A/N: This does not purport to support one side of the abortion debate or the other. I wrote it during a debate about said subject in class, to alleviate boredom and to exercise my current penchant for physical description. I have no idea whether some of the science is accurate or not.

The child is swimming. His pink hands drift through the liquid. The cord curls and uncurls slowly.

He is not breathing yet. Ontogeny is not finished, although his gills have dissolved.

He has no thought as we know it, because his external stimuli are nearly static and because he has no knowledge of comparisons. To realize that he is warm, he once must have been cold. To realize that he is saturated with nutrients he must once have been hungry. To realize that he is happy he must once have been unhappy, and furthermost, must know that he exists.

Pain is the one thing that does not need a comparison. It is so obviously poisonous, strikingly physical, and intimately inhuman. He squirms, instinct forcing his vestigial nerves to thrash. There is a moment in which he knows that he exists.