Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor:
Two writers to your paper wrote articles that cited a letter I wrote and purported to rebuff my claim that abortion is not morally permissible. However, both pieces make enormous mistakes that cannot be covered over.
Both Annasara Purcell and Melissa Miller do an enormous disservice to the pro-choice movement by asserting that a fetus is not a life. This is a sloppy mistake. By biological standards, a fetus IS both alive and a life. A fetus does not become alive at any later point. Oxford defines life as “The property which constitutes the essential difference between a living animal or plant, or a living portion of organic tissue, and dead or non-living matter.”
The abortion debate has never centered around whether a fetus is a life, rather, whether a fetus is a human, a human life, a living person, a being with a future like ours, or an entity with a welfare right to another’s body.
No pro-choice philosopher that I know of, including Mary Ann Warren, Judith Thompson or Jane English has claimed that a fetus is not a life. Those who do not understand that distinction should not be debating this issue.
Secondly, I have never claimed that a fetus has a life that is more important than his or her mother’s life. I have argued that they have an equal right to existence, and that neither is more important than the other.
-Steven S. Hoffmann
Class of 2007
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