by Kelli I followed my trainer to the lab where products of conception (P.O.C.) were inspected to make sure the doctor removed all the bits that, if left behind, could cause an infection. My trainer made a point to show me the tiny arms and legs floating in the glass baking pan. At 10 weeks […]

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who became a national political sensation by filibustering her state’s tough new restrictions on abortion, discloses in her upcoming memoir that she had an abortion in the 1990s after discovering that the fetus had a severe brain abnormality. In Forgetting to be Afraid, Davis also writes about ending an […]

by Kelli

On one hand, the depiction of “release to elsewhere” – especially of one of the unqualified babies, who is given a lethal injection and then dropped down a chute — could surely be used as grist for organizations who are deemed pro-life. (Especially given that in real life, abortion foes often use jarring images of fetuses to further their claim that abortion is murder, despite the fact that such images misrepresent the reality of abortion.)

On the other hand, the suggestion that birth control and family planning are necessary in a world of limited resources are in keeping with pro-choice sentiments. Further, the focus on “unqualified” babies who are at least several months old – not on embryos, fetuses, or zygotes (what those on the “pro-life” side often call “life”) – indicates that this “release” is NOT the same thing as abortion. (Thus, the story is much different from the one told by the likes of Rand Paul — the horror at ending a life is not focused on the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus, but on a functioning, breathing, fully formed human baby.)

More human cells - mostly skin cells - probably die when you dump a bucket of ice water over your head than are actually in a four-day-old embryo (pictured here above). If anti-choicers are really worried about cellular life, telling people to stop killing their skin cells for those greedy ALS sufferers would be the more direct approach. ~ […]

I have a new poll question up. It’s one of those abstract questions I’ve been asked, but it does test theory against reality:

If in one hand I was holding an embryo in a petri dish, and in the other a newborn, and could only save one, I would…

Vote in the poll on the right lower side of the home page.

The previous poll question was in response to threats (idle, as it turns out, unsurprisingly) by abortion zealots in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision to overturn Massachusetts’ buffer zone law.

And pro-lifers by-and-large said, “Bring it on”…

… Imagine that you want to buy a horse. You pay for a horse, and what is delivered to you is a fertilized horse egg. You would probably feel cheated. You can’t ride or race a fertilized horse egg. It isn’t a horse. Even in Texas. You need a mare and a lot of development. A single cell isn’t a horse, a cluster of undifferentiated cells (technically, a “blastocyst”) isn’t a horse, a cluster of differentiated cells isn’t a horse, a horse embryo isn’t a horse, and a horse fetus isn’t a horse. You would feel cheated if you were sold any of them….

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat At the Prospect, E.J. Graff displays a typical rant from a pro-choicer completely uninformed about fetal development. This is embarrassing: [At 10 weeks] I see an embryo, the size of a pinkie, that couldn’t survive even in the most intensive NICU. It doesn’t have a working brain, internal […]

In the book, The Da Vinci Code, the first clue was a “vault with 5 concentric, rotating sections labeled with letters that when lined up properly… form[ed] the correct combination word,” as explains Wikipedia. Similarly, the birth control pill’s Big Secret can only be discovered after decoding a series of words – except they never […]