Fertilized egg being called a child?

James Finnegan’s letter (Fence Post Jan 13) praising Ireland for not allowing mothers to kill their children is an outrageous, deliberately emotive, distortion of the English language. A mother is not a mother until her first child is born, and an embryo is not a child until born.

How can a fertilized human egg be called a child? The actual difference between a fertilized human egg and a fertilized chimpanzee (or even a mouse) egg is biologically minuscule, but is one sacred with a “right to life” and the other worth nothing? If so, why? The “pro-life” label is craftily designed to imply that anyone not “pro-life” must be “anti-life,” when nothing could be further from the truth.

I am pro-(in favor of) life, and I would not gratuitously kill an ant, but I support abortion in specific cases. Sperm are alive, but tens of millions die daily in most men, and eggs are alive, but most women will “kill” hundreds in their lifetime. Most women even flush away eggs that are fertilized, even Catholic women; they may not mean to, but it’s OK, because these are not children. Before the embryonic brain begins to form it can have no thoughts, no feelings, no emotions, and you could not tell the difference between a human and a chimpanzee.

Michael G. Albrow

Naperville