Cute L’il Babies Fetuses
Michael Williams has long maintained that it’s a matter of time before science forces the majority to become anti-abortion. This article and these ultrasound photos (h/t: Patterico) make it hard not to agree.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking of aborting me, that’s illegal, and has been for 37 years to the day.
June 29th, 2004 at 8:19 am
Happy birthday (what a weird way to announce it!)
On the substance of your post, though, I have to disagree (even though it’s your birthday). If pictures were going to convince anyone, they would have done so already. No matter how good a look we get, the people who favor abortion will continue to do so.
June 29th, 2004 at 8:25 am
Happy birthday!
I’m not sure that you can’t be aborted. Didn’t Mrs. Cartman get a 27th-trimester abortion for Eric?
June 29th, 2004 at 8:49 am
Spoons: that’s definitely true about the hard-core abortionists, but not necessarily true about the fence-sitters. Time will tell.
John: Nah, he’s still around. IIRC, she almost got a 27th trimester abortion, but realized at the last minute that she had confused “abortion” with the other a-word. Then she reneged on that, too, but I forget why. Then again, seeing as she is really his father, I’m not sure she ever had the legal right to abort him in the first place.
June 29th, 2004 at 10:01 am
Happy birthday to another member of the class of 1967!
June 29th, 2004 at 10:39 am
Should it be changed from happy birthday to “Abortion Freedom Day?” (kinda like tax freedom day?)
June 29th, 2004 at 11:14 am
Happy Birthday.
Just wait until someone gets a video of a partial-birth abortion. There are a lot of barriers to that happening, but I’ll bet it happens some day. You thought the Nick Berg video was gruesome? Ha!
June 29th, 2004 at 11:30 am
Happy Birthday! But…are we talking about the day of conception, or birth, here? ;)
June 29th, 2004 at 11:33 am
Day of birth. I was never conceived. Well, I guess I was. I must have been …. ew. Nope, I was never conceived. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
June 29th, 2004 at 1:33 pm
Happy birthday.
June 29th, 2004 at 8:06 pm
Jeff,
The proper term for the opponents of the culture of death isn’t “anti-abortion, it’s “pro-life.”
BTW Your new format rocks … I can even see the comments as I type them. Woo-HOO! :-D Next thing you’ll have is a preview button and it will all be good.
Oh, and happy birthday! :-)
June 30th, 2004 at 9:25 am
Happy Birthday, if a little late.
If science had any place in the abortion debate whatsoever, “pro life” people would be handing out condoms and birth control pills on every street corner, working to stop the cause of abortion — unintended pregnancy.
(Yeah, yeah, yeah, abstinence is the only sure-fire way. Guess what? People are having sex anyway. You can deal with that reality, or you can ignore it.)
June 30th, 2004 at 10:24 am
I guess it depends on what you mean by “pro-life.” If you equate it with “anti-death,” then I almost agree; the only caveat being that pro-lifers should push abstinence and birth control, and not accept a false choice between the two. OTOH, that’s not a literally “pro-life” position; strictly speaking, preventing unwanted life from occuring in the first place is no more “pro-life” than killing it after the fact is. If anyone were truly “pro-life,” as opposed to anti-killing, they’d be encouraging people to multiply like rabbits, all the better to create as much life as possible. [I was half tempted to suggest they not scrub their toilets, either, but thought it best to limit the discussion to issues surrounding human life.]
I think the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are fine, as long as both terms are used and not just one. Most people are, generally speaking, both pro-choice and pro-life. The hard part is what to do when these two principles conflict: do we compromise life to protect choice, or do we compromise choice to protect life? The answer depends on whether you are more strongly pro-choice than pro-life, or vice-versa. The only problem I have with these labels is both are too broad, as neither is restricted to the issue being discussed.
As neutral, descriptive terms go, I think “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion” are as good as any. Many pro-abortionists object to the phrase “pro-abortion,” but it’s in line with the terminology used on other controversial issues. For example, if I support your right to bear arms and pay less taxes, I’m considered “pro-gun” and “anti-tax,” even though I may not have expressed a preference that you actually take advantage of these rights, and may have actually expressed a preference that you not do so. This is, however, the first time that I’ve encountered an anti-abortion person who objected to the term “anti-abortion.”
June 30th, 2004 at 12:45 pm
The reason pro-abortionists (such as the Left Angeles Times, which has a policy of changing “pro-life” to “anti-abortion” in their articles) insist on referring to “pro-life” as “anti-abortion” is two-fold.
First, they seek to cast the pro-life movement in a negative (”anti-”) light, referring to it as what it is against rather than what it is for.
Second, they seek to abort the term “pro-life” because pro-life is a standing rebuke to the opposition. Those who are opposed to pro-life are “ANTI-life” (pro-death). The truth hurts, so pro-abortionists seek to dictate the terms of debate and expunge pro-life from the lexicon.
While I may be the first pro-life person you have encountered who objects being referred to as merely an “anti-abortionist,” I am not at all unique among the pro-life movement in my objection.
PS–I’m not upset at you, although I am upset with leftist rags like the Times who have made it a policy that “pro-life” shall never sully the hallowed pages of their daily screed.
June 30th, 2004 at 1:34 pm
I don’t like the Times’s terminology, either, but only because they are inconsistent. They should either refer to each camp according to neutral criteria (pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion), or they should refer to each according to its own, self-imposed, and somewhat self-flattering name (pro-choice vs. pro-life). Calling one group “pro-choice” and the other “anti-abortion” under the guise of objective news reporting is unjustifiable.
June 30th, 2004 at 7:18 pm
Happy Birthday, Captain Vague.