Abortion... Yes? No?

"My God has a bigger dick than your God"

Classic Carlin.

Can someone explain to me why people usually focus on the number of abortions since Roe v. Wade, but not on the vastly larger number of abortions performed before the Civil War, extending back into European common law and antiquity? Simply speaking in terms of chronology, the outlawing of abortion before viability (or "quickening") is a historical anomaly (ref, also see the Roe v. Wade majority opinion) and the previous strata would represent the overwhelming majority of terminated pregnancies simply based on its exponentially longer frame of action.

Why not condemn the vast majority of our ancestors for providing the historical basis, which provided a substantial grounding and rationale (although far from the only one) for the ruling?

Considering the number of potential offspring that each of these potential offspring could have had -- keeping in mind that we'd be going back to ancient Greece, just to mention one culture, based on references in the writings of Dioscorides and Soranus, among others, and probably all the way back to Egypt if we wanted to be accurate (there is suggestive evidence in some Egyptian tombs, at least, given the inclusion of images of Birthwort, an abortifacient, in scenes of birth and nursing: ref), stopping there only if we don't want to project equal equivalent practices onto earlier cultures and into prehistory -- isn't this historical aspect what pro-lifers should really be attacking? Surely we're talking about magnitudes more lives here, leaving aside its use as evidence that allowing abortion, culturally, is far more the norm than the exception.

If abortion is genocide, why not focus on this group of deaths, rather than those since Roe v. Wade? The latter would certainly seem to be the weaker choice.

Although I am vehemently in favor of abortion rights, with the caveat that I do not believe that this is in and of itself a justification for those rights (historical precedent is not a justification for slavery), its lack of employment seems to me to be a glaring omission. It suggests to me that bringing up this consequence of Roe v. Wade is not so much an attack on abortion itself as an attack on those who stand behind it -- attempting to foist on them, by means of a selective view of cultural practices, the burden of a massacre unprecedented in human history.

If so, that is dishonest and abhorrent in the extreme -- and the shame that should be felt, assuming the presence of an operative and functioning conscience, is beyond description.

If not, I can only attribute its omission in argument as the symptom of simple ignorance: hardly more defensible, in view of what is being implied.

No. You see, all them Non Americans are just heathens and savages, so why would we care what they do. As for history, most Americans see history as boring, we - like our President - prefer to make things up as we go.

That is of course why we keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and...

Not that I pay much attention to the arguments of pro-lifers, but I was under the impression that their dislike of RvW stemmed from the fact that it took away the state's right to decide for themselves, not some academically fraudulant omission. But like I said. I don't really pay much attention to them.