Fetuses are elderly

Have you ever noticed how anti-abortion activists often use pictures of babies? The general message they present is "Don't kill babies!" This is a message I can get behind. I have a niece now and she is amazing, and if someone were to harm her, I would perform a very late term abortion on whoever hurt her. I won't say I'm a fan of babies in general, but I'm certainly anti-baby-killing.

I'm pro-choice as well. Well, none of the very late abortions, those really are just killing babies. I would know, I was one, born nearly thee months early. So I can conclude that 6 months is definitely too late for an abortion. Six days isn't too late. Between those it's a fuzzy area that needs work. When is it a baby? I don't know.

Why are the pictures always of babies? Unless it's a late abortion, it's not killing a baby. In most cases it's an undifferentiated, nonviable blob of cells. That's not a baby. It is certainly the potential of a baby. But if they are defending potentials, why only baby pictures? Why no posters of teenagers? Or middle-age adults? Or the elderly? If they seek to protect potential, they appear to be ignoring 99% of human life.

I have a theory: Anti-choice activists don't actually care much about babies. If they did they might focus more on far bigger sources of dead fetuses, and dead babies: malnutrition, stress, war, and the expense of pre- and post-natal care. Instead what is at stake for them is contraception. They've fought against condom use, birth control pills, and whatever else you can think of. But those are look so harmless: a bit of rubber, a pill, not all that scary or easy to attack. Abortion is simply more convenient. It's a starting point.

I wonder if anyone would care so much about abortion if it wasn't a way of preventing childbirth. Would we accept killing people if it didn't give women control, but instead gave us cheap stuff? I think we would. We would! We only need to look at factory conditions overseas, or even here in some cases, to see that it is true.