(POLITICALLY SENSITIVE DISCLAIMER: This is not an attempt to sway anyone’s opinion or feelings about abortion, just a demand that if one is going to argue against, or in favor of, something we should at least expect real facts, not emotionally based false representations.)

Here’s one of my favorite billboards…

The cute little smiling baby, whose precious heart began to beat 18 days after conception, how could anyone take this life?

How could anyone terminate a pregnancy by an intentional abortion?

But there is a different reality…

At the point of pregnancy described by the billboard, the fetus is the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

And the (.), looks like this,

At various stages of development, the fetus has gill-like organs and goes through a series of development phases known as Ontogeny recapitulating Phylogeny;

Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny—is a biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory)

 

This applies to the Human fetus as well.

Now this is not considered to be a fully established biologically based theory but it is a commonly held dogma of developmental biologists.

My purpose for writing this is to merely complain about just one, albeit significant, example of the use of incorrect, misleading, and, in many cases, outright false information to support an argument.

Whatever one’s opinion of abortion is, at least make your arguments using real facts and images.

 

In the interest of full disclosure I believe no one should have a say in what choices a woman makes regarding her own body.

I do believe people should be trusted to base decisions on factual data.  If anti-abortionists need to rely on misleading, emotionally charged, false representations to support their position, what does that say about their opinion regarding the intelligence of the targeted audience, and more importantly, the lack of any logical, fact-based, intellectually persuasive argument available to them.