People Pie

I was reading the most recent Time magazine's reader response section, when one letter in particular caught my eye. Paraphrasing, the letter stated that the author was a pro-life christian, but realized that contraception would be prefferable to abortion. She was willing to take a step toward the middle in order to support her core beliefs.

Normally I would have found this encouraging, but my mind took off on a tangent:

Let's agree that a cake is made of wet and dry ingredients. Milk and egg & flour and sugar. When these ingredients are combined, is the result a cake? No - we need to bake the ingredients. If you wait just a few minutes and pull the mixture out of the oven, is the result a cake? Hardly.

I think the obviuos analogy here is that it is difficult to say exactly when a human becomes viable. At what point do potential and viable meet? Pro-lifers would state that a cake is done as soon as the ingredients are mixed. Pro-choicers might state that as soon as the knife comes out clean the cake is ready. They might also be willing to concede that a cake with only 15 minutes to go should be allowed to become a cake.

What got me thinking is that the reader's letter stated that she could support contraception to avoid abortion. If we look at this backwards, in a pro-life way, what do we see? A cake is a cake the instant that all the ingredients are mixed. But why stop there? Potential is achieved far before this. When flour and sugar are combined, we have half a cake already. This is a potential cake. Of course, it is also a potential cookie, eclair, pie, etc. To allow this potential to be wasted (contraception), is to forever negate the possible cake. Or to take a further step back, what are the implications of impeding kinetic human procreation in any way? Aren't state-sponsered executions, chemical castration or even sending men to war, in a sense, contraception? And isn't that, basically, abortion?

I'm just floating ideas. It seems to me that the cake analogy is too obvious, so it must have been used to better effect by someone much more gifted than I. Understand that I am not pro-abortion, but I'm also not pro-choice. In this post I've been playing Devil's advocate, but I'm willing to hear both sides on this issue. I just wanted to pass on what had occured between a few synapses while reading a Time magazine.

UPDATE - I just had to check for any similar references. While I haven't had time to read the posts, this page lists my initial supposition almost word for word.

Religion