Quote:
Originally Posted by cartman
But there is a marked difference. Once you are born, the odds are really good that you will live quite a long time. This actuarial table bears that out:
Actuarial Life Table
But a fertilized egg faces very long odds. Anywhere from 25-40% do not make it past the first trimester.
I made the point rather awkwardly with the first post, but many abortions would have ended up as miscarriages. In fact, prior to Roe v. Wade, miscarriages were widely referred to as 'spontaneous abortions'. There seems to be this notion that all of the abortions would have resulted in a birth if the abortion wasn't performed, when that just isn't the case.
It is my personal opinion, but I don't see an inherent evilness in someone given drugs that causes their body to react the same as a someone who has suffered a miscarriage, when the incidence of miscarriages is so high. Or someone undergoing a medical procedure that is the same as one to deal with stillborns. I see it as evil to force someone to endure a pregnancy caused by a sexual assault or one that could kill or maim the mother. |
I've softened on this a
lot since my younger days, especially concerning drugs that work this way very early in the pregnancy. Where I haven't softened is on the argument that a person isn't a person until it has passed through the birth canal (or abdomen). I think
that view is ridiculous. Of course the trick has always been pinpointing at what point exactly is a person a person, if not at birth.
Maybe looking at things from a statistical point of view
would help some. Do you have any data on what the survival rate is for fetuses that make it to 18, 21, 24, etc. weeks (not numbers on % of births that occur at 24 weeks, but how many pregnancies that make it to that point result in an infant that survived to X months)? I would think that at some point, the survival rate rockets up then levels off.