<<Would you like some references to situations where mothers sacrificed lots - in some cases their lives - so that their unborn child (aka "collection of cells") could live?>>
What could it possibly prove? I acknowledge that mothers feel an attachment to their unborn children. The question is the strength and universality of the attachment. Ask any mother who has lost a child in utero whether her attachment to the lost fetus is as strong as her attachment to her living children. And while almost all mothers would sacrifice for a child already born and living, a whole lot less make the kind of sacrifices you're talking about for their fetus.
We waited six years for our first child, and when my wife was about four or five months into her pregnancy, she began spotting. The doctor ordered bed rest. We couldn't travel to Montreal for the World's Fair (Expo 67) which was also a celebration of Canada's 100th birthday. We were glad to make that small sacrifice and would have gladly sacrificed lots more in order to have that baby. The loss of that child would have crushed us. But let's not kid ourselves - - the "baby" at the time was a collection of cells; as much as we loved it, it was not a human being with rights of its own. It was my wife's decision and hers alone whether that mass of cells would mature and ripen into a human being or not. Once the baby was born, of course, that was no longer my wife's decision to make.
I can tell you, if that fetus had been the 12th or 13th and we were at our wits' end (financially speaking) with no desire to become parents for the 13th or 14th time, that fetus could easily have been sacrificed. Only a lunatic would have considered it a human being with human rights. It had no thoughts, no feelings and no memories except of the most rudimentary kind as for example an invertebrate might have had. I don't like to kill invertebrates either, but I sure as hell wouldn't let the future course of my life be determined by the life or death of an invertebrate and nobody has the right to force any woman to do so either, unless it's entirely of her own free will.
I will always be amazed and dumbfounded by the way that conservatives can in one breath defend the right to life of a fetus, and at the same time accept the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as justified in order to bring them "democracy." Something is seriously out of whack in their pointy little heads.
