The End Result

Response to Reply on Abortion.

Rachael, Thanks for the diplomatic response on abortion. I am glad that you agree adoption is the best way. It saddens me when people criticize because of the reasons you mentioned such as families being very willing to do whatever it takes to have a child.

Many of the responses I have gotten have addressed certain things that I forgot to mention in my post… such as gestation periods. You’re right about small embryos. I honestly, for the most part, don’t see that as a big of a deal. But in some research I was looking up (and again I haven’t done extremely extensive, nor do I really need to, for logic and morals to prove itself), I found just about half of abortions were done after 9 weeks. That means the baby is coming right along in development. Also, some of the abortion methods, such as the one I mentioned in my article are ridiculous and should be banned.

About rape. I know I sound extremely insensitive. In the effort to keep the post to the point I didn’t go into detail of any personal experiences, people I know, etc. It is a really terrible thing to endure and I can’t imagine so. But personally to me, I feel that an abortion for being raped still isn’t right. Should it be enforced by the government? I don’t think so… I think I may have implied it should in my post, but that was wrong. I don’t think that. This is where I’m not on one side or the other: Pro Choice vs. Pro Life.

However, I feel that there definitely should be a greater consistency across the nation. I looked it up once (and I’m too lazy to find it again, but if you’d like I can) that 20 states in the US still are for partial-birth abortion. That’s practically murder and that was my point. Not that removing an embryo, which like you said has about the same or less capacity as a fly, is murder, but when the child can pretty much be born, how can anyone be for that? Also to mention that if a pregnant mother is shot and killed the shooter is charged with two deaths. Should he be? YES! So there’s another loop hole.

I agree with you on many points, but if there was anything unclear that I said, or any questions you have shoot them to me! Thanks for joining this rediculous intense topic. I’m actually quite surprised I even posted about it, but it’s USEFUL debate and conflict like this that is what actually helps growth.

rachaelcox:

theendresult:

So I’m treading on a pretty darn sensitive topic here. But I want to. And I apologize to any readers who are offended by this. That isn’t my purpose.

The other week in my Critical Thinking class this was the topic at hand. Let me tell you, it was pretty intense. And I was not prepared for one of…

Abortion is one of the few issues in which I honestly can’t say I have a black or a white opinion on. Before I give my thoughts on this, just one quick jab (that is actually a little irrelevant to the point): I wouldn’t ask people if they’ve taken “anatomy” as an assessment of their knowledge on genetic inheritance, especially when anyone who has taken a biology or genetics class knows that there are inheritable mental disorders. Just off of the top of my head I know Huntington’s is one—I had to do an in-depth pedigree tracing the genetic disorder through several generations in one of my classes just this semester :)

At the heart of it all, I agree with you in that adoption is the best option. There is no shortage of families unable to have their own and would give an arm and a leg for the chance so many girls throw away. That being said.. I completely and utterly disagree with your rejection of rape as a justification. Even without an unwanted pregnancy, rape victims struggle to endure the emotional trauma associated with going through something so horrifying.. I’m sure that there are people somewhere who have enough strength and compassion to lock away the ordeal and its emotionally damaging effects, but I would never expect anyone, let alone require by law, that rape victims live with a reminder of that experience every single day for the rest of their lives—or even just nine months. That’s a cruel injustice to someone whose probably only mistake was deciding to walk out to her car alone, and the fact that she is the 1% does not mean her perspective should be so easily discarded.

In the event you are still not convinced and perhaps intend on some response akin to “abortion is equally cruel,” allow me to address that. A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. For the sake of comparison, there are more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. It will not become an embryo and show brain activity until roughly week 6. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter’s potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a holocaust of potential human beings. Just to give you some numbers for comparison, you shed approximately 30,000-40,000 skin cells per hour.

I support adoption as the best route for an unwanted pregnancy because it creates an immeasurable amount of joy for people who are unable to have children. However, I am adamantly against the denial of abortion to rape/incest victims because placing the well-being of a person who is here, alive, breathing, thinking, and already suffering on the back-burner for a a tiny collection of cells that is 1/1000 the size of a fly’s brain and as non-functional as one of your skin cells does not sit well with me. Of course it will always come down to where you individually define the “start” of a human life, which is ultimately why this topic will always be grey for me, but after extensive research and earning three-quarters of a Biological Chemistry degree I can confidently say rape/incest victims have a grace period of at least a few weeks before they can reasonably be condemned as “murderers.”