Re: Roe V. Wade, My POV on Abortion Rights (Newsletter No. 56)
it is possible to be in favor of a federal law supporting abortion rights and not be in favor of Roe v. Wade.
My pro-abortion opinion: I believe abortion needs to be accessible as an option in the following cases: medical necessity, rape (including statutory rape), incest
My anti-abortion opinion: in the event of healthy pregnancies as a result of consensual intercourse between two adults, all alternative options to abortion should be heavily considered before terminating the life of a fetus. It is contentious where the cutoff mark for elective abortions should be, and I am strongly in favor of as early as possible, if at all, in this context.
The fetus actually becomes distinctively human relatively early in the pregnancy, after that it is mainly growing larger rather than developing *into* a human. Up to week 5 it looks like “just a mass/clump/bundle of cells", by week 6-8 it looks sentient, by week 9 it looks quite human, even if it’s “just a fetus.” State deadlines for abortion are as late as week 20-28, around which time the fetus may likely be viable if born premature.
‘Fetus’ is the term used right up until birth, whether you want to call it a baby or not. Again, this is why opinions like “it’s not murder, it’s not a baby, it’s just a fetus” are contentious, especially when used to defend elective abortion. My opinion is, we ought to at least acknowledge that terminating the fetus is terminating a life, whether or not there is just cause for doing so–just like killing someone in self-defense is not considered murder, but is still terminating a life (and the state expects you to exhaust alternatives before being able to claim self-defense).
Even under Roe v. Wade, abortion rights are not limitless. At some point during the pregnancy even the federal government has a vested interest in the fetus as an individual in what it views as upholding a humane society.