I've noticed your discussions in abortion threads usually include the "5 minutes prior" meme. Exactly how many late term abortions occur 5 minutes before birth would normally occur? I'm sure you have the numbers on that since you cite it often.
It serves to illustrate a simple point: At some point while still inside the mother's body, the child is a human being. So at some point, killing the child before birth is no different than killing the child after birth.
Since you don't agree with 5 minutes, how about 24 hours? 48 hours? 1 week?
Able to live outside the womb with large amounts of medical aid. And still lots that can happen that would end the life of the potential human being.
...which is a standard arbitrarily applied. We apply that because it sounds good, not because it has anything whatsoever to do with science or facts.
That's true, you didn't. My bad. I was just giving my own definition of a human being. I was full term and still needed weeks in an incubator and other medical aid. It's not a given that every viable fetus or baby is going to live long enough to see their first, second or even third birthday. Even in the U.S. which has one of the lowest mortality rates.
I would no more take the life of a newly born baby then I would a 27 week old fetus in an incubator. Just saying that there are many circumstances that happen during pregnancy that can take the potential human being/human life.
I am only concerned with the circumstances that we force on the fetus in question. If the child dies on accident, then no one could be said to be at fault for that death. If we deliberately move to destroy it, then we are committing a crime and a horrible crime at that.
I want less abortions performed as well; I just think there's better ways of accomplishing that goal.
You seem like a decent person. So I'll tell you what motivates me.
Before I had kids, I was pro-life. Now that I've had kids, I've become sentimental about it. For me, the magnitude of not just killing someone, not just killing a child, but killing your
own child, is...there's not really a word for it. Staggering; barbaric; unthinkable. Those words don't suffice. It deals with the trust that a child has for its parents, especially for the mother; a trust so complete and so innocent that the child doesn't even know to question it.
If I tossed my 8 month old son off the Mississippi river bridge tomorrow, from the time I threw him to the time he hit the rocks and died, he would never know the enormity of the betrayal perpetrated against him. He would simply be too young to perceive that there was ever a threat to his person, much less from those least likely to present such a threat, and equally unable to act in his own defense if he could perceive it. For me, that's not a betrayal. It is
the ultimate betrayal.
To betray a trust like that, to take advantage of a person's inherent weakness and powerlessness, and then use clever rationalizing to say it was in that person's ultimate best interest, is to reduce ourselves to something less than dirt.