Concerning the anti-abortion letters in last Thursday’s Northern Star: Alison Joy Vorreyer shouting at me in capital letters isn’t going to convince me of anything. A fetus is, indeed, a living human being, but it does not have a right to life. At three months, its brain has about the same size and complexity as a rodent’s brain; it is not self-aware, and it is incapable of knowing it’s alive or even desiring to be alive. The fact that the anti-abortionists want it to live doesn’t give it a right to outlaw abortion.

The anti-abortionists use emotionalism to cover up the fact that outlawing abortion would force a pregnant woman to carry a fetus to term against her will. The only thing that could justify this is a fetus’ right to life, and a fetus doesn’t have a right to life. You can’t force a woman to carry a fetus to term just because the fetus has the potential to be a person, any more than you can force her to become pregnant and give birth to as many children as possible just because each one of her egg cells has the potential to be a person.

If a fetus were allowed to mature, it would be a person like you and me. But what it could be doesn’t matter! I know that if I had been aborted, I wouldn’t be alive today, but if I had been aborted, I wouldn’t even know or care; at the time I would have been about an inch long, with no self-awareness, just like any other fetus.

Brian Price

Undergraduate Student