Pro Abortion:

Pro-abortion is the stance of a belief in a woman's right right to choose to terminate a fetus. This stance is based on the pro-choice opinion that the embryo or fetus is clearly pre-human and that only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat the developing clump of cells as a person.

Individual Rights

While defenders of the pro-choice stance believe that a fetus or embryo has the potential to develop into an individual, they are cautious not to confuse potentiality with actuality and maintain the position that an embryo is a potential human being. The pro-choice movement holds that it can, granted the woman's choice, develop into an infant, but what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman's body. Pro-abortion chooses to consider what the embryo is rather than what it might become and maintains that an embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish and that to compare it to an infant is ludicrous.

The pro-abortion opinion is that to accept the equation of the potential with the actual and call an embryo an "unborn child," would be equivalent to calling an adult an "undead corpse" and then choosing to bury her or him alive or perform vivisection for the instruction of medical students. Rather the pro-choice movement believes that that tiny growth, that mass of protoplasm, exists as a part of a woman's body. It is not an independently existing, biologically formed organism—a person. They feel that something which lives within the body of another cannot claim any right against its host—rights belong only to individuals, not to collectives or to parts of an individual.