Informant38

Abortion is still a wonderful tool for keeping Americans divided.
The whole question gets presented as life begins at conception, life begins at birth.
Take your pick.
It's like trying to draw an official line between the tide and the beach.
What if life doesn't begin?
What if it's there in the sperm and the egg, what if they're alive?
They're alive.
Life doesn't begin anywhere mechanical, these are supra-rational distinctions.
Death isn't any more measurable.
What's lost is animation, permanently. Yet that line keeps getting pushed into the machine and death is getting further and further away from where it once was.
The purpose of the debate about abortion is to keep Americans divided, as earnest as the combatants are and as furious and strident as they get.
One side sanctifies its own hunger for the womb, elevates the child, the state of childhood itself, above its nature, the other sanctifies the self and demands that be recognized as a right. And there's only those two sides.
Life begins at conception - life begins at birth.
Children are holier than adults, until they become adults - the self is what matters most, is central to life.
Anti-abortion imagery of abortions tears at the miscarried, elevates miscarriage to requiring funerals and mourning, which it almost does, but there is no line.
The insistence that the pregnant woman must have final authority on what happens to what is in her body elides the miracle of the reproductive. Miracles are in short supply.
Miscarriage in the first three weeks is not grievous. Miscarriage gone unnoticed isn't serious, it happens all the time.
The loss of a child from the womb past a few months is a sad serious thing. Where that changes can't be legislated without being false, for convenience sake.
You can say that where the normal high tide line usually is will be the boundary, you can give that distinction legal standing, you can encode it in property laws and real estate deeds, but it's a lie of convenience, it's arbitrary and false for all its utility.
There is no line.
Life blurs into the form we recognize, and at its end blurs out of that form.
Drawing lines on the mist is the work of fools, driven by madmen.
Or, more politely:
It's my considered opinion that abortion is being used like a cudgel, to keep well-meaning people disengaged from each other and in opposition. That that keeps well-meaning people from finding common ground and common enterprise, keeps them from recognizing how closely they resemble each other, keeps them from acting against those who keep them divided.