Time Immortal

What [pro-lifers] seem to have failed to recognize, therefore, at least with the necessary clarity, is that the humanity or inhumanity of the fetus is often no longer the issue - at least, not within the elite spheres of the pro-death movement…

Agreed. I once interviewed a woman working in an abortion clinic. Our conversation became more heated (not good) and I spluttered something along these lines of “Don’t you know what the fetus is?” She in turn rolled her eyes at me and said “Of course. You think I don’t know? You think women don’t know?”

So it was then that I realized there are two types of pro-choice people: Those who naively believe the fetus is not a person until a certain magical moment in gestation and those who know the fetus is human from day one but don’t care.

As I’ve remarked before, the abortion debate is no longer about whether or not the unborn are human being — that particular question can be (and has been) put to rest, as any student of biology at even a high school level should be able to realize. That an unborn baby is both human (that is, of the species homo sapiens) and alive follows logically from the observation that a newborn baby is a) human (that is, of the species homo sapiens), and b) alive.

What the abortion debate has turned into, then (or, perhaps, what it was always about) is at what stage of development/life it is socially/morally/legally acceptable to kill a living human being. That’s all it comes down to. And for many women (and men), there is seemingly no problem with saying that it is acceptable to kill a human being during the gestational phase of its life. The fact that it is a human being is irrelevant to them. The fact that it is alive is irrelevant to them, except in the sense that its being alive is the problem to begin with. The fact that it is genetically distinct from either of its parents (that is: it is its own person) is irrelevant.

“Human” and “alive” are not, to some pro-choicers, sufficient categories to merit a right to life. To merit a right to life, something which is “human” and “alive” must also be “wanted” and, legally speaking, “a person.”

And that’s the scary part. Because we’ve heard that kind of talk before. And we know where it led.