Rights of the unborn

Your Oct. 31 letters included a familiar diatribe against Republicans for their hypocritical opposition to abortion as “completely eliminating a woman's control of her own body.” This argument has been around for years, and has resurfaced recently in Obama campaign ads targeting women. We’ve all become accustomed to oversimplified and hyperbolic rhetoric, especially during the run-up to an election, but this statement bears closer examination.

Medical science has shown us that an unborn child has separate respiratory, circulatory and nervous systems from its mother. It also can have a completely different blood type, and certainly has totally unique DNA than the mother.

There is no argument that an unborn child resides temporarily within the body of its mother, but given its unique and separate identity (from the very beginning) from the mother, there can be no valid assertion that when a woman chooses to destroy that life, she is merely acting in control of her own body.

In a society which enacts zoning laws to protect the property rights of others, protective laws for animal rights and product labeling laws to protect consumers rights, how can we continue to blatantly fail to protect the human rights of those without a voice?

Warren Sovereign

Raleigh