Posted on 12/04/2008 1:37:22 PM PST by NYer
If you're positive there's no way an overzealous prosecuter or CPS bureaucrat could turn this into a witch hunt or use it to pursue a personal vendetta, I'm OK with it.
I don't think we had the abortificant drugs then that we do now.
You mean you’ll tell me how often you’ve been pregnant if I can prove I’m not a prosecutor? Well, I used to do taxes for an insurance company, but I’ve been a full-time breeder since 1995.
There have been abortifacient drugs for the whole of recorded history. Chemical contraceptives, too, some apparently very effective. It’s an interesting topic.
What I found amusing was that, a little later in the discussion, I said that his argument was illogical - which he chose to take as an insult as in I had called HIM illogical - and he proceeded to show the logic of his position by getting mad at me (emotional response).
Something that's not always made clear up front on this issue is that modern birth control pills don't always prevent fertilization. Sometimes they allow an egg to be fertilized, but then prevent implantation. In these cases it effectively acts as an abortificant. The objective is not just to prevent surgical abortions, or "morning after" pills like RU486. If the standard is that anything that results in killing a fertilized egg then even regular birth control pills will be illegal.
On this issue of human life beginning, I think that the Law of the Perversity of Nature is best applied. This law is best understood by example i.e. beforehand you cannot determine which side of the bread to butter. While, after the bread is buttered; it is easy to determine which side to butter, because it is buttered.
The beginning of a human life is indeterminable, but the ending of human life is obvious. One instant there is not human life and the next instant there is.
Until we have the technology to determine the instant before the instant after we may not intervene; in the intervening instant. Anything anyone does to purposefully intervene and end that human life is murder.
Note that instants are very very short.
After 9/11 they identified victims from a chunk of finger or other flesh and long shed hair from hair brushes.
At the moment of conception there is the complete complement of 23 chromosomes that uniquely identifies that individual for ever..even after death.
Yeah, that's likely a miscarriage, but what you said was an *apparent* miscarriage, and if that's the criteria, then any cramping and bleeding would fit the bill.
The idea that any apparent miscarriage needs to be reported to the police by the doctor is ridiculous and nothing more that more liberal control tactics. Any woman who's going to illegally terminate her pregnancy is not likely to go to the doctor anyway to confirm the pregnancy and is also not likely to go report it when the abortion occurs.
It's fatal flaw is that like all liberal policies, it's only going to burden doctors and mothers unnecessarily at a critical time in the mothers' life. A woman who just lost a baby to miscarriage does not need to be accused of killing it on purpose in addition.
The other thing is, since abortion is already legal, why SHOULD the doctor report it for homicide investigation?
MrB was right about the stupidity of the question.
You need to go back and reread comment 40 again. This discussion has gotten off track from what it originally started from.
Someone is covering his uhh, tracks.
The question was with regard to what the consequences of the proposed legislation would be. If a fetus is afforded the same status as any child, and we investige the death of any child that dies under mysterious or unexplained circumstances, do we do the same in the event of the death of a fetus? Children don't "just die".
Why did you say “no” to what I said? Nothing I said about the frailty of the human egg disputes that all embryos deserve the respect of life unless one knows they are euploid incompatible with life.
Many chromosomal abnormalities mean the embryo will NOT become a 2nd trimester baby no matter what. But we don’t know which those are, so we need to treat all embryos as if they had the capability of becoming babies.
----
The truth: Every embryo is a human being with potential.
Define human being. A 5-day-old blastocyst is indeed HUMAN (not dog, not mouse). But the 50% or more human embryos that are aneuploid enough to not be able to go on developing past a week or three have no full potential. If your wife had one in her uterus, she might never have known she was pregnant briefly.
So I see, say, 10 frozen embryos in a tank of liquid nitrogen, and I say that they are ALL potential human beings. Maybe when they are placed into someone's uterus, 2 at a time, maybe 5 will become people. The other 5 will probably not even register a positive pregnancy test, though perhaps one of those will, and the joyful mother will be brokenhearted in the 7th week when she loses the baby.
Hold on just a second. In America, the state is responsible *TO* the people, not *for* the people. The people have authority *OVER* the state, not the other way around.
Conservatives resist attempts to reverse this.
I understand that. I also know that all too often this gets turned upsided down by the bureaucrats and politicians and you have to be careful exactly how you make the law or you can end up handing them authority they were never inteded to have. Once they have it they are loathe to give it up.
Well, yes. I tend to do that.
Doctors make judgements about child abuse all the time.
“Is this child here because of an accident, or has he been abused, in which case I must report it.”
I see no difference between this and a doctor judging the likelihood that the death of an unborn baby was caused by intentional external action by another person.
“Scientists in GB were able to cull the ovaries from aborted fetuses with the intent of extracting these ovum for implantation into infertile women.”
What is the state between queasy and actually hurling?
Hearing that, I’m ready to report for peasant mob duty. I’ll even bring my own pitchfork.
Well, yeah, in a way. People used to say life is sacred "from the cradle to the grave," but seeing as it obviously starts before the cradle, they changed that to "from womb to tomb."
But does life really end at the tomb?
I say life is sacred "from erection to Resurrection."
:o)
Oh, and one good thinker (Dr. Mildred Jefferson, MD, the first African American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1951), had this to say: "I don't know when human life began. Possibly almost 2 million years ago, in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. But I do know that human life is transmitted to a new generation every time human fertilization occurs."
I like it. It even highlights the sin of self-gratification. ;)
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