Abortion

When it comes to abortion, most liberals are pro-choice and most conservatives are pro-life. But when it comes to the environment, most conservatives are pro-choice (freedom to grow the economy and pollute as much as we want), whereas many liberals are pro-life (yes, choice must be limited if we want to save the biosphere).

And yet, it seems like environmentalists almost have to be anti-abortion. I mean, if our credo is "respect for all life," how can we leave out fetuses, embryos, or even blastocysts? You can argue that they aren't sentient or even human, but you can't reasonably claim that they aren't alive.

From this perspective, the only real way to argue for abortion is to demonstrate that rescinding Roe v. Wade would result in more deaths from illegal abortions (which often kill the mother as well) than currently result from legal ones.

More clarification on the extinction rate

"If today is a typical day on planet earth . . . [w]e will lose 40 to 250 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 250."
-David Orr, Earth in Mind, 1994

If 40 was a lower limit ten years ago, does that mean we knew of about 40 extinctions per day? Is anyone cataloguing their names? A cursory Web search turns up some fairly extensive lists of animals that have gone extinct in the past millenium, but not nearly enough to account for all the thousands that must have died over the past two decades according to the statistics. There is also a recent extinctions database project getting underway, so I guess we'll see what happens. If a list of 40 more species could be put up every day, it might spur some action. However, I suspect the confirmation process for an extinction takes so long that such a list wouldn't be feasible.