Momentum is growing in several states to classify fetuses as human beings. I assume this is due to a fervent desire to help the natally challenged and not a cynical end-run around abortion laws, but it seems to me to miss the point.
Fetuses, while clearly human in all aspects but the most minor (like having been born), are hardly the only people being persecuted by liberals.
What of the zygote? Who will speak for the zygote?
I know what you're saying: "Zygotes are merely fertilized eggs." Well, who are we to discriminate against a potential human being merely because he/she/it happens to be a sperm-egg at the moment?
Anti-abortion groups are lobbying for the anesthetization of fetuses before abortions. But what about the zygotes? "Zygotes don't have central nervous systems!" whine the liberals. Of course they don't -- they have potential central nervous systems. "No one's even talking about aborting zygotes!" bleat the liberals. Not yet they're not. Just wait till Obamacare goes through.
That zygotes are as much potential human beings as fetuses should be obvious to any unbiased, uneducated, unthinking observer. Yet even granting full civil rights to fertilized eggs is a half-measure; as Kristen Schaal recently pointed out on The Daily Show, women's unfertilized eggs are crying out (albeit softly) for representation. But why stop there?
Man goes into a bar, sees a hot babe. Stop! He's thinking about banging her, right? Assuming she's fertile (and c'mon, look how she's dressed, you telling me she's not fertile?), that bang has the potential to create life. If a fetus is a potential human being and a zygote a potential fetus, aren't the man's thoughts potential zygotes and therefore potential fetuses (feti?) and therefore potential human beings worthy of legal protection?
"You go too far, sir!" puke the liberals. Do I? In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court defined corporations as human beings. Are you telling me that the sleazy thoughts of a horny man in a bar are less deserving of constitutional protection than Toyota?
We are all human beings and we must recognize and extend that definition to every living and potentially living thing on earth. Listen to our hurtful and exclusionary language: "inanimate objects" -- if someone throws a shoe at you, it's not so inanimate, is it? Plants, vegetables, animals... they're just a few DNA sequences from humanity; who are we to say they won't achieve it?
So the next time someone tells you a zygote is only an egg, a cow only an animal, a chair only inanimate matter, let them know America loves those potential people -- their hopes, their dreams, their ability to be anesthetized. And their longing for full civil rights. I dream of the day when every (young fertile) American woman (who recently had sex) can say "I have zygotes... and they vote!"