“8 cells” alliterated nicely with “8 months”. I didn’t “move” there. I gave you your arbitrary answer: 30 days. It just doesn’t do any good to misrepresent me or anyone else. It wastes time; reality can be, at best, described. It cannot be manufactured through semantics.

I spoke of “common ground” because that is your quote in post # 100, at your maximum level of reconciliation. So, sometimes you allow as how there is common ground, sometimes you do not. I’m trying to figure out which you think it is.

To extend your raging bull analogy…
It’s true a wooden fence wouldn’t do much. But it’s also true one should do all one can. Agreed.

But I think the scenario is like this: There is a raging bull charging down the street. To the left and straight ahead is a maternity ward full of premies. To the right is a stem-cell lab. All I have is a red cape. I am going to attract the bull over to the stem cell lab, and away from the ward of premies. Why? because the personhood of the premies is in far less question than that of the stem cell embryos.

By contrast it wouldn’t do any good to try and twirl the cape around at both of the buildings,or neither of them. And if I see a wooden fence I won’t bother with it, so lacking is its effectiveness. Because even if I didn’t have a red cape, I myself could run around attracting the bull toward the lab.

On the language- “procedure”,”terminate”, etcetera…
That’s great that you want to call it what you think is true and all. But it doesn’t help establish common ground, to the degree there is any. I don’t think the prochoice community has any hope of deliberately “covering up” what is going on. They mainly tried to find neutral, accurate, clinical words. It really doesn’t sound too wonderful to “terminate” something if it is indeed deserving of life. This goes back to your assumption of their guilt, whether you do it through semantics or accusations. They do not believe they are guilty, and so calling it “slaughter” isn’t going to draw them in.

Even if you are somehow omniscient and can know intimately of all prochoicers’ guilt, it still apparently has not been effective to call it that.

I still say, if you actually want to change the political landscape, then it is wiser to participate in the common language, and educate the opponent on the technicals. Again, do you think I will save animals by calling their deaths by some loaded subjective words? Animal rights progress has been made, and it has been made on clinical, objective arguments. There isn’t even a lexicon at all for the suffering that animals experience.

You had also alluded to the Declaration of Independence. It said all “men” were created equal, but women didn’t eventually get rights because liberals insisted they were men. Women got rights because of reasoned argument and incremental political steps.

“Calling a spade a spade” is a luxury that your own issue can’t afford.

What speaks louder, intentions or results?

I realize there are some pro lifers who are ‘absolutists,’ as you describe them. For these people, only a law forbidding abortion in all circumstances is morally deserving of their support. I believe they are correct in that this law is the ideal goal, but where I think they err is in their belief that any other law (late-term restrictions, parental consent, parental notification, ‘right-to-know,’ fetal pain laws, etc) is unworthy of support and even harmful to our cause.

As I have previously stated, I support late-term restrictions because, to use the same analogy as before, I don’t believe it is right to refuse to save 5 drowning people because you can’t save all 100 who have fallen overboard. I believe we have an obligation to save as many victims as we can, even if we cant save them all.

I also see the other aforementioned restrictions as putting up blockades in order to try and slow down a powerful oncoming event.

To use another analogy, if a raging beast is stampeding toward a kindergarten class and the only thing you can do to try and stop it is put a wooden fence in it’s path, you do it even though the fence will most likely fail to stop the beast. It is our duty to do all we can to save those children, even if those things ultimately do not end up saving them.

I really question your Obamian claim that there is “common ground” in this debate. Again, there is the same amount of common ground in the abortion issue than there was in the slavery issue. It is not okay to enslave some blacks sometimes for some reasons, and is not okay to kill some babies sometimes for some reasons.

I use the word “slaughter” and the like to describe abortion because I believe in calling a spade a spade. Linguistic cover up is largely how the abortionist movement has succeeded, and I will not play their game to their advantage. Terms like “terminating a pregnancy,” “family planning,” “procedure,” and even “abortion” are really just euphemisms for what is really happening: the violent dismemberment of a baby. These terms are meant to deflect from the reality of abortion. I mean to direct toward it.

I begged you to state your strategy, so that you could put it in your own words.

But, absent that, I’ll tell you what I think you are accomplishing. (And don’t take my word for it. Look at what everyone else thinks.)

You are alienating potential allies. You are manufacturing opponents unnecessarily. It is just not practical to think that you will magically convince prochoice people that they are committing “slaughter” by simply accusing them of it. After all, did it work on you when I demonstrated it back to you about animals?

When you alienate (accuse, misrepresent, avoid), you pass up that chance to achieve common ground. You will, if anything, inspire prochoice people to be even more prochoice. Look where that has gotten the country. The federal laws are, and have been for a long time, completely prochoice. I doubt it will change from that until some absolutist prolifers either die off or change stance and join a compromise movement.

Until then, more 8 month fetuses are freely killed, so that you can say that 8 cells is murder.

They say that you can attract more flies with honey than with the other stuff.

Just something to think about.

You better believe we can ‘legislate morality.’ We do it all the time!

I meant sex free from the responsibility of being a parent. Sorry for not being more precise.

” I’m fairly certain that those who subjugated and oppressed blacks, women, jews, etc. did not have a doubt in their minds about the personhood of the ones they were oppressing….No. There could be no moral ambiguity because that could lead to the abolishment of their way of life. Instead, they picked a moral stance with no factual basis and rode it until the wheels fell off.” – I agree. This is very similar to what most abortionists do today.

Those things might be preferred by women, but you what you obviously don’t realize is birth control and the morning after pill are actually designed (as 1 of 3 mechanisms) to cause very early abortions. They do so by depleting the lining of the uterus of the nutrients needed for the newly created embryo (human person) to implant, grow, and survive.

You did use dehumanization when you compared the unborn to wasps (crushing the head in the process of aborting the unborn human causes no more suffering to it than when I smashed a giant wasp in my bathroom last night) and those without the ability to relate to others or have ‘self-awareness’ (such as people in comas) as bags of flesh. That is dehumanizing.