by Mary W. Matthews

Created on: April 13, 2008   Last Updated: May 09, 2008

There are five excellent sets of reasons why abortion should remain legal.

(1) BIOLOGICAL. Many women have suffered, and some have died, over the fundamentalists' insistence that life begins at ejaculation. The debate over when life begins is spurious. A living man meets a living woman, and a living sperm meets a living egg and becomes a living zygote, which MAY become a living morula, which MAY become a living embryoblast, which MAY become a living blastocyte, which MAY become a living embryo, which MAY become a living fetus, which MAY become a living baby. (Physicians believe the rate of spontaneous abortions, also called miscarriages, is at least 15 percent of all pregnancies.) There is no moment in the process when the developing life is NOT alive.

Those who acknowledge the irrelevance of the first question say the true question is, when does the blob turn into a "whole separate unique human being"? Again, the debate is irrelevant; there is no moment at which the blob is NOT a human being. What, do they think women start out being pregnant with artichokes?

No, the real question is, when does a developing life become a PERSON? It's perfectly acceptable to remove a tumor, for example. But killing a PERSON unjustly is murder.

Throughout most of history, people have accepted that a developing life becomes a baby when it is capable of surviving outside of the womb without sophisticated technological help. But even a newborn baby cannot hope, dream, or even giggle. It takes more than just nine months for a zygote to become a PERSON. In Jesus's time, people left unwanted newborns out on hillsides to die of exposure.

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

Those who insist that every zygote is a person forget that gestation isn't an event, it's a process. We recognize that poverty can cause malnutrition, but we fail to notice that a malnourished fetus becomes a baby prone to type 1 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and brittle bones. Most people recognize the evil effects when a mother drinks alcohol, smokes crack, or takes Thalidomide, but what about the evil lifelong effects of a mother who resents the life growing inside her?

(2) LOGICAL. Most people today reasonably accept the idea that a victim of rape, abuse, or incest ought not to be raped twice, the second time by the system that ought to have protected her the first time. Most people today reasonably accept the idea that it is more compassionate

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