NOTE:  Dr. Hern asked me to cross-post this for him from HotFlashReport.com.  I'll stick around for the discussion.

When Is an Egg Not an Egg?
By Warren M. Hern, M.D.
Director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic.
Reprinted with author's permission as first published in The Colorado Statesman, July 27, 2007.

An egg is a person. No, an egg is a chicken.  A fertilized human egg is a person.  An acorn is a tree. A seed is an apple.  A set of plans is a house.  A blastocyst is a "pre-born baby."  An adult human being is a "pre-dead corpse."  Up is down.  Black is white.  War is peace.   Facts are not important.  Belief is what matters.  And people who know the truth will tell you what to believe.

(Plenty more below the fold.)

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals today asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to answer for it a politically volatile question:

As of September 1-2, 2003, did the Oklahoma Wrongful Death Statute, Okla. Stat. tit. 12, § 1053, afford a cause of action for the wrongful death of a nonviable stillborn fetus?

I will begin by assuming that most people have read the excellent and horrific diary by eugene. If not, you definitely should This seems like an excellent time to discuss the wider implications of miscarriage for the millions of women who have had to suffer one or more, and usually in silence.

You see, miscarriage is something of a taboo topic in this country. We have scripts for break ups, divorce, loss of job, and the death of a family member. Yet grieving mothers who have lost a pregnancy are largely expected to remain silent. People don't now how to deal with miscarriage, and because of this and our increasingly anti-choice culture, it's quickly snowballing into a political issue of astounding significance.

The chance of miscarriage during the first trimester in a woman’s first pregnancy is 40%.  Thousands of women miscarry or deliver a stillborn fetus every year.  And if it’s early enough in the pregnancy, we don’t even realize it’s happened.

I’m seeing a very disturbing trend lately, where people are referring to the women who miscarry as the "mother" of a "baby" that was "delivered" prematurely and it’s got me scared.  Scared that – through redefining a fetus – the anti-choice crowd are succeeding in moving that Overton window over to the right to where we’ll soon find that life as we know it will indeed be thought (under law) to begin at conception – thereby destroying our right to choose.

They've gone from using language to redefine themselves not at pro-control but pro-life, and now they're using it to redefine when life actually begins by calling a fetus a baby in our laws, & I don’t hear anyone talking about this frightening trend.  

Make the jump...

There have been some excellent, thought-provoking diaries about abortion in the past couple of weeks.  However, I have not seen a diary focusing on where miscarriage (and responses to miscarriage) fits into the issue.  If I have missed something, my apologies and please tell me if I'm duplicating!

The outline of my personal experience is that I have, from a medical perspective, "aborted" twice, the first two out of four pregnancies.  One had a surgical component, one was spontaneous.  However, neither of these early pregnancy terminations was intentional: both were miscarriages of planned and deeply-desired pregnancies.  I'd like to share, after the jump, how that experience contributed to my thinking about abortion.