Logic Problems

I used to be pro-choice...until I thought about it a little more. (Yes, this is an abortion-oriented post, but read on. I'll keep it short.) I have never been a fanatic on either end of the spectrum, but I used to think that it was okay to let a woman decide whether or not she wanted to have a baby. Then one day in Mr. Buckley's 9th grade health class, we talked about how California was creating laws to prosecute mothers who smoked while they were pregnant for harming the fetus. Something clicked in my brain. We would allow a mother to terminate this pregnancy, but if she decides to keep it and take part in a potentially damaging habit, she can be slapped with a jail sentence? Why do the unborn suddenly matter?

Another example -- earlier this year, there was a funeral director, I believe, who was found to have kept a large number of aborted fetuses in his garage rather than cremating them like he was supposed to. He was going to be charged with "abuse of corpse." Yes, what he did was vile, but how can he "abuse" something that was "not really a baby, just a bunch of cells"??? I mean, you can't really abuse something any further than killing it in the first place, as far as I can tell. Why not charge him with animal cruelty for overcooking a spiral ham? It sounds absurd, but if it's not lawfully wrong to kill something in the first place, it doesn't make sense to treat it as if it has rights after it's already dead.

You could go one way with this and say that since it's okay to have an abortion, then it should be okay for mothers to smoke while they're pregnant, or for funeral directors to do whatever they please with aborted fetuses, but I think it makes much more sense to take it in the other direction and realize that if those things are wrong, then abortion should be as well. I'm not asking for much...just a little bit of simple logical thinking.