...and another thing about life beginning at conception...

I wrote this in response to a "Margaret" (could I have been jousting with Tighe herself?) on Andrew Bolt's blog some time ago, and thought it worth reposting here.  It's a short and sweet response to a popular Pro-Life refrain:

“On conception, the baby has everything it needs to grow and eventually become an independent person outside the womb.”

There are two responses to this:

1) One in three conceptions end in miscarriage.  So one in three of your “babies” is already dead of natural causes. Perhaps you could redirect your energies to solving that problem?

2) An embryo, on its own, does not have everything it needs for survival unless it has a mother willing to bring it to term.

That is so important, I’ll repeat it:

An embryo/foetus, on its own, does not have everything it needs for survival unless it has a woman willing to bring it to term.

Some embryos spontaneously abort because something has gone wrong at some stage in development - they do not have everything they need for survival.  An embryo that is aborted by a woman who does not want to bear a child has the same problem - it lacks everything it needs for survival.