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Notes -
The latest abortion kerfuffle is decently well in the past now, and we've had a number of good threads on it in various places. I think it's a reasonable time to ask here:
Have you changed your personal opinion or political position on abortion access at all over the course of the last year or so? If so, to what, and based on what?
No, my opinion is much the same as it has ever been, and probably has hardened due to things like thinkpieces and articles about "now here is how you explain abortion is a good thing to the ignorant" which want to reach out to people on the pro-life side, but in essence give nothing as a compromise; we'll teach you how to persuade pro-lifers abortion is fine, but we won't give in on anything we believe about it.
What ground my gears recently was someone writing a Substack article about this where they explained to their (presumably) pro-choice readers that "pro-lifers think the foetus is a baby and that it is a person". So if you can just convince us dumb pro-lifers that a foetus is not a baby or a person... oh, and yes, the pro-lifers do use "baby" for the thing that is inside the womb, instead of the more correct "fetus" even though etymologically, fetus is Latin, derived from a verb meaning "to breed/bear" and refers to "being pregnant; having young, progeny; those young, progeny" - so in effect, 'fetus' is just medical Latin for 'baby'. I have noticed this kind of language-juggling before - "baby" means something different and is emotive, the real neutral scientific term is "fetus" which doesn't mean a baby, it means something like a clump of cells is all.
Convince me first that the noodle who wrote that is a person with rights and not just a particularly large clump of cells, and then maybe I'll change my mind on "the products of conception".
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