The abortion debate is a different beast entirely when you're familiar with the field of teratology, the study of aberrations of embryology. The word has a Greek root that means at once "wonders" and "monsters", so it's perfect.
Particularly horrific is when a damaged embryo attempts to regulate and recover, leading to astonishingly ghastly results that are
almost normal. For example, you cannot know if an embryo is going to develop into a baby or a foetus in fetu, in which one foetus develops inside of another (a condition that should give pause to those who believe that souls are enshrined at conception, but never does). We often hear stories in the news about people who, as the headlines put it "give birth to their twin". Such twins to not go on to earn doctorates and run companies as did Dr Jonas Venture Junior in
The Venture Brothers. I believe incineration and pickling in methanal are the only two options available for such wretched scraps of human tissue.
One incident that stands out in my my memory was in Colorado Springs two and a half years ago, in which a foetus was diagnosed with a brain tumour. It was delivered at the earliest safe opportunity for surgery, and instead of a tumour they found folds of intestine, part of a hand and two tiny feet, one of which you can see flopping out of the child's brain
here (warning: not safe for the squeamish).
It is unclear that this is an example of foetus in fetu, there are things called teratomas, which are cancers that spontaneously differentiate into other human tissues such as hair, muscle, teeth and nails, but the level of organisation required to form a foot as part of a tumour is not otherwise known.
The child they were removed from is doing fine as far as I know, and there's no question that these fragments of non-sentient tissue had to be removed, but the image of that foot bears striking similarity to the gory pictures of aborted foetuses that anti-choice protesters love to parade around, pointing out details such as hands, feet and faces.
There was no human being, no person, behind those perfectly formed toes. It is a piece of human tissue that has executed part of the genetic programming of cell:cell interaction and induction that those kinds of cells can do. Which is exactly what an embryo or foetus is. People can arise from these processes, and there is definitely something spooky, "disquietingly resonant of humanity" in those pieces of embryos and foetuses, but we should not be fooled. They're beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells, but there's no person there.
