If I ever have the “pleasure” of having a pro-life individual in my house for lunch who won’t stop using the word “child” to refer to fetuses, I fully plan to serve everyone else apples, and give them an apple seed, and tell them that since they can’t tell the difference, I figured they wouldn’t mind.
Grumble. Internets. Someone wrong on. And so on.
awesome use of metaphor. i love it.
I love it.
I might actually do that in that position.
Perfect.
Yeah, but you can’t win with people like that. I have pointed out to people that you can’t make marinara sauce out of little yellow flowers, and they say that of course they know that a potential tomato is not a tomato, but that a potential human is a human anyway.
That’s interesting. I’m pro-choice in terms of legality–but strongly morally opposed to abortion–and I use ‘child’ to refer to fetuses. Not only does it reflect the way I think about the nature of conceived-but-not-yet-born people, it seems *highly* disrespectful to expectant parents to refer to their growing family member as a ‘fetus’. (Though, out of parents’ hearing range, I have been known to refer to babies/children as ‘larvae’ :-p)
Of course, I also use ‘children’ and ‘kids’ to refer to my non-human dependents, so I suppose my usage of the term is rather more liberal than most.
I don’t understand this at all. “Fetus” is the correct term. How is that even mildly disrespectful?
it seems *highly* disrespectful to expectant parents to refer to their growing family member as a ‘fetus’.
Why? It is a fetus, after all (after 8 weeks anyway-before that it’s an embryo.)
In the event that I am talking to someone who is pregnant (or closely related to someone who is pregnant) with a wanted fetus, I will use the word child as short-hand for “(your ideas and dreams for a) child” or “(fetus that your body is currently attempting to grow into a) child.”
I do that because it’s a lazy way for us to talk about the future, in a language we both understand. If the pregnant woman (or person closely related to that woman) were to start jumping up and down and demanding that I acknowledge her fetus is a baby and not a fetus right now right now right now then I would check for other signs of a psychotic fit.
If we’re not talking about a specific, wanted fetus — if we are instead talking about political ideologies, or fetuses in general — then there seems to be no reason* to use the inaccurate word “child.” Well, that is unless you’re using it as short hand for (fetus may be medically correct, but I don’t believe women are fully human, and I want to take away their abortion rights by making bald emotional appeals and pretending there’s no difference between a thing in its seed-form and the fully grown thing, and so I shall conveniently eliminate women’s labor in the process of pregnancy by calling this a) child!
— *This is not strictly true, in that there is one more reason, which is using the word child as shorthand for “(Bah, I’m just being inaccurate out of laziness, and this may be a fetus technically but I’m going to use the vernacular anyway and call it a) child.” But oddly, these people don’t freak out when you mention that fetus is the correct term, and they don’t try to beat you over the head with the idea that there’s no difference between a five-year-old child, and a three-week-old cell clump in utero.
Hey Vidya, I’m currently 9 months pregnant (and close enough to holding my baby that I spent today in fake labor) and I have NO problem whatsoever with people using the correct term for my fetus.
That is fucking awesome. Thanks for sharing, best thing I’ve heard in a while!
Pingback: Comparing Apples and Fetuses « Missives from Marx
Most of the people I know just call them ‘babies’.
Here, Fred, have an appleseed.
Maybe I’m reading far too much into a joke here, but an appleseed isn’t a potential apple. An apple seed is a potential tree.
If seed=zygote/embryo/fetus then apple=amniotic sac and sapling=child.
@ sanabituranima–
lol. didn’t even think of that.
if I’m remembering correctly, a good amount of ground up apple seeds (they need to be broken so that digestive juices metabolize the amygdalin inside) can pr0duce enough cyanide to poison a person.
hmm, maybe I should go hand a couple apple seeds to the probably hungry anti choicer with a sign I saw not far from my work this morning.
(Hopefully this isn’t right underneath the cyanide comment because that is definitely NOT what I’m implying!)
Are you feeding the pro-choice poeple trees? Because you analogy isn’t very good unless you are.
Apples are the fruit of trees. Trees are the individuals. Apples are pretty much either the fetus or the womb depending on how you look at it.
Maybe you want to give them unripe apples? Of course then that raises the question of how you know when an apple is ripe enough to really count as an apple in your analogy which you really don’t want to deal with…
Ali–It totally was, and even if you didn’t mean it that way…I’m just pissed-off enough at anti-choice protesters to find it awesome.
I don’t normally pay much attention to bumper stickers. But yesterday I was waiting at an access lane for the light to change so I could get onto the expressway to go home. The person ahead of me (whose gender, age, race, etc. I could not determine due to light and glass angles and traffic conditions) had 3 bumper stickers on their rear bumper from left to right:
“Choose Life” with a stylized picture of a fetus in utero – I couldn’t make out the organization’s name.
“War Is Not The Answer” by some kind of Friends committee.
Obama ’08
and I thought “Boy, I’d like to talk to this person.”
and I thought “Boy, I’d like to talk to this person.”
I know a number of people in real life who identify as pro-life and think abortion is almost always wrong, but who are liberal or left-leaning in all their other political positions and who always (or nearly always) vote Democratic. I don’t think it’s that unusual, especially among Catholics.
On abortion, they tend to not get riled up the way I would about abortion restrictions, but they think moral persuasion combined with a more generous social safety net, better access to birth control, and more equality in sexual relationships is the most effective way to reduce the abortion rate, rather than simply banning it.
I think that women who are pregnant generally should choose life for the fetus. It doesn’t make much sense for me to be super pro-adoption unless I think open adoption (i.e. where the birth mother has access to the child) is, all else being equal, better than abortion. So I would be happy to stick a “choose life” bumper sticker on my car so long as the proceeds went to assisting women who do complete their pregnancies, rather than to an abortion prohibitionist group.
“Choose Life” actually uses the framework of people like me who want to keep abortion legal, because it says women have a choice and that the decision of what will happen with this fetus is up to the woman who is carrying it. Any preference abourt that decision has to be directed to the woman — not her husband, or the government. Speaking of which, I think the government should encourage women to choose life by providing support for low-income mothers and expanding open adoptions to more states.
“Don’t have an abortion unless you want the doctor to go prison and for you to go to hell” uses the framework of the prohibitionists (the nicer ones who don’t want to impose criminal penalties on the woman who has the illegal abortion), and would be a more accurate description of their viewpoint than “choose life.” Doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, though.