The controversial abortion case, Roe vs Wade, has recently celebrated its 42nd birthday but despite its age, the case is far from out-of-date and irrelevant. Abortion is still a hot-button topic; maybe even more than it was in 1973. People opposed to abortion make outrageous arguments against the medical procedure; arguments that liken the practical, safe, and often necessary operation to genocide. But these people and the government seem to have conveniently forgotten - or ignored – that other than personal morality, there really is not a reason that abortions are a negative thing or that people should not have the freedom to receive them. First of all, what is an abortion and how is it performed? An abortion is a deliberate termination of
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Are they not alive? Is abortion not murder? Not quite. Black’s Law Dictionary defines murder as a crime committed when a mentally competent person kills any human being excluding unborn children (Black’s Law Dictionary). Abortion is not murder and it’s certainly not cruel or brutal because a fetus doesn’t have a mature nervous system. The fetus has no conscious or pre-existing conscious. Heartbeat and primitive neural activity does not indicate consciousness; the fetus needs to have higher brain activity and consequent self-awareness (Smith, 2015). The scientific consensus is that there is no relay path between the cerebral cortex and thalamus until relatively late in the pregnancy, meaning that fetuses cannot feel pain or suffer (Redden, 2015). Fetuses are not really alive either. They have human DNA, but so do human tissue samples and tissue samples are living people (Hallquist, 2012). Rapidly dividing cells are not a sliding scale of humanity. The weeks of pregnancy do not represent something more than a fingernail but no quite a human (Graff, 2012). The potential to possess human characteristics and life does not make a fetus alive. The potential to have certain rights does not endow them on the thing with potential, and it certainly does not endow more rights than to an actual live person. “To say that the potential for X is an actual example of X renders the distinction between potential and actual meaningless” (Sharvy,
Are they not alive? Is abortion not murder? Not quite. Black’s Law Dictionary defines murder as a crime committed when a mentally competent person kills any human being excluding unborn children (Black’s Law Dictionary). Abortion is not murder and it’s certainly not cruel or brutal because a fetus doesn’t have a mature nervous system. The fetus has no conscious or pre-existing conscious. Heartbeat and primitive neural activity does not indicate consciousness; the fetus needs to have higher brain activity and consequent self-awareness (Smith, 2015). The scientific consensus is that there is no relay path between the cerebral cortex and thalamus until relatively late in the pregnancy, meaning that fetuses cannot feel pain or suffer (Redden, 2015). Fetuses are not really alive either. They have human DNA, but so do human tissue samples and tissue samples are living people (Hallquist, 2012). Rapidly dividing cells are not a sliding scale of humanity. The weeks of pregnancy do not represent something more than a fingernail but no quite a human (Graff, 2012). The potential to possess human characteristics and life does not make a fetus alive. The potential to have certain rights does not endow them on the thing with potential, and it certainly does not endow more rights than to an actual live person. “To say that the potential for X is an actual example of X renders the distinction between potential and actual meaningless” (Sharvy,