We Are All Ruled By Webster's

Thank you for your contributions, gentlemen. We'll be in touch. https://t.co/NoR5DEJfAx

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) May 13, 2022

Well, by definitions, anyway.

Note that the discussion there turns on the idea of "conception."  When does that happen?  When the egg enters the sperm?  And we know that happens in particular, how?  By "in particular," I mean in the uterus of the woman in question.  Of course, the egg is not viable until it implants in the uterus.  Sometimes that happens in the wrong place (I speak as a lay person trying to describe this as carefully as I can, but I don't know human biology all that well), and you get an ectopic pregnancy.  The embryo can't thrive, but it can threaten the life of the woman.

Tough shit?  Get another one and try again, bub?  That fertilized egg is a life, and it gets absolute priority?

And there are what medicine calls "spontaneous abortions," where the pregnancy simply fails, usually because the fetus is no longer viable (or perhaps never was.  There is a great deal we don't know in the particular, but only in the general.)  As a doctor explained to me, that's nature's way of ending what isn't going to be born.  It's a fairly efficient system when it happens early in the pregnancy.  Emotionally devastating, probably (I've had family members suffer through it), but still, better than a stillbirth after 9 months.

"Better" is admittedly a relative term. Again, I'm trying to be sensitive here.  Doin' the best I can.

So nature sometimes aborts (i.e., stops early) a pregnancy.  Life may begin at conception, but that doesn't mean it lasts until old age, barring accident or disease.  And now we're back to that notion of implantation.

If an IUD interferes with implantation, is that an abortion?  Is that "killing the egg"?  What if the body itself "kills the egg", outside of any contraceptive effort?

Does the law assume sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy every time?  That every failure to concieve is an abortion?  Every miscarriage a criminal act?  Is this a rebuttable presumption?  Or does the state only have to prove that intercourse took place and a miscarriage occured sometime later (many miscarriages occur but are perceived only as regular menstrual flow)?  Seems to me the solution there is not to go to the hospital if you (the woman) aren't sure.  Based, at least, on the experience of the poor woman in south Texas who's hospital visit ended up with criminal charges against her.

So women aren't entitled to full access to healthcare because they are required by law to be baby containers, whether they can be or not?

This is rapidly devolving into insanity.  Or to the 13th century that Justice Alito seems so enamored of, when men were men and women were chattel.  It's harder and harder to deny that's the definition many would like to put back into place, maybe because women shouldn't be having sex in the first place, and if they do, it should be only to make babies.