So, this started out as a reply to a comment on my previous post about Personhood. It quickly outgrew comment status, and became a full on blog post.
This is half directed at the commenter, half directed at the anti-choice movement in general.
First of all, since you don’t have a vagina, I don’t believe you have any amount of understanding of what’s it’s like to have one, and therefore you get to tell me what to do with mine.
Secondly, it IS just a mass of cells. It doesn’t have thought, it can’t breathe, it can’t live on its own. It’s not even conscious. It’s a parasite to a woman’s body, for all intents and purposes.
I already HAVE a life. This mass of cells in my body does NOT have a life yet. And the government has no business telling me what to do with my life, including whether or not I have to keep this mass of cells in my body.
I have two children, and I most certainly did not feel that way towards them during my pregnancies. They are wonderful human beings, and I was very happy during both pregnancies.
However, just for example, if I were to become pregnant today, and were to stay pregnant, that would mean I couldn’t have the surgery that I’m scheduled for in less than 2 weeks. Would I choose to eliminate the mass of cells in my uterus, rather than enduring another year of the pain and other disabling symptoms that surgery will cure for me? Without blinking an eye, yes.
Would that make me sad? Yes. But more at the lost opportunity for another child, which I’ve wanted but never felt that it was the right time for, and have given up real hope for. But, it would be just an opportunity. It wouldn’t be a child.
Normally, an unplanned pregnancy would not result in me considering an abortion, but I can imagine a situation where it would be acceptable to me, as I just described. Who are you to tell me what situations are acceptable situations for abortion? Who am I to judge another? Isn’t that a biblical idea?
Removing that mass of cells from my body at 8 weeks is NOT the moral equivalent of strangling a 3 year old. It just isn’t. And you’re wrong for trying to force that idea on women, especially women who are undoubtedly in a fragile emotional position in the first place. Women don’t use abortions as a form of birth control as right-wingers would have you believe. As a result of an accident, a woman who finds herself pregnant and decides to have an abortion is going to do so based on a situation that she finds unacceptable to bring a child into, or for herself to be pregnant in. Trying to shame a woman for needing an abortion is what I find morally unacceptable.
If society actually believed that a zygote or a fetus were the equivalent of a human life, why isn’t there a push to find out why there are so many miscarriages? Can you imagine if half of all of those 3 year olds that pro-lifers want to have us believe these zygotes represent were to suddenly drop dead? Don’t you think that society would demand an investigation into why? Government agencies would be all over it, there would be studies and every effort made to prevent this from continuing to happen, right? If you people really believed what you’re saying, why don’t you focus your attention on that, too? Because a zygote is far more likely to be miscarried than to be aborted. You’ll save more lives that way, if you really believe that a zygote and a fetus are the equivalent of a human life.
As a side note, were you aware that miscarriages are technically abortions? Really early miscarriages are, more specifically, called a chemical pregnancy. The later ones are called clinical spontaneous abortion. But, they’re all called abortions.
And if it’s a life, why don’t women get a tax break for them? Why aren’t they counted in the US Census? (Thanks, George Carlin)
Even pro-lifers, I mean anti-choicers, are divided on this whole personhood thing. I see it referred to as Personhood Now, Personhood Later, Personhood Whenever, and Personhood Never.
And for my final point before digging into the science that you requested, if you anti-choicers were to succeed in outlawing abortion, you wouldn’t eliminate abortion. You’d relegate it to dirty, seedy back rooms, and put women in these situations at unnecessary risk. Of course, as always, women with money would have far more options, so as far as those in charge are concerned, this really would serve a higher purpose – to create even more divide between the haves and the have-nots. To invoke the late George Carlin again:
Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t wanna fuck in the first place? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked. Conservatives don’t give a shit about you until you reach ‘military age’. Then they think you are just fine. Just what they’ve been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life… pro-life… These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like them. They don’t like women. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state. Pro-life… You don’t see many of these white anti-abortion women volunteering to have any black fetuses transplanted into their uteruses, do you? No, you don’t see them adopting a whole lot of crack babies, do you? No, that might be something Christ would do.
So science. I hope you’re prepared for the science. Let’s get terms straight, first. So, we start out with a sperm and an egg. Those two get together and form a zygote. The zygote lasts for somewhere around 4 days, and then it turns into a blastocyst for a few more days. (See also: Blastocystis, a single-celled parasite). Then it turns into an embryo, which lasts about 7 weeks. At the 8th week, it’s called a fetus.
So, does a zygote deserve to be called a legal person? I’m really just gonna laugh if you’re saying yes, because a zygote really is just kind of a blueprint. It’s a plan that hasn’t been executed. A zygote is still just moving around in a woman’s body trying to figure out what it’s going to do.
For the first scientific point, let’s talk about pain. Interestingly, as I went to look this up, I was thinking that to feel pain, you have to be conscious, right? According to this article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Doctors Lee, Ralston, Drey, Partride and Rosen write:
Normal EEG patterns have been characterized for neonates as young as 24 weeks’ postconceptional age (PCA) (ie, the gestational age plus number of weeks postpartum). Electroencephalographic activity is normally asynchronous between the hemispheres and mostly discontinuous at less than 27 weeks’ PCA, becoming mostly continuous around 34 weeks’ PCA. Interhemispheric synchrony increases around 29 to 30 weeks’ PCA, then declines, then increases again, reaching almost complete synchrony by term. Given these baseline differences between neonatal and adult EEGs, patterns associated with impaired consciousness in adults are inapplicable to the analysis of neonatal EEGs.
Some investigators contend that EEG patterns denoting wakefulness indicate when consciousness is first possible. Wakefulness is a state of arousal mediated by the brainstem and thalamus in communication with the cortex. In preterm neonates, the earliest EEG pattern representing wakefulness appears around 30 weeks’ PCA. However, wakefulness alone is insufficient to establish consciousness, as unconscious patients in a persistent vegetative state may also have wakeful EEGs.
So, in English, EEG patterns are the closest things we have to establishing wakefulness, which really isn’t the same thing as consciousness, because even a person in a vegetative state can have a wakeful EEG. Even if it were enough to indicate consciousness, the earliest possible time a fetus could possibly be conscious would be 24 weeks, but it’s more likely 30 weeks.
As far was what it takes physically for a fetus to feel pain, the docs have this to say:
Pain is a subjective sensory and emotional experience that requires the presence of consciousness to permit recognition of a stimulus as unpleasant. Although pain is commonly associated with physical noxious stimuli, such as when one suffers a wound, pain is fundamentally a psychological construct that may exist even in the absence of physical stimuli, as seen in phantom limb pain. The psychological nature of pain also distinguishes it from nociception, which involves physical activation of nociceptive pathways without the subjective emotional experience of pain. For example, nociception without pain exists below the level of a spinal cord lesion, where reflex withdrawal from a noxious stimulus occurs without conscious perception of pain (Figure, A).
And:
A histological study of the visual pathway in 8 human fetuses, each at a different developmental age, concluded that thalamic projections reach the visual cortex at 21 to 25 weeks’ developmental age (approximately 23-27 weeks’ gestational age), based on results from a fetus of 24 weeks’ developmental age (26 weeks’ gestational age). A similar 7-fetus study found thalamic afferents reached the auditory cortical plate at 24 to 26 weeks’ developmental age, with 1 specimen showing initial cortical plate penetration at 22 weeks’ developmental age (24 weeks’ gestational age).
In a study of 8 human fetuses, mediodorsal thalamic afferents were first observed in the cortical plate at 22 weeks’ developmental age (24 weeks’ gestational age). While connections between mediodorsal afferents and the anterior cingulate cortex may be relevant to pain perception, this study examined mediodorsal afferents to unspecified regions of the frontal cortex, which serves numerous functions unrelated to pain perception.
Another histological study of 12 specimens found that afferents from unspecified thalamic regions reached the developing prefrontal cortex in 1 preterm neonate of 27 weeks’ developmental age, concluding that thalamic fibers begin entering the cortex between 26 and 28 weeks’ developmental age (28 and 30 weeks’ gestational age).2 A different study found that thalamic afferents had not reached the somatosensory cortical plate by 22 weeks’ developmental age (24 weeks’ gestational age). By 24 weeks’ developmental age (26 weeks’ gestational age), the density of cortical plate synapses increased, although these were not necessarily from thalamic afferents. Based on these studies, direct thalamocortical fibers that are not specific for pain begin to emerge between 21 and 28 weeks’ developmental age (23 and 30 weeks’ gestational age).
However, others have proposed that thalamocortical connections could also be established indirectly if thalamic afferents were to synapse on subplate neurons, which could synapse on cortical plate neurons. The subplate is a transient fetal structure 1 layer deep to the cortical plate and serves as a “waiting compartment” for various afferents, including thalamic afferents, en route to the cortical plate. The subplate recedes after 30 weeks’ developmental age, while the cortical plate matures into the 6 layers of the cerebral cortex. In contrast to direct thalamocortical fibers, which are not visible until almost the third trimester, thalamic afferents begin to reach the somatosensory subplate at 18 weeks’ developmental age (20 weeks’ gestational age) and the visual subplate at 20 to 22 weeks’ gestational age. These afferents appear morphologically mature enough to synapse with subplate neurons, although no human study has shown that functional synapses exist between thalamic afferents and subplate neurons. Subplate neurons may synapse with cortical plate neurons and direct the growth of thalamic afferents to their final synaptic targets in the cortical plate. Despite this developmental role, no human study has shown that synapses between subplate and cortical plate neurons convey information about pain perception from the thalamus to the developing cortex.
In summary, the brain connections that are required to have the neural pathways to feel pain just aren’t there until 21 – 28 weeks. And if you read on to the next section, which I partially quote above about EEGs, the doctors say that not only do these neural pathways have to be there, but they have to be functional. And they go on to say that EEGs aren’t enough to prove that the pathways are functional.
That article also goes into other ways of checking into what’s going on with a fetus, such as facial movements that could indicate pain, stress responses, why they use anesthesia for fetal surgery but it’s not warranted for an abortion, and some other cool things. Worth a read.
For a nonscientific point, I’d just like to say that if I ever have something happen to me, and I’m in the same state as a 20 week fetus, I really hope that my loved ones will go ahead and take me off of life support. There is no life left to support.
If abortions became illegal in the US, we would become like a 3rd world country where every single day 192 women die because of complications arising from what is termed an “unsafe abortion”. This is what leads me to believe that the anti-choice movement is more about class warfare than it is about the morality of abortion. This article from The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada says:
Each day 192 women die because of complications arising from unsafe abortion; that is one woman every eight minutes, nearly all of them in developing countries. These women are likely to have had little or no money to procure safe services; many of them are young, perhaps in their teens, living in rural areas and having little social support to deal with their unplanned pregnancy. Some of them have been raped, and some have experienced an accidental pregnancy due to the failure of the contraceptive method they were using or the incorrect or inconsistent way they used it. Some of them lacked knowledge of methods to prevent unintended pregnancy or did not have the means to obtain them. Some may have found contraceptive services hard to reach, while others may have been turned away by judgemental or insensitive providers. A large percentage of them may have first attempted to self-induce the abortion and failing that, they may have turned to an unskilled, but relatively inexpensive and affordable provider.
We all know that the rich have access to whatever they’d like to have access to. Money can buy just about anything, and in a country where abortion isn’t legal, the rich can still buy an abortion. Not everyone has access to birth control in this country, and if the conservatives among us get their way, health care won’t be equal for all, meaning that women who have a choice between paying their gas bill and paying for birth control won’t end up with birth control. They won’t have a way to prevent pregnancy in the first place. That would leave the poorest, most vulnerable women in our country with 2 choices: let the pregnancy continue or find a way to have an abortion. Actually, to say that this is a choice is kind of a lie. The woman who couldn’t afford birth control certainly can’t afford a pregnancy or the child that comes after. And for anyone saying that she should adopt the child out, you’re all assholes. A woman can’t go through 10 months of pregnancy and give birth to a child and then hand it off as if it were nothing. Yes, some women are able to do this, and I applaud them, but it’s not realistic as a solution to pregnancy. Abortion IS a realistic solution to pregnancy. Besides the fact that her body is completely taken over during this time, it’s not just a matter of letting the pregnancy continue. So, this fictitious, but very real, woman has to try to have an abortion; it’s a matter of survival. So, not having much money, her options are the same as 3rd world country options. How many women have to die here in the US before anti-choicers decide that the woman’s lives are more important than the mass of cells that they’re trying to rid themselves of?
From the previously mentioned article:
Induced abortions outside the legal framework are frequently performed by unqualified and unskilled providers or are self-induced; such abortions often take place in unhygienic conditions and involve dangerous methods or incorrect administration of medications. Even when performed by a medical practitioner, but outside the conditions of the law, a clandestine abortion generally carries additional risk: medical back-up is not immediately available in an emergency, the woman may not receive appropriate postabortion attention and care, and, if complications occur, the woman may hesitate to seek medical care. The risk of unsafe abortion differs with the skills of the provider and the method used, but is also linked to the de facto application of the law.
So, back to the original question: you want to put these women in jail, call them murderers? Because the conservatives who are backing this so-called personhood movement certainly don’t want to help pay for these children, or help the woman out for medical care. When they don’t have their heads stuck up women’s vaginas, they’re busy calling these women names and deriding them for choosing not to have an abortion, and accept government help. That’s reality. The conservatives are doing everything in their power to remove a woman’s right to healthcare, and take away money from the poor, either through eliminating the programs that help them or through making them pay a greater share of taxes. How can any human being do that, and then try to shame a woman for having an abortion, or even put her in jail for it? It makes no sense to me at all.
Looking at this table of Global and Regional Estimates of Induced Abortion, the rate of abortions has gone down in developed countries, while increasing drastically in some undeveloped countries.
If you want to save lives, I wish you’d concentrate on sending birth control and other health care to these women, instead of trying to duplicate 3rd world country conditions here in the US. It baffles me that this mass of cells deserve more rights than living breathing human beings, in your opinion. I want to shake you and beg you to wake up and look at what’s really going on.
So, bringing myself back to the original point – at what point do you think you can give this mass of cells the rights of a real person? Is it while it’s a zygote? Or a blastocyst? How about while it’s an embryo? You know, while a vegetarian won’t eat a chicken, most of them are fine with eating embryos, aka chicken eggs – society does recognize that an embryo does not equal a life. I don’t think you can scientifically argue that even an embryo is a life. Most women aren’t even aware that they’re pregnant – are you going to call a woman a murderer if she happens to go on a diet at this point, and her body kicks the embryo out? I mean – perhaps by not having dieted, she wouldn’t have miscarried, and even though she probably just thinks she’s having a heavy menstrual cycle, if you are trying to call an embryo a person, and give it the rights of a person, she’s just committed Involuntary Manslaughter.
So, maybe it’s when the embryo turns into a fetus? Things are starting to get a little murky, here. It’s a little more than a mass of cells, but it still can’t even come close to living outside of a woman’s body. As shown above, it can’t feel pain, and it isn’t conscious. In my opinion, it’s definitely not a person, yet. To even prove that it’s a fetus, you’d have to do some pretty in-depth study of it. A woman can still have a miscarriage and not realize it, though most women are more aware of their bodies than that.
I’m going to wrap up here, because I think that sometime between the cells turning into a fetus and birth, it probably turns into a life. But, there’s nothing out there to really prove when that moment happens. And the reason for the personhood law is to try to outlaw abortions. I’ve clearly stated my case on why abortions should not be outlawed. The main reason that people are anti-choice is religious, and religion, much like a pregnancy, is a personal choice, and I don’t want the government attempting to regulate my personal choices.
See also: http://xkcd.com/386/
Once you’ve created your account, you’ll immediately be asked to connect your social networks. Click the Facebook link, and you’ll probably see a page that asks you to log into Facebook. Next, Facebok will ask you to give Hoosuite permission to post on your behalf. After you’ve approved this, you’ll be back at Hootsuite, and will be shown a list that includes your Facebook profile, any Facebook Pages that you have created, and then Facebook Groups that you are a member of. You’ll want to select which items that Hootsuite can post to. 
You can change this later, but if you think that you’ll want to automate posts for any of these, go ahead and select them now.When you select a group, you’ll see a green checkmark next to it. And when you then unselect a group, you’ll see a red minus symbol for just a moment. As of now, it’s a little wonky in Chrome, so just roll with it, and make sure you have the Green Check next to any items you want to include. Since this post will include setting up a post to be made in the future to a group, go ahead and select the group you want this to be posted to.
All of those icons have different uses, such as adding a link to another web page, attaching an image, or setting privacy options. Hover your mouse over them, and you’ll see a description of what they do. We want the calendar icon, the second one in that row, which says “Scheduling” when you hover your mouse. When you click on the Scheduling icon, you’ll be able to select the date and time that you want the post to go live.
If you click the Gold Star, which says “Move to Top” when you hover over it, that adds the group, page, or profile to your Favorites. If you have added a lot of groups and pages to Hootsuite, this will help you stay organized.
If you have something that you want to post multiple times, say a weekly posting of group rules, you can save a post as a template. When you have the Schedule box showing, in the earlier steps, instead of clicking “Send Now”, you can click the “Save” icon, to “Save message as a template”. When you click the save button, the post will be saved as a draft, and the title will match the beginning of the message, just as you have entered it. And each time you click that Save button, a new draft will be saved. Feel free to delete old ones, by clicking the Trash Bin icon. You can view existing drafts, by clicking the down arrow, next to Save, that says “View templates”, when you hover.
Saintless 