A little more than a week away – the word from South Dakota is that the abortion ban is losing in the polls by a few percentage points, Planned Parenthood is pouring money into the state – the main group coordinating support of the ban would appreciate your help, if you can – they have a donor with a matching offer on board.

At the site you can, of course, watch some of their very powerful ads – but they can’t run them if they can’t buy the time.

Related: This post at First Things by Richard Stith, professor of law at Valparaiso University School of Law. takes a slightly different angle in examining how people think about abortion and the unborn.

Why do many pro-choice people find our arguments against early abortion not just unconvincing but absurd? Consider, for example, the ridicule that the defense of human embryos sometimes draws. In order to have any hope of winning the debate, defenders of unborn life must understand how an argument that seems wholly reasonable to us can strike our opponents as a bizarre (therefore religious) doctrine wholly unconnected to the real world.

I submit that pro-life arguments seem absurd to any listener who has in the back of the mind a sense that the embryo or fetus is being constructed in the womb. Here’s an analogy: At what point in the automobile assembly-line process can a “car” be said to exist? I suppose most of us would point to some measure of minimum functionality (viability), like having wheels and/or a motor, but some might insist on the need for windshield wipers or say it’s not fully a car until it rolls out onto the street (is born). We would all understand, however, that there’s no clearly “right” answer as to when a car is there. And we would also agree that someone who claimed the car to be present from the insertion of the first screw at the very beginning of the assembly line would be taking an utterly absurd position. To someone who conceives of gestation as intrauterine construction, pro-life people sound just this ridiculous. For a thing being constructed is truly not there until it is nearly complete. (Moving from ordinary language to metaphysics, we would say that a constructed thing does not have its essential form until it is complete or nearly complete. And it can’t be that thing without having the form of that thing.)

Now, this way of thinking (treating gestation as construction, assembling, fabrication, making) has not only intuitive appeal today but a grand pedigree. For thousands of years, it was the dominant (though not the exclusive) way to conceive of what was happening in the womb.

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