The problem with the way the abortion debate is framed is that the unborn child is presumed, by social liberals, to be a "nothing".
Observation does not bear that out.
When a woman who wants a baby is pregnant, the unborn child is automatically treated as a someone. The parents call him "the baby". Doctors call him "a baby". Heck, public bodies (like Health Canada) call him a "baby". Even in Canada, the law acknowledges the fetus to be "an unborn child", (only that he doesn't have personhood).
The parents give him a name or a nickname. He is treated as a living entity. The parents, and sometimes other relatives, talk to the kid. Some people even go so far as to play music and read to the child.
So the whole notion that unborn children do not have "personhood" is crap. It's meaningless in the face of experience. People treat the wanted unborn child as a person with a separate identity, not as a female body part, nor as some kind of "potential" being. He exists, he has an identity.
But does that standard apply to the unborn child of a mother who wants to abort? No.
Based on human whim, that standard no longer applies when an abortion is sought. The baby is an inconvenience, so that makes it okay to change the standard of personhood.
(Although some parents, already having wanted the baby, and finding out the baby is diagnosed with a fatal disease or genetic anomaly, treat the unborn like their child right up until the abortion! At which point the doctor rips their baby's body limb from limb. They don't change the standard of personhood, but one shudders at how they can accept treating their own child like this.)
One does not have to have faith to understand how this is wrong. People without faith treat their unborn children as people all the time. The next step is to then have that personhood of the unborn child acknowledged in the law.
How is it okay to change the standards of personhood based on whether a child is wanted or unwanted? Do born people get treated that way?
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