To the Editor:

I wish to commend Sarah Gassel ’12 for her recent opinions column (“The case for infant rights,” March 18). I’m pleased to see that Gassel and others are standing up for the rights of fetuses even before they can exist as independent organisms outside of the mother’s womb. But sadly absent in Gassel’s column was support for the rights of gamete cells — specifically, the millions of ova and billions upon billions of sperm cells that are heartlessly murdered each year as a result of “C/M/A”: contraception, masturbation and sexual abstinence. If fetuses are voiceless, then gametes are doubly so, because there are two of them for every embryo produced. Can we simply stand by as these countless potential lives fail to be created?

Just as with Gassel’s touching story of adoption, everyone reading these words would not be alive today had the gametes storing their genes been destroyed through “C/M/A.” It is truly horrifying that organizations like Planned Parenthood support this wholesale baby slaughter through their promotion of contraception, family planning and sexual health.

Millions of future American lives are at stake, and I would argue that in terms of sheer quantity, this is a far more pressing issue than abortion, though less widely publicized. While I agree with the opinions expressed in Gassel’s column, I believe we pro-life advocates need to direct our attention first to solving the “C/M/A” issue before tackling the comparatively minor issue of abortion.

Nicholas Gaya ’14