Embryonic consciousness

In response to your blogstress's exposé, at The American Prospect Online, of the cleverly named group, Feminists for Life, she received this thoughtful missive from an artist:

I hear your points but I also can't help but hear a differing point. I heard a lady ask a question, "Why am I not fit to live?" She was asking the question because, as a child conceived as the result of a rape, she had a question which is not so easy to answer.

The pro and anti forces couch the issue of abortion in terms far too conveniently simplistic.

--Joseph David Marshall

True enough that, in the sound-bite age, all arguments get reduced to their essences. However, with regard to the woman conceived through a rape, your pro-choice cyberscribe is not saying that the woman is not fit to live; rather, I'm saying that her mother's choice to carry to term the embryo yielded by the rape should remain the pregnant woman's choice.

The framing of the issue as whether or not the woman conceived through rape is "fit to live" is not only not the issue, but is a frame around the ego of an adult human. It is safe to say for any of us, I think, that if the embryos from which we developed as humans had been aborted, we probably would not miss never having existed as humans.