While I am old enough to remember the debate over whether “life” begins at conception, there has recently been a rhetorical shift in terms. Now, the argument is increasingly over whether “personhood” (including the rights of citizenship with all attributes thereto pertaining) begins at conception.
Not pregnancy, mind you. Fertilization.
If personhood really does begin at that point (which I don’t think it does) consider what that would do to the annual United States death rate.
How many persons die in that period between fertilization and implantation? Some say it is as low as 22%, others say 50%, and still others say it is more like 60-80%, but that in any event, an absolutely huge number of conceptions end up in natural miscarriages.
If the rejected eggs were people, that’s a lot of dead people. If they were entitled to the same full legal protection other Americans are entitled to, are we talking merely about millions of accidental deaths of American citizens?
Could they have been prevented? Consider that among the causes of miscarriage is this:
Lifestyle (i.e. smoking, drug use, malnutrition, excessive caffeine and exposure to radiation or toxic substances)
Wouldn’t it then become the government’s business to investigate whether the mother’s behavior may have been criminal by negligently or deliberately causing the death of a person?
I know I sometimes sound like a theoretical nit-picker debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but consider a bill introduced in the Georgia legislature:
(1) ‘Fetus’ means a person at any point of development from and including the moment of conception through the moment of birth. Such term includes all medical or popular designations of an unborn child from the moment of conception such as conceptus, zygote, embryo, homunculus, and similar terms.
(2) ‘Prenatal murder’ means the intentional removal of a fetus from a woman with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus; provided, however, that if a physician makes a medically justified effort to save the lives of both the mother and the fetus and the fetus does not survive, such action shall not be prenatal murder. Such term does not include a naturally occurring expulsion of a fetus known medically as a ‘spontaneous abortion’ and popularly as a ‘miscarriage’ so long as there is no human involvement whatsoever in the causation of such event.
(c) The act of prenatal murder is contrary to the health and well-being of the citizens of this state and to the state itself and is illegal in this state in all instances.
(d) Any person committing prenatal murder in this state shall be guilty of a felony and,124 upon conviction, shall be punished as provided in subsection (d) of Code Section 16-5-1.
How could anyone demonstrate to the satisfaction of a determined prosecutor that there was “no human involvement whatsoever” in the causation of a miscarriage?
Think of what this could do to the murder rate!
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The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
5 Comments until now
This only makes sense if there’s a law passed banning parents from smoking after birth. (Second-hand smoke is reputed to be dangerous to air-breathing children.)
On the other hand, by the time a pro-life law can get passed, preventing pregnancy failures will probably not require major lifestyle changes. (The odds are a pro-life law won’t be passed until abortion is obsolete. I suspect 22nd-century leftists will blame capitalism for abortion and cite pro-choice rhetoric from libertarians to back it up.)
On the gripping hand, the phrase “exposure to radiation” set off my bulshytt detector. Does this mean eating potato chips (far more radioactive than bananas) can cause a miscarriage by the radiation?
Yes, deciding at what point a fetus or infant should be granted legal protections and just what those protections should be, is going to be tough. Like many other moral, ethical, concerns turned to legal questions, we may never find common ground. We need to try.
Until we acquire a better understanding of human brain development and function; I will hold to my belief that a heartbeat is sufficient evidence of brain function to warrant caution. Science will eventually provide more data but the arguments will continue.
“They don’t think or feel like us” is not a belief I need to be an omnivore or meat-eater. I will not apply it to any human beings. We should all know where that reasoning has led before.
Neo-Puritans
Where all such laws break down is enforcement.
Sadly, laws like this are already putting women in prison. Alternet has a couple of examples.
How long before tampons are banned and every pad must be checked in case there was a miscarriage the woman didn’t even know about?
Will women who can conceive but can’t implant be permanently criminalized?
There’s a really simple rationale behind all this idiocy, and it’s one that no-one wants to admit to.
It’s all – and always has been – about controlling the pussy. And the pussy is (like its feline homonym) uncontrollable.
It’s way past time to start pushing the consequences of this nonsense. Time for women to start showing up en masse at police stations with their (used) pads and demand said pads be examined for evidence of miscarriage because they want to prove that they weren’t pregnant (tip off the media first – this is one place they’ll be sympathetic).
Shame these uber-puritan morons back into their caves so the sensible people can get on with life.
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