The fact that the unborn need their mothers to survive does nothing to take away from the biological fact that they are organisms anymore than the fact that many born children nurse proves that born children who nurse aren’t organisms.

Stacy,
Your point? It’s a scientific fact that the sex of an embryo has already been determined by the time of implantation so my language is far from inaccurate. Unlike Jill’s language (and Saletan’s by the way) which will more than likely continue to describe implanting embryos composed of more than 100 cells as “fertilized eggs.”

Egg and sperm are parts of whole human organisms (such as yourself and me) while an embryo is an organism unto themselves.

Uh, well, pardon me, but if they actually were organisms unto themselves, it doesn’t seem like we’d be having this discussion, since they wouldn’t require another human being to accomplish ingestion, respiration, and temperature regulation on their behalf for several months.

If dehumanizing the unborn with inaccurate language isn’t the goal then I’d hope pro-choice individuals could refrain from using wholly inaccurate language.

By the time the embryo reaches the uterine wall to attach she is composed of more than 100 cells.

Juxaposition is fun.

What is this “life” with quotation marks? Are you referring to some kind of philosophical criteria for “personhood?” If so, you should say that in your posts by saying “No one can agree when personhood begins” or “no one knows when a human organism has a soul.”

“Abortion,” in the popular conception, is the killing of a fetus, not an embryo, and certainly not as induced failure to implant, though as Saletan so well points out, the pro-life argument makes no distinction between these things, and so when they argue against “abortion” they are really arguing against all of the above.

I think there’s something to be said about accepting the full anti- abortion rights definition of abortion while at the same time pointing out precisely what the procedure does in fact. This might jarr some preconceived notions of what an “abortion” is, at least in terms of the moral / political debate. Then people might stop thinking of abortion as a monolithic, singular act whereby induced implanation failure is ethically equivalent to killing a 30 week old fetus, subsumed under the singular concept “abortion.”

They might start asking themselves what’s the difference between this type of “abortion” and that type of “abortion”?

That would be progress, IMO.

Jill,
No medical conclusion to when life begins? Have you ever read an embryology textbook because they certainly make a number of claims which disagree with your statement?

Oh, I knew I should have been more careful with this one, but I assumed that people would understand what I meant. Obviously human life begins to form when a sperm meets an egg. Human life is arguably “forming” even before that, with the creation of sperm and eggs. The bigger issue, though, is whether this forming/potential human life is the equivalent to a born, fully realized human life. I was trying to point out that medical experts (and religious communities, and philosophers) haven’t come to a definitive conclusion as to when “life,” as in the great big thing that you and I are living right now, begins — some people phrase it as a question of when one has a soul, etc. That’s what I was getting at when I brought up the “When does life begin?” thing.

I hope you will forgive pro-lifers if they err on the side of life.

They can do so. If they don’t want to take EC, they don’t have to.

However, they can’t force me to err on the side of life, and I won’t forgive them for trying. A demolition derby driver is welcome to crash his car into other participants in an arena, but he has no business forcing me to try to crash into other cars, and he has no business forcing me to loosen up my steering system to “err on the side of demolition,” either.

No one gets to force me to make myself more likely to suffer a consequence I don’t want. Forcing me to avoid EC happens to do just that.