No Tom, my piece was not focusing on the stem-cell directive. At the end, it pointed out a lack of safeguards specified by the Administration to prevent human life from becoming a eugenic commodities market. In some ways it already is, but that takes nothing away from this particular argument re: the Obama Admin.

Tom, you ask me: "Legal, moral, loving sexual intercourse is essentially guaranteed to mean death for a fertilized ovum three out of four times, on average.. Is that OK with you?"

My answer is that you ask a question based on a false premise. Your false premise is that natural failure to implant is within the control of the potential parents in that situation. It isn't.

Tom, you ask: If an embryo does not implant, (the situation mentioned above), what is the moral verdict on it? We're speaking of the morality of human beings whose agency determines the happening or non-happening of some event or state. In the case you set up, it is not specific human agency that causes a spontaneous abortion or failure to implant.

I'd also add that I don't believe morality is juridical in every case. That is, moral reality does not always assume guilt of a particular individual where there is a moral wrong. There are cases in which the negligence of a few or many brings about conditions in which something happens which is wrong, however, for which culpability could not be traced by intentionality or knowing. I suppose you might say this means the verdict would be "liable" or "not liable" but then we would be trafficking in tort principles where no amount of money could bring back the lost lives. A specific example? Perhaps second hand smoke permeating an apartment in which a pregnant mother brought her child to term came from apartments in which those smoking were both addicted to nicotine (had compromised will power) and / or the smokers were unaware of the facts about second hand smoke.

Tom, you ask: Does the "morning-after" dose of birth-control pill inducing this result mean it is an abortion? Tom, the pill is itself an intention to block life giving resources from a conceived life whose development will cease without docking, so to speak. You tell me.

Tom, you state: "Since we used to know nothing about fetus development, life was said to begin at quickening, that is, movement. Only recent medical research has shown otherwise." In so stating you admit life begins earlier by science's lights.

Yet you argue: "But for now, that fetus is party of the mother's body until viability allows the occasional live premature birth." And I respond, in elective situations, the fetus is party to the mother's body by invitation from the mother, or by knowingly risked invitation. Where one invites another onto their property, it is never legal to kill the invitee for trespassing even though one may change their mind about the invitation. If the invitee is such that they cannot leave and depend on resources for nourishment (say for a 9 month stay until they can go about with the adoption agency or whomever) and the property owner knows this on electing to risk the invitation, barring this resource support such that is deprives the invitee of what it needs to live while visiting is knowingly killing the invitee unless there is some other source for these resources.

Tom, you then state: "So any Manichean dichotomy is not supportable, in that you can't make clear lines dividing good from bad, you can't show where society has a right to intervene in a mother's actions---is eating badly an abortion? Too much exercise? Not enough? Alcohol, cigarettes? TV?"

Here, Tom, is where you have introduced society's intervention into what was a conversation about morality that I would hope might convince you and others in the misnamed 'pro-choice' camp that abortion is not a moral choice, but immoral, regardless of what the state does about it. Principled people, if convinced of what is and isn't right, and lending their power to the doing of what is right, are a force greater than state and law. Their prevention power is worth more than the incalculable tonnage of state largess needed to regulate behaviors.

Tom, that you have to come up with Huxley-like contingencies for being able to discern right and wrong regarding abortion, it means that you have left common sense alone. Common sense says that men and women are capable, smart, basically good and would love to accept parenthood responsibilities if their culture had not brainwashed them to think of reproduction as the evil that would end all of their material fixations after having soundly transfixed them with dead material projections on life's meaning to begin with.

It parallels in the reasons for regulation in one case but not in the other. Read the piece before responding and you'll figure that out.

AJM, your argument that potentiality is fallacious is itself based on a condition created by another argument asserted in your camp: that at best, the life of the unborn is merely potential, not actual. That is not a premise we share, however, it is a premise that pro-lifers sometimes entertain arguendo.

Why?

Because, as I responded to you earlier this evening, potentiality is an argument of uncertainty about life's existence -- i.e. it is potentially life because where you and I may accept that we do not have absolutely perfect philosophical certainty, life can at least be said to be potential. In fact, the other side of that coin would be a pro-choicer saying that non-life is potential.

That is where we reach the question of what to do at this philosophical impasse. And that is where pro-lifers say that in the absence of certainty, the price of being wrong that there is potential life is much less than being wrong that there is potentially no life.

And so when you cite absurdity in "potential life" you do so in an area (scientific certainty) where there is no doubt that there is actual human life as if we were talking in philosophical terms. That is why it is absurd -- because scientifically there is no doubt. Scientifically, what grows from conception in the womb must be alive or it would not grow. And if it is the product of conception b/w human egg and human sperm, it is human. This gives us certainty that it is human life, after which discussion of potentials is absurd.

Yet we are really talking about philosophical uncertainty of human life, since the science is already clear. And that is where the potentiality of life is not absurd to discuss.

Your probability assertions aren't exactly empirical.

Most Catholics have seen the aftermath of an abortion on placards. It isn't a theological abstraction bluebell.

What are those horrendous images? They are there to impress on people the very opposite of your false assertion.