by Mary W. Matthews

Created on: June 05, 2008   Last Updated: September 04, 2011

There are dozens of excellent reasons why women should have the right to make their own decisions about what happens to their own bodies. The two most important sets of reasons are biological and moral.

BIOLOGICAL
No one wastes time debating whether a woman has the right to have fibroid tumors removed from her uterus, even though fibroids are exactly as alive and exactly as human as embryos are. And yet when smaller cell-forms are excised from a uterus, if there's any chance these cells MIGHT evolve into a baby 266 days later, screams of "Murder!" ensue.

Many people talk as if they believe that the instant a sperm cell meets an ovum and becomes a zygote, that zygote is "a whole separate unique human being," and thus deserves MORE rights than its mother has. (These same people have no problem with capital punishment, so long as the pregnancy is terminated after the 21st month.)

But is a collection of two, four, or even 1,024 cells (as you read this, you have about 50 trillion cells) REALLY "a whole separate unique human being"? Does it have a personality? Can it think? If this collection of cells were in one petrie dish, and a fibroid tumor were in another dish, could you tell which one has MORE legal rights than the woman it came from?

The difference between two blobs of living tissue, one of which is a tumor and one of which MAY develop into a baby, comes down to this: when does a developing life become a PERSON? It's perfectly acceptable to remove a tumor, but killing a PERSON unjustly, or for some profit to oneself, is murder.

If an hours-old zygote is a PERSON, then a raw egg is a chicken salad sandwich.

Here's what the anti-choice crowd doesn't seem to understand: Gestation isn't an event, it's a PROCESS. Just as it takes about a year to turn a raw egg into a chicken salad sandwich, it takes many months for a developing life to become a PERSON.

Look at a newborn baby. Is he chronically late? Does she hate rap music? Yes, the newborn baby LOOKS like a person, and most people (including me) regard babies as people — in today's world. In Jesus's time, babies were more like replacement parts. In Jesus's time, one-third of newborn babies died before reaching age 1, and a second third died before reaching age 15. You just couldn't afford to get sentimental about babies, or your heart would break and break. I'm bringing up Jesus's time because it is representative of what the world was like from approximately 198000 BCE to approximately 100 years ago, and

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