Of course I wouldn't kill you. If it was for nine months, and your survival depended on you being attached to me, I would ensure that you would survive. It's really as simple as that.

If you being attached to me meant that I might or probably would die (such as if you were cancerous or poisonous or something like that) then I may have a different answer.

But being pregnant doesn't make you die - in and of itself. Yes, women do die in childbirth and from complications of pregnancy, but pregnancy itself is not a malignant force.

If you were not a malignant force and you had to be attached to me to live then you can have me - I don't have such a selfish view of life that my own convenience must come above and beyond anything else.

And really, I think that is the fundamental difference between us. I'm not trying to be insulting, but I respect life, and would do all I could to preserve it. By all that you have said, you don't have that kind of respect for life. And that's ok. There are a lot of people out there who don't respect life. Or don't respect it much - or have conditions on it in order to preserve their own ease of existence.

You should change your terminology, I think, to better reflect your views. Once something is alive, it's alive - it's got nothing to do with breathing or `potential' or anything else. That's just science.

The distinctions you draw are about consciousness and awareness. A foetus is just as alive before it's born as afterwards when it becomes a baby - if it wasn't, it wouldn't be able to die. That is really irrefutable. There would have to be intervention of some sort to stop that life from coming to fruition. That's life - there's no way around it.

What you determine as life can only be different from what is scientific life by the fact of consciousness and awareness - outside the mother's body (because foetuses have consciousness and awareness, too). But then we need to get into the nitty gritty of self-awareness and memory - because these things don't start to develop until well after a baby is born.

By that rationale, it could be deduced that any child who is not consciously aware of being alive could technically be killed, because it wouldn't know - same as a foetus wouldn't. And that is a disregard for life - which I believe you have.

But then, that'll change if you ever get pregnant. I think being pregnant is actually something you fear, even if you don't realise it, so it may not happen for you. But I hope it does. I just hope it happens when you want it to - so you don't kill off what will be the most amazing experience of your life.

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins