Ultrasound photo of the baby

"I took one look and I saw a picture of the baby."

Yes, yes, you don't want to debate abortion. We all get it. It's because for you, the issue is settled, and therefore closed. You have chosen the liberals' "openness" and "Gee, I won't impose my will on the woman" point of view. I hope you realize what you've done.

Many many times I have heard your disclaimer, "If we call it a human being we have to call it murder and if we call it murder we have to go kill abortion doctors therefore because I don't think we should kill abortionists we can't call it murder therefore it isn't the killing of an innocent human being because we will call it something other than a human being."

You need to step back and see what you did here. You wanted a certain conclusion, so you constructed (or in one case reconstructed) your arguments to reach this conclusion.

I'm not talking about the very reasonable practice of assembling the arguments for an issue, finding one or two of them to be more compelling than the other arguments, singling out the one reason that is most compelling to YOU, and reaching a decision based on that most-compelling argument though acknowledging that other reasons do still have merit.

Sometimes people pursue that path when they ponder the reasons for and against legalizing abortion. "Well, in favor of legalized abortion, there's the issue that you can't tell a woman what to do with her body, the government should get out of regulating sexuality, it's not a human being, it has no rights till I see its face, it's just a lump of undifferentiated tissue, no woman should be forced to be pregnant against her will. Against legalized abortion there's the possibility that it might be a human being, it shouldn't have to pay for its mother's mistake, you're killing someone and calling it okay just because they don't know they're being killed."

I did this myself. Most of those arguments I could dismiss because they're answerable or refutable because they're false. But I had no answer for "A woman shouldn't be forced to be pregnant against her will." That's a value judgement I happened to agree with, so I supported legalized abortion, knowing full well all the facts about fetal development, knowing full well that it's a human being (just that our radicals choose to define it as not one), and knowing the answers to the argument that it doesn't look like a human being so we don't have to consider it one.

I was happy with my position for a few years. But finally I heard someone say "We don't have the right to kill someone just because they don't know they're being killed." I spent many months trying to refute that one. If we have the right to kill someone (and the fetus is a someone) just because they don't know we're doing it, then we could kill sleeping people, kill anyone in a coma, kill someone at a whim, just so long as we knock them out first. Besides, there is a lot of evidence that a twelve-week-old fetus knows it's having its life taken. They stop sucking their thumbs, they kick, they struggle, they try to move away from the suction. They fight for their lives.

That's when the argument that "We can't kill someone just because they don't know they're being killed" became far more important to me than "No woman should be forced to be pregnant against her will." There are answers to the latter claim, anyway, but I won't go into them.

But this not what I'm talking about.

You started with your conclusion. "If it went through a lot of mental calisthenics to get to your "It's not fully human, it's um, nascent human life" conclusion. Nascent, for those who don't know, means "just beginning but not yet arrived".

I'll finish this later.