This article first appeared on the debate page at Helium.

com, where it was ranked as the

number 1 article out of 427 articles under the topic, "Should a woman have the right to
choose abortion?" However, it mysteriously dropped to number 44 out of 428 articles
shortly after I voiced my concerns to the Helium website that the access to this debate
topic might have been hijacked by abortion rights opponents, due to the fact that there is
a permanent "known problem" with the buttons that navigate readers to the debates. I
pointed out that this topic was the most popular debate topic, with many more voters
agreeing that women should have this right than disagreed, and many excellent essays
delineating different reasons why women should have the right to choose abortion. This
is a slightly revised version of that same article. In light of the fact that the all-important
health care reform is being held up by the debate over this topic, I feel the need is ever
more pressing to have arguments put forward that might convince people to leave their
belief systems out of public policy.

Should a woman have the right to choose abortion?

A woman should have the right to choose abortion because she should be able to decide
what will happen to her own body based on her own beliefs. 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 this is one of the very few
issues where 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 and understandings of 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 create a human being or not, because, according to our belief
system, this decision does not in any truly tangible way effect anyone else but the woman
making this decision. By “anyone,” I am referring to the notion that the unborn fetus can
be reasonably seen as not being a person yet, as I will go into shortly. The idea that the
fetus might be “sad” that it doesn't have a chance at life, or that it has any emotions at all,
or any thoughts about the subject, 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 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.
The opponents of a woman's reproductive rights take a position that imposes their
particular belief system on all women, throwing all principles of democracy, all deference
for feminine power, all understanding of what the practice of medicine is about, and all
respect for what it really means to be a human being, out with the proverbial bath water
in their hysteria. For I don't believe that it is an exaggeration to say that many people
obsess over the belief that every day, little unborn human beings are being murdered by
sinful, evil women and the medical professionals who assist them, and this perceived
tragedy effects them more deeply than that of all the actual human children who are
murdered, maimed, and orphaned in wars throughout the world (collateral damage), or
debilitated by industrial pollution and chemicals (the cost of doing business), or left
practically on their own while their single mothers struggle in poverty (free-market
capitalism), or scarred by familial abuse (family values), or lost in the dysfunctional
foster care system (compassionate conservatism)...

They are fixated on the idea that, from the moment of conception, the single-celled
zygote is a human being, complete with all the rights of a human being, perhaps with
even more rights than the woman who carries it, since she is expected to forgo many of
her rights and freedoms in order to ensure that a child is born, whether she is actually
willing and able to or not. And because of this supposed status as a human being,
abortion is then seen as the killing of a human being, and not just any human being, but a
human being so innocent, so pure, that it is more valuable than all other human beings, as
a vessel of the uncorrupted divine spirit.

But the belief that abortion kills innocent human beings is just that, a belief, whether it
be religious or otherwise. There are also other legitimate beliefs about the nature of the
zygote and then the embryo, beliefs that recognize that they are unique and amazing and
precious, yet are not actual human beings. Could a caterpillar be called a butterfly? No,
they are recognized to be entirely different entities, even though the caterpillar changes
into a butterfly. This example shows that it is quite possible for a single being to progress
through very different, unique stages of existence. In the earliest stages of human
development, the entity that is beginning to form can therefore be understood to be
something other than an actual human being, rather, a possible future human being. Tiny
microscopic groups of cells do not in any way resemble a human being, nor do they
exhibit any capacity whatsoever of a human being.

This idea then begs the question, "What does it mean to be a human being?" Our
humanness does go beyond any physical traits or survival capacities, as there are
certainly distinctions between us and all other living things. We humans have created a
world for ourselves that is separate from the world of nature, although we are just now
realizing how our social, economic, political, technological, artistic realms are really a
world within the larger world of nature. Yet we are definitely different from any other
living thing in nature. Many people believe that what separates us from the rest of the
natural world is that we humans each have a distinct soul, and that soul pops into
existence at the very moment when a determined sperm breaks through the outer wall of
a lonely egg.

But our very humanness could also be connected with our amazing brain and nervous
system capacities, where each human being's unique essence lies not only in our genes,
but to an even greater degree in our abilities to communicate with each other, to express
ourselves through language and art and music and writing, and to remember our own
experiences, those of others, and all of the information that we carry around in our heads.
So, the collection of all the love we accept and return, all of our memories, the emotions
that we feel, the visions and smells and sensations that we experience, and all of the ways
that we interact with others – all of this is what makes each human being who they are,
and it is all accomplished through our amazing nervous and mental capacities. When our
brain waves cease, we are no longer who we once were. And similarly, before our
neurological systems are developed, we are not yet who we may or may not become.

Because human beings are the most complex living things here on Planet Earth, it doesn't
make much sense to claim that the tiny package of information that begins the process of
the development of a new human being can be identified as being the same thing as the
actual, complex, viable human being, just as bread dough, which contains all the
ingredients for that life-sustaining food that is bread, is not the same thing as the
wonderful loaf that we remove from the oven only after the process of baking is fully
completed. This analogy of the process of human life formation with the process of
baking bread is in fact rather intuitive, as indicated by the common phrase, "she has a bun
in the oven." And so, because we can see that the beginning of human life is a process of
different stages, it can be argued that abortion is something other than the killing of a
human being.

The zygote certainly contains the genetic information for a unique person, but uniqueness
is not actually all that unique in the universe, and cannot be the criterion for limiting a
woman's right to abortion. After all, who goes around trying to save every single
snowflake, just because each one is unique? No two living plants or animals are ever
exactly the same, unless they are cloned (which is the very reason that cloning is so
scary), yet they are not of special value. To accept this uniqueness principle as it is
being applied to the human zygote, one must accept the idea that uniqueness in and of
itself is what makes each of us special, rather than the ways that each of us are unique,
which means that someone who is hateful, homecidal, abusive, etc, is of equal value to
someone who is caring, compassionate, thoughtful...

Another reason often given for why the human zygote is so precious is that the joining of
the sperm and the egg represents the “miracle” of life itself, yet how miraculous is a feat
that doctors now regularly accomplish in petri dishes in their labs? Perhaps the true
miracle is the woman's ability to build a person inside of her body, out of nothing but her
own body materials. This is an awesome power that women hold, to create life, and it
should be honored, used wisely, and not taken for granted.

No one can argue that abortion does not prevent a possible future human being from
developing, and we could all marvel at the thought that our own mothers might very well
have chosen not to carry through the pregnancy that brought our own lives into being, but
to then make the claim that each and every zygote has a "right" to fulfill its potential as a
human being stretches the boundaries of the imagination yet again into that wonderful
realm of pure conjecture. The "what if" argument simply holds no water, because if one
wants to worry that the possible future human being that a woman chooses to not bring
forth might have been the person who would have found a cure for cancer, then another
can argue that the woman who knows that she is the smartest person in her classes, who
becomes pregnant and, because of societal pressures that the opponents of women's
reproductive rights are loathe to acknowledge, forgoes college in order to raise the child
that she has given birth to, well, she might also have been the person who would have
found the cure for cancer, had she not sacrificed her professional dreams to the life of her
child. The fact of the matter is that life is abundant with unfulfilled potential, because the
nature of the idea of "potential" is that its actuality is not certain, and life in general
progresses forward as the expression of select results out of infinite numbers of
possibilities.

Futhermore, the decision of a woman to not bring forth a possible future human being is
far less tragic than the lives of developing fetuses that are unwanted and unloved,
resulting in individuals who are disadvantaged from the moment that they begin to be
able to sense these things in the womb, whose lives are troubled from even before their
birth. A woman who knows that she lacks the financial means or the familial support or
the will to raise yet another child or perhaps a child with very severe incapacities or a
child that was conceived through unthinkable violence or force, a women intrinsically
understands that the choices that she makes during pregnancy have less to do with other
people's beliefs in the supposed right to the imagined life of a possible future human
being, and more to do with her own intuition about whether she will be able to carry
through a pregnancy with love in her heart, food in her belly, strength in her body, and
access to proper health care and support, so that she brings forth a child who will have
hope for a good life, rather than someone whose very beginnings are filled with stress and
despair. These things matter. Allowing women to decide for themselves whether they
are ready and willing to take on the responsibility, discomfort, pain, and life long
devotion that pregnancy involves results in less human misery and more well-adjusted
persons, which would seem to be a good goal for society.

Not only do opponents of a woman's right to choose abortion insist on imposing their
own simplistic belief system, that "(human) life begins at conception," on all women,
without considering the real-life complexities of the matter, but they further seem to be
willfully misinformed about several important points. First of all, they do not understand
that religious arguments that originate from the Bible are not facts. Any argument that
cannot be proven outside of the circular reasoning of "it's in the Bible" because "God said
it" because "it's in the Bible" simply does not apply to people who do not subscribe to
that faith. The Biblical reasoning for why fetuses are supposed to be considered as human
beings doesn’t even make any sense in its own context to me, let alone when statements
about God knowing people before they are born are used in a debate like this one.

Then there is the misstatement that the "right to life" is in the Constitution. Where the
phrase actually appears is in the Declaration of Independence, a document that
established our claim to sovereignty based on certain general principles, but these are not
codified into law. This nation does not actually, by law, hold the rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness to be inalienable, as evidenced by the fact that we practice
incarceration and the death penalty. The right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness
turns out to be not so inalienable, after all.

Another argument that opponents of a woman's right to choose abortion sometimes use is
to claim that if a woman discovers that her possible future child will be born with
"special needs," she should still bring the child forth because there are waiting lists of
people who want to adopt these children. However, when I researched this, I found that
the lists in fact consist of special needs children who are waiting to be adopted. Where
are those people's convictions when it comes to these unfortunate children? Hopefully,
this is just a confusion on their part, and not a willful deception, like the spreading of the
falsity that abortion causes breast cancer, a claim that has been made only by
ideologically driven opponents of women's reproductive rights, which has been debunked
by all other cancer researchers after studying the matter very carefully in search of the
truth.

So, while the opponents of a woman's right to choose abortion argue passionately about
the supposed rights of the unborn, usually from the Biblical stance that a fertilized egg is
an actual human being, or at least that that single cell has the "right" to develop and live
out its potential, and that any woman in whose body this union of egg and sperm occurs
has no right to interfere with the process of human development, regardless of her own
attitude toward the pregnancy or how the pregnancy came to be, or any medical factors
that might be involved, they are not very attentive to those pesky details of fact that do
not support their position.

Neither are they very attentive to the needs of children who are not their own progeny,
once they are born. According to a UNICEF report from 2007, as stated by "Save the
Children," "Factors such as single parenthood, low levels of maternal education, teenage
motherhood, substandard housing, large family size, and parental drug or alcohol abuse
increase the risks that a child will not survive to the age of 5." These factors only occur
when mothers are left to their own devices in a society that does not believe very strongly
in helping those who are less advantaged. And these factors apply to the industrialized
world, where children don't face the even more daunting challenges of preventable
disease, severe poverty, and wars that plague the underdeveloped countries of the world.
Sadly, despite our prominent stance in the world, the United States ranks at 26th in the
rate of child mortality of all nations, an astounding figure for a nation that prides itself on
its supposedly superior standing in the world. And, according to the Economic Policy
Institute, the US had the highest rate of impoverished persons under the age of 18 in the
industrialized world in 2006, again, a sad statement about the priorities of the world's
wealthiest nation.

It is high time that the opponents of a woman's right to choose abortion paid more
attention to facts and realities of life than to their ideologically driven speculations about
unborn possibilities, because there is so much more that they could be doing to help
improve the lives of those that have come forth into the world as human beings. No one is
denying them their own belief system, and their right to not have abortions. But for
others who hold different beliefs or priorities, such as honoring a woman's choice to not
have to bear a child conceived by an act of violent rape, or for whatever other reason that
she cannot bring herself to offer her body over to the needs of a developing fetus, it
seems only reasonable that this is a decision that each woman should be able to make for
herself. She, alone, has the power to decided whether to be the bearer of life or not. She,
alone, has the right to make the decision that will not only effect the next months, but
more likely than not, many years of her life. If she decides not to go through with a
pregnancy, then that is something that she must work out herself however she will, with
the aid of trained medical professionals, as a very personal matter. And if not, then the
developed child will be born and become a member of society, and will hopefully have a
chance to live a productive life full of meaning and fulfillment. One would think that a
woman's intuition would count for something, especially when it comes to carrying out
the most feminine and wonderful of her abilities.