real, I wish her the best.

As a man I am so happy for the biological luck to never be in that predicament.

It's unfortunate that so many of the voices on both sides of the abortion issue are from people who have never been in the position to need an abortion or to go through the ordeal.

Anti-abortionists seldom get to experience first-hand the horror their protesting and policies enact. Pro-choicers who often preface and postfix their comments with a "but I'd never personally have an abortion" disclaimer don't know what impact that attitude has on young women.

Nobody knows what it's like until they're there. I'm glad this woman is talking.

Rebecca, regarding this:

One explanation being that it's not exactly the same thing as mommyblogging - that abortion isn't really a drawn-out process that one can blog.

She says in one post that she has another, regular blog. This is just a side project that's only meant to last for a comparatively short time. While that's hardly proof that it's real, I certainly hope it is.

I had often heard that women change their mind and become pro-life when they have a child of their own. Becoming pregnant on purpose, and having what must be one of the easiest pregnancies on record (I just got a little carpel tunnel - how weird is that?) made me even more rabidly pro-choice.

I had the choice, due to easy access to sex education, health insurance, and birth control to wait until I was 34 to get pregnant. As I learned more and more about what pregnancy does to the body, and the lifetime changes it could make (where even an easy pregnancy can result in a hard labor, for which I've already undergone 3 surgeries to repair lingering damage) I began to truly understand how horrible it would be to face this under difficult circumstances - to know that the baby growing in your body was going to potentially kill or maim you, was going to financially break you, or tie to to someone you need for you own safety and well being to never deal with again. How awful would that be to have no choice but to proceed with the pregnancy?

The author of this blog has certainly made a brave choice in making the details of her pregnancy available for public scrutiny. My concern, however, is that this kind of focus on personal experience can sometime be used as a tactic to divert attention away from the core moral question of abortion, which is: at what point does an unborn life have rights? If one does not believe that life begins at conception, when does it begin? No pro-choice advocate I have ever encountered has ever been able to answer this question (Obama's response to Rick Warren was typical) and yet there is no corresponding caution about abortion rights to counterbalance this moral uncertaintly. "You don't know what it's like until you're there" seems to be used to justify ignoring the moral questions altogether.

RM: I don't think you need to worry about that. The whole abortion debate centers around fetal rights. The reason this blog is so notable is that woman's rights are largely ignored, except in feminist discussions of it.

And if you want an answer? A fetus's rights begin after the woman's. We don't let people use other people, even when they need them to survive. That is my moral when it comes to abortion: No one, adult, child, or fetus, has the right to use my body against my will for anything. There, now stop going around saying "No pro-choicer has ever answered this" because that's BS.

I had an abortion when I was 21 (there was some slip up with the condom when I was a senior in college). Now I'm 37 and pregnant deliberately. I have never regretted having the abortion (even during recent years when I was trying to resign myself to never having kids). I've always been pro-choice but ever since I got pregnant, I've been more vehement about the issue than ever.

One thing though, the first post referenced in this post was August 20th (I don't know if that's her first post), almost two weeks ago . . . when is she going to have the abortion? That's the only thing that seems a little suspicious to me.

Here's an idea, RM: we don't talk about the moral issues because we don't think our own individual morality should have any impact on anyone else's.

Now that I've explained to you the essence of the pro-choice position, please go troll somewhere else.

RM: It's really sort of irrelevant what rights a fetus has, because one right it does not ever have is to live in and off of my body without my consent, because that's not a right any person has.

However, I'm perfectly willing to grant that it has freedom of speech, of the press, of religion and so on, although you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little tentative about giving it 2nd Amendment rights - the idea of guns in my uterus makes me twitchy.

Women will do what it takes to control their fertility- so the question of fetal personhood is kind of irrelevant.

RM: I am ashamed to share initials with you.

[insert reminder that morality cannot and should not determine legality]

Mags: You just made my day. Thanks.

Wax Ghost--the protection of human life is not an issue of personal moral choice, akin to drugs or sexual activity. It is the foundational principle of a free society, one that we must have a moral consensus on. That is why we have laws prohibiting homicide and infanticide. No civilization could survive were it to relegate the protection of basic human rights to the sphere of "personal morality."

Nightingale and Mags--I am glad you agree that a fetus is, in fact, a human being with rights, even if you believe it can be killed for infringing upon the rights of the mother. What is missing from the pro-choice platform is any acknowledgement of the fact that an abortion, even if performed under extreme conditions for the sake of a mother's health or survival, is still the death of a human being, and is no less tragic for the fact of its circumstances. Instead of confronting this reality, too many pro-choicers attempt to argue disingenuously that a fetus or embryo is not, in fact, a human life.

Oh for God's sake.

No, RM, you very likely won't find any "acknowledgement" of that "fact" in pro-choice environments, probably because it's entirely a matter of opinion and most of us have already settled on ours. For the record, I saw nothing in either Mags's or nightingale's comment that suggested that they "agree that a fetus is, in fact, a human being." The general consensus among the pro-choice is that a fertilized egg, an embryo or a fetus is a potential human being, and that humanity itself doesn't begin until birth. Which reminds me to join in calling BS on your claim that no pro-choice person you've ever asked has been able to tell you at what point they believe a fetus becomes a human being. If that's really true, you must've asked a very, very few people.

It's not "moral uncertainty" just because we disagree with you. For me, personally, there aren't very many things that are more morally certain than a woman's right to reproductive choice. So you can stop proselytizing. I can't think of any place you're less likely to guilt people into renouncing their pro-choice views than on a feminist blog.

I've written previously about the problem of defining humanity based on external factors (such as whether an infant is inside or outside the womb), so I won't repeat myself here. I will merely note that, by Misspelled's logic, one would have to say, retrospectively, that a baby that survived a late-term abortion procedure was a human being, but if the same baby had been successfully killed during the procedure, then it was not human.

In any case, you are right that I am unlikely to change the minds of any posters here; people who hold powerful pre-rational beliefs are seldom led away from them by rational argument. (Try using reason to convince a racist that all human beings are essentially equal.) However, I suspect that far more people read this forum than those who post here, and I believe the presence of at least one dissenting voice against the prevailing orthodoxy is essential to healthy discussion.

I've written previously on the problem of defining humanity based upon external factors (such as whether an infant is inside or outside the womb), so I won't repeat myself here. I will merely note that, by Misspelled's logic, one would have to say, retrospectively, that a baby that survived an abortion procedure and lived for several hours in a soiled utility room was a human being, but if the same baby was successfully killed during the procedure, then it was not human.

In any case, you are right that I am unlikely to change the minds of any poster here; people who hold powerful pre-rational beliefs are seldom led away from them by rational argument. (Try using reason to convince a racist that all human beings are essentially equal.) However, I suspect far more people read this forum than those who post here, and I believe that the presence of at least one dissenting voice against the prevailing orthodoxy is essential for a healthy discussion.

Many late-term abortions are performed because the fetus is dead or dying. If a botched abortion procedure results in a live baby, then the reason for the procedure was that carrying the pregnancy to term, inducing labor, or performing a C-section could have permanantly injured or killed the pregnant woman. The fact that it could have survived outside the womb had she been able to give birth does not trump her health and safety, because for as long as it's inside her, it's still threatening her, and she has every right to protect herself.

If the doctor fucks up and the baby is delivered alive, then that sucks for everybody involved. No one's going to argue with that. And I'd even agree that yes, in that case, when the baby dies -- and as far as I know, in all known cases, they have died after a short time -- there is the loss of a human life. But it's not intentional. There was no intent to kill a human being. The intent was to end the pregnancy before that human being was created, in order to save a woman's health. And if you're going to argue that in that case, a woman should refuse to have a late-term abortion in case the baby is delivered and dies -- bullshit. We don't tell doctors not to perform emergency surgeries because if they screw up they could end a life. It's a calculated risk, like any medical procedure. And the sanctity of the life that already exists takes precedence over the loss of life that could potentially result.

So, sorry, but no. The personhood of a potential inadvertantly delivered baby doesn't make it murder to try to prevent the delivery -- and the personhood -- from happening in the first place.

But then again, I'm "pre-rational," and you're "one dissenting voice against the prevailing orthodoxy," so I guess we knew who our Lone Ranger was before I even got involved. You keep shining lights in dark places, and I'll go locate a small child and secretly abhor him.

Well, RM, you're right. Chances are that telling someone they are "pre-rational" won't win you any supporters.

Apologies for the double post.

I actually considered "pre-rational" to be a fairly mild choice of words, but I will be more forthright: if you believe the mere fact of passing through the birth canal "creates" a child's humanity, that is downright anti-rational. There is no constituitive difference between a 251-day-old child that is inside the womb and a 252-day old child that has left the womb. And when does the humanizing actually happen? When the mother enters labor? When the child is inside the birth canal? Where does one draw the line?

You can choose to believe that humanity is conferred upon a child's delivery if you wish, but keep in mind that I could just as easily profess that (for instance) young children are not human until they have learned to speak, and the killing of pre-lingual babies is morally unproblematic--and you would have no rational basis upon which to argue with me. If "it's entirely a matter of opinion" when human life begins, all of us can invent our own arbitrary moral constructs, and no one can ever refute us.

Well, RM, a 251-day old fetus inside me is basically a parasite. And bringing up birth canals is a red herring, considering my own child was born by c-section.

A young child who can't speak can, if a problem for it's biological parents, be raised by someone else. If you're offering your womb to carry my fetus, then we can talk about the fetus' humanity.

So a fetus's humanity depends on whether or not it is wanted by the mother. That's quite an insight into the pro-choice philosophy.

This is beginning to look more and more like the simple truth.

Nobody gets an abortion at 36 weeks for convenience or fun. Stop trying to make us out to be monsters because we care more about actual living children than about bundles of cells.

No. A fetus's humanity depends on whether it's still living off of anybody else's body. If a woman who wants a child miscarries, I'm very sorry for her loss -- because it is a loss of the child she could potentially have had, and the loss of their future together and of a lot of hope and waiting on her part -- but I don't see it as the loss of a human life.

If a pregnant woman is killed or injured and her fetus dies, I think the assailant should be prosecuted for the death of the fetus, no matter what the woman's intentions were about carrying it to term. Because as long as it's inside her and sustaining its life from what her body provides, it's her choice what happens to it. (I do wish there were a legal alternative to calling the fetus's death a murder, but right now there isn't.)

If a parent of a living baby kills it because they don't want it, that is murder.

It has nothing to do with being wanted or not. It only has to do with the woman's right to decide whether she will continue to keep a parasitic organism alive inside her uterus until it's ready to leave. So drawing the line of humanity at birth is not arbitrary or irrational (or "pre-rational" or "anti-rational" or whatever antonym you're going to come up with next, since the one already provided by the English language apparently isn't good enough). It means that a person starts being a person the moment they no longer require someone else's body to live in and suck nutrients out of. It really isn't a terribly complicated concept, if you ask me.

"Nobody gets an abortion at 36 weeks for convenience or fun."

If someone chooses to for convenience or fun, don't they still have that right? Or are we only for abortion rights when they are for tasteful or socially acceptable reasons?

Generalizations are no one's friends.

Misspelled,

There is a well-known thought experiment that goes something like this: suppose a person were to become deathly ill and needed your blood to survive. (Let's assume for the sake of argument that only your blood type matches theirs.) Now, suppose you were hooked up intravenously to this person and required to share your blood with them in order to keep them alive. Logically speaking, do you have an absolute moral obligation to donate your body for their survival? Not necessarily. But the person in question is still a human being. Does their humanity vanish the moment they become bodily dependent upon you for survival? By the criteria for humanity you presented in your last post, the answer would have to be yes.

So I will never accept the argument that humanity is defined by something as superficial as dependency. That, I maintain, is a dangerous idea used to justify the killing of innocent lives by rationalizing that they are not human. (And it is especially pernicious becuase "dependency" it itself a slippery concept. An infant, while bodily separate from its mother, is still dependent upon its parent(s) for survival.)

*headwall* *headwall* *headwall*

Yeah. I actually know the well-known thought experiment. Obviously a person can't stop being a person. But a fetus was never a person in the first place. We have an obligation to take care of an existing person who becomes dependent on us. We don't have that obligation to a hunk of flesh that might be a person one day but at the moment is only living inside our abdomen, kicking us repeatedly and drinking our fluids.

And -- really? Babies require care? Thank you, Dr. Obvious. Tell me, do they also require space inside my uterus? Or are they separate entities that can be cared for by someone else just as well as by me?

Obviously a person can't stop being a person.

But why not, if a fundamental criterion for personhood is bodily self-sufficiency? Are you really suggesting that a baby is made a person by the mere fact of becoming bodily independent? What about conjoined twins who can never be separated? Are they not people because their bodies are dependent upon each other for survival? And does one twin have the right to kill the other for being a "parasite"?

I honestly have to wonder if you truly believe the implications of the philosophy you're espousing. If what you say is true, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with a woman having an abortion at 36 weeks for pleasure or convenience. Yet clearly, the majority of pro-choicers are made palpably uncomfortable when confronted with this idea, as clearly evinced by the responses to that cartoon.

It should be fairly obvious that I really am suggesting that, yes.

Conjoined twins are different in that there's not an already developed person being saddled with a potential person living inside her body. The twins are born at the same time and have the same personhood, each with an equal claim to the body they share. Can't say that about a pregnancy.

As to the cartoon thread, I don't see discomfort in the comments. I see indignation. People are, rightfully, pissed off by the constant implication that women who get abortions, particularly late-term abortions, are just callous whores who don't care about whether or not they're killing a baby -- rather than honestly believing that a fetus isn't a person -- and that they typically "wait till the last minute" out of irresponsibility or selfishness, when in reality late-term abortions are usually only performed for women with serious health problems.

It's not that a woman who could safely give birth doesn't have the right to a late-term abortion, or that someone who really does wait till the last minute purely out of irresponsibility or selfishness is less deserving of a choice. It's that these characteristics are way too often applied to all women, both inside and outside of the abortion debate. It's ignorant and misogynistic and a dishonest smear tactic, and we're sick of it.

I know there are pro-choice people who remain uncertain or uncomfortable about the morality of late-term abortions. I don't see those feelings reflected in any of the comments. Could you point out where you thought you saw that? Or are you drawing on your status as the enlightened truth-teller?

Misspelled: there's been a bill proposed in Canada to make pregnancy an aggravating factor that a judge would consider when sentencing someone for assaulting a woman. The MP who proposed this one specifically said that he worded it so as not to confer legal personhood upon fetuses.

Oh cool. Thanks for the info.

Misspelled, while your criteria for personhood keep getting narrower (I would summarize your definition of personhood right now as "someone who has been bodily independent for at least some period of time from a person whose existence preceded their own"), I should point that out one of the main problems with this definition of personhood--and the corresponding justification of late-term abortions--is the fact that late-term fetuses are often capable or living outside the womb--a fact demonstrated by the frequent survival of babies born prematurely. Can it ever be justifiable to kill a late-term fetus if, by your own criteria, it might already have become a human being?

I suspect you might argue that, while a fetus might be capable of surviving outside the womb, it still is not a person because it is bodily attached to the mother. This is hardly the fetus's fault, however. It is a fully developed human capable of sustaining life on its own; does it deserve to be killed because, by luck or quirk of fate, it happens not to have been born yet?

Your suspicions are correct. I might argue that. In fact I'm pretty sure I already did, about a half a dozen times. But since it's apparently not clear yet:

First of all, just so that we don't completely lose touch with reality, let me reiterate that if a fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb, and the mother is healthy enough for the doctor to induce labor or perform a C-section, then that is what happens. When women get abortions past the point of viability it's to protect themselves.

That said -- no, actually, that's not a problem with my definition of personhood. It's completely irrelevant to my definition of personhood. The fact that the fetus could be living elsewhere than inside the woman's uterus doesn't change the fact that it's not. And you don't have to try pulling at my heartstrings with "oh, but it's not the fetus's fault!" or "does it really deserve to die?" The fetus isn't capable of guilt or innocence. It doesn't deserve anything one way or the other. It's not a person. Its existence is limited to the body of the woman who carries it. It is attached only to her. It directly affects only her. She is the only one to whom its continued or discontinued existence makes any difference. And she is a human being.

RM, conception is also a very arbitrary starting point. You do know that sperm and eggs are technically alive, right? It's an interesting fact about this world that nothing alive can come from something dead; life can only come from something else that is still alive. So why is the joining of the sperm and the egg the magical moment if the only criteria is that there is life?

According to your logic, then, we should protect sperm and eggs as if they are actual human lives. Women and men should be constantly having unprotected sex so that we can avoid the tragic holocaust of the body flushing out unused and/or unimplanted eggs. And of course that also makes masturbation totally out of the question for men. In fact, if a woman dies before she has reached menopause, or a man dies without ejaculating all of the sperm he has created since the last time he had sex, we should save those sperm and eggs, and put them in as many fertile women as possible so that they have the chance to continue to live too. Women whose bodies reject a pregnancy or who have even one period should be tried for murder, since it is obviously her fault that the sperm and eggs were allowed to die.

Of course, that makes me wonder what the prescription for women with dangerous or unfulfillable pregnancies would be. Is a woman required to continue an ectopic pregnancy, even though it would kill her? Is a woman required to carry an anencephalic fetus to term as long as the fetus is still alive, even if it could kill the woman to do so? Is a woman required to carry a fetus with a different Rh factor than her to term even though it will inevitably kill the fetus? Because everything has a right to life, according to your logic.

And in this world of yours where conception is always the beginning of an individual life, what happens to those women who inevitably try to abort anyway? What about the women who puncture their own inner organs with sharp objects while trying to abort themselves, since they can't have a doctor do it in a safe and sanitary environment? What about the women who manage to abort part of it by themselves but not all and develop an infection as a result, but are too afraid to go to a doctor until it is too late because it is against the law? What about the women who insert nasty chemicals or who take poisonous abortifacient herbs? When you are talking about preserving life, do their lives mean nothing at all?

Misspelled--what you are saying is that, even if a healthy 9-month-old fetus could survive outside the womb, the mother could justifiably choose to kill it because simply because it is still inside of her (though thankfully, as you say, this typically does not happen). If she chooses to keep the baby and delivers it, then she has created a new human life. It's as I said before--according to pro-choice philosophy a fetus becomes human when the mother (or doctor, or whomever) wants it to be human. A baby's humanity is based upon nothing more intrinsic than a mother's will and the snip of an umbilical cord. (I suppose that before the cord is cut a newly delivered baby is still nothing but a non-human hunk of flesh sucking nutrients out of its mother.) Thankfully, most American cannot and will not accept this logic--statistics suggest that most citizens are indeed in favor of prohibiting or resticting late-term abortion.

As for pro-choicers having moral qualms about late abortions, at least one commenter in the cartoon thread made reference to the fact that many women who abort undergo a great deal of emotional agony in making their decision--a fact that betrays a sure discomfort with the idea, given lip service by pro-choicers, that abortion is not the least bit morally problematic. The decision to bear a child is a decision to be made very seriously, but if it is true that preborn life is not human, choosing whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term should be a source of no more agony than the choice to conceive in the first place. The fact that many women do experience such emotional distress is a positive sign that fundamental human instinct easily rebels against pro-abortion philosophy.

Repeating my own beliefs back to me in a way that barely differs from how I phrased them in the first place isn't exactly going to shock and appall me, you know. I'm aware of what I wrote, and I stand by it.

And to be perfectly blunt, it's absolutely none of your fucking business what a pregnant woman feels during the process of deciding whether to terminate. Every woman is different, and every pregnancy is different in terms of the circumstances and what it means for the woman involved. An actual experience with abortion is a highly complex, personal, often emotional thing. Which, incidentally, was what this thread was about until you decided to derail it.

There are any number of reasons -- personal, familial, societal, medical -- why a woman might be reluctant to abort but eventually decide to do so. The fact that you want to exploit that in order to make the ludicrous case that "fundamental human instinct easily rebels against pro-abortion philosophy" -- whatever "pro-abortion philosophy" is -- is pretty despicable.

Wax Ghost, to address your question--conception is not an arbitrary starting point at all, because the fundamental question is not what is merely alive (and of course sperm and egg cells are alive, as is every other cell in a person's body), but when a new, complete human organism is formed--which is precisely what happens at the moment of conception. It surprises some people to learn that there is actually no scientific debate on this question: the union of sperm and egg, and the resultant intermingling of the parents' chromosomes, results in the genetic sequence of a new human being. And, fundamentally, genes are what define a human as a human--just as they make a dog a dog, a cat a cat, an oak tree an oak tree, or anything else.) If you are interested in reading scientists' words on the subject, you can do so here.

As for the fact that many fertilized eggs do not implant or that a woman's body may reject a pregnancy, there is a very fundamental moral distinction between a death that is induced by human will, and a death that occurs due to natural causes. Imagine if you lived in an earlier time in history, when the majority of children did not live into adulthood; no one would suggest that this would have made it acceptable for you to kill your child.

The same principle hold true in the tragic case of a pregnancy that threatens the life of a mother. I can only respond to your scenario with a question: can any moral person conscionably kill one innocent human life in order to save another?

It is equally tragic that some women resort to self-mutilation in an attempt to terminate their pregnancies, and no woman who has performed such actions upon herself should ever live in fear being refused medical treatment. This sobering reality is a reminder of why, as a society, we have a very grave obligation to provide support and assistance to women struggling with unplanned pregnancies, and it is deeply unfortunate that many pro-choicers, who typically pay lip service to the idea of reducing the number of abortions, have directed so much hostility and resistance toward individuals--such as those who work at pregnancy centers--who are attempting to practice humane ways of realizing that goal.

Misspelled, my summarizations of your beliefs were not really intended to change your mind, since you have made clear that you hold very disturbing beliefs which (as I said) the majority of people do not share. Yet even you seem to flinch at the idea of a "pro-abortion philosophy," even though your reasoning makes it perfectly feasible to celebrate abortion as a morally good thing.

RM, having distinct DNA does not make a blastocyst a separate being. As much as you keep trying to erase the woman from the picture, erasing the woman also erases the "separate being" from the picture.

Every scientist will also tell you that it is almost impossible to tell when conception has occurred. How exactly do you propose to protect a blastocyst that you can't even definitely know exists, other than to treat every fertile woman as if she is pregnant?

Yes, moral people have to make the choice between two "innocent" lives all the time. If Schindler had tried to save all the Jews, he couldn't have saved any. The Underground Railroad saved slaves only a few at a time, necessarily leaving behind vast numbers of people in order to save a few. A woman I know who aborted an unexpected pregnancy was able, because she wasn't tied by a child to the father, to get out of that abusive relationship, meet a man who treated her with respect, and now is happily married and has two children. Is it a terrible choice to have to make? Of course. But she didn't just choose abortion; she chose a better life for herself, she chose two future children in a secure and happy relationship. I would say that that is a wonderful reason to choose to terminate a life, even if I find terminating life somewhat distasteful. These kinds of decisions are not easy decisions - none of us ever said they were - but they are choices that we each have to make individually according to our own consciences and the circumstances of our own lives. And no matter how much you try to make it a black-and-white issue, it is not now and it never will be.

And pray tell, what exactly do pregnancy centers do to stop women from mutilating themselves in an attempt to abort?? Guilt them into staying pregnant?

If no woman should ever live in fear of being denied medical treatment, how can you support making abortion of any kind illegal? If no woman should ever live in fear of being denied medical treatment, why are you not advocating with us feminists against the new doctor conscience clause that the Bush Administration is trying to create right now that will allow doctors to deny women medical treatment? If no woman should ever live in fear of being denied medical treatment, how are you helping those women who are being denied medical treatment across the country RIGHT NOW? If no woman should ever live in fear of being denied medical treatment, what are you doing to ensure that all women have all of their health needs met?

It is deeply unfortunate that many pro-forced-pregnancy people, who typically pay lip service to the idea of reducing the number of abortions and actually having women's own health in mind, have directed so much hostility and resistance toward individuals--such as those who work at family planning centers--who are attempting to practice humane ways of realizing that goal.

Wax Ghost, to address your question--conception is not an arbitrary starting point at all, because the fundamental question is not what is merely alive (and of course sperm and egg cells are alive, as is every other cell in a person's body), but when a new, complete human organism is formed--which is precisely what happens at the moment of conception. It surprises some people to learn that there is actually no scientific debate on this question: the union of sperm and egg, and the resultant intermingling of the parents' chromosomes, results in the genetic sequence of a new human being. And, fundamentally, genes are what define a human as a human--just as they make a dog a dog, a cat a cat, an oak tree an oak tree, or anything else.) If you are interested in reading scientists' words on the subject, you can do so here.

Except, whoopsy-daisy, there actually is "scientific debate" on the issue -- or rather, scientific ambiguity. "Conception" has no scientific definition. "Fertilization" does, but even so, it's a process with several steps, not a single event. And in the end, all it means from a medical standpoint is that the embryo's genetic coding is complete and will not change without interference. Damned if I can see what that has to do with personhood.

The view that "pregnancy centers," which deliberately lie to pregnant women and use blatant scare tactics to bully them into continuing unwanted pregnancies, are a "humane" way to "provide support and assistance to women" would be hilarious if it weren't so infuriatingly prevalent. Likewise for the suggestion that pro-choice people, wanting to make contraception and comprehensive sex ed easily accessible, would have less luck reducing the number of abortions than groups that set out with such odds-on goals as persuading teenagers to stop having sex or getting atheists to go to church.

Not that your judicious use of words like "grave" and "sobering" and "deeply unfortunate" was at all unconvincing, or anything. I mean, it's clear how compassionate you are toward pregnant women and how much you empathize with their situations. Sure, you say they're heartlessly murdering babies if they decide to abort; and you support institutions that will lure them in under the pretense of providing information and medical care and then refuse to let them leave until they've watched a slideshow of photos of dead bloody babies; and you wish there were no legal alternative to living for nine months with a parasite in your womb, knowing it will likely kill you at the end of its term, and then being forced to go to the hospital, put your life on the line, and give birth like any expecting mom, and feel fine about it because hey, RM says it’s a human life. But you called their circumstances "tragic," so you must understand how they feel.

Oh, and -- after all this, please don't try to wax sermonic about what I "seem to flinch at." You just sound ridiculous.

Okay, since everyone's throwing their definitions out there then I'll do it too.

Let's do a thought experiment, shall we? =) Say someone's in critical health and they need your blood to survive, say you're the only matching blood type. Say you walked into the Hospital at just the right time. Say that the doctors saw you thanks to that entry into the Hospital and they ask you to support this person for 9 months in time to recover. Let's just "say" that this is how long it takes him to recover, shall we? You know, just for the sake of argument. So this person will be tied to you for 9 months.

You know, let's just "say". So you walked into the Hospital, doctors see you and tell you that you're this person's only hope. If you hadn't entered the hospital, there would be no problem right? Now, you have the obligation to help this person, no less for 9 months! Oh, but let's say for the sake of argument that you are a hemophiliac and that going through this procedure could cause massive blood flow. And let's just say that you also wanting to go to University. Let's just say you have a job to go to the next day. I'm sorry, but I don't think so. Not only is your analogy imperfect, because the patient was already considered a human being and was already delivered previously (I would assume), but I think it's quite easy to break down. For the simple reason, that you can "say" practically anything. So let's just say that I'm right and that you're wrong. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that my analogy is superior.

And yes, I also do think a unborn foetus is considered a parasite until it's delivered.

I may regret jumping into this, but I haven’t been able to stay out of an abortion debate since my Usenet days (“Susan C Mitchell” from talk.abortion).

the fundamental question is … when a new, complete human organism is formed--which is precisely what happens at the moment of conception.

And, fundamentally, genes are what define a human as a human

… and it is deeply unfortunate that many pro-choicers, who typically pay lip service to the idea of reducing the number of abortions, have directed so much hostility and resistance toward individuals--such as those who work at pregnancy centers--who are attempting to practice humane ways of realizing that goal.

If she chooses to keep the baby and delivers it, then she has created a new human life. It's as I said before--according to pro-choice philosophy a fetus becomes human when the mother (or doctor, or whomever) wants it to be human. A baby's humanity is based upon nothing more intrinsic than a mother's will and the snip of an umbilical cord.

The question is, when is personhood conferred. And the answer, of course*, is what it has been throughout human history: “at birth”. That’s the fundamental definition of a person: that which is a) human, b) born, and c) alive. With which of these three criteria do you take issue, and what would you put into its place?

*Wow: three "of course"s in one segment of one posting. A new personal best. What it says about my interlocutor I will not speculate.

"... when a new, complete human organism is formed--which is precisely what happens at the moment of conception."

I'm sorry, but that just made me laugh out loud.

Last time I checked, a complete human organism has, like, organs and stuff.

Nice try, though.

Funny thing is, even sometimes babies born prematurely that DO end up surviving and growing aren't even complete human organisms - which is why they require such intensive hospital care until their organs are completely formed and functional.

(Not saying they're not persons, just that they're incomplete human organisms)

On the issue of genetics, genes really are the most fundamental reality available to us for defining what the essence of a particular form of life is. And a newly formed human embryo, or blastocyst, is in its essence a complete new human being. Of course I did not mean "complete" in the narrower sense of having fully developed body parts and organs (one could argue, after all, that infants and prepubescent children, not being fully developed, are not really "complete" either, in this narrowest, most trivial sense).

And our understanding of biology--including the discovery of DNA--really has had an impact upon our moral understanding of preborn life. Consider the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, did not believe that abortion constituted homicide before a fetus had experienced "the quickening" (i.e., movement inside its mother). He did not have a scientifically accurate understanding of what was happening inside a mother's womb.

And of course, I was using the concepts of "personhood" and "humanity" interchangeably, because they should be understood as one and the same. An attempt to define "personhood" as something distinct from humanity has very grave and extreme implications--though this is precisely what Peter Singer has attempted to do in his philosophy. This is an excellent article summarizing the ramifications of this belief systen--in particular, that it involves the rejection of the idea that human beings have greater inherent moral significance than other forms of life, that it replaces "sanctity of life" with "quality of life," and that it makes the Cartesian error of identifying a person's being with his or her ability to think or suffer.

But if you do not believe in the sanctity of human life, I suppose it would be difficult to convince you otherwise. That wisdom must be born out of the heart as well as the mind. Yet I think it is revealing that pro-choice advocates vehemently protest women being shown photographs of aborted fetuses in pregnancy clinics. A photograph is, after all, merely a factual representation of the natural results of an abortion. Why are pro-choicers so discomforted by people being given full exposure to what they support? If an individual feels a visceral sense of horror upon being exposed to such images, that fact surely has great moral significance. There is a type of moral knowledge borne out of our deepest emotional convictions--what Leon Kass described as a "wisdom in disgust"--that is essential to provide the bedrock of our moral understandings and to be integrated with our reason and rationality.

I will leave you with something on a slightly different but related note, a quote from writer Eve Tushnet on the subject of artistic treatment of abortion. Her sentiments are something any humane person should be able to identify with, regardless of his or her political leanings.

Abortion was made for horror. In abortion, a mother is pitted against her child, the Madonna becomes Medea; and the child, usually a symbol of innocence, is experienced as an invading enemy. The distortions of the pregnant woman’s body are mirrored in the dismemberment of the fetus, and the helplessness and terror felt by many women facing unwanted pregnancy are mirrored in the unfeeling, unthinking total powerlessness of the embryo. The present is turned against the future, the doctor works to end a life, and the womb becomes a battleground. Regardless of your political or moral beliefs, there’s enough material there to give anyone nightmares.

Aaaaaand... scene.

I know "and scene" is a great place to end. But! I wanted to pass along that the Canadian bill mentioned above in comments which would confer additional charges to those accused of violent acts on pregnant women is no more. The bill died in Parliament last week.