Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[goodluck]

1. A blastula and an embryo aren't human beings. The law sensibly recognizes this by effectively allowing abortion on demand during the first 3 months, and restricting it more tightly as each trimester goes by.

2. There are times when the choice is the mother or the embryo. That choice isn't one for the state to make. Some mothers/fathers will choose to go through with the pregnancy anyway, others won't. It's their choice to make.

3. It is very clear that all embryos/fetuses aren't made "equal." Some are clearly deformed, sometimes horribly so. "Nature" makes mistakes--what a concept. Life is full of difficult choices--sometimes they are excruciatingly difficult choices. Sometimes the state can be involved in these difficult choices, sometimes it should leave them to the individuals who are most affected by them. I've seen families destroyed by having to care for infants/toddlers/children who were born with some sort of genetic defect and who would have been allowed to die at birth or shortly thereafter in the not very distant past, but today are kept alive through the (very expensive) "miracle" of modern medicine. I've seen other families devote resources to etiher fixing or adjusting for the defect, and occasionally succeeding. Good for them, I applaud them. Guess what, not many families have those resources.

4. Those people like you who want to make blanket statements about the "rightness" or the "wrongness" about the truly difficult choices in life are part of what is wrong in political life in the US today.