This letter is in response to Shannon Fiecke’s Jan. 23 opinion piece “No matter how short, all life is worthy of recognition.” Following this argument to its logical conclusion, we should expect to see funeral services for discarded feminine hygiene products. Consider:

Most fertilized ova do not attach to their respective woman’s uterine wall but rather leave the uterus before or during the next menstrual period.

For radical abortion opponents, a fertilized ovum is a person every bit as much as a full-grown woman.

Ergo, a fertilized ovum deposited on a tampon deserves a funeral. One might argue that an unattached ovum was not meant to live, so it need not be mourned. But the same could be said of the stillborn child that Fiecke mourned; nature, or God if you prefer, simply gave up later on the stillborn child.

It is, of course, absurd to propose funerals for the tampons of sexually active women because a fertilized ovum is not a person. The point of Roe v. Wade was to define when a fertilized ovum does legally become a person.

There’s no denying this is a grim question, but not more grim than drawing a legal line between, say, negligent homicide and merely unsafe working conditions, a question that seems less urgent to those who call themselves abortion rights supporters.