"Yet they look vaguely like babies."

There is no one on the planet who believes a tumor has the right to life. When one is shown an image of his brain tumor, it is not to see if perhaps the tumor is worth keeping around – if its cute little tendrils of malignancy won’t awaken some parental compassion in the patient’s heart….

Abortions are never easy things, and forcing a woman to view a sonogram against her will makes it even more difficult. First-trimester fetuses are not people in any sane sense of the word – their organs cannot function independently, and they possess submammalian levels of cognition, if any. Yet they look vaguely like babies. Adult humans, with our visually oriented neo-cortices, will automatically ascribe them human characteristics. That’s an inescapable fact of our biology.

~Brandon K. Thorpe, claiming ultrasound before an abortion is “pro-life propaganda,” Broward-Palm Beach New Times, April 23, 2011

1.  Why are abortions not easy?  Why shouldn't an abortion be just like pulling a tooth?  If it is not a person then who cares?  Abortion should be really easy.  Not convenient for sure, but certainly not very gut-wrentching.

2.  What is a sane definition of personhood?  I know many people who have organs that can't function independently and have very little cognition.  Should we be able to kill them too?  Claiming that we can kill people based upon a very vague definition of personhood seems horribly cruel.

3.  If they look like babies and have their own distinct DNA shouldn't that lead us to believe that they are actual persons?

4.  Let's say that we concede that we don't know exactly when personhood is arrived upon by a fetus, shouldn't that lead us to caution and not wholesale legal killing?  If we don't know and murder is on the line shouldn't that lead us to exercise humanitarian compassion and err on the side of caution?