Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Skin Cells and Abortion

I read a letter this morning from a county Democrat lackey griping about pro-life lobbyists mentioning that the embryo is genetically homo sapien. He rambled for a good three hundred words about the skin cell mataphor. I mentioned a while back, I'm all for a comprimise in the pro-life/reproductive rights debate. I'd love to see the pro-lifers stop saying "abortion stops a beating heart" bumper stickers if we could get the RR crowd to drop the "but skin cells are just as human as a fetus" diatribe.

Homo sapien genetic code is found in embryos' cells. Additionally, it's found in skin cells, hair cells, cells in the ovule, cells in the semen, cells in the egg, cells in toenail clippings, cells in your eyebrow, and so forth.

Each cell contains your complete genetic code. The collective of the cells serves a common purpose, while the individual cells each have a role.

The egg cannot, in and of itself, become anything other than the egg. The semen cannot, in and of itself, ever be anything other than semen. The embryo will develop through gestation, eventually exit the womb, go through infancy, toddler era, adolescence, young adulthood, mid-life crisis, and senility. It's no more moral to END this process by spontaneous externally inflicted death (killing), which in many cases inflicts excruciating pain (medically settled point in many stages of gestation in which abortion occurs), at the stage of being embryo than the stage of adolescence. If, hypothetically, you could give the embryo a haircut, clip its toenails, or do something that doesn't kill him or her, it would be perfectly fine. But you're ending the cycle of life. Stunting the development of a precious human. Killing him or her. That's what becomes morally reprehensible.

P.S. Before someone objects, don't start bickering over semantics with using the word kill. You can kill crabgrass. You can kill a book proposal. You can kill an ABC Docu-Drama when Madeline Albright complains. Sure as heck you can kill an embryo.

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