Awesome Comment Award: Emjb on how fetuses are made

I don’t awesome do this, but sometimes a commenter says something truly awesome that deserves repeating. Here is what emjb had to say after reading today’s post on the erasure of women in the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement.

One thing that was powerful to me was when a pro-choice woman pointed out that a fetus doesn’t just grow *in* a woman’s body, it is *made from* a woman’s body. Fetuses literally use the blood, food, and energy of the woman to build their own bodies. They are not separate from the woman in any true sense until they leave the womb. They don’t even stop receiving her blood until the cord is cut/the placenta detaches from the uterus. We think of them as floating in her like an astronaut in a spaceship, but they are more like an extra organ of her body for much of the time they are in the womb.

This is something I intend to repeat, and often. Fetuses are not some sort of autonomous beings that just happen to have residence inside women’s bodies. They don’t simply grown in women, they grow on women.