I consider myself to be pretty anti-abortion. If I thought it would help, I would support putting women who get abortions in jail, right alonside their doctors (but I don't think it would help and so oppose it on tactical grounds).

But because I recognize SOME of the usual exceptions (rape and life of mother, but not necessarily incest), I am usually counted as pro-abortion. Makes no sense to me, but that's the way it is.

I don't necessarily want to put women in prison, but prison is where we put those who murder others, whether they're women or not. Are you implying that you don't think we should put murderers in prison?

Murder is the malicious and unlawful killing of one human being by another. What is a human being? The answer may be clear to you, but not everyone sees it the same way. IMO, a human being has human attributes, especially a brain. I don't think a fertilized egg is any more a human being than a seed is a tree.

Before Roe v. Wade, the individual states determined when and whether terminating a fetus's life was illegal, but it was not treated as murder.

I understand your position... my comment was phrased that way in part because I believed your remark about wanting to put women in prison oversimplifies the objections of most of the anti-abortion crowd. Although there are admittedly some who seek political power and even profit from the abortion issue, the vast majority of us who oppose abortion do so out of a genuine, principled belief in the humanity of the fetus. I probably resorted to snarkiness reflexively, out of the habit of having to constantly defend my motives to people who automatically assumed the worst about my views. Sorry!

By the way, I would like to cordially contest your analogy with the seed/tree. It is true that a seed is not a tree. However if "seed" is analogous to "fetus", then "tree" is not analogous to "human, but rather to "adult". "Human" would be more analogous to, say, "redwood". Just as the seed and the tree, although they look different, are both truly redwoods, both the fetus and the adult are still truly human.

Thanks, and I see your point, but I don't think a fertilized egg is a fetus. It's like a seed, and like a seed it can have an awfully long shelf life unless and until it is implanted. Many of the hundreds of thousand eggs in labs are now voting age if they're people.

I'll never be able to conceptualize of an egg as a human being, and I don't think most people will. (Sure, it's human, but it could become two or more humans, or none.)

A fertility specialist told me that about half of all fertilized eggs don't make it to the implantation stage. If they all had souls, then according to a certain cruel logic that would make Nature the biggest abortionist of them all. (I'm skeptical that a soul can exist in the absence of a brain, as I think brainless = soulless.)

Is cracking open a fertile egg the same thing as killing a chicken? I don't think so. They are different things.

Suicide's illegal. Yet strangely, we don't put people in prison for it. Instead, we prevent them from committing suicide and give them counseling. If they insist on trying to hurt themselves, we put them in a mental health facility until the urge passes, and teach them how not to get so desperate.

Since it's pretty clear that many women abort out of coercion by their boyfriends or parents, a nice safe shelter is pretty much what they need. For many others, it does seem to be purposefully hurting themselves. So again, the mental health method seems to be the best model. For those few for whom it's a real economic problem, a facility to feed and house them, provide pre-natal care, and assist them in finding adoptive parents for the child, would seem to be a good idea.

Fortunately, pro-life groups have made out-patient pregnancy centers and counselors pretty common in the US. They are ready to help women who are ready to accept help.