. . . "As you, annrose and I know," me being the "you" in that statement. Trouble is, as you know, only we deeply embedded insider know this - and few outside the deep enclave even care - until it strikes them personally.

We are very much in agreement, geomoo. In fact, my response to what you have written is, "Amen." I like your sign-off: "I don't believe in evolution. I am convinced by the evidence." The implied converse should be equally true, i.e., to quote Mark Twain, "Faith is believin' what you know ain't so."

No, it is certainly not acceptable to commit murder even if you do believe in it. I have long thought that we will never win this debate unless we can somehow convince enough people that zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are not "babies," and, to be blunt, that they are no more "miracles" of God than the very similar recombination of DNA that produces a steer out of which the majority of us have no compunction about making hamburger. Is that too blunt? Probably is, politically - I would not make a good politician.

However, as long as the antiabortionists keep flashing those pictures of bloody, dismembered, and dead late term fetuses everywhere we turn, with the false (but persuasive to many who are willing to uncritically believe) implication that these images realistically portray abortion, I fear our efforts to combat them in the public at large are doomed.

Has your daughter's friend contemplated the following (from an essay I wrote), and would it matter to him?

The World Health Organization has estimated that in those parts of the world in which abortion is illegal, about 70,000 thinking, feeling, often desperate women and teenage girls die every year from illegal attempts to abort unwanted pregnancies. That is more than one every 10 minutes DEAD because they are prohibited by law from accessing a reputable legal clinic for safe, legal, professional abortion care. Many times that number are seriously injured and maimed for life. This is simply the unadulterated factual truth.

In addition, every minute, night and day, no holidays or weekends off, around the world

• one woman dies of complications of pregnancy and childbirth (every minute),

• ten teenage girls undergo unsafe illegal abortions (every minute),

• thirteen infants under twelve months old die (every minute),

• fifty seven people contract an STD (every minute),

• eleven people are infected with HIV (every minute),

• and the already-burgeoned-beyond-the-planet's-capacity-to-sustain human population increases by one hundred fifty more people (every minute),

all sanctioned, encouraged, and even required by our callous right-wing-dominated government through international interference with and withholding of funding from worldwide reproductive health programs. This is simply the unadulterated factual truth.
 
There are 525,600 minutes in a year. You do the arithmetic. The numbers are so huge as to be virtually impossible to contemplate, but those are the kinds of numbers we deal with when describing events in a world population of 6.5 billion individuals that is growing exponentially toward the point of severe degradation and destruction of the biosphere upon which all life depends.
 
In the United States we are vastly more fortunate. Almost 4,000 women every day obtain professional abortion care in the United States that is legal, professionally provided, and therefore extremely safe. Approximately 40% of all adult women in the country have had an abortion. 40%. Maybe your sister – the teenage girl next door or down the street (yes, no matter how perfect her Sunday School attendance) – your daughter – your best friend’s daughter - your wife – your mother – your teenage son’s girlfriend! You just aren’t likely to hear about it because they fearfully keep it secret. It’s one of those taboo subjects most people don’t feel free to discuss. Nor do many people want to hear about it, preferring to bolster their comforting beliefs that it just couldn’t be so by screening out and denying factual knowledge of it. This is simply the unadulterated factual truth.
 
Abortion was not always so safe in the United States, because it was illegal in most states here, too, until January 22, 1973, when the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade. Prior to that momentous decision, which declared unconstitutional, and therefore unenforceable, all state laws prohibiting abortion, the statistics in the U.S. were similar to those quoted above for illegal abortion forced underground in the third-world, and many major U.S. hospitals were forced to provide entire (and often overflowing) wards for the victims of injuries from illegal abortion attempts – those who didn’t wind up on slabs in morgues. Even so and tragically, there are today those willfully ignorant and misguided persons and their narrow and uncompromising political, legal, and religious organizations in this country who are fervently struggling to throw history into reverse and turn the clock back to those horrific times. They strive to recreate the blood bath and the wrecked lives that existed prior to Roe vs. Wade as one especially pernicious plank in their ardent campaign to transform our free society into a religious tyranny – motivated by much the same sort of fervent and uncompromising beliefs that moved other religious fanatics of a different religious persuasion to guide large airliners full of people into large buildings full of people on September 11, 2001. (I’m merely connecting the dots.)

I agree with the concept of attained personhood that was the philosophical backbone of Roe v. Wade. From the same essay:

I have been asked a question that is simplistic, ignorant, and misleading: "Just what is the magic of passage through several inches of birth canal that makes the difference between abortion and murder?" My answer to that question is just to state the honest, simple, obvious factual truth, as far as I can know it: "Nothing." No magic - and no difference in my opinion when the fetus is far enough along in development to be sentient and to survive outside the uterus. Implied in this answer is that I am no supporter of unrestricted elective third trimester abortion, or unrestricted abortion after the age of independent viability of the fetus - that is, the age at which a fetus can be expected to survive outside of a woman’s body.
 
However, let's go to the other end, to the beginning, of the 38 weeks-long period of fetal development deep inside the corporeal domain and deeply personal jurisdiction of a woman's body, and consider the same question from the other direction. The question becomes: What is the magic that makes its destruction "murder" in the estimation of some when the DNA of a sperm and the DNA of an ovum share a common cell membrane when just a moment ago, before the event of conception, or fertilization, the same two clusters of DNA were just as alive, and each, one a living sperm and one a living ovum, was contained within its own cell membrane, and their destruction would have borne no moral significance whatsoever, or relatively very little? I think the honest, obvious answer is exactly the same: "Nothing." No supernatural magic - certainly not as far as anyone can know.

• Is a newborn baby a person? Yes. Of course. It has developed into what we have through many centuries of legal and moral tradition defined a person to be.

• Is a fertilized egg, or zygote, two DNA clusters occupying the same space inside a single cell shortly after conception, a person? No. Of course not. It can and might develop into a person, although most actually do not under natural circumstances.

As for the belief that there is no difference, or no difference in value, between even a very early embryo or fetus and a newborn baby or child, consider this analogy: What do you have if you have a bowl containing a mixture of flour, sugar, shortening, baking powder, and eggs? Cake batter. Not a cake. It has all the ingredients, but it is only a potential cake - a cake-to-be in the making, not a cake. It must be placed in the proper atmosphere in the proper vessel and subjected to the proper conditions for the proper span of time before it can be considered a cake.

Actually, an even better analogy pertaining to the early stages of embryonic development is that of a blueprint (DNA) for construction of a building before the building materials have even been ordered. A bit simplistic perhaps, but a fetus is a baby-to-be in the making, not a baby. It is human life, as is any cell or group of cells in a human body, but not a human life, not a human being, not a person - not until it becomes "ensouled" at the time it takes its first breath some believe, while others believe "ensoulment" takes place earlier, even as early as conception, and still others determine the emergence of personhood upon other criteria that are more objective than varied and conflicting religious beliefs about "ensoulment." (Question: Multiple pregnancies result from division of the very early embryo after conception. If "ensoulment" occurs at conception, does a twin therefore have half a "soul?" A triplet one-third?) Similarly, we differentiate between an acorn and an oak tree. Scrambled eggs are a popular breakfast entree, not scrambled chicken.  

I’ve been asked questions of the nature of, "By the way, my wife was adopted, so I look at her and think what would be if she weren't around." To this sort of question I reply, "Well, yes, but that's one of those ‘BIG IF's.’ Sure, she wouldn't be here IF she'd been aborted, or IF her biological mother and father had not ‘done it’ that time, or IF her biological mother had not ovulated that cycle, or IF the condom hadn't burst that time, or IF the embryo that became her had gone the way of the majority of early embryos and spontaneously aborted (‘miscarried’) - or IF her mother had had a headache that night. And what IF she ‘weren't around?’ Well, just as in cases like the aforementioned, she would not then exist, and you'd be married to someone who does exist. Why, you might as well dwell on all the millions of unfertilized eggs and spontaneously aborted embryos, any female one of which might have been your wife IF they had only been fertilized, gestated, born, and then grown up to meet and marry you. There is no bigger subject in the world than what might have been nor one any more irrelevant to what is."

You might not want to believe it, but uncountable billions of early human embryos are thrown into the garbage or flushed down the sewers on used tampons and pads by women who didn’t even know they were pregnant prior to their very early miscarriages, but this is not regarded as a great tragedy by any but the most ardent "pro-lifers." Their deaths are not solemnized in funeral rituals. Used tampons and pads are not buried in cemeteries in graves marked by marble monuments. We are issued certificates of birth, not certificates of conception, a pregnant woman requires only one passport when traveling abroad, and she is counted as one in the census, not two or more. Not only citizenship, but many other ages-old principles of law and legal status depend upon this distinction. This is simply the unadulterated factual truth.
 
Many ardent Christian believers describe themselves as "born again" Christians, not "conceived again" Christians.
 
There are profound differences between prenatal and postnatal life, and previable and viable life, that we acknowledge in various ways every day. Therefore, the concept of attained personhood, which underlies the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that in effect legalized abortion nationwide, is not frivolous or unsubstantial. It is of central importance in this controversy. A zygote can become a baby, but is not one now. A baby was once a zygote, but is not one now. Between these two extremes, personhood is attained as the result of slowly progressive development and differentiation of what did indeed begin as what, in the beginning, could reasonably, if not precisely, be called "just a blob of tissue" – a single cell and then a growing cluster of undifferentiated embryonic cells beginning a long and complex journey of multiplication, differentiation, and specialization toward becoming a person.
 
• Should we be obligated to fully include a baby in the social contract that defines the legally protected rights of all persons and grant to it a right to life? Yes. Of course.
 
• Should we be obligated to include in this secular social contract and grant a right to life, independent of a pregnant woman’s consent, to a zygote, a single cell composed of two DNA clusters sharing the same cell membrane, unconscious and insentient, visible only with the aid of a microscope, that is totally dependent for that life upon the 24/7 donation of one specific woman’s body outside of which it cannot live? No. Of course not.

At least that seems reasonable enough to me.

So, in my opinion, since abortion is not murder, I personally regard "If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one" as a sensible slogan, although I agree it might backfire politically by virtue of its being so easily countered by the more simplistic (and IMO wrong) slogan "Abortion is murder." As I said, I'm no politician.

then it's the ultimate personal choice.

In the end, the only thing is "what is your personal choice?"

If you choose murder, you're punished for it because it's illegal.  It's a truly moral decision because who decides your morals but you?

Abortion is uniquely a moral decision because it's legal and you're free to decide to do it or not do it.  That's what morals are all about...not what the law says.

It's not illegal to fuck around on your wife.  But, it's immoral.  In the end, you won't go to jail for it, but it's up to your inner self to decide what to do.

"If you're against abortion, don't have one" is not a bumper sticker because it takes away all the debate and makes it a personal decision.