Changed Mind about Abortion - Anne G. Beal

In his book, The Moral Question of Abortion, Stephen Schwartz used the acronym SLED to describe the four differences between the born and the unborn - 1) Size, 2) Level of development, 3) Environment and 4) Degree of dependancy. All four of these differences are fully irrelevant to the question of personhood or what constitutes a human being.

1) Size - Bigger people are not more "human" than smaller people.

2) Level of Development - Adults aren't more "human" than teenagers, or babies developing in their mothers wombs.

3) Environment - Where one is is irrelevant to who one is - a baby in a mothers womb is not less "human" than a baby in a mothers arms.

4) Degree of Dependancy - A person on a kidney dialysis machine is very "dependent" but no less "human" than a person not dependent on a machine.

Anne G. Beal addressed the first of these four differences between the born and the unborn in a recent letter to the editor which appeared in the July 30, 3008 Argus Leader newspaper. Anne changed her mind about abortion when she realized a person is a person no matter how small.

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Anne G. Beal - Colman, SD

Before 1976, I was as pro-choice as a woman could be. Then I got a job that changed my mind. I was working as a lab technician for Dr. Ernest Hook in Albany, N.Y., researching genetic birth defects. We were looking for fetal cells in maternal peripheral blood. Every morning I went to the hospital delivery suite to pick up our paired samples of maternal blood and fetal chord bloods. Then I copied the data from the delivery suite log book: mother's name, date of birth, child's sex and weight, etc. Every entry was much like the other. Every child was identified as a "boy" or a "girl." The only way to know if the child was born alive or had been aborted was by the weight: 2,000 grams and up was a child born alive; 200 grams or less was aborted. But they still were identified as boys or girls, and the awareness of that made me uneasy.

I did this for a year, becoming more and more uncomfortable with the fact that the only differences between these little boys and girls was their weight. As a society, are we prepared to decide who lives and who dies by how much they weigh?

How much does a person have to weigh before he or she is a human being? As individuals, are we incapable of changing our minds about abortion even when given more information?

I changed my mind. I hope other pro-choice people will look at the facts and change their minds, too.