Ammunition

Even though I don't agree*, everyone generally seems to think that babies are really cute and that we should save them. OK, well I meant more that I don't agree with the cute thing, because otherwise they're right: we should vaccinate, intubate, and swaddle in bubble-wrap as needed!

HOWEVER, there is a huge difference between a full-term, autonomously-living baby and a 16-cell blastocyst. One is alive, the other is a tissue. I feel no compunction whatsoever supporting a woman's right to self-determination, and that includes what's going on with her womb. Basically, I don't have the organs or biogeneic capabilities that women do, so I can't really ever truly understand their situation in an unwanted pregnancy and therefore I have absolutely no right to project my opinion all over their rights.

This is a well-written reminder of the cost to fully-formed women when abortion isn't available. In these situations desperate women do desperate things that, all too often, wind up in permanent injury or even death. Here in the West, it's all too easy to think of child-birth as a safe, happy event where women painlessly pop out laughing little bundles of joy. It's too easy for soft-minded hypocritical middle-class people to forget that poverty and hunger are very real and that many women would rather terminate an inopportune pregnancy than try to raise a child in hardship.

So if you ever find yourself locked in an interminable argument with someone Who Just Doesn't Get It, point them back to the article and hopefully it'll remind them what's what.

*Metaphor.