You can add the abrasive, dissident feminist writer, Camille Paglia, to the list below. Here is what she said in an interview with Salon magazine:
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.
On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution? What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion. http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/…in/index3.html
Sarah Terzo, LifeNews.com: It is usually assumed, in the abortion debate, that the fundamental difference between the pro-life and pro-choice positions is the question of when life begins. Pro-life people point to the scientific fact that the life of each organism begins at conception, when the sperm and egg meet to form a new individual with its own DNA different from that of the mother and father. As this new life implants and begins to grow, it has its own circulatory system, heartbeat, and developing body, making it an independent organism and a very young member of the human species
Pro-choice activists, on the other hand, argue that the fetus in the womb is not a person, not a baby – instead, just a “thing” that will eventually become a human being. However, in a disturbing new trend, more and more pro-choice activists are changing their tune and admitting that an unborn baby is a person, and that their pro-choice stand is based not on the belief that the baby is inhuman, but rather on the belief that killing the baby is okay. Read full article here.
