Of course you’ve all heard this line, which is supposed to make women considering abortion feel horribly guilty over the murder they are planning to commit. But this is a deliberately constructed lie meant to harm women, change society - a socially engineered statement meant to provoke a certain set of beliefs by exploiting the ignorance of most people and encouraging them not to think about what they do not want them to think about.
When the woman-haters spew their little line, “Life begins at conception”, what they really mean by “life” is “the beginning of the independent and individual existence of a new human being who morally is entitled to all the same rights as anyone you would see walking down the street.” In other words, they believe this is the beginning of the pregnancy, the beginning of the new person. This has cultivated a sort of magical belief that at the moment when the sperm penetrates the egg, the woman is instantly pregnant and even that some women can feel this magical moment, which they seem to believe happens in the immediate afterglow of sex - when in fact it can take place up to four or five days later. Most people, being beaten about the head for years with the lie that “life begins at conception” would be surprised to know that medically speaking, a pregnancy does not begin until the fertilized egg is attached to the inside of a woman’s uterus - an event called “implantation”. During the five to seven days before implantation a woman will not feel any difference in her body due to pregnancy because she has no difference in her body. Many fertilized eggs never implant, and are washed out, dead, in the next menstrual flow. Before implantation, a woman will not have a positive pregnancy test, because she is not pregnant. If she gets super drunk or does drugs the developing blastocyst will not receive an infusion of such, because it is not attached to her body - she is not pregnant.
But in accordance with the post-modernist practice of redefining everything that doesn’t fit their personal preferences and support their personal irrational beliefs, woman haters have now successfully framed the beginning point of pregnancy as a “controversy”, wherein some people believe it begins at conception and some believe it begins at implantation. This is false - pregnancy is an objective condition not subject to post-modernist theory, being an actual event which occurs regardless of theory, and which begins at implantation no matter what you may believe. This is and has always been the medical, that is to say, scientific, definition of pregnancy.
So why do woman haters yell so much about this point that is not true? After all, it is only in retrospect, and then only for a few women, that they can determine, approximately, when they had the sex that resulted in pregnancy, when fertilization probably occurred, and when implantation occurred. (Some women have light bleeding and cramping that occurs at implantation, as well as the start of hormonal pregnancy changes - such women can often mistake this for a light menstrual period).
1. The redefinition of the point “life” begins is a psychological tool meant to change the way people think. See, they want you to think of “life” as “the independent and individual existence of a new human being, separate from the mother”. They want you to imbue, in your mind, the newly fertilized egg with all the individuality, personality, uniqueness of any other individual you encounter. And most importantly, they want you to see this being as SEPARATE FROM ITS MOTHER. Thus, they like the idea of “life” beginning at conception, as, at that time, the fertilized egg is floating freely, unattached to its host, developing on its own, as it were. They want you to separate the idea of “life”, which they mean in only the most tenuous, idealistic sort of way, as some concept of “individuality”, from pregnancy, which is a medical and scientific fact that can be detected, measured, that causes actual changes in the physical world and in the body of the pregnant woman.
But the entire idea of considering an embryo, fetus, or blastocyst as separate from its mother is ridiculous. Even though they can unite egg and sperm in a petri dish in the lab they still need a human woman to implant it into to start a pregnancy that will result in a new person. The fertilized egg, the zygote, the blastocyst, the embryo, the fetus cannot grow without its mother. It is most emphatically NOT a separate being, as anyone can realize when they know that medically speaking pregnancy starts when the happy free floating little fertilized egg implants - that is to say - attaches itself - to the inside of its mother’s uterus.
Thus the idea that “life” starts at conception is emphatically a BELIEF - not a FACT. Laws, science, medical care, should be based on FACTS, not BELIEFS and OPINIONS with no basis in fact. The belief that “life” begins at conception and that the life that begins at conception is equal to and separate from the pregnant woman is illogical, unfactual, and stupid, and, in America, is promoted almost exclusively by extremely religious Christians, with a veneer of more mainstream, respectable seeming conservatives to push a more moderate version of the belief in a way that doesn’t make people see the only logical outcome of what legislation based on this belief would be.
Despite the moderate face of the anti-abortion scumbag movement claiming they are all for “responsible” contraception use, when one redefines pregnancy as beginning at the moment of conception, one then redefines many of the most effective contraception methods at “abortifacients”. The IUD, most hormonal methods of birth control, and emergency birth control all can work by preventing implantation, thus preventing pregnancy. Sometimes they also prevent ovulation, thus preventing conception. It can not be known in any individual instance of these contraceptive methods working whether they worked by preventing conception or by preventing implantation. Thus, those who have promulgated the belief that “life begins at conception” now promote the belief, not the fact, that contraception is abortion, i.e., the deliberate termination of a pregnancy. This is not true, but building upon the first unscientific principle that “life begins at conception” they have created a second unscientific principle, that contraception methods which may or may not interfere with a fertilized egg implanting are abortions. And then because they have redefined “life” as “the independent and individual existence of a new human being, separate from the mother”, and killing a person walking down the street for no good reason is murder, they arrive at the unscientific and incorrect opinion that “abortion is murder” and even that taking the birth control pill or having an IUD causes women to murder helpless little individuals several times a year without even knowing it. Thus they make every woman who takes the pill a possible mass murderer, all unknowing.
This may seem ridiculous to you, the reader, the idea that the millions and millions of women who have used the IUD or Depo Provera or the birth control pill are mass murderers. But there is no other logical outcome to their line of argument. Let us follow it very closely again, in its basic terms, to show how this becomes true:
“Life” (an individual’s existence) begins at conception (moment sperm meets egg).
Ending a “life” by means of abortion is murder.
Those who commit murder are murderers.
Every month a woman is having sex she has an opportunity to become pregnant, and if she uses a birth control that can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, she is really using an abortifacient.
Therefore, every time a woman’s birth control method causes a fertilized egg to wash out along with her menstrual flow, she is committing a murder.
A woman successfully using birth control for 10 years of her reproductive life may well have this event happen twice a year, maybe even more. There is also a Schroedinger’s cat sort of quandry to all this - since all of this is happening inside the “box”, i.e., the interior of the woman, which we cannot see, every month there either is or is not a successful conception, and we cannot know if the “cat” (the fertilized egg) is or is not in the box, is or is not existent, and thus do not know if she is or is not committing murder this month. In theory, if she is particularly fertile and her birth control method always works, in ten years time she could successfully prevent up to 120 pregnancies, and thus be a more successful mass murderer than Jeffrey Dahmer, or Ted Bundy, or Charles Manson. All while just walking around, smiling, having sex with her partner, and leading a normal life, thus leading us to believe she is not a monstrous destroyer of her own children!
So since this is the logical conclusion these theories come to, we can expect a logical response from the anti-abortionists, who are thinking human beings who have clearly thought this out, correct? I mean, if you found out the smiling woman next door committed a hundred murders of helpless babies, you’d want her locked up or worse, right?
But no, the stock answer is “we will only punish the abortionists.” Now, if the woman next door pays someone else to murder her husband, she is still going to jail, right? So even for induced abortion this answer doesn’t make sense. In the case of birth control, it is like a woman who purchases poison and goes home to feed it to her children. Some of the try to get around the logical fallacy of it all by claiming the woman who has an abortion is a victim too, a victim of society! Well so much for the theory that feminists are the ones who paint women as helpless victims. By saying a woman can’t help but kill an innocent baby, perhaps multiple times, they make women somehow naturally immoral, unthinking, unable to reason or stand on their own two feet.
2. There is a second ramification to the idea that the life of an individual human being begins at conception, i.e., when sperm meets egg. If the fertilized egg is now an individual human being on its own - a child - its father now has rights, legally, to determine its future. We have, indeed, seem men in the last decade occasionally suing for a woman to birth his child against her will because “it’s his right”. Also we see men suing to NOT have to support a child because a woman wouldn’t abort on command and, by gosh, he should have a choice too over what happens to the joint product of their labors. See, when pregnancy is redefined as beginning at the moment sperm meets egg and creates a new person, instead of being understood as a process which takes place in a woman’s body, men are BELIEVED to be equal partners in the creation of a new life. The factual reality is that women do 99.99999999999% of the work involved in creating a new life, and therefore logically should have 99.99999999999% of the say in what happens during pregnancy. The man contributes a few minutes of thrusting and a sperm. Many, many billions of men have contributed nothing more to “their” children. Biologically, factually, one sperm is all that is required of a man for the continuance of the human race. But the pro-life movement, being run mostly by men who work under the most patriarchal of religions and constructs, do not want to admit this, so they build man’s contribution to women’s pregnancy into something disproportionately important, their end goal being that of forcing the women they fuck to become subservient to and dependent upon them. They call this “family values”.
3. The third ramification of the statement “life begins at conception” is not often thought of, or discussed, but ultimately I find it the most insulting. If “life” begins at conception, is the woman within whose body that conception takes place not alive? Does she not already have a life? Of course she is, dead women cannot become pregnant. But her life is considered so insignificant that it is not even acknowledged to exist before the pregnancy. Every thought, plan, feeling, health issue she may have is immediately rendered irrelevant by a fertilized egg that immediately takes precedence over her own desires and needs, which are dismissed as “selfishness” and “convenience”. A woman is so insignificant, to the “pro-lifers”, that a fertilized egg IMMEDIATELY trumps anything she may wish for herself. Of course, in the end, all this quibbling over the moment of conception vs the moment of implantation as being the “important” one skims over the fact that what we are actually arguing about is “at what point does the already existing, living, already breathing, already conscious, human woman in whose body this is taking place cease to matter in favor of this “new life”?” This “new life” is NOT separate from its mother, to suggest so is ridiculous. This is another post-modern construction, a re-defining of the meaning of “separate.” “Separate” means apart. “Independent” means “surviving on its own”. A fetus or embryo is not separate or independent from its mother. If it were we wouldn’t even have any of these problems. A pregnant woman is by definition NOT separate from the growing fetus. She is a singular person in a particular condition. By law, there is not a new person until it is born. You cannot legally name a fetus even if you determine its gender. You cannot legally date a person’s age based on conception or implantation - your age is and always has been determined by when you were born - by when you separated from your mother. The birth of babies who never breathe is handled differently in many places, either registered as a person born who then died or as a stillbirth, but the act of the intake of breath is everywhere recognized as an important event signifying a new person’s independent existence. Separateness, independence - these are easily established at birth without compromising the human rights of the pregnant woman. This quibbling over the “rights” and “independent existence” of something you need a microscope to see, which is entirely dependent on a woman’s body to continue growing, with the stakes in the argument being nothing less than the full humanity of the unquestionably alive, breathing, independent individual who is pregnant, is insulting, ridiculous, illogical, and can only result from a culture that demeans women, deems them insignificant to the extreme, considers them, if human at all, to be a sort of natural servant and slave to the rest of humanity and punishes them whenever they resist.
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