Posted on 09/09/2001 10:00:00 AM PDT by MHGinTN
With your indulgence, I've constructed a second letter to the editor regarding embryonic life. Here's my rationale for the letter which follows this short essay.
While perusing a FreeRepublic.com thread on Saturday, a Freeper’s extensive scholarship offering (electron 1, thread http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b99b3ca775c.htm) highlighted the following quote from Margaret Sanger’s early feminist magazine:
"If a woman is to free herself effectively, she must make herself absolute mistress of her own body. She must recognize her absolute right … to suppress the germ of life. (The Woman Rebel, circa 1914)
That quote struck my brain as having something in common with a recent statement by Senator Orrin Hatch, something to the effect that ‘conception doesn’t take place in a petri dish', that 'conception takes place in the womb of a woman.’
Why are those statements insidiously similar? … Because they’re contrary to the truth regarding conception! Those statements share a pernicious error at the heart of feminism and the abortion advocacy folk clamoring speciously for ‘reproductive rights’; that error contributes mightily to the mindset that has condoned the slaughter of more than forty million preborn individual human beings since the Roe and Doe decisions by the fiat court of Justice Blackmun. For too many decades, Americans have accepted lies upon which abortion apologists base their arguments. Let’s dispel this lie confusing the likes of Senator Hatch, right now!
In the quote above, the underlined portion referring to the germ of life is what we must focus upon, for this subtle twisting of the truth is to be found even in the statement by Orrin Hatch and belies the system of belief at the heart of this pernicious mistake.
How many times have we heard that an acorn is not an oak tree, or a peanut is not a peanut plant, as part of the argument that the germ of life is not the individual life? But you know what, a peanut IS a peanut plant! Can I prove that? YES! And so can you. Find a peanut, even a roasted one still in the shell. When you remove the kernel from the shell, carefully separate the two halves. At one end of the meat you will see a tiny peanut plant, an individual peanut plant that would grow into the green, lush peanut plant in the field, if allowed to receive life support from the earth.
So, is abortion a part of reproductive rights? Well, if there is already an individual other human being already conceived and seeking life support or receiving life support in the womb, hasn’t reproduction already occurred? Let’s examine that more closely.
The lie hidden in the feminist statement is that the germ of life is solely a woman’s right to reject. If germ were referring to the sperm, I could agree with that, agree that a woman has a right to reject reproductive efforts, but the feminists transpose germ with conceived new individual life, just as Orrin Hatch did in his faulty reasoning. Is the germ of life the tiny plant in the peanut cited above? NO! The germ refers to the gametes that united (the male and female gametes) to conceive the new plant you see within the nutmeat! With humans, the sperm and ovum are the gametes, the germ that unite to form the new individual human being, called an embryo in that individual’s earliest stage of life.
Using our peanut analogy, is the tiny colorless plant in the nutmeat actually THE peanut plant? Yes it is, in its normal, earliest manifestation of the plant conceived when the male and female gametes united … formed when the germ of each sex united to form the new plant. With the human embryo, the cell mass seeking implantation in the uterine wall of the woman’s body IS the normal manifestation of the individual human being already conceived, being an individual new life in its earliest manifestation.
Just so there is not confusion, Senator Hatch is wrong regarding conception because the union of sperm an ovum is the true conception; receiving life support in the uterine wall is impregnation or implantation, so conception does take place in petri dishes at in vitro fertilization clinics all across this nation!
With the issues related to embryo stem cell research heating up in America, it is time to correct the error in thinking characterizing so many duped with wrongheaded lines of reasoning. Make no mistake, if one agrees that killing embryos for their stem cell embryonic body parts is acceptable, one is condoning the killing and exploitation of individual humans being human in earliest stage of their continuum of life. … And the fetal stage is soon to follow the embryonic stage, so will we then condone killing for harvest of these individual humans being human in that stage … and what will follow that, perhaps agreement with the Chinese practice of killing dissidents for their body parts?
Sadly, preborn children are already slaughtered, and then their body parts harvested, and we have vaccines on the market to prove it. With billions of dollars now flowing in the industry of fetal harvesting, it cannot be denied that the harvesting profits are to some extent driving the abortion industry, but to what extent is hard to measure … but is the amount really what should affect our outrage? We must stop this evil progression of killing and exploiting individual human life, NOW.
The above minor essay leads me to the following next letter in the series designed for Freepers' use with their local newspapers>
Letter to the Editor
[Newspaper name]
The following quote is from a feminist magazine, circa 1914, and contains a falsehood at the heart of support for abortion on demand: "If a woman is to free herself effectively, she must make herself absolute mistress of her own body. She must recognize her absolute right … to suppress the germ of life.” (The Woman Rebel, form Margaret Sanger’s feminist movement)
The lie is that a conceived new individual life, the embryonic stage of a new human being, is a germ of life, not THE actual new life. This lie is ignored by the press, and that has served to support the willful killing of more than forty million preborn individual humans slaughtered at various stages in their continuum of life in their body.
The actual germ (gametes) of life would be the sperm and/or the ovum. Once the union of human gametes occurs, the resultant new life is an individual human being at earliest stage on a continuum of bodily existence that could stretch for eighty or more years, if not stopped. An embryo is not a potential human being; it IS A HUMAN in embryonic body being an individual at earliest stage. That life will continue through many other stages, such as fetal, newborn, toddler, pubescent, young adult, perhaps parent, then oldster.
It is easy to prove this notion of an individual present in embryonic stage by merely breaking open a peanut. Tucked neatly between the halves of meat is a tiny peanut plant that would grow into the green leafy thing seen in fields all across the South. The actual individual plant is there in earliest stage of its continuum of life. And so it is with human embryo, as actual human in its earliest stage of individual continuum of life in its body.
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