Letter to editor:
A baby is not a tumor.
In a recent opinion piece regarding abortion rights advocacy, columnist George Will made a very perceptive observation, namely that today’s pro-abortion extremists are increasingly defending extreme abortion procedures — including dismemberment of full term infants up to the point of birth — to emphasize their deeply held belief that, in his words, "never does fetal life have more moral significance than a tumor in a mother’s stomach."
This view is rather hard to reconcile with clearly established scientific evidence that brain waves and human heartbeats are detectable as early as six weeks into a pregnancy — the very same heartbeats that are detectable at six months as well as at the birth of the infant. It is surely not unreasonable therefore to conclude that a fertilized human ovum (fertilized egg) at the moment of conception will always emerge as a human baby at birth.
One might have hoped that this evidence would be sufficiently compelling to seriously question the morality of virtually any abortion. However, a several decades cultural descent to a much lower bar of moral certitude now apparently gives standing even to an argument that essentially equates a full term human infant in the womb to a removable stomach tumor!
David A. Nealy
Greenwood
