Prolife answers

Serge has posted some responses to questions posed by Jill from Feministe regarding abortion and whether unborn children are persons. Jill does posts like this with some regularity and yet when someone like Serge links to his prolife answers to her pro-choice questions, she pays no attention. Which makes me wonder if she actually cares how prolifers would answer her questions.

In the comments section of Jill's post, I found this response by Jill to a question from a prolifer named Jessica about when personhood begins to be worth noting (my emphasis).

"Jessica, I hear ya, it is a hard line to draw. I guess what these questions eventually lead me to is, It doesn't really matter. I know that sounds cold, but the way I see it, even if a fetus is a person it doesn't have the right to use another person's body for its survival. It's a balancing act, and for me, the woman's right to her own body comes out on top."

Has Jill really thought through comments like this and the implication of them?

My daughter uses my wife's body everyday for her survival. If my wife decided that she no longer wanted to use her body to help my daughter survive, would it be alright for my wife to kill our child?

In a response to another comment about the consensus Jill writes,

"I am saying that if we accept the pro-life premise that embryos are people, then we have to re-calculate a lot of these things. I am saying that doing so will be a logistical nightmare, and will illustrate just how silly it is to argue that embryos are people in the first place."

How poor is this argument? The unborn aren't people because counting them in a census would be a logistical nightmare? That's probably one of the least sound reasons for determining whether someone is a person that I've ever heard.

I also enjoyed this comment from Zuzu (another pro-choice writer at the Feministe blog) responding to someone claiming "we obviously don't assign soc sec numbers based on when we think personhood starts."

Actually, we do. Try to get a social security number for a fetus sometime.

Our 3-week-old daughter doesn't have a social security number yet. It takes around a month or so (I believe that's what we were told) for the government to assign a social security number. Does that mean my daughter isn't a person until the government gets around to assigning her a social security number?