Janet Phillips’ letter (“Protect life starting at conception,” Our Readers’ Views, June 9) is about the third letter in favor of women’s deaths due to banning abortion and family planning that’s been published lately in your newspaper. The fact that women would die prematurely as a result of policies Phillips promotes is not mentioned, of course; a lie by omission.
The position of favoring women’s deaths over fetuses is gravely immoral. It’s also morally repugnant to put an equal sign between born people and zygotes, blastocysts and fetuses. That’s because there’s fundamental differences between born people and fetuses, zygotes and blastocysts: born people have the capacity to be aware. They have the capacity to remember, to form relationships, and to help and protect other people. Fetuses, zygotes and blastocysts are not sentient, and the proof of this is simple: There are no people who have reliable memories of being in their mother’s uterus.
Conservatives who place an equal sign between born people and zygotes, blastocysts and fetuses are in effect objectifying humans; they are not in favor of human life, but the idea of human life. That’s why they care so much about unborn life, and nothing at all for real, flesh and blood humans.
