I was just thinking that this story (about the Rwandan woman) vaguely reminds me of that of a former friend and coworker from my retail days, I think the only woman I've ever known well who chose to give her baby up for adoption (I've had several female friends who decided to bear and raise an initially unwanted child, as well as several--single and married, with and without kids--who chose to have abortions). This all happened before I knew her, but anyway, she'd been married to a violently abusive man, and discovering that she was (unexpectedly) pregnant actually turned out to be what gave her the will, courage, self-determination, however you want to put it, to finally leave him--at which point she spent I think almost a year moving from one battered women's shelter to another (he was dangerous and repeatedly tried to track her down). Since she was quite literally starting her life over from scratch, she knew she was in no position to provide for a child, plus she'd never wanted kids anyway; but for her, having the baby and seeing to its placement in a home where it would be well-cared for became something like the central project in her process of regaining emotional independence, a concrete way of asserting that her husband no longer defined her destiny while she tried to figure out what that assertion was going to mean for the rest of her life. It was an amazing and inspiring story. Yet she was also pro-choice, and I know she'd object to anyone trying to use her experiences as an 'If she could do it, what's your excuse?' against any other woman. I don't know how her husband might've reacted to the pregnancy (he never found out, as I recall), but the way she told the story at least, it seemed like the fact that she chose the solution she did was indeed integral to its transformative role in her life.
Well, this is a whole other can of worms, but legally, philosophically, medically and theologically, the source of contention there is how we're to interpret 'being,' or as it's sometimes put in this context, 'person'. (I'm not aware of any substantial debate as to whether fetuses, or embryos for that matter, are both human and alive, as far as literal interpretations of 'human being' as a superficial physical description go.) Essentially: what are the qualities which specifically grant a human life form the aspect of a rights-bearing legal and moral subject; does human life in utero possess those qualities; and if 'yes,' at what point? And because the idea of the 'rights-bearing person' is just that--an idea, not an empirical reality--there's really no definitive answer, nor in this case even the next best thing, a consensus answer. Theologians might focus on notions of ensoulment; philosophers on phenomenological understandings of self-awareness; neurobiologists on the possibility of conscious perception as a milestone in fetal neuromaturation; some legal scholars regard the condition of existing only through and within some other (rights-bearing) person's body as inherently exclusive of 'personhood'...etc. etc.
infinite knowledge
