A "joke" in the glibc manual

I suppose you mean "begins" instead of "ends". But this fundamental difference is why people who are against abortion and those support it don't and never will see eye to eye. Personally I think the life begins well before the child is born.

God, I'm glad that's not true. I'd be a murderer by proxy at least. (I arguably crowded out my identical twin, though he didn't actually die until after he was born, an action done by conscious choice of medical staff and parents which I completely agree with even though it *was* technically probably murder: he could have been kept alive indefinitely but would likely never have regained consciousness and would have had a dreadful quality of life even if he had. It's the sort of edge case that makes the law scream, but frankly it is better that I live for him. Even more horrifying is what happens to twins sharing a placenta if one twin dies in utero -- do you prosecute the twin that died first for murder after it in effect vampirically sucks the other twin's entire blood supply into its own body, on account of not having a working heart to pump it out again? Parasitic necromurder! Biology is often horrible and does not care about our legal niceties.)

>That actually makes me worry whether a significant part of the "pro-life" crowd is merely in the business of inventing twisted definitions of what life is in order to make women lives miserable.

Punishing women is usually the primary intention, and occasionally you see it explicitly stated as such. After all, the pregnancy is proof positive that the woman "sinned" -- and any suffering she experiences as a result is not only (obviously richly) deserved, but that any sort of social assistance for said mothers would be rewarding her for her sins.

Consequently, there's a substantial overlap between political pro-lifery [1] and those who are actively trying to dismantle the social safety net that is often the only thing keeping these mothers and their "every life is sacred" new babies from being kicked to the curb. (It seems that "life" is only sacred when it's in foetal form, and said sacredness ceases the moment it pops out of its mother. Similarly, the mother's "life" is only sacred when it's carrying said fetus within it)

I do find this attitude rather curious, given that the lion's share of pro-lifers [1] claim to follow a religion that was founded by an individual they claim was born out of wedlock, and whose highly revered mother suffered all manner of depredations as a result.

Okay, this is _way way way_ off topic. I'll shut up now.

[1] In my country. I can't comment on how this plays out elsewhere.