I think some folks here might wish to know that today's New York Times (20 January 2019) has a "SPECIAL OPINION REPORT" by its editorial board about the increasing number of laws treating a fetus as a person. I have a print copy (which I did NOT pay for ) but I cannot access the online version and post any excerpts here.

I think it may have been running for a few weeks as there are several parts to it and it starts off with the date 28th December. Here's the start of it, if it's of any help:

"You might be surprised to learn that in the United States a woman coping with the heartbreak of losing her pregnancy might also find herself facing jail time. Say she got in a car accident in New York or gave birth to a stillborn in Indiana: In such cases, women have been charged with manslaughter.

In fact, a fetus need not die for the state to charge a pregnant woman with a crime. Women who fell down the stairs, who ate a poppy seed bagel and failed a drug test or who took legal drugs during pregnancy — drugs prescribed by their doctors — all have been accused of endangering their children.

Such cases are rare. There have been several hundred of them since the Supreme Court issued its decision ratifying abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, in 1973. But they illuminate a deep shift in American society, away from a centuries-long tradition in Western law and toward the embrace of a relatively new concept: that a fetus in the womb has the same rights as a fully formed person.

This idea has now worked its way into federal and state regulations and the thinking of police officers and prosecutors. As it has done so, it’s begun not only to extend rights to clusters of cells that have not yet developed into viable human beings, but also to erode the existing rights of a particular class of people — women. Women who are pregnant have found themselves stripped of the right to consent to surgery, the right to receive treatment for a medical condition and even something as basic as the freedom to hold a baby in the moments after birth."

From conception, the "cluster of cells" is a human being.

Also, viability is of no concern to the left.

There is no objective line that can be drawn between a "clump of cells" and a "human being"; no line that would not exclude people who are asleep, or in surgery, or on temporary life support. It is simply what a pro-choicer has to say if he doesn't want to say that it's OK to kill a human being. (Some will go ahead and say that.)

Amen!

That's why I'm antiabortion!

An abortion can be seen as the ultimate act of convenience for a woman. A woman arranges a murder to make life more convenient for her ... because she no longer has to face the consequences of her actions. A dead person is a tiny price to pay for her convenience. And she is told, for example, by some who scream against executing vile criminals that the criminal's life is much more important than an innocent, blameless child.

I think they are all perfect candidates for the Einsatzgruppen.

Had to look that last word up, but murder was claimed to be legal by the supremely wrong court.

[S]upremely wrong court.

+1.

Agreed, Father. When I read or hear clump of cells in such a usage, I think rarely is so little made of so much.

Thank you, Denise, for the additional information.

Do I detect the victimization narrative entering into the anti-life mantra?

That's not new. Unborn babies have been called parasites inhabiting an unwilling woman's body for years. I have also seen it described as a fetus holding a woman hostage.

I caught a whiff of the complaint that, if a woman murders her child, then the angst and anguish resulting from the murder ... is the child's fault. And the mother is a victim.

We need to pray for abortionists as well as those who think like them, and for the end of abortions.

Can't the same argument be made about infants of lactating mothers?

Google for Judith Jarvis Thomson violinist.