Fire Hydrant of Freedom

My triplets were born early enough to have been aborted in some states. But I remember them well... less than 2.5 pounds each with legs and arms like string beans and their entire torso fitting into the palm of my right hand with their little legs/arms sticking out over the sides of my hand. They moved around, made noise, we could comfort  them with our touches and they expressed pain when pricked or prodded. When one of the triplets (Andrew) died after two days my wife and I bawled our eyes out because we didn't lose a fetus... it was our son who died. The surviving triplets (a boy and a girl, Riley and Gracie) are 12 years old now, doing great BTW, and they were not fetuses either.... they were small, under developed babies who lived for awhile in the womb until it was time to live in the open world. I have some good friends who disagree with me about when life starts and we remain good friends but I tend to be very dogmatic on this issue. Anyone who believes anything else is as uninformed as someone who believes 3+3=10. They may be innocently uninformed but they are uninformed none the less.

Any honest debate about abortion rights has to begin with the honest recognition that a baby is a baby whether living in the womb or living in the open world. I would at least feel intellectually honest about a debate that surrounded whether a person had a right to terminate a pregnancy because the pregnancy itself or the life that would be born would be too destructive to the mothers and/or father's lives and that they had the right to destroy the baby.  I wouldn't agree with that argument, but at least THAT would be an example of what I would consider an  honest debate.

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