...then perhaps you need to re-examine the way the right-to-life people approach their target population: with a stick.

Women are not children, that we must be told what to do by our betters. We are independent beings who largely understand the moral implications of our actions. These decisions are complicated by a number of considerations that the simple black/white approach of inflexible doctrinaire political positions cannot touch. We also have to live with the consequences of those decisions.

Women bear the ultimate cost of our decisions. You will have noticed the high rate of poverty among single-parent families, and the predominance of female-headed families among them. Until the right-to-life position includes positions and activities that are every bit as aggressive and intrusive toward the fathers of the unborn, assuring appropriate financial support and protection from abuse, and also support for laws that allow legal "abandonment" of infants at safe-haven sites in all states, right-to-life will continue to mean bullying pregnant women and assaulting health care workers whose philosophy differs from the right-to-life position.

Women have varying religious beliefs on the status of an embryo or fetus. Some people believe in a soul and some don't. Some people believe (like a friend of mine who is a carrier of the Tay-Sachs gene) that a short "life" of unreasoning suffering is worse than no life at all. To force them to conform to right-to-life positions predicated on someone else's theological beliefs treads on their First Amendment rights big-time. No.

Women are actual humans. Embryos and fetuses are potential humans. The state's interest in a fetus can only be measured realistically by two criteria: viability and the possibility of consciousness. We are allowed to pull the plug on the brain-dead; the brain-nonexistent are similar in their condition. This is the basis of medical ethics on the subject; other underpinnings go back to theology and personal religious beliefs of physicians and others. See above.

To treat women as incubators with no lives of our own once we become pregnant is to treat women as objects in the sentences of our lives, and the fetuses as the subjects. This begs the question of whose life is dependent on whose, who is really in charge, and who has value.

The most insulting thing about the right-to-life approach, though not the most dangerous, is the tendency to assume that, given a choice, women will prefer to abort. Given a choice, women will choose. We have chosen for a long time, as the existence of herbal abortifacients testifies. Yet the human race has survived, and life continues.

Is that the kind of response you had in mind?

Regards--
Mary Anne