Did I miss something? Did Open claim to be pro-life?
I believe there are people who honestly think that a fetus is a "blob of tissue" and not alive. I remember on another forum talking with a person who really did think that it was not alive. When we began dissecting what it meant to be alive she had to come to understand that it was alive in the sense that any other living thing is alive - like a tree or an animal, but she said it was not alive in the sense that it did not have a "real life". We eventually agreed that when I started by saying it was alive I had an accurate statement but that a a metaphorical kind of life in which one is self-actualized is not relevant. Did she become pro-life? No. She simply stated that even though it was a single organism that was alive and human that it was still not a person. It did not matter that the definition of person has always meant any human, she used a newer definition which had to mean that it could think higher level thoughts and maintain its own life. From there we learned that she did not respect life of anyone who could not think higher thoughts or take care of themselves - so if a person were really old or really disabled they should watch out for her kind. Another person on that thread was more hones and just said that she did not care if it was alive or a person or whatever she just thought that killing it was Ok no matter what.
I do not expect to change the minds of pro-choice people. I do expect that if I can establish that an unborn baby is an individual, alive, human and meets the established definition of a person that the vast majority of people seeing that enough times will eventually have it sink in.
The biggest obstacle is not that people do not want to understand what words mean but that they cannot let go of the ability to end unwanted pregnancies. I have had success in discussing that unwanted pregnancies can ethically be ended if one does ones best to save the life of the fetus even as it is removed from its mother's body. (which is what we would have to do if a disease such as cancer made it impossible to carry a fetus to term). Few complain that it is too expensive to try to save the life of the fetus they just want to be able to end pregnancy. If this were the goal then more people would accept the obvious that an unborn is a living human individual person. Two things would happen: accepting that abortion would become rarer and we would get really good at saving the life of the unborn.
