Those who unlawfully kill a pregnant woman deprive her not only of her life, but of her choice.

So basically personhood is determined by the attitude of others toward you? If they don't believe you're a human with a right to live then you're not? Sounds like a slippery slope. Not too mention extremely self centered to the detriment of others. Maybe I think certain people who are already born aren't really human either.

A woman’s feelings about what’s going on inside her own uterus are relevant, yes.

Not everywhere in the country, anymore. And maybe not in your state. But many places — still! Even today!

So is a human only a human if another human thinks they are human?

7 hours and no answer? Hard to argue logic isn't it

Been busy today. Alright.

If personhood begins at conception, as we’re told by many pro-lifers, then it ought to be easy enough to tell what exactly a person looks like at conception.

I’ll stipulate to you that one of these picture is a “person,” (the way we’re defining personhood, on your terms).

The other is a monkey.

Destroying one of these would therefore be “murder,” while in destroying the other, we wouldn’t apply any civil or criminal penalty.

See the problem?

What we on the pro-choice side sometimes get accused of calling a “clump of cells” is… well… exactly that. A clump of cells. At least, until somewhat later in pregnancy when the fetus really starts to take shape. You wanna call this two-cell zygote a “person”? (Again: Which one?) Okay. But it’s a bit of a leap.

Common-law era abortion laws, to the extent they were even enforced (which wasn’t often), recognized this by not penalizing abortion until the moment of “quickening,” i.e. when the fetus begins to move around and make its presence felt in the womb. That generally happens between the 1st and 2nd trimesters.

Some religious traditions don’t regard a fetus as a person until the head has crowned from labor.

Today in America we have abortion-related laws (both enacted and proposed) all over the map. Zero weeks. 12 weeks. 15 weeks. Third trimester. Birth.

Zoom out and look at legal regimes across the entire world — Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia — and you will also find tons of variance in how abortion is permitted or restricted.

Which brings me back to the crux of the pro-choice viewpoint.

Rather than attempt to impose these one-size-fits-all solutions, why don’t we leave the exact moment of personhood up to the mother and her conscience?

I'm not asking if a zygote, fetus, or nearly newborn is a person, is it of the homo sapiens species, yes or no? It just takes a one word answer, it's basic biology.

Well of course it’s Homo sapiens. What else would it be? It’s not an alien. It’s not a monkey. (Then again, it might be, when it’s at the super-early two-cell stage — as far as anyone without an advanced degree in biology knows.)

Here are two photos showing the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), an endangered species. Without getting into the weeds of environmental ordinances, common sense would tell you that the destruction of the thing showed on the right would be a more serious offense than crushing up the pine cone and throwing the seeds in the trash.

What makes the difference?

The investment of sunlight, soil, nutrients, some good luck, and, of course, time (lots of it) — all crucial ingredients required to produce a tree.

The seeds? They each hold the *potential* to become a tree, unless they have some latent defect. But they’re simply not a tree, not yet.

This comes to mind because various ecology organizations are touting the fact that they’re planting “a million trees,” and plan to plant “a billion” or some other outrageous number — when really what they’re doing is they’re throwing that number of seeds on the ground, forgetting about them, and then letting nature take its course.

So, no. They’re not “planting trees.” They’re planting seeds. The distinction matters. “Planting trees” would entail putting saplings into the ground, which naturally have a higher survival rate, but also require more upfront investment of cost and labor.

Trees produce an enormous number of seeds over the course of their lifetime — and only a tiny percentage may ever grow up to become a tree.

Mammals are similar. Males produce hundreds of millions of sperm over the course of their lifetimes. Human females are born with 1 million eggs, which reduces to about 300,000 by the time of puberty, while only 300-400 are actually ovulated over the course of an average lifetime.

Who cares?

Well, conception (the fusion of sperm and egg) may be the magic moment according to most pro-lifers, but the line can be drawn elsewhere. In the Bible, God put Onan to death for “spilling his seed,” i.e. coitus interruptus.

Put him to death!

The vast majority of people today (including most Christians) regard this story as a little bit weird. Nevertheless, it’s been used off and on to stigmatize masturbation and sex-for-pleasure and contraception and those sorts of things.

Let’s use common sense, not the Bible.

Where have I mentioned the Bible anywhere in my discussion here?

If it is a homo sapien in the woman's womb that is being aborted then it is a homo sapiens' life being taken therefore a human is being killed. Full stop.

And comparing human beings to trees is over simplifying not to mention insulting.

Would you serve this at a party and call it a cake?

Just another analogy for you to either consider or feel insulted by — up to you.

So you believe it's a human, but whether it's a person is up to the mother and could change depending on her feelings, opinions or thoughts on any given day during gestation? have you by chance, ever heard of the law of non contradiction?

I don’t think the state generally has a right to mandate that an unwilling mother give birth. Difficult decisions in the many scenarios that arise during pregnancy should be made by a woman in consultation with her doctor. We don’t need politicians standing over their shoulders. (Especially when those same politicians fail to enact paid family leave, free early childhood education, minimum wage rises, and other policies that would actually give struggling mothers a leg up.)

That makes me pro-choice, broadly speaking.

That said, I’m not an absolutist. I’m not keen on pregnancy terminations in the third trimester (unless for strictly medically necessary reasons).

So, a woman with a belly as big as the one your pictures show matches that description — and very few women who are that far along in pregnancy ever seek an abortion.

Roe v. Wade always allowed for states to enact pregnancy restrictions in the third trimester. Partial-birth abortion bans, those sorts of things — totally reasonable, you’ll get no objections from me.

But labeling the termination of a two-cell zygote as “murder”? No, that’s ridiculous — especially for the practical reason that no woman is even capable of knowing she’s pregnant that early. And if the woman can’t know, then the state can’t possibly know, either. So how do you intend to prosecute it?

There are hard limits to how much state intrusion you can inject into the pregnancy process, for pure biological reasons if nothing else.

By the way, that’s a monkey zygote.

You can keep showing me pictures of trees and pinecones, cake batter, ape cells, dog turd etc but you've yet to answer my question which takes a simple yes or no. 2-3 letters you can easily type and save you from having to write paragraphs displaying the mental gymnastics liberals have to engage in to justify killing their own kind.

Is a fetus a home sapien? ..... yes or no.

Asked & answered. Anything else?

How do you know she wanted the baby, if she was walking to a planned parenthood on her way to get an abortion and she got shot and died would it be less of a crime?

As I mentioned somewhere in this thread, up until the moment she gets the procedure, she can change her mind. So no, it’s not less of a crime.

"She wanted to keep her baby, intending it to be born."

I admit this is our weakest point on our position in the interest in pro-choice as we make exception to the rule of "potential for life."

But you gotta see it our way. It's not that you're robbing something that isn't alive the chance of a life, you're robbing another person the chance to give birth to life.

If she wanted to have her baby but unfortunately complications arises that’d cost the baby’s life or her own, then like any good mother she’d want the doctors to do everything they can to at least save her baby. What’s wrong with supporting her choice in saving her child before herself?

Nothing's wrong with a mother making that decision.

What's wrong is removing the choice.

If you're 31 years old, and you have kidney failure, should your mother be required to give you a kidney by law?

Another thing, I’m 28 so I’m not 31 yet lol

Age wasn't important, I was just throwing out a random number.

Maybe, I wouldn’t want her to die for me though but again that’s how awesome most moms are, they think of their children’s well-being before their own.

One would think...I'm a mom. My kids come first born or not. It separates the true women with a backbone from those without.

For whatever it’s worth, you have all my respect, ma’am!

On paper, sure. But, you can't just make blanket, rules. Nothing is ever black and white, or clear cut. What if he's a serial killer? Or he attacked her? Or has a Narcotics addiction that's killing his kidneys? The choice should be hers.

You’ve a point there.

Yep. Because she wants her child to have a long and healthy life, which the unhinged Right, led by TrumpTards, doesn't give a damn about the lives of babies.