If you're replying to me, could you please identify the specific post (date, mainly) to which you're referring?
Without looking at that post, I guess I can respond partially as follows:
1. Yes, appearances can be deceiving. A face in a cloud may be taken as "inspiring" when in fact it's just random accident; a face in the paneling may create an obsession with a ghostly presence. But a face on a living collection of cells that is developing a brain, a nervous system, a skeletomuscular system, etc., and will do so without some kind of trauma (violent interference, malfunction, illness, whatever) is not really comparable to such phenomena. If your point is that the fact that a fetus has a developing face is not conclusive evidence, automatically destroying all counterarguments, that the fetus is a protectible human identity of its own, I could agree with that. But I do think it's at least somewhat suggestive, don't you?
2. If your post was indeed directed to me, you may be referring to what I said (at some point in this thread) that it seemed to me that some of the pro-choice rationale for being in favor of abortion in the early months but against it in the later months was based on the fact that the fetus looks more human as time goes on, and it's less comfortable to talk about "terminating" a mass of cells that has started to look like a baby--which would make the position less principled and more self-involved or self-focused ("I don't want to kill it because it's started to look like us, now"). Certainly nowhere near every pro-choicer thinks that way, but I think it ought to bother people when anybody on either side of the question comes to a position for the wrong reasons. You see pro-choicers making an argument for how the fetus is part of her own body as long as it's in there, but very few of them would argue that therefore it's OK to abort right up until the time of birth. And then you get into some shaky ground too, don't you?--because how do you account for early births? What difference should one day earlier or later mean? How do we determine--with life-and-death importance--the moment of "viability," if that's the standard we're going to use?
This is why I really do think that virtually all the arguments I've heard in favor of the _certain_ rightness of abortion end up in hairsplitting and tremendous difficulty. But then, so do some of the pro-life arguments.
Again, though: I vote pro-choice, for a variety of reasons. I just wish there were never such a thing as an abortion, and I'd like to see that happen. But with this many intelligent people of good will on both sides of the question, it's hard to see how this could rightly be a matter of law. That's really what it comes down to for me. If abortion is in fact morally wrong, you can avoid having one even when it's legal, so your moral choice is unaffected and uncompelled. But if abortion is not immoral or wrong, and you can't have one without violating the law, then somebody's compelling and dictating your choice.
At any rate, I wasn't saying that _I_ was using the "face" thing as a standard; I was saying that it seems to me that others do that. And I'm saying that people articulate principles that just don't hold up when pushed to their logical limits, and thus are abandoned by the very people who articulated them. (I think you could find arguments on the pro-life side that fit this pattern, too, btw.)
As for whether death is preferable v. life, I'm not trying to open out that argument--although I would say that a relatively small percentage of abortions are performed on fetuses where there is a strong reason to believe that death is preferable to life. Am I missing something, though? Was the question bigger than that for a reason I've missed?
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