Perhaps this is one of the missing playmates.
A young girl in an antiabortion group claimed after roll-playing (during which time they argued that a 15-year-old girl should keep the baby she got after getting raped—’it’s not the baby’s fault!’) that she has five sisters and a brother, while most of her classmates lack her stock of siblings. Apparently the joy her classmates were lacking is blamed on abortion.
“I look at my friends,” she said, “and I wonder, ‘Where are your siblings?’”
Many activists feel the same way: that millions of their peers are missing.
Wow.
I mean, be against abortion, if that’s what makes you happy, but refrain from getting depressed over all the people that are “missing.”
When I was teaching, I almost made the fatal mistake of getting into a when-does-life-start argument with a strong believer. She thought it was when that first little sperm hits the egg. That’s when a person starts to exist.
Nah. That gooey, microscopic egg thingy ain’t no person. I know full-grown people who barely qualify for peoplehood—how in the heck could some clingy zygote be any closer?
I once took a class on BioMed Ethics at UCSB. A large portion of the class was concerned with abortion and the “personhood” concept. I had a really hard time with the debate because it centered around potentiality. I remember sitting there in class thinking about the sin of halting a potential life from beginning or maturing because, if taken to the extreme, then every man and woman should be fucking each other every chance that they get because of the “potentiality” that they could create a new life together. Silliness.