Okay, yes, this is another abortion questions, so start loading guns/tuning out now.
Anyway, a friend of mine has a problem that brought up twist on the ol’ abortion question: She doesn’t eat fertalized chicken eggs since, in her opinion, it amounts to abortion.
Now, since the one of the main arguements (and the legal one, I think?) for pro-abortion/choice/whatever-you-want-to-label-the-opinion is that it’s the woman’s body therefore only she has say over it. However, how would the entire abortion concept change if the human female laid an egg instead of carrying it internally?
Along the same lines (if you don’t like the concept of non-platapus mammals laying eggs), how about if, like the kangaroo (IIRC), the fetus/child completes its full gestation period inside a pouch or similar aparatus?
Interestingly enough, I have a friend who maintains that she will never give birth unless she can be outfitted with a pouch and have a one inch baby like the kangaroos do. I think the abortion debate would be gone if there were pouches or eggs involved. Women not desirous of being a parent could easily just “accidentally” destroy the egg or embryo (What is the term for a pouch-dwelling, less than fully formed youngster anyway?).
But in order to find out whether a chicken egg has been fertilized or not, you usually have to crack it open. Which normally kills the developing embryo. Assuming that being put in the refrigerator (or her grocer’s refrigerated section) for a few days hasn’t killed it already.
It’s not exactly relevant to my main question… I was just trying to describe how I arrived at the question. I wouldn’t argue for her position on fertilized (sorry for the mispellings) checken eggs.
Apart from that, if there’s a rooster in the henhouse, usually the eggs the hens lay are fertilized.
But tracer has a point. There is no way to know before hand if the eggs are fertalized. There will always be some in there. The only way for your friend to not practice “abortion” is to stay away from all eggs. Then it simply enters the realm of not eating eggs or meat.
Um… if you look at the OP, this is not about chicken eggs. My friend’s (somewhat silly) opinion on fertilized chicken eggs (which are labeled as such in the store) was only the inspiration for the main question I’m asking.
Actually, now that I think about it, even if she did crack open a chicken egg and find a developing embryo inside, the embryo would have been dead long before she got to it. That egg would have been refrigerated for several days, even assuming she cracked it open as soon as she got it home. Eggs are shipped refrigerated and displayed in grocery stores in the refrigerated section. That much cold would certainly kill a developing chicken embryo.
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Modern egg-production techniques have 30,000 battery hens confined to individual cages, with a conveyor belt of food going past in front of them, and the eggs they lay dropping gently into another conveyor belt going past underneath them. They have no access to a rooster at any time. Hens don’t need to be fertilized by a rooster in order to lay eggs.
I would say that Skott’s OP is moot, because unless the friend goes out of her way to find an organic health food store that sells fertilized eggs, she’s got nothing to worry about.
Saying, “she doesn’t eat fertilized chicken eggs” is the same thing as saying, “she eats only the regular eggs she buys at the Kroger store.” So big deal.
If a human female laid an egg instead of carrying it inside her body, it would still be her call. How does having it pop out in an eggshell change things? It’s still her egg.
If humans laid eggs, a lot less of us would live. For example:
Mom: WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?!?
Kid: … nothing, mom.
Mom: YES YOU ARE! YOU WERE PLAYING WITH JERRY … Omygod, what DID YOU DO!
Kid: I can explain! I was seeing if I could stick my gum to it, and then I thought you would get mad, and then … I’m sorry.
Mom: Not as sorry as you’re gonna be!
See? If humans laid eggs, there would be almost none of us left. We’d end up, well, cracked.
But the OP wants to know how the abortion debate would change if a woman did lay eggs instead of incubating the fetus inside her body, and I would say that the debate would be totally changed.
For one thing, if a woman decided she didn’t want to keep the egg she had just laid, she could quite simply hand it over to someone else to be hatched and walk away. It would then be somebody else’s problem to decide whether to incubate it or not. The woman would have to bear only the onus of guilt for abandoning her egg, not destroying it. “It’s in God’s hands…” etc.
Also, the man who had contributed the sperm would have a chance to take over the incubation, an option that isn’t open to him today.
Also, smashing open an egg is considerably more graphic and obvious than vacuum-aborting a fetus the size of a kidney bean. Most of what goes on during an abortion you can’t actually see, unless you go over and look in the receptacle and poke around in there. Would there be special egg-smashing equipment, to deal with the detritus? And a broken egg doesn’t look like an early developmental stage human, it just looks like egg. Even an incubated chick doesn’t start looking like a chick until the last couple of days of incubation (out of 21).
[apologies if this turns out to be a double post, the computer’s being particularly stupid today]
But the OP wants to know how the abortion debate would change if a woman did lay eggs instead of incubating the fetus inside her body, and I would say that the debate would be totally changed.
For one thing, if a woman decided she didn’t want to keep the egg she had just laid, she could quite simply hand it over to someone else to be hatched and walk away. It would then be somebody else’s problem to decide whether to incubate it or not. The woman would have to bear only the onus of guilt for abandoning her egg, not destroying it. “It’s in God’s hands…” etc.
Also, the man who had contributed the sperm would have a chance to take over the incubation, an option that isn’t open to him today.
Also, smashing open an egg is considerably more graphic and obvious than vacuum-aborting a fetus the size of a kidney bean. Most of what goes on during an abortion you can’t actually see, unless you go over and look in the receptacle and poke around in there. Would there be special egg-smashing equipment, to deal with the detritus? And a broken egg doesn’t look like an early developmental stage human, it just looks like egg. Even an incubated chick doesn’t start looking like a chick until the last couple of days of incubation (out of 21).
