MUST WATCH – Marco Rubio gives amazing pro-life address

And you stated it perfectly, deny a two month old fetus the ordinary means of survival and he/she dies – which equals murder. Hence why we have to respect the developmental stage of every human being. To interfere with it, is to destroy it. But how silly for you to think it makes sense not to kill a fetus at 6 months because it can survive outside the womb…You are cherry picking the unborn – and you don’t get to decide who can be an individual by re-defining what it means to be a person. And with new medical technology, your definition will keep sliding back to meet “who can survive outside the womb.” That’s still a deadly slippery slope. “The intrinsic humanity of unborn children, by definition, makes them persons, and should, therefore, guarantee their protection under the law.”

What is the threshold of malicious equivocation?

It is the point where, with so few weeks required of a woman to complete minimal gestation, that to make a case for asserting Personal Sovereignty–i.e., the right to NOT be “inconvenienced”–one must resort to equivocation about enduring stretch marks, weight gain, social stigma, avoiding certain foods, etc. The reason it would be malicious is that medical technology can remove so much of the burden from her, that to deny the life of the child in those circumstances becomes more and more cruel, as the window gets smaller.

Thus, we are really trying to determine, not just where Life begins, but where that threshold of malicious equivocation about it begins. Obviously between that threshold and the third trimester, we are talking about a very small window indeed.

Somewhere within that small window is where the law must settle, today, to be able to simply catch up with science and medicine. This means that we should have a firm number of weeks of gestation–between the instant of conception, and the threshold of malicious equivocation–where life is deemed to exist, and must be afforded the protection of law.

We’re basically talking about the first trimester here.

Twelve weeks.

And growing smaller.

We can see where this is headed. All too soon any appeal to Personal Sovereignty will be seen as cruel, given the small period of inconvenience. (We can assume any “born” child would be put up for adoption, if it it is not wanted).

Given this shrinking window, and the fact that all of these points-in-time during gestation are arbitrary, why should we be required to assume the Life doesn’t exist during any of it? What need do we have to make that assumption, given that the Personal Sovereignty issue is so insignificant, compared to our ancestors? Why must we choose any date at all?

It turns out we don’t. Since it IS a matter of “inconvenience” to the mother, for all intents and purposes it does not matter which date you choose. In fact, as a philosophical issue, arising from a matter of logistics and basic logic, we can treat the developing fetus as a fully grown child, because the inconvenience to a mother giving up a child to adoption is roughly the same, regardless. (And because to have an abortion just to “avoid all that hassle” is needlessly cruel, given the small, and shrinking window of criticality).

So the law can, and should assume life begins at conception.

This brings up issues that are separate from it, but arise because of it. But we can go into those later.

The bottom line is that the pro-life position is NOT based on cells, fetuses vs embryos, or even viability-ex-utero. It’s based on the growing insignificance of the Personal Sovereignty issue and the increasing likelihood that Life starts very early in the process.

The issue isn’t about “when life begins”, but is actually about “when the foetus becomes an individual and therefore endowed with inalienable individual rights, which consequently must be protected by the government”.

The pro-choice stance does not declare that foetuses, cells, or even single sperm are “not alive”. We wholly admit that they are… just as we admit that our appendices (and other organs) are “alive”.

If the criteria is “let’s protect life”, then there are NO limits, and there is NO justification for imposing any limits. It’s literally a free-for-all, where people can call on government to stop the killing of animals, insects, plants, bacteria, and so on (they’re “life” too, you know!).

It doesn’t take a genius to realise what logical conclusion we’d be headed towards under such a criteria.

I’ve pointed out in previous posts that the defining quality of an “individual” is that it can survive (aided or unaided) outside of the womb, since until it is able to survive separation from its mother, then it isn’t an “individual”, but is instead a part of the mother, just as her organs are, and so therefore the mother can CHOOSE to remove any part of her body, just as she can choose to remove any organ.

I’ve also explained in previous posts that the point at which a foetus can survive separation from its mother can be estimated by biologists, and then government can work with that time frame to objectively decide the cut off point at which the foetus becomes an individual with individual rights and therefore protected by the government.

btw, I appreciate that I can have a real debate on this issue; too many people get emotional about this topic and it’s refreshing to read well thought out pro-life posts.