Since the shooting of Dr. tiller, and every time something happens to an abortion clinic or a doctor who provides family planning services, there is a spate of articles and blog posts about abortion. These range from the calm and understanding to the ridiculous and inflammatory. I fully understand that pro-lifers think that abortion is murder and that murderers are getting away with an evil act.

The thing is..I simply don’t believe you.

I don’t believe you because I have never once heard of a pro-lifer acting in a way that indicates that they really believe what they say. Here is what I mean.

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists miscarriages happen so often they rival the number of abortions that are performed. Specifically,

Miscarriages occur in about 15–20% of pregnancies. Most occur in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. Some miscarriages take place before a woman misses a menstrual period or is even aware that she is pregnant.

This is confirmed even at pro-life sites (this one puts the number at 40%). That means that if you are truly pro-life, you would be holding a funeral, like you would for any dead child, if you (or your wife, or whoever would be the one who gets pregnant) have a period while trying to get pregnant, or even are just having unprotected sex. You would check to see if the blood contained a fertilized egg (you need a lab for that), and even if you couldn’t prove there was one, you would be having the same type of funeral that you would for any child who died regardless, since, by your standard, there is a dead child in there. You would do this for a fertilized egg, a blastocyte, and embryo whether you can see them or not. Otherwise I simply don’t see how you can claim that you think that a fertilized egg is a baby.

I don’t believe you when you say that an embryo is a baby. If you thought that then you would be appalled at the state of our healthcare system, one that is allowing a health care crisis beyond that of any other malady that humans get. There are between 800,000 and a million miscarriages a year (its hard to pin down because many times a woman doesn’t know she was pregnant nor that she miscarried). Compare this with other leading causes of death:

Number of deaths for leading causes of death:

• Heart disease: 631,636
• Cancer: 559,888
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
• Diabetes: 72,449
• Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
• Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
• Septicemia: 34,234

If you really believed that a blastocyte is a baby, you would be urging your politicians and health officials to be funding the #1 natural killer of people in America. Where is the outrage that so little is spent on preventing such a pervasive cause of death like miscarriage (I cant even fund the number) while over 170 billion dollars is spent on measly diabetes?

[sidenote: this argument has been feebly answered before, but its done by creating a straw man. No one is saying that murder isn’t bad, but we as a society fight hard to prevent murder and prevent and treat disease. We pursue both paths vigorously through government, education, law enforcement, and research and medicine. Pro-lifers only seem to care about the perceived murder. Somehow the death of an embryo is far worse is it is caused rather than natural]

I don’t believe that you really think conception is the formation of a human life because you don’t, as a stringent practice, name your embryo. Oh you think about names, but when that baby is born, you name it and that is the name he or she has for the rest of their life. If you thought a fertilized egg was a baby you would go through the naming process before you got pregnant or very quickly thereafter. The fact that its hard to do because you don’t know if its a boy or a girl is really your problem isn’t it? I suppose you could stick with names like Jean, or Chris, or Pat.

I don’t believe you when you say abortion is wrong because you do not fight hard enough to make alternatives viable. It costs about 15,000 dollars to have a baby in a hospital, but this is covered by insurance. It costs a similar amount to adopt a baby but it is not covered by anything (although there are starting to be some avenues for help that mostly involve financing). Your choice to have your own children instead of adopting is also telling. On this (and probably only this) I agree with focus on the family. If you want abortions to be made illegal, you have a moral obligation to adopt and make adoption a low bar to hurdle. Why should people put their children up for adoption, if in all likelihood, the child will not get adopted. Think of it, there are currently 2 million kids up for adoption and only about 1.5 million of them get adopted. That leaves 500,000 kids “in the system”, and now you want to add another 1.3 million or so to that?

I also don't believe you when you say that you think a fertilized egg is a baby because while you rail against unwed mother, unwanted pregnancies, and abortions, you don't do anything to help to prevent them in the first place. You cry on and on about teenagers having sex and unwed mothers and then promote utter nonsense as a remedy for that. Instead of providing information based programs to give everyone the tools they need to be cautious and knowledgeable about sex and pregnancy prevention in a realistic and proven fashion. you promote programs that increase unwanted pregnancies. You conflate "abstinence" as an effective prophylactic with "abstinence only", a ridiculous, demonstrably poor method of educating our teenagers about their sexuality.

You say you are pro-life. You say life starts at conception. But you don’t act as if you believe it yourself, why should I?

[second sidenote: I know that some pro-lifers do some of these things. I’m sure a number of them have adopted, although when I have asked people marching in front of a clinic I have so far found that none of them have. I’m sure some of them have written to health officials to help ease the rate of miscarriages, but I have never seen an organized response toward this. I’m sure some of them have attended funerals for late term miscarriages. The measly amount of pro-lifers that do any of these things, and startlingly few, if any, who do all of them, is the reason why I simply don’t believe most pro-lifers really believe what they say]

[Third sidenote: My wife an I are having a baby soon. We had intended on adopting..but err…um… well things happen. We may still. Anyway, I say this because I wrote a lot about miscarriages in here, and I understand that it sounds like I am mocking pro-lifers in their contentions. I am dead serious about what I wrote and am not mocking people who have had miscarriages at all. Women who experience a miscarriage are more significantly affected than those who have abortions, and I can totally understand the loss and horror they must experience, as do the fathers I am sure, particularly for late term miscarriages. For anyone who has had a late term miscarriage, my heart goes out to you.]

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Pro-lifers: I simply don’t believe you.

2009-06-05T14:10:00-07:00

Techskeptic

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