For those in the comments arguing about abortion, this pro-choice guy made some good points. He goes on to say "At the outset, let me say that from a pro-choice point of view, the status of the fetus is a peripheral issue. Regardless of whether a fetus is a human being or has rights, women will have abortions anyway, even if it means breaking the law or risking their lives. Even women who believe that abortion is murder have chosen to get abortions, and will continue to do so[1]. That's why we should leave the decision up to women’s moral conscience, and make sure that they are provided with safe, legal, accessible abortions. Because ultimately, the status of a fetus is a matter of subjective opinion, and the only opinion that counts is that of the pregnant woman The biggest challenge in giving legal rights to embryos arises when trying to decide whose rights would take precedence when they conflict—the woman's or her zygote's. The idea that a grown woman's value and status can be equated with, or overridden by, a cluster of undifferentiated cells the size of the period at the end of this sentence is not only bizarre, it's insulting. We are treading on dangerous moral and legal grounds when we exchange a woman’s actual rights in favor of an embryo's theoretical rights. Declaring fetuses to be legal persons with rights would generate countless legal and social dilemmas. Fetuses would have to become dependents for tax and estate purposes, be counted in official census-taking, and be subject to many other laws affecting persons. Wouldn't every zygote have to have a Social Security Number, as well as a Certificate of Conception? The sheer absurdity of this proposal reveals that society does not think of fetuses as persons in the normal sense at all, and would have great difficulty trying to treat them as such. Anti-choicers might argue that special laws or legal exceptions could be written for fetuses to accommodate their unique characteristics, but the very fact that exceptional laws for fetuses would have to be created proves that they are incapable of having the same legal status as real persons. If anti-choicers want fetuses to share the same human rights as the rest of us, this means they should enjoy the constitutional freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, and other basic freedoms. Since fetuses are physically incapable of believing, speaking, or assembling, they cannot have or exercise any constitutional rights. This puts them in a totally different category than regular human beings Fetuses are uniquely different from born human beings in major ways, which casts doubt on the claim that they can be classified as human beings. The most fundamental difference is that a fetus is totally dependent on a woman's body to survive. Anti-choicers might argue that born human beings can be entirely dependent on other people too, but the crucial difference is that they are not dependent on one, specific person to the exclusion of all others. Anybody can take care of a newborn infant (or disabled person), but only that pregnant woman can nurture her fetus. She can’t hire someone else to do it. Another key difference is that a fetus doesn't just depend on a woman's body for survival, it actually resides inside her body. Human beings must, by definition, be separate individuals. They do not gain the status of human being by virtue of living inside the body of another human being—the very thought is inherently ridiculous, even offensive. Anti-choicers say that a fetus has an inherent "right to life." But many of them support exceptions to a ban on abortion in cases of -blam!-, incest, or a threat to the woman's life, or even health. This clearly indicates that they believe the right to life of a fetus is negotiable, certainly not absolute or paramount. By compromising their "right to life" definition in order to accommodate a woman's rights, they inadvertently acknowledge that women's rights are more important than the "right to life" of fetuses. Even if a fetus can be said to have a right to life, this does not include the right to use the body of another human being. For example, the state cannot force people to donate organs or blood, even to save someone's life. We are not obligated by law to risk our lives jumping into a river to save a drowning victim, noble as that might be. Therefore, even if a fetus has a right to life, a pregnant woman is not required to save it by loaning out her body for nine months against her will."