Prochoicers express hostility to science

A prolifer puts forth the scientific evidence that a human embryo is a separate human organism. She then urges people to vote based on this science. Then the abortion defenders respond.




Some choice (ha!) quotes from the friends of abortion/foes of science.

"We are not gonna try to use science, or evidence."

She stresses opinion again and again. Her point seems to be that her opinion trumps science.

"We need to focus on the birth control issue, and that's what you need to be thinking about, rather than any of the photos or scientific evidence..."

Again, simply expressing a hostility to the idea of introducing science into the picture.

"I didn't look at it because I didn't want to."

She chooses ignorance so that she can continue to support abortion. At least she's honest in her embrace of deliberate ignorance.

Science was used to defend slavery.

Actually, no. Typically they used economics, and misused morality and religion. When they did turn to physical evidence, they relied upon psuedoscience,based on a popular conception of evolution, to say that since people of African descent looked like monkeys (in their opinion), the Africans must be more like monkeys, not humans. Much the way the abortion supporting woman uses psuedoscience to argue that a fetus is like a virus, since to her the fetus (which she carefully did not look at) seems to her more like a virus than like a human being.

I've noticed that a lot of prochoice defense of abortion has the "don't look human to me!" flavor of slavery apologetics.

Science is not ultimate truth.

I'd guess that science gets closer to reality than just forming an opinion based on your personal preferences, then flat out and proudly refusing to even see anything that is contrary to what you happen to prefer to believe.

Science can not be applied to my body to force me to do something against my will. So that's why it's not science.

Honey, try telling science that it can't force you to do something against your will if you're in a car wreck. Try saying that inertia has no right to force your brain to slam against the inside of your skull against your will. See how it works for you.

And I notice that she has no problem whatsoever using opinion to cause a fetus to die (I'd presume against its will), so she's pretty selective about whose opinion matters, and when.

Now let's move into the pure falsehood, which accompanied the general and overwhelming hostility to science:

All of us women out there, we shed fertilized eggs pretty much every month.

1. Humans are viviparous. We don't lay eggs. So there's no such thing as a "fertilized egg" in human biology. The term she should use is either zygote or blastocyst.

2. A woman would have to be sexually active in order to conceive and thus "shed" a zygote. So the "we" she refers to would only include women who were sexually active that month.

3. Sexually active women don't conceive every month. There'd be a lot less infertility if they did.

4. Even if every sexually active woman did conceive every month, and the majority of those zygotes died natural deaths, we all die eventually. Using a high mortality rate to justify deliberate killing is a pretty slippery slope.

It's two cells! Two cells! Not -- what you saw -- I didn't look at it because I didn't want to.

The embryo is way past two cells long before the woman even suspects that she's pregnant. The zygote has about 16 cells as it leaves the fallopian tube and enters the uterus. When the embryo is finished implanting, it has two layers of cells. All this before the woman has any reason to think she is pregnant. Is this woman confusing two layers of cells with two cells? Is she just spouting "two cells" because she heard it from another abortion proponent? Did she just make it up? Or does she know better, but she's lying?

At about the time the woman's period is a week late, the primitive eye cells have moved into place, as have the cells of the ears. The neural tube has closed. The heart has formed an S shape and the cardiac muscle is active.

It's at this stage, with the foundation of the brain, eyes, and ears laid and the heart pulsing, that the woman is four weeks pregnant and might be able to get a chemical abortion.

At five weeks post-ovulation -- still too early for surgical abortion -- the brain is demarcated into midbrain, forebrain, and hindbrain. The esophagus forms and is visible separate from the trachea. The four major subdivisions of the heart are clearly defined.

At six weeks post-ovulation -- the earliest a surgical abortion can be performed -- the brain has well marked cerebral hemispheres. The intestines are in place, as are the ureters that bring urine from the kidneys to the bladder.

And at eight weeks post-ovulation -- six weeks into life -- the brain is sending messages to the muscles and the embryo makes spontaneous movements. Ovaries or testes can be distinguished. Fingers and toes are distinguished from one another.

It is that period, between six and eight weeks past ovulation, that roughly 50% of abortions are performed. And the other half are performed on fetuses more mature and developed than this.

Hardly a matter of "Two cells! Two cells!"

There's no consensus in science.

I'd say there's consensus in science about a lot of things! Humans are bilaterally symmetrical carbon-based life forms. Absolute zero is the temperature at which all molecular activity ceases. The earth orbits around the sun.

There's people on this side, for their researchers say that the heart beats in -- 21 days. There's people on our side, researchers, that says that the heart doesn't beat until 24 weeks.

Name one researcher, a single embryologist, who says that it's 24 weeks into pregnancy before the fetal heart starts beating!

How many of you, during a planned or otherwise wanted pregnancy, had to wait until 24 weeks to hear your baby's heart? Or is your experience more like what's described at this site on prenatal care:

Your baby's heart begins beating around 22 days after conception, about 5 weeks after your last period. At this stage, the heart is too tiny to hear even with an ultrasound. However, it may be detected as early as 4 weeks after conception as a flickering in the chest via ultrasound.

After 9 or 10 weeks of pregnancy, you might be able to hear your baby's heartbeat. Typically your physician will use a Doppler instrument to do this. A Doppler instrument bounces sound waves off the fetal heart. These sounds return, affected by what they bounced off of, and the changes in these waves are picked up by the receiver in the Doppler. This may not be possible until around 12 weeks of pregnancy, depending on the position of your uterus and your own weight.

At around 20 weeks of pregnancy, the heartbeat can be heard without the Doppler amplification.

Now, is this claim that the heart doesn't beat until 24 weeks a misunderstanding of reality -- that you probably can't hear the baby's heart with a stethoscope until about 24 weeks -- or did she pick 24 weeks because that's the beginning of the third trimester, when abortion is no longer just readily available on-demand in outpatient settings?

As the prolifer says at the end, "I would encourage you guys to maybe take a science class. It doesn't sound like you like science a whole lot."