Noia's arguments on abortion miss mark

Regarding Justin Noia's Sept. 20 column "Ground Rules," an alternative viewpoint to his poor characterization of the abortion debate is required.

Many pro-lifers' attempts to associate pro-choicers with genocide and racism is a disgusting strawman. There are few, if any "pro-abortionists." Pro-choice advocates simply do not force or counsel a woman to abort/keep a child she wants/doesn't want. Otherwise, one abrogates a woman's right to self-determination and SCOTUS defined privacy.

The polarizing strawman "innocent life" has no basis in medical science. A delivered pregnancy shorter than 20 weeks has a 99 percent mortality rate, with mortality decreasing with increased gestation time. A fetus, potential human life, often cannot be saved in the best conditions. Pro-lifers should complain that Erectile Dysfunction can be treated (arguably increasing pre-term birth and miscarriage rate), but every pre-term baby cannot be saved. Pro-lifers ignore spontaneous abortions (a.k.a. miscarriages), which occur in 25 percent of pregnancies.

Believers in "Something Else" should also condemn their allegedly benevolent, powerful deity for not saving an "innocent life" through negligence or unintelligent design of the reproductive system. Will pro-lifers make exceptions when the mother's health is threatened by medical complications or for victims of rape or incest? Will they force women to terminate or delay higher education during and after pregnancy, education that can grant more personal stability to conceive, carry to term and nurture a child for 18 years?

The transition from fetus to a human person is a gradual process. Just as the law makes a sudden distinction between childhood vice adulthood at 18 years old, there is no objective standard to judge legal personhood for a fetus. Each jurisdiction makes up its own collective mind. Abortion is most emphatically NOT murder. It is a most often a spontaneous, natural act, and far less often a medical procedure done for any number of valid moral, ethical and responsible reasons.

Eric Clinton

Research Associate, Physics