"Abortion stops a beating heart..."
             "Western philosophy's idea of the autonomous self: the pregnant woman is in fact both a person in her body and a vessel. Rather than seeing both beings as alive and interdependent-seeing life within life-and acknowledging that sometimes, nonetheless, the woman must choose her life over the fetus's...".
             Few issues have fostered such controversy as the topic of abortion. The participants in the abortion debate not only have firmly-fixed beliefs, but each group has a self-designated appellation that clearly reflects what they believe to be the essential issues. On one side, the pro-choice supporters see individual choice as central to the debate: If a woman cannot choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a condition which affects her body and possibly her entire life, then she has lost one of her most basic human rights. These proponents of abortion believe that while a fetus is a potential life, its life cannot be placed on the same level with that of a woman. On the other side, the pro-life opponents of abortion argue that the fetus is human and therefore given the same human rights as the mother. Stated simply, they believe that when a society legalizes abortion, it is sanctioning murder.
             Pro-life activists would argue that the taking of a human life is wrong no matter what the circumstances or in which trimester it is done. The controversy over abortion has avoided the real issue facing today's woman-her need to grow beyond stereotypes. Much emphasis is placed on pregnancy as a result of rape, even thought the statistics show only about 0.1% of all rapes actually result in conception. That means that a large majority of pregnancies that resulted in abortion were the result of free choice. The assumption is that a woman does not have control over her own body until after a male partner is finished with it. Only then does she here talk of "...