Look at an embryo. Wait a few months and look at the baby.
That happens for less than 1 in every 100 embryos. Approximately 98 in every 100 embryos are naturally aborted by the mother's body before the second trimester. An additional 1 in 100 die between the beginning of the second trimester and full term. Embryo's do not have destinies, they have probabilities of survival.
I don't see anti-abortion groups out there trying to improve the health of pregnant women (in fact, I frequently see otherwise) nor do I see them heavily involved in correcting the social ills such as malnutrition that are frequently a cause of natural emrbyonic death (not that addressing those ills would reduce that statistic much, mostly it's a product of the inefficiencies of sexual reproduction on the whole). But damn, they're good a telling a woman what she's allowed to do with a pregnancy she doesn't want for whatever reason!
The absolute irony is that its frequently people with strong religious convictions that are anti-abortion; and I do not use the term pro-life for a very specific reason which I am about to elaborate upon.
Oddly enough, religious institutions are possibly the most selectively pro-life groups on the planet. In many cases they're almost pro-death. I'm going to skip over the obvious history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (to pick on three good examples) throughout the past two millenia and their various holy wars, persecutions, oppressions, and state-sanctioned mass slayings and move straight to present day.
-Mid-1990s: A series of Catholic Cardinals issue a statement opposing the distribution and use of condoms in a series of addresses across the African continent, notably in Christian-populated areas. Africa contains the vast majority of the world's active HIV cases which are passed between heterosexual couples. Death toll to date due to HIV/AIDS and its social consequences through war, famine, and secondary illness: some 30 million people.
-Catholicism, strict Judaism, and strict Islam still condemn equal treatment of women and access to health care for women in certain circumstances. Theoretical maximum fertility rate of an average woman: 13.0 children. Actual maximum average number of children to average women in particular nations in Africa and in social groups denying women health care access and birth control: ~9.0 children per woman. Reason for discrepancy: persistence of sexually transmitted disease and inadequate pre-, peri-, and post-natal care during pregnancies lead to high rates of sponatenous (natural) misscarriage.
-High rates of HIV/AIDS infection in third world nations are directly linked to the state of women's health care. In regions where access to health care for women is prohibited on religious groups, infection rates more than quadruple. HIV transmission is largely eliminated when women are at reduced risk of infection (that is, men get HIV more frequently from women than do women from men).
-Islam prohibits abortion due to the "killing" of an unborn fetus, yet many of the same Islamic sects openly support or quietly condone suicide bombings, martyrdom, murder, and open warfare on religious and political groups.
-Strict Judaism prohibits abortion, yet Israel as a nation has directly contributed to thousands/millions of Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian deaths over the past 50 years; those nations have killed innocent Jews by the thousands in turn, all the while extremists in both prohibit the abortion of early embryos.
So, the next sanctinmonious ******d belonging to a religious institution who wants to tell me that a woman should not have the right to intervene in the probability of embryonic development because you're killing a person should have a good long reflection on their belief set.
A basic understanding of biology will tell you rather simply that an early embryo is not yet a person, it merely has some unknown probability of becoming one.
Even if it were a person and you want to engage in a moral argument, we kill people on a daily basis for all kinds of beliefs, so I would quite willingly sacrifice a few undeveloped totipotent cells bundles if it lowers the crime rate, reduces social chaos associated with the problems of unwanted pregnancies, and simultaneously improves the overall health of women and the general population. We do it with fully grown adults (in which probability is not a factor; they ARE human beings) on a daily basis. Call me immoral/amoral or a monster all you like; deluding yourself into thinking that humans as a society share life and protect it, especially among children, unborn children, and those embryos with the potential to become children will not make it so.
