When your body doesn’t belong to you
ACB is a big fan of forced pregnancy.
Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court nominee, signed off on an advertisement in 2006 that called for the overturning of Roe v Wade, and called the landmark abortion rights decision “barbaric” and a “raw exercise of judicial power”.
The two-page ad, published by the St Joseph County Right to Life group, an extreme anti-choice organization in South Bend, Indiana, is the most striking evidence to have emerged to date of Barrett’s personal opposition to Roe v Wade.
And thus to women’s right to decide whether to be pregnant or not.
The first page of the ad, which is signed by Barrett and her husband, Jesse, states that life begins at “fertilization”. The ad, which the organization publishes every year to mark the anniversary of Roe v Wade, was signed by Barrett while she was working as a law professor at Notre Dame.
When “life begins” isn’t the issue. Viruses are alive*, bacteria are alive; so what? We don’t consider it murder, or bad, to kill them when necessary.
On the second page of the two-page spread, the group condemns Roe and claims that “the majority of those abortions were performed for social reasons”.
Meaning, reasons having to do with the woman’s life and plans and wishes. Apparently ACB thinks women have no right to let their plans and wishes decide whether or not they want a human growing in their abdomens for nine months. Apparently ACB thinks women’s abdomens don’t belong to them but instead belong to any egg that happens to get fertilized. This amounts to thinking that women are public property and have no personal rights of their own.
*Updating to add: Viruses not really alive:
Since viruses were first discovered in 1892 by Dmitri Ivanovsky, our ideas of what they are have shifted from poisons to biological chemicals. Some years after their discovery, scientists first raised the idea that viruses were living – albeit simple – organisms because they caused diseases like bacteria, which we know to be alive. However, viruses lack the hallmarks of other living things. They don’t carry out metabolic processes, such as making the energy molecule of life, ATP, and they don’t have cells and therefore the cellular machinery needed to make proteins by themselves. The only life process a virus undergoes independently is reproduction to make copies of itself, which can only happen after they have invaded the cells of another organism. Outside of their host some viruses can still survive, depending on environmental conditions, but their life span is considerably shorter. This complete reliability on a host for all their vital processes has led some scientists to deem viruses as non-living.
Life begins at fertilization is much more extreme than at conception. In theory, it could make menstruation illegal if you slough off a fertilized egg without knowing it. And so many of the eggs never implant…if life begins at fertilization, God is the biggest abortionist/murderer of all. The mind boggles.
This also makes Mitch McConnell’s statements about Barrett and Roe seem…well, the nice phrase would be disingenuous. Self-serving, nasty, lying, manipulative…more accurate.
For one awful moment that I thought that by “ACB” you meant me!
I have been oft bemused by the apparently total lack of engagement with opposing argument displayed by those on the pro-life/anti-choice side. To parrot the line “life begins at fertilization” as though it were the end of the conversation reveals enormous ignorance.
I wonder if this will shift the needle. It is an open secret that she is the choice to end abortion, known by all; yet all the same the right have been cautious to maintain that she is neutral and uncommitted on the subject. They seem to prefer having even a flimsy pretence at impartiality over casting it aside, and this tears it down entirely.
(Irrelevant nitpick – viruses aren’t living organisms. No intake of nutrients, no metabolising them, no excretion of waste products, no response to stimuli etc.)
#1 iknklast
I seem to remember reading a estimate of 50% for implantation failure.
Not a terribly irrelevant nitpick – I had read that, and thought about it, but forgot it at that moment.
Thanks for saying this, Holms. I was thinking it, but also thought that it might be pedantic for me to say so in this context, given that it is close to my current research interest.
I would just say “no self-organization”.
Nah, don’t worry about being pedantic. Keep those fact-checks coming!
The figures I have read suggest that between 30% and 40% of fertilised eggs fail to implant. Of those which do implant, many are miscarried within the first few weeks when chromosomal and/or hormonal errors result in a non-viable embryo. Of those pregnancies which last long enough for the woman to know that she is pregnant rather than just having a delayed period, 10% of established pregnancies will end in miscarriage in women under 30; up to 20% of pregnancies will end in miscarriage in women aged 35 to 39; and in women over 45, more than 50% of established pregnancies will end in miscarriage.
There is no doubt about it; if there is a God, he absolutely delights in abortion and terminates pregnancies as often as he can.
I should add, those are first trimester miscarriages. God is a jerk, and will happily kill a fœtus right up to, during, and immediately after birth. And will kill the mother, too, given the opportunity.
Humans are considerably kinder. We’ve been inventing ways to make childbirth safer for mother and baby for millennia. What has God done? Sent a novel coronavirus.
I had a dear friend who’s wife ended up with the baby dying at eight months; she had to carry the dead baby (I’m not sure why. He never explained it) and give birth normally. That was heartrending.
Like many other things, “living” is a category with fuzzy borders.
“Life” is a social construct anyway. Let’s call it a spectrum and reject the binary!