The Washington Post's columnist Gershon (ex-Bush White House staffer) wrote an editorial today slamming anyone supporting Obama who opposes abortion. I entered this comment:
Don't let radical ideologues like Gerson get away with calling their position "pro-life."
If you don't agree with this position and let him call it "pro-life," then he's succeeded in labeling you as "pro-death." He doesn't have to say it in so many words. It just hangs in the air. Whenever you let someone frame the debate this way, you've lost before you began. You have to challenge the propagandists' assumptions and don't let them get into their talking points, which this essay provides in a textbook case of building a McMansion on a foundation of quicksand.
You have to ask "Hey there. Why are you calling me pro-death." He'll say "I didn't." You say "Oh yes you did. Unless you accept that I'm pro-life too. And of course I am. I'm pro-actually-alive people. Calling a dependent organism "alive" is just as true as calling your gall bladder alive. And just like a blastoplast, it has organic functions but can't live on its own.
"Moreover, you're being deceitful. When you say a fertilized ovum is "alive" in some way different from how a gall bladder is "alive," you mean to say that the fertilized ovum is a potential human being. This if false. Some are indeed potential human beings. But others are not, because they're so genetically defective that they can't even come to term. What lay people call "miscarriage" is usually the body spontaneously aborting a non-viable fetus. A non-viable fetus is not a potential human being.
Absent modern medical technology you can't know whether a fetilized ovum is a "potential human being" until it's born. Before then you're guessing, and in many, many cases you're guessing wrong.
"What you're really trying to get your listeners to think without you having to say it is that you believe that God sticks a soul in an egg at the exact instant that a sperm cell penetrates the egg's cell wall.
Only that's nonsense. First, it's based on a 19th century Catholic Pope's interpretation of early 19th century scientific understanding. It's not based on the Bible, which says exactly nothing about abortion, and only implies that fetuses have souls in a few isolated passages, and those only apply to fetuses that are well along in development--enough for the mother to feel the child moving inside her--the so-called "quickening."
21st century science proves that the Catholic Church's position is impossible even if you do believe in God, souls, the Bible etc. Because neither identical twins nor Chimeras occur at the moment of conception, nor, as far as we know, are their existences mandated by the condition of the fertilized egg, either entirely or in part. Sometimes an egg will divide into two organisms that later become identical twins. If the Pope and Gerson are correct, then identical twins either have half a soul each or one of them has no soul at all. Chimeras form even later, when two fertilized eggs merge and become a single fetus with a mosaic of DNA / organs from the two donor blastoplasts. Does someone who's a Chimera then have two souls? And what about ectopic pregnancies? Would a loving God park a soul in an ovum that not only has zero chance of coming to term but will--absent medical intervention--probably kill the mother in the process? Or anencephalic fetuses that a mother can bring to term but when born are unable to even breathe on their own and never will?
It was an amazingly effective piece of propaganda that the Catholic Church managed to convince Protestant fundamentalists that we get a soul at the instant of conception. And it's amazingly that fundies buy this when they say they strictly adhere to the words in the Bible, when this believe is patently non-Biblical.
So: don't let them call themselves pro-life, and don't let them call fetuses "unborn people" or anything like that.
And make them come out in the open about the basis of their beliefs: Catholic dogma based on obsolete and incomplete understanding of the morphology of reproduction.
Lastly, you can point out that Gershon and his ilk are direct hypocrites for not opposing the in vitro fertilization, which produces many thousands of destroyed embryos every year. Be sure to add that his stance, if applied logically, calls the parents holding their in vitro babies in their arms...baby killers. And if he doesn't, he's applying his own "logic" selectively. Which means it's partisan propaganda pure and simple, and nothing resembling the advocacy of life per se.
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