by Julie R Butler

Created on: January 01, 2009   Last Updated: March 11, 2012

A woman should have the right to choose abortion because this is first and foremost a medical issue that should be worked out between each woman, according to her own conscience and personal beliefs, and the appropriate professional medical practitioners.

 This viewpoint would seem very democratic and in line with every other issue where the guiding principles are personal responsibility and respect for individual rights, yet these principles are ignored by opponents of womens' reproductive rights. In this debate, religious fervor overtakes civil discussion, medical knowledge, and the right to privacy and self-determination. Through ideology, pure conjecture, and flat out misinformation, opponents of a woman's right to choose abortion essentially trivialize the awesome feminine powers that women possess, disrespect their ability to make good decisions based on a range of information about the very complicated nature of this issue, and demand that they deny themselves the opportunity to avail themselves to the medical treatment of those professionals who are brave enough to step up and help them through a very difficult and complicated situation.

This is very frustrating to proponents of this right to self-determination, and yes, to determine whether to allow her body to create a human being or not, because there is a valid argument to be made that this decision does not in any tangible way effect anyone else but the woman making it.

The argument depends on the notion that an early-stage unborn fetus can reasonably be seen as not yet being a person, as I will elaborate upon shortly. The ideas that the fetus might be “sad” that it doesn't have a chance at life, or that it has any emotions at all, are hypothetical, at best, and the similarly hypothetical life that the unborn fetus would have lived, if not for the abortion, is only a thought experiment, like imagining what it would be like to move at the speed of light, or to time travel, or to flap one’s arms and fly, or to be the Queen of Sheba, and on and on. Therefore, even if there are human beings who might be saddened by the idea that a new life that had begun is not being allowed to develop into a full fledged human being, their sadness is not based on the loss of an actual person, but rather, on the intangible idea that the person who might have been will not materialize.

And sorry guys; just contributing sperm doesn’t give you an intrinsic right to be an equal partner in the

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