The building the conference is in—the MIT Stata center—really looks like this. It’s fitting for this conference, somehow. It suits the cheekiness of the average attendee.
I should have slept in longer, since I functionally only got 6 hours of sleep, but sometimes I just can’t sleep in, even in a nice, soft hotel bed surrounded by pillows, so I’m up. Which gives me time to blog about my panel at the WAM! conference yesterday before I head out and see another panel.
Kudos to RH Reality Check and especially to editor Emily Douglas for putting together a good group of speakers. We had Aimee Thorne-Thomson of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, Cristina Page, author of How The Pro-choice Movement Saved America, and me. The panel was called “Breaking the Frame: Revitalizing and Redefining Reproductive Rights Media Coverage”. I was stoked and a little intimidated to be on a panel with such awesome women. That sense of being intimidated grew when I got to the conference and mingled and realized this place is just packed to the gills with intelligent, invested, awesome women (and a few men). We got to the panel room, looked inside and saw about 15 hanging out waiting for stuff to start. I lingered outside the door, talking with the other panelists, and then we turned around to go inside and it was packed. Every seat full, the entire windowsill the length of the room had people sitting on it, and people standing in the back. There’s a couple of liveblogs of the panel here and here. Cristina and Aimee were both a bit surprised—usually the issue of reproductive justice is not that big a draw, due to a combination of complacency and probably privilege—but I suppose the recent encroachments on basic rights has shaken people out of complacency. It was great to draw such a crowd, but I did shake with nerves throughout, because I wanted to make sure they got something interesting out of the whole thing.
The order of the speakers worked out great. Aimee talked about the framework of reproductive justice, which is different than reproductive rights or reproductive health, and certainly different than the framework “choice” that makes the extremely important matters sound like a matter of consumer choice. It’s basically a marriage between the social justice movement and the reproductive rights movement, based around the idea that people can’t exercise their reproductive rights to the full extent without having real social equality to back it up. You can read more here. Reproductive justice is a way to expand the discussion beyond abortion rights, and especially beyond the go-nowhere debate about the personhood of the fetus. (A debate that’s frustrating because it’s basically common sense locking horns with immoveable religious dogma. To boot, it’s frustrating because it’s a red herring—most of the time, the belief that a zygote is a person is a stand-in for a series of anxieties about sexuality and ego, anxieties that many anti-choicers won’t admit even to themselves. Which makes the discussions loopy and irrelevant, as well.) It gets the discussion into the framework of talking about actual people, and what actual people need to flourish and to be free. If you ever get a chance to see Aimee speak, get your ass in a chair. It’s hard to do justice to her combination of inspiration and pragmatism.
Really, what the reproductive justice framework provides is an entire way of looking at the world that gives us meaning and energy, which is what we need to match the anti-choice movement. The anti-choice movement absolutely has a worldview that gives them direction—they’re invested in a stifling patriarchy where women, reproduction, and sexuality are tightly controlled. Which is what Cristina talked about. She has a great tale of her hunt for the one true Christian, as it were, the anti-choice activist that is actually interested in reducing the abortion rate, which would require attacking the causes of abortion, which are basically unwanted pregnancy and poverty. She has a really hard time finding an anti-choice activist who was actually interested in reducing abortion, instead of controlling and punishing female sexuality. She finally found a woman, and they cowrote an article about the importance of reducing demand for abortion by empowering women. The fallout? Cristina was supported by the pro-choice community, but her anti-abortion friend Amanda Peterman was stonewalled in the anti-choice community. If the price of reducing the abortion rate is empowering women, they won’t have it, basically. Controlling women is the point, and attacking abortion rights is just a tool.
I spoke third, and the order worked out great, because after the framework and facts were laid out, I talked about strategy. I encouraged people to stick with blogging, because we do have an effect on the way journalists and pundits tackle this issue, and we can get our narrative out there. I also emphasized the reproductive justice framework, because it makes it a lot easier to put together persuasive arguments, since you’re speaking from a place of having a vision and having well-articulated values. I then went on to highlight what I think is a larger problem in the pro-choice movement of speaking from on high, which makes people tune you out. I said that the need to hide behind euphemistic and academic language was understandable, because the battle over abortion, contraception, disease prevention and education is, at its core, about sex. What I didn’t say, and I wish I’d added, was that it’s not even that Americans are necessarily prudish all the time. We have plenty of room for validating heterosexual male sexuality, especially if it’s expressed through dominance. But it’s the sexualities of everyone else that causes problems, which is why you have liberal men who won’t allow that anyone could discuss the problems of sex work for any other reason that prudery, but then who want to believe that anti-choice activists are well-meaning.
But that aside, the fact that what the debate is really about is sex is what makes it so hard for even pro-choicers to talk frankly. Many of the most straightforward terms available, the ones that communicate best with the widest audience, are considered obscene and not available for polite conversation. While that’s a problem that won’t be completely addressed in our lifetimes, the casual nature of the internet helps get around that problem. The internet is also an awesome communication method, because behind your computer, no one can see you blushing.
I also emphasized the importance of humor as a way to get around uncomfortable issues. Make people laugh, and they get past a lot of discomfort. I’m also a fan, as you all know, of using humor to take on political enemies. One thing that the right has gotten really good at is using the liberal tendency to parse language and weigh everything down with caveats, which gets people to tune out. And you certainly don’t want to embrace the lack of empathy that defines the right, but the middle ground can be reached by being funny. I used an example from my podcast that’s coming out Monday that addresses the anti-choice accusation that abortion rights is some back-handed way to get rid of black people, an accusation that is appalling on 15 different levels, but the one that pisses me off the most is the way that it totally dehumanizes black women who have abortions, making them out to be brainless dupes instead of human beings making decisions. Anyway, you can and should address this accusation by examining the history that makes it a little stickier of an accusation than it should be, but there’s also opportunities to take shots that get the point across—that point being that racism is much more of a right wing hobbyhorse, even if there is racism on the left—and I take such a shot in Monday’s podcast.
Okay, this is getting long, so I won’t go into the Q&A part of the panel, which was so great we went way overtime. All in all, the panel was a smashing success. I’m pig-in-shit pleased with it, seriously.
35 Responses to “Panels, man, panels”
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I’d like to read some of the Q&A if you have time to make it into another post later on. A post on the Blend didn’t just shake me out of my own complacency but kicked me in the ass with its scope…
that building may look fancy. but MIT is suing the architect because of shoddy design. (water condensation at the edges are corroding part of the metal)
and I have to say Gehry design doesn’t look good on small building. Bilbao looks spectacular tho.
I don’t know…
Parsing language, at its heart, is about empathy. Tuning into the world and to each other and naming it and he and her for what they are. Humor is something that’s pretty similar in nature even if only it supplies contrast…And it can go wrong as well, as this post about the use of humor at humorless Viacom.
One can make stuff that can make people laugh, but not everyone can really laugh for the same reasons, so the humor tends to reinforce the problem areas.
I thought about your condensation of your speech in context of the interesting bullying thread and your review thread of Hartsburg, USA: A Novel, and nothing comes to mind more than that the people that one tries to reach about complexity, whether its abortion, or race, or global warming for that matter, are the agressively stupid. There is very little chance of reaching them, because there’s no reaching back since they cannot or will not use empathy to deal with complexity, and that’s kind of the first step, which they won’t get unless they wind up in places like Alchoholics Anon meetings.
Putting on my PantheistCalvinist Cap on, I think it’s a better idea to not engage them at all, and if provoked, give ‘em a bleeding nose. All of this, and all of who we are, is available in the intricacies of the Wind that culled us from nonexistences. If they cannot read the patterns, at least well enough to respect personhood…truly…just fuck ‘em. They can rot in a hell of their own devising (Absence of God sort of hell, I mean–even though many pray to the big beard in the sky).
Parsing language and cracking jokes will work about as well as it did in junior middle school. It’s them, not you.
I’ve long since found out that the more you grow up, the more you find out that others have never really matured from high school (and maybe I haven’t, either).
Of course it is. And you should parse when parsing is appropriate. But you shouldn’t all the time, or you lose people. Excluding people is a major issue that shouldn’t be ignored.
I wonder if reproductive justice idea can spread quicker if somebody come up with sensible status of ‘zygote-embryo’. Currently it’s not well define. It’s somewhere between meaningless cells to a complete child. And argument often made by shifting definitions of zygote-embryo.
Clearly zygot-embryo are not random meaningless cell (tho’ I personally think so), and definitely not a complete person.
It could be that once a sensible (legal?) definition is created, then that can be squared with woman’s reproductive right.
of course this has the potential to cloud current framework further …
I just finished reading E.J. Dionne’s Souled Out. Dionne is a liberal Catholic of a sort that is very familiar to me, many of whom are/were heavily involved in the social justice movement. He doesn’t talk about “reproductive justice” by name, but he does talk favorably about the basic approach.
To what extent do you think Catholics can or will become part of a reproductive justice movement? Do we have to try to make people *consciously* aware of how their anti-abortion platform is
(which is IMHO certainly true), or is it possible to move them without forcing those issues into consciousness? Can we get them to agree consciously to the importance of empowering women *even though* that is the the thing they’re unconsciously afraid of?Of course, being unnecessarily wordy is bad, and we should be democratic in our language.
However, that isn’t really what I’m talking about.
I’m saying that in many cases, what people call parsing…well, they call it parsing so they can disregard fundamental premises. It’s not that they can’t understand it. It’s that they feel that accepting such premises violates their worldviews. Beyond calling the sky pink, or assuming that there are sentient noodles in Heaven–it goes down to even minute details. It can also be that they do not want to expend the effort to understand. Or whatever.
Still, there are units of knowlege and agreements that are wholly real only at a certain level. To believe otherwise is to believe that black body radiation is continuous. To believe otherwise is to assume that it’s safe to give home loans to crackpots who don’t believe in fine print. To believe otherwise, is to not believe in the value of multiculturalism–which is *all* about parsing, and all about jokes as well!
I might be overly sensitive, but I think it’s a pretty important point. It’s at the heart of why most populist movements go bad. It’s also at the heart of why Lincoln and MLK were successful to the degree they were, because they enounciate the central truth that an open and just society requires accepting complexity, even unto saying uncomfortable things to their supporters.
Look, in the end, the Populist/Progressive movement degenerated and fragmented into different shards and ending in the debacle of Prohibition. As much as Progressivism was about positive things, it was also utterly provincial, which revitalized racism and anti-catholicism among other things.
Or shorter me:
As much as I dislike the idea of using framing…
I find that complaints about parsing outside of environments of intense verbiage or the use of verbiage to decieve, tends to be people who want you to dismantle one of the planks of your frame.
In topics relating to social justice, and preventing miserable people from making other people miserable, well, it’s the whole point.
Isn’t MIT suing Frank Gehry because the buildings in your photo have leaky roofs and windows, or something?
Then be generous to me and assume when I say “parsing”, I mean “parsing”, and not what someone else meant when they said it. It’s useful to address issues at length, taking every shade of gray into account. I never said don’t do that. Do that. All the time. A lot. But don’t discount the usefulness of getting to the point, as well.
Shah, you’re making the mistake of assuming that if one does X, one is precluded from doing Y or Z. Incorrect. You can do all the above, or some people can reach some audiences with X, and some can be more effective doing Y, and some do all the above.
Correct me if I’m wrong–I might be reading the wrong stuff–but it seems that very few female writers mention that they’ve had abortions, much less write about them. My female friends and family members who’ve had abortions talk about them, sometimes matter-of-factly, sometimes not, but I seldom see female writers discuss theirs. Or, for the matter, male writers whose girlfriends and wives had had abortions. Where are the people who’ve experienced abortion? Who are they?
I don’t see how the stigma of shame will ever lift unless pro-choicers talk openly about abortion. As it stands, a pol is more likely to admit she’’s gay than admit she’s a “baby-killer.” A lack of candor perpetuates the myth that abortion is dirty and immoral.
Incidentally, the issue seems poised to intrude upon presidential politics, what with people talking up Casey for VP and rightwingers up in arms because Obama said he didn’t want teens to “punished with a baby.” Bloggers beware.
Why the bleep should they? (I don’t mean that in a hostile sense.) For women writers to be talking in large numbers about My Abortion would mean that it was somehow a really big deal for all of them, some kind of formative experience from which they have drawn deep life lessons blah blah blah. For none of the women I know who’ve had (and mentioned) abortions, including a couple of writers, has that been the case. It just wasn’t a particularly big deal to them.
Outside the how-dare-any-patriarchal-asshole-deny-this-right part, my impression from the women who’ve mentioned their abortions to me is that the experience itself isn’t automatically worth writing about. Just as, say, most jewish writers don’t write about the fact that they’re not in concentration camps, or black writers about the fact that they’re not chained up in the hold of a ship, or protestant writers about the fact that they’re not currently being tortured by the inquisition. Heck, even among male writers, it seems to be pretty much only the anti-choice ones who write about “their” abortions.
I biked by this building pretty much every day as it was going up. Construction workers in hard hats standing in huddles looking at plans and confusing about the whole mess was a standard morning sight.
It made me think of a kids television show at the time -
Wimsey’s House, which was all wacky angles on misshapen shapes.
I’ve yet to guess if the newness is enough to make it better than building 20, which it replaced. Building 20 was slapped up during WWII with a five to ten year lifetime. It lasted over 50 years, but had it’s own “charm” as it were.
Oh, the status of “zygote-embryo” is PARASITE.
It cannot do much if anything without its host. Therefore, the host makes the call.
That simple? Yes.
Ms Kate:
Don’t know about the newness making it better than Building 20, but I do know that the architect, MIT and the builder are apparently locked in a ginormous lawsuit about roof leaks and all the other basic-equipment failures that apparently come with groundbreaking design these days.
I think what I will do is give you credit for speaking at an academic confrence. I can see a point in reinforcing a consideration to use laywoman’s and not academian language in educating an audience not familiar with feminist basics.
That said, I agree with everything else you said, except this, as you probably know:
The preview field is definitly broken for blockquote stuff, and I certainly don’t know hypertext enough so…
This was the quote that didn’t make it into the previous post.
One thing that the right has gotten really good at is using the liberal tendency to parse language and weigh everything down with caveats, which gets people to tune out. And you certainly don’t want to embrace the lack of empathy that defines the right, but the middle ground can be reached by being funny.
I really don’t understand how architects let their profession get so fucked up that most of them think it is a good idea to design buildings so that they are disorienting to the people who are supposed to use them. Do they just hate their fellow human beings and want them to suffer, instead of be comfortable? Or is it that they are such self-aggrandizing motherfuckers that they can’t bear the thought that a building could be so suited to its environment and intended use, that it wouldn’t even be noticeable?
Either way, the design of that building in the picture is fucking disgraceful.
David,
The idea that more women who have experienced abortion should speak out was brought up in the Q & A portion of the panel. (Which was excellent, by the way.) The idea was that if more women (and men who have supported women through abortions) recounted their experiences, it would personalize the issue and put a human face on it. A sort of “if you’re telling me i’m going to hell for having an abortion, listen to my story and say it to my face” mindset. The issue with that, though, is that privacy, and the right to it, is an integral part of reproductive choice. Many women, for various reasons, choose to maintain their privacy rather than become the public face of abortion.
Just my two cents, filling you in on a little bit of the latter portions of the panel. Again, I can’t say enough good things about WAM! in general and Amanda’s panel in particular. It was the first one of the weekend, and set the tone for me perfectly.
For women writers to be talking in large numbers about My Abortion would mean that it was somehow a really big deal for all of them, some kind of formative experience from which they have drawn deep life lessons blah blah blah.
I don’t think that has to be the takeaway message if that’s not how a woman feels. She could also say, “I’m writing about this because it’s a politically charged topic, but for me, it’s not that big a deal.”
But on the panel, a lot of people who know better than me—Aimee on the panel, and some audience members, to be exact—offered that it’s actually better to talk about women’s mixed feelings. Basically, get ahead of the stereotype that we think abortion is sunshine and roses. No one wants to get an abortion in the same way no one wants to get a divorce. By talking about the pain as well as relief and all other feelings, we can contextualize it as being the same as divorce—unpleasant, but necessary.
Aspen Baker from Exhale talked about it on my podcast here.
Most importantly, and this is why the anti-choice side is fucking up in one sense by talking about “post-abortion syndrome”, is that putting the woman front and center is breaking the rule of “Always talk in your frames.” When people are thinking about fetuses, they’re easier to incline towards “fetal rights”. When they’re thinking about women, however, it gets much harder to be against our rights.
“For women writers to be talking in large numbers about My Abortion would mean that it was somehow a really big deal for all of them.”
On the contrary. If anything, the reluctance to talk about it seems to suggest it was a really big deal for all of them. Women need not write extended soul-searching posts in which they purge their conflicted emotions about it (unless they want to.) But they–we–could refer to our personal experiences to make larger points. When, say, Obama talks about abortion being a morally vexing issue, or some such, we could say, wasn’t for me, bud. Is this identity politics? Yup.
I don’t mean this to sound crass, though it may come off that way: the visual effect of pictures of stillborn fetuses being passed off as aborted fetuses has a huge effect on a person’s immediate emotional response when confronted with abortion. There are dozens of websites devoted to showcasing pictures of ripped apart fetuses. It’s disgusting. I would like to see this visual imagery countered with imagery of what happens to women when they’ve had a medically unsafe, illegal abortion and pictures of what women looked like when they were in septic wards in hospitals, pre-Roe. I don’t think a lot of people know what the consequences are for women’s health if abortion is criminalized; of course, there will always be people who think that if it abortion is illegal and a woman seeks one, she deserves whatever torture or death sentence she receives from it, but I do believe a lot of people would be swayed to acknowledge that it could be a girl or woman they love, bleeding to death or with any number of serious physical problems due to a botched or unsafe abortion.
@PhysioProf:
Yeah, the Stata Center purchase hasn’t quite worked out for MIT. To be fair, though, they have a history of purchasing questionable buildings. Many less-famous architects have described Gehry’s works as “building-size sculpture”; they are made to look nice, and one could potentially work inside one, but any utility or fitness for a particular purpose is incidental.
I’ll say this for Stata, unlike the Disney Theater in LA, it doesn’t accidently set fire to neighboring structures on sunny days…
deep6
March 31, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I don’t mean this to sound crass, though it may come off that way: the visual effect of pictures of stillborn fetuses being passed off as aborted fetuses has a huge effect on a person’s immediate emotional response when confronted with abortion.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I was recently thrown off the Jill Stanek board for pointing that out.
Stanek used the picture of a fetus that had died of some hideous infection (the body was covered in blackened necrotic tissue) and tried to pass it off as the result of a saline abortion. When I pointed out the obvious, she pitched me off her board.
Here’s the pic: http://www.mttu.com/abort-pics/baby-choice.jpg
Does anyone else NOT see a fetus with reddened skin from being immersed in a saline bath?
This gets better. She used to be a NURSE. A labor and delivery nurse.
(You’d think she’d be aware that saline abortions haven’t been used in 20 years…)
Forgot to mention - she changed the picture of the fetus on her site after she threw me off, but asked if it made any difference HOW the fetus had died.
Thank you for the debunking, Beast.
The majority of abortions are performed during the embryonic stage of development. No cute aliens involved - blob and a yold sac. Somehow, that doesn’t thrill those who seek to guilt women out of them, so they trot out these near-viable, fully formed intact spontaneous abortions (miscarriages - God’s abortions).
The vast majority of late abortions - a very small fraction of the total abortions - occur because something went badly wrong. Most of those are considered tragically lost children by their parents and happened because the child died in utero, was deformed beyond compatibility with life, or threatened the mother’s life. The idiot brigade wants you to think otherwise because it is so much easier to hate women that way.
Beast - I’m glad you questioned their propaganda. I don’t expect the anti-choicers to actually *accurately* educate the public about abortion, so it’s no surprise to me you got kicked off that board. I think debunking their bullshit is prime in retaking this fight. People have been duped into associating first trimester abortions with cute little human-like fetuses, and this lie has got to be challenged in public forums throughout mass media and by pro-choice politicians. Every protest they launch is accompanied by these pictures and gruesome displays of what they want people to think a medically safe abortion actually is. I think the pro-choice “focus on the woman” meme is strategically wise, but we don’t go about it with the fervor the anti-choicers do. I think we need some pictures. In color. The site of a stillborn fetus is nothing compared to a dead woman pooled in her own blood. People need to remember these images because they are the true story of what happens when we criminalize abortion. People need to be reminded of what septic infections look like. The public has been able to forget because federal law has (mostly) been on our side for a generation.
I also think we need to address the pro-safe sex gap. Although there are clearly exceptions, many people in our generation have understood the don’t-have-sex-without-a-condom message. It’s easy to be brought up in a sex-positive household with responsible views on STI-prevention and contraception and then see women who do get pregnant from consensual unprotected sex as irresponsible and not worthy of “the abortion bailout”. This needs to be addressed too.
…but asked if it made any difference HOW the fetus had died.
Which is actually even scarier than the usual Krazee she spews, because it leads to holding women accountable for the outcome of their pregnancies. A police officer for every womb.
Oh, she’s great.
Check out the thread. I post as “Fetus Fascist” (yeah, I’m funny) It’s old and dead but very revealing. AFTER she admits swapping out the picture (a picture I found of a real saline abortion) she went on to call me “pig dog slime,” and accuse me of “Satanic retching.”
She’s a lovely Christian woman.
Here’s the thread: http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/03/new_abortion_ba.html
(By the way, that was just the first time she threw me off of her site. The last time was yesterday. She was ranting on and on about Obama’s pastor’s racist remarks, so I posted John McCain’s famous “I hate the gooks” comments from 2000. She threw me off again…)
Deep 6:
I also think we need to address the pro-safe sex gap. Although there are clearly exceptions, many people in our generation have understood the don’t-have-sex-without-a-condom message. It’s easy to be brought up in a sex-positive household with responsible views on STI-prevention and contraception and then see women who do get pregnant from consensual unprotected sex as irresponsible and not worthy of “the abortion bailout”. This needs to be addressed too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, do go over to Stanek’s blog and check out today’s mighty “Condom Users Die” thread. It’s PRICELESS!
http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2008/03/faithful_condom.html#comments
Ah, yes. Stanek sees the world through an upper-middle class, first-world living, emancipated white woman’s eyes. Only someone like that would apply the same behavioral and cultural standards to impoverished women in Tanzania that she applies to herself.
Shorter Stanek: I can Just Say No to sex, so all you poor black women in polygamous relationships with no health care and second-class citizenship can too!!!! Yay! The HIV epidemic is solved!!
Ms Kate March 30, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Oh, the status of “zygote-embryo” is PARASITE.
It cannot do much if anything without its host. Therefore, the host makes the call. That simple? Yes.”
Yeah but baby is pretty helpless too, so that argument will go nowhere quickly. (I lost an argument using that line of thought once.) But mark my word, the next big fight will actually be ‘legal definition” of zygote-embryo, from there status, right and relationship of both pregnant mother and ‘zygote-embryo’ are codified.
in itself won’t be a bad idea, in fact I think this fight is necessary. This is fairly fundamental in term of how we see ourselves, woman’s right, …. etc.
deep6 March 31, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Stanek sees the world through an upper-middle class,
she is an idiot. I think it’s all about money and exposure in her case. Take out the funding and spotlight, she’ll go away.
I had the pleasure of attending this session, and was completely blown away by it. I didn’t have a chance to thank you or the other presenters, Amanda, but this session was really one of the major highlights for me. I’m still thinking about and excitedly talking about what a tremendously informative and thought provoking session it was.
I really don’t understand how architects let their profession get so fucked up that most of them think it is a good idea to design buildings so that they are disorienting to the people who are supposed to use them. Do they just hate their fellow human beings and want them to suffer, instead of be comfortable?… …Either way, the design of that building in the picture is fucking disgraceful.
It may just be a myth, but my understanding was that the building was designed to force a group of people that are traditionally sort of isolationist to interact with each other. The outside of the building is far more chaotic looking than the inside, and, honestly, the inside is thought provoking but comfortable, I thought. It’s a visually interesting space and I can see how the slightly curving hallways and such make one more likely to run into and interact with other people. Maybe the story I hear wasn’t true, but, either way, I really love the strata center. *shrug*
Ms Kate March 30, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Oh, the status of “zygote-embryo” is PARASITE.
It cannot do much if anything without its host. Therefore, the host makes the call. That simple? Yes.”
Yeah but baby is pretty helpless too, so that argument will go nowhere quickly.
Not quite. A baby no longer has a host, which means that just about any reasonable person could, potentially, care for it. I can go down to a hospital tomorrow and feed babies and make sure that they’re clean and cared for. I can’t do the same for my co-worker’s fetus. That’s a rather significant difference.
A baby no longer has a host, which means that just about any reasonable person could, potentially, care for it.”
that argument is the one used against late trimester abortion. that an embryo is mature enough to live in most cases of premature birth.