you are freaking priceless Amanda.

Murcielago: Now, tell me: how does the consideration of spontaneous abortion impact the morality of abortion

Since a wide variety of activities (alone or combined with environmental factors) might cause a body carrying a fertilized egg to expunge it, the self-declared “pro”life phonies would have to explain how they’d restrict women’s participation in a variety of activities and spheres.

If setting the life-clock at fertilization gains popularity, then the no-choice crowd should be made to explain their case on real merits and real facts and not false nightmarish imagery or pickled perversities.

Should women be prevented from travelling without being screened? (Preventing a fertilized egg from getting past the baggage check — for its own safety — could be part of a new program for Homeland and Wombland Security to protect good fetuses and tag teensy terrorists at the embryonic level.)

Would a suspicion of having a fertilized egg and, say, boarding a plane criminalize women’s travel?

Should women be banned from all sports and fitness? Stopped from losing weight or gaining too much weight? Conceiving outside the continual surveillance of the state? Getting sick without permission? Recovering after being sick? Live her life without screening herself constantly for possibly carrying a fertilized egg?

Should men be punished for endangering fertilized eggs or failing to fertilize perfectly good ones — preemptive unmeditated spontaneous partial abortion — for taking a hit off a blunt or other reasons?

Sanctimonious rhetoric alone should never have been enough to give every religious bigot a forum and the presumption of a higher morality. We have to stop letting them hide this deep-seated hatred of women behind a pretense of religiosity.

If anti-choicers believe (as they claim) that every fertilized egg is a human being, and that having an abortion is as much murder as killing a toddler would be, it follows that they believe that half of all the human beings in the world die before they are born, and that these deaths are exactly as tragic as the death of a toddler would be. To someone who genuinely believes what anti-choicers claim they believe, spontaneous abortions would be the most serious health crisis of all: far more serious than the (relatively) trivial number of fetuses that die by induced miscarriage.

But then, if anti-choicers really believed that abortion is terrible and needs to be stopped, they would be investing their efforts in means of ensuring women neither conceive accidentally (since accidental conceptions are the most likely to be aborted) and will be able to support an unplanned child, no matter what her life circumstances (the most common reason given for having an abortion). They’d be working on a universal program to bring contraception, including the morning-after pill, to the world (never mind the women of the US) and they’d be working on social programs to prevent women from needing to abort a child they would have kept because they can’t afford to support another child.

But they don’t. So we know they don’t. Their claim to believe that life starts at conception is a self-serving lie, which ought not to be taken seriously in any serious discussion.

And above, when I wrote we should reject the bogus “life begins at conception” mantra, I really meant “at fertilization.”

Obviously, anyone who rationalizes or takes on faith that the new human genome formed at fertilization marks the beginning of a new human being with a complete set of human rights to set against the woman’s, won’t see any distinction between an egg (or whatever we call it at that stage) that has actually implanted and one that is still floating around loose.

I’ve got to read that Woman: An Intimate Geography book sometime, after I can afford to pay my library fines, I guess.

The title is certainly appealing enough.

This is why we shouldn’t accept the bogus argument that “life begins at conception,” period. It’s completely mystical.

Humanity is clearly something that develops gradually, and often doesn’t completely.

Some winger or other recently repeated their rhetorical question somewhere where I couldn’t reply, “What is the dividing line between human and non-human then, if not conception?”

What I wanted to be able to say was,

“Pregnancy. It’s a nine-month thick line.”

For myself, coming from a Christian-based background, I’m tired of my faith being used as a weapon for sexism

Anna Clark, that’s exactly why I’m no longer a Christian. I’m now a Unitarian Universalist.

Also whats with the naked women banner ads? ,

LIFE BEGINS A FEW DAYS AFTER SEX