Revolutionary Worker #897, March 9, 1997
As most people know, fertilization doesn't have to take place inside a woman's body anymore. You can operate on a woman's ovaries and collect some live egg cells and then mix them with some live sperm cells in a laboratory dish, and you'll often end up with one or more fertilized eggs. But, so far, the technology doesn't exist for us to be able to "grow" the fertilized egg in a test tube for the whole nine months until it can become a baby. In fact, it must be injected very quickly into a woman's uterus in order to grow.
What does this tell us? It tells us that all those changes that take place in the next nine months are not just processes of the fetus, but processes of the woman's own body. The egg, embryo, and fetus are made up of live cells, but this developing body really has no independent existence yet and its growth and development are inseparable from the living cells that make up the woman's uterus, hormone system, food and oxygen transportation system, etc.
An abortion kills and removes some living cells which are part of the woman's body. Living cells which are going through lots of changes, and which have the potential to become another human being somewhere down the line, but which are not yet this other human being.