by Matt Lau

Created on: October 25, 2008   Last Updated: April 21, 2009

Should a woman have the right to choose abortion?

A follow up question I have is, "Should a woman have the right to kill her teenaged children?" I'm totally serious here. A teenager in the house can cause stress in the life of the mother, possibly leading to depression. A teenager causing distress in a household could lead to the mother abusing him or her, so wouldn't the prudent thing be to simply kill the teenager? But in order to make it more palatable to those bible-thumping, right-wing Christians, we'll just refer to it as exercising her "Right to Choose." After all, the mother has a right to choose how to live her life doesn't she? Having a teenager to care for is expensive and time-consuming; A downright inconvenience. The obvious solution is to "choose" to have a "procedure." In this particular procedure, a surgical knife is stabbed into the teens skull, then his or her-I'm sorry, "its"-brains are sucked out with a vacuum, then it is dismembered and discarded.

So if someone is not okay with this late-late-term abortion procedure, then they must have some way of differentiating between killing a teenager and killing an in utero fetus. For example, a pro-choice advocate may claim that, the fetus is not a human being yet and therefore it is okay to destroy it before it is born.

It's not a human being yet? What is the statistical probability that it will be born human? I'm sure there is the occasional instance of a pregnant woman giving birth to a capuchin, or a seal, or perhaps a condor. Given that line of reasoning, I guess it is okay to destroy the eggs of endangered bald eagles, since we are not actually destroying a bald eagle, right?

At which point they need to back-pedal and clarify their argument. Sure it's "going" to be a human, but until it's born it's not really alive yet.

So what is the difference between killing a baby that has gestated for 8 months, 29 days, 23 hours and one that has just been born? Are we really saying that the only difference between a newborn baby and one that is killable is the fact that it is still inside the mother? Since when do we kill people based on their place of residence? The baby inside the womb is physically indistinguishable from the one just born. It has a functioning nervous system and brain, so of course it can feel the trauma of being cut into pieces before it can be extracted from the mother's womb.

The pro-choice advocate needs to back-pedal even more, because of course nobody would have an abortion that late

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