The righttoamiserablelifers must have screamed "Murder!" when they read of the scientific progress that now allows downs syndrome to be detected in the first trimester, so a pregnant woman can "privately and safely choose to abort." Use of the word privately in the news story was surprisingly subtle, though even the nonrealists must have angrily understood the point. By definition not being realistic, they probably won't understand this, but here it is:
        (1) An aborted 11-week old fetus, the nervous system of which is not yet complex enough to be any more conscious than a carrot, cannot and doesn't suffer when it is discontinued and will certainly never suffer thereafter from having been only a potential but never an actual person, because no such actual person with an actual brain capable of suffering has ever or will ever exist.
     THEREFORE:
     (2) the potential person theorized (which the nonrealist will claim has been sinfully deprived of its life) is no different from any of the trillions, quadrillions, indeed zillions of other potential persons that didn't make it even to the level of a carrot because this egg or that sperm met a different sperm or egg or wasn't met at all.
     What am I talking about? Oh heck! I lost you, didn't I? Well, let's try again, and this time pay attention.

     To suppose that a POTENTIAL human being is equal to a human being SHOULD, to the unrealistic supposer, make it also supposedly murder - indeed mass murder - to mate with this person instead of that person, or to have intercourse when this sperm and egg combination can happen instead of when that combination can happen. So when Joe marries Mary instead of Jill, Betty, or Deb, he murders all the children he could have sired through Jill, Betty, or Deb; and when Joe and Mary conceive on Thursday, they murder the child they could have conceived on Friday.
     And God himself should be supposed a mass murderer for sending a flood of sperms toward only a single egg, thus premeditating the death of every POTENTIAL human being that could have existed if any other sperm had connected with that egg other than the one lucky sperm that did.
     In fact, any of these suppositions makes mass murder inevitable, since any connection of sperm and egg that occurs automatically kills all the POTENTIAL connections that therefore couldn't occur. And I insist on taking this absurdity one step further: the killing of any single potential connection among the countless possible connections just alluded to also kills the further countless potential connections that could have been potential if EACH of the killed potential connections had resulted in a human being who matured and produced his own countless seeds. And I think I'll take the absurdity even another step further (that I know you didn't think of): the FAILURE TO ABORT any zygote or embryo automatically results in the arbitrary murder of the entire array of competing potential humans that the next egg that would have appeared in the womb could have been part of.
     If mere POTENTIAL humanness is human and the elimination of any potential humanness is murder, then the aborting of one potentially human fetus is a mathematically pale sin compared to the horrific death toll very accurately pointed out in the last paragraph, and, obviously (HEY! YOU WEREN'T EXPECTING THIS, SO PAY ATTENTION!), any claim NOW - now that you HAVE to see that I've got you over a logical barrel - any claim NOW that the sacredness of human life doesn't begin until conception contradicts your own objections to all forms of pre-emptive birth control and sacrilegiously contradicts your phony god, since that very Biblical god's supposed proscription against casting "your seed upon the ground" clearly and exactly referred to the sinfulness of exactly the same incredibly complexly inevitable massacre I described in the last paragraph.
     No wonder religious people don't habitually think this through carefully. It would drive them crazy to try to amend the Constitution to deal with such an octopus of inevitable sin. I would advise both them and their apparently equally unthinking god (created, as Voltaire pointed out, in their image) to join me in much more realistically considering only actually already existing after-birth humans with conscious human brains capable of actual suffering to be human and murderable. Having taken that quantum leap to a more respectable level of intelligence, it should relieve them immensely to realize that, in fact, when any human seed dries up without connecting, nothing happens to any ever existing human being, because not a single one of the countless potential humans that could have resulted from that seed's connection to any of countless other seeds ever exists.
     Claims that an obviously non-existent god meant a particular such incredibly chancy combination to occur and survive are non-arguments on a par with the supposition that Santa has every pre-destined child on his advance gift list or that Julius Caesar was scheduled for successive reincarnations through certain scheduled meetings of sperm and egg on each March 15 that another of his series of reincarnations died.
     One more thing, new to faith-based thinkers: please do not try to argue with any of the above until you have actually read and understood every word and the entire syntax of every sentence and the substance and organization of each paragraph and of the whole composition.

-Glen Roberts

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