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Thursday, February 10, 2011

As an adamant supporter of abortion rights, I feel everyone has the right to to their beliefs as long as it isn't curtailing the rights of others. And you can be pro-choice without being pro-abortion.

The status of an early-term fetus is entirely subjective and really depends on your personal history and outlook. You can see it romantically as a "potential life" or "existing life", or simply as "a tiny blob of cells that could, but are in no way guaranteed to even without abortion, eventually replicate, grow, and form themselves into a baby." Of course people are going to have different opinions on this.

And then even if someone agreed with your (and I use the word in a general sense) definition of a fetus, there's still no guarantee they'll reach the same conclusion on the value of it. You have people who absolutely view a fetus as a baby, but still see cases where it's ethically permissible to abort (or merely make an exception for themselves). You have people who see a fetus as a "potential life", but determine that it's still as valueless as an acorn compared to a tree, and people who see abortion as an atrocity like you. Then you have people who feel that a fetus is nothing in particular, but either do or don't find an abortion an ethical practice for whatever reason.

As a person who exists between and encompasses both the "potential life" and "blob of cells" definitions, I disagree with you that the potential of life is anywhere near as valuable as life itself, or that the potential for life should ever override the rights of the existing form of life (the mother) in regard to controlling what exists inside of her own body.

I'm interested in more examples of what a theoretically abortion-free utopian society would look like to you though.

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