George Carlin - Pro-Life is Anti-Woman! On the Personhood of Pre-implantation Embryos. Introduction It hardly needs to be argued that the fundamental issue at the crux of the abortion debate is the question of when personhood begins. This is self-evident. Abortion would be quite simply unthinkable if the fetus was viewed as an individual human person, rather than simply as a mass of living human cells which happens to be a potential person. The pro-life community in America, while not entirely monolithic even in this area, has nonetheless been dominated by a surprisingly united political and moral conviction on this question. By and large, they argue that human life and personhood begin at the moment of conception, which they almost universally define as fertilization.[1] Understandably, therefore, they have loudly decried as immoral all practices that involve the destruction of fertilized human eggs and resulting embryos, no matter how early in development.
[It is] a scientific, indisputable fact that we have known [from] well before Roe v. Twinning and Recombination. Public Opinion on Abortion. Personhood: Is a Fetus a Human Being? Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States. July 2014 • Half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] •Twenty-one percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2] • In 2011, 1.06 million abortions were performed, down 13% from 1.21 million in 2008. From 1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions occurred.[2] • Each year, 1.7% of women aged 15–44 have an abortion [2].
Half have had at least one previous abortion.[3] • At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and at 2008 abortion rates, one in 10 women will have an abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.[4,5] • Eighteen percent of U.S. women obtaining abortions are teenagers; those aged 15–17 obtain 6% of all abortions, 18–19-year-olds obtain 11%, and teens younger than 15 obtain 0.4%.[3] • Thirty-seven percent of women obtaining abortions identify as Protestant and 28% identify as Catholic.[3] • In the 1973 Roe v. 1. 2. Abortion Has Become More Concentrated Among Poor Women. 125 Maiden Lane, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10038 Ph 212 248 1111 Fax 212 248 1951 Rebecca Windmediaworks@guttmacher.org Tuesday, May 4, 2010 The proportion of abortion patients who were poor increased by almost 60%—from 27% in 2000 to 42% in 2008, according to “Characteristics of U.S. Abortion Patients, 2008,” by Rachel K. Jones, Lawrence B.
Finer and Susheela Singh of the Guttmacher Institute. The growing concentration of abortion among women with incomes below the federal poverty line likely reflects a combination of factors. “Gaps in unintended pregnancy and abortion between poor and more affluent women have been increasing since the mid-1990s, so—sadly—none of this comes as a surprise,” says Sharon L. Aside from poverty, little changed in the profile of women obtaining abortions between 2000 and 2008. For the first time, the survey on which this report is based asked abortion patients about their health insurance status and how they paid for abortion services. About the Survey.