Hev is correct, most pro-choicers are against late-term abortion. I have also heard it stated that late-term abortions are almost exclusively performed on children who are genetically brain dead, but I do not have statistics on that to be certain.

Regardless, a series of grusome pictures is worth nothing without reasoning to back it. That video provided none. Fortunately, for anti-abortion people, that website is really awesome. I bookmarked it for reference in future debates, and I recommend anti-abortion people do the same.

When you click on the left, look at the links on the left side. Starting with section B and going through section F, you will see a lot of arguments in opposition to abortion, directly referencing the an argument presented by the opposition. And they're very good, in my opinion.

Of course, this doesn't mean I'm anti-abortion; I've always been undecided on this subject. I have three primary points of contention. The first involves the statements under B->What is Personhood?. In this section, the website claims that embryos are humans lives, which is true, but it then uses the dictionary definition of "person" to suggest that these human lifeforms should be called "people". This is illogical. Using our current definition of a word only indicates our current understanding of that word. It doesn't say anything about how we should understand that word.

I like the comparison they make about African-Americans and Native-Americans being scientifically humans, though socitey refused to call them people. However, that comparison is only valid if the reason we call them "people" is because they are members of the human species. I disagree, I think we call them "people" because of their conciousness and their intelligence, and that in a real sense, if an intelligent alien species arrived on our planet, our law would treat them as "people" instead of as animals.

My second point of contention is under C->Level of Development. In this section, the website claims that an underdeveloped person is still considered a person, and it uses retarded children or genetically weaker people as examples. However, these are not people so underdeveloped that they have no minds. If we consider braindead human life to be a person, then it should be illegal to kill my skincells, should they be removed from my body. They should be allowed to die on their own, or even protected from death. It is medically certain that my skin cells are human life. In the same fashion, although we sort of think of a medically braindead human to be a person, our law treats them more like the property of their family. The family can choose to pull the plug.

Considering the complexity of the discussion over development, the words on that website are far too brief.

Now that website, in sections C and D, goes over the differences between children and embryos, arguing why none of those differences mean we should deny the embryo rights while granting a child rights. As I stated, the level of development is where I disagree. Those same differences could be used to say that sperm and eggs should be treated exactly the same as humans. The only difference between a sperm/egg and an embryo unlisted by that website is that the sperm and egg are seperate, while an embryo is together.

But I don't think that the "seperate" thing is a good reason to treat them differently. For example, if a person were able to seperate himself into two pieces, then bring himself back together into a single person, would we be okay in killing that person while he is in two pieces? Of course not, that makes no sense at all. So if we give an embryo the same rights as a child, it is only logical to give sperm and eggs the same rights as a child. More specifically, we must not allow sperm and eggs to die, which means we must have sex as much as possible: rape must be mandatory.

Now you might be thinking: "Woah, wait a minute, a sperm and an egg are completely different from a child." That may be, but most of that difference comes from level of development, which was discounted as a bad argument by this website. I argue that level of development is actually very important, and that is why we cannot consider a sperm and egg to be the same as a child. You might think of other differences, such as environment or dependency, each of which is discredited by the website with what I consider to be a very good argument.

To perhaps put this more simply, I think the best comparison is this: we know that sperm and eggs should not be considered people. We know that newborn babies should be considered people. What is the reason we consider the newborn babies people, but we don't consider the sperm or eggs to be people? Level of development is a very likely culprit: sperm and eggs do not have conciousness or intelligence.

Another likely possibility is that we've entrusted the choice to have a child with the owners of the sperm and the eggs.

If either of those are the correct reasons, that still leaves open plenty of debate over whether abortion should or shouldn't be allowed. But we can't have that debate if we don't understand the reasons we sometimes consider human life to be reproductive material, and we sometimes consider it to be a person.