One of the primary difference between the life and choice sides is when you think a fetus is a baby. To me until there's at least a 50% chance of survival outside the womb (ie premature birth) it's not a baby because any miscarriage would terminate the pregnancy without a child.
It doesn't really matter what I think about what word to use to describe or refer to certain human beings because the actual nature of a living, existent, human being-in-fact does not change based upon how we refer to that human being.
I guess that can be considered degrees of death. But we are a society that believes strongly in degrees of death (hence why we have 4 classifications of murder plus the civil court oriented "wrongful death").
In law there are degrees of culpability for causing the death of another human being, but there are not degrees of death as far as the victim is concerned.
So insofar as abortion (in the sense we are using the term here) is the deliberate killing of a live human being, the issue is not whether whether we use a latin word, fetus or English words such as "baby" or "child" to describe him. The issue is whether or not there exist some human beings who do not have human rights and some human beings who are "less equal" in terms of intrinsic human dignity than other human beings, and who can therefore be manipulated and killed with impunity by others more powerful than they.
The answer is no. Every human being has the same human nature that you and I do. Human beings do not derive their inherent worth from how other people value them or how other people evaluate their survival possibilities, or any other extrinsic consideration. People have intrinsic human dignity simply by the fact of their human nature. That is what is meant by The Declaration's "all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...". Anything less as an ideal is a frightful prospect for all of us.
Cordially,
Absolutely true when refering to the base essence of how things work. But we don't make decisions down there, we make decisions based on how we see things. And there's a very tight tie in between what we call something and how we see it, and that governs what we think should be done with it. For the prolife person everything that can become a baby is a baby (to put it crudely and not very well). While I understand the position I don't agree with the position. Maybe it's because of the large number of miscarriages in my family history (wombs in my family are not safe places, the good news is those of us that make it out are very tough, never get sick and live a long time). To me that causes a very obvious distinction between fetus and baby. My mom was pregnant 8 time for one kid, from where I sit it's very obvious that the 7 fetuses that never made it weren't babies, I can tell because I have no siblings.
It probably seems wierd to you that I focus so much on miscariages but that really is the source of my definitions. If a fetus can be "not born" with no interference from man I simply can't define it as a living human being, it makes no sense to me. While I can follow your logic I cannot accept your initial assumption. I can only hope I have presented my position well enough for you to be able to do the same.