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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that.....
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To: Edwarda who wrote (920)9/7/1999 6:22:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte  Read Replies (1) of 6418
 
Germination and birth are analogous events. A fetus is akin to the seed. Conception in the plant begins long before there is a seed - a flower receives pollen. A seedling is a born baby.
There are only two obvious delineations in this debate - conception and birth. There are more indistinct intermediate milestones: implantation, early neural function, theoretical viability ex utero. But these are not nailed down either by science or by common sense.
The abortion debate centers on the status of the embryo/fetus before birth but after conception. It is necessarily so.
How each of us arrives at a decision regarding the admissibility of doing an abortion has to do with a variety of value judgments. We've heard many of these here.

But there is a big difference between regretting or opposing an abortion of one's own and telling someone else what she may or may not do. Killing a born child is murder. Preventing a pregnancy is plain common sense. Between conception and birth, the act necessarily contains elements of each. Imo only a psychopath would abort a healthy seven-month fetus, and only a fanatic would forbid the abortion on patient's demand of a five-week embryo. Somewhere in between is the spectrum of personal cutoff points as to where prudence ends and murder begins. I don't want someone passing a law telling me it is entirely out of my wife's or daughter's hands. More strenuously, I don't want this law to be based on what the black robes tell us about sanctity of all life. And while Michael has said he knows people who oppose abortion on grounds free of a religious component, I am incredulous. I haven't spoken to or even heard of one. Always we come back to articles of faith. And my faith is libertarian.
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