Tom Shaller of the non-sex blog TAPPED, reflecting on some of the uncomfortable questions CNN selected for Democratic candidates on the famous YouTube debate last night, wondered if they’d select similarly uncomfortable questions for any remaining Republican candidates when it’s their turn in September, and then proposed some of his own.
Among his sample questions was one very dear to my heart:
Of every hundred conceptions, 50 end in natural abortion without a mother ever knowing she is pregnant and, of the remaining 50, about 10 end in known miscarriages. If life “begins at conception,” abortion is a sin, and God is all powerful, why does God terminate six of every 10 conceived lives?
As you probably know the term “pro-life” is a marketing-oriented term of art coined by abortion opponents who recognized how few Americans support forcing a woman to carry an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy to term — when it’s put to them in such stark language. So they focus-grouped and test marketed (or did the marketing equivalent for the late 1970s) till they found a term that, while technically a bald-faced lie, makes people think they’re motivated by love of life rather than suspicion, fear, or outright hatred of sex.
More by coincidence than anything else, the idea that “life begins at conception” just naturally shakes out of the (artificial, marketing-driven) decision to re-label the anti-abortion movement “pro-life.” And since they’re nearly all of those who coined the term, though of course not all their fellow travelers, are also anti-contraception.
Shaller’s question goes right to the heart of their problem, however. If their claim is true that life begins at conception… if they’re willing to hold that the Constitution of the United States of America should be interpreted by the Supreme Court, or amended by Congress and the Several States, to uphold that position… then they really need a better answer for why it’s perfectly fine for 60% of all fully-fledged sovereign American Citizens to “die” unmourned before birth but not some other fraction.
Submitted by 1502 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-07-24 20:35.
Along the lines of the question you mentioned in your post, I've always wanted to ask Mr. Bush why, rather than or in addition to opposing stem cell research, he's never tried to ban IVF or other assisted reproductive technologies that result in the creation and consequent destruction of thousands, if not millions, of human embryos every year. I've never heard a peep from him or any other pro-life politicians about it.
I'm too lazy to do my research, but I think unused IVF embryos were what the stem cell researchers wanted to tap for their new lines anyway.