On 14 February 1990, Voyager 1 captured an ex­traordinary photograph of Earth seen as a Pale Blue Dot. The last-mentioned was the same title Carl Sagan gave his book which was inspired by the attached image.

Sagan (1994), goes on to write that “every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” From the perspective of the space probe, our home might look like a speck in the constantly expanding universe, but to much of humanity it is everything. This can be expanded further with respect to the abortion debate.

Some members of the pro-choice lobby discuss that a fetus is just a few cells. Is there a particular definition for ‘A few’? Noor (2022) shows images of pregnancies at various early stages. Such photos show matter expelled from the uterus. Aren’t all humans specks on Earth a “mote of dust"? Yes. So what’s the big difference between a fertilised human egg and a postnatal human? And, what sense does the My body, my choice statement make when taking into consideration the physicality of what is being discussed? Size and coordinates in space (in utero) translate to the right to live according to the previously mentioned.

To understand what we’re dealing with, we need to delve deeper into what makes us who we are. We are made of matter consisting of particles. In quantum mechanics, there exists a concept called the wave-particle duality which converses that particles can behave both like a wave and a particle. You, as an entire human being can also behave like a wave (Siegel, 2022).

Furthermore, quantum entanglement can be discussed. Imagine a subatomic particle represented by Earth; it has North and South poles and it’s spinning on its axis. Say we are dealing with two indistinguishable Earths separated by an innately large distance in space. These two plan­ets (particles) can somehow become entangled. If you observe one particle and its spin is pointing up (imagine the North Pole is facing toward the ceiling), the observer instinctively knows that the other particle is spin down without observing it. If this hasn’t already boggled your mind, the two particles were actually spinning in all di­rections simultaneously before observing them (superpo­sition).

This can be described using the very popular thought experiment called Schrödinger’s cat. The experimenter puts two portions of food in a box where one is poisoned and the other is not. If the cat is locked in the box and the viewer has no perception of what has happened inside; the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. This counts as true until you open the box and analyse the outcome. This shows that the particle has an innate awareness that it’s being watched. Yet, in reality, the system is so sensitive that any instrumentation used by the observer affects the prior. This concept can be translated to all the things that happen all over the universe; a reality that is based on cause and effect.

Now that we’ve understood the sensitivity of our sys­tem and the wave-particle duality, the perception of our surroundings can be discussed. ‘A few cells’ that follow fertilisation can be extracted from the uterus and displayed on a petri dish. They appear like so to our eyes because light consists of a variety of wavelengths (colours) that interact with those cells. The wavelengths that aren’t absorbed by the matter in question are scat­tered or reacted to reach our eyes. Without discussing the physiological processes that follow, we see what is in front of our field of view; a few cells. If we were to view an adult human from the eyes of galactic bodies, the subject is either not seen or is extremely small from the viewer’s perspective. This means that like time, size is relative to the observer.

Yet, let’s abandon distances in space. Let’s superimpose an adult human and a fertilised egg. One has more cells than the next, both behave differently and are alive. They are considered alive if they satisfy particular criteria. In Patten’s Foundations of Embryology, Bruce M. Carlson (1996) states that “The time of fertilisation represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual." Here we have human life whose DNA is distinct from the mother’s. Hence, any matter in the womb throughout the entire pregnancy can be consid­ered as an organism that obeys the exact same laws in space and time as the mother with the only difference being a unique DNA sequence, coordinates in space and perspective.

Let’s talk about mass. Anything that has mass warps space-time. A cell and an adult human are living amounts of matter that warp space-time differently, but they still do it. Another fact is that no two systems are the same. Even if one considers identical twins, they are small wave-particles, warp-space time, interact with light; but they are still different (as everything in the known universe, except identical particles).

There is a great division between those who are in favour and against abortion. The debate spurs tension between two groups having a variety of social, political, historical, genetic, religious, moral and belief systems. Yet (hopefully), we can all agree on one thing; that every­thing is a wave-particle interacting with its surroundings constantly, warping space-time and existing in different coordinates in an extremely sensitive entropic system; including you and a fetus. Do the latter have less value and no rights? According to those who are pro-choice, the answer is yes.

No two human adults have the exact conditions in the quantum and macro worlds. This means that abortion is justified by many because they mistakenly categorize themselves as an entity whose rights are proportional to an invented metric that measures worth on the wrong fac­tors.

David Abela has Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Physics, Medical Physics and Radiation Protection at University of Malta Junior College