{"id":852,"date":"2009-05-11T13:28:21","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T13:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/05\/500-zygotes-vs-1-baby-what.html"},"modified":"2009-05-11T13:28:21","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T13:28:21","slug":"500-zygotes-vs-1-baby-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/05\/500-zygotes-vs-1-baby-what.html","title":{"rendered":"500 Zygotes vs. 1 Baby — What Are the Pro-Life Gray Zones?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of you asked what I was getting at with the thought experiment pitting 500 zygotes against one baby.<\/a> (If you were in a burning medical building, which would you save?)
\nI’ve argued that some pro-choice leaders are slightly out of synch with some pro-choice voters. While all pro-choices want the decision to be made by the woman, many rank and file voters do believe that after a certain point the fetus takes on some personhood rights — a position not typically espoused by pro-choice leaders.
\nI’ve wondered to what extent there’s also a gap — more subtle perhaps, but real — between pro-life voters and pro-life leaders. Consider: 37% of the population wants abortion illegal except in cases of rape and incest. That means about half of pro-life voters would make that exception. Yet if abortion is murder, allowing it because the life was created through another crime makes no sense. To me, that means pro-life voters are seeing — perhaps unconsciously — their own shades of gray.
\nSo: curious: what’s the nature of these gray areas? And do they point to areas of potential common ground? If a pro-life person would save the baby instead of the 500 zygotes, it made me wonder whether they would agree to some public policies that would prevent some second or third trimester abortions at the risk of allowing some loss of zygotes. For instance, if Plan B mostly operates as birth control, not an abortafacient, but it may occasionally lead to a fertilized embryo not implanting. If greater use of Plan B led to far fewer second or even later-first trimester abortions, is that something that some pro-life voters would be willing to accept?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of you asked what I was getting at with the thought experiment pitting 500 zygotes against one baby. (If you were in a burning medical building, which would you save?) I’ve argued that some pro-choice leaders are slightly out of synch with some pro-choice voters. While all pro-choices want the decision to be made…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n500 Zygotes vs. 1 Baby - What Are the Pro-Life Gray Zones? - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/05\/500-zygotes-vs-1-baby-what.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"500 Zygotes vs. 1 Baby - What Are the Pro-Life Gray Zones? - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of you asked what I was getting at with the thought experiment pitting 500 zygotes against one baby. 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