There is all the metaphysical (and moral) difference in the world between a "potential person" and an actual, really existing person.

We have moral obligations toward the latter, not the former.  

Fertilization is an event, Joseph, not the condition of a woman.  

There is no pregnancy in a petri dish because there is no woman. 

A woman carrying a newly conceived human being is a pregnant woman, even before the child has implanted in her womb.   This, it seems to me is the ethically relevant reality.

But I will grant you that there may well be a scientifically meaningful reason (such as the fact that only at implantation is the hormone released that causes such dramatic changes in the woman's body—orienting it toward nurturing the life of the child) for defining pregnancy as beginning at implantation.  

(There's also an invalid political motive for defining that way.)

Will you similarly grant that to call, say, an IUD, or "the morning after pill", "contraception" is false, since it doesn't prevent conception?

None of this is to the point, Joseph.  The point was about the definition of pregnancy, not the correct scientific names for stages of fetal development.   

The political left wants to pretend that pregnancy begins at the moment the baby implants in the uterus.  That's a lie, utterly falsified by science.  

A completely unique individual of the species comes into being at conception.  

I don't know you, Eric.  But your line of reasoning and your mode of approach in this thread have not be notable for thoughtfulness.  I have no doubt you can do better, though, when you want to.

Few people are always thoughtful about everything.  And all of us can improve.

It starts with listening.

It also has to do with not being defensive—not making everything about ourselves— but rather focussing attention to the thing under discussion.

So, for instance, in this last comment, you skip over my whole argument, which was in response to questions and comments of yours, and pretend I have somehow insulted you, when, in fact, what I did was defend So-Cons from your more-than-implied charges of irrationality.

You suggest we're inconsistent to want to outlaw abortion but not contraception.  I reply that, on the contrary, we're thoughtful people making sound, practical distinctions.

You get all huffy: "What, so you're saying I'm not thoughtful?"

It's not what anyone would call a thoughtful response, is it?

We can recognize that using contraception in order not to get pregnant is not in the same class of evil as consciously choosing abortion to kill a living baby.

We can recognize that abortion is a grave offense against God, against natural law, and against the founding principles of our nation, without recognizing the same about contraception.  (I would venture to guess that most pro-lifers don't see anything wrong with contraception.)

We can decide that stopping the brutal, soul-destroying legal slaughter of innocents in our nation is a more urgent political priority than anything else.

We can deplore the dishonest rhetorical tactics of the left and its libertarian enablers, who teach women to think that SoCons will take away their access to birth control, without pretending that we think contraception is just great.

We can draw moral and philosophical connections between the explosive rise of abortion and divorce, plus the decline of sexual mores, and the widespread acceptance of birth control without advocating that contraception be outlawed.

Thoughtful people make such distinctions every day.

If you read back, you'll see that, on the contrary, I do desire that oral contraceptives be severely restricted in law (because they are abortifacient, abusive of women, ruinous of marriage, cancer-causing, environment-poisoning, etc.).  (They shouldn't be outlawed, because they have valid medical uses.)  But I am enough of a realist to see that it's not a politically viable issue at the moment.  Not even close.  Therefore, I do not want on our platform.  I don't know anyone who does.  Catholic pro-lifers generally support and give tons of hard-earned cash to politicians (like, say, Sarah Palin) who champion contraception.  Why?  Because those politicians are convincing opponents of abortion, which is a live political issue, as well as a moral absolute.

Politics is not moral philosophy.  It's "the art of the possible."

But even on the philosophical level, we can make distinctions.

You certainly implied it.  Over and over again you implied that SoCons' wrong-headed opposition to birth control is damaging the political prospects of the right.

You  mean stop resisting the legal slaughter of innocents?  You mean do I think we shouldn't vet candidates according to whether they will defend life or not?  Or that we shouldn't keep the pro-life plank in the Republican platform?  No, I don't.  I think opposition to abortion is both morally and politically essential to the Republican party.  If it abandons the pro-life cause, it will die.  In truth, I suspect its failure to defend marriage has doomed it already.

Nor do I see anything "slimy" about the pro-life movement's aims and tactics (not counting the fringe element.)

We're not using symbolic logic here, Eric. We're having a real discussion using real terms.  And real language, being concrete, has implications.  There is nothing unfriendly about gathering implications from a person's choice of words.  One thing that anyone reading this thread can gather from your words is that you (like many libertarians) are unfamiliar with tons of information that is highly familiar to virtually everyone in the pro-life movement.

Keep even modestly abreast of these life and death issues, and you become keenly aware that one of the ways the left lies about the destructive nature of oral contraceptives is by pretending that there's no pregnancy until the embryo implants in its mother's womb.  This flies in the face of science and common sense.  It radically de-humanizes the tiny new baby.  It's part of their agenda.  You've evidently fallen for it, since you thought it was normal to think that pregnancy begins when the baby attaches.

Now you know, and can be more aware. (Yay, Ricochet!)

You do it again right here:

I'd like to see even one example of a credible present day SocCon doing any of the following:

1. Proposing a law against contraception

2. Proposing an anti-contraception plank in the platform

3. Vetting of candidates according to their views on contraception.

Maybe if you scrounge around on Google you'll be able to come up with something.  I've never come across it though.  

Contraception is a live political issue in two and only two respects:

1. The left is forcing everyone to pay for it, in direct contravention of the first principles of our founding.

2. Leftists and their libertarian enablers use it with good rhetorical effect as a part of a lying propaganda campaign to discredit and marginalize SoCons.

If you cherish your image of yourself as a logical guy with good critical thinking skills, you ought realize you're helping their cause.

A logical guy should care.  He wouldn't think it's okay to call a fetus a toddler, or anything but an actual person a person.  He should also take note that it is not SoCons who are inconsistent linguistically and logically, but liberals and libertarians, who play fast and loose with language and science in order to avoid coming to terms with moral realities they don't like.

It's not about what you may or may not have intended.  It's about what you actually did, which was write as if SoCons are hindering the cause of the right by pushing to outlaw contraception, when we're not.  Not even Rick Santorum did that.

Eric, you said:

which implies that the problem of contraceptive drugs causing abortion only happens in cases where embryos "manage to attach", when, in fact, many embryos are killed (i.e. aborted) by contraceptive drugs before they get to the mother's womb.

You may think words can be defined however one likes.  But if you're going to engage the public debate on these issues, you ought to be aware that the abuse of language is a prime tactic of the left.  

Change the definition of pregnancy and you can pretend abortifacient drugs are "preventing pregnancy."  Change the definition of death and you can harvest organs from lots more bodies.  Change the definition of marriage and you can reduce the foundation of the civil society to rubble in no time flat.

I wonder if you know that the World Health Organization has labeled oral contraceptives as "a group one carcinogen".  That's what we're shoveling into young girls and women.

And then we wonder where the breast cancer epidemic comes from.

And then there's the environmental impact of millions of women using all those hormones to render themselves infertile.

Due to the accumulation of synthetic steroids in water, much of the research conducted on its impact has been done using water-dwelling vertebrates such as fish and frogs. An ever-increasing collection of studies report harmful effects of these hormones on aquatic vertebrates, particularly with regard to their reproduction, as would be predicted given the nature of the contaminants (4). One study focused on the effects of exposure to the progestin Levonorgestrel (LNG) on the frog Xenopus tropicalis. While the male reproductive system did not appear to be impaired, female tadpoles exhibited severe defects in the development of their ovaries and oviducts, rendering them sterile (5). 

But libertarians generally prefer to raise phantom alarms about SoCons and abet the left's agenda in undermining marriage, which is, in fact, the most basic institution of the free and civil society.

I dont' know about you, Eric, but I didn't learn that in the recent discussion.  I've known it for decades.  (I note that you evidently join liberals in adopting the scientifically and morally risible notion that an embryo becomes a fetus only when it implants.  This is a definition of convenience for pro-contraception propagandists.) 

Personally, I'd be elated if the truth about contraception and its moral ugliness were so widely known that majorities of the public would vote for laws restricting it.  But, like very other SoCon I know, I get that an awful lot of cultural spadework to be done before that's anywhere near a realistic possibility.

I am with Kylez in holding that there is no Constitutional right to contraception.  With him, too, in finding your treatment of the issue a straw man argument.

No one is proposing that contraception be outlawed.

Socialists have scored a double rhetorical victory.  They've managed to make themselves sound like "good Christians", and they've managed to make the Church sound socialist.  

Hence, free marketers think the Church isn't on their side.  They're wrong.  The Church does condemn the de-humanizing tendencies inherent in the absolutizing of money and wealth, and in a version of capitalism that is divorced from morality.  The economy is made to serve the good of man.  Man isn't made to serve the economy.

Here's Lawler again:

Socialists make their arguments in moral terms, because if the argument is stated purely in practical terms, the socialists will lose. By the same logic, capitalists prefer to state their arguments in practical economic terms. Unfortunately, in doing so, they cede the moral high ground to their opponents. With rare exceptions—one thinks immediately of Michael Novakand of the Acton Institute--defenders of capitalism have not taken the trouble to state their case primarily in moral terms. And that’s unfortunate, because a powerful argument can be made that capitalism, tempered by a Christian moral framework, is the best available solution to the problem of poverty.

I am sorry I don't have time to read through all the comments! 

I've mentioned before that I'm working on an article contrasting the leftist idea of social justice with the Catholic idea.  I'm extra slow these days, being busy with daughter's wedding preps and other things.  But I will finish some day.

Meanwhile, here is a good article by Philip Lawler on the subject.  In short, the Pope's critique of capitalist excesses is by no manner of means an endorsement of socialism.  Rather, socialism is based on a perversion of Catholic moral truths.

The Judeo-Christian condemnation of false idols, which Pope Francis invoked today, stretches back to the Book of Exodus. The moral imperative to care for those in need, for widows and orphans—yes, and for aliens living in a strange land—runs through the Psalms and is amplified in the Gospels. The Church is not imitating the rhetoric of the socialist movement; the socialists are exploiting the teachings of the Church.

Some SoCons are "against" contraception in the sense that we think it's immoral.  But we've been at pains to say that thinking it's immoral doesn't mean thinking there should be a law against it.  Similarly, lying and masturbation immoral, but I don't want laws against them.

I don't know anyone who is advocating for laws against contraception (though, personally, given how destructive they are to health and to the environment, I'd favor more restrictions on some forms).  Nor is it on the political table anywhere in the country.

What's actually happening, though, is that through Obamacare, people who think contraception is immoral are being forced to pay for other people's use of it.  And insurance companies are being forced by law to provide it (in all its forms) free of charge to any girl or woman who wants it.

Even people who think contraception is the bee's knees should be up in arms about that.  But are they? No.  Many hate SoCons more than they love liberty.