If we thought of a fetus as a baby....Re: abortion

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 9:45 PM -0500 10/10/02, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>Most arguments that hold abortion to be an ethically-acceptable choice
>depend on the assertion that a fetus is not a fully human person, and
>therefore the rules about killing human beings (e.g., that killing can be
>justified in cases of self-defense) simply don't apply to the argument.
>(It's true that some recent defenses of abortion have begun from the
>premise that abortion means killing a human being; as the defender of
>civil liberties Nat Hentoff puts it, it's finally hard to deny that "it's
>a baby.")

If one _really_ thought of a fetus as a baby, though, one would 
logically have to consider aborting a fetus to be the same as killing 
a baby and argue that abortion should be criminalized and that 
abortion providers and women who have abortions are murderers who 
ought to be tried and sentenced to prisons.  The Alan Guttmacher 
Institute reports that "The current rate (as of 1997) of 22 abortions 
per 1,000 women represents a total of 1.3 million pregnancies that 
end in abortion each year in the United States" (@ 
<http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/archives/nr_roe.html>).  That should 
make 1.3 million women, as well as abortion providers at 2,042 
clinics, baby-killers who should be treated as criminals.  As "[a]n 
estimated 43% of women will have at least one abortion by the time 
they are 45 years old" (@ 
<http://web.mit.edu/pro-choice/www/facts.html>), we would be putting 
about a quarter of the US population behind bars.
-- 
Yoshie

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