Fetus Should Be Considered Human

I wish to take issue with your pro-choice editorial stance, which you reaffirmed on Thursday, March 14 ("Alliance Brochure is Fallacious). You write, "The fetus itself should not be considered human." The only evidence that you present for this claim is the fact that during the first few months after conception, a fetus cannot survive outside of her mother, with or without the aid of machines. However, this litmus test of "viability" is not a valid one. For example, there are many people with fatal illnesses for whom no machine can do any good. Yet of course these people are just as alive and just as human as the rest of us. Indeed, you acknowledge the failure of your "viability" rationale: "It is true, though, that because of technological advances in the coming decade or two, almost every fertilized egg will be able to develop independently outside the womb." And yet you cling to your original premise that a fetus is not human.

Perhaps you believe, as do many pro-choicers, that the fetus should be relegated to sub-human status because he is very different from the rest of us. You might claim, for example, that since he is much smaller than we are and his physical features are still underdeveloped, he is not human. Yet by that logic neither is a six-month old baby. Or maybe you maintain that because she does not take in food and oxygen through her mouth, she is not human. Yet if that is the case then a hospitalized person who takes in food intravenously or who is hooked up to a heart-lung machine relinquishes his humanity for that period of time. The belief that a fetus is sub-human because he does not look like us at all and because he does not breathe and eat the way we do and because he is not out here with us is as widespread as it is arrogant and wrong.

But many pro-choicers concede that the fetus is a human being and argue that some people should simply be put out of their prospective misery, like a horse with a broken leg. You seem to espouse this view: "What if the fetus is retarded or plagued with the Epstein-Barr Syndrome--should the child be forced to live an unpleasant life?" Your concern for the future happiness of the fetus is most touching. However, your position flagrantly violates the principle of individual liberty. Nobody--not the chancellor of one's Reichstag, nor the general secretary of one's Supreme Soviet, no one's friend, nor one's father, nor even one's mother, should be allowed to decide whether one is to live or whether one is to be killed. For anyone to take this prerogative is simply murderous.

Please reconsider your position. I think it would mean something to the one million or so people who will be legally murdered in this country alone before the year is out if the nation's preeminent campus newspaper stood up for their cause. And it would mean a whole lot more if that support were one of a number of factors that helped save them. For justice will prevail. Indeed, with each passing day it comes closer within reach. --Carlos Cobo '97-'98