And if a fertilized egg is a “person” and a woman miscarries (as up to 50% of fertilized eggs are believed to result in), can she be charged with manslaughter? Why or why not?

Regarding the nurse with the dramatic recount of seeing an abortion: as someone in nursing school the first thing we’re taught is to not judge to try to control others. That “nurse” had no business be working on a ward where her personal feelings clearly cloud her judgment and harm her effectiveness. At best she is insubordinate, but she borders on dangerous.

Regarding the right-to-lifer comments: what I’d like to know is who is going to take all these unwanted babies? Where are the clinic protesters? Cause they sure are NEVER at my state’s foster care or adoption offices (!!!)

Re: Kevin’s comment: “There’s life when there is a heart.”
By your definition someone who is brain dead must be forced to stay on a ventilator, even if that goes against wishes. By this definition, an elderly patients Do Not Resuscitate order would never be honored. Having a pulse is not sufficient to prove “personhood” and we as consenting adults risk losing our right to choosing our own care (or refusing care).

Then maybe life is, indeed, nothing…

I say, “There’s life when there is a heart.”

“The baby breathed. It was lying in a bedpan – it was a little boy and I saw him breathe. I said to the doctor: ‘I am going to get the crash team (emergency resuscitation medics).’

“And he got hold of my wrist, pulled me into a cubicle and said: ‘We are not on the labour ward. What are you doing?’

“He said that the only way I would be able to prove that the baby was alive was to drop him into a bucket of water and see if he floated! I ran out in tears.

“Later, the ward sister jabbed her finger at me and said: ‘You should seriously think about whether you should be a nurse.’

“What got me was the total lack of regard for human life. I have no issue with abortion at the right time. But this is murder.”

[...]

Recently, she watched an abortion at 19 weeks in a North London hospital.

“A baby aborted at 19 weeks is given a lethal injection into the heart. It is the most scary and unbelievably horrible thing to experience. This is Death Row.

“The needle goes into the heart and then the baby is left for 48 hours. The foetal monitor is checked until the heart stops.”

Check out Genesis 38:1-10 (click on my name).

Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment. Let’s take an even further step back. If you say that one cannot know exactly when it is a human, and that one risks murdering a human because of that, then there is also the risk of murdering a human every time a man ejaculates (either through direct stimulation or through dreams) or a woman has her period. Because we can’t say with certainty when something is human, then individual spermatozoa and ova are no less deserving of the moniker.

Why, then, place the burden on people having sex at will? Perhaps that is only because you place the development of “human” at some point after the union of the sperm and egg, which is just as arbitrary as what Nigel has pointed out.

I understand your message that people should be more responsible in how and when they have sex, but I also detect some moralistic undertones suggesting that sex should only be done for procreation, so as to avoid the “problem” of abortion. Sex has multiple roles: procreation, certainly, but also pleasure, enhancing the bond between two people, reassurance, the release of stress or anxiety. But all that is beside the point and off topic for Phil’s post.

The decision of where to draw the line between “human” and “not human” should not be based out of fear that it may be murder, lest we have people incapacitated by guilt every time they have a racy dream or get to “that time of the month”, let alone loving couples wracked with remorse every time they engage in loving acts that reinforce their relationship.

Don’t get me wrong. It is an important discussion to have, and we should work toward a reasonable consensus, a compromise, that can be accepted by, if not all, at least a great majority of the people who will be affected most by the decision. But any such decision should have some rational basis, rather than making emotional pleas.